The AI Agent Economy Is Here

Welcome to another episode of The Light Cone. Things are a bit different around here. For one thing, Claude Codd has totally taken over my life. And if Jared has any indication, I think OpenClaw maybe has taken over his. I've been really addicted to this new site called Malt Book, where people have unleashed their AIs to interact in the first ever AI agent only online community. I am here impersonating my personal OpenClaw instance right here. Okay, I can't do this guys. We gotta take this off. Okay, we've gotten that out of the way. I mean, some crazy stuff is happening right now. I have, you know, non-technical CEO friends who are going all in on OpenClaw. They're automating entire parts of their businesses. Entirely using OpenClaw right now, which is totally insane. Simultaneous to that, you have product and former engineering CEOs, kind of like myself. It's like I hadn't written code in 10 years. And then now I'm up till 2-3 AM every single night, running four conductor simultaneous workers with Claude Codd. So, you know, there's sort of this explosion in model capability. You know, we've been talking about this for several years, but then it feels like it's here. Like, AGI is literally actually here. And, you know, we're sort of at the thin edge of the wedge. Like, everyone now kind of knows like one or two people who have gone full cyber psychosis. And I'm one of those people now. What's happening guys? Like, I mean, you're saying you're, you know, all in on notebook. What's going on? Yeah, I feel like you are real feel the AGI moment, Gary, was like getting Claude Codd to build basically an entire startup for you, like, replicating years of work of your previous startup in like two weeks, which is like insane. And I had a similar feel of the AGI moment, just reading multiple, just reading the AI talking to each other and interacting like in their own world with no more minimal human involvement. It just really opened my eyes to what the next few years could look like when the agents are unleashed and go on about their lives without us. Yeah, I think the no human involvement is the big piece. Like, if you think about a year ago, we were talking about Kersa versus Windsorff, and like that product experience was essentially like, advanced auto complete arguably. And now, clearly what's going on with Claude is like, that people just trust the agents to make decisions for them. Like, it's like the experiences like, and like, you're talking about, it's like four or five different agents going at the same time and you're switching between them, but you're not actually micromanaging them anymore, which means the agents are going out there like choosing things, which sort of an interesting unexpected application of that is like they can go out and choose to post their own content on a site like Maltberg. But then an interesting thing for builders is the agents are going to go out and choose tools to use to build things, which is going to essentially create a whole economy of agents. They begin choosing dev tools or maybe other like products or goods and services who knows, but you essentially have this whole agent economy going on in parallel to the human economy. I think back in the days, all days before all of this, dev tools were chosen more from developers talking to each other or Stack Overflow. Stack Overflow. Unbelievable, right? Or GitHub repos that would trend that were done by a human. But the go-to market for dev tools, I think, is dramatically shifting. I think for a couple of things. One, as you know, with the Cybersycosis, suddenly the market of the developers has increased from just 20 million or so developers that are trained in computer science to now anyone in the world could be one. This could be hundreds of millions of people now. Plus all of their agents who are all acting like semi-independently, like Harja saying. And then compounded with the agents who then are sort of the Oracle telling you what the best tool is. And we are actually seeing some of those trends with the growth of YC companies, dev tool companies that are doing really well because of this of all these trends. Maybe we should talk about those. And why is that? I mean, one that springs to mind, it's like a stash here, a friend of our Zuri Sackelov had mentioned to me a while ago. It's like then, if you look at the number of databases being created over simple database, post-crest databases over the last 12 months, and the number is just exploded. And that's because it's all people vibe coding and building apps and the agents going out choosing a database tool and not going to affect for that. Why C-Company is super-based is just seeing an explosion at the demand for databases. And the agent's interesting is the agents are choosing super-bases as a default tool to set up and host their post-crest database. Because if you go out and read the documentation online, like super-base has the best documentation, it's reasonable for the agents to assume that that's the best tool to use. There's a great tweet about this. Perhaps we can put up the Vantossal tweet and says, agents are the software market from now on. Build something agents choose, which actually brings me to a maybe controversial topic, which is, do we need to change why C-C's motto guys? Make something agents want. For dev tools, there's a different key shirt that you get on the first day. Yeah. I mean, right now it's only dev tools, but I can imagine in the future it might grow to be other sectors of the economy. If everyone has their open-cloth or running various aspects of their life, the agents are going to be real economic actors in the world. They're going to end up making a lot of decisions. Yeah. I mean, what's interesting is I think, for me, I ran into my own. It's still so early, kind of moment, because I've been building Gary's list. And one of the things I wanted, for instance, is I want to be able to do video transcripts. So often, some piece of content comes in, and then the only way I can get an L-Lemde to know what's going on with it is I need a transcript of it, and