AI Agent innovation is going to follow the same pattern of disruptive innovation that we've seen happen time and time again in technology. As most people in tech know by now, new disruptive innovation often starts out as tackling a set of problems for the lowest end of the market or an underserved part of the market with a new technology or business model, then advancing over time to tackle more and more of the market and use-cases as product performance continues to improve.
For instance, when the personal computer was first introduced, PCs were inferior to mainframes and minicomputers for high-end business tasks, but it introduced computing to the average consumer and knowledge worker; then over time, as performance improved and more software was introduced, PCs quickly took on more segments of the market. In digital streaming, the initial streaming products like Netflix often seemed inferior to cable providers, but over time, with better bandwidth in homes and more ubiquitous hardware support, streaming began to topple traditional television. We've seen this play out in many other technology categories, from digital photography to EV cars and cloud computing to smartphones.
In each of the cases, the new technology starts out as being able to only serve a small fraction of the customer base that the incumbent could serve, then with continuous technological advancements, the disruptive innovation chips away at capability after capability to solve the entire need of the customer.
We're likely going to see the same dynamic likely play out with AI Agents. While we're in the earliest innings of AI Agent development right now, where most AI Agents can only handle a small fraction of work that we throw at them, and with often limited quality and accuracy. This is a dynamic that will inevitably change over time, and likely quite rapidly. The important thing about disruptive innovation is to understand what vector of improvement you can expect to continue to see over time that will cause the "low end disruption" to improve in quality over time.
With AI Agents, there are multiple components to a self-reinforcing flywheel that will serve to dramatically improve what AI Agents can accomplish in the near and long-term:
1. The underlying cost of GPUs will only continue to improve on a price/performance basis.
2. AI models are continuing to get more efficient over time, as we've seen with token pricing from GPT-3, 4, and others.
3. AI model quality is improving constantly, just as we've seen with Llama 3, GPT-4o, Gemini, and Claude releases recently.
4. The architecture of AI Agents will only continue to get more robust as time goes on, with more open frameworks.
5. The data and app connections that AI Agents can talk access with equally get more sophisticated.
Altogether, these improvements mean that what we're seeing today in AI Agents is barely scratching the surface of what will soon be possible. Something that may not work today or seems too expensive to automate, may just be one performance improvement cycle away from becoming possible. It also means that architecting for the future is far more important than over-optimizing for just what is possible today.
When we first started Box at the beginning of the cloud wave, we had many competitors that were still building on-premises solutions because of the temporary limitations of cloud at that point. This turned out to be a very bad architectural decision because it eventually meant they were hobbled by a design choice that they were stuck with for years to come. The right move in a fast moving market that has many generations of improvements to come is to bet on the architectures continuing to improve rapidly and build for the future.
AI Agents have the potential to democratize knowledge work in the same way that SaaS democratized software. And as we've seen in the past couple of decades with software, every time you make a service cheaper and more available, you dramatically increase the size of the total addressable market.
Let's take, for instance, what happened in the early days of SaaS. The biggest mistake that most people and investors made was looking at the market sizes of traditional on-prem software to see how big the market could be for this new crop of companies. In fact, some even felt the markets would actually be *smaller* because the software may be cheaper to run for an enterprise. All these theories were wrong, by an order of magnitude.
What we actually saw happen was not that SaaS initially replaced or went after traditional incumbent software products for existing customers, but instead, the biggest early customers were actually smaller businesses or teams in large enterprises that previously didn't have access to traditional on-prem enterprise software. On-prem software, from CRM systems to ERP platforms, were notoriously expensive, hard to manage, and required significant IT teams and partners to operate. This meant only the largest enterprises in the world could actually implement best-in-class technology for their enterprise.
Enter SaaS. Starting with Salesforce and NetSuite, for the first time small businesses had access to effectively the same tech stack that a large enterprise had. This led to a gold rush of software. AWS ushered in an era where a one person startup could build an app and scale it without ever visiting a datacenter. Box let businesses of all sizes manage documents and content securely. Shopify let anyone have access to a powerful ecommerce system, leading to a huge boom in direct-to-consumer product companies and other retailers being able to sell successfully online. Stripe gave any developer a full payment stack. All of these new services --and thousands more-- led to a 10Xing (or more) the size of traditional markets by serving customers that previously didn't have access to these types of tools.
