The Exchanges

Q 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 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?

A So 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 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 an absolute bliss, but those moments were actually very little in terms of the, if you think about the pie charts of what it meant to work as a programmer. So the first thing that Repli did is remove the need to do all this 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 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 exp…

AI assessment note: “So the first thing that Repli did is remove the need to do all this setup.”

Q 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?

A Yeah, I, I think that's, um, that's fairly reasonable number of projects. So there's a six-year-old developer. His name is Ray Han. 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 because discord has 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 Scylla 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 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.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, I, I think that's, um, that's fairly reasonable number of projects.”

Q also a decision that you made, which was to build Ghostwriter on top of your own models. So something like a co-pilot is built on top of GPT-III 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?

A Well, first of all, how crazy it is that, uh, that Microsoft had a dependent on another company, whereas Replit built our own thing. There are like multiple ways to answer this. One of them is UX. UX is 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 Kaye 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 going to 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 going to 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 can get the caching ride. We can 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 a strategic part, which is like, if you think, if you believe that this is a primary platform shift and this is going to …

AI assessment note: “if this is going to be a core interaction... we have to get latency down”

Q 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 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?

A 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. That's an absurd example, but that's what happens at Upwork or some of these marketplaces. Like I asked 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. And Replit, I just sent 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 you're opening out AI API key that the cloud runtime, like all that stuff, the database, we just added, uh, Postgres support. Just Repli being this complete platform, just like makes this process a lot more efficient.

AI assessment note: “the reason it's already differentiated is because the development environment is built into the system.”

Q 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 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?

A So 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 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 an absolute bliss, but those moments were actually very little in terms of the, if you think about the pie charts of what it meant to work as a programmer. So the first thing that Repli did is remove the need to do all this 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 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 exp…

AI assessment note: “the first thing that Repli did is remove the need to do all this setup.”

Q have 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?

A 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 Lisey Doll game. Do you remember that move? That basically what happened is the AI made a strange move that made it, gave 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 on the lookout for that. What I would say we've seen is that tasks that were 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 question. GPT-III 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-III is one of the easiest thing you could do. You could spend 15 minutes in the OpenAI Playground. And so really that goes from a task That requires hours and maybe days and weeks of building and testing to something that takes a 15 minute. And so that's a fundamental phase shift in, in how we do things. That's act…

AI assessment note: “I don't think we've seen that entirely in, in programming yet, but I'd”

Q Some people ask, hey, how should I think about X versus other platforms? You know, maybe their customers aren't on X, et cetera. How do you think about that?

A Well, I, I think, uh, X is very good for the sort of Silicon Valley, for tech, for kind of the in-group messaging, for maybe one hop, Outside of Silicon Valley, which is kind of the early adopter, if you're targeting early adopters, uh, you know, so I would also cluster Hacker News within that as well. Um, but it, it actually, once you want to go to late adopters, or like early majority, if you think about this kind of bell curve of adoption, uh, Twitter becomes actually not very impactful there. It can still be very important where Um, like, you know, just this morning, uh, journalists reached out to me to, to ask to talk to me about a tweet that I made. About some of the stuff that's happening with Anthropic. Uh, and so like Twitter can still be a place where it is, it is the start of stories. And that's another thing, you know, back to the conversation of why this is important is the landscape shifted so much that journalists report on Twitter. So it's kind of starts on Twitter. So Twitter's influence is amazing, but it tends to be elite kind of inside group influence. I think Instagram, Facebook still, You know, YouTube is where you get to the early majority. And I think I was late to, to YouTube, uh, to sort of to Instagram. Like, um, you know, I just started focusing on it and like maybe, uh, February or something like that.

AI assessment note: “Instagram, Facebook still, You know, YouTube is where you get to the early majority.”

Q Is it worth telling the hacker story? Because there's a version of the world where you didn't actually, like, if that changed differently, maybe you wouldn't have gone to America.

