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Category: AI Creativity
Tags: AICreativityCultureLeadershipParenting
Entities: Agent.aiAndrej KarpathyCameron AdamsCanvaDamesh ShaHubSpotJack ButcherJacob CollierJason Fried
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[Music] AI still cannot write even a decent original dad joke despite my best prop engineering attempts. You know, I love AI as much as anyone.
I have a huge amount of respect for the technology, what's going to be capable of. My money is still on the humans.
I'm sorry.
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[Music] Welcome to Prompted, a podcast about AI, people, and the creative spark. I'm Cameron Adams and I am fascinated with leaders who are actually using AI to be more creative.
Whether that's building better products, coaching their teams, or harnessing AI for their personal
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creativity. In this show, we dig into the details of how they use AI that we all want to know.
Today, we are joined by the amazing Damesh Sha, co-founder and CTO of HubSpot. If you followed his career, you know that Damesh has always
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taken the unexpected path. From starting his first company with $10,000 on credit cards to writing a regularly updated culture code for HubSpot and publishing it for the whole world to see.
He's got a refreshingly simple approach to leadership. He runs a massive company
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without a single direct report. And in true entrepreneurial spirit, he has recently started some exciting new projects focused on AI agents, which we'll get into on this episode.
Damesh, welcome to the show. >> Thanks for having me, Kevin.
>> It is so good to have you here and I am
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keen to dive into AI agents and tech powered parenting with you. But to help us get to know you a little better, let's kick off with the prompt.
This is the part of the show where we get an idea out of your head and onto
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the page. And then we get one of our designers here at Canva to take it even further with AI.
So to start, we would love you to draw something from your childhood that inspired you in your adulthood. While you draw that, you got to tell us the story about it as well.
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You get 90 seconds to talk and draw. Do you think you can multitask?
>> Wow. The multitasking is going to be hard, but I'll I'll try it.
So, I'll tell you the story. When I was in my teens, my parents visited uh Singapore uh for the first time.
I didn't go and
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they brought back um this electronic device uh which ended up like changing my life. Funny thing is when when I tell people this story, which I haven't told that many times, um it's like they automatically assume it was a computer and it was not a computer because I didn't get a computer until I was in my 20s.
Uh much later. Uh the device I did
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get though that they brought back um which I'll try to sketch out here. >> I'm excited to say what it is.
>> Looks like this. So it's a tiny little Casio keyboard.
This is probably like almost drawn two size. I had not shown any inclination for music.
I'm not
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exactly sure why they they got that for me as a gift, but I sort of became obsessed with it even though I didn't know how to play it at all. And I taught myself through brute force, which is randomly pressing keys and seeing if the notes sounded right or not, and then pressing one of the other keys until something sounded right.
It would take
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me like weeks to learn a single song. And I've been doing that uh for about 30 years now.
Um you know, ever since. >> Amazing.
I've never heard anyone apply brute force for piano before, but uh sounds like it worked for you. >> Yeah, it it worked.
But uh if you want
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to see that image and you're listening to this on the audio, head to the link in the show notes to see Damesh's picture. We're actually going to send this picture to Paulo, our designer in residence, who's going to team up with AI to whip it into something new.
We'll reveal Damesh, Paulo, and AI's creation
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at the end of the episode. So stay tuned for that.
But while PA works, let's go deep on AI with you, DHS. Now, I want to get into HubSpot a little
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bit later, but I first wanted to touch on agents. You've recently launched agent.ai, a professional network for agents.
What was the spark that led you to build this platform? I've had this thesis that in the future we're going to have agents and humans working together
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in what we would think of it like modern hybrid teams. I'm like, okay, well, if that's true, if we're going to be um putting kind of AI agents on teams along with humans, then we're going to need all the things that we have in the kind of analog human world.
It's like, how will people find these agents? What will
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their resumes look like? How do we know if they've had experience in all these things?
Um, and so the original spark was there should be a professional network for agents because that's going to need to exist someday. So, that was the original kind of genesis of the agent.ai idea.
We launched in beta about a year ago at about 50,000 users uh back
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then. It's now up to 2 million.
So, there's been some resonance with the idea. What's happened now is people are sort of building their own agents, kind of creating them on the platform and and we have um about 2,000 kind of publicly shared um agents now on the uh on the platform.
So, it's been a lot of fun.
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>> Many of the agents on agentai.ai are actually ones you've built yourself. I figure that's a cold start problem.
You needed to get some agents on there to start. But can you walk us through one of your favorite agents and what it does?
>> One of my favorite agents, one of the most widely used ones is a company
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research agent where you can say type in the company name or the website domain and it will do this kind of deep research uh from all across the web uh hitting a bunch of proprietary APIs. But what's cool about it is just like if you had a like a research uh researcher on your behalf, you would say, "Okay, well
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here's the parts that I'm actually interested in. I'm in like here's the business that I'm in.
Here are the questions that I have. So, I want you to answer these five questions, focus on these particular areas, and give me a customized report every time I ask you for a research report on a company.
That's one of them. But I've done probably built a dozen or so agents from
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relatively sophisticated ones to really simple ones. And I'll tell you the one that I've been trying to build um which is like a dad joke agent to be able to generate a dad joke uh which one needs one of the last remaining frontiers.
Despite all the reasoning models and all the advancements and I played with all
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of them uh AI still cannot write even a decent uh original dad joke. That's what I've discovered.