Now, if you extrapolate out what we're seeing in the earliest days of AI, the same dynamic could hold true for AI Agents. While large enterprises have traditionally had access to nearly every specialized form talent or an abundance of labor, the vast majority of businesses don't have this same luxury. For most small startups just getting going, they often don't have the resources to do outbound sales, full customer support, specialized legal work, and so on. And as a startup scales, you're constantly making resource trade-offs that are less driven by what's best for the business, but instead driven by how much capital you have.
In the future, by making the barrier to entry to getting knowledge work done as simple as a website signup or API call, we will likely see a massive increase in usage of “services” that previously were near-impossible to access easily. And what's amazing is the vast majority of the usage of these AI Agents will likely come from previous areas of "non-consumption". That is to say, these will be customers that would not have spent anything on similar labor categories in a pre-AI world. Now, of course, in many cases, AI will start out worse on some dimensions than traditional forms of solving these problems, but as tooling gets better, models get cheaper and higher quality, we know the capabilities will improve over time dramatically.
We're in only the very beginning of this new era of AI-driven work, but the scale of the opportunity and the market will be massive.
One of the most common concerns about AI is the risk that it takes a meaningful portion of jobs that humans currently do, leading to major economic dislocation. Often these headlines come out of economic studies that look at various job functions and estimate the impact that AI could have on these roles, and then extrapolates the resulting labor impact. What these reports generally get wrong is the analysis is done in a vacuum, explicitly ignoring the decisions that companies actually make when presented with productivity gains introduced by a new technology -- especially given the competitive nature of most industries.
The thinking generally goes that if a company could, say, be 50% more productive in a particular function, it would mean a commensurate reduction of jobs in that area. For instance, if a certain function (like engineering or sales) required 10 units of labor before, then with a 50% gain in productivity, in the future that same function would now only need ~7 units of labor. The challenge with this type of thinking is that it assumes that companies have maximized the amount of labor they wish they had for a particular function, when in reality many functions are only staffed at the level the company can afford. Further, it assumes that a company is not in a competitive field, and that the company would be complacent and happy about generating the same output as before, just with less costs. Finally, it ignores the fact that productivity gains in a market will lead to increased response from competition, which companies equally have to respond to with more productivity not necessarily more profit. Time and time again this is the type of flawed thinking that we tend to get out of broad economic studies on the labor needs in the economy.
To break this down and make it practical, I thought I'd illustrate the point with the example of an engineering function -- one that already is seeing the benefits of AI starting to roll out. The numbers will all be kept simple, but you can change almost any variable and the point will remain the same. The key to thinking through job impacts is to think through what happens a step or two *after* the productivity gain of AI is experienced.
So, imagine you're a software company that can afford to employee 10 engineers based on your current revenue. By default, those 10 engineers produce a certain amount of output of product that you then sell to customers. If you're like almost any company on the planet, the list of things your customers want from your product far exceeds your ability to deliver those features any time soon with those 10 engineers. But the challenge, again, is that you can only afford those 10 engineers at today's revenue level. So, you decide to implement AI, and the absolute best case scenario happens: each engineer becomes magically 50% more productive. Overnight, you now have the equivalent of 15 engineers working in your company, for the previous cost of 10.
Finally, you can now build the next set of things on your product roadmap that your customers have been asking for. We can't assume it will be 50% more because there are new points of friction and coordination tax that emerge as you have 15 equivalent engineers, but let's say your output goes up meaningfully. Assuming you're acting in your best interests as a company, the features you build make your product that much more compelling, which means at some point (sooner or later) they should result in an incremental gain in revenue. Let's be somewhat conservative on what impact these new features will have on your product, but let's say they generate an incremental 10% of revenue over time or keep customers retained at a 10% greater rate (roughly the same financial benefit).
Now let's assess the downstream impact. Firstly, any growth of revenue will often lead to some functions in the business growing as well to support these new customers, which will directly create new jobs. But further, the company now has to decide whether it remains satisfied with its 10 engineers that have the output of 15, or with their incremental revenue should they hire even more engineers to build the *next* set of features that will make them even more compelling to customers. Unless this company is in some rare monopoly position, they likely will want to build the next set of features even faster than the last set to grow even more quickly. This then means AI has caused the company --counterintuitively-- to hire more engineers than before, because the productivity of each engineer is much higher, allowing them to generate more return per engineer, and thus more revenue.