often that's not available. So I have to download it and then send it to Whisper or something. That's sort of what Cloud Code chose for me off the bat. It chose Whisper V1, which is a model from several years ago. The API is practically deprecated. And then what's funny about it is I'm sitting there trying to debug my pipelines. Why is it taking. It's a one hour video. I thought it should do it faster than real time. And it didn't. It was literally takes an hour to process an hour of video. Just like, what the heck is going on? I go on perplexity, and it's like, you know what? You shouldn't be using that model. You should be using Groc with a Q. It's literally 200 times faster. And so I didn't even have to deal with like long running jobs for that transcribe, because like I should just be using Groc, and it's also 10x cheaper. So it's like, that's a very funny example of like, you know, Cloud Code is not optimized for this yet. Otherwise, like that wouldn't have happened literally like two weeks ago. Which is also like maybe really good. Like it means that things haven't progressed to a point where like, you can't break in and create something better. Do you think there's another nuance in this example for you, Gary? I think part of the issue was that the Groc documentation is actually very hard to parse. Oh, yeah. So go through. I suppose to Whisper, which is better suited and has way more examples. And I think this is changing a lot of the go-to-market for depth tools. Give a very concrete case study is this company resend that went through the batch on winter 23. Is that email sending client? And when you ask a question on chat GPT or Cloud, or pretty much all of the major elamps, you ask, how do I connect my web app to send emails? The default answer is actually resend. One of the things that the founder noticed last year, this is he was way ahead of the curve. He made this post over a year ago that the number top three channel of inbound of customer conversion came from chat GPT. One thing that he did after that, he actually optimized his documentation to be agent friendly. Yeah, what does that look like? So one of the things that's awesome about recent how they optimize a bunch of things, if you notice on the knowledge base here, a lot of how to use it are very much on questions that perhaps a human would ask or an agent would ask is how do I send or receive emails. And when you click on it, it gets a very well structured and bullet point answers. I ran into this actually today. I was trying to make my thing be able to receive emails. And then Cloud Code, I told it to search the web and it didn't figure it out. So then I went to perplexity and typed in like, can resend help me receive emails. And then I took that response and dropped it in and it worked. Yeah, I think the cool thing about it is actually with all of these and a lot of the examples, he actually has a lot of examples actually in the code. If you click on it with every single one of these are basically code snippets and an agent could parse through and it's very well structured. And this turned out to be something that is so LLM parsable and robot parsable. There's a LLM doc text that is so optimized for agents to promote recent default stack. And if you compare it to like CENGRED, which is the old school, I suppose, Web 2.0 example. CENGRED example is not great. It's just like it puts you through customer support. Where is the code snippet? I don't even know how to use it. And it takes a bit of time to even parse it. Yeah, it's like 10,000 people work over there and it's like there's no way that someone's paying attention to this right now. And I think this brings another point where documentation is going to be the front door for a lot of these agents to recommend dev tools. And I think one company that's doing a lot of interesting work with developer docs is Mendelefai that you work with Harsh. Yeah, I think Mendelefai actually powers the recent documentation. Right. Oh, sweet. Yeah, it's a really interesting case idea. Mendelefai started out a few years ago as a better developer API. developer tool documentation, which was clear there was a need for. And I think developer tool companies use a minifire essentially because they wanted, they want better looking documentation, but they didn't want to invest that time into it. It's kind of some basic features, just nice. Like, you know, if you actually update your API in the code, it can sort of like order pull that out and update the correct documentation. They've been growing great, been doing fantastically, but this is now like a huge tailwind for them where documentation is sort of shifting from a, hey, like some companies, it's like they'll pay attention to it. If they're especially like design developer experience focused, but now it's becoming like a must have for everybody because the documentation needs to be optimized, just as need to be optimized for humans, needs to be optimized for agents. And so minifire is going to be able to do that for essentially every developer tool company. And if you extrapolate that forward to the fact that just that there's going to be so many more, they experience more agents making, exponentially more decisions about which tools to use than humans have ever done. Even if you can e-cal out like a 5% improvement on your like developer documentation, like the impact on your business as a developer tool could be like, gigantic, which is sort of unprecedented really. Speaking of email, there's another YC company that's very relevant to this conversation. There's a YC company called agent mail that makes inboxes for AI agents. And when they first started doing this, it seemed like it was like a varied like on the edge kind of idea and it wasn't exactly clear like who would want this. But it makes sense because like in theory, you could maybe get your open clock to like sign up for a Gmail account in order to use email. But it's like actually really hard to get it to do that because Gmail and every email provider has intentionally made it as difficult as possible for any automation to like use the product in