Uh despite my best prompt engineering attempts >> that's going to be the new cheering test. Can you pick whether this is a dad or an AI dad?
>> Yeah, there you go. Yeah.
What's the actual process for building an agent
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that you're using at the moment? Is it mostly just wiring up APIs or what does it look like when you're building from scratch?
>> There's a a spectrum of when we started the platform, it was a we had a low code um agent building platform which u primarily uh deterministic flows that says here are the steps I want to take
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in a multi-step flow. Here are the inputs, here's a minimalist UI, and then it would call the LM or call APIs and we have a bunch of like data connectors to get social media data and you know, pull all that in.
And now we also have the ability to have um agents that are built off platform. You know, pick your um
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agentic or vibe coding tool of choice and and build an agent that way and just wire it into the platform, which I've been spending a lot of time on. Um you know, building these much more sophisticated UI uh agents that still kind of plug into agent.ai.
>> We see a lot of data mining and research and going out to the web and fetching
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stuff, but do you think AI can possibly be creative? Could you have a truly creative agent?
Yeah, for some definition of creativity, right? I use AI for what I think would would be kind of classified as relatively creative use cases.
They're
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not just data research. It's not just kind of writing or um kind of words smithing something.
One of these tricks I sort of learned from my uh well, not sort of I learned from my son uh who's 14 is around kind of creating what I'll call a simulation for lack of a better term. So what he does is he's an aspiring uh fantasy author.
So he'll do
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world building inside of chat GPT. So, he's got like a 2,000word prompt to say, "Oh, here's the world.
Here are the characters. Here's the power structure.
Here are the things that people can do." And then he'll pressure test the ideas like, "What happens if I do this?" And and it'll come back and it's this very iterative process. I do something similar um with kind of business ideas
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like, "Oh, here's what I'm going to tell you." And I've got this kind of very long kind of knowledge base um that I can pull information in from and say what would happen if HubSpot launched a product X or we did this change to it or whatever. like give me uh or if I were to uh ask five people across different
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disciplines to give me feedback on this thing uh from different uh regard like what would that be? What would that look like?
In a way, creativity is sort of kind of combining primitives that already exist in novel and unique ways. Not like we're kind of building things always from whole cloth.
I don't use it for writing full articles or um you know
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help with talks and things like that, but it's really good at connecting dots that might be hard to connect and doing like transitions or like oh I'm trying to wire this up and I can't quite find a way to get to this thing that I want to get to from where I am right now. Can you give me some options?
It's a great critic. It's a great brainstorming tool.
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It's a great way to kind of just spark some ideas and add some dots to this kind of mix of dots you're trying to to wire up. Yeah, I love that possible concept of what created creativity actually means in terms of connecting dots and bringing ideas that maybe you didn't think should exist together into
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proximity to one another and seeing what comes out of it. In my life, a lot of creativity has come from that.
And I can truly see the value of doing that through an AI model that has all these connections in it that you mightn't possibly actually think of. One of the the neat things you can do um it does it
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really well is you can uh so imagine you had a spreadsheet or just a two axis thing whatever and you have your kind of products or product features uh uh down one side and the same product features along the top right so it's the exact same thing along x and y dimension and then what you do is you you run the
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simulations like I want you to combine this product with this product or this feature with this product in novel ways and come up with a description of like what would that look like what might be like oh we happen have this and we also have that. Is there some unique blend of things and some of them or a lot of them are not going to make any sense?
Uh but
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sometimes it comes up with things that are like actually like useful. No, it's like oh yeah, I hadn't thought about how we could take this feature that's in our kind of sales product and connect it with this customer service product and that would be kind of cool actually.
>> And that's kind of an emerging skill, isn't it? In the age of AI, it's like picking out the gold.
You being that
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editor that is taking in everything that the AI is spitting at you, which might be terrible, might be brilliant, but you need to figure out which one's which. >> Yes.
Yeah. It's weird.
Back on the dad joke thing. Not only is it not able to write dad jokes, well, it actually
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struggles with even when you tell So, I have a database, which is what I call it. It's a database of of like curated jokes that I've collected over the years.
And so, it can actually explain to you what makes a joke a joke and why it's funny. So, it's actually does a very good job at that.
But then if you have it rate the jokes on a scale of 0
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to 10, this is I'm going to give you 100 jokes, you tell me which ones and and give me a quantitative score, you know, based on the joke, it does actually not that good at that. And I'm not exactly sure why.
Even though it can tell you what makes the joke funny, like the underlying mechanics of it, it's not
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good at like actually quantifiably kind of measuring the quality of something, which is I don't know if that's just a function of the way they work or something like anyway. I haven't been able to figure that out yet.
But >> do you think there actually is an objective measurement of humor, though? >> That's a good question.
Um,
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you know, maybe I'm asking the wrong question. Maybe the question I should ask is I want you to simulate an audience of a thousand people and estimate how many people would laugh at this joke.
>> Well, you've got you've gone on this before, haven't you? Because you have optimized some of your talks for laughs per minute.
