Sam Lessin on Artificial Intelligence

Essays

From the Podcast

I just registered agenttreatyframework.com. Do we get the .ai?

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 170

So I think one of the most interesting points I saw from two managers is, these are ones who are way, way, way up on, like, AI stocks or AI Microns of the world, and I think they're all struggling with, like, what's the Main Street application of AI, 'cause AI is so hated by Main Street and by normal people. And the ones who are bulled up on it, the basic narrative is Main Street says they hate it, but then if you actually show it to them and use it, they love it. And so, like, it's, like, there's this whole gap around, like, perception versus the real- the narrative versus the reality of it, and, like, so-and-so's small town store has been around for 100 years You know, then you show them how to redesign the store with AI, and their mind is blown, and they're super psyched about it. You know what I mean? And so like there, there's like a whole narrative about like, okay, what's the real story on how people feel about this stuff, and what's, like, story versus narrative? I thought that was somewhat interesting, et cetera.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 170

Well, okay, if we really wanted to make it into a business, a money-making scheme, you come up with, as Dave said, the agent treaty framework, and then you basically would want some sort of, like, treaty platform, right? Where like, okay, we're gonna sign a treaty, and, like, you can have treaty lawyer bots. We're gonna have, like, a meeting place where you can put up, okay, I'm willing to do treaties.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 170

Standards exist in a world where you need standards because you can't do a bunch of one-off deals. It's too complicated, right? It's too much work. So you have the standard and you write to the standard, right? Fine. We don't need that shit anymore. Now, like, with AI, everything can be a pairwise t- treaty, negotiated truces, right? And so everything becomes the agent treaty framework.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 170

Well, and the funny thing is, is with the agents, I wonder if you can run long tail BD so much faster. Uh, the part of the problem with BD is just, like, it's time-consuming. Like, Amazon's clearly, it's worth doing a business deal with Amazon. Do you think in the future, Dave, like, these micro agents basically go out and negotiate deals more dynamically using, like, AI, like, at scale?

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 170

But on the other hand, it's like, here's the thing. It's just an interesting business problem because, like, what ChatGPT originally s- uh, what ChatGPT originally said is, "Oh, put yourself inside us." You know what I mean? Like, "We'll effectively literally front end you," or, "Give us specific APIs that will let us do this to make it easier." Pri- companies have been trying this forever, right? Which is like, "Hey, we should be partners. Give us the APIs, we'll sit on top."

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 170

But, like, hotels, like the Hilton, for instance. This is my, my example last night. I went to Muse and said, "Hey, I need a hotel room. I have an early morning flight out of LAX." I don't care.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 170

Oh, I thought you were gonna say something different, which I have a half-written essay on, is that actually the, the fact that Facebook Connect ultimately didn't work and Open Graph failed and had to be shut down is the same story, where, like, there's not enough value trade for the brands.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 170

But people don't... The thing I don't understand about, like, the s- the standard doesn't change anything. Like, it's either simple. It's like, as a business, you're either gonna be able to say, "Well, I literally cannot stop people from crawling me or taking my stuff." That's what happened with, like, the textual internet and why we even have AI, is they basically just, like, Carmen Sandiego stole the entire internet to bootstrap these things, right? Like-

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 170

Because everything, it's just an API. These things can read APIs and documentation. It doesn't matter whether it's MCP or not. It's just ways for machines to talk to machines, right? And so for me, it's when people are like, "Oh, we have new standards, da, da, da," it's actually a very simple thing. It's like either your machine or a service you have has an API in some way, shape, or form, which Dave was pointing out a year ago, even if you don't publish it, I can reverse engineer it now, right? Either it is accessible to other machines, in which case it will be used by other machines, or it is not, in which case you can have something that is protected. And so the entire thing, like these standards and protocols, is all bullshit. What is interesting, though, is, like, I don't know about you guys, I've already noticed from Muse, for instance, Facebook's thing, that certain workflows that used to work have already been turned off, right? Because servers are like-

