(Preview) All About Agents: Dots Arrive, Google and Apple Questions, Muse Follow-Ups, Super Intelligence, and the Mandate of Heaven

Ben and Andrew begin with a note on VIM and reactions to a confusing product launch from OpenAI at Dev Day earlier this week. Then: Will personal agents be a winner-take-all market? What can Apple and Google do in the consumer agent space? Will normal people take longer than expected to adopt these products? And did Meta’s push into the enterprise break the company’s hot streak? From there: Emails on the future of payments, “super intelligence” branding for AI, America.gov, and firing Dario Amodei. At the end: AI Show & Tell with notes on generational adoption shifts (and Tamagotchis), movie games, a personalized sports page, App Store hell, and going full KGB on messaging.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Hello and welcome to a free preview of Sharp Tech.

• 0:09Speaker 00

  Hello and welcome back to another episode of Sharp Tech. I'm Andrew Sharp and on the other line, Ben Thompson. Ben, how you doing?

• 0:19Speaker 01

  I just had an amusing moment. You had to drop a couple of hellos. One of them was my fault. I wasn't quite ready. The second one was a little too enthusiastic. It was more a greatest of all talk hello, which by the way, I always laugh because my kids would always imitate it. Whenever I'd say your name, they would just drop into a long extended hello. And come to find out, all your listeners do this. You've got multiple emails of kids imitating the Andrew hello. Anyhow, you said after you did it too enthusiastically, that you had too much Vim.

• 0:53Speaker 00

  Too much Vim. Yeah. So I had to crank it down a little bit.

• 0:56Speaker 01

  Did you know that? This is very funny because this is reestablishing our normie versus nerd credentials. Did you know that there is a Vim? Vim has a tech reference?

• 1:05Speaker 00

  Oh no. What does Vim stand for? I'm still a little bit ashamed of the VPN, VPS mistake on the last episode.

• 1:14Speaker 01

  That's also very funny. No, Vim is a text editor. There's like famous wars that are used like Unix type systems. And there's like Vim people and there's like Emacs people. Emacs is like the ultimate nerd out sort of you can configure literally everything. And people have these massive configuration files that they carry around their whole life and they like can't function without it.

• 1:36Speaker 00

  So the nerd Chads, they're all Emacs people. Is that right?

• 1:40Speaker 01

  I think Emacs is going to be more on the nerd side of the spectrum, Vim a little less. I don't actually use any of these. If I have to edit text in a terminal, I use Nano, which is like just the bare bone sort of thing. So I'm actually out of my depth as well, but it did amuse me. Vim, there you go. That's your word of the day.

• 1:56Speaker 00

  The more you know, you know, the Emacs Chads versus the Vim virgins out there in technology.

• 2:03Speaker 01

  No, look, if you know what Vim is, you're already off the reservation. So it doesn't matter.

• 2:07Speaker 00

  Everyone is a Chad nerd in that scenario. Well, Ben, we are going to be talking agents today, and I want to start with a note that I saw earlier this week. OpenAI famously announced Dots on Tuesday, and at some point, either before the announcement or immediately afterward, SpaceX AI bought dot.com and dot.com now redirects straight to the Grokbot download page. And I highlight that sequence first because I find it delightful. And second, just to step back and celebrate the Wild West nature of the ecosystem right now. It's the best.

• 2:49Speaker 01

  That was going to be my response to this, this other rundown. This sort of stuff used to happen all the time. Like just like companies doing practical jokes on each other. There's a whole thing about, I think Salesforce was actually like, they would do all these crazy stunts at their keynotes. I should have like come up with some examples before of just like making fun of their competitors. That was like way over the top and arguably over the line, actually almost certainly. And that used to be the way tech operated all the time. And you're right, it's good to have it back. Dot.com goes to a different spot.

• 3:21Speaker 00

  I feel like we completely missed that generation of technology. I certainly did.

• 3:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, there was no podcast period back then, which is a real shame because there's, but then again, maybe that's why it all happened because there wasn't enough documentation going on and you know.

• 3:36Speaker 00

  That's right. You could get away with line stepping here and there. Well, this is all a thousand times more fun than dealing with a bunch of monopolies who have their own little fiefdoms. So thank you to all of our participants in the AI wars and the frontier wars.

