This is a familiar stage for you, right? Let me... I want to get into Dazzle AI, but I feel like you've been in Silicon Valley basically since like Web 1.0. Here we are heading into Web 4.0. I feel like I should sit back and say, 'Marissa, what do you make of all of it right now?'
Well, I think that, you know, technology is fundamentally about innovation and invention, and that really comes down to building. And I have to say there's never been a more exciting time to build. I have to say, in my little startup, I'm having a ball.
Just, you know, on Monday, Meta announced Wonder. Yesterday, Google made Argon available. We have an AI harness that can put any model into it. And so, you know, there's probably going to be another model announced this morning. When you look at how fast everything's moving, how fantastically you can actually make progress on your own application, and really deliver great value for users, it's just an incredibly fun time to be experimenting and playing and building things. And so, I think it's all been building towards this moment.
So, before we get to Dazzle AI, there's been a lot of sort of debate within Silicon Valley with regard to the frontier labs, the AI models. How are you feeling about that? What's your comfort level? Because you're not out there on X just sort of, you know, yelling at each other.
I think that, yeah, X is definitely an interesting place right now. But I think that anyone who says they know how this is going to play out — we have a new form of intelligence, and anyone who says they know how this is going to play out is either lying or arrogant or both. So you have to take this with a grain of...
Name, just, you know...
[laughter] Altman, arrogant. Take a bow.
So, we don't know how this is going to play out. So we have to acknowledge that there is a possibility that things won't go well, right? That there is a possibility of that. But in the broader context, I think it's well less than 50%. In fact, even some of the doomers would say it's well less than 50%. And what that really means is the odds are in our favor. The odds are in our favor that really amazing things will happen in terms of science, in terms of creativity, in terms of really freeing people up to spend their time and live their lives the way they want to. I think that's really exciting. So I'm very much an optimist. I do acknowledge, I think we have to acknowledge and address the possible negative outcomes here, but I think that we get so focused on that that we forget to focus on what's actually possible and what's going to be unlocked through all of this.
So, you're addressing the positive, that small part of negative. I'm just curious again because I think of you as somebody who's been in a perch as a leader. You know the technologies. There is debate right now about how do we protect against that downside? Do you have your own thoughts, since this is a platform to share it?
Well, I think that some of the things that are being proposed — regulation, collaboration across the labs, really thinking about where we go and how the technologies are used — I think is really incredibly important. I think the right steps seem to be happening there.
So, Dazzle AI, you were in stealth. Tell us about that and where you fit into the ecosystem.
Sure. So, Dazzle AI is a personal AI assistant. To your point of the kind of long perch, I realized that my honors thesis in college was actually building a voice-assisted travel planner. So, I've actually been thinking about assistants for a really long time in the background and sometimes in the foreground of my career. So, what Dazzle is, is it's a personal AI assistant that learns from your camera roll on your phone. So, there's going to be 5 billion photos taken today in the world, 98% of them on mobile phones. And what that means...
96% of them will be ones you regret. No, I'm just kidding. But...
Maybe, but I'll get to the interesting stats in a minute. But one of the things is that what we do is we really take your camera roll and then we understand your taste. So it gives us the context of you. We understand your lifestyle. We understand your preferences. Dazzle for me even understands the brands that I like and the brands that I prefer. And we couple that with agents, both human and AI, that can help get things done for you. So it really can do things like create a to-do list and actually have a to-do list that gets itself done. Interestingly, one of the stats... Yes, because 96% — I don't actually think it's that high that you don't regret.
That's my life. Go ahead.
But at my previous startup, we were looking at photo sharing, and one of the interesting things...
Sunshine. We were looking at it and we were trying to understand — we were building an AI model that could understand when people are likely to share a photo. And that doesn't mean post it publicly, but it might mean, you know, sending it to a loved one, sending it to a friend. And what we realized was about 60% of your camera roll is share-worthy, after you deduplicate, you know, the times you take it multiple times to get it right. So then that begs the question of what's in the other 40%? And in the other 40% is all the stuff we need to get done. And I have to say that we built Dazzle for all demographics, but it's particularly good for women and it's particularly good for busy moms because it's that appointment card that you snap a picture of as you leave the doctor's office. It's the time you take a picture of cleats to remember to size them up.