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 170

All these things, right? And, like, that's actually f- as wild as it is, fairly practical. The funny thing about that is we could do something about that. Like, it's not that hard to think about what the US liability framework could be. Like, think about post '08, we had to have cash reserves, whether it's you have to carry a lot of insurance, 'cause if you're doing lab research, then things might get out, but you don't have the balance sheet to pay for it. You can't dump that risk on the US government or the US people. Like, you should pay for that, right? So because we're so obsessed with the tales of zero and infinity and the religion, we're missing actually good decisions in business about how to operate in a new technological landscape. And, like, I think that's the thing is like, to me is like, religion is super fascinating.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 170

Agreed. But then it kind of, the crypto thinking plus a lot of the stuff br- came into the AI story. Now you have these two interesting infinities and zeros. Infinity and zero-one was like the Sam Altman original pitch, which is we will own everything. Whoever gets the AGI first owns infinity. There are no more businesses except for us, and it can only go to zero, right? And so you're like, "Okay, well, the average of infinity and zero is still infinity, so I guess we should invest in this. Who cares what the price is? Who cares how much capital it needs?" Like that was infection one. Now we have the inverse going on, which I think is to be taken very seriously, which is it might be that, it's actually not, and like that was a silly narrative when you think about it, but people believed it enough.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 170

The tails like meaning the extreme, like zero or infinity, like the tails of numbers.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 170

It's an awesome book, and it's an important one to internalize, I think it talk about what Silicon Valley's business model is and, and kind of where we are. The basic point of the book is that if you go all the way back to like the time of the Greeks and before, the idea of true zero, right, was like highly fought. And so like the, the first historical vignette is the Pythagoreans who wanted to kind of introduce the idea of true nothingness. This is like kind of like creation ex nihilo from the Bible. How do you like create something from nothing? These are very deep philosophical problems, and the West hated it because it's really hard to reason about, and it's really hard to talk about consistent growth and like the things we're good at. Same thing with like infinity, like infinity is a weird concept. Because of that, the zero came from India. The West fought it like hell. The only reason it exists in Western culture is it is just too useful, like you need zero. Like the traders made it happen. The church fought it like holy hell to like keep it out of Western culture. But like fast-forward, if you think about like our markets and the way we build businesses, and we think about competition and compounding and all those sorts of things, they're great at like most normal modeling in numbers that we're familiar with, what we can argue about and multiply, da da da. The second you introduce a zero or an infinity anywhere in the chain, you break everything because the tail, which is infinity or zero, dominates the whole story, right? And what's really interesting, I think, is in some ways, if you look at the story that we've seen in the last many years in Silicon Valley, the tendency towards infinity, which you saw the, the geometric returns on Google and Facebook and oh my God, the world is infinitely large and we can dominate the whole thing, started this. Things like Bitcoin, which is like, oh my God, if everyone believes, then belief is self-perpetuating and it can be in- infinitely valuable, right? And it can only be zero. Then you see like GameStop and like this whole series of things. I think there is this... In fact, in some ways, like the tails infected the entire narrative of Silicon Valley, right? And so that's why we get to the today's-

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 170

Although it's a recent phenomenon, right? Because like even as far as ten, 15 years ago, the businesses that Silicon Valley generated were like unbelievably capitalistic. You know what I mean? Like it wasn't about like moving heavy dollars. Like that's kind of a recent Bitcoin style. There's a series of things. I, I honestly think a lot of like what's gone on has been people learning the wrong lessons from like Bitcoin and religion effectively in this era, right? Where if you think about like this dynamic, it's like you had the era of Google and Facebook, which everyone got wrong from like a storytelling perspective, largely because like, well, how big could they possibly... Even I got this wrong. Like I was like, what is the thing that is more than a hundred billion dollar company? That's unfathomably large in historical context. And so people got, "Oh my God, things can be huge." Then Bitcoin, which again, I was early on, you know, Dave, you were too, and like then Ripple and Solana and like all this stuff taught people the lesson of like effectively the aver-- which I love this line, 'cause it's true, which is the average of zero to infinity is infinity, which is like-

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 170

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