What's interesting is this analogy works similarly for most functions in a business. In sales, if you could make sales reps 10% more productive (i.e. they sell 10% more of your products/services for the same cost), almost every company in the world would prefer to hire even more sales reps, instead of merely banking the incremental profit. That incremental sales productivity again would lead to downstream implications, like the need to deliver more features to customers, and thus more R&D hiring! Even back-office functions that don't as directly tie to revenue growth, often are a bottleneck to growth . If you can reduce the bottleneck -- say lawyers reviewing contracts, or people processing invoices-- cycle time in businesses accelerates, which almost always lets you serve more customers faster or grow more quickly, again letting a company reinvest those dollars.
In the end, when you step out of the vacuum of just the specific productivity gain of a particular job function, and look at how the whole system will adapt and improve due to that productivity gain, a very different picture of AI's impact on jobs will emerge. Yes there will absolutely be changes to what jobs become more or less in demand in the future, but the competitive nature of companies inevitably ensures that across the whole system companies will be focused on leveraging AI to become more productive.
With OpenAI, Figure 01 can now have full conversations with people
-OpenAI models provide high-level visual and language intelligence
-Figure neural networks deliver fast, low-level, dexterous robot actions
Everything in this video is a neural network:
# automating software engineering
In my mind, automating software engineering will look similar to automating driving. E.g. in self-driving the progression of increasing autonomy and higher abstraction looks something like:
1. first the human performs all driving actions manually
2. then the AI helps keep the lane
3. then it slows for the car ahead
4. then it also does lane changes and takes forks
5. then it also stops at signs/lights and takes turns
6. eventually you take a feature complete solution and grind on the quality until you achieve full self-driving.
There is a progression of the AI doing more and the human doing less, but still providing oversight. In Software engineering, the progression is shaping up similar:
1. first the human writes the code manually
2. then GitHub Copilot autocompletes a few lines
3. then ChatGPT writes chunks of code
4. then you move to larger and larger code diffs (e.g. Cursor copilot++ style, nice demo here https://t.co/u8ueY0mGxZ)
5....
Devin is an impressive demo of what perhaps follows next: coordinating a number of tools that a developer needs to string together to write code: a Terminal, a Browser, a Code editor, etc., and human oversight that moves to increasingly higher level of abstraction.
There is a lot of work not just on the AI part but also the UI/UX part. How does a human provide oversight? What are they looking at? How do they nudge the AI down a different path? How do they debug what went wrong? It is very likely that we will have to change up the code editor, substantially.
In any case, software engineering is on track to change substantially. And it will look a lot more like supervising the automation, while pitching in high-level commands, ideas or progression strategies, in English.
Good luck to the team!
Figment Europe along with https://t.co/R30r6YRj8X are pleased to announce our team rang the bell this morning in Zürich, officially debuting two ETPs: ETHF and SOLF. 🇨🇭
Learn more:
https://t.co/2FHpAD72ZV
The presidents of @Harvard, @MIT, and @Penn were all asked the following question under oath at today’s congressional hearing on antisemitism:
Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate [your university’s] code of conduct or rules regarding bullying or harassment?
The answers they gave reflect the profound moral bankruptcy of Presidents Gay, Magill and Kornbluth.
Representative @EliseStefanik was so shocked with the answers that she asked each of them the same question over and over again, and they gave the same answers over and over again.
In short, they said:
It ‘depends on the context’ and ‘whether the speech turns into conduct,’ that is, actually killing Jews.
This could be the most extraordinary testimony ever elicited in the Congress, certainly on the topic of genocide, which to remind us all is:
“the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group”
The presidents’ answers reflect the profound educational, moral and ethical failures that pervade certain of our elite educational institutions due in large part to their failed leadership.
Don’t take my word for it.
You must watch the following three minutes. By the end, you will be where I am.
They must all resign in disgrace.
If a CEO of one of our companies gave a similar answer, he or she would be toast within the hour.
Why has antisemitism exploded on campus and around the world?
Because of leaders like Presidents Gay, Magill and Kornbluth who believe genocide depends on the context.
