AI That Ends Busy Work — Hebbia CEO on “Agent Employees”
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What is Hebbia and how does its AI platform work?
You'll actually have hybrid AI and human employees working alongside each other. People that are really good at prompting, be the best managers. Intelligence will become too cheap to meter.
Welcome back to the Mad Podcast. In this episode, I'm thrilled to sit down once again with George Sivulka, a Stanford prodigy who walked away from a fully funded PhD when the launch of GPT 3 convinced him that the real action was outside the lab. Instead, he decided to launch Hebia and became one of the very few founders to get a pre seed investment from PeterTiel. Fast forward to today, Hebia has become an AI platform that chews Through billions of pages for top Wall Street asset managers and tier one law firms and has raised 160 million in venture capital. In this episode, we explore why journalist AI beats vertical AI.
The best investors reading really crazy data sources that have nothing to do with finance. The best lawyers have backgrounds that are way outside of law. You don't want specialization, you want generalization.
The power of inference time superscaling.
And actually, the the whole scaling at inference paradigm was pioneered at Hebia. We're one of the first people to say, hey, you get way better accuracy from using more large language model calls at runtime.
And how AI is already redesigning org charts.
And when you think of that from an organizational design perspective, you can start to define the agent employee as another node in your org chart. It will probably have to have an email. It'll probably have to have a slack. It'll probably be doing things the wrong way and you'll have to manage it in the right direction.
This episode was recorded live at a recent data-driven NYC, the in-person monthly event we run in New York in partnership with our friends at Foursquare. Please enjoy this energizing chat with George Sivulka. Good to see you.
It was uh I think almost two years ago to this day where we started talking about Matrix uh in a very similar setting.
Actually, uh Matrix was if I remember correctly, not even the name then it was stealth. We it was pre marketing
lingo. But uh it was it was still in stealth, but a lot of the early ideas and and you were my first podcast ever. So I'm very excited to be back.
Wonderful. Well welcome back. So maybe uh for anybody that did not attend that event or does not yet know about Habia, what is forty five second elevator pitch for what you do and why it matters? If we're in an elevator,
Elevator Hebia is uh we actually build AI agents for finance, uh, for investors, bankers, and lawyers. So anyone that does white collar work, whether you're doing uh or you're discovering as part of what you what you work on, uh, we build an AI agent platform so that you can leverage uh some of the latest and the greatest.
And you know, rewinding back to that chat from a couple of years ago, um I remember that you had a very powerful kind of mission statement, which was to keep smart people from doing stupid tasks. And if you watch that back and if you sort of fast forward to today, are you still doing exactly that? In what way has the mission evolved?
I think when we when we started Hebia, I think that one of the fundamental insights was that you had a lot of the smartest people in the world doing the stupidest tasks. Uh and that it seemed like there was an arbitrage opportunity there to like, you know, save them some time or some effort or some sweat. And the the goal of Hebia was was never to just stop at you know, really highly paid knowledge professionals, you know, the investor or the finance guy or the the the lawyer. It was actually always to go much more broad. And our vision and and mission have solidified really over the last couple of years uh into building capable AI platform for a billion people. And the idea is that there's lots of consumer AI products, products where you can go and, you know, talk about your sushi restaurant and wine in San Francisco.
But there's actually not very horizontal general purpose workplace AI products. And what we mean when we talk about capable AI and AI that can do things, uh, is actually something much more horizontal.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is Hebbia and how does its AI platform work?
0:00–13:13
2
How did the mission of Hebbia evolve from “saving smart people from stupid tasks” to a universal AI platform?
13:13–25:15
3
What are “agent employees” and how are they reshaping organizational design?
25:15–36:25
4
What is the Matrix platform and why is it different from traditional chat‑bots?
36:25–47:58
5
Why did Hebbia move away from RAG and develop the ISD architecture?
47:58–48:23
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from The MAD Podcast with Matt Turck
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