Joe Reeve

How to talk to statues — Joe Reeve, ElevenLabs

Jun 1, 2026 · 33:28

Joe Reeve, an ElevenLabs growth engineer, built an app that lets users talk to statues by pointing their phone at one—it identifies the statue via OpenAI deep research, generates a matching voice with ElevenLabs' voice design API, and starts an ElevenLabs agent conversation—all in 30 seconds. He created it in two hours on a Sunday using Cursor and a single prompt, posted it on Tuesday, got 50,000 impressions, then reposted about vibe coding and hit 1.5 million. Museums, auction houses (Bonhams, Christie's), and travel platforms reached out; one CEO tracked down his WhatsApp, saying a team of 10 had worked on a similar project for a year. The episode explores voice interaction patterns, the challenge of interrupting agents, the need for multimodal interfaces (voice plus visual), and the potential of vibe coding to democratize software creation, with Joe noting that music and captions are key to viral videos.

How to Improve Your Agents: Academic Lit Review

Feb 22, 2025 · 39:02

Joe from Columbia University and founder of Arklex AI explains research on AI agents, focusing on improving their reasoning and planning through self-reflection, test-time compute, and tree search methods, without relying on human supervision. He details the TriPath method, which uses larger models to edit smaller models' feedback for better self-improvement, achieving up to 48% accuracy on math benchmarks. He shows how multi-color tree search (MCTS) with contrastive reflection and multi-agent debate (RMCTS) outperforms other search methods on Visual Web Arena and OS World, achieving top non-trained results. He proposes exploratory learning, where models learn from search trajectories rather than optimal actions, improving performance under compute budgets. Finally, he presents the Arklex open-source agent framework, combining machine learning, systems, and security for practical multi-agent orchestration.