Inside the AI memory machine
41:02 Share

Support for the verge cast comes from strike. Strike is a payments in billion platform supporting millions of businesses around the world, including companies like uber, B, M W and door dash. Striping has help countless startups and establish companies like reached their groth goals, make progress on their emissions and reach more customers globally. The platform offers a sweet of specialized features and tools to fash track growth like stripe billing, which makes IT easy to handle subscription based charges, invoices and all reactions ring revenue management needs. You can learn how stripe helps companies of all sizes make progress at stripe dot com that striped out com to learn more, right, make progress.

Welcome to the verge cast the flagship podcast of total recall but the concept and the movie, but only the first movie, not so much the con fair one. Anyway, i'm in from David piers, and this is the first episode in our latest many series, all about A I. We talked so much about A I these days, and so much of IT is so abstract.

A I is this big, messy concept, and it's easy to get lost in all the theory and consequences inside of IT. Those things matter, of course, a lot, but we also want to try and get a bit of an on the ground view of how A I is actually being used and whether it's actually useful. Today, I want to talk about a use of A I that is suddenly everywhere IT goes by.

Many names, microsoft calls IT recall. With recall, we're going to leverage the power of A I and the new system performance to make IT possible taxes. Virtually anything you have ever seen on your PC apple calls IT personal intelligence.

IT understands who's in your photo library, so you can just ask photos to create a movie about leo learning to fish.

For google, it's one of the most important features of germany. Do you remember where you saw my glasses?

Yes, I do. Your glasses were on the desk near a red apple. There are also .

lots of startup s enterprise of our companies. Everybody else. You can think of working on something similar, call this feature, whatever you want, but the goal of them is all the same, to remember everything you need to remember and give IT back to you at exactly the right moment and in exactly the right way as an idea.

I find this incredibly compelling. I think I find IT more compelling than most actually see. I have this thing called afghani a, which essentially means I don't see pictures in my head, like if I tell you right now, a picture and apple, there is a wide range of things that you might be picturing.

Maybe you see a super crisp, detailed apple with colors and leaves on the stem, and there's a whole surrounding universe around IT. Or maybe you just see sort of a cartoon looking apple, like the apple est apple you've ever seen. Maybe you just see the rough shape of an apple in your mindset.

If you're like me, you don't see anything, nothing, blackness. I can tell you what an apple looks like. I know what an apple looks like, but I can't see IT there.

I honestly always thought that when people talked about visualizing stuff and their minds eye, they didn't mean you literally IT breaks my brain. Still, to this day, every time I think about the fact that people can just conjure images in their brain and they see them, I don't get IT. And people who see IT don't get that I don't.

Brains are weird. One thing that seems to be true about people with affiliation like me is that we don't necessarily have particularly great visual memories. Like, I can't just counter up a photo of my childhood home.

You know, I remember lots of things. And to be clear, I don't think of india is like a disability so much as IT is just a different way your brain works, but I just don't have that kind of visual memory. So over the years, i've been pretty hard on technology to help me fix that.

I take a lot of photos, and I love all the on this day and automatically generated albums that I get on my phone and in google photos. I've tried to journal much more over the years because going back to words and pictures and videos does put me back in a place Better than just closing my eyes and trying to remember something. And anyone who knows me will tell you that I am an obsessive note taker and list maker, because IT just helps me keep my world in order, is how wever remember things and go back to things.

All of this is to say that a tool like the one these companies are describing is kind of my dream, something that can remember, every article I read, every message I receive, everything I need to do, person I meet, place I go, everything else that happens in my life, and then both store all of that for me to access, and then actually presented to me when I needed that would literally change my life. There are obviously huge complex privacy and data security questions associated with how that all works. And I want to get to that.

But this is one of the things AI is actually pretty good at, just storing, sorting and cognizing vast amounts of data. What if that data could be my life? I wanted to get some perspective on what IT takes to actually pull this off. So I call the one of the people who's been working on at the longest dance saucer.

the cofounder and C. E. O of a limitless.

Here's dance story in a nuta. He worked to google out of school, then started the company called optimized, which he sold in twenty twenty. And along the way, he started to lose hearing the way he described to me, he had this really visual experience.

The first time he tried on a hearing IT, he told me he was like gaining a superpower. And he started to look for other ways to give himself and other people technological superpowers like that. And he landed on memory.

