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The 1000x Developer with Amjad Masad

A small minority – likely less than 1% – of the world can code. Yet also widely known that the skillset yields outsized returns, with developers generating some of the highest paying salaries out there. But even this field is quickly shifting, especially with the advent of wide-scale AI. Today we get to chat with Amjad Masad, CEO and founder of Replit, about these foundational shifts. We dive into how Replit has integrated AI into its platform and the implications on both current and future developers. It’s easier than ever to learn to code, but is it still worthwhile? And does the 10x engineer really exist? Listen in to find out. Timestamps: 00:00 - Introduction 02:02 - What is Replit? 04:30 - Stories behind Replit 12:02 - The software hero’s journey 14:24 - Making coding fun 17:02 - AI powering software 21:03 - Training your own models 23:40 - Building UX around AI 26:03 - The developer landscape 29:43 - The 1000x engineer 32:39 - Should you still learn to code? 36:56 - What does AI enable? 43:40 - Developing on mobile 46:21 - A software labor market 49:42 - Differentiating a marketplace 51:39 - Building new market dynamics 54:10 - Looking ahead Resources: * Replit: https://replit.com/ * Replit Ghostwriter: https://replit.com/site/ghostwriter * Replit Bounties: https://replit.com/bounties * Find Amjad on Twitter: https://twitter.com/amasad Stay Updated: * Find us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/a16z * Find us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16z * Subscribe on your favorite podcast app: https://a16z.simplecast.com/ * Follow our host: https://twitter.com/stephsmithio Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.

Amjad MasadguestSteph Smithhost
Feb 16, 20231h 4mWatch on YouTube ↗

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  1. 0:00 – 2:02

    Introduction

    1. AM

      And we're seeing people making software in 30-minute increments. Someone the other day put a request for a landing page up, they attached a Figma file, they got it back in 30 minutes. That's really never been done before, and why shouldn't have it existed, uh, like that before?

    2. SS

      It's hard to find concrete numbers, but some estimates predict that less than 1% of the world knows how to code. Yet it's also widely known that the minority of people who know how to not only consume, but create software, yield outsize returns, with some developers generating some of the highest paying salaries out there. But even this field is shifting quickly, especially with the advent of wide-scale AI. And in this interview, we get to chat with Amjad Masad, founder of Replit, an integrated development environment that allows you to code live in the browser. Here we chat about how Replit has tackled the difficult problem of making coding fun, but also how it's now integrating AI into its platform via Ghostwriter, and the implications of these shifts on both current and future developers, in addition to the applications that can be built. As a personal anecdote, I actually taught myself to code in 2018, and to this date, it's one of the best decisions I've ever made. And despite screaming this from the rooftops, still many other people find it extremely daunting. My journey took around 300 hours. Yes, I tracked it. But with the advancements in tooling and technology, it may actually be easier than ever to learn to code. And I was surprised to hear from Amjad just how quickly he thinks people can get up to speed today. Let's get started. As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. For more details, please see a16z.com/disclosures. Amjad, thank you so much for joining the a16z podcast.

    3. AM

      It's my pleasure. I've been listening to this podcast for a really long time, so it's great to be finally on.

    4. SS

      Yeah. Well, we're happy to

  2. 2:02 – 4:30

    What is Replit?

    1. SS

      have you. So just to set the tone for listeners, you are the founder and CEO of Replit. I think you're also the head of engineering now, but we'll get to that. Uh, can you just share what Replit is and, I'm probably getting a little ahead of myself, but how it differs from maybe other similar products or development environments, whether it's Gorm or just other IDEs out there?

    2. AM

      I like to think about Replit as the technology that reduces the distance between an, an idea and a product. The moment any person in the world gets an idea for a piece of software, and so the distance between, you know, having that idea and making something in the world is typically very large. The internet had-- has really reduced things down further and w- you know, we think Replit is the sort of the ultimate, uh, answer there, where, um, we want to get to a place where the moment you get an idea, you just Replit, you know? And that's sort of where the name came from, and we do that in a, in a number of ways. One way is that we just simplify the development process. Crucially, we don't make it stunted. Like a lot of tools sort of think that to simplify is to reduce the power. You know, we actually keep the power while also making the process a lot more enjoyable and learnable. We also superpower it with AI. We also, you know, have various courses and things that can teach you how to code. If you don't think coding is for you, then you can hire someone from our community to make the program for you. So we have this thing called Replit Bounties where you can just like put a price on a project you want to get done, describe the project, and then a combination of, uh, an AI and a human being will get that done for you. And so it's really ultimately about that idea of like getting from idea to product, and w- we'll help everyone in the world kind of have access to that superpower that we call software.

    3. SS

      I love the way you put that because you've kind of represented the different modalities depending on where someone is and their proficiency, or at least their hypothetical proficiency in terms of being able to code. And regardless of where they sit, getting them to that end product, that end vision, uh, that they, they want. And we'll get to Ghostwriter, we'll get to Bounties. Those are two things that have been released recently.

  3. 4:30 – 12:02

    Stories behind Replit

    1. SS

      But I wanna give people a real sense of some of the stories behind Replit, because that's something that's really gripped me as someone who's been following the company for a period of time, and I'll call out two, but then I wanna play a quick game so that we can share s- more of these stories with the audience. So two things that I remember. One is recently you shared a thirteen-year-old kid that set up a sizable crypto mining operation via Replit. Another example that I saw a while back was these two kids, they looked maybe six years old, maybe seven years old, crashing a computer science teacher conference and sharing their startup pitch, uh, to the listeners. So I just thought those were incredible examples. Getting to this idea of a game, I've come up with five or so different scenarios. I have no idea if these scenarios have actually happened on Replit. I haven't shared them with you prior to this, but I think they might stimulate either other stories that have happened on Replit, or you can tell me if these things have indeed happened. So let's give it a shot. The first one is someone has started learning to code via Replit. They haven't, you know, gotten a computer science degree, they haven't done a boot camp. They've learned within Replit and since been hired as a developer at a FAANG company. Has this happened yet?

    2. AM

      I would say it happened, yes. So, um, we've had someone who learned to code on Replit primarily on their own, became a very productive community member, and applied to work at, at, at Replit. And we thought they were very talented, but at the time there wasn't, like, a really good fit for them. And so they started applying for other companies. I helped them apply for other companies, and they ended up, uh, at Google, actually.

    3. SS

      That's awesome. Let's move on to the next one. Someone has used Replit to build over 50 projects. Now, you can use your own definition of project here. Um, these don't need to be full-blown startups, but have you seen someone build that magnitude of projects on Replit?

