Speaker 1I think absolutely it's worth taking a discount for Sequoia and Benchmark. We spend probably roughly 30% of our engineering salary on coding tools. It's actually gone down the last two months. While tokens, the number of tokens that we've used has actually gone up. I think I really underestimated the demand for inference. Everything just works. This market is so big. There's just so much demand for it. And I don't know if it's going
Speaker 2to get less anytime soon. This is 20VC with me, Harry Stabbings. Now, I remember sitting down with my friend, Miles Grimshaw, when he was at Benchmark. And he said about this incredible founder he met, Harrison, the founder of Langchain. It's since become a multi-billion dollar company. It is a leader in the ability to create and monitor your agents. And today, we welcomed him to the hot seat to discuss why it is so hard to build agents today. What no one knows that everyone should know about what is coming with agents. And then, my favorite, some really kooky predictions, which no one else believes will happen, but he knows will. Definitely happen. This and so much more in the show today with Harrison. But before we dive into the show today, what do Uber, Cursa, and Harvey have in common? Well, they made the really wise decision to build on Fireworks. Fireworks is the specialized intelligence platform behind many of the world's leading AI products. Companies use Fireworks to deploy the latest open models, specialize them with their own data, and run them in production with the speed and reliability modern AI applications demand. But getting models. into production is only the beginning. As AI usage scales, the best model for one request isn't always the best model for the next. Well, that's where Fireworks Nexus comes in. Nexus connects to the AI coding tools and harnesses your engineers already use, and intelligently routes each request to the best model for the job, helping you optimize for quality, latency, and cost without changing how your engineers work. To see intelligent model routing and printing, practice, visit fireworks.ai/20vc to create a free account, and use the promo code 20VC50 to claim $50 in credits for 20VC50. While Fireworks powers AI, Laradin helps you measure its impact. Every company now runs two workforces, humans and AI agents. Laradin is the first unified dashboard across both workforces that measures their work and optimizes their impact. Laradin answers four questions. Who's using AI, which tools, what is it costing, and what's it actually being produced for every team across every vendor? AI ROI stops being a guess and becomes a number that you can consistently and confidently measure. Gainsight, Vertiv, SurveyMonkey, and many other enterprise organizations run their AI programs on Laradin. Thousands of AI tools and millions of dollars of AI spend are measured. You bet on AI, Laradin proves that it's working. Learn more at laradin.com, that's L-A-R-R-I-D-I-N.com. While Laradin tracks AI impact, Superhuman helps you move faster. Can I be honest with you for a second? Here's what my week actually looks like. Back-to-back meetings all day, and the real pressure builds up in the gaps between them. I'll come out of six Founder meetings with a whole stack of follow-ups waiting, and my inbox is hundreds of messages. And somewhere in there is the one thing that really matters, which I always tell my mother is her. Heh. I tried AI tools for this, but they always lived in another tab. I'd have to stop, go find it, paste in the context, write the perfect prompt. It was just enough friction that it never really stuck. Superhuman Go, from the makers of Grammarly, totally different. It's right there, where you need it, when you need it, in the doc, when I'm reading, the email I'm writing. When a thread gets dense, I highlight it and ask Go to pull out what matters without losing my place. And after a run of back-to-backs, I ask what was actually decided, and Go turns it into clear action items, or drafts, the reply I need to send. It's already up to speed, and I'm always the one in control. Try Superhuman Go from the makers of Grammarly, and find out more at superhuman.com. You have now arrived at your destination. Harrison, dude, I'm so looking forward to this. I've been looking forward to it for a while, because I remember Miles telling me about you when he was at Benchmark, and just singing your praises, so I wanted to make it happen for a while. So thank you for joining me. I'm excited to be here. For those that don't know, 60 Seconds, what is Langchain, and where do you sit in the stack?
Speaker 1We build tools to make it easy to build agents. So we build developer tools primarily. We have an open-source framework, which basically connects the model to everything else that you need to build a useful agent. So tools, data, computation, things like that. And then we also have Langsmith. Langsmith is observability and evals. Agents go wrong all the time. How do you know how they go wrong, and how do you measure them so that you can increase their performance over time? That's what Langsmith does.
Speaker 2Why is it difficult to build agents?
Speaker 1The hard part about building agents is they don't behave how you want them to behave. So the models are these non-deterministic black boxes, right? And they take natural language as input, and then they output natural language. And inside the black box, they're also non-deterministic. And so what that means is that the input you get is infinite in dimension. It can be anything. You put a chatbot in front of someone, they can type anything that they want, right? And so that makes it really hard to know what they're going to type. And then once it goes into this model, and by the way, agents are not just one model call. They're a series of model calls, and they're interacting with other tools. And so you have these small black boxes that are then put inside this large system. And you get basically these cascading types of errors. So you have this very big kind of like input space. You have this very big output space because two similar inputs can go in, and they can arrive at completely different answers. And the thing that's making all this hard is the LLM itself. Yes, they're very, very smart, but you don't know exactly what they're going to do, and they change answers based on small changes to the input. And so you build this system, but it's really non-robust. And so getting this system to behave reliably, like that is the hardest part. Like when we talk about agents three years ago, four years ago to agents today, they've gotten a lot better. And the main thing that's happened is one, the models have gotten better. And two, we've figured out how to build systems that basically harness these models better. And that second part, the harnessing of these models is what we focus on.