We as humans are terrible at remembering ing things. We forget things over time. We forget things immediately because we just weren't paying attention when we've learned them.

We remember things, but must remember where they came from. We remember things selectively because we come to everything with specific biases. Some people have Better memories than others, but nobody's memory is perfect. And dan had this thought that maybe he could help fix that.

Started with this idea. Well, if there's a hearing for hearing and glasses for vision, what's the equivalent for memory?

The first version of limit list was actually that called rewind, which you would install into your mac, and IT would immediately begin to capture audio through your micro especes ers, and IT would also take almost constant screen shots of whatever you were doing on your screen. That basic technology is pretty simple, right? Capture a lunch of audio, take a lot of screen shots.

And IT gets you pretty far in terms of trying to figure out what you're doing on your computer. The question then is what to do with all of that? What does that actually mean to give someone a Better memory at the beginning? That was the big question for rewind.

It's good to think about IT as an analogy, like there are many things today that you do not remember and you're very happy to have overloaded technology. A good examples. Phone numbers, probably I rushed the last time you had to type in an actual phone number in your phone.

Pretty are now you just open up your phone, tap the person's name. There was appeared to time in my youth, were I to remember everyone phone number, and that's the way I would call them. Similarly, with getting from point to point, there was appeared at time in our life when we had to remember across ets, and we had to remember how to navigate the world.

Now we just tell the computer this is where we want to go and that gives us in time, real time that was opted out. We can take. And like the memory of those things that sort of i'm using those as very basic examples we don't miss at all.

There are other things in our lives that are like that, that we don't even realize. We're forgetting because our memory is laud. You know, good examples is how I know a person or you when uni maybe reconnected in a few months, how old was your Young one and know those details that actually help build connection and report um make us feel more human to one another.

They might seem robotic to have your computer remember for you, but they also create this amazing connection that if you image, imagine a world where if you had perfect memory, what you could do both in terms of connection, in terms of productivity, in the same way. Imagine, could you imagine if you were glasses today or contact lines? Could you imagine going a day without them? Like, why would you live your life? A blurry and the same thing could be set of memory. Why would you live your life for the blurry memory?

That such an interesting like ilo sophy question, right? Because I feel like the way you think about that as opposed to something like hearing is is is an interesting one. Because I think what your thing is less kind of let's solve for an issue that you're having, right? And and kind of get something back to the level at which you had IT or would like you to be.

And more thing like how do we limitless build this right? It's like what if instead of using ten percent of our rain, you use one hundred percent of our rain? And that's such an interesting like, what does that mean to be a person when you have all of that stuff at sick? Have ever seen the reaction people have to like dating, spread etes when people have these these really like intense databases with all the people are going out with, on the one hand, makes total sense, but on the other hand, I think that gives people this sort of like human ik in a way that i've never really been able to describe. This is such a technological question we're having directed with right now in so many ways that it's like if all of this stuff is just available to me, how do I use IT in a way that makes IT still feel like me and feel human and feel honest and feel real? And I don't know, it's not even really a question, is just IT just opens up this really complicated, like philosophical wanderings in a way that so much A I stuff us right now for me.

yeah, I often imagine, how will the future think of us today? And one way to think about that question is to think about how we think about people fifty, one hundred, one hundred, fifty years ago and that feeling you describe that ik of using computers to do a thing that you thought should just be want to just to go to a bar and meet somebody. That ik actually in hini seems silly.

You, it's like the same way that people had an ic toward cars. What I love my horse, and they had an extol, telephones. You, that feeling of newness, of novelty, of difference. People, just as human beings are not wired well to respond to change.

We are just not there are some people who are very excited about new and they buy the newest gadget on one of them like no matter what IT is, no matter how about IT is just that it's new is good enough for me. There's others for that would be the worst way to live life. They are just are happy with the way things are.

And the world is changing faster than they've like and is changing faster than and you know, the way I think about IT is five, fifty. Hundred years. And now we will look back at today and be shocked that we accepted the lives that we live, that we would forget ninety percent of what happens after a week, and that we thought that was okay.

sure. Yeah, this brilliant device we have of our mind that so precious, this is incredible machine. We just let IT forget things.

And that's okay. No big deal. That just life. I think people will will laugh at that. You know, my grandkids will ask me, really, did you just want through life, forgetting most of IT and who's okay?

