The a16z Show - Seeing The Future from AI Companions to Personal Software

Episode Date: November 5, 2025

Eugenia Kuyda, CEO of Wabi and AI pioneer behind Replika, joins Erik, Anish, and Justine to reveal how personal software will transform from a developer monopoly to a creative medium for all. She exposes why command-line AI interfaces are the new MS-DOS, explains how mini-apps will become as shareable as TikToks, and details her decade-long journey from training language models in 2012 to building the platform where your mom can create custom apps in minutes. Plus: untold stories from OpenAI's apartment days and why voice-only devices completely miss the point. Resources:Follow Eugenia on X: https://x.com/ekuydaFollow Anish on X: https://x.com/illscience Stay Updated: If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to like, subscribe, and share with your friends!Find a16z on X: https://x.com/a16zFind a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16zListen to the a16z Podcast on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5bC65RDvs3oxnLyqqvkUYXListen to the a16z Podcast on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a16z-podcast/id842818711Follow our host: https://x.com/eriktorenbergPlease note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures. Stay Updated:Find a16z on YouTube: YouTubeFind a16z on XFind a16z on LinkedInListen to the a16z Show on SpotifyListen to the a16z Show on Apple PodcastsFollow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Right now, AI is just an app on your phone. It should not be that way. Sometimes you need to sort of go big or go home. Not having the balls to do that, especially in this current environment, you can suffer the consequences. There's a huge mind trap that exists among builders in the space where they somehow think that voice is the main interface. That's because they are somehow thinking about the movie her all the time,

but not in the right way. So you were a true pioneer in the space before everyone else was doing it. Maybe just talk about your reflections of how that category as you helped create it and then how it's evolved. It definitely evolved. I have noticed. It's pretty crazy. We had a very strong belief that it would happen, but we still were so surprised when it actually happened, I guess. It just still felt like complete magic.

Personal software is about to explode from 20 million developers to 8 billion creators. Today, you'll hear from Eugene. E. Khoita on how Wabi is building the YouTube of apps, where anyone can create, remix, and share software as easily as posting a video. We discuss why current AI interfaces are holding us back, how many apps will become the new social currency and what it really means when software becomes ephemeral, personal, and delightful. Let's get into everything you're doing with Wabi. But first, let's contextualize this a little bit. When you look back at sort of the arc of your career, perhaps the last decade, what is the through line, through replica? Wabi, et cetera.

Oh, wow, that's a hard question. But I guess maybe the main theme is we're always early, sometimes a little bit too early, sometimes hopefully this time we're on the right type of early. But generally, yeah, I've started working on AI in 2012, so over a decade ago, and was always fascinated by kind of the idea that you'll be able to talk to a machine, to have a meaningful conversation with a machine. But more importantly, with the fact that that could influence your life in a really good way. And before that was really, the focus was on these AI companions,

I have friends that could really be there for you and help you live a better life, help you feel better. And now I guess it's just the same idea, but apply to personal software. Like can we build mini apps or software that will really help us throughout the day in a very personal way and will be focused on you, on helping you live a better life?

Trace the journey of how you got excited about this new category and what you hope it becomes. I guess while running Replica, we always had these conversations with our users about what other products they use and how they use AI. And it always struck me as strange that they were using products like Chichipti or J. Javina, Claude, but really they were mostly using it for very simple use cases, like they were using Chagipti just for search or to help them write something, help with homework or something else. and no one was really mentioning any of these exciting capabilities that we just kept seeing the models get. And so we felt like there must be an interface problem.

When people look at a command line or a chatbot, they really just see search writing tool. Maybe I can talk to this. But if you think about that, that's the affordance of a command line. Really, these are the main use cases. I think even recently Chad JTPOPA, when I published one of those studies showing that these are in fact the main use cases.

I think a third of all of the use was around writing, writing help. And so that gave us an idea that there should be some next interface. There should be something else on top of this. There should be something more interactive, visual, simple for everyone, being included, to actually discover these amazing use cases that all these models already have. And so we started thinking, we got obsessed with this metaphor that the current chatbots are really the Microsoft DOS era for AI interfaces and that there were. will be some sort of a Windows MacOS moment.

And I think the confusing part for most people is that there is so much traction with chatbots anyway, almost a billion people using these AI tools already, but they only use them for these kind of simpler use cases. And in order to unlock something else, you need a more exciting interface. Paint more a picture of what the world will look like when this Windows or MacOS moment happened. What will that look like? Well, I do think right now we exist in the paradigm of.

When I was growing up, we had TV, and here you had maybe a few dozen TV channels. Back in Russia, we only had six TV channels. And so then, of course, now TV still exists, but now we watch YouTube and Reels and TikTok, a lot of UGC stuff. And so I think the same will happen with software. Right now, we're kind of stuck in this world where these few apps developed by professional developers. And then eventually, of course, we're going to move on to this new world where apps, are built by all of us for all of us, and maybe sometimes by AI for us.

