A very human vision for going all-in on AI

Support for the show comes from L'Oreal Group, the global beauty leader, defining the future of beauty through science and technology. L'Oreal Group, create the beauty that moves the world. Welcome to the Birdcast, the flagship podcast of personal knowledge management. I'm your friend David Pierce and please believe me when I say that if I could make this show entirely about to-do list apps and note taking structures and the PARA method, I would. But for your sake and frankly also for mine, that is not what we're going to do here. What we are going to do here is the second part of our two-part mini series about how developers are using and building with AI in their products. Basically, I reached out to a couple of people who make apps that I really like and just said, can you come explain to me what AI does, what it doesn't do and how you think it fits into this product. We had a lot of fun with Thomas Paul Mann from Raycast last week and this week I'm talking to Sarri Azut who builds a tool called Sublime. The way I would describe Sublime, you'll hear Sarri describe it too, but the way I would describe it is as a bookmarking tool and then some. The idea is you collect stuff, you find a link that you like or you highlight something in a Kindle book or you journal into Sublime and not only does it put everything in one place and let you make collections and let you search stuff, it tries to use that to start a discovery journey. If you save a quote from an article that you really like, you open up that quote on Sublime's app and it'll also show you this endless feed of other interesting things that you might enjoy based on that quote. Sometimes it's totally similar, sometimes it's by a similar author, but the idea is it's sort of an explorer system built around the stuff that you save. I think that's very cool and really interesting and I have actually really enjoyed using Sublime to just like dump things that I like. I read a lot for my job and just like putting in articles that I like and quotes that I find interesting and all that stuff in there and just sort of using it as a database to find even more cool stuff has been really powerful. Sublime, they're using AI to make a lot of that stuff possible. I think the thing that's so interesting to me about Sublime is that Siri, as you'll hear, is a very human oriented person. Sublime is not some like whiz bang new AI app. It is very like deliberately sort of quiet and relaxed and it's not a high tech feeling thing. It feels like sort of old internet in a way, but there's a lot of AI underneath all of that. I wanted to talk to Siri about how to make those two things match. How do I have a place that feels private and mine and human and sort of interesting and curated and cared for when it's just chat GPT all the way down underneath? Is that disingenuous? Is it possible? Do those two things eventually run into each other and cause conflict? This is all the stuff that I've been thinking about with frankly every product I use and I think lots of developers I talked to are thinking about this. How do you use AI in useful ways and not just sort of shout loudly about AI to make venture capitalists want to give you more money? There's a lot of that. That's fine. More power to the venture capitalist. I think the best apps are the ones that are going to figure out how to strike this balance and I think Sublime is actually doing it really well. That's what we're going to talk about. She's always a good time. She and I have met a few times and I'm very excited about this. All of that is coming up in just a second. But first I have to go and make sure that nothing in my Sublime library is actually going to get me in trouble in case anybody finds it after we do this episode. This is the Vergecast. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from LinkedIn ads. When you're running your own business, every decision could feel like make or break and you can't afford to waste a penny. So if your B2B marketing is still falling short, it may be because you're preaching to the wrong choir, whether you know it or not. If you want to reach the right professionals, use LinkedIn ads. LinkedIn has grown to a network of over one billion professionals and 130 million decision makers according to their data. That's where they stand apart from other advice. You could target your buyers by job title, industry, company, role, seniority, skills, company revenue. So you can stop wasting budget on the wrong audience. That's why LinkedIn ads boast one of the highest B2B return on ad spend of all online ad networks. Seriously, all of them. So get your ads in front of the right people and make your B2B strategy work. You can spend $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads and get a free $250 credit for the next one. Just go to linkedin.com slash Vergecast. That's linkedin.com slash Vergecast. Terms and conditions apply. Sarah Azut, welcome to the Vergecast. Thank you, David, for having me excited to be here. Siri just went off on I said that, which is just a very funny thing to have happened. Happens all the time. I believe this. I think the place I want to start is I just want you to describe a little bit of the story of Sublime because it's a thing I find really fascinating. You and I have talked about it a few times in the past, but for people who don't know, what is Sublime and kind of where did it come from? Yeah. Sublime is in a very concrete utilitarian way. It's a personal knowledge management tool. I didn't start wanting to build a personal knowledge management tool. I wanted to start by building a different way of being on the internet. What we've built really is a way to curate and build a personal library. The catch for Sublime is it's connected to other people's libraries. I think that unlocks just a different experience on the internet where you are connected to other people. There is serendipity, but fundamentally, the way you're interacting with the tool is as a personal knowledge management tool and not some performance circus. One of the things I always liked about Sublime is it seems like, and I'm curious if this is your experience, there are people who get that basic activity of just save things that mean something to you in the broadest possible way. Things that make you feel something. Put them in a place and trust that something will come back about that. There are people who instinctively get that and find that activity even on its own, really