You I don't know that I buy that theory of the future completely, for whatever it's worth. But IT is a theory that I hear a lot in talking the AI people. And it's largely true over time that as we found more ways to augment our own capabilities, things have gotten Better.

I mean, look, what is a computer, if not a way to just do math faster than writing a down on paper, right? Offloading things that we don't do well to technology that does do IT well tends to be a pretty good outcome in a lot of ways. We have to take a really quick break, and then we're going to talk about what an APP actually does. When IT tries to give you a Better memory, we'll be right back.

Support for this show comes from the aclu. The aclu knows exactly what threats a second Donald trump term presents, and they are ready with a battle tested playback. The aclu took a legal action against the first trumpet administration four hundred and thirty four times, and they will do IT again to protect immigrants rights, defend reproductive freedom, safeguard free speech and fight for all of our fundamental rights and freedoms. Join the aclu today to help stop the extreme project twenty twenty five agenda. Learn more at aclu dot org.

Alright, go back. So when then starts really working on his memory, super power APP in earnest. It's twenty twenty early covered times and everyone's suddenly working from home and on zoom calls all day.

This is prechAmber GPT, by the way. And before everybody decided that A, I was going to immediately change everything forever, zoom by the hip is like the hottest st. company. Do remember these times three times. Then has this big, huge idea about memory superpowers, but the ends up deciding to start his product on a much narrower path.

We started with a meeting bot. Everyone was doing zoo meetings. IT was a bought that joined your meeting capture, recorded, transcribe IT and make that shareable.

When we started, that was novel. And then every week you started, came in the, the, the, the new.

Yes, exactly. So that became very crowded. And what we realized that from our users is then this is where any where best ideas came from.

There are all the seed in a problem that our users described. They love the idea of comprehensiveness. They really want to capture more of their lives, not just these in a zoo. Meetings are having. And that let us to, uh idea around how do you capture more than just meetings.

And around that time, the enabling technology of apple silk get around apple m one came chip that allowed to do a lot more things locally, offload a lot of the things that would other I have to be done in the cloud. And that's when we moved from describe, was meeting, bought to rewind the mac APP. That was again long before ChatGPT GPT three o three, three five, which was the model powered.

Then I actually say, we ve got more lucky than good there, where the data we are actually already captioning with reline just really lends itself well to rag retrieval augmented generation, like the ability to use that data, know to ask A A model like GPT, three, five, four, four o now, if you asked IT to drag me name of the same movement, you just ask IT today without any context that doesn't know k job and knows who sam as as certainly doesn't know who I am and does not know our relationship. But if you augment IT with the context of our relationship, the fact that he invested four years ago and that know we working terrorist ly in this migration revolution to limitless all that contexts, you provide a large range while IT draft a perfect email, in fact, and email, I sent h two sam, that an A I could have drafted. We're great. And we went and we connected to, like these things that you others have, a blank piece of paper can easily be made easier by having a augmented with your context of your past.

What would you have done had this not happened like in this sort of parallel universe where like ChatGPT doesn't happen and we don't get this kind of incredible run of stuff we ve been on the last few years? IT doesn't something you are counting on that you weren't saying like we're gonna bet on this foundational technology to be the thing. What is parallel universe and building to make that stuff work?

Yeah, I would have been doing more of the same. I mean, I would have IT was already valuable enough to do search over the things you've seen that heard in the past, the large things model just makes that search more useful and more actionable and more IT takes that the task you would have had to do IT like, let me start you all my emails with sam.

Now we figure, okay, when do we meet to you? Introduced us instead of doing that manual test, you do automatic. And so I just that made me analogy draws like before, you know, we are on this evolution from horse and buggy to self driving cars.

Our evolution before chat V T, maybe we added a car with menu transmission way Better than horse and buggy, but what ChatGPT and the along API that we use, but enable us to do go to automatic transmission. So we're not quite self driving cars where autonomous AI simulations of your mind doing things for you. Yeah, but we are able to actually save you time and give you lot of value through this sort of evolution.

So that's what we would have been doing. And by the way, now our process is basically banking on the moves getting Better like everything we do is under the premise of just that, the models going to get Better. So like just just collect the date in the best possible way to ride that wave.