So if you think about it, the operating system of the future, you open it up and you see your regular, popular apps you use all the time, maybe it's X, maybe it's Instagram, whatever it is. And then you see maybe some cool apps that you discovered your best friends using, or maybe you built for yourself, or you tweaked one of the apps you found for yourself. And then you'll see AI suggesting some apps for you. Maybe you're going to New York next week and you're into art.

So it made an art show finder app for you, which is going to help you find art shows around the Airbnb you're staying at. So it's a lot more flexible, malleable, and very deeply personalized. Think of it as an operating system built on the platform of you and not on some random fixed context. Can you talk about that? We've always had this idea that software has to be durable because it's really expensive to make and it seems really serious.

What types of ephemeral software like the New York Art Gallery app do you imagine existing? Well, so right now we're already seeing, you know, some of our first users building very specific apps that would never exist on the app store. They're just too small, the too personalized, too niche. They don't have 20,000 features.

Like someone built a motivational quote app that's only pulling from one particular show that I didn't even know anything about. But he's really obsessed with that show, and so he just wants that at 5.30 a.m. when he wakes up. I feel like people are building very particular things to fit their needs. Like, for example, I was putting my kids to bed the other day,

and my daughter wants to play these puzzle games when I tell her something. She's trying to guess what it is. And so we built a game very quickly where it's a puzzle, and then she sees four pictures. She can click on one. But she also wanted them to be about Princess Elsa and Princess Jasmine. And so we had to incorporate that. And so now she was so happy because now she's doing these puzzles,

learning something new. And then we change it to Italian because she goes to Italian preschool. and so this is another way to practice. And she's so excited. We couldn't put this thing away. And it took me two minutes to build it and then a few seconds to tweak it versus going on the app.

I don't even know if an app like that exists and going through 15-minute onboarding, pain again, then it's not really what she wanted. There's no personalization there. So I think these are the use cases where something like that should happen. And I do think in the future I should just be able to say, hey, I'm putting my kids to bed,

or it should know that context and just maybe suggest a few apps that are already pre-built for me that I could use right now. It's funny, I just got a new iPhone, and on the new phone, I got to delete a bunch of my old apps because I like to start fresh. And there were, like, probably over a dozen apps that I had downloaded and in some cases paid for

that I just totally didn't need it anymore because I built better versions of it on Wobby, everything from, like, migraine tracking to, like, tracking restaurant recommendations, to like a really hyper-personalized notes app to special things around image trends, transformation in a particular style. And I can imagine that will be true for a lot of people, which is like instead of having to find this long-tail app that's running all these crazy ads,

pop-ups all the time, and is hard to use and is not personalized to you, you can just make exactly what you want on the fly and tweak it, which is another really cool part of the product, I think. This is what, and I'm so glad to hear that you using it, but for me, that was kind of the product market fit with Wabi for me was around that, where I found there were a few things that really needed and wanted an app for to track my weightlifting very beginner level of weightlifting workouts I just figured out you got to go up and wait this is I didn't know I would I know a woman anyway so I was tracking it in Apple notes and I try to find some apps on the app store and they're just there's just so much in these apps that is a need and so I just wanted

a really simple I'm also trying to follow one particular book I wanted the workouts to be based on that book so anyway I build a simple app to track these workouts, and then now, anytime I go to the gym, I built it on the way to the gym, but now any time I go to the gym, I find something else I want to add to it. First it was just the tracker.

Now it's generating new workouts based on all of my inputs, where I am mad, the book I'm trying to follow, whatever the latter technique of progressive overload. And so I put it all in the prompt, and every time I go to the gym, I add a little bit to that. I want a little more of this and a little bit of that.

So now I'm not just using the app. I'm kind of constantly in the process of tweaking it and republish it to Wabi kind of mini-app store. Hopefully someone will find it useful. How many people do you think, or generally as you think your audience, do you think it will be 90-10 sort of consumption creation? Or do you think that most people, I think one of the things we saw with SORA, for example,

is that many people, the majority of people are creating, do you think that Wabi will be like that? I hope that more people will at least tweak. But I'd say, like, fully kind of original creators probably still under 10%. And what we're working on right now, this week we're releasing, we're pushing sort of a big update,

the social graph. So you'll be able to see who is downloading what mini apps, how they're using them. You're going to be able to see comments or like mini apps. And so in this case, for example, if I created that workout app, someone in comments can ask me to tweak it.