Speaker 2How does your business change? How does your business change in a way that people don't see as the
Speaker 1models get better? The main way our business changes as the model gets better is we basically have to erase big parts of our product. So what I mean by that, and Cursor said this really well as well, I think this was one of their actual operating principles as a company is like erase the product or delete the product, I think is what they called it, where basically like these models get better and things that you had to do six months ago, you no longer have to do. And so this is very relevant in our open source. And so I think that's what we're trying to do. And I think that's what we're trying to do. no matter who it's coming from. It's defensive in the fact that you don't want to get locked in, so they can't raise rates, things so you want to be able to switch models the harness can be very tied to the model it can also be neutral the context right now is really intricately linked to the harness so the harness's job is to basically take the model and interact with all the other things all the other things includes data and apis but also includes memory and so if you build this memory in a way that is linked to the harness and the harness is linked to the model then you're kind of stuck so the true
Speaker 2value of the harness structure is the portability of data that it allows the user yeah you you want
Speaker 1to you want to basically not be locked in to models and if if memory of context starts building up in a way that is specific to what how one model wants to interact with memory and wants to interact with context that's very bad for portability and then that puts you at a disadvantage building your business going forward we talk with a lot of people about owning their intelligence and what that means and there's a lot of different versions of that the version that that that we think like owning your intelligence means we think there's a few different components of that but one key component is having kind of like this open and controllable agent like you want to be able to adjust all the different pieces you want to be able to adjust the model you want to be able to adjust the harness as well because sometimes these model labs are training harnesses to be really good at the things that are in distribution for them which oftentimes is coding and coding is great and there's a ton of use cases around coding but there are a ton of use cases that are aren't coding and maybe they'll write code as part of it but they're using that as as a way to do sales as a way to do research as a way to do these the law as a way to do these other vertical specific things and so when you get out of distribution of what the the model labs are training on you want to have control over like what the harness does and then you also want control over the context as well so model the harness itself and the context make up kind of like this open and controllable agent architecture and we think that's a big part of what it means to own
Speaker 2one intelligence i just want to back up a little bit when we think about like agent value so to speak some people say that the value is actually in the verification like whether it did well or not that are not the next step which is automation if value is derived through verification who wins the harness if value is derived
Speaker 1through verification i think the people who win are the domain experts the people who are able to kind of like quantify what that value means which is very hard like building evals is a very hard job and so i think a lot of the value will accrue to whoever can kind of like write those verifiers capture that domain knowledge i'm massively bullish on vertical agents for different domains for this reason because i think the domain experts who are suited to write those verifiers or build those evals as as we kind of talk about it they will be able to build harnesses and models and it won't be just the harness it won't be just the model it will be some combination of them so very practically if you're getting started building a vertical agent i would highly suggest you start at the harness layer you do context engineering you kind of like tweak the harness and then when you've got users then you start tweaking the model in post training i think it's it's much higher roi to start at the context or harness layer first and so i think we'll have all these different verticals they'll be able to quantify what good looks to them in a very domain specific way and that'll let them build not only like vertical agents but also vertical agent experiences different agents might have different experiences and so i think like a lot of the value will i massively bullish on vertical agents and so we want to enable a lot of that you said
Speaker 2like if i was building that i would start the harness layer we're seeing a lot whether it's a harvey or i think it's ramp build their own models to what extent are they actually building their own models mike can and bruce had a lesson set on a show we released today that it's largely kind of respectfully bs and they're fine tuning open source chinese models is that true and and how do you think about that
Speaker 1i think a lot of it is they are post-training open open weight models absolutely i still think that's a valuable thing to do i don't think there's kind of like anything wrong with that i think that i think there's different like dimensions that you can go in terms of owning your intelligence i think the cheapest way is you just control the context you use an off-the-shelf harness off-the-shelf model the next level down is you start tweaking the harness and and that gives you more control than just the context but it's a little bit more expensive to do the next level down is is you post-train an open weight model and so you might take an existing open weight chinese model and post-train it for your domain and then and then the very kind of like bottom layer is they actually train a model from scratch i don't think i don't think many folks are training kind of like a model from scratch i think most are post-training i think if you're training a model from scratch you're probably a neolab i think those are one of the few that are doing that but yeah the ramps and the harveys of the world they have a ton of talent they have a ton of data they have a bunch of usage and are trying to think about really optimizing it and so they've gotten all the juice they can out of the context all the juice they can out of the harness and now they've arrived at basically post-training of these models
Speaker 2can i ask you the jury's kind of out on the efficacy of these specialized models in the post-training realm like we mentioned there some reports i've seen say that massively more efficient and better and some less so how do you think this will play out i think
Speaker 1what we've seen in regards to post-training is that a lot of the post-training that practically makes sense right now is probably for like simpler tasks that make up a larger harness so what i mean by that is like when you have an agent harness that's doing interesting work it's actually very rarely just one model running the loop that might be the core of it but there's a bunch of other model calls that happen either as like guardrails or routing or sub-agents or sub-workflows or things like that and so a lot of the places where we see post-training being efficient now are for simpler tasks like classification or extraction or summarization that might be a tool the agent uses or a guardrail or things like that i think those types of post-training right now make a ton of sense and will continue going forward i think the question that is more unanswered is for this core model that's driving the loop because the main way an agent works is there's an llm running in a loop calling tools and so the question is for for this model that's driving that loop will those be kind of like post-trained models or will those be kind of like frontier models and i think this is where we see more of like a back and forth where like every time a new frontier model comes out the better they are at just running this kind of like core loop we do see people like harvey and ramp and others kind of like experimenting with post-training models for this core loop and so i think harvey recently in the past month or so announced something exactly in that vein i think that's an open question i think if you were
Speaker 2building your own vertical application would you post-train your own or not not to start