    4. AM

      Yeah, I, I think that's, um, that's fairly reasonable number of projects. So there's a 16-year-old developer, his name is Rayhan. He's one of our most prolific programmers. He actually built a bunch of interesting projects where he reverse engineered how Replit works, and he built, he built an unofficial API. One of his unofficial APIs is a security program that searches people's repls to find Discord tokens. So a lot of people build Discord bots on Replit, and they copy and paste the tokens in clear text, as opposed to putting them in our encrypted service, the Secrets Manager. And so he would find those tokens, he would invalidate them, 'cause Discord has a service to invalidate those, and then he would send them a notification. He would say like, "Hey," like, "we found that you've exposed your token." Uh, so that's one example of a project he made. He w- he was, and still is, one of the most prolific, uh, bounty hunters, and he built one of our earliest bounties, which was a startup that wanted to build, like, a stable diffusion-based T-shirt generator. So you would share it, generate a T-shirt based on a prompt, and then get it printed and sent to you. Like, there isn't one week where I don't see Rayhan producing, like, a new piece of software.

    5. SS

      [laughs] That's amazing.

    6. AM

      So I would say, like, 50 is probably on the low side of, uh, things here.

    7. SS

      Yeah, I mean, I, I undershot it, I guess. Let's rapid fire through the last three. The third one is someone has built an app on Replit, and through that app has since made a million dollars or more from it.

    8. AM

      A million dollars, I don't think that happened, uh, yet. There are people that are on trajectory to doing that right now, and so there are, like, bounty hunters that are making thousands and thousands of dollars a week, and I think that'll continue to grow. There are startups that are starting entirely on Rep- Replit today. There are some, a couple of AI startups that have f- their f- entire stack built on Replit. Um, and, uh, uh, presumably one of those projects will maybe get to a million dollars. There are a couple of earlier examples of startups that sort of prototyped their projects. For example, Fig is this command line autocomplete tool that this YC startup, I think it was, like, YC 20 or something like that, or YC 21, and it's used by tens of thousands of engineers, and the ent- the original product was entirely built on, on Replit. Uh, they're starting to sell. I don't think they're making a million dollars, but maybe that's a- another example of maybe on the path to a million dollars. But I would say it would be a success if someone, like an individual person, just made a million dollars. I think that's really my dream, and I hope we can get to that this or next year.

    9. SS

      That's awesome. And I should mention, there's a time element to this. I believe Replit, was it founded in 2016?

    10. AM

      That's right.

    11. SS

      So we're around six to seven years later, so let's see how things progress. Next one is someone over the age of 90 [laughs] . I went a little crazy with this one. Someone over the age of 90 has used Replit. Has this happened?

    12. AM

      Someone who, uh, ended up, uh, working at, at Replit, their grandpa in I- India is, like, a physics, uh, PhD. They do a lot of, like, physics, uh, sort of writing, and in one recent paper they published, they used, uh, Replit to write a physics simulation, and Replit was published as part of that paper. I don't believe they're 90, but they're, they're definitely 70 plus.

    13. SS

      Okay, final one. Strangers have met via Replit, maybe it's the forum, maybe working on a project together, and have since gotten married.

    14. AM

      Hmm. Man, that, that, that would be awesome to know. I haven't heard of it, if that happened. I know there are some community members that, like, recently got married. I don't think they met on, on the community, but you know, I, I've certainly, like, seen some people date and things like that, but, uh, married I haven't heard that yet, so...

    15. SS

      Well, I had to ask it. Like I said, I hadn't shared these with you beforehand, so I went from what I think are maybe more ordinary scenarios and maybe more extraordinary.

    16. AM

      One story though, let me mention, is that, you know, there's a story in the news about the world's youngest Microsoft Azure AI certified programmer, and naturally someone looked them up and they found them, that they're on Replit. This kid is six years old.

    17. SS

      Oh, my goodness [laughs] .

    18. AM

      And if you go to the Replit profile, they have 1,000 followers on Replit, and they just, like, they have games with thousands and thousands of runs, and they're just, like, completely prolific. And I just can't wrap my head, especially now that I have kids, I can't wrap my head around, like, a six-year-old, like, doing this, like, every day, and it's, like, pretty freaking amazing.

    19. SS

      That's incredible, because just as a reminder, six years old, that's grade one, I believe. In grade one, I believe I was learning to, like, trace letters so that I could write the alphabet. Wow, that's incredible. Um, are there any other stories worth mentioning here? Any top of mind scenarios like a six-year-old who's coding [laughs] on

  4. 12:02 – 14:24

    The software hero’s journey

    1. SS

      Replit?

    2. AM

      O- one of my favorite stories is one day I wake up and I see my Twitter blowing up, and I go on Twitter, I find that this Indian mom and dad, uh, are tagging me and saying that I corrupted their child. Their kid is totally addicted to Replit. They're supposed to go to IIT. As you know, IIT requires a lot of preparation. But that kid is not interested in it and not studying at all and just programming all the time. And I actually felt pretty shitty about it, um, because it started going viral, and a lot of people were, like, pretty negative about the parents. Um, apparently, it hit a nerve in some discord, uh, discourse in India about how parents push their children really hard on, on IIT. And so I, I reached out and tried to help. I tried to talk to the kid and tell him like, "Hey, you should listen to your parents." And then, um, you know, a few months after that, um, India was hit pretty hard with COVID, if you remember the, the issue there. And that kid wrote the application that first responders were using to find equipment, to find oxygen, to find all these things, and it went totally viral. It, it brought, uh, it, it brought down our website. That's how viral it went. And in my mind, I was like, "The- the-- his parents should be really proud now." And then something even more fantastic happened. Out of that experience and him going viral using his skills, he got a job, and now he gets paid more than his entire family. And, and so you go-- this is sort of this hero's journey. You go from getting blamed for someone ruining their future to actually turns out that they actually did a huge favor to, to their future, and I think that's the sort of power of, of software and the internet and things like Replit.

    3. SS

      That's beautiful. And something that also stands out to me from that story, which we'll touch on throughout this interview, is this idea of coding being fun. Like, this kid really just wanted to code all the time. And as someone who taught myself several years ago, prior to learning, I thought coding was really dull, just something more prescriptive instead of creative and artistic, and again, using this word fun. Um, and after I learned to code, I saw it in a different light, and I think that's really important is this idea

  5. 14:24 – 17:02

    Making coding fun

    1. SS

      where it's like, how do you make coding fun? So what are your thoughts there? How have you been able to design Replit to actually enhance people's creativity and make them want to come back and make them see this skill in a new light?

