Everyone, That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare breathlessly announced this week, is about to be offered an AI personal assistant. Or, to put it in Silicon-Valley-speak, a digital chief of staff. OpenAI unveiled Dot at its developer day. Meta already has Muse, Musk has Grok Bot, and a British start-up called Instinct raised a billion dollars at a ten billion dollar valuation while adding group chat, so that an entire team can share this same digital master of the universe. My instinct is that Instinct might be the Pets.com of this bubble. I would check with my digital chief-of-staff, if I had one. Which I don’t.
The novelty, Keith insists, is the virtual machine. It’s a computer in the cloud that your agent owns, where it can run a browser, read your email and write code on your behalf. So we have one interface instead of the fifty chat windows that I use on Claude. No keyboard, no mouse, no screen. As a particularly wealthy and busy man, Keith has given five of these assistants access to everything (and I mean everything) he has: multitudes of credit cards, bank accounts, brokerage logins. He confesses to spending a combined thousand dollars a month on AI subscriptions. But the fruit of all this — his argument for our agentic future — is that he recently asked one of them, by voice, to find him a sub $40 Hoya lens hood with the correct thread. $1000 to save $40? Even a human chief-of-staff might flag that raspberry.
What do we become when we talk to machines? I asked Sherry Turkle this week. Idiots, I suspect.
Five Takeaways
• Everyone Gets Offered One. Not everyone will have a personal agent — everyone will be offered one. Dot, Muse, Grok Bot, Instinct. What they share, and Anthropic lacks, is the virtual machine.
• A Thousand Dollars a Month. Keith has given five agents his credit cards, bank accounts and brokerage logins — and concedes he is not a poster child for anything.
• The IPO That Leads With Its Liabilities. If AI ends up in everything, the liability is effectively infinite. Saturday Night Live has Amodei begging to be stopped and funded in the same breath.
• Run It Like a Nuclear Plant. David Robinson quit OpenAI saying the culture is broken. Kill switches, says Keith, are technically illiterate — and would never reach the Chinese models.
• Does Claude Have Feelings? Religious scholars left a meeting at Anthropic stunned. Keith: it is code running on a computer. The children meeting a talking toy are the ones who won’t know that.
Website: https://keenon.tv/ Substack: https://keenon.substack.com/ YouTube: https://youtube.com/@KeenOnShow
Chapters:
00:00:31 Introduction: Keith in Hollywood
00:02:23 Everyone will be offered a personal assistant
00:03:20 Why hasn’t Anthropic got one?
00:04:30 What the virtual machine actually does
00:06:19 A thousand dollars a month
00:07:39 Nicole Nguyen’s hesitations — and her verdict
00:09:44 Giving five agents the credit cards
00:11:21 A lens hood, ordered by voice
00:14:14 Apple locks down the Mac mini
00:15:12 Sherry Turkle, and humanizing the machines
00:17:19 Religious scholars at Anthropic
00:19:22 Rights for AI?
00:20:57 Jonathan Haidt, children and the ban movement
00:22:01 Morozov on techno-imperialism
00:23:52 Rattner’s six charts
00:25:10 Kill switches, and why they can’t work
00:26:43 David Robinson quits OpenAI
00:29:39 Why Anthropic’s IPO feels so weird
00:31:20 The Amodei sketch
00:33:07 Tooze: AI is not the Manhattan Project
00:35:12 Big pharma as the better analogy
00:38:00 Dr. Strangelove, Digger and private power
00:39:38 What strong government is actually for