Speaker 1absolutely not to start but like if we're talking like five years in the future assuming that i'm getting a ton of usage um i think it could be a realistic possibility
Speaker 2one of the things that harnesses also need to do i imagine is model routing depending on request how much value is in the model routing layer
Speaker 1model routing is so interesting i think it's one of the hottest and maybe most divisive topics right now so a few thoughts at first there's there's a question of where the model routing should even be should it be at the harness level or should it be in the gateway level and this is this is like getting a little bit into the technical ways what
Speaker 2is the difference i'm sorry the
Speaker 1difference is in the harness level it's in kind of like the code of how it runs and in the gateway it's just an api call so the benefits of putting it in the gateway level because it's just an api call you can drop it into any harness you could put this this this routing that's happening at the gateway level into cloud code into any harness without having to change the code the downside and why i think we're more bullish on routing happening in the harness as are i think factory and cognition have also written things about this is that in the harness you just have more knowledge of what's going on you have more awareness of the state when you have an api it's generally assuming that it's kind of like an open ai it's kind of like an open ai it's kind of like an open ai chat completions api and so it only takes in a certain amount of state you have more state in the harness to know hey like what's going on with the prompt cache you want to try to keep the prompt cache warm and available you can also change the prompt more easily so a lot of these models have different prompting strategies and so if you do the routing at the harness layer you can more easily change the prompt and so i think a lot of what we've seen is one this debate between kind of like gateway and harness and where does routing go i think we probably believe it belongs in the and just so we understand that the
Speaker 2open routers and all the other providers which there are several there are a lot they are in the gateway they are
Speaker 1in the gateway a lot of obviously open router incredible company incredible usage on the show love alex alex is great i think a lot of why people use open router and for cell and other gateways is largely for the model access so i think there's also a difference between a router and a gateway and so i would probably say most of open routers usage and alex obviously knows the numbers a lot better than i do if i had to guess i would guess a lot of it just comes from being a gateway not a router so people specify the model they want up front an open router just provides a single api with a single api key for accessing that in terms of like smart routing i think that's actually being done like way less than people think and i think when it's done it's built into the harnesses by folks like factory i think factory does a tremendous job about this they've written a number of technical blogs that are very well done on terms of how they do routing but i think right now i i pretty strongly believe that like routing is a very important part of the process and it's a very important part of the process and it's a very important part of the process you have to be harness aware you have to know what the task is you have to know what the harness looks like so i don't think you'll have routing that works for law and works for finance and works for coding and have it all be the same it's going to be very domain and very harness specific i'm
Speaker 2sorry when i listen to you it seems so unwaveringly obvious that routing should be at the harness layer given the context and memory that is stored there when i have such an obvious response i like to understand why am i stupid what is the bull case for it being at the gateway layer i think when
Speaker 1people talk about it at the gateway layer i think there's maybe like two things that they're talking about so one it makes it way easier to port so you can take clod code people love clod code right if you tell people hey you can't use clod code you have to use this other harness there are other good harnesses out there but let's pretend for a second that you love clod code and you want to let them keep on using that but you want to do some semblance of kind of like routing to maybe like a deep seek or an open source model or something like that then the only way you can do that is at the gateway layer because you don't control the harness side note this is another argument for open source harnesses that you can control so you can control the harness but you can't control the gateway layer because you don't know how to control and modify and then the second thing is when people talk about kind of like routing at the gateway layer i think they're oftentimes in implicitly assuming that there's a domain. So there's kind of like two general domains that you could maybe argue that you can build general routers for. And I actually think Open Router has done this to some extent. You could argue coding. Coding is like the most popular domain. That's where all the usage is going. Let's build a router that works really good for coding. Maybe we won't be like harness aware, but we'll be like use case aware. So we know different models are good for different things in coding, and we can put it at the gateway. The other thing you could say is like, hey, we've got this like general chat bot. Like, we're not trying to be best in the class at law or best in the class at finance, but we're just going to be like a general chat bot across the company. And like we can know well enough that if you say, hi, how are you doing, you don't need like Opus for that. You can use a cheap model. And so I think when people talk about routing at the gateway level, they're implicitly kind of assuming that you're doing either like general purpose chat or coding, and you're not doing like a domain specific thing. As soon as you get into a domain specific thing, I really think it has to be at the harness layer. You're not going to use an off the shelf. Gateway router for that.
Speaker 2MARK MANDEL: So in two to three years time, you think the majority is within the harness, given the benefits that come from that context. But for very horizontal tasks, it will sit in gateway.
Speaker 1MARK BLYTH: I think that's exactly right. If you're building a vertical agent, I think routing needs to be in the harness. If you're thinking about a general purpose horizontal task like just general chat or coding, it could maybe be in the gateway.
Speaker 2MARK BLYTH: Is it a commodity? Does everyone just build it?
Speaker 1MARK BLYTH: I don't think routing is a commodity. I do think people will build it. I think building it is quite hard even today. And I think part of the reason for that is the models just change so rapidly. So you can argue that certain models are better at different things, but then a new Opus or new OpenAI model comes out, and it's just better at everything. And so then the value of routing kind of goes down. MARK BLYTH: Do you trust evals? MARK BLYTH: I think evals are useful, but I wouldn't trust them fully. And so what I mean by that is I think a lot of the academic evals that are out there that are used when a lot of the models come out are not really that useful anymore. All the models that come out are kind of benchmark maxed against those evals, and so you don't learn a lot. I think internal evals that you have and that you build for your domain absolutely can still be useful. And so I mean, this is the main reason that building evals is such an important part of building a vertical-specific agent. I think you have to have some way of measuring things. And I think you can generally trust those evals. But even then, one of the most important things to do is just look at the data. Just look at the data and see what it's doing. Don't rely too much on kind of like a single number. I think this is why you want to have traces. You want to look at what's going on. Maybe your evals aren't perfect. Evals are really hard. You can have some sense. But maybe models are doing better, but in just a different way that you didn't know how to capture before. And so I do think, yes, I think you can trust vertical-specific benchmarks. But you have to evolve those as well. And that's one of the main things that we've seen, because these models just get better in different ways.
Speaker 2MARK MANDEL: Can I ask you, you mentioned traces there. If traces are the exhaustive agent work, where is the value then? Is it the app, the observability layer, the model layer? Where is it?