    2. AM

      So I, I think most things that are fun tend to be devoid of a lot of drudgerous routine work, right? You know, when, when you're playing a video game, you're not s- like building the video game every time or setting up the TV or, or, or doing some, like, rote IT task, right? When you are, um, doing a sports hobby, you're in the flow. You're doing the thing you're excited about doing. The problem with coding is that a lot of the maintenance around the development environment and the packages and the integration of all the different components was the thing that engineers were spending most of their time doing. The moments they were coding, they were in absolute bliss. But those moments were actually very little in terms of the-- if you think about the pie chart of what it meant to work as a programmer. So the first thing that Re- Replit does, remove the need to do all the setup. That in itself made programming a lot more, uh, fun. And then add the collaborative aspect. Like, a lot of what we find fun in life has to do with other people. We're just social animals, right? And so-

    3. SS

      Mm-hmm

    4. AM

      ... like, if I can share my program with you with just a link, that's really fun. That's what makes Figma fun. That's what makes any other collaborative tool fun, is that I can just, like, send you a link, and you're, you're in there with me, or you can play it and try it out. And then finally, there's, like, a lot of, like, explicit gamified elements of Replit. For example, like, we have a built-in currency called Cycles. Cycles allow you to, like, earn, you know, from bounties. You can spend it on AI or compute, or you can cash it out. And it's built with a, with a mindset of, like, it feels like a-- it feels like Roblox. It feels like one of those in-game currencies.

    5. SS

      Well, I like your analogy of almost, like, the setup or the admin that goes into coding at times being a lot more overhead, where if you compare it to other activities out there, like I love playing soccer, for example. If playing soccer required me to, like, put on my shoes and shin pads for an hour before every hour-long game, I'd be like, "Man, this is really frustrating. Like, I just wanna get on the field." Um, and so that ratio is actually important.

  6. 17:02 – 21:03

    AI powering software

    1. SS

      Let's take a left turn and go straight to AI, which is, you know, the theme, I feel like, of the last six months with many companies. But why don't you give listeners a quick overview of what Ghostwriter is and how it works?

    2. AM

      So, um, Ghostwriter is like a pair programmer that is an AI. Uh, we think about it as this embodied thing that helps you achieve your goals of making software. Um, and so it helps you in every aspect of software creation, whether that's typing code, it's provides this type ahead component similar to Gmail to either complete lines of code or entire functions or entire classes. So you can see that happen as you're typing. You also can generate sort of entire programs. So you can do right-click Generate, and you can give it a prompt in the same way you could Stable Diffusion and DALL-E a prompt and generate entire images. You can give it a prompt and generate entire programs, entire programs that run entire, like, applications. And then you can highlight a piece of code, and you can right-click, and you can transform it. Finally, like, the, uh, ability to talk to Ghostwriter is the final piece here, and we're actively working on it, and it's, uh, it's our number one priority. It'll be like a chat box inside Replit, and it'll both chime in when things happen that it could help. So for example, if you get an error, it'll be like I can help you with that. Like a Clippy-like thing, [laughs] hopefully not as annoying as Clippy, but Clippy was way ahead of its time. So it'll be like, "You know, you got an error. Like if you want, I can, you know, try to help you with that." Or you can just sort of ask it like, "Hey, like I wrote this code. Can you write, write tests for it?" But it, it's really remaking the IDE as we know it.

    3. SS

      I would also say it's less binary in a way. Something I've been thinking a lot about as I've learned more about how AI is being implemented with code is when I learned one of the most frustrating aspects of learning was just the binary nature of code. When you get into a bad error, it's just like, "No, no, no, no, no, no," and then eventually you hit a yes, and sometimes that takes way longer than is comfortable. And so what I like about this idea of having this sidekick is just the nuance to that, of someone being able-- or someone, the AI being able to say, "Oh, have you tried this yet? Oh, ha- did you mean this by your code? Like this is what your code is trying to do. Is that what you intended?" Getting suggestions and again, having the learning curve be less like a, "No, no, no, no, yes," and more like a gray that evolves into a yes.

    4. AM

      Like a gradient descent, sort of how you sh- how you train an AI, actually. So yeah, I, I, I 100% agree with that. I think it humanizes the process as opposed to this like mechanistic sort of trial and error thing. It allows us to iterate a lot faster on tools. Like traditional IDEs are very hard to build. They're super complex classic algorithms. Uh, I'm sure you remember, Steph, but like some of these IDEs are super big. Like you download, uh, IntelliJ, that's like a couple gigabytes of, uh, stuff, and they're clunky. They take up a ton of RAM. Like try starting Xcode, you know, it's k- it's kind of like, uh, it just consumes your computer. And the cool thing about the AI revolution is that the AI's gonna be running in the cloud, and you're gonna give it a prompt, like, you know, what you're talking about, what your code is about, and it'll be able to implement suggestions and implement features and tools without having this heavy algorithmic, hard to maintain sort of piece of software. Um, so I'm really excited about that. And as a startup, you always want to catch a new platform shift, and, and with Replit, I feel like we're catching this platform shift, and the older IDEs will not be able to adapt as fast as we can.

  7. 21:03 – 23:40

    Training your own models

    1. SS

      Well, something that I've heard you talk about is also a decision that you made, which was to build Ghostwriter on top of your own models. So something like a Copilot is built on top of GPT-3, to my knowledge, and that's a decision to be built off another platform, but you went a different route. So can you speak a little bit more to how you made that decision and what kind of inputs led to that output?

    2. AM

      Well, first of all, how crazy it is that, uh, that Microsoft had to depend on another company, whereas Replit built [laughs] our own thing. [laughs] There are like multiple ways to answer this. One of them i-is UX. UX is, uh, inherently inseparable from the infrastructure for how a product works. I think most people think as the- they're separate things, but if you're serious about making products, you know, uh, you know, famous, um, Alan Kay quote to Steve Jobs. He told Steve Jobs, "If you're serious about making software, you have to make hardware." Um, and that's why like Apple's this full stack company is because they think about everything from the transistor to the touch, right? And so I think for us it was like just like if this is gonna be a core interaction with our platform, we have to be able to optimize it, and we have to get the latency down to the point that we, we like, we feel it's gonna be a really great user experience. And we weren't able to really get that when we're hitting something over an API 'cause the latency will be all over the place. We couldn't get the caching right. We couldn't get the, um, you know, location right. We didn't have control about any of these things. That's a huge downside of being a consumer of a mere API. And then, uh, the other part is the strategic part, which is like if you think, if you believe that this is a primary platform shift, and this is gonna be a core part of your technology, then you have to build it. If you call yourself a technology company, that means you build technology, right? It just doesn't mean you're just like building glue code on top of like existing technology. Finally, uh, w-we think that we have a bit of a data advantage, and that data advantage will compound over time, and so will allow us to, to train more advanced AIs, uh, over time. Um, so all these three reasons just made sense for us to bring at least part of it in-house. I should say that we still use OpenAI for a lot of the sort of like, um, you know, bigger, uh, uh, workloads that require really large

  8. 23:40 – 26:03

    Building UX around AI

    1. AM

      models.