To think that these are the leaders of Ivy League institutions that are charged with the responsibility to educate our best and brightest.
On the bright side, our congressional leaders deserve accolades for showing tremendous leadership and moral clarity in their statements, by the questions they asked, and the respectfulness with which they conducted the hearing.
It was a masterclass of how our government and democracy should operate.
If you have time, please watch the entire hearing. Throughout the hearing, the three behaved like hostile witnesses, exhibiting a profound disdain for the Congress with their smiles and smirks, and their outright refusal to answer basic questions with a yes or no answer.
New YouTube video: 1hr general-audience introduction to Large Language Models
https://t.co/Bl4WNuNyFJ
Based on a 30min talk I gave recently; It tries to be non-technical intro, covers mental models for LLM inference, training, finetuning, the emerging LLM OS and LLM Security.
Sadly a growing sentiment for me over the years that has been magnified the last couple of weeks.
If terrorism seeks to create fear and disrupt daily life, then one way to counter it is to push yourself to live your normal life
This is how most Jews feel right now
Despite being so loud on Twitter, I’m afraid to go to pro-Israel rallies
We pulled our son out of his Jewish pre-school
I’m looking over my should everywhere I go, especially after being this vocal
I’m just trying to give the world context
“…Then they came for the Jews And I did not speak out Because I was not a Jew Then they came for me And there was no one left To speak out for me”
https://t.co/5Hp8088Ye0
Day 13 - Sixth Set of Thoughts on unfolding Events in Israel and now around the world.
This is what you NEED TO KNOW about increasing pro-terror organizations on college campuses, Radical Islamists in London and Sydney, Hamas, the Houthis, Iran and Hezbollah. You need to know this and understand it deeply so you understand what we, collectively, are facing.
This is not only Hamas. This is a global ideology and death cult that has congealed to a global movement of hate, rape and murder. It is not a far leap at this point from what happened in Be’ery and Kfar Aza to Columbia, Harvard, Sydney or London.
I am sure many of you watched the video of Columbia professor Shai Davidai telling parents that universities cannot (and will not) guarantee their kids’ safety on college campuses. I am sure you have seen the video of the students at Baruch College giving the finger to signs of kidnapped children, videoing it and putting it on social media. I am sure you have heard that the Houthis want to join the fight. You have seen the US embassy in Beirut be attacked. You have seen the synagogues in Tunisia and Berlin. You have seen the streets and cars that these radical Islamists have set on fire in Berlin. You must know and tell yourself everyday that there are almost 200 people still kidnapped in Gaza including many children.
You might have asked yourself, what the hell would drive people to kidnap children, to carve up a pregnant woman’s stomach (I have seen the video), to poke out the eyes and chop the heads off of innocent children, of numerous civilians ( I have seen those too). You must also ask yourself, could this happen to me, because the answer is it could. And it will, if you do not act now. Imagine if this was you? You do not need to imagine, the cases above make clear it is on its way.
I want to try to help you understand the moment we are in. To do that, go back to other ideological movements. The playbook is straightforward: Build content, propaganda. Work hearts and minds. Capture academia, which includes some of the most shallow and confused smart people you can find. They work and indoctrinate people burned out on capitalism, from unstable or unsupportive families, who just need something to believe in. They invade their feeds and feed their vacuous minds and souls with a cause to sympathize with. They co-opt and appropriate symbols that disaffected people can relate to such as arch-terrorist Yehiye Sinwar using images of policemen pinning a black man to the ground to advance the terrorist Hamas cause. And, then, there is a moment where the ideology reaches critical mass and can do some real damage by activating those hearts and indoctrinated minds. That is the moment we are in now.
Influencing hearts and minds and activating them is much easier today in our era of social media, the era of post truth and the era of global, instant, communication. For the last 20+ years, global radical Islam has cultivated an ideology for people to connect to, to identify with. They have been indoctrinating and cultivating hearts and minds. They have exported some of those to western countries. It shows itself in various ways: ISIS. Al Qaeda, Hamas, Pro-terror student groups, those shouting “gas the Jews”, terrorists at soccer matches, extreme left-wing groups around the world. All of these groups are deeply connected, if not the same, because they subscribe to the same ideology. Ideology is the core of the movement. It is ideology, not geography. It dresses itself in many fancy clothes but it is trying to attack a weak western world, in the middle of an economic crisis (same happened post depression) where people’s resolve is very weak.