Speaker 1JASON MILLER: If you're building an agent, I think the value is at what makes that agent good at the domain or vertical that you're working in. So what I mean by that is, again, I think there's different ways to control what an agent does. There's the context, there's the harness, and there's the model. Having specific proprietary things for any of those can be an advantage. I think controlling the context is the easiest and the most obvious thing to do when starting. MARK MANDEL: And that would be data? JASON MILLER: And that would be data. That would be memory. That would be specific API. That would be APIs, specific tools that you can use. Controlling the harness is a little bit harder, but you can still put a lot of your domain knowledge around what should do, both routing and things in there. And then the model is the hardest to control, but potentially the highest ceiling. The thing that lets you iterate on each of those is evals and traces. So there is a ton of value in these, but there's only value in that you capture insights that you bring back to the context, or bring back to the harness, or bring back to the model. And that exact process can look different So post-training, great for bringing these insights from traces back to the model. For bringing things back to the context or memory, you're probably going to want to run another agent over those traces and then have that agent output kind of like learnings from memory. And then for bringing these learnings in the traces back to the harness, you're probably going to want to run an agent over those traces and update the code of the harness itself. And we actually have something that does this for people. It's called Engine. It's an agent in Langsmith that runs over traces and tries to update code. And when you update these things, you're going to need to know that it's actually better, and this is where evals come in handy. -
Speaker 2Can I ask, how does continual learning change agents and how they work? -
Speaker 1Continual learning, I don't think so much changes how agents work, but I think it changes the systems that you want to have running around the agent. So what I mean by that is I think the core loop for a continual learning agent, the core inner loop maybe to say, will still largely be the same. It will be an LLM running in a loop, calling tools, interacting with the model, and an environment. I think what continual learning adds is an outer loop. An outer loop that looks at the exhaust of agents and then does things with it. And again, what it does could be different depending on what continual learning means for you. So I think continual learning is also one of those words that doesn't have a super precise definition, or maybe-- - How would you define it? - I would define it as a system that gets better over time as it runs. And again, there's different ways it could get better over time. It could update the context, it could update the code of the harness, or it could update the weights of the model. And the outer loop will look roughly the same for all of those. It will look like take traces, get learnings, fix something, measure it to make sure it improved, and then repeat. But that exact kind of like changing, again, updating weights of model, very different from updating a text file that is like a memory file. -
Speaker 2If we look at the context layer, we mentioned data being a part of that. We're seeing data companies scale to hundreds of millions of revenue in the fastest time ever. I mean like ever, ever, ever, and we're seeing data. How do you expect this market to play out, given your neutrality on not being involved in it, but being adjacent to it? Will this be a market of consolidation in years to come? How do you see it play out? -
Speaker 1I actually think the data market is still like pretty early in the grand scheme of things, in so much as we're talking about kind of like a context layer for agents. So what I mean by that is like, there are a bunch of databases that are, ClickHouse is maybe like a really good example of one that's doing incredibly well recently. I think they're still largely focused on, you know, like their database, their good old fashioned database. They're good at storing data and querying data, but it's still in pretty kind of traditional ways. ClickHouse existed pre-AI. When we talk about kind of like a context layer for agents, and again, like there will be a bunch of data produced from like software systems and great, like I think like existing databases, ClickHouse, Mongo, Elastic, whatever, are great for that. When we talk about a context layer for agents, I think a key part of what exists there is yes, there's a database, but I actually think there's a system around the database. I think like a context layer for agents, will look more similar to like an agent around a database than just a database. And the reason for this, is that taking all of these learnings and ingesting them into a database, you need some sort of like intelligence to do that. And I think that intelligence is actually really, really hard. The hardest part about memory is actually not the database at all. When we talk to a number of companies, the way that they do memory is they just store it in a single file. Very, very kind of simple. The hard part is taking all of the observations that happen, whether it's from the user interacting with like the, let's say it's a traditional SaaS, interacting with the software, or the user interacting with the agent and distilling that into information that's valuable enough to go into this context layer. That's the hard part in memory right now. -
Speaker 2Why is that so hard? -
Speaker 1Because it's tricky to get LLMs to do what you want them to do. And this type of like meta reflection, I think is something that LLMs actually still struggle at a lot. Like reflecting on kind of like prompts and improving prompts, reflecting on agent architecture, improving agent architecture. We should build a benchmark for this internally. We do have some benchmarks for this in terms of engine, which is our agent that's running on things. But I think this type of meta reflection is still really difficult for agents. I think it's also generally like a hard thing for humans to do as well. Like, I don't know if we actually understand, some people probably do, so I shouldn't say this, but I don't know if we understand like what goes on inside our brain. Like I feel like our brains are still kind of like complex things that we don't fully understand. And so if we're trying to now replicate this kind of like learning process in a system, I think there's a bunch of different pieces. And so I think models aren't great at kind of like reflection and I don't think we know what this system should look like. What should the inputs look like? What should it be? What should the outputs be? What should the harness for this agent be? What should the different workflows be? -
Speaker 2Will the models be meaningfully better at reflection in 12 months? -
Speaker 1Probably. I mean, it seems like they'll get better at everything. -
Speaker 2Do you think the speed of model improvement will continue in the same manner of acceleration that it has done? Or do you think we are approaching some form of asymptotic plateauing? -
Speaker 1I think the speed of model improvement is something that's probably really tough to say without being inside of a lab. I would say, I think there are a lot of tasks for which the model improvements will flatline in the sense that like, it's already good enough. Like I think there are a bunch of tasks where the models are just good enough. - Which would be like coding. - Yeah, coding is getting there. Like summarization, routing tasks. There are probably more difficult tasks or tasks that we don't even know to think about, know to throw a model at. I would probably say like this type of like meta-learning is one of those tasks that the models aren't good at now. I would imagine is very important to the labs in terms of kind of like cracking RSI or things like that. And so I do think the models will get better at that over time and it's possible that that progress actually looks much faster than previous. I think it's really tough to have an educated opinion without being inside of a lab. There are some tasks where it's saturated. There are other tasks where I think it will probably just increase faster than before. -
Speaker 2What about agents today sounds crazy that you think will be incredibly common in two to three years? -
Speaker 1I mean, I think this memory layer for agents is still massively unsolved. I think one thing about agents that is rare today, but will be incredibly common in the next few years is this memory layer. So what I mean by that is if you look at like Instinct or Muse, I think one of the things nailed is this kind of like personalization and learning and seeming like it's it's something for you whether it's because it's speaking in the tone or because it's just following up like that proactiveness and so i think memory is super super early we've been talking with folks about memory for like two years and trying to do things in the open source we launched an alpha and then and then killed a commercial solution for memory it's just so early on in memory and it's so domain specific what memory looks like for instinct or muse is actually pretty different than what it probably looks like for a company or org harness and it's pretty different than what it looks like for legal or finance or things like that so i think memory is one thing that really makes a difference you see this make a difference i think instinct and muse have done a great job at this and so you see how it makes a difference there but i think it's still very very early on and i would expect uh all products in a few years to have some aspect of memory in it with respect is that not quite obvious i think the fact that memory will have an impact is quite obvious and that's why you see so many people interested in it and have having it be interested in it for for the past few years i still think it's not obvious what the answer is i still think it's incredibly not obvious what the answer is i don't think anyone knows what the answer for