They can also remix it and change the app however they want. But maybe they just want this particular app to be slightly different. So they can put in comments and maybe as a creator, of person, I'm reading all the comments, changing the app also for these people

to be able to use it. So I think this is cool because it creates all of a sudden it's not just about building apps for yourself. It's really about discovering apps and finding what your friends are using, using these apps together, and so on and so on. And even asking creators to change them in some particular way. Amazing.

Anish and Justine, how do the categories or the topics that we've been discussing as it relates to personal software relate to themes that we've been exploring on the investing side in terms of what got us excited here. Yeah, I mean, look, I think that the YouTube metaphor is the right one that Eugenia outlined, which is that we would have said in 2007

that 100 cable channels is enough, or six, in your case. And now, obviously, there's this entire ecosystem, everything from unboxing videos to all of the very YouTube native content that exists. And I think people are sort of have more content or more fulfilled by it. And then there's also the act of creation. Some people create for a business,

but many create and post just because it's fulfilling to themselves. And software has just been so restrictive because there's only 20 million developers in the world. So in a sense, all of the software that we consume is downstream of the preferences of those 20 million people. And it seems intuitive that if more people could make software, they would and that there would be a mass market consumer product here.

I think unlike many of the other products, and you should comment on this that we've seen, it feels like this is not text to app. You know, it's not a developer or developer-adjacent tool. It's truly a mass market consumer product for non-technical people. I agree with you, and we really made this kind of choice early on, that we're never going to show any code or anything or say anything in the app that's even remotely technical. No API keys, no bring this, whatever, connect this integration or anything like that.

We do have integrations. You can add your apps and services, but you can just say, you know, use my Apple Health or use this, use that, or use my email. And we call them power apps. So that's sort of probably the most technical you're going to get here. But we wanted to, yeah, we wanted to make it super simple for anyone to make apps and to make this process very delightful. And almost to feel like you're just creating something really quick.

You're not even really building many apps. What we're adding right now is more, I think the company of the product we're looking at most is Canva and the ease with which they're letting people. create beautiful presentations, the similar kind of similar thing needs to happen here. Right now we're talking about vibe coding a lot, but I feel like we should be more about vibe kind of taste around or vibe designing these apps. So we're going to give a lot more of the just visual controls, more in the vein of like choose style, choose, you know, some colors.

You can go a little bit deeper, but really it's just one button and things look great versus, yeah, you need to go deep and just really try to understand what to do and get technical with your mini-app. And I do think that unlocks a certain level of creativity where all you need to think about is, like, what's the use case? One other interesting thing that one of our investors, Solio mentioned, was that apps, mini-apps,

could become kind of community starters. So if today the app store is very much not social, and it probably won't ever be social. because of Apple's mandate for privacy and how important that is for them, which is great. But at the same time, you probably do want to know

who else is into, I don't know, toddler activities in Petra Hill. I want to know what other moms are going to a Italian preschool. I want to, you know, have their kids go to that preschool. And maybe, I don't know,

my design is really into word watching in London in his particular neighborhood. So creating that app and finding some other people who could be a little bit of a community building around that topic. Yeah, I think there's a bunch of really interesting choices you guys made in designing the product that it feels like really built on the explosion in like vibe coding or building with AI, whatever you want to call it in a super interesting way. One of which is like, yeah, for many consumers, the existing tools are a lot more accessible than like coding something from scratch,

but it's still pretty easy to like break them or get to something where you don't know what to do. Whereas I think Wabi, you've purposely put guardrails around the experience to make it hard to like super mess up, which is actually extremely helpful for consumers. And then it also feels like, you know, we needed to move beyond this paradigm of like,

great, you vibe code a website and it exists out there. But like, is that the best interface for you to be using a product? you want to use daily and storing personal information on and having your own records and like all of these sorts of things, probably not. And for a lot of people, like their phone is where they spend most of their time online. It's kind of their primary interface and where they want to use things. And so obviously I know there's like challenges designing for mobile and that sort of thing,

but it felt like a really smart choice for you guys to start there just to get so much more deeply ingrained in someone's daily life or daily workflow. You know, I've only pretty much built mobile apps. Yeah. I really like the idea of mobile apps. And a lot of things you're not going to be doing on, you know, really just putting in a website or whatever, some links. Exactly. And I do believe a lot in the concept of an organizational layer.

Like, to a degree the app store is the organizational layer for, you know, the mobile. And the browser, the organizational layer for Internet. And so something like that should exist for by coding, I guess, or for this new era of software for AI. Let's call it AI software. And I don't believe that people will be, I do believe that we're all going to be building

some sort of software in using software that everyone builds, some UGC software. But I definitely don't believe in links that people will share with each other and with me relying on some random person somewhere who's not a professional developer, to support the database for the app where I might store some sensitive data, or at least data that I don't want to disappear, even if it's not very sensitive.