A Right, right. Yeah. So, uh, in, in school I was programming the whole time here. So I, I just want to start businesses. I just like, I'm exploring with ideas all the time. And like the reason Repl.it exists is because I have ideas all the time. I just want to go type it on a computer and like build them. Um, so I wasn't going to school. It was like incredibly boring for me. Uh, and part of the reason why Repl.it has a mobile app today is because I always wanted to program under the desk. Um, And so the, at school, they kept failing me, ah, for attendance. So I would get A's, but I just didn't show up, and so they, they would fail me. And so I felt it was incredibly unfair, and all my friends were graduating. Now this year, this was like, twenty-eleven. I've been like, for six years in college. It should be like a three or four year. And I was just like, incredibly depressed. I really wanted to be in Silicon Valley. And so, I was like, oh, what if I change my grades? There we go. In the university database. And, um, and, and so I went into my parents, uh, uh, basement, uh, and, uh, implemented, uh, the polyphasic sleep. Are you familiar with that?

AI assessment note: “I was like, oh, what if I change my grades? There we go.”

Q also a decision that you made, which was to build Ghostwriter on top of your own models. So something like a co-pilot is built on top of GPT-III 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?

A Well, first of all, how crazy it is that, uh, that Microsoft had a dependent on another company, whereas Replit built our own thing. There are like multiple ways to answer this. One of them is UX. UX is 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 Kaye 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 going to 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 going to 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 can get the caching ride. We can 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 a strategic part, which is like, if you think, if you believe that this is a primary platform shift and this is going to …

AI assessment note: “a huge downside of being a consumer of a mere API”

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

A 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 10 X becomes a thousand X. But like a .1 X becomes a, you know, a 10 X, right? So if you're someone who's previously maybe whose impact with coding is going to be very minimal, now it's going to 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 that or not. It's very hard. Right now, you can just use GPT-III to do the parsing. Right? So you're doing the basic coding, and then anytime you find something that's like a little difficult, you can plug in GPT-III 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 going to get more done and you're going to get, not going to get as stuck.

AI assessment note: “To me, it feels like it's more worth it today because”

Q 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 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?

A 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. That's an absurd example, but that's what happens at Upwork or some of these marketplaces. Like I asked 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. And Replit, I just sent 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 you're opening out AI API key that the cloud runtime, like all that stuff, the database, we just added, uh, Postgres support. Just Repli being this complete platform, just like makes this process a lot more efficient.

AI assessment note: “I think it's already differentiated. And the reason it's already differentiated is because the development environment”

Q 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?

A I think as much as possible, having competition is going to be important. I think a world in which just one company controls the biggest AI models is not going to be great, but 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 the Silicon Valley, you're going to 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, but 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 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 going to be more freedom, more decentralization.

AI assessment note: “having competition is going to be important. I think open source plays a part”

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

A 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 10 X becomes a thousand X. But like a .1 X becomes a, you know, a 10 X, right? So if you're someone who's previously maybe whose impact with coding is going to be very minimal, now it's going to 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 that or not. It's very hard. Right now, you can just use GPT-III to do the parsing. Right? So you're doing the basic coding, and then anytime you find something that's like a little difficult, you can plug in GPT-III 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 going to get more done and you're going to get, not going to get as stuck.

AI assessment note: “To me, it feels like it's more worth it today because it's a tide”

Q Some people ask, hey, how should I think about X versus other platforms? You know, maybe their customers aren't on X, et cetera. How do you think about that?

A Well, I, I think, uh, X is very good for the sort of Silicon Valley, for tech, for kind of the in-group messaging, for maybe one hop, Outside of Silicon Valley, which is kind of the early adopter, if you're targeting early adopters, uh, you know, so I would also cluster Hacker News within that as well. Um, but it, it actually, once you want to go to late adopters, or like early majority, if you think about this kind of bell curve of adoption, uh, Twitter becomes actually not very impactful there. It can still be very important where Um, like, you know, just this morning, uh, journalists reached out to me to, to ask to talk to me about a tweet that I made. About some of the stuff that's happening with Anthropic. Uh, and so like Twitter can still be a place where it is, it is the start of stories. And that's another thing, you know, back to the conversation of why this is important is the landscape shifted so much that journalists report on Twitter. So it's kind of starts on Twitter. So Twitter's influence is amazing, but it tends to be elite kind of inside group influence. I think Instagram, Facebook still, You know, YouTube is where you get to the early majority. And I think I was late to, to YouTube, uh, to sort of to Instagram. Like, um, you know, I just started focusing on it and like maybe, uh, February or something like that.

AI assessment note: “X is very good for the sort of Silicon Valley, for tech”

Q 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?

A Yeah, I, I think that's, um, that's fairly reasonable number of projects. So there's a six-year-old developer. His name is Ray Han. 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 because discord has 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 Scylla 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 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.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, I, I think that's, um, that's fairly reasonable number of projects.”