I have, but I actually use
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real life humans and human audiences to kind of test that prior to um actually delivering it on stage. But that's it's some interesting ideas like maybe just run a like a mock simulation of an audience with a certain makeup and say, "Okay, well, I'm going to test this this
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joke or this humor and see uh if it gets a reaction or not." >> So, you've talked about, you know, AI agents possibly being teammates and you're actually all in on hybrid human AI teams at HubSpot. Can you actually share a real moment at HubSpot or one of
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the companies you advise where that human AI collaboration has created something unexpected, something that neither humans nor AI could have pulled off alone? >> I'll be honest, uh the answer is not yet.
I think we're very early in this notion of um agents being more than just
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tools. So they're sophisticated tools now as AI is, right?
Uh because they can actually, you know, carry on conversations. We have a customer support agent, we have a prospecting agent.
Uh the thing we haven't quite figured out yet and I think we're right on the brink is I think the really interesting thing things start to happen
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not when you have an agent that's for um you know purpose-built for a specific thing which is what our agents currently do is when agents have knowledge of each other and can actually bring in it's like okay I'm trying to resolve this customer support issue I'm going to
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bring in the prospecting agent to try and resolve this issue for whatever reason like bring in some other agent that's you know disconnected from the core core kind of mission of the agent that's currently running and I think part of this is going to get resolved we have things like the agent to agent protocol from Google and MCP where uh
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the large language models can be exposed to kind of tools and other agents and we have some sort of discoverability but that kind of dynamic of kind of unexpected things now it will do unexpected things and be able to answer questions we didn't think it would be able to answer but it doesn't really draw outside the lines right it's like okay well sort of within the system
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instructions and the and the rag based knowledge that we kind of provided it will do mostly stay within the within the lines. And we see this with humans as well.
It's like very very interesting things happen uh when the number of humans exceeds one, right? It's like okay, there's a certain number of creativity I can draw in a brainstorming session with
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myself, but then when I kind of put other people in there um is when the truly interesting things start to happen. And the other thing I think this is more on the kind of technology side and AI is getting better and better and that's great and protocols will get better but I think we need a better way
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to kind of weave agents into all the same tools that we use be it email or Slack or whatever it is right like they need to be sort of part part of the same systems that we use for doing the regular work that we do. I think that um that'll probably happen probably next year sometime.
Yeah, I
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think sitting around waiting for a prompt to come in is probably the least interesting thing you can do. And getting a WhatsApp notification or a Slack notification is definitely going to be the future.
>> Yeah. >> Do you see agents really being part of a team?
You kind of mentioned they're at the tool stage now. Or do you think
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they'll always be tools? Will they bridge that gap to truly being a teammate that you trust, that you converse with, that you're happy to delegate to?
>> Yeah, I I think so. Um, and this is not just the optimist in me.
It's, you know, from a just a raw IQ perspective, you know, models already have the
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intelligence to kind of do a lot of the things that that we do that we would ascribe um and and say those are human oriented tasks. There's a couple things where uh we can continue to do work.
Um, one is around EQ around understanding despite its lack of like human experiences, can it actually develop
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true uh at least a proxy for empathy? And it's starting to get better at that because it sort of fakes it pretty well.
And there have been some studies that are done. But the thing I think will sort of really unlock it is is not the technologies problem.
It's our problem as organizations. The analogy I use uh
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for agents is like so let's say you were hiring uh what I think of as a u very adept intern. That's the way to think about an AI agent.
And let's say this adept internal was really adept had a PhD in everything was very very knowledgeable super smart. But when they show up for their first day of work,
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they don't know about your business. They don't know about your policy.
They don't know about their teammates. They don't know anything other than all the external training that they've had.
Or we're like, "Ah, we hired this really smart agent to do X and we sort of unleash it on the world, unleash it within our organization and expect it to uh really perform." And I think that's a
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unreasonable expectation. So once we start truly treating them as potential teammates, well, they're going to need onboarding.
They're going to need some training. They're going to need some feedback.
They're going to need some objective, measurable way to know whether they're making progress. They're going to get some things right.
They're going to get some things wrong. And then
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over time, I think we'll have um much more feels like a teammate kind of person that just so happens that they're digital, but they're sitting in my Slack. They're responding to emails.
are kind of watching what's going on and they don't have to always be prompted to do something just like and the distance
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between how much you have to sort of look over their shoulder. Um, you know, it sort of grows over time just like we have with a regular person.
The trust builds, they get more awareness uh and more context about the organization. I'm hopeful we'll get there.
>> I wonder what those relationships are going to be like because you've talked about onboarding, you talked about
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feedback, you know, possible coaching of AI agents which are all very human things. You have conversations about performance.
You identify growth areas. You have growth plans that kind of roll out over 6 months, a year.
All very
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human things. And are we going to treat AI agents in the same way or is it going to almost be a servant relationship?
>> I still think of it as a as a tool, right? So, I don't like uh personifying tools.
It's like I'm, you know, I love
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AI as much as anyone. I have a huge amount of respect for the technology, what's going to be capable of.
I don't think it actually like replaces a human in like in the literal sense. I think it replaces individual tasks that humans may or may not should have been kind of investing their calories in because they're capable of so much more.
And the
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reason we did those things and we have the same thing with the industrial age is like we sort of as we invented machines and sort of automated things like okay now we can sort of work at a higher level as humans work at a higher level of abstraction. I think these will still continue to be tools for uh for a while, but that doesn't mean that they
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can't um be accountable and responsible and overtake things uh with a high degree of trust. But I think ultimately like the taste maker, the um the thing that's going to hold it all together, the glue is going to still be carbon based life forms.
