The Information's TITV
00:25:32 · Akash Pasricha
[00:25:32] S0: Right. I want to shift the conversation slightly to dig into the demand side of the equation here. And, look, we had chat, which was sort of a big moment for the world, I guess. Then you had these coding agents that sort of commanded a lot of the attention. Now there's been a conversation around, well, what is the next big use case for AI that will continue to drive demand and accelerate it? Look, personal assistance has come up certainly with Muse and Instinct. It's become a popular category. Elon has been very clear on X that the economics of some of their own personal assistants haven't been that great. And so I guess there's a question as to how long these personal assistants can stay at the prices that they are, also how good they are. What do you think is sort of the next big use case beyond coding agents that will command a lot of these tokens and compute that people are building for?
00:26:37 · Paddy Srinivasan
[00:26:37] S3: Yeah, great question. My fundamental belief is there are two different segments of the market. I think the knowledge worker workflows will increasingly become more and more agentic. It could be in horizontal use cases like marketing agents or sales agents and things like that. We're already starting to see that. There'll also be vertical agents for doing the legal work that has also started, or vertical agents for doing ad production, multimedia, generative media type of use cases. And then the second big bucket that I am starting to see emerge is the physical intelligence and agents that will enable physical devices, whether it is a surveillance device or a humanoid or a drone or any kind of physical device that needs intelligence is the next wave that is about to come on board. So I feel like the proliferation of these use cases is going to continue at a rapid pace, but there will be normalizing of do you really need the latest multi trillion parameter frontier model to drive all of the use cases. So for example, I have a bot now trying to hunt me down an iPhone Duo. Like, do I need Tables 5.1 for that? Or can I use open weight model to do that grunt work? Think there will be a lot of routing of tasks to intelligent routing of tasks to the best appropriate model for a given task. So I fully expect the cost to normalize, but there will be a proliferation of agentic workflows in both knowledge worker, but also in the physical world.
00:28:26 · Akash Pasricha, Paddy Srinivasan
[00:28:26] S0: I was trying to track down a tweet this morning that I feel like I came across a couple days ago about how maybe cybersecurity and finding vulnerabilities and addressing vulnerabilities, I think somebody had mentioned that they expect it to be something like 50 of all token use. Is that a future that you think is in the cards? [00:28:48] S3: Absolutely. Absolutely. We are living through that. I don't know if you saw, but the past month was dubbed as the Black October, given how many cyber incidents we all had to deal with as the industry. So I think this is only going to escalate. That's [00:29:03] S0: a you great think 50% is reasonable, you think? [00:29:06] S3: I don't know what the exact number is, but [00:29:09] S0: Clearly, I feel like I don't either. I just... It was... I I remember seeing it. [00:29:13] S3: No. But that's a great use case for a must have a frontier model both for playing offense and defense in that world. Like you cannot compromise on that. So I think we will find an equilibrium where there are some frontier tasks for which you need a frontier model, and then you'll have a super long tail of tasks for which you can route it to the best available model.
00:29:13 · Paddy Srinivasan, Akash Pasricha
[00:29:13] S3: No. But that's a great use case for a must have a frontier model both for playing offense and defense in that world. Like you cannot compromise on that. So I think we will find an equilibrium where there are some frontier tasks for which you need a frontier model, and then you'll have a super long tail of tasks for which you can route it to the best available model. [00:29:37] S0: Great. Well, Paddy, wanna thank you for coming on. That is Paddy Srinivasan, the CEO of DigitalOcean here on TITV. That does it for today's show. A reminder, we are on this stream Monday through Friday at 10AM Pacific, 1PM Eastern. If you can't make it then, episodes are available on theinformation.com, on our YouTube channel, or wherever you get your podcasts. Make sure to follow us on social media, on X, on Instagram, on TikTok, and on LinkedIn. I am already excited for our next show tomorrow. Have a great rest of your Thursday. Bye bye for now.