• 3:50Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 3:51Speaker 00

  As for Dots and OpenAI Dev Day, I will say at the top, my feelings after consuming the content from the OpenAI event are close to the exact opposite of my feelings after watching Meta Connect last week. So I'm curious for your thoughts. We'll start with an email from Steven. He says, Ben and Andrew, I can't wait for Ben's rant on how OpenAI has 90% of consumer mind share when it comes to AI, but somehow completely fumbled the Dots launch to feature SF-coded techno parents launching their startups and side hustle companies as the primary use case, rather than going hard into family scheduling, kids' activities,

• 4:36Speaker 00

  catching up with friends, taking care of parents, groceries, et cetera. It even came with dystopian fake house aesthetics that feel like a Black Mirror episode, presumably to ensure we really get the point that the real world and real people's lives are an afterthought and all that matters is the techno grind lifestyle. What do you think of those sentiments from Steven?

• 4:59Speaker 01

  It's interesting because I think Steven made me realize something that's sort of just been in the back of my head, which is I've given up on OpenAI and the consumer market ages ago. Like it's just, I just, I think at some point, I think it was when the Gemini looked like they were, you know, Gemini 3 looked amazing. And I'm just like, they don't have an advertising model. Even if they launch it now, they're going to like, they're swimming upstream. It's going to be tough. And I think I just sort of gave up at that point. It is what it is. They missed, they had the chance, they missed it. Now, it sounds like their advertising product is doing okay by all accounts. I think this relationship with Amazon is very interesting. There's a bit where it's very much in Amazon's interest that OpenAI

• 5:44Speaker 01

  wins because OpenAI is a surface for Amazon ads. They, that is a way for Amazon to deliver on sort of the external agentic. Yes, you can have a great experience, look at OpenAI, accesses our products, no problem. They also show our ads. That's the trade.

• 5:58Speaker 00

  Doesn't kill our ads business.

• 6:00Speaker 01

  That's right. And so, so maybe, so maybe there's, maybe I'm like, I've jumped to conclusions too quickly. And so this didn't really, this didn't really bother me because it's what I expect. And I think like the big change, if anything, is the extent to which Meta and Muse have walked into the opportunity and Google has it.

• 6:20Speaker 00

  Right. I feel like Meta has highlighted a consumer opportunity that other, and including on this podcast, we haven't really talked about the consumer space for like nine months on Sharp Tech.

• 6:31Speaker 01

  Well, the other two was the, sort of the ChatGPT app reboot, which made it unbelievably more complicated in, I think, an attempt to introduce people to what is possible and capable.

• 6:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:47Speaker 01

  But along those lines, it was still kind of jarring for them to introduce Dots by basically mocking the use cases. Oh, of course you could use it to check your school email, but you could also do this. And, and it's funny because I actually think there is a lot to mock about the use cases being put forward for consumer agents, to be clear. Everyone is terrible at this. But my prescription is not that you highlight how you can embrace the grind lifestyle. My prescription is actually you have to go in the exact opposite direction and market these as the modern day Tylenol, the modern day Advil. It's pain relief. There's

• 7:29Speaker 01

  all this stuff in your life that is painful that agents can make easier and better. And it helps that I actually think that is true. Like the, the thing I didn't really put in my Monday article, I mentioned it in sort of a follow up on Tuesday, I think, is the reason I'm optimistic about agents is not because I'm a nerd who thinks agents are fun and cool. That part is all true, to be clear. The, the reason I'm optimistic is because I think tech sucks. It sucks for normal people. It's so hard to use. Apps on an iPhone were way better than what came before. But there is a mindset that sort of looks at the world

• 8:11Speaker 01

  as apps were so much better than before, therefore apps are the best experience. They're not. And actually, if anything, apps have gotten way harder to use.

• 8:20Speaker 00

  I was going to say, at, there was probably a point in time where they were a much better experience. At this point, I think you mentioned you have like 700 apps on your phone. That's true for everybody. They have so many apps, they don't even know where they are and you just search and find one and they're all kind of a pain in the ass to use these days.

• 8:39Speaker 01

  Well, especially things like security, like just keeping track of logins and then two factor authentication and stuff doesn't stay logged in and you have to do it all over again. Like migrating to, like one of the reasons I bailed on the Macs, I didn't even, like, I was like, I should try it for at least a week to see if I get used to the size. And it, I got halfway through migrating and it's like, this is so painful that if I go through with this and I don't like it, I'm gonna have to do the same thing all over again in the opposite direction. And I know I'm done.