I think there's still
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something particularly special um about humans. I may be biased uh being being uh being a human, but >> I've seen you described as a creative CTO.
To what extent does technology unlock your creativity and how do you think this might be changing in the AI
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era? >> I understand the arguments that argue that AI kind of squashes or suppresses creativity because it allows you it sort of replaces the need for that kind of creativity and I think the exact opposite.
Creativity is like okay you have uh some concept some idea in your brain. um and the challenge that many of
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us have and I'll talk you know like my son has so he's you know this aspiring uh you know fantasy writer someday but you know when he was nine and 10 and even like now uh his skill set in terms of being able to put words together into sentences and actually write and do it
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was lacking right that it's going to take him years to kind of develop that to even a rudimentary level to where he can kind of craft a story uh you know for his target audience but now with AI it's like okay well he still has the ideas he's always had the ideas in his head, right? It's like, and I, you know, from a design perspective, since we're
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here on the Canva podcast, it's like, okay, well, Canva did this for me u you know, back when you first folks first came out and now AI does this for me. It's like I've never thought my of myself because I'm not like a designer, but it's not because I don't have visual ideas, right?
It's like I have things that are in my head that I want to accompany a blog post or something like
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that. And now with AI, it sort of reduces kind of lowers the bar in terms of the kind of entry level for people that do a particular thing.
And so I think it amplifies creativity because now takes the ideas that you have in your head, the creative ideas and helps you manifest them creative uh express
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them. Be it music, be it visual design, be it writing, whatever it happens to be as your kind of skills catch up.
On the whole, I think people are going to be more creative. We're going to see more output, more creative things u from people because the bar is just lower.
More people can do it. >> Yeah.
I love getting that insight into how the next generation is using AI. You
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mentioned your son is building worlds to express his fantasy writing and he's putting in 2,000word prompts which is like amazing. I think you're pretty experienced with tools like chat TV.
Is there a way that you use it that would surprise people?
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>> Yeah, a couple things. So, I just launched a very simple kind of agent, you know, so we've heard of like prompt engineering, which is a craft of writing a prompt in order for uh you to get good uh results from um from AI back.
But there's this kind of step up from that uh and it's called metarmprompting. And
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the idea behind metarrompting is being using AI to actually improve your prompt. And the agent that I have is metaprompt.com.
It's completely free. Um and so what you do is you type in the prompt that you have been using on a recurring basis.
And what it will do is say, okay, here's what you're trying to do. It'll come back and ask you
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questions. It's like, oh, you're doing this, but you haven't told me this.
You haven't told me this. You haven't told me this.
You know, answer these questions. Uh, and when you do, it comes back with a well ststructured prompt that's actually written to, you know, and it's like a one-time investment to take your prompt that you've been using all the time into something that will
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demonstrabably prove to give you better results, right? And I use that all the time.
And this is one of the the nice things about uh AI now in in uh in Agentic or VIP coding is that these are the kinds of things I would build for myself back in the day. And it wasn't the calories necessary to be able to kind of launch something and put it out
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there for the world to to use. I could just never make that kind of trade-off, but now it's like, okay, not that hard to build, not that hard to share, and it's uh I can just put it out there.
>> Metaprompt.com, you heard it here. It's actually one of my favorite pieces of advices.
It's turned into my let me Google that for you. Just telling people
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to go metaprompt. That is like my automatic response when they're asking for how to deal with AI.
>> Totally. >> So, you actually write simple.ai, which is a newsletter with more than a million subscribers.
Now, I'm going to guess that you actually use AI to help get this out the door. So, how do you
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personally use AI in your writing workflow? >> I tend not to use it for writing, per se.
What I use it for is um editing. I use it for visuals.
I use it for um what I think of as is less about writing and more about copywriting. So, I'll use it
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for headline ideas uh or subject line ideas. Uh and I'll use it for coming up with like punchy ways to kind of capture something.
It's like, okay, I've got this thing. I'm like right around here on this particular concept.
I need a piffy way uh that maybe uses a literation or a figure of speech that
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makes it more memorable, more remarkable, and sort of improve and take it up a notch. And I've made multiple attempts at this.
And I think I think it's pretty good, but it still can't capture my voice, and it's not good at that yet. Um, and I say yet, maybe will be someday, but >> I'm sure you're very data forward and
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you've got an amazing amount of content that you can feed it. Surely it could find your voice somewhere in there.
It can replicate my voice. What it is likely unable to do.
Um, and maybe this will change. The thing that it doesn't have though is doesn't actually have
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human experience, right? So, it's not had the day that I just had.
Kind of going back to comedy, which I'm not a comedian either, but you know, I've heard comedians say it's like their best material just comes from just observation of like, I had this day and it was nothing particularly remarkable, but that was kind of quirky. I had this or whatever.
And then they kind pull on
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that thread and that turns into, you know, a skip or a joke or something like that. And I think it's similar for writing.
It's like, okay, I was solving this particular problem or I had this thing where I had this debate in on a call and it's like, oh, then I thought about it. It's like, oh, there's something broken or something kind of
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noteworthy about that. I just put it out there.
Um, so yeah. >> So, what I'm hearing is that the creative spark always needs to come from your brain, from from a person.
>> Yeah. For the kinds of things that I'm doing, right?