cathartic, just like the act of bookmarking does something for some people. There are other people who are like, what in the hell is the point of this? I'm just creating this massive text file of nonsense that I'm never going to look at again. It really feels like you can sort the world into those two groups of people and there is nothing in between. I mean, 100%, that said, I would argue that it's been a niche thing because the tools that serve this need don't have a big ROI. What's the point of storing this? I think if you experience Sublime, you save one thing and you go down a rabbit hole that is just like you don't regret the minute spent. It's just unlocking a different experience. I do think a big part of it is what's the point because the ROI of that in the past has been I've got a massive archive of things that I will do nothing with. The timing that you've been building Sublime is right next to this crazy AI boom. Did you think about this as sort of an AI adjacent product from the beginning? Because I think spiritually it both is and isn't in ways that I really want to talk about. But were you thinking about what some of these language models might do in sort of the early days of building out this product? I think the question of what is your AI strategy or starting even with tech first is very foreign to me. Even just companies or founders that tell me I'm building a Web 3 startup, I'm building a B2B startup, that tells me nothing about whether that's like a trend that is very easy to mistake for a real market and a real product opportunity. The way I think about it is what is a problem that I want to solve and in what ways are the current technologies available going to allow us to solve this in a better way. If you think about a tool like Sublime, there's broadly speaking three jobs to be done. We help people collect ideas, we help people connect ideas, and then we help people create with those ideas. Looking at those three functions, on the collect front, I am very opinionated about this is taste driven. This is judgment driven. Only the user knows what deserves to be in their personal library. We have connections. You can plug in your Instagram bookmarks, Twitter bookmarks, Kindle highlights, all the things, but the act of just like the judgment of what deserves to be here, we don't use AI. You could theoretically have some argument for somebody that's just like monitoring what you're doing in your browser and deciding what's worth adding. We've decided not to do that. There are some things in the collect experience that we use AI for where there is utility and not judgment. For example, podcast magic. With just a screenshot, you can send the transcript of a part of a conversation that you like straight into your library. You made the judgment call, but we use advanced AI to go from screenshot to a moment. Nobody needs to know that AI is a part of that process. It just is invisible, which is I think a big part of the way we approach AI is it's invisible. I remember I got feedback in the early days by like sophisticated tech investors saying we should say like this is AI driven and our landing page should have like AI powered connections. There is an argument that there is a window opportunity that opened because people were more open to trying new things. But I think for the most part, once the shock and off fades, people go back to the baseline and they just want their problem solved. I think a big part of it is just play the long game. It doesn't matter what is powering this thing. It matters that it's solving something interesting for people. That's the connect piece. Collect connect. Then there's the create piece. The create piece is interesting because this is where users need a lot of control. You might have a collection of really cool, maybe I'm collecting ideas for sublime merch. I have got a collection of cool things that I've curated. One potential interesting thing is how do I combine all of these things into something new? These are my sources and references. If AI is a generalization machine, it's going to retreat to average, what can AI do with my sources? Ideally, it can recombine them into something new. I think the problem is not a model problem. It's an interface problem where at some point the sort of like AI assisted iteration stops being great and you need that manual tweaking. That's where I think chat sort of ends. I just tried so many times to tell chat GPT, change this and this image and it all just kind of breaks. I think we've been very cautious on the create front because we've seen a lot of people just panic to add AI features everywhere. People don't like it if it doesn't work. That's where we're at with it is I think it is interesting to think about source-grounded creation. But I think the quality is so subjective and users need a lot of control. I think a lot of the disappointment with tools is the lack of control. Yeah. I like that framing of it. I think a thing you and I agree on is that that connect phase is actually something these models are already really good at. One example I give all the time is if you want to just do a useful, valuable thing with chat GPT or any of these other tools, get movie recommendations. Tell it a bunch of movies you like and let it feed you other movies that you might like. It's low stakes in the sense that if it's wrong or it hallucinates a movie or whatever, that's not the end of the world. But it is able to just sort of open up a bunch of doors for you and be like, are any of these anything? Sometimes that's not what you want and sometimes that's exactly what you want. I think in a case like this, one of the things that I immediately gravitated to about Sublime is that idea that, okay, not only am I going to save a bunch of stuff and I build this library full of things that are meaningful to me, but also it's going to help me extend that library because every time I save something, I save a quote from an article I like. As soon as I open that thing up, it just gives me an endless feed of other similar, I guess, is the word I would use, things. One of the things I'm thinking about is as you're tuning these systems and building them, how do you even decide what success looks like? Because again, in this sort of old way of thinking about movie recommendations, it's like, okay, if I like this movie, I probably like other comedies. I like movies by the same director. I like movies with the same actors. We had parameters. A generation ago, Sublime would have been the