Josh Elman
@joshelman
I have been very lucky to work on or invest in many products I use every day including this. Now finding and helping the next great consumer companies at @a16z
3.4K Following 174.2K Followers
Day one into Siri Recap from my watch and this may be my favorite new feature from Apple in a long time
I want to go to UC HMB!
The University of California’s investment arm has purchased the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Half Moon Bay for $193 million, but university officials have not publicly discussed their plans or management strategy. Read the full story by Royal Calkins at
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Discord is rapidly rewriting their app using Rust (and presumably with the assistance of brilliant AI coders like Mr. Claude or Ms. Codex).
The performance improvement is astounding.
I imagine every app / service will “tune up” their hand crafted code to run faster and better
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A mobile comparison test
On the left is the current Discord Android client, and on the right is the new version we’re developing in Rust
A wonderful post on the history of from @thealexhoffmann and how their hustle and community finally got it to break out. I had been tracking it for quite a while but this is their story of how I found them in 2015
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We need Brinks Trucks for moving GPUs around now
A truck carrying $11.4 million in Nvidia hardware disappeared after leaving Oakland, as organized cargo thieves increasingly target expensive computer equipment destined for the data centers powering the AI boom.
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to Josh’s point, it may not have the delivery and consumption patterns of “software” the way we think about today, but it will serve the functions
think generated pages in instinct, generated workflows in sola, chrome extensions for personalized versions of the web, etc.
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Yup! It was Hue!
this is Hue btw :) makes me so happy that @joshelman loved his experience enough to share on the @a16z podcast.
@joshelman: "So far I've found them just to be probably some of the most joyful moments I've had with agents."
"When we were first both onboarding onto this agent, it was like, how'd you guys meet? And we told slightly different stories and the agents were kind of poking us both to rationalize the two stories of how we met. And we met at a friend's house and they were like, which one of you knew them better? And it was this really kind of fun curiosity game that made it just, whoa, I'm having a good experience. And my friend and I were texting on the side too. And it was just a thing that if we hadn't had an agent doing it, we wouldn't have had that same moment."
@illscience: "What I love about that is it provides a degree of social indirection that actually makes you closer. Because they're your friend, they're like, I don't know how to text Josh and tell him my power's out, it's oversharing, you know? And I think we also have been very trained to be cautious about sharing now with existing social products. So something that can create almost a social lubricant in a very sort of low-key way is really cool."
@joshelman: "no, it's great. It definitely was bringing us together."
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Been testing quest and really enjoying the daily experience and how it gives me daily tidbits of information that are very useful for me on a few different threads - consumer apps and Bay Area theater
The extra effort in getting to know me first really gives a different feel
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Introducing Quest, the personal agent that studies you like a profiler.
Quest is for believers-only. It requires radical transparency: full access to your life so your agent can craft your memory.
If you give it a shot, you’ll unlock a personal advisor, always in your corner, helping you and encouraging you to start your quests.
Quest is built different:
1. Memory from day one: 100+ wiki files created on you, all your relationships mapped.
2. Phone-Use: Quest has its own Android phone, and can control messaging apps like WhatsApp, Instagram or TikTok.
3. Fluid UI: Quest builds tailor-made iOS mini-apps around each of your quests.
4. Mothership of AI Assistants: Quest can manage your Instinct and Muse on your behalf.
5. Self-Improving Proactivity Harness: Quest reacts to anything, not just your email, and its proactivity evolves from your feedback and its own mistakes.
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One of the biggest fears with AI assistants is how much to trust them with our data and our apps. I love the way @ShaneMac has been talking about it.
If your yard has no fence, you hover over your kid. Put up a fence and they can roam free inside it. I think agents work the same way. Draw the boundary (which data, which apps, how much they can spend, etc), then let them do everything they can inside it and check in before they cross it.
We're still at the early, messy stage, and I love that stage! @illscience and I got into all of it on the pod with @DavidPawlan, who's tested nearly 150 of these so the rest of us don't have to.
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David Pawlan, creator of Assistant Benchmark, has tracked 147 AI assistants so far, and in his group chats of AI power users, the number one fear is trust. It comes up in 22% of roughly 3,600 messages.