Q And so is that your advice people want to get, just exposure therapy, just, you know, like one tweet a day or something? Like, what, what's the best way to, to get started, to get really good at this?

A Yeah, so I, I think, uh, a few things. One is, uh, the concept of building public. It wasn't coined when I started doing that, but the idea is that, uh, look, as, as a CEO, you're gonna do a good amount of, uh, you know, writing and communicating to your employees, to your investors. You can just do it publicly, right? I mean, I've always been this believer that there aren't really a lot of secrets that you need to, to keep inside, inside a company. And so a lot of your otherwise writing that would be in private, you can put it public and that way you carry people, uh, in the journey with you and you're, you're getting, you're getting the reps in. So whenever there's a piece of communication or story I want to tell, Uh, and there's a choice between public and private. I might buy a source public. I, I often write something publicly and then paste it on Slack. I just say, you know, this is what I wrote. And, um, uh, and so, uh, that, that's been, that's been helpful. The other thing is, um, authenticity. I think, like, being really, being yourself, uh, is, is kind of like a big radical thing that, you know, maybe started happening with Elon maybe 10 years ago, but CEOs were supposed to be this, you know, very polished thing. They had to kind of be filtered through this, um, prism of, of, of PR, uh, and journalists are kind of the way to get to the public, but you see kind of Elo…

AI assessment note: “One is, uh, the concept of building public.”

Q nuance to that of someone being, or someone, the AI being able to say, oh, have you tried this yet? Oh, 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.

A Like a gradient descent, sort of how you, how you train an AI actually. Yeah, I, I, I hundred percent 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 stuff, but like some of these IDEs are super big. Like you download, uh, IntelliJ, that's like a couple of gigabytes. Uh, stuff and they're clunky. They take up a ton of Ram, like try starting Xcode. You know, it's, it's kind of like, uh, it just consumes your computer. And the cool thing about the AI revolution is that the AI is going to be running in the cloud. You're going to 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 ideas will not be able to adapt as fast as we can.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, I, I, I hundred percent agree with that. I think it humanizes the process”

Q it progresses. Again, taking the lens of not just Ghost Rider V-one, but Ghost Rider V-ten quite a ways away from now and how, how good, how proficient it can get. So I'll just read you each question. I just want to 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?

A Something I care deeply about, which is Uh, equality of opportunity. So I think just the ability that anyone in the world being able to contribute and build something is just beautiful. It's just amazing. It allows us to include everyone and anyone who's willing to work hard. And that's like the real Americanism in my opinion. That's like what, what America is built upon is the idea is that if you're willing to do, do the work, you're going to get the chance at doing the work. And if you do the work right, you're going to 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 going to be, the pie is going to be bigger, uh, but also there's going to be differences between, again, like the 10 X difference becomes a thousand X difference. And that's going to create some political issues because I think it was going to create envy and it's going to, um, accentuate some, some differences. And I think that part is not going to be fun. And, um, and I think reasonable people should be able to like, say it like it is. And that's why I think You know, the 10 X 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 just going to be a big issue that socie…

AI assessment note: “the ability that anyone in the world being able to contribute and build something”

Q And so is that your advice people want to get, just exposure therapy, just, you know, like one tweet a day or something? Like, what, what's the best way to, to get started, to get really good at this?

A Yeah, so I, I think, uh, a few things. One is, uh, the concept of building public. It wasn't coined when I started doing that, but the idea is that, uh, look, as, as a CEO, you're gonna do a good amount of, uh, you know, writing and communicating to your employees, to your investors. You can just do it publicly, right? I mean, I've always been this believer that there aren't really a lot of secrets that you need to, to keep inside, inside a company. And so a lot of your otherwise writing that would be in private, you can put it public and that way you carry people, uh, in the journey with you and you're, you're getting, you're getting the reps in. So whenever there's a piece of communication or story I want to tell, Uh, and there's a choice between public and private. I might buy a source public. I, I often write something publicly and then paste it on Slack. I just say, you know, this is what I wrote. And, um, uh, and so, uh, that, that's been, that's been helpful. The other thing is, um, authenticity. I think, like, being really, being yourself, uh, is, is kind of like a big radical thing that, you know, maybe started happening with Elon maybe 10 years ago, but CEOs were supposed to be this, you know, very polished thing. They had to kind of be filtered through this, um, prism of, of, of PR, uh, and journalists are kind of the way to get to the public, but you see kind of Elo…

AI assessment note: “a choice between public and private. I might buy a source public.”