same thing. Like, oh, I saved a GQ article. You probably like GQ. You probably like articles by this person or about this person or about this subject. You're trying to do something much fuzzier. It seems like both a sort of opportunity and a challenge to figure out what is that fuzzy thing that you're trying to do. It's a huge challenge. It's a huge challenge because it's not deterministic. The software in the past is rules-based. This is every piece of content that you add to Sublime has an embedding. It's just going to show you things that are semantically in proximity to that embedding. We try to tweak certain things here and there. I mean, there's this whole field of AI evals that is emerging, but I think your point is very clear. What I like about this in particular in the Sublime use case is that I think people think of hallucinations as a bug. I think in this context, it's a feature. It's the fact that it's going to take you down a path that is completely unexpected, that is interesting. I think your point is clear. In fact, it just changes software development because in the past, I've got my project management tool linear, and here's the ticket and do this, and it's approved, done. You could be in endless cycles of iterating. In fact, when I test a lot of this stuff myself, we've got a database of millions and millions and millions of things. I can run tests on 10 things today. By the way, the output for you is going to be different for me with the same card. I think we're still learning, but it's a completely different era. Yeah. I mean, it does seem like you have to develop a philosophy around what's good on that kind of thing because I assume one thing you've going for you is that everybody has saved all of this stuff into the database. By definition, your database is full of things that people have gone through the effort to save in one way or another. That is like every single one of them has some signal of importance. Figuring out what that is and what that looks like much harder, but it is like you've sort of deleted all the crap from the internet just by virtue of what the tool is. But then deciding what is good to put next to my stuff is so hard. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting. I learned a lot about recommendation systems from Ken Stanley, who wrote an incredible book and something he was saying about social media and the way that algorithms work on social media that really resonated with me is if you are driving down a highway and you turn around and look at a car crash, the algorithm interprets that as you love looking at car crashes and then it starts to show that to everyone. And so it's very based on, you know, if anyone has experienced going viral online, once you're past like a certain number of likes, it just keeps like cascading. The way that we think about recommendations on sublime is we do have a human page rank of sorts, meaning you added this card or idea to sublime and then I added it to my library. So there's some signal there that two people like this. What we are saying is past certain threshold, which is very low. It could be three people. It doesn't matter if three people have added it or a hundred. It's just a basic threshold and then there's just a different level of openness. So we have some philosophy around let's not just show the obvious stuff, you know, because that's everywhere on the internet and part of the philosophy with sublime is how can we help more people find the non-obvious stuff on the internet. So algorithms are, you know, like all of this stuff is like opinions embedded in pixels. So there are, of course, underlying opinions and decisions that we're making that are philosophical, but I think your point of how open-ended and subjective this is remains true. Yeah. And it does seem like going back to what you were saying about the collect idea, like it makes making it giving people the tools to make that particular corpus of content, like in the way that you're describing, becomes super, super important. Right. Like, and I think this is where I get into like what is sort of the human AI relationship in all of this. And I think a thing that you and I agree on is that the best thing you can do for your AI tool is just feed it good data that you care about. And it feels like we're in this place now of like, you know, I think you talk about the sort of collect, connect, create loop. And I think what a lot of AI companies want to do is just collapse that into like all sort of one thing where like you do a prompt and then the AI does the rest. And it's doing the collecting and the connecting and the creating for you and that all of it is just sort of happening and collection and creation are the same thing. And that to me is like a bleak future that I kind of hate, but I love this idea of like, I'm going to build a library and database of stuff that I care about. And then the tools job is to help me make meming and something out of it. But it does start with like, it's a hell of a lot of work to make people make that corpus of stuff. Yeah. I mean, so a couple of things. I think I 100% agree and believe that the value of dumping all sorts of context about any given thing in one place has gone up with AI, whether it's coming up with a marketing plan, all of your, you know, research for a book, like just centralizing all of that in one place that you can dump and then export easily. That has immense value because AI grounded in your sources is just going to unlock immense value. I feel like notebook LM was the thing that like turned a lot of people's brains on to this, that it's like, oh, just stick a bunch of PDFs in a place. And then you can, you can sort of talk to this tiny corpus of data about whatever you're working on. It was like one small version of this thing that made people go like, oh, when I start, when I tell you what matters, and then we do something about it, like cool, cool things start to happen. 