And we've already seen this with some app, vibe-coded apps, reaching the top of the app store, I think, the one around women dating, that all the super-sensitive information got leaked. And that wasn't because they are bad actress. It's just they're not professional developers. So there needs to exist some platform where everything will live. And to a degree, we're not watching videos somewhere. You just see videos somewhere.

We're watching them on Instagram, on TikTok, on YouTube. It's not like people are passing around links. And so the current situation I do think is very similar to the very beginning of the internet where people were creating personal pages with GeoCities and some other tools like that, which I don't remember very well because it was very little. But, yeah, before LinkedIn, people were sending these links to each other. And of course, now there's LinkedIn. There are certain guardrails.

You can't really do everything the way you could do in JuCities. But at the same time, you get the social graph, you get the platform, you get all sorts of cool things. They're guess the same as Shopify for e-commerce. Yeah, you can build your own online store, but no one's really doing it anymore. Everyone's just using Shopify, and then they also get all the platform benefits. And I feel like the same will happen with Wabi. Yes, you cannot download an app from Wabi and put it on the App Store. but you can use it inside Wabi

and you can get the social graph and all the integrations and potentially the shared context between all the apps and the memory behind you know, for that user and so on, so on, so on. Our mutual friend, Heaton, said that

Wabi is not just a collection of apps, it's a framework for memory, context, and expression. Every time you create or share, you're teaching it who you are. Is that how you see it? I believe in it 100%. And I think with every, I believe, I still remember, of course, and you guys obviously remember it too, but I do remember how the first iOS apps were just people trying to squeeze those websites into an app format

or just kind of toy apps like I beer or that was my favorite one, I am rich, that was $999.99. $0.99 and it didn't do anything. And then, of course, people figure out, well, you know, there's something special about, this being a mobile app and maybe GPS and connectivity and things like Uber and Tinder came out and a whole new categories of apps. And so they figured out what's so special about mobile. And I feel like for AI, the super special thing is personalization, but really deep personalization. So for me, kind of vibe coding an app, but that still is sort of like the same old software that's not really taking any of your context into consideration where the data of that app is not exposed to AI that

keeps learning, it's kind of just old school. I do believe a lot in Andre's idea of like software 3.0, some next level of software that's super deeply personalized. So if you think in the context of a Wabi mini app, how can you personalize it? First of all, you can personalize the features, the looks, you know, where it was skinned the app in a certain way. But then on top of that, you can also change the problem. So for example, for my workout app, I added to the prompt a couple things. First of all, the book that I'm reading, that that method that I want to work out using that method, also the fact that I go to as a fitness and it has a certain, I added a photo of that gym, so kind of the model is not generating workouts in a completely different size of the gym.

If it's a super side, it has to be next to each other. So this is the deep, deep, deep level of personization that is following. And of course, on the Wabi platform level, the mini app also knows that I'm a certain age, that I live in San Francisco, that I have kids, these are my fitness goals, and so on and so on. And then eventually, when I build another mini app, maybe around nutrition, those apps should be able to talk and pass along that context.

And today, of course, all of that exists in just the, you know, the walled gardens. You're fully locked in in one app, which to me feels absolutely crazy. And I can't connect. If I connected my email or my calendar, it can be connected to both of these apps. I have to go through the process

with every developer all the time. They have to build it. I have to connect it. That seems crazy, too. Do you imagine people building true social apps where the in-app experience involves a community? I'd love that. And we're building multiplayer right now, as we speak,

we spend the whole day to try to figure out, like, what? It's really complex just because all apps can be, can have very different type of multiplayer. And that needs to be explained to users as well in a very intuitive way. But yeah, totally believe in, first of all, using apps together, at least with your friends, your family, but also potentially building these more kind of community apps

where everyone can join. Maybe I can make my app multiplayer and open for everyone to join. A good example of that is made some ImageGen app around dogs where you can turn any of your dogs into like a royal, some use of built it, It's like a royal portrait of different era. And so that would be cool for all the dog owners to just join that app and to be able to post to the universal feed.

And so that's something we've been talking about today because this would be really cool. I said if you're just making these photos and then sharing somewhere, you're just adding them to the ongoing feed of dog photos. Sorry. Yeah, there's a, no, no, I think it's a great example. Well, yeah, I'm definitely going to use that on my dog. But I feel like there are so much.

examples too of image and video prompt sharing that happens in very unoptimized ways today. Like I've been following a lot, as you know, very well, like teen girls and college-age girls are often early adopters of stuff. And they have been making all of these like nano-banana and Quinn image edit prompts of like them like lying on a couch and the ghost face killers behind them for like Halloween. And the end they'll like post the image on TikTok or wheels or wherever and it will blow up. And then they'll be like commenting. like this long-form prompt, like in the comments on TikTok, which makes no sense as a way to do it. And then everyone's asking, like, where do I go to do this?