He puts agents through head-to-head tests, like ordering same-day flowers as cheaply as possible or planning a weekend in LA that's both luxurious and cost-efficient, to see which ones can hold competing preferences.
He joins a16z's Anish Acharya and Josh Elman to discuss why the scariest agent failures are the embarrassing ones, why agents are where e-commerce was in 1997, why scale is still a moat, and the "dark agent" that could speak to the parts of ourselves we don't reveal.
0:52 Inside a meetup for 100 agent nerds
2:52 Why we'll all have an army of agents
5:36 Trust is power users' top fear
6:28 Building fences around your agent
10:14 Privacy loses to free pizza
12:41 Can agents balance price and speed?
14:19 How agents define luxury differently
19:44 Migrating from one agent to another
21:06 What your photo roll tells an agent
25:48 Will agents make us more rational?
27:38 Why paternalism kills products
31:43 Gossipy agents as social glue
33:41 Scale is still a software moat
36:55 From OpenClaw to agents hanging out
39:23 Agents that introduce you to people
46:15 Predictions and the dark agent idea
YouTube:
@DavidPawlan @illscience @joshelman
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AI also flips the order of how we build. The old loop was idea, spec, design, build. Now you build something quickly, play with it, then design it. Not only will you learn more from playing with a prototype than from debating it, you find the story sooner.
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Hand-crafted code is already like cursive handwriting.
AI also flips the order of how we build. The old loop was idea, spec, design, build. Now you build something quickly, play with it, then design it. Not only will you learn more from playing with a prototype than from debating it, you find the story sooner.
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This is huge news for Siri AI (and one of the last things I was working on when I stepped away)
Any app can now offer dynamic skills from their app to Siri so users can take broader actions across their apps
(App Intents instead of MCP)
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Big news for our developers! We are shipping a developer preview that dramatically expands the capabilities of all apps to integrate into Siri. So excited to see what you folks do with this.
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This is my new daily habit.
I love puzzles. I even subscribe to Games Magazine.
Filling out my new daily card limit is already much fun and good for my brain.
We’ve pivoted Oboe. The first version, which we spent the past two years building, didn’t work. No excuses. Here’s the full story, culminating in what comes next: an all-new Oboe, available today.
We launched Oboe with a mission to make humanity smarter. That mission is core to who we are, and it hasn’t changed. The first way we thought to achieve it was by leveraging frontier models to offer everyone personalized tutoring.
But through many iterations over the past two years, it became clear that we built the wrong product. First, we’d made strategic decisions that left us undifferentiated in the age of LLMs. Second, by focusing on utility above all else, there was little organic incentive for people to return to the platform. And most importantly, no matter how great our product was, not many people were motivated to actively learn every day.
Despite our best efforts to serve everyone on the planet, we landed on a small, loyal user base that loved a product which wasn’t growing fast enough.
So we took a step back: How else could we serve everyone on the planet and still achieve our mission?
We decided instead to focus on a motivation everyone has: to have fun. Every day, billions of people entertain themselves on their mobile devices, filling countless minutes with mindless scrolling and brainrot that doesn’t make us smarter. In many cases, it actually makes us stupider.
What if we could replace scrolling that makes us stupider with scrolling that is both fun and makes us smarter? That’s the new Oboe.
It’s a fully personalized feed of dynamically generated, interactive, anti-brainrot challenges. Every scroll is designed specifically for you, to help you get smarter in a few minutes every single day.
We’ve been blown away by usage from our thousands of beta users. The differences in engagement and retention between this and the original version are stark. The product is working. It’s already clear that this new direction taps into a universal need that none of our previous iterations did.
For all of those people out there like me who feel like doomscrolling wastes their precious time, who enjoy feeling fulfilled, and who wish there was a better alternative: this one’s for you.
We can’t wait to see what you think.
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This is quite the deep insight into what a team / company can look like when you build and scale agent- first instead of people- first.
The thoughtfulness of the scaffolding and constitution you need to empower humans to then manage swarms of agents is impressive
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Build this playbook into your AI and use it every single step of the way. From ideation to listening to potential users through building and launching. HI (Hiten Intelligence) is the new SI.