Speaker 2memory is why did you kill the commercial solution for it given the obviousness of it and the clear need for it in in almost
Speaker 1everything we killed it because we didn't find product market fit why didn't we find product market fit i think we actually tried to be too general i think memory is so early that i think a lot of the solutions that you want to build are actually very like domain or agent specific
Speaker 2and so you would build vertically specific memory solutions and what would you use to
Speaker 1do differently so again going back to what the hard part of memory is i think the hard part of memory is that process for learning from facts about what to remember and that agent that that does that remembering as i said i'm massively bullish in kind of like vertical agents i think having those agents be good at learning things specific to their domain is is a key part of that and so i do think these kind of like learning agents at least to start probably have to be domain specific and i don't know if there's like a general like what what does the what does the harness for these learning agents look like it probably looks pretty similar to a lot of the harnesses we have now it probably looks pretty we build deep agents deep agents as an agent harness it probably looks similar to that and oh i'm running the loop but it's got specific instructions and specific tools and maybe there's some specific sub-agents that are really good at navigating existing memory structures or or distilling kind of like facts and so i think you'll have you'll have agents for remembering things i just think they'll be domain specific do you think you
Speaker 2will have vertical agents for consumer applications i understand and i agree with you when you look at finance accounting sales marketing legal you mentioned muse and instinct they would be horizontal agents do you think we'll have vertical consumer agents i
Speaker 1think my take on the consumer space is that you'll have both you'll have both horizontal and vertical agents and the horizontal agents will interact with the vertical agents
Speaker 2where does it make sense to have a vertical agent versus not i think
Speaker 1for most apps it probably makes sense to have a vertical agent and i think the reason that having vertical agents makes sense at all is is probably twofold maybe more but two that to mind one a lot of these apps have knowledge about you and can learn things about how you interact with that app better than a general horizontal agent could so back to the point about domain specificity how you interact with music for say like spotify is very different than how you might interact with strava and so those those apps are actually probably best at learning things about you and i think the best way to expose those learnings is probably through an agent the other thing is a lot of these apps have a ton of apis and so you could say hey spotify don't build an agent just expose a bunch of apis i actually think it's better for it's a better experience if there is an agent that kind of like wraps those apis and exposes a single or maybe multiple but like probably a single like natural language interface for a horizontal agent to interact with that vertical agent
Speaker 2how does the infrastructure change when agents are the fundamental interface with sites and what i mean by that is you know i wanted tickets to a specific concert and i said check every five minutes and buy any seat that comes available and for three days it checked every single five minutes the volume of queries was a thousand times what it would have been with humans how does the infrastructure require change in a world of agent interaction or human interaction when agents are
Speaker 1interacting it makes the number of requests go way up i think i think you saw a story about how i think it was resi that blocked a user's account because they were using instinct to pull it i don't know how frequently but pretty frequently and so i think there's just way more strain on the infrastructure how does that percolate down to lower layers i i don't know if i have an opinion on that yet i think you have to build systems that can be much more bursty that can scale way way broader i don't i don't know if i have more specifics do you
Speaker 2think providers will allow agent usage or not i think
Speaker 1the future is providers exposing their own agent and having people either interact with that agent or having people's horizontal agents interact with that agent so
Speaker 2my horizontal agent sorry just wanted to say this would interact with resi's vertical agent i think that's exactly right why would that work because that still doesn't solve the two core problems of advertising for a lot of these businesses they lose that ads model and then upsell they lose the like anything else you might like also on the side so you get reduced basket size why would agent agent work i think you could
Speaker 1include some of those things in the agent response so you could do advertising for specific things on on resi or etsy or whatever and include that in the agent's response like hey i found these three things you might also want to consider this other thing that's now a natural language response that goes back to kind of like the the main agent i think also to the point around the strain on the systems if you have a vertical agent it's going to be better and more efficient at interacting with the underlying systems than a third-party agent will so i think it will make it a lot more efficient for for them to do that
Speaker 2when we look at the amount of queries and the volume that changes with agents it takes a lot of tokens to do all of this work how does the cost of tokens and cost of that intelligence change over time because we always thought it would get cheaper hasn't gone much cheaper how do we actually think about that cost is
Speaker 1one of the big things that we talk with people about right now i think i think there's a few different dimensions to this one i think like the the frontier models are relatively getting cheaper over time astra is like price per performance fantastic compared to a lot of things that existed a year ago two there's just way more demand when you start talking about agents talking to agents or multi-agent systems there are just so many more tokens that are getting burned and so the costs are going up and we see this in coding primarily coding costs have skyrocketed and i think a lot of organizations including ours are now thinking about ways to kind of like pair pair those costs back how does this end up getting resolved i mean if you look at how we're tackling coding agents i think there's a few hints there so so when we're tackling coding agents we think of it in three steps one we think of basically just like visibility showing kind of like how much things will cost how much things have cost to admins two is cost control so you could say something like hey you know go get me a reservation but don't spend more than five dollars like doing it and then third is actually impacting the harness itself so i think primarily a lot of harness engineering has been done around making the agent more efficient because that's the or sorry a lot of the harness engineering has been done to make the agent just like better more accurate because that's the biggest blocker i think as cost becomes more concerned we're seeing people care more about things like prompt caching which are really good for kind of like reducing costs we're seeing model providers actually make this easier by and there's getting a little bit in the weeds but they introduce things like where you can change the tools that are available to an agent mid-flight previously this would have busted the cash and caused like a massive increase in cost now you can just add those dynamically and keep the cost the same so i think we're seeing more attention to both the model apis and harnesses in terms of like controlling
Speaker 2costs when you talk to large enterprises today what matters most of them is it accuracy is it cost or is it security another thing
Speaker 1would be latency by the way so so we so we run developer surveys every year where we ask developers what they care about for the last two years the number one response basically double the next two has been accuracy so that's still the the primary thing the next two are latency and cost and security is like a little bit after that pretty close when we talk to large enterprises recently i'd say like cost has has risen in terms of concern i'd still probably say it's below accuracy but it's probably higher than than latency and and then security is for large enterprises security is higher but still probably below accuracy and cost
Speaker 2so we're seeing more and more of that and so we're seeing more and more of that in the future so we're
Speaker 1seeing more and more of that in the future so we're seeing more and more of that in the future so we're We tracked all of our coding agent usage to Langsmith so we could tell who was spending how much, what they were spending it on. We could do analytics over that. Second is just basic cost controls. We set kind of like a budget. And if you hit the budget, you can talk to our VP of engineering and he'll almost always like increase it. But it's just a safeguard against kind of like agents being used incorrectly or going in a bad loop. And then third would be we control the harness. So one of the things we've done is we actually built our own in-house cloud coding agent. So not an IDE, not a terminal-based agent. We let people use whatever they want for that. But we built our own cloud-based agent, OpenSwee is what we call it. It's actually the only way I code anymore because I'm in Slack all the time. And so I just message it from Slack and it kicks off. But in that harness, we've done a bunch of work to control costs. So things like prompt caching, but also things like routing, we've built into this harness. And I actually think that's like a pretty repeatable three-step process for kind of like getting coding agents spend under control. Just first, visibility. Second, like basic controls. Third, like try to improve. Third, like improve the harness itself.
