#17: Making humans better with new AI

It's a real pleasure to have Killian on my show. For people who don't know, well, who are you? Let's just go into it. That's how I always start my interviews. Who are you? Yeah. Yes. And you caught my eye because you're one of the few people who got your peers excited about what you're building, right? And that happens once in a while. I was one of the first users of Instagram because the same thing I was at a startup incubator, and everybody's like, oh, you got to check out what those two guys have. Right? And getting your peers, particularly in the AI developer world, to say, man, this guy has something legit. It's like, congrats. But now, you know, it's hard to be a media person right now because I can either talk to the nerds and go nerdy and talk about, you know, architectures and, you know, what's going on underneath, how to make an LLM or something like that. Or we could talk to random, regular, everyday people who probably don't know that much about Open Interpreter. Right? Or, or what. Even what we talk about in the industry, the LLMs or, you know, RAG or whatever, they don't, they're like, what? And, and, and if they think about AI, they're usually freaked out. And your, your team is bringing a product that is a little freaky, let's be honest about it. Right? So let's just dive in. What are you building? What, what is this new device that you're, that you've already sold out, by the way? Congrats. Yeah, yeah. Which, which, yeah, which I had the first interview before he went to CES and he dominated ces, the Consumer Electronics show, with the Rabbit. I mean, he, he had dramatically more PR than any other device out of this huge show. Right. Which shows there's a lot of interest in this new kind of device that you can talk to and, and it does things for you and it remembers things for you and. Right. So you're, you're riffing on the Rabbit with an open source approach, which is why? Why? Well, we'll talk a little bit later about why open source matters so much, but keep going on the device. What is this new device and what is it going to let us do that Siri can't do, or Alexa can't do, or Google Assistant can't do, like making the screen brighter or descript. We're using descript to do this video and that's an AI driven tool. Right. I love descriptive, but it still has Things that it doesn't do. I can't do really good demos. You know, I was talking to the team there yesterday. A demo can't be audio, but that's off the point of what you can do. You're trying to build some sort of Jarvis where I can just talk to the world and things start happening. Hey, edit this video or send an email to Joe or. Right. Is that sort of where we're all. Where you're trying to drive us to. Yeah. How does it. Yeah. You know, I worked at Microsoft, and one day I worked at this on the support line, and I had to help a customer drag an icon across the screen. And for this customer, it was very frustrating. It was frustrating for me because I think that's easy. I just click and drag. Right. You know, and I done that for a long, long. But for many people, that. That's a struggle to understand how to use a computer. My grandma comes over and has me send in her taxes because she just struggles to go to a webpage and fill out a form and figure out what. How to enter it all in and. And she's not sure of herself, so she'd rather have me do it. Right. There's a lot of people like that who struggle with computer meters. When you say computer, I usually think of a Macintosh or a Windows box, but it could be a Tesla car, it could be a Linux box, it could be a phone, it could be a tablet of various kinds, it could be a Chinese operating system. How are you going to join with a single idea all of these disparate kinds of computing? And heck, we haven't even started talking about VR or Apple Vision Pro or Quest 3. Right. Which are completely new paradigms of computing. Right. Compared to a flat 2D screen, my Macintosh that I'm talking to you on? Yeah. I just. Just flashed in my mind, my son's friend is blind. And, you know, you go through an airport, well, you look at a screen with the times and all that, that's a computer. Right. Could you use this new approach to help somebody who has low vision or is blind check whether their plane is on time or not? Right. Could it hook up to that kind of computer, which is really a Windows box, but you can't use it like a Windows box. It's just a display that you're looking at at an airport. And there's lots of displays like that in our lives. Right. Trains arriving, subways. Right. Are you thinking about really making this a holistic thing that one device can join all of the digital Displays in our lives together. Yeah. Like your nest thermostat or my lights. Right. My lights have a computer underneath them and my iPhone, I can pull out my iPhone and change the color on my lights. Right. There's a computer there. It, you know, let's go completely weird. 20 years from now, we're going to have humanoid robots in our homes and in our businesses. Are they going to be running this and is that going to be how they understand all these screens in the world? And maybe you're at an airport and you send your little humanoid robot, hey, make sure our plane is on time and it goes over and checks out the screen. Or hey, wait by the screen until the gate gets announced. I've been in many airports where you have to wait for the gate to be announced. So you know where to go. Right. Maybe you'll just have your robot standing in front of the screen. Is that sort of where you're also thinking like, oh, we need to go in a variety of steps to get to that kind of world? Yeah. By the way, there's a new Y Combinator company that has a little humanoid robot that's all open source, 3D printed using standard off the shelf electric motors and computers and batteries. Cost $8,000 to build. That's coming down to the level where somebody like me can afford one. But now it doesn't have a smart. It doesn't have