Lindy Teammate: Flo Crivello on Multiplayer Agents, Memory & Why He'd Ban the Chinese Models He Uses
Hello, and welcome back to the Cognitive Revolution!
Today I'm speaking with Flo Crivello, founder and CEO of Lindy, as he's launching Lindy Teammate, an AI employee that joins your company's Slack.
This is of course competing directly with Claude Tag, and very notably … running on DeepSeek.
Even so, Lindy is subsidizing onboarding, at least, and the first half of this conversation goes really deep into where those tokens are going. We talk about the nuances of multiplayer, how they think about the social contract surrounding historical data and how they use prompting to enforce it, plus a lot about memory implementation and the background processing they use to continually optimize memory. His command of the relevant literature is evident throughout.
We get vendor recommendations – for file systems and sandboxes, and discuss why Flo prefers to buy where he can and is bullish on software infrastructure startups.
We also talk about life at Lindy now that Lindy Teammate exists, and how he thinks about Lindy, and all frontier AI systems, as a superintelligence in most respects, that still somehow chooses to walk to the carwash a bunch of times every day.
For now, we're in the Centaur era – the best ideas at Lindy are generally co-created between humans and AIs, but Flo feels that this will be temporary, and before too long humans will be adding noise to highly optimized AI systems.
And that's in the good world, because as Flo puts it, in light of OpenFace and similar incidents: "it's July 2026, we have AGI, we're in takeoff, and we've not figured out alignment."
We compare notes on how friends and acquaintances at AI companies are kind of panicking, and in the final section, we discuss Flo's very surprising position that … Chinese models should be banned in the United States.
As of now I definitely do not agree, and we had a good natured back and forth about various arguments, and he ultimately seemed open to a compromise on something more like an insurance requirement for companies selling AI services that would allow us to price the risk of Chinese models instead of an outright ban.
I have to say – Flo is a 1 of 1 – after sprinting through the general-purpose AI assistant product race for the last 3 years, he's super open about how Lindy works, and he's fully candid about every issue he cares about.
It makes for a fun conversation about multiplayer AI, machine memory, and the uncomfortable politics of building a company on models that you'd like to see banned, with Flo Crivello, founder and CEO of Lindy.
Watch now!
Thank you for being part of The Cognitive Revolution,
Nathan Labenz