Bret Taylor - The Agent Era

Patrick O'Shaughnessy interviews Brett Taylor, co-founder of Sierra and chairman of the board at OpenAI, about the transformative potential of AI agents in business and technology. Taylor, known for his influential roles at Google Maps, Facebook, Salesforce, and Twitter, discusses the strategic integration of AI, emphasizing the importance of small, empowered teams and the iterative development of AI systems. He highlights the future of AI agents in enhancing customer experiences and operational efficiencies, the significant impact of multimodal models, and the role of craftsmanship and intensity in building impactful AI-driven solutions. Taylor also touches on OpenAI's unique structure and the broader implications of AI on business and society.

• The "mythical man month" is a concept in software development emphasizing that adding more people to a project often slows it down rather than speeding it up.
• Small, highly functional teams are often more effective than larger teams due to reduced need for process and bureaucracy.
• Large teams can lead to disempowerment of advanced technologists and a loss of agility.

"The myth that... to make a software development project go faster, you should add more people to it. And often the inverse is true."

• Adding more people to a project requires more process and planning, which can slow down progress.

"Adding more people often requires you add a lot more process, you add a lot more bureaucracy, you disempower some of the most advanced technologists on the team and can, broadly speaking, just slow things down."

• Larger teams often result in a narrow focus on specific tasks, losing sight of the overall project goals.

"When you have hundreds of people working on a project, often the part of the problem that you're staring at is so narrow, often you lose sight of the forest for the trees."

• Small teams that understand the customer problem they are solving can be more effective.
• Smaller teams can be more agile and can make high-frequency decisions quickly.
• Small, accountable, and empowered teams can work more efficiently and adapt to new information or requirements.

"If you have a small, accountable, empowered team, often it means they understand the customer problem they're solving. Precisely."

• Larger teams require more upfront planning and coordination, which can reduce agility.

"You need product managers and engineering managers and this and that and the other thing. Whereas if you have what I think Amazon called the two pizza box team, you reduce the need for a lot of that overhead."

• Google Maps was initially a small team project that faced many technical challenges.
• The original codebase became messy due to the accumulation of hard-won lessons and technical hacks.
• Brett Taylor rewrote Google Maps to simplify the codebase and improve performance.

"Google Maps was a small team... The code base was this accumulation of hard-won lessons... I just rewrote it... with all the knowledge that we had accumulated."

• The rewrite aimed to reduce the size of the JavaScript bundle and improve browser compatibility.

"The main goal at the time was to get the bundle size... down to like 20k uncompressed... and got it working really reliably on all these different browsers."

• AI agents are systems that can reason and take action autonomously.
• Agents can be categorized into three types: company agents, persona-based agents, and personal agents.
• Company agents act as digital assets for customer interaction, similar to a website or mobile app.
• Persona-based agents perform specific job functions, such as coding or legal tasks.
• Personal agents assist individuals with tasks like planning vacations or managing calendars.

"The word agent... is a system that can reason and take action autonomously... your company's conversational AI... will be your AI agent."

• The effectiveness of AI agents will improve over time, allowing for more autonomy and agency.

"My sense is that progress in AI will be fairly iterative, with occasional jumps and capabilities... Over time they'll be more powerful and have more agency effectively."

• The development of AI agents will be iterative, with improvements in reasoning capabilities and tool use.
• As AI agents become more advanced, they will be given more autonomy to complete tasks.
• Safety and guardrails will become increasingly important as AI agents gain more capabilities.

"As the models get better, you can give the AI more agency to complete tasks. But I think the level of sophistication of the safety issues that you have to handle also get more broad and complex as well."

• The future of AI agents will involve balancing increased agency with robust safety measures to ensure responsible deployment.

"There's a tension there, right? As the models get better, you can give the AI more agency to complete tasks. But I think the level of sophistication of the safety issues that you have to handle also get more broad and complex as well."

These notes cover the key ideas and topics discussed in the transcript, providing a comprehensive overview of the themes and their relevance.

• AI agents are becoming more complete in their tasks, requiring improved guardrails and safety measures as they gain more agency.
• Designing conversational customer experiences is a new discipline, evolving similarly to early web design.
• AI agents allow for more expressive and authentic customer interactions compared to traditional web interfaces.
• The balance between control and creativity in AI agents is crucial to maintain brand integrity while offering a personalized experience.

"If you have an AI agent with a free-form text box, people can type whatever they want into that. Your concept of what your customer experience is defined by you, but it's also defined by your customers by what they write in there."

• This highlights the unpredictability and expressiveness of conversational AI, where customer inputs shape the experience.

"If you give your agent too much agency, in the extreme case it will hallucinate, but in the more practical case, it just might not protect your brand in the way that you want it to."

• Emphasizes the need for a balance between AI creativity and brand protection.

• Building robust, industrial-grade AI systems is technically challenging compared to creating simple demos.
• The transition from rule-based to goals and guardrails-based systems represents a significant shift in software development.
• AI systems are slower, more expensive, and non-deterministic compared to traditional software, posing unique challenges.