the OS to run it. Right. That's why I'm really interested in how you are building a new world. Sam. It. Yeah. Like a Macintosh or a Windows Boxer. Yes. So what do you use this today for? What do you personally use your system that you're building for and what's it really great at? You know, what kinds of things? What will the first customers want to try out and use with theirs? Like ingesting a YouTube video and building, you know, a list of what's important in that video. You know, like, like, like, hey, somebody doesn't have an hour to listen to the two of us talking. Maybe it could ingest it into this and get a synopsis or something like that. I mean, give me an idea of what you're thinking. Media. Because I. Media is spraying on my screens right now. You're almost describing a new kind of offering system. You know. Yeah. It's not Windows where you're trying to display a pixel on the screen, but you're building a new way of. Of computers to work with us. Right. To me, that's an operating system you. Yeah, man, it's infinite. Right. You know I'm watching X Pro or what we call tweetdeck, used to call tweetdeck and I have all these lists that I've worked for 18 years building and it's way too much information for a normal, everyday, even me, I look at this for an hour and my mind is fried. Right. I want to be able to tell a system like this and say, hey, can you watch the list of tech journalists for instance, and just tell me if anything new is going on. Right. You know, last night a bridge fell down in the east coast. Tell me about the news. That's all I want. I, I don't need to see all the, you know, people talking about what they had for breakfast and stuff. I just need the major news or new things or. Right. Whatever we're, whatever we're seeking out of that is, is that the kind of world we're heading to where we can just say, hey, you know, oh one, help, help me watch the news on, on the, on this list or help me watch the Slack channel. You know, tell me, tell me if my co workers are saying anything important instead of just talking about politics or music or something like that. Right? And, and I'm only seeing a little, tiny, tiny grain of sand of the beach that is x.com, right. You know, because I, I'm not seeing all the sports people and all the political people and all the music people, right. They all have their own Twitter X going and if I built a list for them, I could see a little piece of their world. But a computer can watch a lot of information and a lot of things. Yeah. And then we, you know, I just incorporated my company and you know, the lawyers created a real long document that's very dense, very hard for a human to understand or read. I gave it to chat GPT and anthropic and perplexity didn't ingest it. But you know, the other two ingested just fine. And then I started talking to it and saying, hey, what should I care about in this document? What should I pay extra attention to? Is there anything non standard in this document? Something that's out of the norm, right. That somebody snuck in there to try to rip me off. Right. And that's what I'm doing. And it did a really confident job. Right. Computers can read a long document and ingest it and really see the patterns in that. Right. Where humans struggle with that. Now this is a freaky new world for people because what, what you're going to have a computer that's reading everything on my screen Listening to everything I'm uttering. Someday soon we'll have glasses on and it'll know what I'm touching, what I'm looking at, what I'm gesturing toward. Right? That I'm gesturing toward the screen right now. It'll know our emotion. I just interviewed a company that's building an AI that understands our human emotions. So it'll understand I'm yelling at the screen instead of happy. Right. That's a lot of private data to give this new machine in the sky or the machine on my local computer. What do you say to people who are freaked out by this world and I are resisting? Yeah, yeah, let's get simple, right? Yeah. Us, Chat GPT or any LLM, you know, something simple like give me a list of 10 restaurants, you know, that I should go to within 10 mile drive. And it gives you a good list because it has millions of people's information, you know, patterns and reviews and all that. But if you tell it a little bit about your food preferences, right. Or your allergies or, you know, I'm a vegan, all of a sudden, the list gets better. Well, you just give private information about your food preferences to what you know, chat GPT, OpenAI. Right. Which might use that in the future against you or for you. We don't know. But it's, this is a. We're going to do it because it's going to make our lives better. We're going to give it a lot more data. Right. And this leads into new worlds where, you know, if you're, let's say you have evangelistic parents, religious parents, and you haven't disclosed you're gay to them. Well, a computer can notice patterns that go, oh, you're gay, does it out that. Right. Does that cause a consequence to you? You might live in a country where that's illegal. Right. And now you have huge consequences to the society, to people, to individuals, right? Yeah. Well, the business people are worried about it. You know, you give a spreadsheet to Chat GPT. What, what did it just learn about your business? Right. A lot. Is that your intellectual property? Yeah. Did it ingest the intellectual property? Is it sharing that with other people? Is it, it for its own purposes to compete with you? Right. Amazon is very willing to compete with you eventually. If you're like the guy who makes my clothes, Amazon called him up one day, he didn't even have an Amazon account. And Amazon called him up, says, hey, we notice a lot of people are searching for your clothes on Amazon. We'd like to the first call was we'll buy $300,000 of one shirt right away. Right? Because it had the data to know that there was demand like that. And now he sells millions of dollars on Amazon. But now if