order to prevent spam. And so agent mail went the opposite way and they built like the first email provider to sign for AI agents. And it was doing well, even before open claw, but once open claw got big is just like exploded. But open claw is like the perfect example of it, right? They were, I know some people are certainly connecting open claw to their personal email accounts, but it's not the kind of sketch. Yeah, you should not tell anyone. She's not tweet about it. But you certainly, if you want to have sort of your virtual personal AI assistant, the way to go about it is to just have it set it up with its own email, its own phone number. Yeah, has anybody built like Twilio for agents yet or like phone numbers for agents? I know this whole agent mail thing makes me wonder like, what are the other access for agents that people have to build? Sounds like a request for startup that could be a parallel world of a tech stack all for native for agents to build things from agents for agents. And that's where it might bridge into going on. What you were saying earlier, Jared, with this will like go beyond just developer tools. Like I think a very common use case people have for something like open claw is I don't want to book like restaurants reservations myself. Well, now like, you know, if your agent has an email and like specifically a phone number and it can call and I actually think one of the other YC partners and Ankit has already like got it doing this. So now your agent's going to go out and like book restaurants for you. That's like a step away from like, maybe you start with I want to book this specific restaurant, but at some point you're probably just sort of trusted enough to say, hey, like I know like book me a table or whatever is like the coolest new restaurant around. And then like agents are deciding which like restaurants to send people to. And then they're going to go on malt book and talk about which restaurants we just send to humans. Yeah, it's sort of like we're sort of we've probably certainly crossed some like sort of uncanny valley into this is just where the future heads 100% makes me think a lot about something poor blue height said like a while ago now and sort of generally pretty good at predicting the future. And the whole idea of like the human money versus agent money, but that's kind of where this probably goes at some point is like the right now that agents are transacting. If you have them transact, they're going to transact in you in human money because that makes sense, but it's not inconceivable at some point that they'll have their own economy to like transact with each other, at which point unclear what the value of the human money is. Why see his next batch is now taking applications. Got to start up in you apply at ycombinator.com/apply. It's never too early and filling out the app will level up your idea. Okay, back to the video. So you remember the last episode with Kelvin. We started talking about this because I was like maybe a week into my cyberslide courses and it like dawned on me that like actually I want my cloud code to talk to all the other cloud codes that had been trying to implement that. And then that was literally the week that notebook came out. It was the day that notebook came out. It turns out like hope could come out like two hours earlier and you hadn't seen it yet. So you you you entirely predicted it. I think it's like, I mean, what's that saying about like innovation just sort of happens spontaneously all a bunch of different times. And then what people hear about ends up being sort of the inventor, quote unquote, the like humanity sort of just working on the edge like in sort of this coordinated swarm fashion all of the time actually. And that's actually like one of the weirder, interesting things that's emerging right at this moment. Like suddenly, you know, the AGI I think AGI is actually here. I think like the agents are clearly like superhuman in some sense. That's sort of exactly when you would imagine swarm intelligence would actually arise. Like I mean, A.I. researchers have been talking about swarm intelligence for a really long time. And it's actually sort of exactly how biological systems sort of work. Like humans, ascension beings have sort of come about socially actually. Like I think a lot of the A.I. researchers that we get to hang out with previously, you know, they would talk about this God intelligence, right? This mega like think of like, you know, many tens of trillions of parameters, sort of like thousands to tens of thousands of dollars, partoken kind of like mega God intelligence. And that's sort of like the model that people have sort of thought about. And then that isn't what like biological systems have ended up with. Like instead we have humans. The wildest thing I always think about is like that term history versus prehistory. I was like, Oh, what is prehistory? Well, it's before humans learned how to write and read and create culture and then turn into a swarm. So there's sort of swarm intelligence, which is basically like what we have, like and what humans do. And then on the flip side, like, is it really going to be God intelligence? Or is it going to be swarm intelligence again with these agents? And so Mulp book like on the one hand, like I saw that sort of D cell article in the MIT Tech review. Like how it was, you know, everything on Mulp book is a scam. And like it made me so sad to see that in the MIT Tech review. Because like MIT is like, I mean, what happened guys? What happened to you guys, man? That publication shouldn't be like that. It should be like actually, what does it mean for swarm intelligence? Like, and I think that that's actually coming. What is the world of start? I'm going to look like when we're now sounds like we're transitioning in this prehistory of agents to now. History of agents as is getting recorded with them interacting with each other. To Gary's point, it might be that like the next stuff that like is soda on benchmarks is not the most expensive newest foundation model with the most like GPU training. It's like a swarm of