Aaron Levie: Everyone is Wrong; We'll Have More Developers in 5 Years

Yeah, I'd still be probably loading up on all of the frontier rounds. These numbers could continue to get much larger

Now, I think Aaron Levie is one of the luminaries on AI pervading into enterprise, and he did a viral tweet the other night, and I said, "Dude, we've got to do a show on this." So this is specifically on how AI will impact the biggest enterprise in the world, how agents will be introduced into the largest enterprises, and we couldn't have anyone better than Aaron, founder and CEO of Box, one of the public companies of the last decade. This is an incredible discussion.

What we are in is a commercial and economic race. We haven't removed humans from the loop. We've just changed where they enter the loop. Everybody is so myopic about this. I want to just, like, shake the industry. There are going to be more lawyers in the next five years than we have today. The workflow needs to be redesigned for agents, not for people. The budget of tokens will have to move out of IT spend and into regular OPEX spend.

Is your job harder than ever?

Yes. If you're in software or infrastructure or building agents, it's a year of complete unrelenting execution.

Ready to go? [upbeat rock music] Aaron, dude, it's so lovely to have you on the show. You know that we have Rory on every week, and he's just like, "Aaron is the greatest." I'm not going to do his accent because I suck at them, but he's like the greatest-

Wait, you can't, you can't easily do a, an Irish accent?

Well, you know, I, I can't really do the Irish accent so well.

Okay. [laughs]

But, uh, that's fine. Exactly. Uh, but you basically, I'm sure, bought Rory one of his houses, so no wonder he's grateful. Uh, but [laughs]

We, we... Rory, uh, we got more out of Rory than he got out of us, so, uh, uh, I'll, I'll take that.

An exceptional man. But I wanted to start, and we were just chatting. I was running around the park listening to the Dwarkesh and Jensen episode, and I was like, "I don't think Jensen came out very well." Do you agree with me that Jensen didn't come out very well from that episode?

Um, I, I think this is, like, the greatest Rorschach test of all time of, of where, uh, where, where, where somebody is mentally on AI. Um, I, if... Uh, so I happened to see a bunch of the tweets before I watched it, and so I was a little bit obviously biased in advance. But if I hadn't seen any of the commentary and I had just watched it, um, I would've been very confused by the, by the commentary post, uh, you know, post, uh, interview. Uh, a-and, and, um, to be clear, I kind of jumped to the more, uh, salacious part of, of, you know, China and, and that topic. But I'm, I'm almost probably 80% with Jensen. Um, and, um, and I, I, my, my sort of, uh, kind of way of thinking through the logic actually works much closer to, uh, to Jensen. Um, you know, the, the idea that we're in some kind of, you know, kind of race, existential race where a month or two of advantage is gonna, you know, change the total outcome of, of AI progress and, and what everybody does between us and China, I, I just don't agree with. I think what we are in is a commercial and economic race. Obviously, with safety, you know, built into that, there's no question. Um, and I think we actually have a lot more power globally, uh, if it's our technology stack that's powering AI. And so I, I, I kind of am more in the camp of, of Jensen on, on hi- uh, on his lines of logic. And, you know, Dwarkesh kind of oversimplified a few, a few components. You know, he said, "Well, you know, with Mythos, if, if we get early access to that, then we can go and upgrade all of our systems." And, you know, with, with, again, great respect to Dwar- Dwarkesh, it's like, it's like upgrading software is a multi-year effort, so unless they somehow keep Mythos, you know, closed for the next decade, there's not, like, some magical moment where you can just secure everything. This is an ongoing, endless, you know, till the end of time, you're always in this sort of leapfrogging, you know, between the defensive side and the offensive side. Um, and so I just don't think these things are as binary, and so I, I actually more am inclined to, uh, to, to Jensen's view of that. And then Jensen had a really key point that was... didn't go viral yet, so maybe you could kick it off. But he had this little small vignette, uh, about 90 seconds into the whole conversation, where he said, you know, "We're gonna do ourselves a disservice if we scare people out of engineering, if we scare people out of radiology, if we scare people out of healthcare because they think all these jobs are gonna get eliminated with AI. That is not helping us. Uh, that is, that is, uh, it's doing a disservice to the next generation. It's doing a disservice to society as a whole." Like, we, we don't yet know any way to use AI in a capacity other than augmenting our work, where we still eventually have to go and review the work in some, in some form. Maybe you don't have to review the tiny little parts of it anymore. You can review a, a bigger, you know, part of the, of, of the, of the, you know, work product that happens. But, um, but we haven't removed humans from the loop. We've just changed where they enter the loop. Um, and, uh, and I think that, that Jensen has a more pragmatic view of, of the technology. We should be, you know, very thoughtful about how we make these systems safe, but I much more land in Jensen's camp, uh, on the overall kind of contours of the debate.