you get too popular on Amazon, well, they'll build their own product to compete with you. Amazon Basics, right? Who? That's all. That's New World. We have to think. I think, I think it's a worthy topic for people to really think through because, you know, you hand a spreadsheet or you hand your Oracle database over to an AI, all of a sudden it knows everything about your business, right. Probably in better detail than you do. Right. A bridge just fell down last night after a shift hit it. Right. Well, what's that causing to the supply chain in the port there? The computer can see those patterns real quick, right? Human. Take a little bit of time to figure it all out, what it all means. But a computer can get ahead of you and, you know, really understand your business in a way that I don't think most people are prepared for. Do you have a dev? Is this a working piece of hardware yet? Or when are we going to. When are the first customers going to get it? So we could try it and see it, maybe even come back and get a good demo of the first 01. Yeah, maybe we should walk around the street and use it and see how it works. You know, sit down at a cafe and try to use it with a Macintosh or a Linux box and see what it does. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is a competitor. I mean a lot of the devices are built with the same chipset, right? And you're 3D printing a case for it or trying to build a case for it. Right? This is the. Where. Where be AI. Which. Yeah, where be be AI. I'm just, you know, people are starting to send me all sorts of different devices like this, right? We, we have the Humane pin that's coming out. Abby Shipman has the tab, which is a DEVI device that hangs around your neck and Rewind has a similar device to that. Right. Tell me about the competitive landscape and what's going to make your. The, the open source world special compared to all those others. Yeah, it. Yeah, yeah, you bring up a good point. Because if I'm sitting at my computer, I don't care. Listen to me all day long, watch my screen, help me out, be there, do it. In fact, I use Rewind on my Macintosh. It's listening all the time. And out of this call. It'll make me a nice transcript and it'll tell me what we talked about and put it in my notes so that five weeks from now I can search for it and, you know, and find information that. As a memory aid. Right? And this, this little device does something similar too. It has a wake word. You can talk to it. But when you start wearing these things out in public with your friends, now there's a social contract problem, right? Oh, how many, how many devices are you wearing, Killian? How many are recording me right now? Can you turn them all off, please? Because we want to have a private conversation, right. You know, and have some fun at a night or something like that, right? You know, and, and so now you have to take them off or figure out how to turn them off or have to worry about, you know, are they recording your friends who didn't consent to be recorded? You know, and recording is a funny word because these don't really record. They transcribe into a transcription, right? Which is similar, but it leads to a whole bunch of social contract and privacy problems, right? Did the other people around you consent to be transcribed? And, and you know, it in some way? How are you guys thinking about that? You know, how, how to, how to change the device based on its context? Because some context, I'd leave it on, leave it turned on. I, I'd like, I'd like to talk to this thing all day long, right. Other times when I'm out in public, maybe not so much. I, I want to turn it on in specific instances, right? And that's frustrating, too, because maybe your friends are like, hey, we're getting hungry, right? Oh, let's ask our tabs or our. Oh, one, you know, where's a great restaurant nearby? And so again, you need to turn it back on to, you know, to serve you. Right? But it should be the human that's in control of it, right? Nothing's stuck yet, you know, but ambient computing is sort of where we're heading, right? A computer's just listening to me and I, hey, computer, take me, you know, to, to the Taj Mahal or turn on CNN or. Right. Or tell me what's going on on X, you know, or send an email to Gillian. Right? Something like that. We're heading to that world. I mean, when you're wearing the Vision Pro, you're sort of always in that kind of world, right? It's not yet completely taken to the Nth degree, you know, because Apple doesn't want to freak out his customers. Yeah, right. It doesn't, doesn't let developers use the idata yet or, or turn on an always listening thing. Right. It's. It's. You can, but then you're in VR and, and you're explicitly in an app. You know that, that does that. It's. We're. They're holding us back. And I think that's why. One reason we're seeing an explosion of these new explorations into these new tabs and pins and things, because Apple doesn't let you do that on a phone, right? That you, you can't really just turn on an app. And Siri doesn't work that way. Right. And just listen to me and do things just because I'm talking to Siri. Right. I have to actually wake it up with calling it. Right. So, yeah, your iteration speed is going to be far. Even if Siri and June at the WWDC does a really great job. And I'm expecting at least I'm going to fix. Stupid question, but here's one for you. You park your car, you walk to a restaurant, you get in the restaurant, you get done with your meal. You ask Siri, hey, take me back to my car. Can't do it. Doesn't understand what you just said. If you say, take me back to my parked car, it starts up Apple Maps and takes you back to your car. It knows where your car is. Right. The phone knows where you are. Right. It's just, it's an inflexible AI system that was built a decade ago and it's, it hasn't really been upgraded. It doesn't have a large language model. It's not very flexible. It's, it's not modern. It's not, you know, new technology. So