illscience@illscience2h ago

Hearing this week that personal assistants cost $3k-$7k per user per year, depending on scale effects / vertical integration / model selection. Implications/questions: - Consumer subsidies will be a huge factor; people don’t care about privacy, they want utility and they want it for free. - Model costs are deflating, but not fast enough for many startups. The dark horse is that Jev may rapidly deflate computer-use costs 100x. - An interesting counter-position would be building an expensive and narrowly focused agent — perhaps combining proprietary supply (Carbone tables!) with a unique POV (“no one goes there anymore, go to The Grill instead”). - Social is wide open but hinges on a key design challenge: how can agents increase social cohesion and not feel invasive in a group chat? A working social agent would rightly attract an avalanche of capital and be hard for incumbents to replicate. - Finally, there are vertical focus areas like financial services where the LTVs outweigh the subsidy needed and are outside the near-term competitive focus of the incumbents. If it were me, I’d focus here — Credit Karma as an agent >> Credit Karma as an app. Overall, it’s still very, very early, and we may very well be in the MySpace era of social or iPhone 2010. Hang onto your hats and keep building!!