Q Is it worth telling the hacker story? Because there's a version of the world where you didn't actually, like, if that changed differently, maybe you wouldn't have gone to America.

A Right, right. Yeah. So, uh, in, in school I was programming the whole time here. So I, I just want to start businesses. I just like, I'm exploring with ideas all the time. And like the reason Repl.it exists is because I have ideas all the time. I just want to go type it on a computer and like build them. Um, so I wasn't going to school. It was like incredibly boring for me. Uh, and part of the reason why Repl.it has a mobile app today is because I always wanted to program under the desk. Um, And so the, at school, they kept failing me, ah, for attendance. So I would get A's, but I just didn't show up, and so they, they would fail me. And so I felt it was incredibly unfair, and all my friends were graduating. Now this year, this was like, twenty-eleven. I've been like, for six years in college. It should be like a three or four year. And I was just like, incredibly depressed. I really wanted to be in Silicon Valley. And so, I was like, oh, what if I change my grades? There we go. In the university database. And, um, and, and so I went into my parents, uh, uh, basement, uh, and, uh, implemented, uh, the polyphasic sleep. Are you familiar with that?

AI assessment note: “what if I change my grades? There we go. In the university database.”

Q The, um, I mean, earlier on you were alluding to the stakes are, are really high with these. What advice might you have for, uh, an anthropic or, or open AI in terms of like some of the communication challenges or opportunity?

A It's a, it's obviously way above my grade. I've never, you know, uh, battled with a United States government. Uh, not yet. Uh, one day goals. Um, but, um, Look, I, I honestly think it's a kind of a win-win for them. Like, it's really, if you, if you game out what's gonna happen with Anthropic, Fable comes back, it's gonna be a huge flood towards Fable. It's kind of like, you know, this, this thing was banned by the government. Actually, Steve Jobs, um, once did this ad, uh, they, they had a, they had a Mac I don't know, the big towers of Mac Pro, I think it's called, where they had tremendous computer power that was subject to export control. So they had this, uh, this ad where it's like military tanks going and like surrounding the Mac and the Mac in the middle, and it's like showing that this thing is so powerful, the US government doesn't want, you know, doesn't, doesn't want you to have it, so you should go buy it. Uh, and so it's like a tremendous marketing opportunity. And for them, it's already kind of their, uh, their reputation is pretty big. Uh, but, but even if, but even if they can't get Fable back on the, on the market, you know, they still win the PR game of like, we're a company that's kind of principled and doing the right thing and all of that. So I, I think just, uh, my advice would be not to stress out too much and not to, uh, Honestly, just sit back and let …

AI assessment note: “my advice would be not to stress out too much and not to”

Q it progresses. Again, taking the lens of not just Ghost Rider V-one, but Ghost Rider V-ten quite a ways away from now and how, how good, how proficient it can get. So I'll just read you each question. I just want to 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?

A Something I care deeply about, which is Uh, equality of opportunity. So I think just the ability that anyone in the world being able to contribute and build something is just beautiful. It's just amazing. It allows us to include everyone and anyone who's willing to work hard. And that's like the real Americanism in my opinion. That's like what, what America is built upon is the idea is that if you're willing to do, do the work, you're going to get the chance at doing the work. And if you do the work right, you're going to 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 going to be, the pie is going to be bigger, uh, but also there's going to be differences between, again, like the 10 X difference becomes a thousand X difference. And that's going to create some political issues because I think it was going to create envy and it's going to, um, accentuate some, some differences. And I think that part is not going to be fun. And, um, and I think reasonable people should be able to like, say it like it is. And that's why I think You know, the 10 X 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 just going to be a big issue that socie…

AI assessment note: “I think that comes with also increased inequality. I, I, I think there's going to be”

Q The, um, I mean, earlier on you were alluding to the stakes are, are really high with these. What advice might you have for, uh, an anthropic or, or open AI in terms of like some of the communication challenges or opportunity?