So our mindset has definitely shifted. We're not dog just pursuing. We have done before and now we really okay. There's an amazing wave of change through these models, just going to get Better, Better and acaba. Why not just write that wave and build a product that just gets Better on its own? It's cheaper, gets Better on its own as the model get Better?

The car analogy there is a little messy, but it's an interesting way to think about where we are with A I. We spent two decades or so with products like google and facebook, which built very smart and sophisticated systems for looking at a huge amount of stuff and ranking IT a million different ways. Those systems are, by and large, very good.

But the promise of A I is that I can take all that stuff and actually come to understand IT not just find you the thing you're looking forward by putting you at the hopital list, but by finding the perfect thing that you're not looking for or by using everything you already know to help you do with the next thing. We don't need A I to do google searches. We really don't.

Even google is currently showing us how much we don't need A I as IT tries to put more A I in to google search. But if all the AI boosters are right, we can use A I to not just find things, but build new things on top of them. In a personal context, that brings up the central problem with all of these AI systems. In order for an outlet reines to know everything about you, IT needs to know everything about you do. You want your computer to store and save everything you do, everything you click on, all the words you type, all the tiktok you score through, all the pictures you look at, every single thing that you do.

Why computer forget about the data security risks behind that for a second? Just like as a human, how does that feel to know that all of that stuff is being recorded and stored in purple unity? And how useful does your computer need to become? What does that need to do with that data in order for IT to be worth the trade? Dm has been thinking about this for a long time, and he calls IT the personalized A I privacy paradox.

And IT goes something like this in order to build a more useful person's ed AI. You want more context recorded, but that raises more privacy concerns, which requires more need for data protection, which makes IT harder to build a more personal ed AI. So the desire of a personal, A I know part of IT, is this okay? We want to lack more things good.

That context is going to useful. But next, ability you go down this pathetic at some point, that's going to make the original goal harder to do. And you can see this paradox ying out in the world in two very different ways with microsoft.

You know they were pretty cavalier on privacy when they launched windows recall, lots of things to say and that, but let they launched a protocol, winters recall, which looked very familiar, but they took a very, very cavity approach to privacy. And that really hurt them. On the flip side, apple intelligence seems to respect privacy, but is actually is limiting what apple can actually do in terms of usefulness.

So they're kind of on this both sides of production. We've actually made many mistakes in this space. I think the most recent evolution of our thinking, uh, has really set us up well for the future, but it's not obvious.

Ous is not straight. Ford is one of those things you have to like tight Robing between and I to find the right path. IT doesn't make IT a choice between privacy community and the same time makes the product useful enough um because you're able to use the data and way to offer a personal day.

I I agree with that, but then you have to put that in front of users, right? And I think even there's something about the idea, just like here is an APP that shows a timeline of every web page i've ever been to feels instinctively weird to some people, right? And I think it's it's been very funny watching a lot of this because like you, of course, your browser knows all the web pages you've spent to like that's a witter web black.

Yes, that's how IT works. But I think got a lot of what has been happening in these recent months is people are slowly starting to understand kind of how much awareness their technology has of what they're doing with IT in a way that everybody probably should have had before but didn't. And I feel like what you did, especially with three one in the early days, is like really speed that process up, really, really like this.

APP knows everything and it's actually it's job to know everything. And I wonder if to something IT IT helps because it's such a thing you have to downloads. So by definition, you're going to get people who are more comfortable with IT rather than like building and in the appening system.

But you have to do, I would think right away we are like, okay, this is asking a lot. It's going to know a lot about you. I have to sort of immediately telegraft to you why it's worth IT. And I feel like that's that's a pretty big hurdle to clear right away.

Yeah, I think we certainly pave the way there, but I wouldn't say we didn't make any mistakes. I think showing a timeline of everything you've seen is interesting is a cool party trick like IT helps to create you this magical moment of like, wow, I didn't realize that the people love that. And that's partly why we need the first product in the space rewind.

But if if I really had to be honest, like people don't care about technology, they just care about their problems being solved. The technology is the means, the end. And this was too much of a cool. Let's see what the technology can do part of the product, unless here's the problem were trying to solve for you. So I do think that right user experience on personalized AI is to be very opinionated on the use cases.

What is IT the what are the problems in your life every day that we are trying to solve for you? How do we give you time back? How do we make IT so you're in time for dinner with your Young kids at night? That was.