100%. So there, so this context question becomes more and more important. And I think we, you know, book a limb is probably more about like sales and just the positioning is a little bit more enterprising. But I think similarly with, with creatives, I mean, some of my favorite use cases for sublime could be something like, I have a collection of phrases I love. And when I'm creatively stuck, I will just be have a one click button. I'll open chat. GPT with those sources. And I'll be like, you know, help me get unstuck use like for this other thing I'm writing using these references. And it's just fun. You know, I also think people take AI so seriously. And a lot of it is about speed and volume. But some of my favorite use cases are just where it's not about speed. Like I would argue a lot of the places where it's helping me is it's not necessarily faster. It's just better because I'm constantly iterating and, and spending more time with, with ideas because the cost of doing so is lower. Yeah. It just seemed to me that there is something, I don't know, sort of essentially pro human about sublime that like, and you and I talked about this before and you write this news that I already talk about it all the time that is like, this is not supposed to feel like mining a database of, you know, AI generated highlights from magazine articles. Is it, is it, is there a risk the further you go into, like we're building these sort of cool AI tools that are going to help make sense of all of this, where like it stops feeling like this sort of human discovery process. Can the AI get too good at this over time? I think that in a world of AI, you can think of companies as automate the things people don't want to do. Or help people do more of the things that they choose to do. That they get to do, that they have more time to do. And I think that we are designing sublime to be a joyful experience. And I think if you just keep your eye on the, the kinds of, the feeling that you want to orchestrate, you don't get like distracted. So I think part of, I think building in this day and age is putting blinders on, you know, the way like race horses are. You could look around and everyone's like, you know, all tools look the same. It's like a big prompt box and, you know, V zero and bolt and level one. Everything's the same. And I think it's just very easy to, to, to like be, be part of that like mimetic cycle. But, but the antithesis to that is just what is the feeling that you want to generate for your customers and stay, keep your eye on that. The big prompt box is actually exactly why I brought this up. Because to me, there's a, there's a really easy version of sublime to build. If you wanted to that says, okay, we have this giant database full of interesting, meaningful stuff to lots of people. And what we're going to do is we're going to build sublime bot and you're going to use it to query all the greatest quotes in history, right? Like tease this out long enough. And it's like, okay, we, we presumably have the 10 most relevant meaningful quotes on any subject you can think of. And we're going to start to, we're going to start to collate that for you. We'll, we'll make a wall calendar for you with meaningful. Like there's just sort of a million ways you could go if you start the process with prompt this database that we've built, right? But, and you can like sort of do that in the search of sublime now, but like sublime really doesn't want you to do it that way. It really wants you to start by saving something or making something and then go from there. And I feel like that, that at some level has to be a deliberate choice, right? To say this is not fundamentally like a, a thing you can go look at. It's a thing you do first. Yeah. I, so that was very intentional. I don't think that what you're describing is antithetical to the vision, meaning I can imagine a world where we've grown to like a very, very large database where people might want to interact with that database very differently. Like you can imagine thinking what's on your mind today. And instead of posting on Twitter, how many people actually post on Twitter? The vast majority of people are just consuming. So you start with a thought, an intention, something that's on your mind. And then you go down this rabbit hole of related ideas. I do think that intention over attention is one of my guiding principles. So instead of a for you feed, it's what do you want? I think there's something very fundamentally different about that that feels important to me. But I think there's a lot of ways in which we can extend the functionality that we already have and enable new kinds of experiences and still stay true to that sort of feeling. It's nuanced, right? But there is something that gets very flat and boring about a world where everything is served to you in summaries. And, and there is, I think like as with everything, there's an opportunity to be at the extremes for us. It's never going to be about just the summary. It's here's some very interesting, cool sub-stack by this person that you didn't know that relates to this other thing. And, and I don't think it's mutually exclusive with the other reality. I think we'll just live in a world where both coexist and, and serve different needs. All right, we got to take a break and then we're going to come back with more from Sarah Izout about Sublime. Very back. Support for the show comes from L'Oreal Group using the latest advancements in science and tech to create personalized beauty solutions for all. The global beauty leader recently introduced two breakthrough technologies that bring the power of light to hair care and skin care. Light, straight and multi-styler and the new LED face mask, both of which were recognized as CES 2026 Innovation Award honorees. Learn more about both technologies on L'Oreal.com. L'Oreal Group, create the beauty that moves the world. So you mentioned podcast magic. And I want to, I want to talk about podcast magic because I think it, it, to me, it's sort of a perfect example of how to build, as far as I can tell, like an extremely AI driven, essentially like AI dependent product that doesn't, that still sort of hits the like human spirit of the thing you're talking about. This is pure like AI as tool, not as lifestyle decision, right? And I am like very bullish on AI as a tool and very bearish on it as a lifestyle decision, just to put my own cards on the table. Just tell me a little bit about podcast magic and kind of where this thing came from. Yeah. So podcast magic essentially is the simplest way to capture insights from podcasts. It came from both a personal need of sometimes I listened to David on the vergecast saying something really smart and I am constantly, you know, constantly that happens all the time and I am walking, working out with my kids out for a walk, whatever it is. And the only way I get to kind of retain that piece of information is when I'm back on my laptop or there's some like gymnastics I could do with other tools. But the normal thing people do, which is like the