A It's a, it's obviously way above my grade. I've never, you know, uh, battled with a United States government. Uh, not yet. Uh, one day goals. Um, but, um, Look, I, I honestly think it's a kind of a win-win for them. Like, it's really, if you, if you game out what's gonna happen with Anthropic, Fable comes back, it's gonna be a huge flood towards Fable. It's kind of like, you know, this, this thing was banned by the government. Actually, Steve Jobs, um, once did this ad, uh, they, they had a, they had a Mac I don't know, the big towers of Mac Pro, I think it's called, where they had tremendous computer power that was subject to export control. So they had this, uh, this ad where it's like military tanks going and like surrounding the Mac and the Mac in the middle, and it's like showing that this thing is so powerful, the US government doesn't want, you know, doesn't, doesn't want you to have it, so you should go buy it. Uh, and so it's like a tremendous marketing opportunity. And for them, it's already kind of their, uh, their reputation is pretty big. Uh, but, but even if, but even if they can't get Fable back on the, on the market, you know, they still win the PR game of like, we're a company that's kind of principled and doing the right thing and all of that. So I, I think just, uh, my advice would be not to stress out too much and not to, uh, Honestly, just sit back and let …

AI assessment note: “my advice would be not to stress out too much and not to”

Q 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 and in your own terms, uh, how do we deploy it safely? And also maybe how does governance play a role in that?

A You know, I, I, I just like 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 is 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 that 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 create Japanese internment camps, right? You can use safety to do the most abhorrent thing 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. And so, uh, that, that would be my bias is that safety is bad or, or at least, uh, when, when they want to impose something in the, Under the guise of safety, I would be super skeptical. And then on the, on the question of, of governance, I would also be skeptical of that. So maybe I'm showing myself a libertarian. Uh, …

AI assessment note: “I don't think anyone is inherently responsible for governance of technology.”

Q 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? Because at that point you're taking something away from people, this superpower, as we talked about it.

A It's important to notice stuff that nothing catastrophic happened, right? Like this technology and this now massive deployment and nothing as bad as the sort of less strong sort of AI safetyism sort of part of the, uh, debate have said it's going to happen. Um, and, uh, and so it's, it's, it's important to recognize this because the people that are going to be arguing for extra controls and everything are, are going to, 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?

AI assessment note: “now there are millions of people already using this, like nothing really bad happened”

Q Right. Um, you tweeted after GBT-V came out that you were feeling the diminishing returns. Yeah. What, what were you expecting, and, and what needs to be done? Do we need another breakthrough to get back to the pace of growth, or, What are your thoughts there?

A I mean, this, this whole discussion is, is sort of about that, and, and my feeling is that, uh, you know, GPT-Five, uh, got good at verifiable domains. It didn't feel that much better at anything else. The more human angle of it, it felt like it regressed, and like you had this, uh, sort of, uh, Reddit pitchfork, uh, sort of, uh, movement against, against Sam and OpenAI because they felt like they lost a friend. GPT-IV felt a lot more human and closer, uh, whereas GPT-V felt a lot more robotic, you know, very in its head, kind of trying to think through, through everything. And, um, and so I, I, I would have just expected, like, when we went from GPT-II to III, it was clear it was getting a lot more human. It was, uh, a lot closer to our experience. It can, you can feel like it's actually all it gets me. Like, there's something about it that understands the world better. Similarly, three to four. Four to five didn't feel like it was a better overall being, as it were.

AI assessment note: “got good at verifiable domains. It didn't feel that much better at anything else.”

Q Right. Um, you tweeted after GBT-V came out that you were feeling the diminishing returns. Yeah. What, what were you expecting, and, and what needs to be done? Do we need another breakthrough to get back to the pace of growth, or, What are your thoughts there?

A I mean, this, this whole discussion is, is sort of about that, and, and my feeling is that, uh, you know, GPT-Five, uh, got good at verifiable domains. It didn't feel that much better at anything else. The more human angle of it, it felt like it regressed, and like you had this, uh, sort of, uh, Reddit pitchfork, uh, sort of, uh, movement against, against Sam and OpenAI because they felt like they lost a friend. GPT-IV felt a lot more human and closer, uh, whereas GPT-V felt a lot more robotic, you know, very in its head, kind of trying to think through, through everything. And, um, and so I, I, I would have just expected, like, when we went from GPT-II to III, it was clear it was getting a lot more human. It was, uh, a lot closer to our experience. It can, you can feel like it's actually all it gets me. Like, there's something about it that understands the world better. Similarly, three to four. Four to five didn't feel like it was a better overall being, as it were.

AI assessment note: “I would have just expected, like, when we went from GPT-II to III”