Those are the kinds of problems people care about, the technology, how sophisticated e is. They could care less like that data, the architecture. It's important as because it's how we build the product, but to a user, that's just implementation detail.

So I do think limit less does a much Better job of this. This is why we've kind of evolved. And even partly reason named the product is the core experience of reminding. Time isn't the core thing people want. The jo B2Be don e is giv e me bac k mor e tim e, make me more productive, take things off of my plate, what are things I do everyday that Frankly, I just don't need to do in a machine, can do a Better job, be more reliable, and just give me back more time so I can do the things that I am uniquely well suit to do. So those are the kinds of things that in the kinds of experiences that I think ultimately win in this world of personalized day.

I what are some of those things that you identified early on as solutions to those problems they are describing?

Yeah, I mean, big one is a blank piece of paper. Very often as knowledge workers. You start with a blank ce of paper.

Maybe it's an article you're writing or email you're sending or even a simple text message sending you to somebody. It's writers. Block is A A big version of this problem, but it's this idea that starting from zero as much harder.

And part of what the machine can do, unique ly well is capture the context you might want when you're starting from zero. Um a good examples of drafting emails and I gave an example of start drafting. Starting from scratch is a much while spending the time and energy when a machine can service to you perfectly the thing you might need and want a way you can think about is auto complete for your life.

why? Why do so many times you have to start with a empty line? And where a machine can in provide an option? IT doesn't autonomy just right? Dry something can edit and tweak and change and delete.

That's like a perfect win between you, I guess, before a horse of buggies and self dars. There is going to be a day when I can do things autonomously. We trusted IT can book you a trip for you in your wife to italy in three months.

And you know, it'll put the right sea and everything right now. The use cases, I think, as well soon for are these semitones use cases. Things are drafting notes.

So that's just one of many, many others, is that memory, though IT IT is in the sense that the things that the context is useful for those moments are memories. There are things in your past, their details around your last conversation. If you think about this idea that we forget, ninety percent happens after week.

Give a team, weekly team. meet. Many folks probably listen to have a weekly team meeting with our team at work, made with an arrow long meeting. At best, the people remember six minutes to that last meeting. So, you know, simple things like following up with the context of what said in that decision, in the last meeting, the set of decisions, those kinds of use cases, meeting summaries, preparing you for meetings, the alive notes during meetings, all these things are incredible, well, great sort of use cases that personally I can help you solve IT.

Seems me there's almost too things going on there because on the one hand, there's the thing that's like, okay, i'm going to make IT the easier for you to remember at least all the important bits of your one hour long meeting last week, right? So that when you go to your next meeting, you you can very quickly call up all the things you talked last week.

That is I feel like I think a lot of A I companies are pursuing right this like take a bunch of notes or we will take the notes for you and then we're going to give you sort of quick recall of those notes. But I feel like you're also describing kind of a full step beyond that, which is just instead of helping you sort of actively remember something, we're going to use all the things that you forgot to help you do new things. Yes, those feels different things to me.

They are two different things. But the the the alloy raws go back to GPS or go back to phone number, remembering something. Phone number was the means, the end of a conversation of that person. If you don't have to remember phone number and just go straight the conversation that's when understanding cross ate that was the means to the end of getting to some place place. If you can just get a Better place, I have to think about that.

That's the means the end when people think about we're solving memory and trying to help you capture your memory is is not about the year effect that you have those memories and it's nice to clutch onto. It's the the goal of trying to solve a problem like drafting unit to somebody using in the context of your relationship. So those are all the means. The end, the ends are the things we focus on, one of the problems we can solve you, what are things we can take off your plate that A I can do well, and the data and the capture that we capture in your memories is the means that end.

Do you think there's value in the means there? I think you mentioned people don't actually spend a lot of time like scribing back through their old stuff. But I think about like the the whole sort of journal community, right? There's this real belief that like having these artifacts and reviewing them periodical and and having them come back to you as there's there's real value in just the process of revisiting the past. Do you think that matters in this context?

Yeah, I I do. And that just one of the many cases, like I think many people get value from limitless without doing anything, and the others will also get additional value of great examples. Getting insights into your life, when during the day are you the most excited?

You know, who in your life gives you energy? Who in your life drains energy? Looking back at the conversations you have with people are is a great way to answer the questions know how many times are you interrupting people? How many filter rewards are using? When are you using them?

