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a16z Podcast

A True Second Brain

a16z Podcast

a16z

Science, Innovation, Business, Entrepreneurship, Culture, Disruption, Software Eating The World, Technology

4.41.1K Ratings

🗓️ 31 August 2023

⏱️ 48 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

How many people spend more time organizing their “second brains”, instead of leveraging the information within them? With consumer AI now capable of processing simple language prompts and interfacing with unstructured data, is the landscape of information management on the brink of a transformative evolution? Founders of Mem, Kevin Moody and Dennis Xu, plus writer Nat Eliason, explore what’s gotten in the way of a true second brain, and how AI may finally unlock what “knowledge management” tools have promised for so long.

Transcript

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0:00.0

Our brain isn't a filing cabinet. It's very messy, it's very interconnected.

0:05.0

The same search for multiple different people should actually yield different results because you think about the world differently.

0:12.0

Imagine if there was just a digital

0:14.0

colleague on every team who could sit on at every single meeting, read every duck

0:18.0

that was ever written, and had all the contexts that was shared across the

0:22.0

company and knew exactly what information they

0:26.2

could share with who and when they should share that information.

0:31.0

You can delete 95 to 99% of everything you have and never feel that pain for the rest of your life.

0:38.0

Does it actually adapt to who you are?

0:41.0

Is it learn about who you are and does it then apply that in future interactions

0:44.2

with you like a human would. I think the running joke here is Clippy it was just

0:49.3

ahead of its time. Since the rise of the computer, humans have been gripped by the idea of having a second brain.

0:58.0

But, has reality held up to that promise?

1:02.0

How many people spend more time organizing their second brains instead of

1:07.1

leveraging the information within them? How many people constantly look

1:11.2

for a better-to-do app instead of actually checking the studios that they're

1:14.6

organizing.

1:16.1

And how many people have an endless stream of data that they'd love to one day process, but they

1:21.8

just don't have the right tools or time to do so.

1:25.8

Due to the structured directive nature of computers to date, computers have been a shell of

1:30.9

maybe the second brain that we've long hoped for, still incredibly powerful, but also requiring discrete instruction from the director.

1:39.0

But within the last year, Consumer AI has shown up to the party,

...

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