Do We All Really Need a Digital Chief of Staff? Grok Bot, Dot and Muse Say Yes (Duh)

Andrew Keen (0:00)

Hello, my name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen On America, the daily interview show about the United States.

Hello, everybody. It's Monday, October the 5th. That was The Week In Tech. We're a bit late, but Keith was in Los Angeles, a Hollywood superstar, mingling with celebrities. Keith, were you in Los Angeles?

Keith Teare (0:44)

Absolutely. I was. I was in my successful audition for the role of Rambo in the next movie.

Andrew Keen (0:52)

There's a new Rambo movie out actually about Stallone, and there is a really major tech movie out later this week called The Social Reckoning, which is a follow-up to Aaron Sorkin's The Social Networks. I'm looking forward to that. Maybe we'll come back to that later. It's a week, last week at least, where at least according to Keith, that was the week newsletter, that AI is becoming permanent. He suggests that with products like Grok Bot, Dot and Muse, everyone is gonna have a personal assistant. It's certainly big news this week. The Wall Street Journal also ran a piece by their tech correspondent, highly respected Nicole Nguyen, who has a piece on Keith's AI agents. They're offering now to run our life. And she asked whether she would let them. She's ambivalent. She sees they have upside, but she's also worried not just about functionality, but about privacy, Keith. What happened this week to make these Grok Bots and Dots and Muse is so much more real? We talked about Muse last week too. So it's not just this week, but clearly something happened to you in your own optimistic way, suggests everyone's going to have a personal assistant. By when? By next week, by next year, by next century.

Keith Teare (2:22)

Well, everyone's going to be offered one. That is absolutely certain. Probably that's the news of the week. Rather than everyone's going to have one, everyone's going to be offered one. OpenAI had their developer day, I think it was on Tuesday, Tuesday or Wednesday, and announced DOT, and DOT is their version of Muse.

We already had Grok Bot and OpenClaw, of course, and Hermes. There's a British one called Instinct, which today announced that it's supporting group chats with the agent, so a team can talk to a single agent, and all weigh in on what they want to achieve. And Instinct just raised a billion dollars at a $10 billion valuation, which for a UK company is huge.

Andrew Keen (3:06)

That may be the pets.com of this particular AI boom. The one company that's missing from all this, and then my company, Anthropic and Claude, why don't they have one?

Keith Teare (3:19)

They haven't really consolidated everything into a single agentic interface yet. I mean, you could argue that Claude Code and Claude Work, and then Claude Chat together constitute something similar, but they don't use a virtual machine, and that's the key feature that all of these other ones share in common. What is a virtual machine? It's basically a computer that runs in the Cloud. You never see it, but your agent owns it and can run browsers and email and write code on it to make things happen. So that combination of an agent with a virtual machine, where you have an interface to the agent, and that's the only relationship you need, that's what is new here.

If you look at my OpenAI, there's this left-hand column with maybe 50 different chat sessions in it. That goes away. The agent sits on top of that and abstracts it away, and you just talk based on topics and outcomes to a single agent.

Andrew Keen (4:29)

With my Claude, I have a similar situation, but I don't have 50 because I'm not quite as obsessive or mad as you, but I have quite a lot, but I know which they are. I don't really even understand why an AI bot would benefit me in using Claude.

Keith Teare (4:48)

An AI bot becomes the orchestrator of multiple different sessions that have different goals.

So if each of your chat sessions is basically the same, it's one session for one interview, then probably you don't need an agent. But let's say you were triaging your email, your calendar, your travel arrangements, your interviews, the book you're working on, certain commercial relationships and they're all separate. An agent sits on top of them and knows about each of them at a level of detail that you can trust, it knows everything. So you can basically subordinate everything to what is equivalent to a chief of staff that runs everything for you.

Andrew Keen (5:36)

But basically what you're saying is it knocks out a layer on Claude. I've got, I don't know, 15 separate conversations about different subjects, private, personal, commercial, whatever.