Speaker 2Totally get that. And I do just want to unpack that. You mentioned that visibility, see who's spending what, were the people spending the most, the most effective?
Speaker 1Sometimes the people spending most are the most effective and other times they're not. So what I mean by that is we have a few senior engineers who spend a lot and I 100% they're doing is well worth it no questions there we've also just had some cases do more to like kind of like silly mistakes or kind of like improper setup than anything we've had like massive spikes in usage so an example of this we we had uh one or two tasks where some plug-in was being used that basically like would would screenshot or take a snapshot of of the dom of a web page and send that back every turn of the agent because they were doing some front-end engineering and they wanted to take what it looked like and just send it back it would just run this massive loop and so i think we spent 40k in a week on on that one thing you know when it gets to that like again like i think we're pretty kind of like liberal as a company and trust people but i know that's probably not worth it and so that's just like an example of like again it wasn't malicious it wasn't even intended usage really it was kind of just mistaken so i just think just like catching that is well worth it so it depends a bit on the size of
Speaker 2the spectrum 30 of salary as you mentioned that's a guesstimate yeah guesstimate totally fine what is that in two years i think
Speaker 1the hard part about estimating coding agent spend is that orgs are just changing so rapidly so what i mean by that is i think there's a future where orgs are much smaller and coding agent spend is you know the same as human salary or or more or an order of magnitude more and you have a small number of people that are driving and executing incredibly rapidly and incredibly performantly and i think that's one of the things that's really i think that's an enticing vision in terms of of what you think about i don't think many companies including us are are probably there i think we still see that we need a bunch of different people with a bunch of different backgrounds and a bunch of different expertise is collaborating on things and there's a bunch of communication and overhead and review and like yes it would be ideal to have one person driving 100 agents and just like driving everything that like makes up you know a large part of the product but i think we just need to be able to work together and i think that's one of the things that we just see that it's still very human component to it and so i spend a lot of time thinking about kind of like org design is it possible to have like small teams one-person teams two-person teams that are kind of like driving agents i think it's very tempting and in that situation i would say like you know agent spend maybe 3x the cost of but then also you know the engineers who can do that are incredibly valuable and so maybe it actually will just stay the same because the people who can actually do that and who can drive all those agents there's fewer people but you're paying them a lot more so the spend actually stays the same so i think org design is very very interesting right now and so because of that i think it's actually really hard to answer
Speaker 2that question to me that number is so central because it is the fundamental determinant of anthropic's enterprise value if that number goes to five percent then the two trillion dollar ipo might be a little bit overpriced if that number actually goes to three hundred percent like it is in mccall's case then it's dramatically underpriced and so that's why i focus so much on it do you agree that number underpins anthropic's value i think
Speaker 1it's probably right that that number underpins anthropic's value i think the tricky part is that the only place we've seen agents really have effect is in software engineering so far though and there are a ton of other places within an enterprise that i i would argue have yet to kind of be affected by by agents and so i think it's possible again software engineering i think very difficult to predict but but i think there's basically two levers here one is like what happens in software engineering is it the same as today is it more than is it less than but i think undoubtedly for the other domains it will be a lot more than it is today and so i think from that perspective i think that's very bullish on anthropic and open ai and other model providers
Speaker 2i think another question that a lot of people are asking is about kind of the proliferation of open models and how that changes the landscape you work with some very large enterprises one of my dear friends jason lemkin from sasta says that i'm not going to do his accent because i'll butcher it and i've done it before and he got rather i said it wasn't very good do you find that large enterprises are fearful of working with open source chinese models or actually they don't mind
Speaker 1we see that some enterprises are fearful of working with open source chinese models we we see others that don't don't kind of like that fear is justified i don't really think that fear is justified i i think there's different concerns i think one concern you know is that the data that it runs on will somehow go back to the chinese labs and again if you're if you're using fireworks or hosting it yourself i think that's just ridiculous i think there's other fears that the stuff that they've been trained on will cause it to respond in a way that's you know not consistent with the values of the enterprise or something like that i think that's where evals come in handy and i think that's largely unfounded but like sure maybe for some domains there's there's some realness there so i think it's probably largely unfounded but for some domains because of that kind of like response like i could see there being some some nuance there do you
Speaker 2think in the next 12 months we'll have comparable us open source models i think the next 12 months
Speaker 1will absolutely have comparable us open source models i think you look at everything that nvidia is doing to kind of like work with the ecosystem i think they they care about it tremendously you look at reflection had a model launch recently i think it was still a little bit behind some of the chinese models on some benchmarks but i think there is a tremendous amount of attention in that domain and so i think absolutely this will
Speaker 2catch up when you look at the state of landscape today in terms of open models what does the world not see that you see very clearly given your position i think when it comes
Speaker 1to open models i think there is a lot of usage of them but i do think they're for more narrow tasks than people think so i think we see a lot of people using more open source models and more post-trained models than than i would have maybe expected a year or a year and a half ago but i still think they're primarily for these simpler tasks like routing or guard rails or extraction or summarization i don't think they're really driving the the core agentic loops for a lot of these main agents and so i think open source models are kind of divisive because you have some people on on one end who are like great they're they're good enough let's use them for everything and i don't think they're quite quite there and then i think you have other people who are like you know the frontier models are just going to keep on getting better and better and cheaper and cheaper and like yes that's true but if you really know what you're going to do so you have to have a high volume use case and if there are a few components of that that are simple enough tasks i think it's very good roi to start kind of like post-training models for those use cases
