Why AI Agents Don't Work (yet) - with Kanjun Qiu of Imbue

**Alessio** (0:10)
Hi everyone, welcome to the Latent Space Podcast. This is Alessio, a partner and CTO and resident at Decibel Partners, and I'm joined by my co-host Swix, founder of Small AI.

**Swyx** (0:19)
Hey, and today in the studio, we have Kanjun from Imbue, welcome.

**Kanjun Qiu** (0:23)
Thank you.

**Swyx** (0:25)
So, you and I have, I guess, crossed paths a number of times. You're formerly named Generally Intelligent, and you've just announced your renamed rebrand in huge humongous ways, so congrats on all of that.

**Kanjun Qiu** (0:35)
Thank you.

**Swyx** (0:36)
And we're here to dive in into deeper detail on Imbue.
We'd like to introduce you on a high-level basis, but then have you go into a little bit more of your personal side. So you graduated, yes, at MIT, and you also spent some time at the MIT Media Lab, one of the most famous, I guess, computer hacking labs in the world. Then you graduated MIT, and you went straight into BizOps at Dropbox, where you're eventually chief of staff, which is a pretty interesting role we can dive into later. And then it seems like the founder bug hit you. You were basically a three times founder at Ember, Sorceress, and now a General Intelligent slash Imbue.
What should people know about you on the personal side that's not on your LinkedIn list? Something you're very passionate about outside of work.

**Kanjun Qiu** (1:11)
Yeah, I think if you ask any of my friends, they would tell you that I'm obsessed with agency, like human agency and human potential.

**Swyx** (1:18)
That's work, come on. So what's the example of human agency that you try to promote?

**Kanjun Qiu** (1:26)
Yeah, like with all of my friends, I have a lot of conversations with them that's like kind of helping figure out what's blocking them. I guess I do this with a team kind of automatically too.
And I think about it for myself often like building systems. I have a lot of systems to like help myself be more effective. At Dropbox, I used to give this onboarding talk called How to Be Effective, which people liked. I think like a thousand people heard this onboarding talk and I think maybe Dropbox was more effective.
And I think I just really believe that like as humans, we can be a lot more than we are. And it's what drives everything. I guess completely outside of work, I do dance. I do partner dance.

**Swyx** (2:03)
Yeah, lots of interest in that stuff, especially in like the sort of group living houses in San Francisco, which I've been a little bit part of and you've also run one of those.

**Kanjun Qiu** (2:12)
That's right. Yeah, I started the archive with two friends, oh, with Josh, my co-founder, and a couple others in 2015 That's right. And GPT-3, our housemates built, so.

**Swyx** (2:22)
Was that the, I guess the precursor to generally intelligent that you started doing more things with Josh? Is that how that relationship started?

**Kanjun Qiu** (2:29)
Yeah, this is our third company together. Our first company, Josh poached me from Dropbox for Ember and there we built a really interesting technology, laser raster projector, VR headset.
And then we were like, VR is not the thing we're most passionate about. And actually it was kind of early days when we both realized like, we really do believe that in our lifetimes, like computers that are intelligent are going to be able to allow us to do much more than we can do today as people and be much more as people than we can be today. And at that time, we actually, after Ember, we were like, work on AI research or start an AI lab. A bunch of our housemates were joining OpenAI and we actually decided to do something more pragmatic, to apply AI to recruiting and to try to understand like, okay, if we are actually trying to deploy these systems in the real world, what's required?
And that was Sorceress that taught us so much about, maybe an AI agent in a lot of ways, like what does it actually take to make a product that people can trust and rely on? I think we never really fully got there and it's taught me a lot about what's required. And it's kind of like, I think, informed some of our approach and some of the way that we think about how these systems will actually get used by people in the real world.

**Swyx** (3:42)
Just to go one step deeper on that, you're building AI agents in 2016 before it was cool.
You got some also and you raised $30 million. Something was working. What do you think like you succeeded in doing and then what did you try to do that did not pan out?