existing behaviors often take a screenshot. It's such a thing that, that people do. In fact, when I tell everyone this idea, they're like, yeah, I have already a lot, a lot of screenshots of this stuff. Of course, they never go back to that. So I remember one day seeing somebody add a Spotify link to Sublime for a podcast. And in the notes, they were, they said minute 11, 14, Lenny is talking about, you know, whatever. And I posted it in our team chat and I said, this is so silly. People want the equivalent of the Kindle highlight for podcasts and it just doesn't exist. And Alex from our team said, this is probably a silly idea, but it should be a screenshot. And I was like, that's not silly. And it just, my mind immediately went to, you know, we've got public RSS feeds. We've got OCR, you know, this should be close to possible. And so I spent close to a year actually, because there's, you know, as, as, as much as people want you to believe that coding is easy and agents will do everything. Like reality has, you know, a lot of details and, and edge cases. And it took a long time to get it right. But, but fundamentally the way it works is you take a screenshot from the podcast player screen or the lock screen, or you could use the iOS shortcut and just say, Hey Siri podcast magic. And then within 30 seconds, you have an email that tells you, here's broadly speaking, the moment that you were listening to, here's the transcript. And it's going to use AI to figure out like, Oh, it's not 30 seconds or a minute. It, depending on what you're listening to, we will use AI to kind of extrapolate what it might be. But again, user control is important. So we're building ways for you to be like, Oh, actually, I really like that sentence or I want us to start earlier later. So user control is very important. And, and then of course the podcast magic clips sync to sublime. So you can discover related ideas, semantically search them. It is for us a very strategic top of funnel play for sublime where sublime is this ecosystem, the people that love it are obsessed with it. But like you said, it's, you know, it's either you get it or you don't. I think podcast magic is more of a toy with an immediate aha moment. And it's working very well as a top of funnel. Uh, but yeah, I think for us, the AI, like we don't use the word AI in the promotional materials for it at all. Does it matter? You know, how we make this happen, doesn't matter. What matters is that you can now capture insights from podcasts the same way you highlight books on a candle. Totally. But it is, I mean, the way you described it, like it is basically AI the whole way down. Right. Yeah. So we, once you send a screenshot, we will use that image to determine what is the podcast, what is the podcast title, what is the timestamp? We need those three things. Then of course we do all sorts of mechanics to index like the millions and millions of podcasts out there to do this really quickly. And then we use AI to, to once we have that transcript, we'll use AI to figure out where, what's like the right start and end time. And of course we use, you know, tools to, for transcription and, and audio matching. So it's, it's AI all the way down. Yeah. That's such an interesting one. Cause there's a, there's a chunk of that. That is technically pretty straightforward, right? Like look at a screenshot and tell me the title of the podcast on that screenshot and what time it's showing is like a functionally solved technical problem. Right. And I think one thing that drives me crazy about, especially the, this like these AI glasses and cameras is, uh, they, you point the camera at a, like a banana or a big bag of nuts that says nuts and huge letters on it. And it's like, look, it knows it's a bag of nuts. And it's like, that's not impressive. We solved this problem so long ago that, that it can see the word nuts and know that it's nuts is not interesting anymore. But anyway, so there's a, there's a chunk of this that is like pretty straightforward. But then you get to the point where it's like, okay, not only are we going to like pull the transcript, which itself, that stuff has gotten vastly better because of things like whisper the model from, from open AI. Um, but we're going to actually try to figure out not just what was happening at this second, but like what is, what is the conversation that was happening around this screenshot that made you take a screenshot. And that feels like the kind of thing that you just straight up couldn't do not very long ago. Absolutely. I think, I mean, that is something that AI is very, very good at. It's the, the meme of take a couple of bullets and make it something big or take something big and make it something very small. That compression, I'm amazed. Like sometimes even as we were designing, cause all of these things, it's about the nuance and the details and, you know, like, I, I, I always remind it, like reality has a surprising amount of detail every time we are like tinkering with, with any of these things. Um, but yeah, I think that in, in, in this case, when we decided that we were going to have the moment title from AI, like it is so good, the way that it can just like detect like what is the heart and soul of, of this conversation. So yeah, I think there's a lot of things AI is, is good at. There's a lot of things AI is not good at. Broadly speaking, I think that. Or my TLDR on this stuff is AI is incredible at the shallow technical rule bound stuff that has more of a clear answer. Like transcription is a great example of that. I think AI is helpful, but not a genetic in the stuff that is more fuzzy and subjective. And a lot of, I think the challenges with the implementations I'm seeing right now is they're kind of applying this agente philosophy to things that are not agente, it sort of seems to me like a lot of people in tech have fooled themselves into believing that life is a clear sort of input output mechanism for a lot of things. And sometimes, and again, I want this to work. I, you know, I am not, this isn't like some purity test around, you know, I don't want this stuff. Like I, I've tried a lot of these tools for generating marketing assets, for doing outreach for, you know, podcast magic is a great example. I've got very little time in my hands. I've got a small team. I would love to deploy AI agents to reach out to a bunch of podcasters and get them to share podcast magic on their show. Try doing that with any of the tools out there. It's terrible. You know, there's