All these things that sort of the introspective quantity of self ah you can think about know sleep fitness um you know eight sleep is sort of introduced all kind of a sleepiness but there's a whole set of that which is kind of mind fitness like how do I shop in the world through my conversations I can get a window into and how do I improve and how to get Better so I absolutely believe in that. I don't know if me you have to literally read everywhere. I think there's things again, I can do well there in that space to help you reflect and improve based off of your past. But that's all just one example of all the things we lose the moment we forget .

something ultimately in talking to them and others about this stuff IT seems like there are two huge chAllenges to solve with any kind of A I memory product. The first one is the A I one, which I actually thought would be the hard part, but am increasingly convinced is the easy part.

It's just how do you figure out what's actually relevant in all the data people are collecting? Like I sit down on my computer, I click seventy five links, I watched twenty tiktok. I sent three hundred sock messages and I have four meetings.

How does rewind or recall or anything else make sense of that? For me, most of the focus in this space don't actually think that's really a chAllenge or do this will be forever. It's a big like comp expense, but it's not an unsolved technological problem.

We have to take one more break and then we'll get into the tech that makes that work. And the much harder problem, i'll be IT back. Support for the show comes from the crucible moments, a podcast from scope capital.

We've all had turning points in our lives where the decisions we make end up having lasting consequences. No one knows this Better than the founders of some of today's most influential in critical moments. Let's listeners in on the maker break events that defined major companies like dropbox, youtube, roby's, od and more told by the founders themselves.

Tune in to the season two of crucial moments. Today you can listen at crucial moments, stop com, or where every listen podcasts. Alright, we're back. So the whole makes sense of this giant database of stuff that you do on your computer problem, that rewind, recall and others have the solution and keep hearing about is a technique called retrieval augmented generation, which everybody just calls rag, basically, in a rag system, you're applying an AI model only to a set of data that you've selected that you know is good and relevant. That means the only information the model can access to answer your question is inside of that dataset.

Like if you wanted ask questions about a book, you don't want to ask questions about the book to the whole internet, you just want to ask you about the book. And just by giving in the book that rag, there are some evidence that using rag can make A I models less likely to find in correct answers or make up new ones. And it's particularly useful, I think, right now in a business context where like a model can access your companies internal wiki and nothing else.

So it's more likely to find the right answer. It's a little harder to apply that idea to all the many varied things you do on a computer everyday, but is still a big step in the right direction. The much harder problem is getting all that data into the system in the first place.

Screen shots and audio are a decent approximation of what you do in your computer all day. But what about when you're on your phone or in the car, or watching T, V, or out in the real world, that where other humans are and not interacting with screens at all? If you buy the idea that more data is good and that the more you can collect, the more useful your A I tool can be, you need access to everything that a human sees, touches here, tastes, all their internal biometrics and a million other things.

Besides, we're not getting that technology anytime soon, no matter what anyone in tech will tell you, it's just not happening. And that's why most of these products are business focus right now. By the way, they're designed to help you remember what happened in a meeting, which is the finite and containable thing that you can record and summarize.

And IT has a beginning and an ending and outcomes where a long way away from applying these ideas to the rest of your life and the rest of your memory. The question in the meantime, though, is how much these tools need in order to be useful at all, like we can do the whole thing, but how do you do the next thing? The apple feature I mentioned up top is actually a good example here.

It's not like your iphone is automatically taking pictures every time IT senses something interesting happening. It's just trying to take pictures that you already have and put them together in the ways that you want that's technically doable and still really useful. So how else can these tools do just a little more like that. That question is what LED down and his team to rebrand their company from rewinds to limit less and to build a gadget in addition to their APP.

I think your particular conversations are the ones we've found has been hugely valuable, where moment nothing being captured today is a very human thing. IT is so much low hanging in for interns of the value we can create, especially in persons conversations. As a big reason we built the pendent is to capture more than just zoo meetings, but in person conversations as well.

Dependent he's talk king about is called the limitless less pendent. And it's a ninety nine dollar round clip that you can either wear on a land yard or attached tear clothes or backpack. A kind looks like an old school football to me.

Whenever you activate dependent, IT starts recording audio. And for limitless, the hope is that by capturing more of what you say, and here you'll capture more of everything else too. I think.

in particular, dependence is going to be amazing for relationships. Know, when I first conceived with this idea of something you would wear, that my capture conversations, I was terrified I to even mentioned IT to my wife because I thought she's going to hate IT. Because now finally, dan's going to win an argument.