    2. SS

      Something that I found really interesting was Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman were on the Stratechery podcast, and they talked about how they ultimately... I mean, they're investors, they're not the creators of Copilot, but how Copilot ultimately got to the interface, um, that it now is, and originally, they actually wanted to create it as a chatbot. They thought, oh, people will run into an error. They're gonna wanna talk to someone and ask, "Hey, how do I fix this?" And they're gonna get a response and implement it. Um, but ultimately, they ended up kind of pivoting to what you might imagine as like a robot on your shoulder that only speaks up when it has confidence. And so I know it's the early days of Ghostwriter, but thoughts on how you got to the specific interface that is Ghostwriter today and how you, as you said, kind of linked the UX that people see to what's happening in the back end as you're building these models.

    3. AM

      So, so I th- I think there's, um, the- there's two modalities. One is pull and one is push, right? So pull is the human knows what they want, and they're gonna ask for it. You write a prompt, you're gonna wait a little bit, and you're gonna get it. And then there's push, which is the robot on your shoulder that is, like, continuously suggesting improvements. And there are trade-offs to both. The push model is actually fairly expensive, uh, because you're computing all the time. It needs to actually be fairly low latencies, so that commits you to a smaller model, so you can't use a super large model. Uh, and, and, you know, on the other hand, on the sort of pull model, uh, like I'm asking something, I'm actually gonna formulate my question in a way that the AI could understand it better. Um, I'm gonna be able to wait to get a much... uh, to give the AI time to think or to compute. And so I would say it's, it's not either/or. You have to do both. And I think that's the fundamental UX innovation we brought to the space is that we call it society of models. Copilot uses a single model. Replit uses like three different models of different sizes. So the smallest model is the model, you know, over your shoulder continuously giving you suggestions, then a medium-sized model to do the transformations and things like that, then a super large model, the kind of model that you would wanna talk to, a ChatGPT-style model.

    4. SS

      That's great, and I guess that shows a concrete example of the capabilities you get from developing your own models and really being able to fine-tune them to specific use

  9. 26:03 – 29:43

    The developer landscape

    1. SS

      cases. Let's zoom out a little bit and talk about, you know, right now we're at the beginning of this phase where AI is being applied to code. Copilot came out, what was it, like a year ago or so? Ghostwriter came out recently. Uh, but we're in, you might say, the first inning. So if we extrapolate to maybe, say, Ghostwriter V4 or Copilot V6, uh, many years from now, I wanna think about how you see the overall environment for developers, uh, emerging or evolving. So on one hand, I could see how people might argue, "You know what? Having this technology, being able to just tell a computer, 'Hey, I wanna create this app. Go, go basically build it for me, or at least build the fundamentals for me,' is going to create this wave of really low-quality developers who don't really know what they're doing and were just relying on this AI crutch to be able to do a lot for them." I could also see an argument, though, if we're talking about some of these suggestions, um, within their development environment, this actually creating better developers. They understand a little bit more about, um, how their code is being executed. Maybe they more quickly pick up new skills, new languages, new frameworks because they have this assistant. And so just curious to know how you see this all evolving and, again, this kind of ecosystem of engineers changing.

    2. AM

      Yeah. I mean, anytime you make something, uh, more accessible, you just get the entire gamut of things. Like Instagram made photography way more accessible, and you get like a, like a long tail of crappy photographs, but you also discover people who would have never been photographers, right? You know, everything in the world is like that. Like YouTube, most of their creators don't get any views, but then a few creators like PewDiePie, pre-YouTube, would've been just a kid in Sweden, not a super celebrity, right? And so making things accessible gets you a lot more people involved, and the trade-off you're making is that you're gonna get a lot of noise, but you're gonna discover talent that wouldn't otherwise be discovered. Uh, I think that's good for the world. So with software engineering becoming more accessible because of AI, I do think we're gonna get a lot more developers. I think we're gonna get way, way more developers, probably 10x. Um, so right now there's like thirty million developers in the world. There's probably three hundred million developers by the end of the decade. And the way I see sort of the developer market evolving to accommodate this new technology is that there's gonna be this bit of a bimodal distribution. So bimodal distribution meaning there's no middle end. There's a large tail on both sides, right? So the middle end is the sort of, um, the glue code plumber-type developer that we have today. I think that'll go away, and the reason that'll go away is because platforms are gonna be a lot more expressive. They're gonna be able to be programmed using natural language. A lot of the cloud platforms are just building m- better abstractions. Things like Replit will just, like, make backends a lot more accessible. And so that... the middle end I think will probably disappear because of that, because of pressure from both sides. The front-end engineer is just gonna get way, way more powerful. So a front-end engineer will be able to build full stack products just because they have access to all this really powerful platforms, and they're gonna be able to just produce a lot more code and be able to use AI in every part of the coding process, whether it's testing, CI/CD, design. Everything is gonna be sort of powered by AI, AI just made a lot better, including quality control,

  10. 29:43 – 32:39

    The 1000x engineer

    1. AM

      by the way. So that's the sort of on the front-end side, and then on the sort of back-end, low-level sort of platform engineering, um, I think those people are just gonna get a lot more powerful. Like, imagine John Carmack, right? John Carmack is what we call a 10x developer today. Imagine giving him a army of AI developers that he could delegate work to, that he could, you know, ask questions of, that, um, he- you're just gonna make him 100x, 1000x more productive. And, and so you're gonna have maybe fewer of those sort of low-level 10x engineers, but they're gonna be 1000x engineers. And so maybe a single company would need two or three, like, elite engineers and then maybe dozens of front-end engineers kind of building all these products and maintaining what the customers see. But those, like, core group of elite engineers, uh, their impact is just gonna be tremendous. They're gonna be demanding a lot more money. They're gonna be making a lot more money. So if, if engineering is really your craft, it's not going away, and it's actually, you're gonna be able to actually be-- accentuate your power.