It's like if I'm doing a LinkedIn post, um the kind of purpose of
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it is to kind of put my brain on speakerphone in a way, right? That says, "Okay, well that's I think what people are there following me for." It's like, "Ah, what's going on in Darm's head?" And if and you're not curious about what's going on in my head, then you're likely not following me.
That's uh because I have a grabag of things that I post out there. And it's like, okay,
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well, that's sort of why the audience is here. Um so like and my kind of purpose is to kind of serve, you know, serve that audience.
And so yeah. >> All right.
Well, a AI agents might be teammates, they might not be, they could be tools, but you also famously took on
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the culture project at HubSpot despite feeling that you were absolutely the worst person to do it. So, I'm interested in a truly hybrid team where maybe we've got AI agents sitting next to people.
How do you instill culture in the AI half?
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>> I'll summarize my dozen plus years in kind of working in culture uh involuntarily. I'll distill it down like the the big lesson big analog I've come I've only said like maybe three smart things in my life I think this is one of them which is uh culture is a product and what I mean by that is as as as
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companies we build a product for our customers everybody knows that whatever your offering happens to be culture is the product you build for your team I'm just talking about human teams right now well you would never build a product without asking your customers how the product was doing then so we get you know product feed so we do an NPS for
24:46
our employees in the same way so we sort of carry as much as we can from our kind of product sensibilities over into building this kind of second product which is what uh which is what culture is. Um and the other kind of big lesson on on culture was in the same way that a product is never really done uh culture
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is never really done. I think the mistake a lot of uh founders and entrepreneurs make is like oh my job is to preserve our startup culture is like what we had when we were like five people 10 people 50 people as long as I can preserve and maintain that then like we're good.
It's like, no, that's not the answer because the product that the
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company needs and the people need is going to be different at 50 people, 500 people, 5,000 people. >> And so now I'm going to continue to pull on that thread and maybe there's a point at which the analogy breaks.
But it's like, okay, well, if we continue to think about culture as a product, what's changed now is who the customers are. So
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now we have a combination of humans and AI agents and if the goal for the product is to deliver uh for those customers now we have two constituents of customers just like you might have for your for your regular product and so then how would we get feedback u you know from the other constituent of customers like is the culture serving AI
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agents and making the most is that living helping them live their best life so to speak right not that they're conscious um but that's the way I've been thinking about it is like how do we sort of replicate the things that have worked for us and thinking about culture into this kind of hybrid kind of agentic world. It's Yeah.
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>> How far do you take it though? Does the AI get a vote on what the values of the team are?
>> It's a good question. I don't >> I don't think so.
Um and the reason is I'm trying to think off the top of my head right now just like we would have uh so we may have multiple product constituents for our regular product. Uh
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but there's sort of the constituents that we're focused on. It's like oh yeah this is like for instance HubSpot serves SMBs.
That's our kind of target. That's what we're passionate about.
We've been passionate about that for 19 years. But we have, you know, segments of enterprise.
We have other kind of um kind of adjacent uh you know customers.
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But the ones we solve for are are those kind of key that the SMB constituent uh real time evolving thesis here is that humans will continue to be the kind of primary customer. Uh but we have this other constituent that we need to be mindful of, but that's not who
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we're building the culture for. And so they may get uh they may have a voice in terms of we want to know what they're sort of thinking uh and how they're responding but they may not get a vote uh in the way in terms of shaping what the product looks like.
We're not solving for them in that way. >> Do you think leadership maybe management
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is going to radically shift in a world where AI can take on so much of that role and some of those management tasks and and what a leader normally does. >> Yeah, I think so.
I think the the the managers and leaders of the future are going to be the ones that embrace this
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idea of hybrid teams because I think that's going to be inevitable whether wherever on the spectrum you place the agents in terms of their capability whether it's a tool or to what degree do they become like a a full teammate but they're in there right just like managers sort of have to understand technology today like right so you have to sort of understand that we have HR
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systems and CRM and things like that in order to like be a good manager I think what agents will start to kind of show up and manifest is like great managers will know how to manage a diverse team which includes both carbon based life forms and agents and they'll just know that's like here's what agents how to
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get the most out of them and here's what people expect and how to get the most out of them it's going to be a combination I think there's going to be a whole new generation of managers and leaders that are that have that skill set >> yeah it's going to be an interesting dual skill set of of managing two different types of organisms really
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>> I'm going to take us down a slightly different path your LinkedIn lists one of your favorite topics as tech powered parenting. Does this mean you just put your kids in front of camera for 12 hours a day?
>> I don't. Uh, and even if I wanted to, my wife would never let me.
Um, but I don't
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think that's a good idea. So, I've exposed my son to um technology very very early, including so he had access to uh GPT2 before chat GPT was even launched because I got an early uh early access.
>> Yeah, very very early adopter. What I
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want him to do is I want him to sort of understand kind of the technology that's available uh and use it as a use it as a tool because it's going to be in there. It's gonna be part of his life.
Uh so I don't want to kind of keep him from that. But I want him to sort of over the fullness of time like understand how
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like what responsible use looks like and and the schools will help out here as well because he's you get getting this message from from all over. But I will sit down and say, "Oh, here's how like I I use AI and here's why I use it for this, I don't use it for that." Um, and what I love about kind of collaborating
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with him on on that front is one thing kids are really good at is sort of coming in with a blank slate. They assume the technology will actually work.
That's their default assumption. He will type things into chat GPT that you would never cons like why would you even think it could do that?