"Generative AI broadly is a technology with which it's very easy to make a demo and very hard to make an industrial-grade system."

• Indicates the complexity of developing reliable AI systems beyond simple demonstrations.

"You shouldn't have to be an AI expert to make an agent, just like you shouldn't have to have a PhD in computer science to make a website."

• Highlights the goal of democratizing AI agent creation, making it accessible without requiring deep technical expertise.

• Effective AI agents require factual knowledge, procedural knowledge, and systems integrations.
• Factual knowledge grounds the agent and prevents hallucinations, while procedural knowledge enables complex actions.
• Integration with underlying systems allows AI agents to perform actions, not just answer questions.

"There are two types of knowledge that I think really produce a really robust agent. One is the factual knowledge of your company... The other type of knowledge is procedural knowledge."

• Distinguishes between the types of knowledge necessary for effective AI agents.

"With the right methodology, your agent can do anything that a person can do on a computer, which is just an incredible opportunity for customer experiences."

• Emphasizes the potential of AI agents to replicate human-like actions and interactions.

• The process of building AI agents can take between one to three months, depending on the complexity and customer needs.
• Sierra employs a high-touch model to assist customers in deploying AI agents without requiring them to be AI experts.
• The goal is to make AI technology accessible and usable for companies of all sizes and resource levels.

"Between one and three months. We have a model where we have a really hold the hands of all of our customers so that they don't need to be AI experts or experts and agents at all to get started."

• Provides a timeline and support model for deploying AI agents.

"We really felt like it was important that any company, no matter how many resources they have available, can deploy them."

• Stresses the importance of accessibility in AI technology deployment.

• AI agents have the potential to transform customer interactions by making personalized, empathetic conversations scalable.
• The cost of conversations with customers can be significantly reduced, enabling more direct and frequent interactions.
• AI can operationalize and scale the best customer experiences and techniques quickly and efficiently.

"We have this opportunity to bring down the cost of a conversation down to something that's fairly marginal."

• Highlights the economic advantage of AI in customer interactions.

"AI is an opportunity to this all of your customers and say you can scale things and have them be personalized at the same time."

• Emphasizes the dual benefits of scalability and personalization with AI.

• AI agents can provide highly personalized experiences by leveraging customer-specific information and context.
• The future may involve more sophisticated interactions between personal agents and company agents, changing consumer behavior and company operations.
• The interplay between different types of agents could lead to new, unpredictable ways of doing business.

"I think we're to some degree already there... With AI, you can look up information about the customer, you can tailor the experience to them."

• Indicates the current capabilities and future potential of personalized AI interactions.

"I can imagine a world where I have a personal agent and I send them to do the shopping, and most of the interaction between a company's Sierra powered agent is with my personal agent."

• Envisions a future where personal and company AI agents interact, transforming the customer experience landscape.

• AI agents are anticipated to have a broad impact similar to the smartphone's influence.
• Predicting the exact implications of AI agents is challenging due to first, second, and third-order effects.
• Personal agents will increasingly interact with company agents, potentially surpassing human interactions in certain contexts.
• The integration of conversational AI into various devices (e.g., smart speakers, in-car systems) could transform user experiences.

"In 2007, if you watched Steve Jobs introduce the iPhone, how much would have you predicted correctly about its impact on society?"

• Predicting technological impacts is inherently difficult, as exemplified by the iPhone's unforeseen societal changes.

"Personal agents will interact with company agents... conversational traffic to our company agents will be more personal agents than people."

• Personal AI agents may dominate interactions with company systems, reflecting a shift in how we engage with technology.

"The power, the surge we saw in excitement around smart speakers and all that might come back when those things are actually more effective computers."

• Improved AI capabilities in smart devices could reignite user interest and enhance functionality beyond basic tasks.

• AI and AI agents could amplify productivity disparities, benefiting the most skilled individuals disproportionately.
• The democratization of tools through AI could lower barriers in various professions, enabling more people to create high-quality work.
• The digital divide may widen, necessitating efforts to ensure broad access to AI technologies.

"One of the very exciting parts of AI and AI agents specifically is it removes a lot of the gatekeeping in a lot of professions."

• AI can democratize access to resources and opportunities, reducing traditional barriers in creative and professional fields.

"The folks who learn how to use them effectively will gain outsized value from using them."

• Mastery of AI tools will significantly enhance productivity and value creation, highlighting the importance of skill acquisition.

"It's as important as it ever was and much more important now to make sure everyone has access to these technologies."

• Ensuring equitable access to AI technologies is crucial to prevent exacerbating existing inequalities.

• Progress in AI models is driven by improvements in algorithms, data, and infrastructure.
• Multimodal models (e.g., combining text, images, video) are particularly exciting and transformative.
• Continuous investment in AI research and infrastructure is propelling rapid advancements.

"The most meaningful breakthrough over the past decade was the transformers model, which was a paper out of Google called 'Attention is All You Need.'"

• The transformers model represents a significant leap in AI capabilities, underpinning many current advancements.

"Even if one of them hits a plateau, you can see progress in the other."

• Continuous progress in AI is maintained through simultaneous advancements in algorithms, data, and infrastructure.

