AI Agents Podcast

Social AI Agents with David Petrou Continua AI CEO | EP121

Jan 29, 2026
David Petrou, founder and CEO of Continua AI and former Google AI researcher, builds social AI that helps groups collaborate. He discusses agentic systems that join group chats, multimodal advances, and designing polite, memory-enabled chat participants. The conversation covers real-world demos, on-device vs cloud tradeoffs, and practical use cases like trip planning and team coordination.
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ANECDOTE

Slack Bot Spotted Gemini 3.0

  • Continua's internal Slack bot proactively suggested upgrading to Gemini 3.0 after noticing it had dropped.
  • The bot currently has view access to code and logs and could eventually edit itself to upgrade.
INSIGHT

Group Context Unlocks Social AI Value

  • Chat-based LLMs have mainly operated in single-player call-and-response mode, leaving social opportunities untapped.
  • Bringing AI into group contexts unlocks coordination, motivation, and richer human-to-human interaction.
INSIGHT

ML Is Practical Humility

  • ML forced humility: instead of hand-coding solutions we build models that learn to solve hard problems.
  • Collaborating with AIs becomes necessary because many problems are too complex for direct programming.
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