Speaker 2how do you see the inference market playing out you mentioned that fireworks very openly we're a big investor in fireworks and i love lynn and the team but everyone's trying to do it you you have you we had chase on the show from crusoe who also has a lot of work to do and i think that's something that's really important have that as part of their business you know friends with the nebbiest guys they also do it as part of it how does this business play out and how do you think about the need to do all of the stack versus inference only providers like a fireworks or a base 10. i think when it comes to
Speaker 1how things will play out with respect to inference there's two things that i i think i really underestimated from the start of lane change now one is the demand for inference and two is the demand for like coding agents i think both of those markets are just tremendously bigger than than i thought three four years ago i think actually it's it's eric vichery at benchmark who said this on either tweet or podcast recently where i think he basically said like everything just works like this this market is so big i think uh thomas tongues as well uh had something around just like the market for inference is just so big that i think eric said it about more broad stuff than just inference but i think applying it to inference i think any inference will work that's like you know there's just so much demand for it and i don't know if it's going to get less anytime soon and so yeah sure fireworks will work aws will work you're so overworked i just think there's so much demand for
Speaker 2it why would you not be investing today like i so i can give you some examples i think the the customer support space is like wildly uninteresting 20 providers all funded with over 100 million in the last 18 months you've got salesforce and atlassian and big incumbents there too you've got kind of mildly old ones like intercom and talk desk doing it too okay cool all like robotics like bold tape but there's so much money going into robotics but massively far away from having a chat gpt moment humanoids in particular really struggle informed factor i just think funding and that excitement exceeds the capabilities significantly would be my answer i like to
Speaker 1think i'm somewhat of an optimist and so i i do think this technology is transformative and so i think there will be a ton of opportunity and so i might answer that and then through that we can back out what i wouldn't invest in i like i i think uh inference we already talked about i think there's a tremendous tremendous this
Speaker 2yeah fund welcome it's so good to have you on your first day thank you number one we should have
Speaker 1inference we should have inference um there's gonna be way more software written so we should also invest in like lower level kind of like infrastructure primitives modal incredible company temporal incredible company do they not compete with fireworks modal does on some things yeah okay but they also do more they do sandboxes so we've got inference layer one the coding layer i would say inference and then like infrastructure so like low level infrastructure temporal modal super base convex vertical agents i think vertical agents are are are going to be a good layer any specific verticals i don't know if there's any kind of like verticals that i would overweight so much i think the important parts are having like domain specific kind of like point of view and and really diving deep there i think patrick collison said this on a recent podcast i think with amjad from replet when he was talking about like what the next startup he would build it probably wouldn't be like a sexy area it would be some area where like technology maybe or at least ai penetration is low but there's a lot of domain expertise built up there and kind of going in there and really transforming that the key part is basically just having some domain expertise that can either be captured in data or logic that goes in the harness and eventually maybe the model weights but but i wouldn't start there having having some domain expertise that can be captured there and and then putting it to work i think by the way there are maybe like three things that i would look for in all of these and i think our prereqs if you look at all these teams that are succeeding one i think like the talent that they have is tremendously strong like Like, Modal has an incredibly strong kind of, like, talent team. Lynn and Fireworks, right? They wrote PyTorch. Like, how cool is that, right?
Speaker 2When we met them, you know, when you're kind of meeting founders, the first time you do the brief intro, it's like, I built PyTorch. Yeah. Oh, that works.
Speaker 1Yeah, yeah. We've got a tick in that box. So I think to build, like, especially this really deep infrastructure, you have to be, like, super technically strong. And there's just not that many people that can do that. Two, you have to go, like, really, really fast. Like, being able to iterate quickly, I think, is incredibly important. The market just changes so rapidly. I think speed and execution speed, when I think about kind of, like, our advantages at Langchain, I think we iterate really, really quickly. And I think that's one of the advantages we have over other companies. And then the last thing would be brand. I think, like, a lot of companies that made it in this AI era basically caught lightning in a bottle and then, like, rode that wave and captured that. You look at, like, Langchain early on. Like, we went very viral and have executed against that. Cursor, a great example. They went very viral, executed against that. Jev, even Claude Code. ChatGPT. Like, it seems like the space is moving so fast. And because there are so many competitors, and maybe this is even because of it, because there are so many competitors, there were, like, a hundred different frameworks that came out in the two months after Langchain came out. But I think we had a brand advantage that was built up. And I think that was a durable advantage that we kind of, like, rode. And so, Instinct, another example of this, is probably a bunch of personal assistants. I think if there is, in terms of, like, it would probably be, like, maybe higher valuations than is rational. But in terms of some of these funding rounds that are getting done where there's a breakout company with, like, a really strong technical roster that has proven that they can execute quickly, I think you just don't look at the price and you just invest.
Speaker 2Is being first more important than ever before?
Speaker 1I think so, absolutely. Yeah, you look at, I mean, it's possible to catch up. I think OpenAI has an incredible job of catching up with Codex. But being first, Anthropic and Claude Code, that, wow. What an advantage that was.
Speaker 2But to your point, yeah, Langchain comes out. And then months after, more and more come out. But Instinct, same, same. But actually, the jury. The durable brand monopoly that comes from being the haloed first is very real.