And it's like I and he's like why wouldn't it be
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able to do that? It's like it's supposed to be able to do everything.
They don't know of a pre- internet world. It's like okay well yep there are dark uses and you know ways you don't want to use the um the internet.
I think we're going to have the same thing with AI. We just have to use it responsibly, but I don't think it's a responsible thing to kind of keep our kids from it.
Uh because
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they're going to be out in a world where it's going to be there. Um that's just the the kind of reality of life whether we like it or not.
So yeah, >> giving our kids access to technology is one part of it, but with tech powered parenting, is there something that you particularly do to to help them come to
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grips with it or or ways that you use the tools to give your kid a better life? I think what AI is really good at is um taking in context and you know you only have the one child.
This is our first time u first- time parents which lots of people obviously billions of
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people have gone through that exercise but it's actually really good at providing kind of advice and we will kind of collaboratively sometimes like okay well like here's the situation how do we think through this or and sometimes it's just me and my wife sometimes it's just me but in terms of kind of helping me navigate uh or
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helping us as a family navigate uh what are you know common issues but they're uncommon for us because we haven't encountered them yet and obviously every um every child is different But there are definitely patterns and it turns out AI is actually very good at that. Uh it's like having kind of read all that
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there is to read out there on the internet is actually quite helpful. Even before the reasoning models came out uh they were actually really good.
But now the reasoning models they can do kind of deep research can do inference time compute. um the quality of the responses you get on very very deep sometimes
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philosophical questions and and this may be typical uh atypical um because my son is you know wired a certain way but he sort of likes the um AI is arbitrary kind of objective third party also because it's like you know kids sometimes don't trust their parents like
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ah that's you're just saying that because you're my parents like no we're not it's not just us and let's you know uh let's see what AI has to say and it's um if nothing else it may not give us the answer. Uh but it does often at least give us um kind of spark of what the dialogue should be um and at least
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possibly a next step or something like that. So it's been very useful on that.
>> You need to give him access to the special LLM that's only trained on great parenting tips from DH so anything he asks or just agrees with you. >> I'll maybe put that in my in my will and pass it down to him when he has his
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child or something like that. Yeah.
>> You have a fairly well-known philosophy that you've written about called sorry must pass. And for those who haven't read it, and you should, it's essentially a way of gently letting down all the people who ask you for your time, but who would distract you from the things that are important to you.
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You've also paired it with a quote from Derek Civers saying, "If you are not saying hell yeah about something, say no." But as AI amplifies capabilities, has your definition of a hell yeah shifted? >> I'll say it's shifted a little bit.
Uh
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more accurate thing might be it's it's changed. um I have this kind of defined set of three things that I'm working on and the things will change out but there will be three things.
It helps me kind of narrow my focus. What has shifted though is that within those three things the number of things I can accomplish now that I will say yes to um is
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actually grown. I can take on more now as a result of having these power tools and and the assistance of AI than I would have likely so I can say yes to more things but I still don't say yes to more than the things outside of three.
So I haven't gone from three to five things as a result of AI. It's like still those three things, but more
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things will sort of filter in in terms of number of those things within those buckets that I'll that I'll work on. >> That's awesome.
You're living the AI dream, getting more done. >> Yes, I am actually literally getting more done.
I really am. >> When it comes to creative or strategic work, the kind that's, you know, kind of subjective and hard to measure.
What new
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ways do you see emerging to value and monetize AI's contribution? >> Yeah, this is a tough one.
I think um you know there's been lots of discussion uh within the business circles around uh you know how you charge for software and how you build products and charge for them and we've gone from kind of user
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based receipt based things to consumption based things to now um kind of outcomes like you know AI does the actual work and you charge for the work that was done uh or the outcome that was achieved my sense is that uh although people are excited about this u especially the outcome based thing I
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think partly the reason they're excited is you look at the early use cases. Uh for instance, customer service is a really good example.
This one of the kind of most common use cases for which it's like oh if AI can resolve a ticket uh you know the software can charge Y dollars per ticket as long as Y is considerably less than uh what the the
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human cost uh the manual cost would have been. My sense is that um there's a reason why that particular use case the outcome based pricing worked and it's because you sort of have an objective measure.
It's like did it resolve the ticket or did it not? you have an objective measure to some degree of
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quality. Was the seesat at or above the levels it was with human resolution.
So we sort of know and you also had the economics. It's like oh we've been solving tickets for you know months and years so we know what the actual cost of a ticket is.
So we have all those three things. Most of those things have to be
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true in order to have kind of outcome based pricing. I don't think that works uh for logo design or for it's like I because it's like okay well what's a good versus a bad logo.
Did you create 100 iterations versus you know like like what does that mean? This kind of uh kind of classic approach to you know how
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do you value outcomes I think that's still going to be a little bit human-driven which is going to limit uh degree to which you can just charge products based on outcomes and sometimes maybe it's okay for a tool to be charged as if it were a tool. It's like okay well you have a human that's spending x amount of time doing whatever it is
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they're doing. If this can kind of increase that productivity and this is you know age-old um you know pitch for you know software products but it happens to still be true.
It's like if we can deliver a product that uh you know cuts down cost or makes the humans that are super valuable even more valuable and allows them to accomplish
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much um you know much more I think that's great. >> But we've said we've seen data come into all sorts of decision- making and you can put a metric behind anything.