I assume they're going to put an LLM or 3 or 5 or 10 in there and it'll do a lot of, it'll fix those kinds of things. But is it going to let you run code that's, that's Apple has DNA of, you know, first of all, they have to have to make sure it's safe for every single human that has an iPhone, which is billions of people. Right. It has to be, you know, it has to do something that their employees can support and teach people at stores. Right. This is why the first iPad didn't have multitasking code. Right. The first Windows tablet did. But most programmers aren't rocket scientists who really understand how to write multitasking code. Well, Windows, Microsoft thought it was a necessary thing to have multitasking code. Steve Jobs said, no, we're not going to put multitasking in the first iPad. Right. It's too complex right now. It's too hard for people to do and it leads to a whole bunch of memory issues and crashes and problems for our customer base. So we're going to just turn it off. We're not going to let you do that now. They do now, right. Because they have a much better multitasking system that normal everyday programmers can understand how to build. But in the early days they just punted and said, nope. Right. And the same thing is going to be true of this new world is like, nope, we're not going to try to do any of that Killian stuff. No, no, no, no, no. The open source stuff we're going to be very muted and very deliberate, very intentional because it's awful. They have to support it around the world. Right. With it, with human beings who aren't really ready for this new world. I mean, look at the kinds of conversations we're having. It's a new world that we have to get into of understanding how to run a local model. Right. And understanding what the consequences of that are and what are the social consequences of running a model that's listening to us on a tab like that. There's a lot for humans to digest and understand and use and adopt and, and figure out. Right. Apple's going to just punt on a lot of that until later. Right. And then you're going to have the early adopters and you're going to be able to iterate for those early adopters very, very quickly and add new capabilities system. Apple's, they're not good at that anymore. It's a big, big company with a lot of committees, a lot of meetings. So if they hear something in a store, yeah, they do get feedback from the store. That's a magic thing about Apple. But getting that into the product and getting it shipped to customers, it takes a lot to move. It's a lot of inertia where you can get on your channel and in a couple hours you can bang out a new version. Right. So the iteration of a startup is just, it leads to a different place than an Apple or a Microsoft can get to. Yeah. There might be a small team that's worried about it. They're thinking the same way you are. But it's, you know, five, 10, 50 people, right. I saw this at Microsoft when I, when I was a tablet evangelist. The tablet team knew what was coming, right. They had a quarter inch thick tablet that you could type on with a pen. Nine years before Apple came out with iPad. Right. They were bleeding edge speakers. But getting the rest of the company to think about it, to use it, to adopt it, to put office on it, man, it was a real in the ass, right? So I mean Kodak invented the digital camera. We don't use Kodak anymore, right? So there was a group of people who saw the future there, but they weren't listened to by all the chemical engineers who were selling film at same, right, Same thing, right? So this is the world of disruption. And you know, new ideas start out being only for a few weirdos, right, who are like what? Like, like you said, how many tabs are you going to be wearing by the end of the year? You know, you're gonna have a humane pin on and a couple things around your neck and one and a no one, right? And you're gonna be talking to them all and you're gonna be like a weirdo in society. But that leads to innovation, that leads to a humanoid robot, that leads to real disruption, right? And that's the game finding product market fit is the game for startups, right? And you can find it much faster than a big company can for a new idea, for a radically new idea. So good luck. I, I met one of the guys who was early employee at SpaceX. I said, tell me about the team that wrote the code that lands the rockets back on the barges. He goes, that wasn't a team. Was one guy. I'm like, yeah, I'm like what? Yeah, one guy. I'm like, why, why only one guy? Why not a team? Oh, because one guy can keep all the details in his head of all of all the change, of all the things that has to happen as that rocket comes back down. Now he was working with a lot of people, right? But it was one, one person who wrote the code. And that's why Lockheed Martin still hasn't figured this out, right? Locky Martin doesn't have a rocket that can land back on a barge and SpaceX does it every, every week. Yeah, love what you do. I'd love to have you, have you back on, you know, when, when you get your first shipment and you could actually demo this and start showing the power of it, right? And, and then, and then we got to compare it to the rabbit compared to the humane pin and, and the Abby shipments tab and you know the rewind thing, right? So, and there's a, there's a couple. I mean, heck, I didn't even know about this one. This, these guys sent me this, you know, it's, yeah, it's, it takes great notes on, you know, I'm just talking to my wife, and a minute later it's like, oh, you were talking to your wife about buying a Tesla and, you know, doing this and that. It's a new world, man. It's a new world of human. Human assistance. Various kinds. Thank you for what you do. Where do we. Where do we learn more about you and the project and the one project? It. User doesn't fit, you know, consumer doesn't. Creator. Creator fits for some things, you know, influencer fits for some things. But, yeah, it's, you know, thank you so much.