just so, so many invisible details. There's a reason why, you know, maybe for some podcaster, I should reach him on LinkedIn, this one I should do on Twitter. This one really likes concise stuff for this one. This is the right context. You can't automate this stuff. It just seems to me like, like we've, we've got wrong. The sense of how many things we believe fit that archetype of is a simple structure problem with a concise and consistent notion of correctness. Like, no, most work is fuzzy. Most work is like start in one place, change direction, respond to this like nuanced thing. And this is why I think we're just much further than a lot of people say in, in, in just making progress with this stuff. Does it mean that it's not incredibly helpful? Like the semantic search alone, the, like AI for search as you, you know, in the context of sublime is amazing. Now is that a 10x or is that a 10% I don't know how to quantify that. It certainly made my life better. I don't know that it's made my life 10x better. Um, but I think a lot of it breaks down with expectations. What do we expect from, from these tools personally? I think I've sort of replaced this, this AI agents thinking with smart automation. It becomes far less disappointing when you think about it that way. There's not as much VC money in smart automation as far as I can tell, but I think you're probably right. Totally. And I think that's what drives, it's driving a lot of this, right? It's, it's, you know, the narrative for the VC has to be, we are building a genetic AI for X, but the reality is that the consumer doesn't want that narrative because they don't buy that narrative. I mean, of course they wanted it. If it works, if you tell me, you can reliably give me software that will do my taxes every year, I will not say no. The truth is we haven't figured out how to do, build that software. Right. And it's, it, the road from here to there seems so sort of plausible that everybody has convinced themselves that it is inevitable. And I just don't think it is. I do want to make the case before we move on very quickly. I think search is absolutely a 10 X thing, not a 10% thing. And I think this has been one of the things that has most blown my own mind in starting to use this stuff. Like in, in sublime, it feels like this, there's this app called my mind that I use a lot that, that feels very much like this, just the idea of being able to put all your stuff into a place and then trust that you can get out of it, not just like the, the thing that you're looking for, but the actual either piece of information or related stuff or sort of discovery experience that you're looking for is so sincerely life changing. Like the only comparison I can make is, is when Gmail came out and you could search your email instead of having to go find it. And all of a sudden you didn't have to categorize anything. You could just archive email. But now instead of searching Delta and opening four emails to go find my, you know, the, my frequent flyer number, I can just ask my email for my frequent flyer number. Like that, that is a step change in how useful all of this stuff is, especially if you're somebody who likes to save things. The idea of like, I'm so done with like notebooks and tagging systems and like carefully curating wherever I've just entered this phase where it's just like, I'm just dumping shit wherever. And I have full faith that I can find it again with, with just the teeniest, tiniest bit of knowledge about it. And that is like one, once a system like that works and you trust it, you use it completely differently. And I think it is amazing. Yeah. It's a don't organize, just search. Uh, we, we, we call it vibe search. And it's the, it's like, that's this idea that I can be having this conversation with you and be reminded of, you know, what was that saying that Andres Karpathy tweeted that, you know, was vaguely about why the agentic AI is overhyped and he may not have used any of those keywords in that, but we'll still find it again. I agree with you that for these particular products, there's a 10 X, like the reason that ever no 10 years ago was not very useful is because it functioned as a collecting place, but the retrieval was really bad. So I do think that the, the case for why to do this now is first of all, it's retrievable. There's the connections piece. There's what we discussed about the importance of having all of your context in one place that you can then extract. I think that there's no doubt that that's a 10 X for people using this product experience. Now, for the economy, I think the expectation for these tools and what they're going to do for the economy, that's a different conversation, but, but I couldn't agree more with the search piece. Yeah. And it does seem like one thing that strikes me as a potentially scary flip side to all of that is like you write a lot about taste. And I think sublime is very much about taste as a platform. Uh, and I do wonder what happens to our taste when so much of the process starts to be mediated for us. Like even when, when a bunch of things that you like are sort of put in front of you, but you don't know where they came from or why you like them or why they're here or how you found them. They're just sort of here. Even, even when their recommendations are very good, there's this sense of sort of all this is happening to me instead of me doing it myself, that I wonder if it starts to harm our taste over time. Like I think about this with TikTok all the time. I have never once intentionally informed TikTok. I just open it up and it just does things for me. And I'm like, do I like this? Is this what I wanted? Is this what I'm at? I asked, is this my taste or am I just here? And, and I wonder like you care a lot about taste. Is that, can you, can we have it both ways? There's no doubt that our taste is being shaped by these platforms. It's sort of, it's not clear to me that I like certain things or I've just been fed those things enough times by enough algorithms that, that somehow that becomes my, my taste. I think a lot of what I intend to do with sublime is have a point of view on culture. Have a point of view on how important it is to sit with things that are inefficient, you know, to, to develop and hone and cultivate your own taste and, and just have that, that orientation. But yeah, it is true that, that, that these four U algorithms are shaping us in ways that we are not aware of. Before I let you go here, let's talk about your