Speaker 1I think that is super real. I also think that you have to execute incredibly well after that. Counterexample to what I just said, like, just because you're first doesn't mean that you're guaranteed success. AutoGPT, I don't know if you remember the AutoGPT project, but it came out a few months after Langchain, was the fastest growing GitHub project of all time. I haven't heard much from them since. And that's not enough because it's very hard to kind of, like, execute with speed. But I think, like, just because you're first in an area doesn't mean that you'll kind of, like, survive.
Speaker 2I never like to knock people. So I find it, like, helpful to, like, praise them instead in some respects. If you were to write a memo joining the firm for why we should invest in $9 billion Jev round, what would your bull case be for Jev?
Speaker 1Bull case for Jev is that there's a new type of inference and new type of model. And the model category is literally named after them. And so they're going to ride that wave. And they're a very talented team that can execute on that. I don't know the team super well. I don't know the team. I don't think that would have to be the assumption for a round at that value. From everything that I've seen, that seems to be the case. But that would be the bull case. They basically invented a new model category, are associated with it, and have a talented team that can execute on that.
Speaker 2Does taking money from Benchmark change the trajectory of a company?
Speaker 1100%. I think Benchmark, when Miles and really the whole Benchmark partnership invested in us, it was me and Ankush. We were two people. We really thought of them as kind of like a third co-founder. You know, when I think about company building from two people to where we are now today, which is like 400 people, they have been kind of like our most consistent kind of like partner in that journey for sure. You know, I am not a VC. I've never done VC. There's probably also other market dynamics where great Benchmark's involved in that signals thing. And we're very lucky to have Sequoia join us after like two months, three months after the Benchmark round. And they've been a tremendous partner as well. Who was it from Sequoia? Sonia from Sequoia, who is one of the most plugged in people in the spaces. How do their styles differ? Benchmark is maybe a little bit more, what's the core nucleus of the company. And like, that's like, we're going to be a sounding board for that. And we're going to kind of like help with that. So, so what I mean by that is I feel like, yeah, a lot of the company building things, positioning things, I would go to them for, and they would spend time there. Sequoia's style I think is they help with like everything. Like they are just a machine. So they help with recruiting of ICs of executives. They help with marketing and launches. And they're all really operational. Does it really work? I think so. Yeah. I mean, we've gotten a lot of our candidates from Sequoia references. Really? Yeah. They have a talent network. And we've gotten a bunch of really, really strong candidates from there.
Speaker 2Would you say to founders it's worth taking a discount for Sequoia?
Speaker 1I think absolutely it's worth taking a discount for Sequoia and Benchmark and probably other of these top one or tier one VC firms, but those are the ones that we work with.
Speaker 2What do you know now about fundraising that you wish you could tell yourself when it was just the two of you?
Speaker 1I think there is like this game to fundraising almost. And I definitely didn't. I didn't know that going in. I'm a first time founder, like where I spend all my time is on product basically. And so I'm very focused on that. I do think there is this game to fundraising where you want to fundraise without fundraising. You want to like, once you get one term, you want to get one term sheet and then, you know, tell others you have a term sheet and- Post a revenue graph on
Speaker 2Twitter and then it leads to all these inbound and- Yeah. Do you fucking like this? I fucking hate it. Maybe I'm too old for this game now. It's just posturing. It's like, Harrison, do you really- If you really like me and want to build a business with me, I'll give you the same price and the same money than whatever. Let's just do this. Stop fucking posturing.
Speaker 1I don't like fundraising at all. I think, I mean, kind of what you were saying, like I want to build something great with people I enjoy working with. I think like, yeah, especially for the scale of ambitions that we have, we need to fundraise to get that done. I think that that was the approach that Benchmark kind of took when we were fundraising from them as well. Like, hey, let's figure out if we like each other and want to work together. By the way, that was very good negotiating by them. And so I think they're very good negotiators as well. But when I look at our most recent rounds that we've done, we raised from Tom at IVP, our series B. I had been chatting with Tom from, I think, right around the Sequoia round for over two and a half years. And so that was a relationship that we just built up over time. And I got to know him and he got to know me. And so when it came time to fundraising, I feel like there was less games involved there. And I really appreciated that.
Speaker 2I would love to do a quick fire round. So I say a short statement. And you give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay? Let's do it. What was your single favorite VC meeting? First pitch with Benchmark. So many legends in the room.
Speaker 1Who was the coolest to hang with? Bill Gurley. Were you intimidated?
Speaker 2I think I was too naive to be intimidated. He's also just like a big man. There's an intimidating figure looming over you. What is the single most important thing you believe about agents that most of the ecosystem would disagree with?
Speaker 1It's still really hard to build them. Like really, really hard. Maybe people would agree with that, but I think it's just underrated how hard it is.
Speaker 2What have you changed your mind on most in the last 12 months?
Speaker 1Market for inference is massive. I remember talking with the board about whether we should do a gateway a year and a half ago. And we didn't see what value we could add over something like OpenRouter. And I think that was 100% the wrong decision.
Speaker 2What has been the hardest technical thing for you and the team to build?
Speaker 1We built our own database for storing agent traces.
Speaker 2SmithDB. How do you think about competing with ClickHouse and being a customer? Kind of weird or normal?
Speaker 1I think there are 500 different companies that we are frenemies with. And so I think I've personally gotten very used to it.
Speaker 2You can invest in one IPO, OpenAI at 1.5 trillion or Anthropic at 2 trillion?
Speaker 1OpenAI. I think they have more diverse, different paths to really tremendous exits valuations. Totally get that.
Speaker 2What do you know now that you wish you'd known? When you started in 2022?
Speaker 1I wish I knew what the harnesses today looked like so we could
Speaker 2have built them earlier. Final one for you. What are you most excited for when you look forward five years?
Speaker 1I'm really excited for what creative things we can do with AI. I think a lot of AI and a lot of what we work on is helping enterprises be more efficient and delivering outcomes. I think creative things like Suno are tremendously interesting. I wish we'd see more of those.
Speaker 2Totally agree. I remember having Mikey on the show. It was a fun one actually. And this has been so much fun to do, Harrison. Thank you so much for putting up with my waywardness and divergent schedules, but you've been an amazing guest.
Speaker 1No, thank you
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