Ben Tzou

building

[brryant @bryantchou]

GPT 5.6 Sol is so good web design it actually broke our evals 🥲

took creative liberties like a supapro web designer that took us off guard.

in a few prompts, it was able to remix a slurped brand from an URL and Sol lit up 🌞❤️‍🔥

[Ben Tzou @bentzou]

I recently attended a talk by Rich Sutton, Turing Award winner, father of RL. He says AI is moving into the "Era of Experience."

If the next wave of AI learns by doing rather than imitating, the winners won't be fine-tuning LLMs but building sandboxes where agents can learn.

[Ben Tzou @bentzou]

@levie Jevons paradox will play out for many functions, like marketing. Efficiency gains from AI agents will be so massive that, despite reduced staffing, companies will run more campaigns on more channels than ever before.

[Aaron Levie @levie]

AI agents have the ability to fundamentally change the business model of enterprise software. Today, when you build a SaaS product, the primary business model is to sell seats that are tied to the end-users of your service. For "same store" sales, you can essentially grow at the rate of the headcount growth of that customer, or by adding additional capabilities on top of your offering. This business model is, of course fantastic, and has been around since the earliest days of enterprise software, and will keep going forever.

But AI Agents unlock an entirely new business model in software, because you can now grow in a way that is uncorrelated to direct enterprise headcount or even external factors to your software. What's amazing about this model is that the AI vendor actually can directly grow itself within an enterprise account due to direct productivity gains. 

For instance, imagine an AI Agent that can generate outbound sales demand for a startup. Traditionally, B2B companies will start by hiring a very small team of maybe one or two people, and increase resources in this area in a very incremental fashion -- essentially a process that looks like a guessing game where you try to predict how much demand there might be in the market, the ability to fund new resources, and the length of time it takes to hire great talent. In a world of AI Agents, you would simply set a budget and then decide how fast you want to grow. This is much closer to the business model of Google Adwords than it is of a traditional SaaS service.

The same would be true for entirely different functions, where AI Agents can develop software at the rate of how many software projects you want built or how many legal documents you want reviewed -- all unconstrained by a company's headcount. This will even happen in areas where you wouldn't initially expect demand levels to change just because you move to AI, but in fact where there's plenty of latent demand. For instance, in front-line support, in a world where AI Agents can answer a greater set of questions a customer might have, you could see the kind of interaction volumes going up far higher in a world of AI. 

This all has major implications to the economics of software, and it means that the AI Agent business model goes after a far greater pool of spend than just traditional IT. If software products now directly *drive* company productivity instead of just *enabling* company productivity, this could lead to a step-function change in the size of IT markets over time. Wild.

[Ben Tzou @bentzou]

@cyhu my brother keeps talking about that place! i heard the tapas are amazing...

[Ben Tzou @bentzou]

@moomoo811 hows this?

[Ben Tzou @bentzou]

getting some rest before the final move back down from Berkeley