• 9:11Speaker 00

  I don't wanna grind through it. Yeah.

• 9:13Speaker 01

  It's funny, cause I've been like with a Mac for a long time. Like I, you know, I knew the big price X were coming. And I was telling everyone, if you need a computer, buy a computer. I did not buy a computer because I'm like, mine's fine.

• 9:27Speaker 00

  Don't put me through that. I don't absolutely have to go through that. Fair enough. Well, and as far as dots is concerned, it's interesting because I had the experience of introducing my wife to Muse last weekend. Because I thought it would be more useful for her than it has been for me. And her first response is, why do I need that? I use chat GPT for all of my personal organization and AI work. Um, and I said, just try it. And she really liked it the first couple of days. So she's now a Muse user. And I understand from OpenAI's perspective, the best market for them is still enterprise works. And so pointing dots in the productivity direction actually makes sense.

• 10:10Speaker 00

  Like the consumer facing agent category is still mostly theoretical. So this could be a reflection of continued strategic coherence on OpenAI's part. However, watching the event, like the visual language around dots and of course, the lowercase d for dots. An OpenAI trademark.

• 10:31Speaker 01

  Really?

• 10:32Speaker 00

  Very groan worthy stuff from them as ever. Um, but like the cuddly little creatures that are just a straight ripoff of the Muse character.

• 10:42Speaker 01

  I think that's unfair. I mean, these are, I'm assuming these were designed a while ago, but um.

• 10:47Speaker 00

  Maybe. Look, all I'm saying is visually it is completely incoherent to me. Because it looks like a product that's designed exclusively for mass market consumers. But that's not really what the product is. And so that was part of what was confusing to me this week.

• 11:03Speaker 01

  I'm not sure what the product is. Like the way I, you know, I'm gonna have to like a re-update, an update. Uh, uh, there is a, so there is a clear need in code, or at least that I've found. This is probably one of those things where I was over, over extrapolating from my sort of experience. But from what I find, I like the, uh, the chat, the Codex sort of organization. Where you basically have projects that align to files on your computer. You could see it's like, it grew up like connected to the local computer. Which is a big part of all the problem of why, why this smashing all these different products together feels so weird. But you have like projects that align to like folders and in those you have different threads.

• 11:43Speaker 01

  And part of it is, I think people don't realize that like, in general, one massive chat thread is bad. Like the, the bigger it gets, the more context it gets, the, and this was sort of a.

• 11:55Speaker 00

  The more confounded the reasoning becomes.

• 11:57Speaker 01

  It just gets super confused. Cause they're like, you like, you load instructions into it at the beginning. And those are so far back in context. There was a big push early on in like the, the chat GPT era. Oh, we need larger and larger context. Context is the problem. Oh, that's a million token con, or context. This is incredible. Actually, no, that sucks. The, this is where I was trying to get at with the write things down. The way they actually function well is continually writing things down. And the way they keep track of stuff that's written down is by having relatively fresh context and then loading stuff in as it's sort of appropriate. And managing this is actually really, really interesting. I've just been part of the whole thing I've done with this, this Gecko bot thing. And, and just under, getting a much more fine tuned understanding of how this works. But by and large, doing a thread per task is better than having this massive sort of ongoing thing.

• 12:43Speaker 01

  Anyhow, Codex actually aligns this pretty well. And Codex has been, is really good about spinning up new threads. Like there's one, I'm like, oh, let's redo this with this direction. Let's throw this away. And instead of trying to like, continue and remember all the, all the stuff it did that was wrong, which I talked about, like this is an issue here. It just starts a new thread. Like it can do it itself. Anyhow, this is all great. I, if I know exactly what I'm working on. The Codex organization makes much more sense to me than Claude, which is, it, it's, it's much less intuitive to me. As far as organizing a prod, work on a project that I'm, that I'm doing. Claude, on the other hand, manages context much better. So there's a bit where like one long quad thread just keeps track of itself.

