Harry Stebbings

Christopher Pedregal, CEO of the popular note-taking app Granola, was clear on the biggest near-term change he sees coming in AI: “prompting” as we know it will disappear.

“Examples are going to replace prompting,” he said during his lively discussion with British VC and podcaster Harry Stebbings. LLMs could be pretty bad at implementing a series of instructions, Pedergal noted, but do “an incredible job of inferring” based on examples.

Voice input and text output will be a common way to interact with AIs, he predicted, since people can speak faster and with more texture than they can write, but can read more quickly than they can listen.

Stebbings asked if moves like Slack’s shutdown of outside access to its data would be the way of the future, and potentially limit context-building. Pedregal predicted many companies would indeed run in that direction for the short term, but eventually that would shift.

“We’ll see a reactive limiting of data, a middle-age period and then enlightenment on the other side,” he said. Workarounds like having software read Slack data on a screen will be coming, though that could just add to the large pile of legal issues facing the industry.