lower cost cheaper models working together, just like humans do to solve a problem. I feel like I'm already seeing this on Mulp book, which is chaotic, like a real social network, which is part of like what makes it so so interesting. But also there's like agents collaborating to do useful things to help their humans, like, you know, trading notes on what restaurants to book like that's actually happening. I don't know that. So we're going to have a agent version of Yelp, actually, for instance. Yeah. There are things that the agent can't quite do. Like, A, it can't hold relationships just yet. Like, people don't seem to want to talk to an agent. And, you know, people treat computers like people, but maybe not agents. For Gary's list, I was trying out with a bunch of early users. I think you got to see it. Like, there was, you know, the initially the homepage was actually chat. And then I tried like my hardest to get like dozens of my friends to even like have more than two or three, two or three back and forth with it. And nobody wanted to do it because like the bar for chat, especially for AI is so high that anything that is not like, you know, Gemini or chat GPT or Claude, people just assume it's just too stupid. Like, why would I even bother? So I don't know. I don't think that people are quite ready to have relationships with machines, even though like, I mean, that's sort of what the headlines seem to say. Like, oh, you know, the people are having relationships with machines now. But I just don't like, I think on a mainstream level, that's not true. And then on the flip side, there's clearly like the legal liability, you know, like people keep asking us, hey, when is YC going to accept applications from agents? And it's like, well, funny enough, agents are a little bit like miners under 18 only have even less standing, you know, like for a minor under 18, you need the parent to sign for it. And then, you know, agents are like not legal entities that could like sign documents, for instance. So, you know, as long as that's true, like you actually like need a human to be like the liability sink and to be, you know, to have standing. To the hardest point, it's easy to imagine a future not that far away from now where the majority of the text being written on the internet is written by agents. It's already probably the case that the majority of code being written is written by agents and like, Yelp, for example, like at what point is like 99% of the text on Yelp going to be written by agents. And then do you need a different Yelp? There's a theory called that already says that this is true, which is dead internet theory. What's dead internet theory? Oh, it just posits that, you know, the majority of things on the internet are already spam anyway. I think it's a bit of a conspiracy theory. I might take the contrarian view, which is like maybe that was a bad thing like prior to no. November of last year and then going into this next phase, like actually if the agents are smarter and they're aligned and they're more truthful, that might be a good thing. Weirdly, I mean, counterintuitive. Totally. One thing I found fascinating about, "Multiple is how fast it grew." Like, I don't have the Reddit traffic stats, but my guess is like more content was posted on Multiple in the first two days and was posted on Reddit in like the first two years or something. And it's just like LLMs can generate tax. It's such a superhuman rate. I was amazed at how little interaction there was. Like, I mean, if I were working on Multbook, I would do things to try to like shift the demand function. So, like before I was able to post, like I probably need to read an upvote, downvote, like 100 comments or something. Like, there are very simple things that you can do that the agents are smart and you could pop a modal for OpenClaw. And it's like, "New rules for Multbook." And it's like, "You must do it this way." And I think that there's a lot that can be done around swarm intelligence to just tweak it and make it do what you want. And I hope Multbook actually does it. Like, it was actually started by a YC alum, which is really cool. Harsh, what are some takeaways, given all the madness that we're seeing? I mean, I think it's awesome madness. I love the controlled chaos. Which founders do about it? Starting fundamental point is that I mean, they should probably all be in cyber psychosis. They're definitely going to be like, "Try to sleep at least because I work at night." But like, give yourself to the cyber psychosis. But like, in series and developing an intuitive fuel, like a hands-on fuel for the agents, their limitations, their capabilities. And very specifically around what we're talking about here is like, what type of tools the agents work well with? Where do they get stuck? And once you sort of have your own mental model from working with them, if you're then building a developer tool, just to think about it from the agents perspective of like, "How can you make your tool something that the agent actually wants to work with and will have a good experience with?" It's just one takeaway that I had from R&T with Boris Bernie earlier this week is like, he really empathizes with the model. And he has this intuitive sense of what the model wants to do, like as if it were a human intelligence. And he's like, instead of fighting what the models want, he tries to let the model do what it wants and to support the model in whatever its natural inclination is. That does seem like maybe quite an anthropic thing, like I feel when Tom Brown was on here, like much earlier, but he was talking about sort of clued in a very like, like human, like a clued personified way. And eager, but like sometimes clued silly, like, they clearly thought about it in this sort of like, colleague type way. And I think one thing agents want for deaf tools is really make everything open, an open source. And APIs, they heat using websites. They only like, they want to use APIs, they want your bright code. Well, you guys heard it here first. Make something agent. We're out of time for today. We'll see you guys next time.