• 13:26Speaker 01

  I feel better than sort of Codex does. And the way this worked out for me is I actually, cause I have my agents write everything down. Cause I wanna be able to use any agent and I don't want stuff inside, like inside their weird folders. Dot Codex or dot Quad or whatever it might be. I want it out. I don't wanna be locked in. I'm just allergic to lock in the way I've always operated. I always use text files. A, a, and, uh, I just use, I basically use Claude as sort of a chief of staff. It kinda knows everything that I'm working on. I have like this server that just came in. And I also have a bunch of cameras that I'm trying to set up. And like, all these different things, I could just sort of bounce around. And I use this sort of quad thread to sort of keep track of it. And it's writing it all down. And then when I'm actually working specifically on a project, I find it easier working Codex.

• 14:10Speaker 00

  So Claude is the barrel and Codex is the ammo as far as executing on your side.

• 14:16Speaker 01

  I mean, I have, I, that's a great analogy. I think that that is sort of the case. And so I see dots come out. Like that's, yes, that is so needed in Codex. An overarching sort of agent that can be my liaison to all my other agents that are working. So conceptually, this makes a ton of sense. Um, so, so even starting there, that was my assumption around dots. That is so heavily nerd coded, right? It's like, let me manage all my AI building projects.

• 14:47Speaker 00

  Market really for that sort of thing. Sure.

• 14:49Speaker 01

  So here's the problem. Uh, dots kinda sucks. Uh, and the reason it sucks for me in this use case, it has, it seems to not know anything about what I'm working on. It immediately like started looking for my calendar. Like, so I have a plugin to pull my calendar in for Gecko. So it found that. And it's like, I noticed you have a conflict on October 14th. Do you want me to help you resolve that? Number one, I'm like, how did you know that? That was weird. And of course I figured out how it did. But number two, like this is so, I don't know. I, that's not what I need help with. I need help managing all these projects that I have. And, and so, and then I'm like, oh, uh, and it starts asking me for permissions to everything. I'm like, I set, I made my own custom permissions file for Codex.

• 15:29Speaker 01

  So it knows when it has to prompt me to approve something and when it doesn't. Cause I want a little bit, I want fairly loose. Cause I have a dedicated computer just for this. I don't want total full access. So I actually made my, my whole thing. It didn't know where that was. It didn't know about it. And I had to like direct it to the file and then it found it. I'm like, oh, I'm working on this and this file. It's like, I don't know what you're talking about. And it's like, it's weirdly, it's weirdly neutered and like unknowledgeable about stuff. A, a, and so, and then, but again, like I said, it latched onto this calendar thing. It's weird. It's just a, it's, I see a hole here in the Codex offering. But then, to your point, everyone in the media, everyone's looking at it. It's like, oh, they're Muse competitor.

• 16:12Speaker 01

  And it's like, I guess so, but it's just, it, it.

• 16:16Speaker 00

  It's not really that. It's not as good as Muse. It doesn't sound like it's solving your problems either. Yeah. It's just sort of a confused and confusing product for the time being. And of course, now there's dots, spaces, pages, local slash cloud, chat GPT work.

• 16:33Speaker 01

  Thing is a great idea, by the way. So this is a, this is a, this, so the way I backed into Gecko bot is I actually created my own page that just listed all the stuff that I was working on. And, you know, I sort of developed that more. The biggest thing is like basically cards. So any item that I get reminded by Gecko, I click on it and it has all the history of that and the item and any like, there's attachments to it. Or like, for example, I'm editing an interview now. Dumb and just, he does the initial transcript and then he posts it. And then instead of me trying to find where the link is or whatever, it's just, I just, it's in the card. I click it. I download the text file. I can edit it. It's great. Like the, and so this idea of having some sort of substantiation place where you could actually see the stuff you're working on in a way that makes sense.

• 17:14Speaker 01

  And you can, I actually have UI on that page and it's all fake UI. Cause the UI is just prompts. You click it and like, say you click done. It's not act, there's no machinery in the page that is going into the database clicking done. It's firing off a prompt to Gecko saying this is done. And then Gecko actually does all the, the bookkeeping. So this whole concept of a space, now obviously they have way more resources, way more capabilities. What it looks like you can do with those spaces looks great. So I think like, and this is the frustration. There's all these ideas that make sense and that are super cool.

• 17:46Speaker 00

  Should exist.