So logo design yes you can put it in front of 100 people and the one that gets a 95% response is the one that you go
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with. So you can measure things like that and then feed that to the AI and say job done and then pay it for that output.
>> You could um so this is another kind of dimension of it right there are things where the outcomes are can be reduced to
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like I'll call them semifable things. It's like okay let's say the funible thing is in this example is a logo design that gets 95% approval rating among some breath of people.
Yes. But my my sense is there is a large amount of human activity uh where the outcome uh
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is nonlinear that says okay if you produce the one the one thing that happens to actually have that kind of breakthrough breakout outcome uh that pays for a million of the kind of mediocre modest average ones or whatever and you're not going to actually hit those um by simply just kind of solving
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for the mean or the average or something like that. Right?
You look at the publishing industry and look at writing in books and things like that. It's like okay well yes you know can a AI produce a book and maybe it will sell but will it produce something that's actually going to be this thing that like you
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could not have measured uh in a in a test case or whatever. It's like it's I don't know and maybe it will um but I think it's going to be really hard to know a priori that this set of outcome these hundred logos that were produced were actually worth $1,000 they're $10 that's the actual economic value of
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those logos. It's like okay well but for a brilliant one for the right brand for whoever it's like >> my money is still on the humans I'm sorry uh humans powered by AI if they want to use AI fine but I want someone that's got the taste that's sort of have that has that uh certain qua on that
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yeah that's >> well I think that's the takeaway my money is still on the humans that's everything we need to know is there anything that keeps you up at night when it comes to AI what's one thing you think everyone needs to be doing more of now to prepare for the new age. >> Yeah, there's two things that keep me up
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at night. One on the light side and one on the dark side.
We'll do the dark side first. I'm not a like a doomsday thinker at all around AI in terms of like it's going to overtake the world and we're going to cease to exist as a species.
That I don't like worry about all that much. What I do worry about is like on
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the kind of consumer side of the fence, uh AI is going to become sort of indistinguishable uh in almost every modality that there ever was. that'll be able to write like a human, speak like a human, produce videos, produce images that are indistinguishable uh from real life in that kind of world.
So, I'm not
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worried about AI taking over the world or doing really bad things. I think that's uh possible, but uh relatively unlikely.
What is possible uh and more likely is you have malent humans uh like as we've always had that now have power tools uh that they didn't have access to
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before and they can actually wreak more havoc than they would have been able to do. And I think the answer to this is just more education around um just how we consume AI like like for my parents and everyone's parents to sort of know it's like when you get that call or something like that saying I you know
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your son's been in an accident and whatever like okay you sort of need to know uh what's possible now with this technology whatever so you know we don't get uh taken advantage of and things like that. So I think we just need to raise the level of kind of education and people need to understand how it works what it's capable of.
on the lighter
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side of it, what keeps me up at night is that this feels a a lot like the internet back when I was uh first starting HubSpot, which is, you know, back then it was like, oh, there's a thing called the internet. Millions of businesses and business owners and entrepreneurs should be benefiting from this thing called the internet and very few were and and the problem was they
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just didn't understand it and the tools weren't there and and it's like they just couldn't kind of bring it together and that was sort of the you genesis for HubSpot. I'm having that same sort of kind of feeling on a positive way.
It's like there's this new thing called AI that millions of people and businesses and entrepreneurs should be benefiting from. Not enough people actually are
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benefiting. Yes, they'll use chat GBT.
They'll type in a prompt, but they really are not using even 2% or uh you know 5% of what AI is capable of. And I think that needs to change and that's partly the motivation behind simple.ai is like okay demystify all these things
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going on. Try to put some simple tools out there.
HubSpot's doing a bunch of good work in terms of kind of democratizing access to AI for hopefully millions. That's the part I'm optimistic about, but it does keep me up at night, but in a good way.
I love the light side and thank you for going deep on me.
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>> I want to change pace just a little bit. I would love to know who you would have on your allstar creative team.
You get four seats. You can pick anyone from any era, any universe, dead or alive.
put together your dream creative team. >> So, I'm going to pick people that are
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live because I like constraints. Um, and also because it's like, oh well, maybe I have a shot of working with these people someday.
Maybe they'll hear this. Uh, so I'll put since we've talked about uh music before, uh, Jacob Collier, who's a singer, songwriter, multi- instrument.
He's he's amazing. I think what Jacob Collier would be really great at is deep
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down inside he's a product guy. I'll say it right here.
uh like if you watch his he's you know won lots of Grammys, produced lots of albums, done live shows, he solves for the customer, he solves for the audience, but he brings himself into it. I think parachute him in to your company, to my company, to
40:54
pretty much anything. And I think he would be like a top death performer, whatever the thing happens to be.
I'll say uh Jack Butcher, who's a visual designer, he does visualize value. There's a really good tweet, but what I love about Jack Butcher, you should look him up.
He's one of the best that I know of what I think of as like visual
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abstraction and like my life is about abstractions in differing ways in differing levels. That's what software engineering is actually all about.
And he does that with visuals to be able to take a concept and reduce it down to a monochromatic like just lines and circles kind of image that sort of captures the essence of that idea,
41:27
right? Like and he is world class at that.