    2. SS

      I think it's funny that you mention the 10x engineer because a lot of people make fun of this concept of a 10x engineer because you don't see, for example, a 10x plumber because you're a little bit limited in the leverage that you can get with your time in a scenario like that. But we know that one of the reasons there, there truly can be 10x engineers is because software can actually give you leverage. And so if you enhance the power that software can provide, it's actually not crazy, to your point, to imagine 100x engineer or 1000x engineer if you basically have these like robot developers that you can rein in and apply in a specific direction.

    3. AM

      It's scale, right?

    4. SS

      Yeah, exactly.

    5. AM

      It's the concept of scale. It's concept of like this is what technology has allowed us to do since the dawn of humanity. You know, you go from collecting crops manually by hand and doing everything, to using animals, to then using robots, and now a single farmer can maintain entire acres of farms just because of all the technology they're using. That's technology, right? I mean, uh, the 10x denialism is s- is kind of funny to watch. Like every one of those people that say 10x engineers don't exist know in their heart of hearts that 10x engineers exist, and they probably worked with someone they highly respect and admire. The reason they say that is just politically motivated. They just don't like that the fact that some people can be better than other people, and that's just a fact in life.

    6. SS

      It's uncomfortable to accept that some people actually do bring more value to different organizations. All right, so with the bimodal description that you've shared,

  11. 32:39 – 36:56

    Should you still learn to code?

    1. SS

      I have to ask the question, which is just simply: Is it still worth learning to code?

    2. AM

      To me, it feels like it's more worth it today because it's a tide that, uh, raises all boats, right? Like we said, the 10x becomes a 1000x. But like a .1x becomes a, you know, a 10x, right? So if you're someone who's previously maybe whose impact with coding is gonna be very minimal, now is gonna be meaningful because there's this rising tide. Previously, like you learn a bit of coding, you learn how to plug together some frameworks and create some UI. Going from that to like doing a little bit of parsing, for example, parsing some text on I don't know, is very hard. Right now, you can just use GPT-3 to do the parsing, right? So you're doing the basic coding, and then any time you find something that's like a little difficult, you can plug in GPT-3 in that place. And so I actually think that programming becomes more fun and impactful because of that. So it's like totally worth doing, even more worth doing than, than before because you're gonna get more done and you're gonna get-- not gonna get as stuck.

    3. SS

      Yeah. I think too how quickly people can probably learn, I wonder if you have any data on this. But when I learnt, I don't know why I did this, but I decided to track how many hours I was spending from when I first started to when I actually felt proficient. Um, and for me, that number ended up being three hundred hours. Um, maybe I was slow, maybe I was fast, I don't know. Um, but it kind of shocked me in a way because if you actually distill three hundred hours down to if you were learning full-time, which I know not everyone can do, that's less than two months. And now I think to the tools we have today and I'm like, "Gosh, like we can probably do it way faster than three hundred hours." So any thoughts on how quickly someone can actually get to proficiency with the tools that we have?

    4. AM

      So I know you're, you're fond of, uh, Balaji and he was on your podcast. He, you know, he has this, uh, beef with media, and so he wanted to show that The New York Times is a bunch of bots, right? It's [laughs] it's, uh, he, he put in a bounty on Replit. He was one of our early adopters of bounties. And he wrote, it's like, "I want, uh, uh, someone to build, uh, the GPT Times." It's sort of like New York Times, but, um, just totally based on tweets. You give it a tweet, and it goes and generate an article written in the style of The New York Times. So actually, uh, it is-- it should be up now. So if you go to the gpttimes.com, so, uh, that's basically like the site that was built using, um, the bounties program. And the, the person who built it was on day eighty, I think, of 100 Days of Python. So 100 Days of Python is one of our programs to learn how to code. And we say you can do a day of Python in basically twenty minutes. So if he was on day eighty spending twenty minutes, how many hours is that? That's twenty-six hours. So in twenty-six hours, they were able to do, um, to build an entire website using AI and earn eighteen hundred dollars from, from Balaji. Right? So that's, that's I think your answer. I mean, maybe that, uh, guy was an outlier, but we're seeing it all the time where it's like it's taking weeks for someone to get to a place where they can build things, and I think that's really what matters.

    5. SS

      I think that's incredible because I think one of the best decisions I made was learning to code because you just-- to me, it really was like a foundational shift in understanding the world around me. Because again, so much of what we do is digital, it is online. And so even if you don't want to go and be the developer that's hired to build products, just having that understanding... And it's kind of crazy when you think about it. If you were to actually position that like before and after to people and say, "Well, now it only takes thirty hours," that's like y- you could do that in a week. You could take four days off from your job, go through this, and I know there's a difference between the twenty minutes a day and, you know, a straight shot, but that's pretty incredible.

  12. 36:56 – 43:40

    What does AI enable?

    1. SS

      So the final thing I wanna ask you about when it comes to AI is how this might shift, um, not just How quickly we can code or how quickly we can learn to code, but how this may fundamentally change what we can do with code. So let me give you two examples to kind of shape up the question. The first is when we learned that computers were better at chess than humans, we didn't just learn that fact, we also learned that there were all these other moves or modalities to chess that we had never considered, right? It, it kind of reframed the way we saw the game. And then another example is one that our games team shared recently, where basically if you've heard of the Flight Simulator game, you can basically like, you know, in the digital world, fly and land an airplane and fly it around the Earth. And it's got this three-D model of the Earth that was built off of the two-D model from Google Earth. And that three-D model was built with AI, and it only could've been built with AI. So those are two examples of how this technology not only, you know, maybe made things faster, but actually made things possible, if that makes sense, things that weren't prior available. So have you seen any glimpses of that or any thoughts around just like having-- You know, we could position it as somewhat of a superpower, having that superpower accessible. What does that change?