And now the truth was the opposite. He said, perfect. Now we have clearly on what was said, what wasn't. And a lot of conflict comes from this communication, from misunderstanding misremembering.

So I actually think like that from from a single player perspective and maybe two player perspective, one or one relationships, visual relationships, are actually going to be Better, actually IT sounds wear. I have a couple friends who do this this thing that when I describe what our product does, they mentioned, they say, I think a lot of people do this. They don't want admitted because this sounds where what they do is.

At least two of my friends that I know of, when they are about to get into a fight with their partner, they say, okay, let's start recording. They put out the phone and they start with the voice, them, they record the conversation because they know that things we're going to get, he did. They know they want that may never go back to IT.

And and IT has been a gift, not a curse, to the relationship to have kind of this impetuous memory of what was said. And I think those are the kinds of things that wants people feel that actually know you see somebody Better when in your mind are so sure you're right. Like, no, you did not tell me get eggs before I went to go to trade your joice. All you did, and I just I was in my mind for us IT sort of he creates that is out of truth and authenticity and connection in the world that I think today, because we forget so much, we don't know what we forget. We have conflict needlessly.

That's such an interesting example and I love that because there there is immediately part of me that just recoils the idea of my wife being like, hey, i'm going to start recording as soon as I start like being ask.

But then I can know I can also totally see the point of that and this goes back to that seems sort of fill half ical question like how much are we supposed to remember, right? And like, yeah, I would make my life easier if I had a pendent on that was like, yeah, he didn't tell you to go get eggs, but actually just reminded me to get eggs while I was out like that. That's where we go, right? That's where we actually get to something useful as I don't forget the eggs total degree.

And by the way, I think that this is a product that is probably Better suited for people who just wanted do Better and be Better. Not everyone wants that. Some people just, they want to watch football.

They want to be left alone, know and and they don't have this idea that their life could be Better. But I actually think most people in this planet live their lives as zombies. They go through the routines and habits of their day.

They never really asked themselves what they could be doing Better for themselves, for their, for their partners, for their families, for their job. And this is a tool to give you a window into your past in a way that helps you would do Better, be Better, show up Better and do more. And I think there are some people for whom that's what they want and not that's okay.

Let me put that slightly tly more terribly to some of those people, which is, I think most people exist in both of those states some of the time, right? And I think part of what is interesting about products like this is, I think about that the same way I think about like A R glasses, right?

Sometimes super useful and I want more information in my face, and I wanted know where i'm going, and I wanna know all the information of the coffee shops around me. And sometimes that sounds awful. And and the idea of having something on my face all the time that are showing me that soft, whether I like IT or not, is a problem, even though sometimes it's useful.

And I feel like with something like this too, that is that kind of knows me and seize me and is recording everything and is giving you back to me. There are times i'm gonna want that and get value from IT and feel like it's useful. And there are times where that's onna feel intrusive to me potentially.

And and I guess what I wonder both for you as a product maker, Angeles, for kind of us, says people, is like, is this the kind of thing that were either going to learn to live with being there all the time and will just ignore IT? Or can these things be kind of episodes and we can use them as tools rather than these kind of ambient, always on, always aware? thanks. Yeah I I think people .

will decide and choose that path on their own based off of where what value they get. I'm going to war. The dependent were mostly, I go, but sometimes going to take them off, put my pocket and that's OK.

We've decided to work that way. You will turn off and you put IT in your pocket. I won, you know.

And so like that, I think important you give people control and choice and they will choose for themselves when it's value or when it's not with the recognition that there are. Sometimes you mean, I know that might be valuable. Later you're going to know the conversation with the friend.

And like you actually, they're going to give me some good advice. You might, if I wear this pens, I can capture you. I really want to remember you in a saying.

And sure, that's fine. Anything those those things will change slowly over time, and people will throw their behavior and through the trade off they make. We're not forcing anyone to use this without a wanting to use IT.

I think the ability to use and capture more of their life is a choice. Just like wearing glass of the morning is a choice. If you want to see Better for the day, you can. If for any reason you don't want to see the world, you don't have to. I think most people were where glasses most of the time, they like that, that we realized that what they want to do, they want to see the world for what IT is, not the blurry version that gets mango up because their lens is aren't quite sharp.