"Multimodal models to generate images and video are quite exciting."

• The integration of multiple data types into AI models expands their potential applications and effectiveness.

• The evolution of user interfaces from punch cards to conversational AI represents a significant shift.
• Conversational AI offers a more natural and intuitive way to interact with technology, potentially increasing accessibility.
• Future interfaces may include brain-computer interfaces, but the smartphone remains a dominant and versatile tool.

"Every time you watch a science fiction film or a movie, you're just having a conversation, right?"

• Conversational AI aligns with the intuitive, natural interactions depicted in science fiction, enhancing user experience.

"My grandparents skipped ever having a PC... but they did have iPads."

• Simplified, intuitive interfaces like the iPad can bridge generational technology gaps, making technology more accessible.

"We have a supercomputer with a speaker in our pocket connected to very sophisticated headphones."

• The smartphone's versatility and existing infrastructure make it a powerful and likely enduring interface for AI technologies.

• AI and automation could fundamentally reshape business operations and models.
• Companies must consider how automation affects their cost structures and competitive dynamics.
• Adopting AI internally and externally is crucial for companies to remain competitive and avoid disruption.

"Imagine a world where a huge percentage of some of the operational tasks can be automated."

• Automation has the potential to drastically alter business operations and cost structures, necessitating strategic adaptation.

"Companies built natively for these platforms can have different business models."

• New companies leveraging AI from the ground up may develop innovative business models that challenge incumbents.

"The most important thing companies need to do is adopt AI internally and externally."

• Proactive adoption of AI technologies is essential for companies to stay competitive and leverage new efficiencies.

• OpenAI's structure and approach to AI research and development differ from other organizations.
• The focus on safety, ethical considerations, and broad accessibility shapes OpenAI's work and impact.

"OpenAI is the leader in this space."

• OpenAI's leadership in AI research is driven by its unique structure and commitment to responsible AI development.

"Everyone's going to have their iron man suit that's going to be very personalized to them."

• The vision for personalized AI tools highlights the potential for AI to enhance individual capabilities and experiences.

"Technology melts away from what we do... facilitating technology receding to the background despite being a lot more powerful."

• The ultimate goal is for technology to become seamlessly integrated into daily life, enhancing functionality without being intrusive.

• OpenAI is a Delaware nonprofit with a mission-focused fiduciary duty.
• The mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity.
• OpenAI created a for-profit subsidiary to raise necessary capital for AGI development.

"OpenAI is a Delaware nonprofit. Rather than being a fiduciary to shareholders, folks like me were fiduciaries to the mission."

• OpenAI's mission and structure make it central to AI discussions.
• Other research labs, like Anthropic, also balance mission and shareholder accountability.

"The mission of OpenAI is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity."

• The importance of adaptability in evolving roles and industries.
• Personal story of receiving critical feedback from Sheryl Sandberg at Facebook.
• Transition from a technical role to a leadership role by focusing on impact rather than personal identity.

"I was trying to conform the new job to me, rather than conform myself to the new job."

• Emphasizing impact over rigid identity can lead to greater job satisfaction and effectiveness.

"I was just focused on how do I achieve the end that I'm trying to achieve, and by having a very loose concept of who I am."

• Mark Benioff's focus on genuine customer success.
• Deep listening as a key strategy for customer-centric business.

"I saw in Salesforce the most sort of customer-centric company I'd ever experienced and it really changed."

• Product-led growth can sometimes lead to arrogance, but mature organizations focus on deep listening.

"For Salesforce, it's just a more mature place with a really great CEO and founder."

• Importance of intensity due to the fast-paced AI market.
• Comparison with the dot-com bubble: hype vs. generational firms.

"I think the AI boom will rhyme with the dot-com bubble."

• Execution is crucial in a market where technology is rapidly evolving.

"We know we don't have the luxury of patience."

• Urgency and attention to detail are key to fostering intensity.
• Values should be felt, not just displayed.

"If there's a competitive deal, do you feel the depth with which every colleague you're working with cares about it?"

• Admiration for Apple's craftsmanship and attention to detail.
• Importance of well-crafted products in building trust and pride among employees.

"The craftsmanship in every interaction with Sierra, whether it's a slide or a phone call or a document or a product, if you feel that the details are right, you have trust that we're going to get all the details you don't see right as well."

• Importance of intentionality in managing time and responsibilities.
• Recognizing that everything is a choice and being accountable for those choices.

"Try not to pretend that anything is not a choice. You can quit any job, you can abandon your family, probably neither will something that most people want to do, but everything is a choice."

• Understanding the value provided to customers through the "jobs to be done" framework.
• Importance of recognizing the core value provided, not just the method of delivery.

"What is the job our customers are hiring us to do? What will be different in the age of AI and what will stay the same?"

• Practical steps for companies: build a customer-facing AI agent and encourage internal use of AI tools.

"Build a customer-facing AI agent so that your customers are experiencing an AI version of your company."

• Reflecting on the kindest thing anyone has ever done: personal gratitude for a supportive spouse.

"My wife saying yes that she'd marry me."