own use of AI for a few minutes. Cause I, I'm, I'm curious how even sort of outside of like the, the sublime ecosystem, where is AI in your life right now? Are you, are you using it all the time? Are you like moving to the woods and ignoring it forever? Like what, what's, where's your head right now? I'm using it a lot. I would say I'm a very curious person and AI opens a lot of conversations around what is creativity, what does it mean to be human? And I'm very deeply engaged with these questions and the tools help me understand the limits. I would say a lot of what AI has enabled for me for better or worse is it's made me more interactive with myself. I'm spending a lot more time just like contemplating. Like I will just go on a walk and I'll use chat, you P T voice and I'll ramble for 10 minutes about what's on my mind. And then it'll say something back in some ways. I worry that I'm sort of mesmerizing my way into thinking this is interesting and useful and, and sometimes it's not, but I've noticed that that it's, that there is this sort of sense in which I've always had a lot of thoughts and ideas and maybe not the outlets, you know, Twitter is a very particular way of sharing things. My colleagues, sure, but I'm not going to like spill all of my thoughts, you know, 10 hours a day. Sure. My therapist, like maybe, you know, but, but there's a sense of like, I've got access 24 seven to something where I could just like ramble and with voice, it seems even more sort of palpable. So I'm using that a lot. So wait, let me actually just pause you on that one because that, that there's, there's an interesting question there where it's like, what, what about that is valuable? Is it the, is it the having sort of a place to do that? Or is it like what it digests and says back to you that is meaningful? I don't know that it's valuable. Is the, is the, is the conclusion. I'm still, the verdict is still out there. I think there is a world where we all may be in this collective experiment where we're deluding ourselves into thinking these things are more effective than they are. I think a lot of it is the novelty of, oh, this thing can tell me something back. I very much think that what, like it is problematic to take whatever they say seriously, because I could be, I could tell chat, you, B T give me feedback on, you know, this, and it'll tell me this is great. And then I'll be like, no, it's bad because why? And then it'll be like, yes, yes, yes, you're right. It's bad because why? So, you know, it's just going to validate whatever you're saying. You can't trust these things, but there is, there is some, I've noticed in my usage that it's made, that the fact that it allows me to be interactive with myself in a way that I wasn't before is just a lot of how I spend time with it. There are some interesting uses like prototyping. For example, like V zero, I use a lot. I very much think that a prototype is worth a hundred meetings. That for me to communicate and express my intent to a teammate in words always felt insufficient. And now I can be like, here's a prototype. I actually, for us, those tools are not effective at taking us to production. I, I think that a lot of the vibe coding hype is for things that don't carry a lot of weight, but for prototyping in particular, I think it's very effective. I'm an idea person. I think often it's hard for me to communicate the idea. And if I can go to my team with a basic prototype, it just makes everything a lot easier. And so I absolutely love that and use that all the time. Give me an example. Like what's, what's something you built recently that was a, like a cool fun prototype. Yeah. So for example, with podcast magic this week, we, we are, are building a way for people to edit whatever default was captured. So for example, in a podcast, we're making an assumption about, you know, this was the two minutes that you wanted or the minute, but I want to give users control. What does that control look like? Are you editing the audio? Are you editing the transcript? You know, what is the UI for that interaction? And so I'm, I'm starting a conversation with V zero. I'm stating the challenge and I'm kind of iterating my way to it. It's not going to look visually pretty. It's not going to be aesthetically aligned with our brand, but it's a great starting point. So really for most features, whereas before I would have just created a read me document with just text, I am including some basic prototype in the way, when I, when I'm sort of handing that over to, to the team. So that's been very, very useful. I mean, I think a lot of, a lot of the, the compression of let me blabber about this and like help me structure it into something that I can share with the team is, and in particular, because I'm on the go a lot, I do feel like I, I get less road rage these days because I'm, I'm like talking and, and I'm like getting worked on because I could work with voice. And then it's just like compressing that into a bullet that I can then send to my teammate on Slack. So that kind of stuff is helpful. My sort of bar for using these tools is hold myself to a standard where the quality of what we're doing is better, not worse from using these tools. Okay. And, and so for, for the writing stuff, it, you know, I think that using AI makes my writing take longer. Sometimes I like write a draft and I'm like, I want to make this better. Give me some options here. And so I just spend a lot of time, I'm like iterating mode or sometimes I'll just do funny things where I'll be like, convert this draft into something that like, you know, so-and-so comedian would say, and it's, I'm just having fun with it and it's not necessarily, sometimes it'll affect the output or take me in a different direction. Oftentimes it won't. I don't, I think people should just have more fun with it, you know? Yeah. But I think I actually, I like the bar of does it make the quality of the work better because that's very different from, is it more efficient? Right. And I think we spend a lot of time, to your point, the, the people who are having a lot of meetings with VCs talk a lot about efficiency. And we are in this moment where it's like, okay, how much worse are we actually all willing to let things be in the name of them happening so much faster and more efficiently? And like the goal is we're just going to reduce everything to just like blisteringly fast. And it's all going to kind of suck, but it's fine because it's all going to happen so fast and so easily. And