(Preview) All About Agents: Dots Arrive, Google and Apple Questions, Muse Follow-Ups, Super Intelligence, and the Mandate of Heaven

Andrew Sharp (0:00)

Hello, and welcome to a free preview of Sharp Tech.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of Sharp Tech. I'm Andrew Sharp, and on the other line, Ben Thompson. Ben, how you doing?

Ben Thompson (0:19)

I just had an amusing moment. You had to drop a couple of hellos. One of them was my fault. I wasn't quite ready.

The second one was a little too enthusiastic. It was more of a greatest of all talk hello, which, by the way, I always laugh because my kids would always imitate it. Whenever I'd say your name, they would just drop it into a long extended hello. And come to find out, all your listeners do this. You've got multiple emails of kids imitating the Andrew hello. Anyhow, you said after you did it too enthusiastically that you had too much vim.

Andrew Sharp (0:53)

Too much vim, yes. I had to crank it down a little bit.

Ben Thompson (0:55)

Did you know that? This is very funny, because this is re-establishing our normie vs. nerd credentials. Did you know that there is a vim? Vim as a tech reference?

Andrew Sharp (1:05)

Oh, no. What does vim stand for? I'm still a little bit ashamed of the VPN, VPS mistake on the last episode.

That was also very funny.

Ben Thompson (1:15)

No, vim is a text editor.

There's famous wars that are used like Unix type systems. And there's vim people and there's emacs people. Emacs is like the ultimate nerd out, you can configure literally everything. And people have these massive configuration files that they carry around their whole life and they can't function without it.

Andrew Sharp (1:36)

So the nerd chads, they're all emacs people, is that right?

Ben Thompson (1:40)

I think emacs is going to be more on the nerd side of the spectrum, vim a little less. I don't actually use any of these. If I have to edit text in a terminal, I use nano, which is like just the bare bones sort of thing. So I'm actually out of my depth as well, but it did amuse me. Vim.

There you go. That's your word of the day.

Andrew Sharp (1:56)

The more you know, you know, the emacs chads versus the vim virgins out there in technology.

Ben Thompson (2:03)

If you know what vim is, you're already off the reservation, so it doesn't matter.

Andrew Sharp (2:07)

Everyone is a chad nerd in that scenario. Well, Ben, we're going to be talking agents today, and I want to start with a note that I saw earlier this week. OpenAI famously announced dots on Tuesday, and at some point, either before the announcement or immediately afterward, SpaceX AI bought dot.com and dot.com, now redirect straight to the GROKBOT download page. And I highlight that sequence first because I find it delightful.

And second, just to step back and celebrate the wild west nature of the ecosystem right now, it's the best.

Ben Thompson (2:49)

That wasn't going to be my response to this other rundown. This sort of stuff used to happen all the time. Like just like companies doing practical jokes on each other. There's a whole thing about, I think Salesforce was actually like, they would do all these crazy stunts at their keynotes. I should have like come up with some examples before of just like making fun of their competitors that was like way over the top and arguably over the line. Actually almost certainly. And that used to be the way tech operated all the time. And you're right. It's good to have it back. doc.com goes to a different spot. It's great.

Andrew Sharp (3:21)

I feel like we completely missed that generation of technology. I certainly did.

Ben Thompson (3:26)

Yeah, there was no podcast period back then, which is a real shame because there's, but then again, maybe that's why it all happened because there wasn't enough documentation going on. And you know.

Andrew Sharp (3:36)

That's right. You can get away with line stepping here and there. Well, this is all a thousand times more fun than dealing with a bunch of monopolies who have their own little fiefdoms. So thank you to all of our participants in the AI wars, Frontier Wars.

Ben Thompson (3:50)

That's right.

Andrew Sharp (3:51)

As for DOTS and OpenAI Dev Day, I will say at the top, my feelings after consuming the content from the OpenAI event are close to the exact opposite of my feelings after watching MetaConnect last week. So I'm curious for your thoughts. We'll start with an e-mail from Steven. He says, Ben and Andrew, I can't wait for Ben's rant on how OpenAI has 90% of consumer mindshare when it comes to AI, but somehow completely fumbled the DOTS launch to feature SF-coded techno parents launching their startups and side hustle companies as the primary use case rather than going hard into family scheduling, kids' activities, catching up with friends, taking care of parents, groceries, etc. It even came with dystopian fake house aesthetics that feel like a black mirror episode, presumably to ensure we really get the point that the real world and real people's lives are an afterthought. And all that matters is the techno grind lifestyle.