So I think he he would be awesome. I'll say uh Jason Frerieded uh from 37 signals/basecamp awesome entrepreneur and I've known Jason for a long time but I've never worked with him but his one of his many uh kind of superpowers as he
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does kind of idea distillation idea um abstraction really well right it's like he he can take the concept express it visually in in terms of product design but almost more importantly he can kind of reduce it into words he's an exceptionally good writer in terms of conveying the concepts and ideas in his
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head he's written you know lots uh really good books, all of which are are worth reading. I think he'd be awesome.
And the last one I'll say um because his name doesn't start with J as the first three did break the patter. I'll say Andre Karpathy uh who works in the AI space and he does um what I think of as
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like uh technology distillation or complexity distillation the technology front. So he will describe complicated AI concepts in ways that like mere mortals like me can actually understand like what the kind of mechanics of a large language model is.
I mean, he's got and he's obviously he's a, you know, practicing software engineer, deep on AI
42:32
research or whatever. The way his creativity really shows up is that ability to kind of make things simple that are actually really, really complicated.
Um, so those are my picks. >> That is a fascinating T.
We're now turning this podcast into Tinder for product people. So, let's put the call out.
If anyone knows Jacob and can hook
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them up with the mesh to make the most amazing music/marketing product all brought together, please make it happen. Okay, I think Paulo has had enough time to feed your sketch into AI and work
43:05
with it just a little bit. So, let's bring him back to see the final results of this Paulo Dsh AI human creative triangle.
Paulo, you there? >> Hello.
I've been like so excited to share like the excited to see it.
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>> Awesome. Mesh, I love the story cuz I could relate to it like a lot.
Like my grandmother gave me like a guitar when I was younger and I'd also just had to like learn from scratch and stuff. I've also been obsessed with oldtimey cartoons lately.
I started generating
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like these um oldtimey cartoons. I just ran with it and had so much fun um like listening to your stories and even like hearing about your son who's a writer.
So I wanted to incorporate like those are like fantastical elements in it. I ended up with like this like short a
43:53
bunch of clips like just put together of you like learning how to play like the keyboard and just getting older and learning how to play more. [Music]
44:27
But yeah, that's that's pretty much it. Um, >> that's brilliant.
>> That is awesome. >> I love it, Paul.
I love the development of the narrative and seeing your brain in action being fueled with AI and what you ended up with just telling a great
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story about Desh's experience flowing into the next generation. It was really beautiful.
>> Thanks for doing that. >> Thank you so much.
Thank you. And thank you for having me.
>> Thank you for joining us. Well, Desh, it's almost time to close out the episode and we've got some rapid fire questions.
Are you ready?
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>> I think so. I'm not fast on my feet, but yes.
We normally put 60 seconds. Just for you, I'll put 65 seconds on the clock.
Let's go. What are you reading at the moment?
>> So, right now, I'm reading Super Agency
45:14
uh by Reed Hoffman, which is a book about AI and like and what it's actually capable of like what would happen if everything went right kind of thing. >> Of course you are.
What's one prompt you overuse? >> Tell me about XYZ person.
I do it in perplexity. That's my kind of tool of choice for those kind of search based uh
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prompts. What is the first thing you built with AI?
>> The first thing uh with what we would now call AI, Jer AI was uh that chat GPT before chat GPT which is I had GPT2 access and built a little chat app that I used and my son used to just run
45:46
little chat things through. >> Always a pioneer.
What's your favorite underrated AI tool? >> The one I use the most right now is it's a a new tool.
It's called Willow uh Willow Voice. And effectively what it does, it's like voice input uh for everything on your desktop.
So it's a
46:03
desktop tool. You can just like hold a key down, you just say things, whatever app you happen to be in.
And it goes beyond just like transcription will actually be app aware and sort of format things like, oh, you said this thing, but you're writing an email, so I'm going to format the text in this way. Anyway, so Willow voice is the is the answer.
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>> Sum up AI in one word. >> Power tool.
>> Yeah. And AI are making an album.
What's the genre? Bollywood meets the west, so we'll call it Bali West.
>> Oh, I can't wait to hear that. What's one job AI should never do?
46:35
>> Lead. So, our jobs >> and finish this sentence.
Surprising thing AI taught me about myself is >> I have the same limitations as LMS, which is I have limited context window. I hallucinate and I still struggle with
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writing dad jokes. >> I'm hoping you hallucinate legally.
So that's it. That's all we have time for.
Thank you so much for diving deep with me on AI agents and creativity. Damesh, it has been an absolute pleasure to chat with you.
>> Thanks for having me. This was a lot of
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fun. >> Thank you for tuning in to today's episode of Prompted.
That was an absolutely engrossing conversation with Desh. And some of the things that stood out to me were firstly how agents are
47:23
already becoming powerful tools. though the jewelry is still out as to whether they'll become fullyfledged teammates like many people have predicted.
I was also really interested to hear about Domesh's idea that culture is a product you build for your team which really emphasizes its role in creating a
47:39
successful work environment. Finally, what we're all here to learn about creativity.
This notion that creativity is about connecting the dots and the powerful way that AI can serve as a valuable partner in making those connections was one of the best
47:54
insights. To keep up with future episodes, please subscribe wherever you love to listen to podcasts or head on over to YouTube.
And if you're enjoying the show, please leave us a rating or a review. We read every single one and we always love hearing your thoughts.
Until
48:09
next time, keep chasing that creative spark. Heat.
[Music]
48:31
Hey, Heat. [Music]