Last week, I was even browsing social. There was a little program on about summer programs that help prepare you well for college, and I screenshotted it. And Dazzle, basically, you have an AI agent that's sitting on your camera roll, came back and said, 'Do you need me to put together a list of the requirements and deadlines for these five programs for McAlister?'
Because Dazzle even knows that McAlister is my child that's older and is going to be going to college soon.
Model for this? How do you, you know...
Right now, Dazzle is free. And I will say we're invitation only, but we're sending invites to anyone who's at the conference. So please try it out and tell me what you think. But we think in the long run it will either be a subscription model where, you know, basically we are a part of your everyday life — and we're starting to see with our early testers and users, you know, they start using Dazzle for, you know, half an hour to hours a day, which is really incredible to see. So it's a subscription or on a per-transaction basis. So far we've seen cases like Dazzle has helped people replace the roof on their house. You know, it's helped fix the garage door. It helps find that hard-to-find bag that you snapped a picture of that you've always wanted. You know, all of those type of things. So in addition to helping manage your calendar and some of these other tasks, there are transactions that Dazzle drives. So we may apply a transaction fee as well. And I think it's possible that we will have subscription plus transaction fee. And I suspect we'll always have a free tier.
Let me ask you about — it's nice to see you here on stage, and we've talked about Sunshine in the past. And obviously, if I go back, how many times were you on the Fortune Most Powerful Women list? Several years in a row, right? And...
I don't know. I do know I was really honored when I was back at Google — I was, I think, the youngest.
You were the youngest. You were the — no, no, Sarah London. But, you know, that was, you know, you can... you'll be some first in other places. But there was — when I think about the voices in Silicon Valley that are out there, I'm always struck that, you know, you, Sheryl Sandberg — there was a real vibrancy of hearing from women with regard to the tech conversation. It seems to have in some ways gone back. What are you kind of seeing and hearing, and what role do you want to play really to be part of this debate?
Sure. I think that when I look at Dazzle — I launched two weeks ago today. And so, as I said, we're invitation only, but when I look at who's signing up and who's asking for invites, I will say we're happy for all the users, but they're predominantly male, which really surprises me because I really think that — yes, I get that's often the case with early adopters, but this product is so good for women. AI is so good for women. I really think we need...
AI is so good for women also.
I think that in terms of helping you manage lots of different tasks, really being very busy, you know, taking some of these more mundane work streams away from you — my friend Brit Morin wrote this great piece that says like, AI isn't coming for your job, it's coming for all the stuff you didn't want to do anyway. Because nobody wants to wait on hold. No one wants to spend 15 minutes checking every site trying to figure out if this is available in this color and this size. And if we can actually offload that to agents...
...it frees up everyone. But, you know, for women who often are in the role of doing that coordination or doing the shopping and then the buying, I think that it is something that could be really, really good overall. And I think it's important for us to be part of this building. The infrastructure layer of AI is complete. Will it continue to improve? It will. But we're at a phase now where we're building out the application layer, the context layer — how does this actually contextualize into people's lives? And I think this is a place where women can add a lot. And actually, I would argue in many ways are sometimes better skilled at that — how do you take this AI or the technology and apply it to a practical everyday problem.
So we're going to take questions. Do we have mic runners here? We do. So the paddles — so if you have a question, just raise your hand. So as you're thinking of your question, we go to somebody.
[clears throat] I want to ask as a leader. So you're now leading this company. You were leading Yahoo. Do we all mature and grow? Do you feel you lead differently now, or do you give a different perspective in terms of the perch you occupy?
Well, I think the scale is very, very different, right? Tens of thousands versus, you know, we're like a dozen or so people. I will say with AI agents it feels more like 100 people because they're all programming at like five or 10x. But I think that you have perspective — yes, both because the situation is different and the order of scale is different, but also just, you know, experience over time, different things that you've learned in terms of what's worked, what motivates. And I think that being able to paint a picture of what it is we're trying to achieve, how this is going to, you know, be useful for people — the anecdotes start to add up and become data. But I think that it is — I think early in my career I was very wedded to data.
And I say now — I was then, and I remember because you and I talked about this, you know, all the buzz famously with regard to how little maternity leave you took and stuff. I mean, and I don't know, your kids are much older now. I mean, how are you feeling about just balance, work, and just the conversations that we were having when you just had kids to where you are now?
