Nathan Labenz
Founder and former CEO of Waymark, an AI-powered video creation platform, who now focuses full time on tracking and explaining frontier AI development.
“What I want is a future where I have not abundance of API calls, but abundance of things that are more biological. Give me the fruit. The fruit of the AI era should indeed be like, at least in part, actual literal fruit.”
The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis · AI Research & Frontier Labs · November 2026
Context
A co-host had described an agentic economy of software built by and for agents. Labenz pushes back that abundance of agent-friendly things isn't the same as abundance of what makes human life good.
Transcript
…all this stuff for this agentic economy. And as a result, we just have all of this excess because we just don't consume that much, right? Like we're just not, you know, that consumptive in comparison to what the agents are going to consume. And that's where this abundance is going to come from.
My reply leans on a side project I'd launched the week before, Fruitopia, which finds the best fruit at your local grocery and a real world. Here's where I came down on the economy Prakash had just described.
And on the one hand, it's like cool if there's abundance in like API calls because the agents are using so many and they like build up great systems that they can use. And then we get to kind of piggyback on them. But like there's a lot more to life than API calls. And I do feel like we're sort of, especially, and especially those of us that are in the AI space are like really quick to forget that. Or we sort of, you know, we're kind of contorting ourselves in a way to like like this future. This is why I've been like holding myself to this idea of like, I want to be getting outside more and getting more exercise. And if I'm not doing those things, am I really winning? Or am I just kind of plugging myself into some AI We machine as like some sort of human integration layer type component that's like in a way like too subservient to the machine? But this is why I decided to do this fruitopia project recently. And it's again, just one of these things where it's like, okay, if we are in a bright future…
I mean, it's pretty obvious to me that we're going to get vat grown like food, which is far more nutritious and far more tasty. It's going to be like, you know, in the 20th century, you discovered chemicals. And then we, you know, when you look at these food products right now from like Doritos or…
Remember the old onion article? Doritos celebrates its one millionth ingredient?
Like they have figured out your flavor palette so well that they can like, you know, pinpoint exactly what flavor that they want to produce. And all of that technology is going to get deployed into bio, right? We're going to produce like, you know, fruits and vegetables, et cetera. Hybrid, you…
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