Like, I have the Google app. Why isn't letting me do this? And you have to explain like, no, you need the Gemini app. And it just feels like there's already this consumer demand and consumer behavior around, like, prompt sharing in particular for creative stuff that could be done. I've already made a bunch of wobby mini apps for this. And it could be done so much better. And I think the creative community would really thrive with this. Oh, that was the most, and I guess this is why we started the company.

How is it possible that we have this godlike technology, yet we pass around these text prompts, which is almost like Microsoft does commands, but worse, because at least the commands were, it was like sort of like you could learn them. There were a few, whatever, like they were short, they weren't that long. And now these crazy unstructured paragraphs of text, sometimes you also need a reference image or something else. to me that's a little bit crazy and I think that is kind of one of the biggest problems of discovery with AI, it's hard to find these prompts

even if you saw the output of you saw this cool photo with the ghost whatever but then how do I recreate that I need to find the prompts, I need to know what app I need to know what model to choose oftentimes it's not even very intuitive and at that point I've just lost all my motivation to do that. Instead of that if you could just quickly

click on the link in comments on TikTok and open a mini app where everything's already set up for you just add a photo. And you can see examples, you can choose different styles and this and that, and then you can see in comments

what other people are doing. I think this is the way to go. And I think what's most interesting that it sort of combines the vibe coding apps, one of the biggest kind of trends of the last year, at least, and also just using AI. Before that, it was all,

you know, it's either the, Are you in the text to prompt to app market or are you in some other market? And this kind of puts together. Like this is really the one place to use amazing prompts or, and it kind of blends this difference. How much, you know, it's interesting you mentioned just seeing that it's a mass market consumer behavior or maybe like a future one to be sharing prompts this way. How much do you think for the average person whose only AI experience has been with chat GPT that this is going to be a surprising new behavior that they have to sort of adjust? to or something that feels very intuitive and obvious and like, wow, I've been waiting for this. I hope it will be easy because at the end of the day, it's just a mini app. It's just the app graphic

user interface. So it's something that we're all used to. You don't need to learn how to use these new tools. I'd argue it's harder to use a command line because you need to know, well, do I copy paste the text here? Do I edit an image right here with this prompt or do I edit later. It becomes a little bit more, it's too loose. There's, there are no guidelines, but everyone knows how to use apps. And to a degree, a lot of these kind of thin wrappers blew up at some point, like Prisma was one of them, or Lenza, where it was just like, you know, change your photo into some avatar, some hatshot apps. I do. High school yearbook. High school yearbook. But a lot of, you know, they're awesome. But again, like, there's a reason.

reason why apps like that gain traction and not, you know, people just passing along this prompt. Because again, it's too high, whenever there's, the motivation is not too high, this amount of friction just kills all of my mojo. I wake up in the morning. I'm on Twitter or Reddit and find all these cool prompts. I'm like, I've got to try it. And then I'm like, oh, copy, paste. It didn't really work. Whatever. I forgot about it. So that I think is something that at least we're super excited about it. And it's not about just image and prompts, but also also some cool text prompts. People come up with all sorts of cool stuff.

There are millions of people in the subreddit's like Chajibti prompt genius, which I love those. Sometimes you can find some crazy stuff in it. But you would never even know that this could be a cool way to use Chajibati unless you found it there. Like, for example, someone made a fantastic prompt to analyze your blood work. But again, I don't even at this point remember where it was and how I'm going to find it. versus I could just download a mini app from Wabi

and kind of keep it in my health folder. On the investment team, we've said that the world has 1% of the software that it needs and that the rest is going to be built in the next five years. So let's give an example or say more about what that looks like if we're 100xing the amount of meaningful or impactful software. Well, I don't know. I guess I'm always going back to how magical

YouTube felt in the very beginning and all of these platforms where it was all really about just creativity and very raw you know sometimes weird things like putting a home tape whatever home video on

online for TikTok I still remember all my you know whatever friends younger kids lip syncing to different music and how weird it was and felt like a toy And then all of a sudden became really, really huge. And I think the same will happen with, or at least we hope that a similar trend will happen to Wabi,

where in the beginning maybe a lot of that will look like toys or something very simple, very kind of funny, almost, and innocent. And then eventually it can grow into a much larger platform. But I guess if you think about it, like today we just treat apps as software. But what if apps we could treat them as content? If I'm a health influencer or fitness influencer on TikTok, maybe I should put out, here are my five mini apps and Wabi I build that are kind of showcasing my fitness protocol,

get them, and maybe there's a way to monetize it in some way. Maybe it's a way for that fitness creator to create more content that's now useful. Right now people sell courses and stuff instead of that. I think a mini app could be much better. And then people can be talking about that And the community in the common section, again, this is a start of some community. People are working out together.