    2. AM

      Man, this is such a brilliant question. Like, I actually haven't thought about it as much, and I think I should. Like, uh, you know, your example with chess also happened with Go, you know, with the Lee Sedol game. Do you remember that move? That basically what happened is the AI made a strange move that made it give it a disadvantage in the near term and a huge advantage in the long term. And they were so confused about it because it's almost like alien intelligence intruding on this thousand-year-old game, right? And, and producing this fundamentally novel move. So I don't think we've seen that entirely in, in programming yet, but I'd be definitely l- on the lookout for that. What I would say we've seen is that tasks that were, uh, previously would require a ton of work, like a ton of insane amount of laborious work, getting done like that. You know? For example, the parsing, uh, question. GPT-3 is incredibly good at parsing. If you give it a malformed JSON, it will still parse it. Writing parsers is one of the hardest things you can do in programming. Writing parsers in GPT-3 is one of the easiest thing you could do. You could do-- spend fifteen minutes in the OpenAI playground. And so really that goes from a task that requires hours a-and maybe days and weeks of building and testing to something that takes a fifteen minute. And so that's a fundamental phase shift in, in how we do things that's actually quite clear. Uh, you know, I, I, I think there are ways in which, like, we haven't totally explored how to use LLMs in programming. Like, can you create back-end as a service using LLMs? So basically, um, Firebase, but entirely using natural language. So Firebase is this great project that Google, uh, Cloud acquired, and Firebase allows you to have a back end without any back-end knowledge. You just start storing data, and it'll just retrieving data, and it just works. Can you have a back end that's completely programmable using natural language? Can I describe my application and just write the front end for it and just have the back end taken care of? Uh, I think that if that's possible, that'll cut down on, like, how many engineers you need on your team. That'll cut down on time to create a prototype. And so I think that will be incredibly exciting. But your question was more like, what, what is something fundamentally was not possible that became possible? I don't think we've seen that yet, but I do wanna think a little harder about it and really be opening my eyes wide about it. Maybe one thing I'll mention is, like, one direction that could happen is the action model. Have you looked at action models at all?

    3. SS

      No, no. It'd be great if you could describe what they are.

    4. AM

      Yeah. So transformer models are the models underpinning large language models, right? So that's what everyone knows, GPT. GPT stands for generative pre-trained transformer. So you take a transformer, that's a type of model architecture, and you throw a huge corpus at it, and it learns a ton of things. Uh, and then you can program it using prompting, right? That's basically what GPT is. Now, you can do a different type of transformer, where you ta-take a transformer. Instead of throwing a ton of text at it, you throw, throw a ton of actions at it. So what, what are actions? So for ex-for example, actions could be all the mouse and keyboard events in a browser. So I'll just take all of that, this raw stream of data, and just put it-- train a transformer to do that. So now the transformer encodes knowledge about how to use a browser. That's wild. All right, what can you do with that? You can now instruct the transformer to go book an Airbnb for you, to go do, like, more complex tasks, like find the place with the best weather in this time of year and book an Airbnb for me and my family. So that's quite interesting. I would say that wasn't possible before. Um, so I think that's a fundamental area. If, if action transformers became mainstream and as powerful as GPT, then I think it'll unlock a new programmable platform because now you can sort of, you can sort of-- It's almost like everything has an API suddenly.

    5. SS

      Yeah. That's fascinating, actually, because, yeah, in the past, it's like a specific database has an API that you can plug into, but now this idea where anything in the browser, anything on the web could potentially be transformed into its own API without setting up the, like- Specific API yourself, like that the language model could actually figure that out. That's fascinating. And I think to your point, we haven't seen these specific examples of wasn't possible now possible yet because we're really early. But even just as we've discussed so far, the amount of foundational development that is required from engineers today that will soon be abstracted just opens that time up, that brain capacity up to apply to something new. So I think it's a little bit inevitable for something to emerge. We're just not sure what that

  13. 43:40 – 46:21

    Developing on mobile

    1. SS

      something is. I wanna ask you very quickly about mobile as well, because up until now, desktop has really captured most of development. I can't think of many developers who code on their phone, but it sounds like this might be changing. In fact, I heard you actually say that you think millions of people will code on their phone.

    2. AM

      Yeah, I mean, if you think about what we've been talking about with AI, the idea that your primary development experience will include a big portion of chat. And like the, the best way to do chat is on your phone. Everyone texts on their phone, everyone talks on their phone, and I think that being able to generate software by talking to your phone is gonna be a very clear thing that will happen. At minimum, being able to, uh, like instruct your AIs while you're on the go and review their work, that's obviously gonna happen. But as typing becomes less of an issue on the phone, then actually making complete pieces of software just will make a ton of sense because you're just prompting and you're re-prompting, and you're reviewing and then prompting and reviewing or prompting. That iterative loop is very clearly going to work very well on the phone, and actually could be more delightful on the phone 'cause it can-- you could do a lot of swiping sort of activity. Like I, you know, with my team we joke, we call it like Tinder for code, where so if you prompt AI and it gives you a piece of code, you could say yes or no. Say no, then it give you another, another piece of code, and maybe you give it another prompt, or maybe it'd ask you another questions. So, so that iterative piece of making software using AI, I think really lends itself nicely to the, the, the concept of a, of a phone. And then the other thing is that it's not just the phone, it's the tablet. Like how crazy it is, Steph, that, uh, you know, we don't like have good IDEs on the tablet. It's kind of surprising that, you know, Microsoft hasn't made VS Code for the tablet. So we're the first kinda major IDE for the tablet as well. And I think you can do everything that you do-- you could do on desktop on tablet. You can attach a keyboard to that, and you can go to any coffee shop in the world. Everything happens at cloud. Your storage is in the cloud, your AI is in the cloud. You don't need that much local capability, and you could just write software on that.

    3. SS

      Yeah. Yeah, I haven't thought of that actually, but I... it's true. I have never seen someone coding on a tablet, just like I've never really seen someone coding on mobile, but let's see how that evolves.

  14. 46:21 – 49:42

    A software labor market

    1. SS

      Another feature you've developed that you alluded to earlier was bounties. So can you tell listeners a little bit more about what this is, this idea of bounties, and also just a little bit more about how it's going so far?

    2. AM

      Yeah. Um, so bounties is part of our sort of portfolio of products that make it easy to make software. So we realize that not everyone in the world wants to be a coder, and I think a combination of the network effects on Replit and being able to discover a lot of software engineers, like the kind of guy who made the GPT times for biology and the AI revolution and, you know, the, um, sort of what's happening in currencies, whether cryptocurrency or centralized currency, there's a lot of interesting things. I think it's a sort of a, a bit of a trifecta that allows us to kind of build what I think is a fluid software, uh, labor market. Um, uh, like a big fan of, uh, this, um, theory, uh, called the theory of the, uh, of the firm. The fundamental observation is that full-time employment is a bug. It's not a feature of the market. The reason why full-time e-employment exists is because the transaction cost of doing something is really high. Uber is an example of something bringing the transaction cost almost down to zero. Uh, and by doing that, it creates a, a, a huge amount of flexibility in the, in the market. So anyone can enter the market, anyone can do the work, and they could do it at their own terms, and there's no binding contract, uh, between the different parties. Software has been something that's been like very hard to actually contract out, and when you do contract out, you get a lot of problems, a lot of, uh, issues running the software. You get a lot of quality issues. So the fact that Replit is a fully integrated place with high quality software engineers using it allows us to be a place where someone can go put a description for a piece of software that they need to get done, and then a developer, a high quality developer can go and, uh, using AI, can make that software very quickly. And we're seeing people making software in thirty-minute increments. So, uh, so someone the other day put a landing page, a request for a landing page up. They attached a Figma file. They got it back in thirty minutes. That's really never been done before, and why shouldn't have it existed, uh, like that before? And so, so I, I think the combination of all the technologies we're building allows us to create this, this marketplace.