• 17:46Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah. It's just, it's such a, it, there's no organizing principle here. And I think it is all downstream to bring this full circle to the emailer of, they had chat GPT. They decided we have to get money from the enterprise and we're just still living in sort of the shipwreck that is downstream from that. Everything's great and it all sucks. Cause you don't know what's going on. And, um, yeah, I think the, the cardinal sin was the, the super app. Pushing this stuff to, in the long run, you can see why all this should be together. Like dot should be the ultimate manifestation of chat GPT.

• 18:28Speaker 01

  You, you shouldn't have a, but even in chat GPT, it's kinda weird. You had a bunch of different threads. It's be, it'd be easier just to have one thread, right? You just talk to your agent and it answers your question.

• 18:39Speaker 00

  That's true. Sure.

• 18:40Speaker 01

  That's what dot is, I think ultimately going for. But this app wasn't ready. And then you can imagine, oh, you have, it goes off and spins off new projects. For normal people, that means you have to have cloud compute. It has to be, just like Meta did with Muse. You have to have the VM in there. And they were so eager. I think they had the right vision, but they'd had no patience. It wasn't ready to be shoved together. When they shoved it together, you had Codex, which worked on your local computer. You had chat GPT work, which had its VM. And you had chat GPT, which was sort of a stateless sort of thing that it's, it's between devices, but every, every conversation is fresh. There was no sort of ongoing environment.

• 19:25Speaker 01

  Putting those three things together didn't make sense architecturally. It didn't make sense conceptually. Even if in the long run, those should be one product. And it's, it's a lack of patience. It really, really is. Where they're going makes sense, but they're not there yet. And by accelerating, it makes everything harder to use and confusing and a mess.

• 19:47Speaker 00

  Including with dots. They don't have enough compute to serve dots to more than just the pro tier subscribers right now. But dots, it could be a product that's actually really useful to more people.

• 19:58Speaker 01

  It might be telling that dots is exposed in the same part of the chat GPT app as the rest of chat GPT, whereas Codex is its own tab. By the way, why both Anthropic and OpenAI? Why is there not a dedicated Claude code app and a dedicated Codex app? This having to go into a little thing to get to your thing, it drives me by, there's no reason for it. It's, it's weird. It's like.

• 20:23Speaker 01

  Everything has to be in one app, does it? Like, uh, I, I, I understand the lots of people have this app already installed.

• 20:30Speaker 00

  Take advantage and put more capability in there for the people who might not discover it otherwise.

• 20:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it just makes for a really crappy user experience.

• 20:40Speaker 00

  Um, mm-hmm.

• 20:41Speaker 01

  Which, to go super meta, this is all tech. The user experience all sucks everywhere. It really, it really does. And like, this is why I've ultimately, what the actual answer for all this, and again, I think this is where DOT is going in the long run. Is you don't need to know any of the complexity. You just ask your agent. You say, I want to, instead of operating at a level of, I need to know how to do something. You just need to know what you need to do. And the agent will take care of the details. And I absolutely do think in the long run, and probably sooner than people think, the experience of using an agent is going to be so much better than using a bunch of different apps and websites, that this paradigm is going to win.

• 21:25Speaker 01

  It's not going to win because nerds want it to win. It's not going to win because like the economy needs it to win. It's going to win because it's going to be better.

• 21:32Speaker 00

  It's such a good take. It's, well, it's going to win because the rest of tech sucks.

• 21:37Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 21:38Speaker 00

  As you said 20 minutes ago. And that's something that millions and millions of people identify with. Well, speaking of the agent future here, Andrew says, not me. Hi, Andrew and Ben. I'm halfway through Thursday's episode and I can't wait to listen to the rest. But you've been discussing why AI agents for consumers will be or should be a winner take all market. But I feel like you aren't addressing my main concern with that argument. More consumer demand doesn't make the product itself any better. And the switching costs aren't all that significant structurally. So why do you think this is a winner take all market? Any thoughts on that, Ben? All right, and that is the end of the free preview.

• 22:20Speaker 00

  If you'd like to hear more from Ben and I, there are links to subscribe in the show notes, or you can also go to sharptech.fm. Either option will get you access to a personalized feed that has all the shows we do every week. Plus lots more great content from Strategery and the Strategery Plus bundle. Check it out, and if you've got feedback, please email us at [email protected].