People are doing something together. I do think we'll see just a completely different type of software, not just apps, not just stale-fix apps, but more content, community builders, conversation starters, and just fun little toys. Do you imagine a like a creator class, a kind of professional class on Wabi? Oh, 100, you know, yes, of course. I do believe that ideally this should happen. If we're really thinking about it as YouTube, that's sort of the last frontier. At this point, creators can make their own professional content.

They can make videos, they can make shows, they can write, but they still cannot create software. It's still really not happening. But anyone, and especially small niche creators, should be able to afford to create for free any software for their fans. And that's what I'm really, really looking forward to. I've been struck that by the idea that, you know, Mr. Beast, the biggest creator in the world, is such a close connection with his fans. They do anything for him.

And the thing that he makes is chocolate. Like, that's the thing that he chooses to, that it seems like the best modernization. And it just feels like this is yet another sort of, you know, type of offering that creators can provide to be, you know, have a closer relationship with their fan. Exactly. And if you think about it, just even the style,

like I would love, like certain designers, I want their apps that they build because I'm sure they're going to build very beautiful apps and I want to look at them and even if it's the same functionality, the same whatever, Pomodora timer,

but I want their take on it. And so on. I think there's so many different groups and niches that and it shouldn't all just be about monetizing. It's really just about different styles, different outlook on life on the world.

And that is, to me is very interesting. I'm a huge user of Reddit, and I find it very exciting because people just join around certain interests, and that doesn't happen on other platforms really that much. So that's something that I'm excited about here as well. Yeah, I think from the creator perspective, one of the weird things about, and we're all kind of content creators in various ways and put out content, and one of the weird things about that, I think, is you often, you don't really know, like you see how many impressions it gets, but you don't know if those are bots,

you don't know how many people are actually like using the prompt you posted or watching the full video or whatever. And I think that is going to be, like, even beyond monetization, that part of lobby where like you can see what someone else has done or created or accomplished or whatever with the prompt you wrote or the app you made or the thing that you developed will be incredibly cool.

Not only for existing creators, for who it's really obviously I want to do this, but also for people who are not creators today, but who have really interesting ideas and just like no way to build their own mobile app, get it approved in the app store, ship it, like distribute it, that whole type of thing. Yeah, like what other new class of creators could be?

Yeah. That's why in our style, like in some of our communications, we're also trying to, I guess we're a little bit nostalgic about those early days of the internet and just being weird and staying weird. Right now, a lot of the video platforms are very polished and very commercial. You don't even see your friends anymore.

You don't see that much weird content. You just see very curated, polished stuff. But with mini apps, with software, I guess we're just entering this new era of just tons of really weird and fascinating new mini apps that wouldn't even, could never exist because they wouldn't be enough of a business on the app store. Right, right.

Well, speaking of the early days, should we talk a bit about replica and kind of your history in the community. Yeah. Maybe you, well, just, so you were a true pioneer in the space before everyone else was doing it. You mentioned 2012.

Maybe just talk about your reflections of how that category has, as you helped create it and then how it's evolved. It definitely evolved. I have noticed. It's pretty crazy. It's wild because we were thinking about recently just talking to one of the

early employees of Replica that we had a very strong belief that it would happen, but we still were so surprised when it actually happened, I guess. This was just, it just still felt like complete magic. For me, I got into it because my friend worked at Google DeepMind in 2012, and so he came to me to tell me about word to veck and kind of the first technology to translate words into vectors and to be able to actually do something with words. Before that, language was just this whole separate, almost like, thing that computers could not interact with, but now all of a sudden they could.

And to me, I grew up reading Wittgenstein. So for me, it was like, well, the limits of the language are the limits of my world. So I felt like, oh, well, that's insane. If the computers learn language, then they'll learn about the world. They'll be truly smart. That is the future of artificial intelligence. And so that's also image net just came out. So we saw all these new models around image recognition,

and we felt like, well, we got to start a company focused on language models, focused on dialect generation. But of course, there were no papers around it at all and no known algorithms, so anything built models. Really back then, there was nothing. So we're just focused on building some technology to build chatbots using whatever the trying to build some language models around that. And then, of course, 2015, the first paper came out of Google by Cochle that actually showed off the first deep learning model applied to dialect generation.

And they didn't publish any models back then. So it was all about just kind of reading the paper and seeing some of the obviously cherry-picked results and trying to replicate that. And when we saw that in August 2015, we just basically put all of our, but everything we had at the company on building those models. We said, okay, well, this is it. this is right on the corner. We need to really focus on building these language models, getting the first generative AI product, chatbot out there, which we did with Replica, but it wasn't around the corner.

