The AI Email Assistant I've Been Waiting for, with Andrew Lee of Shortwave

**Andrew Lee** (0:00)
The right time to launch a feature or launch a product is right before it seems possible.
If Google with its infinite resources, with the largest email user base in the world, if they are not willing to invest and try to figure out what the future scheme now is, maybe I need to do something about this. We realize that, holy crap, for the entire history of email clients, the data in that email has been completely inaccessible. You can do like basic searches and stuff. But if you want to ask a question and have the email client figure out the answer for you, there was really no way to do that. But suddenly, this giant corpus of unstructured text that everyone has, gigabytes and gigabytes, it suddenly has gone from this pile that's eating up disk space to maybe something that's really valuable to you.

**Nathan Labenz** (0:42)
Hello, and welcome to The Cognitive Revolution, where we interview visionary researchers, entrepreneurs, and builders working on the frontier of artificial intelligence. Each week, we'll explore their revolutionary ideas, and together we'll build a picture of how AI technology will transform work, life, and society in the coming years. I'm Nathan Labenz, joined by my co-host, Erik Torenberg. Hello, and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. Today, my guest is Andrew Lee, founder of Shortwave, an AI-powered email app that describes itself as the smartest email app on planet Earth. Like many of us, I've been using Gmail for roughly 20 years now. While I've tried several alternative email clients over time, for me, none have really stuck. Shortwave, however, has truly impressed me, and I've continued to use it past the point of curiosity and into the realm of forming a genuinely new and likely lasting habit. My favorite feature by far is the AI Assistant, which presents in the increasingly familiar form factor of the natural language sidebar chatbot. It can help you search through and configure your inbox, check your availability and schedule meetings, and refer to similar emails you've sent in the past so that it can imitate your style when drafting responses for you.
As someone who's long since given up on Inbox Zero and really just wants an AI Assistant to help me navigate my overloaded inbox, I can definitely say that I've had a few magical experiences with this product. The time saved in searching for things that I know exist but can't quite remember the keywords for, unto itself has been delightful.
Andrew, who previously founded Firebase and has already been acquired by Google once, was extremely open about the technology underlying Shortwave, reflecting the fact that this is no thin wrapper startup. And I had a ton of fun getting so deep into the details.
We covered Shortwave's Ragstack, which is powered by a full download and re-indexing of your entire inbox, a process that takes hours and costs Shortwave real money, but which creates a remarkably responsive experience downstream. We also got into how the AI Assistant works, from user message input to AI response, including tool selection, query reformulation, feature extraction, retrieval, re-ranking, and finally, answer generation.
We also got into which models Shortwave is using, which include Mistral, fine-tuned GPT 3.5 turbos, and GPT 4 turbo, a list which is always subject to change, and right now perhaps even more so than usual, since Cloud 3 was just launched after we recorded, and long-context Gemini 1.5 is on the horizon as well. Toward the end, we discussed how Andrew thinks about building and timing product launches in such a fast-moving space, his vision for the future of Shortwave, how he expects email to evolve, and how we'll all manage the inevitable rise of high-quality AI-generated spam, as well as how companies will use a deep AI integration to manage knowledge on a team-wide basis.
If you're building with large-language models, this conversation has a ton of great nuggets which you won't want to miss. And if you're just an average email user, as I'm pretty sure all of you are, I definitely recommend checking out Shortwave. To be clear, this is not a paid promotion. Andrew was kind enough to give me a free year of Shortwave, but that's it. I'm genuinely just super enthusiastic about this product. And you do have my commitment that I will always be transparent about any sponsorship deals that we might do in the future. Of course, your feedback is always welcome. You can leave me a message on our new website at cognitiverevolution.ai. That's cognitiverevolution.ai. Or DM me on the social media platform of your choice. Now, let's dive deep into AI technology powering the future of email with Andrew Lee of Shortwave. Andrew Lee, founder of Shortwave, welcome to The Cognitive Revolution.