you won't have to do anything that it'll be fine. Saying, no, I'm actually only going to use this tool when it makes the thing better. Strikes me is actually like a pretty high bar to clear, especially for a lot of current AI stuff that is, it's going to make everything simpler, but it's going to make it worse. I sort of feel like that's the, that's the crusade I'm on. That is what I want to spend the next multi, you know, like a couple of decades on. I think it is our responsibility to wield this tool, to make more beautiful things, to, you know, I think people talk a lot about how machines are becoming more human-like, but we don't talk enough about how humans are becoming machine-like. And I think that's even more problematic. Are we going to just work for machines and optimize and try to feed the algorithm? And to me, there's just this sense of everywhere I look, there's this like, you know, even like the, the entrepreneurship casino of people online trying to sell you, you know, 10 ways to 10X your productivity by six AM. And I, you know, I think that the, the ideal future is one where actually we are in symbiosis with this machine and we hand over all of the optimization so we can focus on the dreaming. Like I, yeah, one of the, the, the sort of like things that's been stuck in my mind is you remember Thomas Edison's like famous code on, on 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration. And I think now it's sort of the opposite where it's going to be 99% inspiration, 1% perspiration. Like sure, you could deploy all these machines to do all things for us, but then the value of judgment and dreaming and understanding what we want to do. Uh, and being kind of connected to that becomes, becomes more and more important. And so I would say that if we zoom out pre-industrial revolution, we lived in a world where our kind of physical strength was everything. Then we kind of moved to a world where our mental strength was everything, our intelligence, you know, knowledge, work and, you know, information age. And so what's next, you know, in a world where you're not going to compete with AI on have knowing more facts or producing content faster. I think the next edge as woo woo as it sounds comes from that being connected to that source of inspiration and heart. And I, you know, I think it's, yeah, our job is to kind of stick around long enough for people to kind of understand that, that that's, that that's kind of the, the last mile here is, is really returning to the things that make us human. Yeah. Are you, are you optimistic or pessimistic about which direction we're headed on that front? It feels like we have, like as a society, good days and bad days on that front right now. You know, I think that both things are going to happen. I don't tend to, I don't think that a technology is good or bad. I think that open AI or chat, you B T AI in general can allow people to outsource their agency. Hey, I got the female help me respond to it. Okay, great. Copy paste. I've outsourced as my agency, but I also think that you can use these tools to augment your agency. Hey, I got this. Help me think about this. Help me think through it. And I think both things are possible. I don't think that the technology is like, I think tech technology is neutral. I think it's up to us to design tools that allow us to make the most of this technology in ways that serve our needs. And I think we need more people building companies that put those needs at the center. I think the problem with AI is the people building these tools have no explicit mission. And what I mean by that is you think about the early kind of internet people, its openness and, and the crypto people are about, you know, for all of the problems with crypto, you know, there's this kind of sense of freedom. And decentralization and with, with AI, my sense is they're just racing to build AGI, whatever that means. And it's not clear what, what does that mean for my life? You know, am I going to be a better parent with AGI around? I'm going to have better relationships. Am I going to be a happier person? Like there's just no connection to what that does for us. And I think there's just a big vacuum of, let's just, you know, there's this very, very powerful technology. There's a big vacuum in terms of how it fits into people's lives. And I think that there's a huge gap in let's fill that with positive visions for, for the future. And that's sort of the way that I see our role and, and sublime in the ecosystem. I love that. I could not agree more. All right. Well, I, I can't beat that. So we're just going to get out of here. So thank you so much for doing this. This is so much fun. Thanks so much, David. All right. That's it for the show. Thank you again to Sarah for being here and thank you as always for watching and listening. If you have questions or thoughts or other people you'd like to see on this show, this is a kind of, conversation I really enjoy having about how we think about product and new technology and user experience. And it feels very much of this show to talk about this stuff. So if there are other products that you think have interesting paths with AI or there are people you just want me to yell out about all the dumb AI stuff they're doing, I would love to hear from you. You can call the hotline at 66, verse one, one, you can send us an email at vergecasts at the verge.com. We check all the inboxes and we absolutely love hearing from you until then. The Vergecast is a verge production and part of the Vox Media podcast network. The show is produced by River Brands and Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer and Travis Larchuk. We will be back on Tuesday and Friday. We've got a bunch of fun year-end stuff coming up. We've got a lot of news to talk about. It's going to be a good week. We'll see you then. Rock and roll. Wherever your family is headed, every mile should feel like part of the adventure. With Room for Seven, the 2025 Jeep Grand Cherokee is built for your whole crew. Quick morning drop-offs, weekend tournaments and those unplanned sunset chases that bring everyone together. 4x4 capability keeps you confident through surprises, detours and let's see where this goes moment. Because the laughter, the stories and the everyone talking at once rides are the ones that become family legends. The 2025 Jeep Grand Cherokee, made for family adventures that matter. Jeep is a registered trademark of FCA US LLC. 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