It was like seven years away. And then we just had to survive for long enough to actually get to the first transformer models. And then, of course, I think the next magical moment was the Mina paper, also out of Google with the first transformer models. model. And then I remember in 2020, we got invited by opening I to go see GPT3 before API, to partner up with them to be one of the first partners for GPT3 API to launch. So we came to the office and Mira, who back then was actually leading partnerships. And Sam showed us GPT3,

and I remember that was just, I was floored. It was insane. Just before that, if you think about it, we had to train every model, we had to create the specific data set. If you wanted to train a dialog model, you have to have tons of chat data, and you would train the model, and the model could only do dialogue. But with GPD3, it was the first kind of zero-shot, few-shot model, where it could do anything. It didn't just have to respond in the dialogue format. You can tell it, well, write a tweet like Sam Altman,

or write a tweet this, or translate, and it would do that. And so that would have felt absolutely magical, and we were the first, one of the first partners of OpenAI, GPG3 API. It was still crazy because we still have a Slack channel where Greg Brockman is training a model for us, which now feels just such a... Amazing. Weird reversal.

You still have the model? It was just, I think it was a fine-tuned divinci for replica, but we were the biggest customer in terms of API calls because we were the only chatbot available in the market that actually used JNWI. And now it's weird to think about it, but back then, all the big companies were scared to put out generative AI products because Microsoft Thai happened. And it turned into some Nazi chatbot in literally an hour. And so everyone else was too scared to put them out there.

So we were sort of the only ones for so, so long until OpenEI had put out their chat GPT and kind of change history with that, of course. But it was crazy because before then we literally owned all the keywords like AI, chatbot, artificial intelligence on every single platform and then we also owned

like hundreds of dot AI domains which I just let expire because I felt like no one wants them they're not really on any of the domain platforms and then recently I went to see what dot AI domains

are still available that are just regular words and the only words that are available like bomb it. And I racked on it. Oh, my God, this is upsetting. Naming Wabi, because of that, was pretty hard. Yeah.

So that's kind of the evolution from my respect. You told us a story at dinner about the time that you'd spent in the Open AI office. Maybe talk a little bit about that when you guys were working out of there, what it was like, what the energy was like, or the expectations of the team. I think that, yeah, so when opening I started was kind of out of Y. it was YC research. So they were doing a few, I guess you remember, they were doing a few different research groups, one on UBI, one on AI, some other ones.

And so because we were a YC company, and they let us come, they were very generous with their time, and they would let us come to back then Greg's apartment, where they were headquartered, I would say. And they would let us come with a couple other companies that were doing AI at YC to ask questions.

learn from them and just talk, maybe exchange experience on what we're building. So we would come to that apartment and ask all the questions. Usually it was Ilya and Andre and some other people, and that was absolutely incredible. We were, of course, absolutely starstruck and super happy to be there, just so grateful for the opportunity. And then they moved to their office and we would go there as well. and very quickly they stopped working on language models. And we were very upset because we really wanted to continue going there, but they didn't want to talk about any language models

because no one was really working on them. And that made us feel very strange because we were so sad on continuing and believing in language models, but they completely moved away to shift it to playing video games and all of these kind of agents, kind of rebuilding the worlds and agents in those. We're also reinforcement learning for that and all these other interesting things. And I guess the only person for, in the beginning it was kind of Alec Front for continued to work on language models.

So we had an opportunity to ask him some questions. But yeah, of course, that was, it's just a while to think that because when we're going to open air, of course they were superstars even back then, but still it felt like such a small kind of research group that has. trying to do something interesting. Of course, now to see it become one of the biggest companies in the world is absolutely wild. Well, it's interesting because Andre said on the recent pod that the entire video game's direction was an incorrect direction. It was an incorrect research direction, and they probably should have stuck with language. So you guys were right. Well, being right, it's not always saying. You got to be right, but also execute. I think to

degree we were really invested with replica in building language models, but at some point, we just required a lot more capital to do that. And after working on that for so long, at that point, we just got really into just revenue maximization at some point, because a little bit got maybe scared. We're like, well, we didn't have the balls to say, okay, we'll need 20 million and we'll build that model, even although that was our discussion internally right after mean a paper and so on. You just need to get a lot more money. If you think about it with a replica, we only raised $11 million,

and I guess it's still all in the bank, and we went for many, many years and built a big business. But of course, this is, in hindsight, a very interesting lesson. That's sometimes being very nimble and very kind of scrappy and very profit-oriented is great, but you can miss out on almost like a generational. chance. And I'm not saying, you know, even if we bet on it, maybe we would have not built it. I would never compare myself to the geniuses that actually did it. We probably were not the right

people anyway. But still, the lessons, I think, still stands. Sometimes you need to sort of go big or go home. And not having the balls to do that, especially in this current environment, I think you can suffer the consequences. One of the things we say on the consumer team is consumer behavior, especially new behavior, cannot be predicted. It can only be observed. I think you are actually one of the few people that is not true for because you seem to be able to predict consumer behavior. Like you've been so early to a number of these things. And I think just every time we talk to you, you seem to have an eye on not only like what's going on today, but like what the next thing should be. Is that like, how did you develop that sense, I guess? I'm sure a lot of people would be curious to know.