Here is another way to think about it. The PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization) was a 1.0 terrorist foe. It had a command structure. A leader (Yasser Arafat) and, a priori, wanted geography. In reality, they wanted to throw the Jews/Israel into the sea. ISIS/HAMAS is a 2.0 terrorist foe. It is decentralized. It does not require command (though it certainly knows how to use it), just activation of its ideological proponents or sympathizers. Since it is decentralized, it is everywhere.
Ideologies, deeply held, do not require coordination. They require a call to battle because the indoctrination is complete. Hamas’ massacre of rape, child murder and mutilation is that call to battle. They have broken the veil of fear that was restraining some of these global cells. Hamas and their doctrine is a clear and present danger to the US, to Israel and to the entire free world.
The numbness of social media scrolling has normalized both the attack vector and these atrocities. The terrorists and their supporters have watched feckless university presidents equivocate and they have gained more power. They have gained more confidence. They have seen terror succeed at a soccer match in Brussels. The officials knew about the Tunisian-born radical but did not do anything for 7 years. They understand the current weak resolve of the system. Activated by the ideology, the terrorist in Brussels answered the call to battle.
This is critical. If you do not root out these ideologies, such as Nazism, Communism or Radical Islam when they are small, it becomes too late. So, we need to get them off streets and off campuses, out of Gaza and out of Lebanon. We need to be firm and fierce about this.
Ask yourself why did Hamas do this if they knew Israel would retaliate? The answer is that they are possessed by a nihilist death cult ideology of radical Islam. It is deep. It is pervasive and it has been driven into them for decades by the playbook. They rape, pillage, plunder and murder. They hate Jews, Christians and most peace loving Muslims too. They murdered Bedouins who serve in the Israeli army and some just on the side of the road. They sent many rockets to Bedouin towns in Israel. They hacked Nepalis and Thailandis to death. That is why when you listen to the recording of the call of Hamas and its evil twin Islamic Jihad, they are nonplussed when the rocket fell on innocent Muslims in the parking lot of the hospital. They do not care. They are totally indoctrinated. They believe that if you are not part of the movement, actively fighting, you too do not deserve to live. You are just a tool.
Why is the West next? Why is Israel just the initial salvo? Because this is a global ideology that has congealed, is coherent to its sick purveyors and devotees and has been given its call to battle. This is not about politics or land. This is a global ideology that has found its moment and will stop at nothing until we obliterate it. They’re tearing down posters of kidnapped babies today, and assaulting people who have the temerity to express a modicum of sympathy for the massacred Jews. What do you think they will do tomorrow?
The leap from Baruch College to Be’ery, from Columbia to Kfar Azza, from Harvard to the Houthis, is small.
We must equal that resolve. This is the time for all people of conscience, Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Atheists, people who love life, liberty and prosperity, to rally, to break their silence and be brave. Show courage now because if you do not, you will be next. First they came for the Jews…
Links to videos in next tweet.
A fantastic listen on what’s happening on the ground, Israeli resilience, and what you can do to support and drown the hate. Proud 🇮🇱
Thank you @HarryStebbings@mikeeisenberg@LevanonAdi for doing and all your efforts
I am a family man. I have always been public about my bond with my mother. To see the suffering of so many families in Israel is devastating. There are no words to account for the loss of lives or the atrocious acts of barbarism.
We have to speak up. We cannot remain silent.
"...Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me"
Pastor Martin Niemöller (1946)
Here is my 20VC with @LevanonAdi and @mikeeisenberg.
Day #6 - Fourth Set of Thoughts on Unfolding Events in Israel — The South, The Funeral and The European Media. CALL TO ACTION.
Our minds and prayers are with the victims of Hamas brutality and their families as well as with our soldiers, our kids, on the front lines.
I want to extend sincere condolences to my friend Eyal Waldman, founder and CEO of Mellanox (acquired by Nvidia), and leader of Israel's tech community who worked tirelessly to employ Palestinians in tech, whose daughter was murdered by the Hamas/ISIS barbarians
Yesterday was an exhausting day. It started with a meeting on a major fundraising campaign (more on that to come soon). I went to Tel Aviv to get some work done and support our portfolio companies but it was short lived. I got a call from the organizer of the largest civilian aid operation in the south who said “drop everything and come.” He never asked me that before so I did. I picked up a few people on the way and we went south.
