Chris Pedregal
speaker
154 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Chris Pedregal’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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I think fundamentally humans are tool makers. It's one of the things that like just sets us apart from other animals. If you look back at the history, there have been these inventions, tools that were invented that just enabled humans to do so much more. And the interesting thing about that is some of those are really just explicitly tools for thinking.
Examples there could be writing is a great example. different mathematical notation. With Roman numerals, you can only do math up to a certain number in your head without an abacus. Whereas with the notation we use now, you can do long division of massive numbers and that's fine. My favorite example is this idea of being able to visualize data. What you brought up is this guy called Playfair.
I think his name was William Playfair. It was something like 200 years ago. He was the first person to graph data visually. So you could use your eyes. Humans have evolved to bring in images and make sense of images really quickly.
So the idea of mapping numbers to the visual plane and being able to intuitively feel, oh, that graph's going up or down, or it's going up much faster than it was before. It's just crazy that 200 years before I was born, no one had done that. All of this is to say that I'm sure we'll get into this into more detail.
You have mathematical notation or writing, data visualization, then there's the computer. And I think with AI, we're just entering like a new realm where the tools for thought will just be exponentially more powerful and more useful. God knows what that's going to look like in 10, 20 years. I guarantee it'll look nothing like it looks like today.
One observation I think that's interesting about these tools for thought is that oftentimes what these tools do is they let you externalize things that you have to hold in your head. One of the most ubiquitous tools for thought today is a notepad and a pencil. And when you use a notepad and you write things down,
It just means you don't have to hold everything in your head and you can look at these ideas or look at these notes. And to use an analogy, it's a bit like extending the RAM. The amount of like RAM that we have in our heads are hard-coded by physical limitations. And these tools basically give you, oh, they give you more RAM. They give you more memory.
I think what's incredible about LLMs, the real unlock here, is that you can use LLMs to bring extremely relevant context to the person in the moment they need it. And that context can be dynamically generated to map the needs of that moment. So I think it is, if being able to write your ideas on a piece of paper and a notepad makes you... much more capable in a meeting.
If you're talking to someone, imagine if a computer can bring in all the relevant context to make you brilliant in that moment. So you have that at your fingertips because LLMs can rewrite content on the fly and pull that stuff in for you. I think that'll be just an incredible, incredible unlock for people.
Before you ask me to talk about what we're building at Granolos, I can talk about that. I think in the realm of AI, it's easy to talk about the next two steps, and it's really, really hard to talk about what the world's going to look like 10 steps down the line. AI really simply is like a digital notepad. So think of it like Apple Notes on your computer. It's an app on your computer.
You can write notes. The main difference about it is that it's also listening to what's being talked about. So if you use it in the meeting, You can jot down whatever notes, whatever thoughts you have. Granoa is listening to the conversation. It's transcribing that conversation in real time.
And then when the meeting ends, it'll take whatever notes you've written and it'll flesh them out to make them great. So you no longer have to write down everything that's important. You can really focus on what are the really key insights or the thoughts that you had in that meeting, like the key judgment that you bring to that situation.
And you can kind of outsource all the busy work, the rote work of writing down information or facts to the AI. What's so powerful about this, and we still don't fully understand, I think, how it's going to change the way people work. I know it's going to change the way people work because I work differently and Granola users work differently.
And we're maybe 5% down the path to our vision is that when you look back at your notes, you have that full context of the meeting. So you can then go and chat with Granola and ask it questions about what happened or pull out themes.
Right now, we have a feature internally we haven't launched publicly where you can look at all your meetings with a certain person or all your meetings on a specific topic and pull out themes across those meetings. And it just makes this context that otherwise is lost or forgotten. You wrote it down somewhere, but you don't know where that notebook is.
You don't look it up when you're making a decision that's relevant. And it just makes it immediately accessible and useful.
This is something that I think will be widespread. Knowledge workers, folks like you and me, we're constantly going to be thinking about what's the context I need right now to be the smartest I can be. For folks listening, when you're using something like ChatGPT or any LLM, there's this idea of a context window. You can put X amount of information into that context window.
And it's basically like giving you like, here's the situation. Here's the stuff you need to know to be able to think about it. That way of thinking is also going to apply to us, to people. We're going to be thinking about that all the time. A concrete example. I need to write a blog post.
Before, I would have just sat down with a notebook and I would have scribbled down a bunch of ideas and then I would have tried to type it up. What I did now was I first talked to a few different people who had good advice on this blog post and I used Granola. So now I have notes and the full transcript from those conversations.
I then used the Granola app and just walked around and spoke out loud about different ideas. So I did a brainstorm where I was just recording it. And then I put all of that in a folder inside of Granola. And I started chatting with the AI, asking it to pull out themes or suggested formats. And at the end of the day, I'm going to write the blog post.
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