    3. SS

      How are you thinking about this bounties marketplace among the existing marketplaces? Because- It sounds like, and let me know if I'm wrong, this is more peer-to-peer. I post a project, someone within the community puts their hand up, or maybe they're matched. But when I think about the existing marketplaces for developers out there, their job, in many of these cases, is to vet a bunch of developers and say, "Okay, you have this skill set. You're this good of a developer." And then also vet their clients and say, "Okay, this is, you know, a good project. This is worthwhile for us to introduce into this marketplace." And then they match people. And then, of course, those marketplaces take some commission for doing so. And so,

  15. 49:42 – 51:39

    Differentiating a marketplace

    1. SS

      since many of these already exist, like, how do you see bounties as an ecosystem differentiating or maybe providing something new to people within the community?

    2. AM

      I think it's already differentiated, and the reason it's already differentiated is because the development environment is built into the system. If Uber was a marketplace to connect you to people, and then they have to go get their own car, right? Like, so you have to go meet someone at a coffee shop, and then you and them go get a car [laughs] and then go, go, right? That's an absurd example, but that's what happens at Upwork or some of these marketplaces. Like, I ask for a piece of software, and then you go make it in something that I don't know, and then you send me a zip file, and then what do I do with that? Right? On Replit, I just send you a link, a link to a computer that's running, that's running your application. That's like fundamental innovation on top of that. And then, like, all the services just being integrated right there, like your OpenAI API key, the, the cloud runtime, like, all that stuff. The database, we just added, uh, Postgres support. Just Replit being this complete platform just, like, makes this process a lot more efficient.

    3. SS

      That's actually a great point because when I think about other scenarios where people hire developers to create projects, I think one of the massive gaps is, as you said, the standardization. But it's also, if we think about the AI tools that you're integrating, if someone gets a project and they can actually read the code, and maybe they're not a developer but have some level of understanding of, like, this was what I got back, I think that's actually massive differentiation. Because in the past, they just get back this code that they can't understand at all. If they need to refactor anything or change anything or get a new developer to work on it, they really struggle, and they really also struggle to have some sort of sentiment in terms of how good the code is.

    4. AM

      Yep, exactly.

  16. 51:39 – 54:10

    Building new market dynamics

    1. AM

      And we wanna do, like, um, more-- We wanna create more market dynamics in the future that are more interesting. Like, for example, like, uh, you know this concept from crypto called staking, and the idea that, um, people like being able to stake their money in order to say, "I'm, I'm gonna build this. I'm gonna build this better than anyone, so I'll put up a bounty for a thousand bucks." And you, Steph, will say, "I'm so sure of my ability to do that, I'm willing to put up a hundred bucks that I'll be able to deliver it on time, and if I don't, you can take my hundred bucks."

    2. SS

      I love that.

    3. AM

      And so I, I think there's a lot of innovation to do in, in, in market. And you could also integrate some kind of AI things on top of that. So for example, you can have a sort of AI project manager, where an AI takes, uh, one bounty and, like, splits it into ten bounties. So we have this, um, experimental product that I tweeted about recently. But basically, the moment you put in a bounty, we actually s- generate the scaffolding for the code. What's... You know, scaffolding in programming is basically the structure of the code. And then every function is, like, that is not implemented, that function could be its individual bounty. So I think once you add all these sort of innovations together, I think you're gonna get this, like, super fluid market of AIs and humans that it-- you can go from an idea to a product just like that. And crucially, like you said, the product that you're gonna get is something that you're gonna be able to iterate on the future and get more bounty creators to contribute to. It's a living artifact that's working on the platform as, as opposed to, like, again, like a zip file thrown over the wall to you.

    4. SS

      I love the idea of people being able to, uh, like, legitimately bet on themselves if they want to participate, if they wanna take on a bounty. Because a- actually, when I talked to Balaji in our interview, we talked about this idea of evidence versus confidence. So someone can have a lot of confidence and say, "Hey, I have these requisites on my CV," or, "I have this degree from somewhere," and that distills a lot of confidence in other people that they can get something done. But what's better than confidence is evidence that you can actually get it done. And if you, if you can show, "Hey, I have-- I've done this project before. Like, literally, here's my work. And also I'll put," as you said, "put five hundred dollars down to say, 'Hey, if you don't like it, like, you can have my five hundred dollars.'" Like, that is more than

  17. 54:10 – 1:04:17

    Looking ahead

    1. SS

      confidence. That is, like, evidence that you can do the work, and you're willing to put, uh, your money where your, your skills are. With that said, let's move on to the very final section, and we'll just rapid fire go through these questions. They are questions that I've actually seen Sam Altman from OpenAI talk about as four different important questions that he thinks are relevant to this advent of AI, especially as it progresses. Again, taking the lens of not just Ghostwriter V1, but Ghostwriter V10, quite a ways away from now, and how, how good, how proficient it can get. So I'll just read you each question, and I just wanna get your, like, raw take on each of these. So the first question is, you know, with that technology, how, how do you think that fundamentally changes society?

    2. AM

      Something I care deeply about, which is, uh, equality of opportunity. So, so I think just the ability that anyone in the world being able to contribute and build something is just beautiful and just amazing. It allows to include- Everyone and anyone who's willing to work hard. And that's like the real Americanism, in my opinion. That's like the-- what, what America's built upon, is the idea is that if you're willing to do, do the work, you're gonna get the chance at doing the work. And if you do the work right, you're gonna get rewarded for it, and I think that's beautiful. However, I, I, I think that comes with also increased inequality. I, I, I think there's gonna be-- the pie is gonna be bigger, uh, but also there's gonna be differences between, again, like the 10x difference becomes a 1000x difference. And that's gonna create some political issues because I think it is gonna create envy and it's gonna, um, accentuate some, some differences. And I think that part's not gonna be fun. And, um, and I, I think reasonable people should be able to, like, say it like it is. And I, I-- that's why I think, you know, the 10x denialism, um, is a small sort of symptom of a larger issue, and the issue of just being uncomfortable of people being rewarded more because they have a, a better ability of, of doing something. So that, that's j-just gonna be a big issue that society's gonna have to deal with.