Talked to multiple founders yesterday who have been building their products over the last 3 years. Started manual code.
They feel behind and slower than companies that started this year with all code written by agents.
I have never seen such an order of magnitude difference.
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I have known @ekuyda since the earliest days of Replika and always been in awe of her insight and understanding of how we can connect with AI.
Wabi is the best of this. I use it for my non-work life to stay in touch with what I want to watch, family updates, our trips, and more
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Worth the read every year. #neverforget#
Todd: Hello… Operator…listen to me…I can’t speak very loud. – This is an emergency. I’m a passenger on a United flight to San Francisco.. We have a situation here….Our plane has been hijacked…..can you understand me?
Lisa: (exhaling a deep breath to herself) I understand… Can the hijackers see you talking on the phone?
Todd: No
Lisa: Can you tell me how many hijackers are on the plane?
Todd: There are three that we know of.
Lisa: Can you see any weapons? What kind of weapons do they have?
Todd: Yes…. they don’t have guns….they have knives – they took over the plane with knives.
Lisa: Do you mean…like steak knives?
Todd: No, these are razor knives…like box cutters.
Lisa: Can you tell what country these people are from?
Todd: No…..I don’t know. They sound like they’re from the mid-east.
Lisa: Have they said what they want?
Todd: Someone announced from the cockpit that there was a bomb on board. He said he was the captain and to stay in our seats and stay quiet.
He said that they were meeting these men’s demands and returning to the airport… It was very broken English, and… I’m telling you…it sounded fake!
Lisa: Ok sir, please give me your name.
Todd: My name is Todd Beamer.
Lisa: Ok Todd….my name is Lisa…Do you know your flight number? If you can’t remember, it’s on your ticket.
Todd: It’s United Flight 93.
Lisa: Now Todd, can you try to tell me exactly what happened?
Todd: Two of the hijackers were sitting in first class near the cockpit. A third one was sitting near the back of the coach section. The two up. front got into the cockpit somehow; there was shouting. The third hijacker said he had a bomb. It looks like a bomb. He’s got it tied to his waist with a red belt of some kind.
Lisa: So is the door to the cockpit open?
Todd: No, the hijackers shut it behind them.
Lisa: Has anyone been injured?
Todd: Yes, ..they…they killed one passenger sitting in first class. There’s been lots of shouting. We don’t know if the pilots are dead or alive. A flight attendant told me that the pilot and copilot had been forced from the cockpit and may have been wounded.
Lisa: Where is the 3rd hijacker now Todd?
Todd: He’s near the back of the plane. They forced most of the passengers into first class. There are fourteen of us here in the back. Five are flight attendants. He hasn’t noticed that I slipped into this pantry to get the phone. The guy with the bomb ordered us to sit on the floor in the rear of the plane……….oh Jesus.. Help!
Lisa: Todd….are you ok? Tell me what’s happening!
Todd: Hello…..We’re going down….I think we’re going to crash……Wait – wait a minute. No, we’re leveling off….we’re ok. I think we may be turning around…..That’s it – we changed directions. Do you hear me….we’re flying east again.
Lisa: Ok Todd…. What’s going on with the other passengers?
Todd: Everyone is… really scared. A few passengers with cell phones have made calls to relatives. A guy, Jeremy, was talking to his wife just before the hijacking started. She told him that hijackers had crashed two planes into the World Trade Center……Lisa is that true??
Lisa: Todd…..I have to tell you the truth…..it’s very bad. The World Trade Center is gone. Both of the towers have been destroyed.
Todd: Oh God —help us!
Lisa: A third plane was taken over by terrorists. It crashed into the Pentagon in Washington DC. Our country is under attack….and I’m afraid that your plane may be part of their plan.
Todd: Oh dear God. Dear God…….Lisa, will you do something for me?
Lisa: I’ll try….if I can….Yes.
Todd: I want you to call my wife and my kids for me and tell them what’s happened. Promise me you’ll call..
Lisa: I promise – I’ll call.
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