Hundreds of young people packing packages, loading buses to go out and rescue more civilians to safety. They were manning phones, WhatsApp groups and computers to take care of every possible need of the communities in the south of Israel. It was pandemonium because it typical Israeli fashion it was: do first and organize later. There were exhausted bodies, sleeping bags, local women turning up to serve hot food and a spirit of camaraderie and determination that was inspiring.
There, I also saw for the first time since he jumped into non-stop military action on Saturday morning, the CEO of the Shomer Hachadash, the largest volunteer Organization in Israel, which I chair. We shared a long and very smelly hug but it was the best hug I have gotten in a while. In the room for the briefing was an air of seriousness. We need a larger civilian effort to help the people of the south. Much larger. Without going into details, this is going to become a major focus over the coming days and weeks alongside the fight against the evil barbarians of Hamas. I also took away that we need more focus on media (more on that and what you can do is below).
We drove back and I got back into Jerusalem in time to do the interview with Fox News, wolf down some food and head to my cousin’s funeral. There I got some more smelly hugs from optimistic soldiers I know in elite combat units who said “we took a gut punch but we are going to get these guys and triumph.” Joey, your cousin, they added, was a hero. He saved lots of people.
The funeral was packed despite central command saying too many people should not come. When my cousins left their home to come to the funeral, thousands of people who could not come to the funeral lined the streets singing Hatikva (Israel’s national anthem) and other songs as they drove out. (Videos in next tweet). I have been reasonably emotionally stable since this all started Shabbat morning. Two things have shaken me to my core. The first was the images I saw of the holocaust level atrocities committed by Hamas, the beheadings, the blood in babies cribs and other gut wrenching atrocities. The second was the eulogy of my cousin Joey’s wife Senai. I broke down crying from her beautiful words.
We are a large tribe thank God and I wanted to hug a lot of cousins but we needed to run out so I could take my son back to reserve duty. I drove him back and we spent some of the car ride mistakenly talking about things to plan for Wednesday. 20 minutes after I dropped him off, he called me to say, “Daddy, it is Wednesday today.” We had a chuckle. Time is a blur.
Candidly, I was exhausted. It was well after midnight and I wanted to pray evening service and go to sleep but my phone rang and it was a very senior European political figure who I am friendly with. He said “Michael, I sense the support for Israel in Europe is starting turn. It was very strong the first five days but your enemies are working hard. They are suggesting that there weren’t atrocities or beheadings or other diabolical acts of evil, that this was somehow related to a long conflict and not barbarianism. They are questioning the shutdown of water and other supplies. Lots of people in Europe support you he said but you need to take care of this and get this information to to the right people.”
I did what I needed to do on our front but NOW I AM TURNING TO YOU. All of you who read my posts and all of your friends can help. First, please tag all European press, media outlets reporters, politicians and send them the images of the atrocities. Send them the bloody pictures. Send them by WhatsApp, SMS, email, tag them on social media. Feel free to share their phone numbers too if you have them. You can create a long tag list below so everyone here can bombard them. They need to see this. Their memory is short on the slaughter of Jews. Take action right here.
Second, you are probably aware that Hamas is holding American and European hostages as well as Israelis from the dance party. The siege on Gaza is necessary to get them back and get rid of Hamas. Until Hamas is gone, even innocent children will grow up to be terrorists because that is how Hamas indoctrinates them. It is that simple. We must weaken the barbarians and get our innocent citizens, partygoers back. This is a war. It is a war to eradicate evil. It is a war to get the kidnapped back. We must destroy Hamas/ISIS to save future Palestinian children from their evil clutches and indoctrination. This should not need to be explained but people have short memories. The 24/7 media cycle has made people numb. Europe should tell Israel: “Do whatever it takes to get these people back. Do whatever it takes to destroy Hamas/ISIS.” That is exactly what President Biden did to support his murdered and kidnapped citizens and also support Palestinians children. Tag the European media and the politicians and tell them to tell Hamas “Surrender and Return the kidnapped civilians and the siege will end.” This is a call to action to all of you to spread this message.