Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
00:58:02 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:58:02] S1: Makes me wonder what's the future of security? Even if you're the best in the world at this, which maybe you'll have to become, you're gonna have so much information and context on so many people. And security is a big problem, I think, across the world. I mean, all these great hacking examples that we've studied now, it's wild what these things can do. The capabilities are gonna get stronger and so on. I'm just curious for you to riff on the future of security and safety and early in technology revolutions of the past. Always, there's these enormous hacks. There's enormous data breaches and so on. It's hard to imagine this won't happen in this technology revolution too. How do you think about this and the responsibility of providing safety, given how much you'll know about people?
00:58:39 · Noah Shinn, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:58:39] S2: It's the most important problem. I think it comes to building security and safety and a mindset towards some of the core values of the company and the people and the way that you build product. This is topical because anytime in the past twenty, thirty years when any new breakout or new consumer experience has been revealed, there's always been immediate backlash of, woah. This is different... Confusing different with being unsafe and seeing some of that now. But, also, I think staying core to the principles that you hold. The user's always in control of their data. They should never feel out of control. Being proactive about the systems that you put in place to be able to get ahead of these types of things. If I call out one example, a hallucination case that existed, language models hallucinate all the time, but with a product like this, you don't want a language model to be hallucinating. So we put in place a more systematic solution that will detect before an action is taken, before a thinking trace is executed as a tool call, it is validated and scrutinized by something that is decoupled from the same incentive system as the underlying agent. [00:59:39] S1: It's like a watchdog. Yeah.
00:59:39 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Noah Shinn
[00:59:39] S1: It's like a watchdog. Yeah. [00:59:41] S2: A filter that's able to find this proper noun was just generated out of thin air due to some sampling error in the underlying model. It's very easy in hindsight to be able to capture these types of mistakes. And these are hardened. So we have world class security teams that are constantly working proactively to find harder and harder adversarial cases to try to find edge cases here and there, and it's becoming rarer and rarer over time. One subtle part about building a platform like this is that it's getting better over time. As we continue to do more adversarial testing, as we continue to be more creative about certain edge cases, these models are just getting better and better over time towards being robust to these types of attacks. [01:00:19] S1: On the other side of the ledger, everyone always shows that beautiful visual of each generation of the iPhone, and you can see it getting better over time and more and more refined. What's that arc for you? It's so interesting because it's not an application. It's not a device. It's an interaction through existing communication channels, WhatsApp and iMessage, etcetera. What are the things that you're adding and envision adding over time that will make the platform and the product more powerful than it is today?
01:00:43 · Noah Shinn
[01:00:43] S2: The product experience right now is very simple. Simplicity is one key that we focus on. But I actually think that it becomes even more simple over time. We may roll out an application in the near future, but I actually think that we're going to trend more towards a simpler interface, which is, do you even need to open the iMessage application and type in a certain piece of content and send the message out and then look at what the response is after when it's done? There's a certain subset of users that interact with Instinct only through voice, actually. Like, more than 90% of the interaction of the messages that they send to Instinct are primarily through voice. I even have this action button, the action button Yeah. Yeah. On on your phone. I can click on the action button and say, like, say hi to Patrick in in two hours from now. I think you have his email address. You can go send him an email. And I don't even now need to unlock my phone and open the iMessage application and type the message in. You can even imagine with real time voice with voice recognition that knows what your voice sounds like and has the discretion to know when you're addressing it and not addressing it, where you could have, let's say, like an AirPod and not a new type of AirPod, just like an AirPod because it's good enough, And it's just on. And it's just on, and you might be going on a hike or on a bike ride or on a walk, on a run, or something like that. And you're just catching up, like, hey. This contract need to review. Okay. I I need to review that. Or this news article just came in, and here's the headline, and here's the takeaway. This new project was released, and you should take a look at this. And you're just like... And you're you're like, okay. Got it. Got it. Put that on my calendar. That's fifteen minutes. Okay. Yeah. That's not important, so go clear that part out. This person needs my help. I know the answer to that, so just tell them that it's this. It's going to be much, much easier over time. I think that there are long term and short term considerations here, where I think in the long term, the interface has become much simpler. But in the short and medium term, maybe there are more expressive interfaces to be able to share.
01:02:29 · Noah Shinn, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
We have a files feature that enables Instinct to be able to send effectively entire sites, like, full web applications to show much more, whether it's like a trip itinerary or a wedding plan or something like that. I don't know. Something that just requires more and more creativity and surface area. It can generate those on the fly and be able to show that to you. And I think that there's something interesting there where you'd look at the last twenty years of application building or product building where anytime that you needed a new interface to be able to showcase some piece of information, you needed to build an application for it. And it's this long software development life cycle to be able to produce application and ship it out to people, and then you find some feedback like, hey. I wish it looked like this. And then take it and you make the improvement, and you ship out a new version. Right? And this is on the order of, like, months. And then over time over the last twenty years, there have been all these applications built for so many different purposes, so many different things. And now the consumer is just fatigued. Right? It's like, every time we need something, like, is there an app that does that? I think that all of that collapses down in the future. I think that all of software is going to collapse down into a single, very easy to use interface. Don't get that confused with capability being limited. I think capability is going to expand. [01:03:38] S1: What's the craziest thing you can imagine capabilities wise?
01:03:41 · Noah Shinn
[01:03:41] S2: When we move away from daily tasks, like, I want to do this. Can you do it? And that friction is going to go down to zero. I think that it will start towards pursuing higher level objectives that are aligned with teaser where the user is able to describe not just, hey. Can you track this workout for me? I did this and I performed here and this is how I did. But more about over the next three or four months, can you work with me to make sure that I hit these certain goals? And actually, lot of people are starting to discover that today of you want to gain this many pounds or you wanna lose this many pounds or you want to hit this certain mile time. Being able to specify objectives and goals and then be able to work with it to then achieve those goals and objectives. I see small businesses being run now that are native to instinct itself, meaning the entire business is not run on instinct. The entire back office is now completely functioning on top of instinct, and even parts of it are fully autonomous too where talk about high level objectives. It's in this certain area. Make sure that this inventory level doesn't drop below this and doesn't go above this. And so now it's not saying, hey. Please order this thing. Static. Yeah. It's pursue this higher level objective and use the tools and devices that you have available to be able to accomplish that. There are so many cases of objectives that you could state and have it pursue for an unbound amount of time that we could brainstorm here. But I think that's the meta level picture is moving away from individual use cases over to higher level objectives is going to be where interaction will will progress.