David Pawlan, creator of Assistant Benchmark, has tracked 147 AI assistants so far, and in his group chats of AI power users, the number one fear is trust. It comes up in 22% of roughly 3,600 messages.

He puts agents through head-to-head tests, like ordering same-day flowers as cheaply as possible or planning a weekend in LA that's both luxurious and cost-efficient, to see which ones can hold competing preferences.

He joins a16z's Anish Acharya and Josh Elman to discuss why the scariest agent failures are the embarrassing ones, why agents are where e-commerce was in 1997, why scale is still a moat, and the "dark agent" that could speak to the parts of ourselves we don't reveal.

0:52 Inside a meetup for 100 agent nerds
2:52 Why we'll all have an army of agents
5:36 Trust is power users' top fear
6:28 Building fences around your agent
10:14 Privacy loses to free pizza
12:41 Can agents balance price and speed?
14:19 How agents define luxury differently
19:44 Migrating from one agent to another
21:06 What your photo roll tells an agent
25:48 Will agents make us more rational?
27:38 Why paternalism kills products
31:43 Gossipy agents as social glue
33:41 Scale is still a software moat
36:55 From OpenClaw to agents hanging out
39:23 Agents that introduce you to people
46:15 Predictions and the dark agent idea

YouTube: https://t.co/uLDJ5ztFWF

@DavidPawlan @illscience @joshelman