I'm sure you've noticed this by now, but dan is one hundred percent committed to the big memory AI theory here. And in the last couple of years, even really the last couple of months, IT has started to seem like the rest of the tech industry has bought. And just as aggressively, a bunch of the biggest companies on earth are now building products that sound an awful lot like rewind and limitless less.

And when I asked about all this new stuff happening, he said what all CEO say, which is what I guess are supposed to say. Which is that, you know, it's validating to have competition and he's not worried. And limitless has the right business model and imitation is the serious as form of flattery, all that good stuff. But when I found myself really wondering about all this was whether all of microsoft problems with recall, which specifically, if you don't remember, was the fact that IT was keeping all of your data basically unprotected on your computer, which is just an able security disaster of waiting to happen, if that might make people even more wary of a product that wants to store all of your data from everything forever. And he said he actually thinks it's a win for limitless.

If we do, I have to spend as much time or energy evAngelizing this concept in this problem, such an that will do that and use my talking points, all for IT. That's great. That's great.

Free marketing for me. And ideally, they do IT and they stumble. And then people think, actually, that was a cool idea.

But how I really don't like how they implemented these are saying something else out there. And that just creates a bigger market for me. So honestly, I feel validated.

I feel seen. I feel like it's a party in the desert and now were planted some trees. And soon this will be a remain forced.

Ed, i've heard from again and others that there's probably a bunch of billion dollar businesses to be built on A I memories, things that can collect and then make you of all of the data associated with your life. I think he's probably right. And I think you'll see many more companies try and convince you to store everything about yourself in their worlds.

It's gonna get weird, and everybody should tread pretty carefully. But through this all, i'm still thinking about the idea of getting in a fight with my wife and starting a recording on my phone as soon as things get heated, or sitting down at lunch with a friend and asking them if I can record in case they say something memorable. Sure, those things might make IT easier to remember things later.

And while I could take notes or something at the end of the meal, the real value might genuinely come from being able to recall something I didn't think was important. But suddenly, days or a week later, I realize actually matters of law. But would recording those things change those things? Would lunch with my friend or a fight with my wife be different with the record on knowing that they would be preserved for forever and for me to access for action items or whatever else?

Does that change of the thing is, is happening? I think that does, even though I can't always explain exactly how maybe done. And everyone else are right that in a few years or a few decades, IT won't feel different and will all be used to IT, just like we're used to, you know, phone cameras being totally ube could now.

But I can't help but feel like maybe having superpowers runs the risk of making us a little less human in the process. We is that what all the marvel movies are actually about having superpowers and being human at the symptom way? Sorry, that's another podcast on. I'm fascinated by tools like limitless and recall and I think they're going na be really useful to a lot of people.

I'm gonna all of them, Frankly, but i'm also increasingly excited about the less ambitious versions of these apps where you get to decide what's important but still let A I make sense of bit like I use this APP called my mind and it's basically just a repository of things that I like. That's how I use IT, uh, podcast, episode, T V show, a funny gift that I find an article, a photo. I take anything that I like, I just save to my mind.

And the APP automatically categorizes them with A I so that I can then search for sad movies or articles about sports or things that are red, and it'll show me stuff that i'd like. I've also really loved the new photos APP in I O S, A teen, which really emphasize those automatically generated albums of people or things that you did, or just particularly interesting days you've had recently. Google similarly recently announced a feature I think is super clever, where you just create a giant repository of screen shots that google A I will look through and try to make sense of for you.

In all those cases, all you have to do is basically signal. This is something i'd like to remember. This matters to me.

And then the A I model does the rest. I feel like that's gonna a big win for my memories. I won't be able to see the pictures in my head, but at least I be able to find them again.

That feels close enough, right? That's IT for the verge cast today. Thanks to dance for chatting with me, and thank you, as always, for listening as I set up top.

This is the first episode in our three part series on A I. So make sure you come back next sunday for the next installment. Very different to fund one.

This show is produced by andrei O B M. James and will poor. The verge cast is a vert production, and part of ox media podcast will be back on tuesday and friday. We've got like to get stock about will see them rocking.

Support for this episode de comes from A W S. A W S, generate A, A, I gives you the tools to power your business forward with the security and speed of the world's most experienced cloud.