SITUATION DETECTED: Warhound launched from stealth today with a $200M seed at a $1.2B valuation. Ben Lamm and Palmer Luckey are cloning gene-edited bio-enhanced dogs and equipping them with custom Anduril vests, goggles, and sensors for the military and law enforcement.

I’ll go ahead and say it… this idea that “the agent will just pick the best product” is extremely stupid and shows a major misunderstanding of how marketing works (which makes sense as it is predominantly engineers in the chat right now). There is no such thing as a “best product”… it is ALL marketing. And even if there were such thing as a “best” running sneaker for Brendan - why is it best? Why don’t we just buy the same sneakers? Everything is marketing. In an age of abundance, all that will matter is marketing. Marketing to agents will be the most important skill every business will need to learn. Code is code. My definition of “good code” is the same as yours. Marketing is different for every single business. The marketing Ramp defines as “great”, would not work for JPMC etc. Every business will need their own definition of what great marketing looks like (a sovereign benchmark) - this will be very important. Lock in, anon

Will AI agents disintermediate every market, so that consumer agents will find suppliers and negotiate sales directly?

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Assorted things I've been mulling over regarding agents in the economy: • Companies are in some sense the original superintelligence. It's often the case that they can use their amortized cognitive surplus to advance their interests against those of certain consumers: relative to the optimization capacity of companies, consumers can be inattentive, underinformed, irrational, etc. (Think, say, of some of the classic insurance upsells at the end of a booking process, which is typically priced substantially above what a regular policy would cost.) Herbert Simon introduced the idea of bounded rationality, and firms often end up benefiting from it. Thanks to personal agents, we will probably get somewhat more rational in how we engage with companies. • How exactly will outcomes change? Well, certain kinds of price discrimination will work less well (how do coupons work if every agent hunts fastidiously for them?), and certain kinds of customer cross-subsidy will change (today, people who forget to cancel subscriptions subsidize those who don't). Taken across the economy as a whole, I'm not sure what the incidence of all of this will be. • In corporate strategy, people have long debated the relative importance of distribution and product quality. Perhaps you've made something better, but does anyone know about it? Won't people just continue to buy the ACME Corp Mousetraps? Personal agents will, I think, act as a kind of structural subsidy for product quality. How would markets look different if individuals always spent at least 10 hours researching their purchases? On the margin, focusing on making a product better is, I think, going to become a more effective strategy for companies. This is good! • It true, a corollary is that information about product quality will become more important and impactful. Today, most people have very limited ability to aggregate and integrate such data, but agents will have insatiable thirst for such signals. (It's often said that data is becoming more valuable because it helps in the training of models. That's obviously true, but I think there's a secondary way in which it's more valuable simply as a complement to cheaper intelligence.) • A big question is whether agents will increase superstar effects (rational agents all settle on the same product) or increase dispersion (because everyone has slightly different tastes and preferences, which agents are good at eliciting, finally overcoming the artificial clustering we've been subjected to). • Many internet companies have monetized demand routing, which is in turn often predicated on short attention spans. "I'll click on the first thing I see." This has led to some amount of inefficiency, as companies try to propitiate capricious ranking algorithms and incur various placement fees. It's not all deadweight loss (willingness to pay is itself a kind of signal, which is valuable to buyers), but it's not great. How will the nature and value of this routing change in a world of personal agents? I don't know the answer, but I think that the effects might be pretty big. • Much of what I'm writing hinges on the assumption that personal agents will be on the consumer's side. I suspect that that will be the winning strategy, but whether it's true, and what it means to be true, involves a lot of other questions. Taken as a whole, the market is a massively parallelized, decentralized, and highly imperfect value attribution machine, and, taking stock of all of the effects, it seems to me that the quality point may well be the biggest: that agents will change the nature of the backpropagation such that the rewards for better products increase. Maybe this is too optimistic, but I suspect (and hope) that companies that make things that they're proud of will feel that the universe is a little more partisan in their favor.

It is literally crazy that every VC is part of the Twitter timeline and one viral tweet can kick off a multi million fundraise Just think about that for a second A couple of words on a lil app moves millions of dollars