I don't know if I have that sense. I only have like a couple ideas, but I really believe in them deeply. And then I go really deep down the rabbit hole. I start thinking about it. But I do think that I do have a lot of, I do have a background in journalism. And I pretty much the whole, I grew up dreaming of being a journalist. My first job was 12 years old, working in a newspaper. I was an investigative reporter for a while.

And the one thing I loved about is being able to go and talk to people. and to really, really try to get to know them and live their lives. And so for that, you sort of have to have a lot of empathy and just trying to real and curiosity about people. And I think today what I'm seeing with AI especially, it's being built by a very specific type of person, personality. It's oftentimes these savants, this like brilliant geniusists, physicists, mathematicians,

and they're insane in building algorithms and math, and kind of scientific breakthroughs, but they usually lack on the human empathy side. That's just kind of how it is. Meanwhile, I'm the opposite. I'm a dumb dumb when it comes to science. Coming from a family of physicists, they were always like, oh, my God,

like, why can't you be smart and also go study physics? But I couldn't. But at the same time, I'm just really interested in a human condition of what people are doing. And just seeing my mom trying to understand how to copy paste a prompt from red, it was such a foreign idea for her to her. And I realized, like, my mom is very savvy with computers.

She's always on her phone. She's always on her laptop. But somehow, she can't crack that. This is just too, this is just not user-friendly enough. And kind of understanding those concepts and I think was really what led us see, kind of come up with the idea for Wabi. And the same goes for replica, just traveling around and talking to people and seeing how much loneliness there is,

and how much people just want to be able to tell someone what they're going through and how few people are able to listen. And I think that realization that maybe in AI is not, can't talk well today, but it could listen, that that could be a groundbreaking thing for millions in the world. So I think this is kind of what just allows me to have a slightly different angle at the same problem.

If you wanted to speculate on the future of hardware, like what is sort of that hardware just like you know five 10 years what is going to be the interaction like how are we going to be interacting with these applications

I do have a few ideas around hardware and I'm not a hardware person at all but I'm a hardware user like all of us so I get to have opinions I think I think where there's a huge mind trap that exists among builders in the space

where they somehow think that voice is the main interface. It's like the best ultimate interface. And I think that's because they are somehow thinking about the movie her all the time, but not in the right way and kind of missing the whole point of the movie her, that, yes, voice was amazing in that movie because it was Samantha Johansson constantly heavy breathing his ear. And that totally worked.

You didn't even need to see anyone. In my case, that's why that works. But if you really think about voice interfaces, they're just so imperfect. You can't use that device if you're laying in bed with someone who's sleeping. You can't use it in a crowded space. You can't use it at the office. You can't use it. Even walking around, it's a little bit weird.

And so all of a sudden, you're betting everything. There's a lot of people try to build voice-only devices. In my case, completely wrong. Like, it can be a fantastic extra way to interact. with the computer, but every single Alexa right now is, like 75% of them are being shipped with the screen. Because even if I'm setting a timer when I'm cooking, the proverbial voice use case, even then, I need to see the timer.

I'm not going to be asking, hey, how long this is left every second? This is just strange. And so I think this is kind of the biggest mistake in my view is trying to ship these screenless devices. I love screens. I think there's no way with voice to solve for discovery, for productivity. I would hate if, you know,

the worst thing with voice and the iPhone is reading out, push notifications, text messages that are coming. I'm like, oh my God, please shut up. It's horrible. It's very hard to listen to turn it off. I think that's terrible. If this was just being,

you want productivity, but you don't want it to be read out loud in your ear because this is just this very slow way of getting information in your brain. So anyway, so I think this is kind of the biggest mistake I would not ever make a screenless device. In fact, I would make it very much screen-first device, but I do believe that the AI device is not about a voice-driven thing.

It's more about building this AI-first operating system, having all the models run locally as well. I think there's a lot in that, like building, truly an AI-first smartphone and not today, kind of more CPU-driven, whatever, hardware, but more the hardware of the future where there are models that can run locally with the operating system is super different from what it is today with no fixed apps, with being able to change and create software on the go for you with the level of personization that goes a lot deeper than what it is today.

Yeah, I think that there is, there is, Definitely space for a device like that. Right now, you know, AI is just an app on your phone. It should not be that way, I guess. And it's a great note to end on. Eugenie, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z podcast. If you like this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe,

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