    3. SS

      I agree. Exponential technology means potentially exponential gains from certain people and not others, and that's not necessarily inherently bad, especially if the pie is growing. But yes, I agree with you, that's going to be something that is divisive. That actually relates to question number two, which is: how do we ensure that it benefits us all? Now, that does not mean it benefits us all equally, but how do we ensure that this technology is something that widely benefits the people participating in society?

    4. AM

      I, I think as much as possible, having competition is gonna be important. I, I think a world in which just one company controls the biggest AI models is not gonna be great. But I-- neither do, like, one-- two or three companies. I think the lesson we learned from the last generation of big tech is that especially if there's like a cultural-- a monoculture like Silicon Valley, you're gonna have similar decisions made. And so how do we prevent that in the, in the world of AI? That's something that's very important. I think open source, uh, plays a part in that. I think as much as possible, you know, pushing this technology to be easy to run and, uh, easy to develop, and not necessarily something that's sort of closed off and, like, a few people can control. I think a lot of what's called AI alignment today is not really aligning with what the average human being wants. It's aligning with, like, what the sort of Silicon Valley average, uh, sensibility is, which I don't think it's good. Like, I think that we should try to build, as much as possible, neutral technology. So my bias is gonna be more freedom, more decentralization.

    5. SS

      Yeah. Ultimately, these models are a tool. The tool itself is neutral, but the application of the tool or the technology often isn't neutral or doesn't always happen to be neutral.

    6. AM

      And they hate, they hate the fact that it can be neutral, and they think that neutral is bad. And I, I think that's where we really need to push back, is that no, actually, it should be neutral, and then the user have to decide what to do with it.

    7. SS

      Right. Yeah, I think that's a good modifier. I'm gonna combine the final two into one question. You can maybe touch on either or both of them. Uh, but the question is, given-- again, if we imagine the exponential nature of this technology, the evolved form of it, how do we deploy it safely? And you can kind of interpret the word safe in, in your own terms. Uh, how do we deploy it safely, and also maybe how does governance play a role in that?

    8. AM

      You know, I, I, I dislike the word safety, and I think, um, a lot of the problems in the world today and, and, and the-- so the way our world is shaping up is this concept of safetyism, is that, yeah, this, this concept of just like that like companies need to ensure our safety, and then they encroach on our freedom to, to ensure our safety. Like, it's such a, um, stupid topic, but there was the recent gas stove debate, right? You know, whatever government official that kind of said, like, they might consider banning gas stoves. That, that kind of impulse of like, "We know better than you," so the nanny state impulse, I think it's bad, and I think it actually-- every time governments have created sort of atrocities have come from that idea. Like, the government wanted, uh, the American people to be safe from the Japanese. That's why they created Japanese internment camps, right? You can use safety to do the most abhorrent thing i-in-in the world. And so I think we need to be skeptical. Anyone's talking about safety, they probably want something bad for you. [chuckles] And so, uh, that, that would be my bias, is that safety is bad. Or, or at least, uh, uh, when, when they wanna impose something in the, uh, under the guise of safety, I would be super skeptical. And then, uh, on the, on the question of, of governance, I would also be skeptical of that. So maybe I'm showing my set of libertarian-

    9. SS

      [laughs]

    10. AM

      [laughs] Uh, impulses here. But, um, like, I, like, I don't think anyone is inherently responsible for governance of technology. Look, I think government has a play-- has a role to play, but government sh-sort of moves slow, and that's good that it moves slow because it needs to learn what's happening, what the system is. Like, you know, if the government moved really fast on regulating cars, they would have gotten super wrong. And it's, it's now, like, making self-driving move a lot slower than it should be just because the regulation just mounted up. But, but I, I think the, the sort of the Process in the US is actually fine for regulation. Just like move it slow and let's learn what's happening in the real world, and then let's, let's react to that and let's have a reasonable debate and discussion. I think a democracy, at the end of the day, will arrive at the right decisions if there's sufficient, uh, freedom, and I'm, I'm a big fan of debate and vicious debate in order to arrive, uh, at the truth. But, but that's just gonna take time and, and, and the problem now is that there are some people talking about AI takeoff being so fast that, you know, you need to react to it really quickly, and I think that'll get us into trouble, actually. If you're gonna force politicians to understand this technology before it's even deployed, you're really asking for trouble.

    11. SS

      Yeah, but I do think on the flip side of that, something beautiful that's happened in the last year or so is that this technology has taken off really quickly, but it also has done so in a way where it's gotten in the hands of consumers. And you see this if you, you look at the charts of like ChatGPT, for example, their speed to 10 million users was so much quicker than, you know, Facebook or Snapchat or other, um, other apps in the past. And so I think while it is inviting some skepticism to say, "Oh my gosh, this is happening so quickly. This is scary. We don't know the implications," I also think you're going to see a level of pushback, right? 'Cause y- a- at that point, you're taking something away from people, this superpower, as we talked about it.

    12. AM

      It's important to notice, Steph, that nothing as catastrophic happened, right? Like this technology and is now massive deployment and nothing as bad as the sort of less wrong sort of AI safetyism sort of part of the, uh, debate have said it's gonna happen. Um, and, uh, a- and so it's, it's important to recognize this because the people that are gonna be arguing for extra controls and everything are, are gonna, you know, always paint a future picture of catastrophe. But like the question to ask them is like, like, okay, now there are millions of people already using this, like nothing really bad happened. So, you know, what are you actually worried about in concrete terms?

    13. SS

      Yeah, and I think your time dimension is so important here because to your point, you look at technologies like cars, and they were worried in the early days about cars scaring horses. And I think just having a layer of humility to say, "We don't know how this is gonna shake out."

    14. AM

      I'm super optimistic about the future, uh, of this technology and everything that's happening. I think, I think it's really lovely, and I, I think it like, uh, it's like the best time to be a builder. [upbeat music]

    15. SS

      Thanks for listening to the a16z podcast. If you like this episode, don't forget to subscribe here on YouTube to get our exclusive video content. We'll see you next time. [upbeat music]

Episode duration: 1:04:17

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