SaaStr Podcast Examines AI Agents Breaking Rules and Jensen AGI Claim
SaaStr podcast covers rule-breaking AI agents like Instinct and GrokBot, valuation concerns at $2.5B, and Jensen Huang's AGI declaration tied to NVIDIA chips.
This week Harry Stebbings, Rory O’Driscoll and Jason Lemkin discussed rule-breaking as a product feature, agents routing around guardrails, and Jensen Huang declaring AGI according to SaaStr.
Instinct and GrokBot Operate by Breaking Terms of Service
Instinct and GrokBot perform actions against terms of service that public companies cannot replicate. GrokBot spins up a VM and a browser per user to Google information prohibited by Google’s ToS. Instinct scrapes LinkedIn in unauthorized ways. Some outbound calling flows are prohibited or illegal in parts of the US.
Jason noted that EchoSign shipped real-time document collaboration by running Word in a container in a VM, violating Microsoft’s terms, and removed the feature after the Adobe deal. Rory observed that no scaled business has succeeded solely on scraping LinkedIn or breaking Google’s ToS, though Uber succeeded by breaking laws until regulators adapted.
Instinct Valuation Prompts Portfolio-Level Pass Decision
Harry posed whether a $100M growth check would go into Instinct. Jason stated a ceiling of $2B given the last round at $2.5B and passed on price. Gorgias will have its own Instinct for e-commerce and Meta will have one, with twenty more expected in the next YC batch.
Rory noted consumer investments lack standard financial math and rely on early category leadership and momentum. Harry highlighted the founder’s weekly shipping cadence including location sharing and a OnePassword partnership backed by Index and Benchmark.
Jensen Declares AGI Arrived
Jensen Huang stated AGI has arrived, crediting OpenAI’s GPT Astra trained on 100,000+ NVIDIA chips with 400,000 more coming. Jason called AGI a nonsense term and emphasized that LLMs doing code matters because code represents a half trillion dollar industry. Rory added that anything reducible to code will be handled by LLMs and cited Ben Thompson that LLMs are the most scaled artifacts humans have developed.
Legal AI Ceiling Discussed
Harry watched his girlfriend use Legora and concluded legal AI remains underpriced. Rory placed a ceiling on the category according to SaaStr.
