The Exchanges, every show

Q When you look at your model usage today, I've heard you say before, when I was obviously listening to your prior shows, that you have a preference for Anthropic. What does the model usage look like across different providers today?

A Yeah. So Anthropic, the, you know, has been the sort of workhorse for, for over, over a year right, right now. It's, it's like the, the, the core agent loop because it can run for a long time coherently. But the few things have changed. Google's Gemini's models have, um, are the best at price performance, for example. You know, given their price, where do they sit on the period of frontier, right? And so for tasks, for example, like tasks like code search, we might create a sub agent, uh, that is, that is cheaper and has good enough performance. Uh, and we offload that from the main core loop, right? So we now we use, and I wrote this thesis back in 22, I call it the society of models. Now we use models from every provider. Actually, at some point we were sending more tokens to Google than we were sending Anthropic, despite Anthropic being that kind of the core workhorse. And so there's this concept of agent labs, right? We talk about AI labs, but there's agent labs, you know, us cursor, some of these other companies. Our goal is to start with the user problem. What are we trying to fix? What are we trying to build? And walk back to the technology and use whatever model we need to use. In some cases, we build our own models.

AI assessment note: “at some point we were sending more tokens to Google than we were sending Anthropic”

Q How do you think about maintenance in this case? You have ops teams building tools, you have entrepreneurs building tools. You gotta maintain these fuckers. This is hard enough running a business. Are you going to maintain this now?

A This is where Replit shines. And, and, you know, if you talk to Jason or some of our other customers, um, Replit goes way further than any other Vibe coding product on creating more maintainable software. For example, and part of the reason Replit has been slightly more expensive than, than others is that we do a code review for every, for, for every, you know, code change that we make. We spent a lot of tokens on maintenance as much as we spent on creating that software. Replit also has a built-in tester. So if you enable all the power features, whenever you, whenever the agent writes code, goes into a testing phase, spins up a browser, tests everything in the, in the app, Goes into a code review session, reviews that, kicks it back to the coding agent, gives it feedback, you know, the test failed here, the code review is not good. And people enjoy looking at the code review agent because it's kind of a dick. It's like, this looks like AI generated slop. It'll actually say that. And then, and then it goes back. We're also building, um, agents that are sitting in production software. So we already have security agents right now that are sitting in enterprise Deployments and are monitoring activity and, uh, and they're monitoring packages, monitoring for supply chain attacks. And so the thing about AI, any problem AI creates, there's more AI that you can build to solve that prob…

AI assessment note: “Replit goes way further than any other Vibe coding product on creating more maintainable software.”

Q Like a hundred. What do you invest in for yourself that has been a game changer? I hope it's not too personal, but you've lost a lot of weight. You look fantastic, dude. Um, tell me about that.

A You know, I, I losing the weight has actually been, been like Three years. I decide, I always yo-yoed my weight depending on my stress level at the company, and I decided in 22 or three, I'm gonna take three years to get healthy. And I'm, and instead of like sprinting and working out five days a week and then burning out, I'm gonna work out one day a week. And I started working out one day a week, and then my energy levels improved. I lost some weight. Ok, now I'm going to add another day a week. And ok, now I'm going to add another habit. Let's add a walk. Let's add like a bit of a stretching. And it's so slow. It's sort of like, I want to get healthy over the next five years, and that's been a major game changer. So, I'll just like add another habit every once in a while. It's like very simple stuff. Let's add a walk. Let's add a sauna. Uh, once a week. So I really love sauna and, and cold, um, hot and cold. It, it, it's like a reset. It forces you, I'm, I'm someone who's like constantly thinking, and I tried meditation, all that stuff, and it's really hard for me. When I go into a sauna and get burnt, and then go into the, into like ice cold water, you can't think. Your, your mind freezes, and that forces me into a meditative state for the next like hour or so.

AI assessment note: “I decided in 22 or three, I'm gonna take three years to get healthy.”

Q The thing that I always hear is that we're using frontier models to basically set benchmarks. We're seeing where those benchmarks lie, and then we're switching to open source to get as close to them as possible with much more efficiency in terms of cost. Is that the future?

A It depends, right? Like, so cost question, I think is secondary to the performance question, right? Especially in a, in a, in a time when, when it's flush with capital. Uh, I think when you focus on cost is when you reach a certain Sort of, uh, asymptotic, you know, plateau in the S curve, and you don't foresee, um, a massive improvement, specifically in your domain. Like Intercom might say, you know, we, we don't predict that models are going to get that much better on customer support for the foreseeable future. Therefore, you know, we, we can focus on, on building our own Or there's like a data flywheel that we can, we can get, or there's a cost advantage that we get. But if you focus on cost at the expense of performance, you're going to lose. Uh, and so, you know, it's similar to any era in tech, right? Like it's cloud, it's mobile, it's a SAS, whatever it is, there are moments of time where, where the goal is growth and performance and being at the edge. And then when things kind of rationalize or Uber lift, when things rationalize, you, you kind of focused on your gross margins.

AI assessment note: “cost question, I think is secondary to the performance question”

Q Enterprises will kind of try things in, in certain respects. You know, I was chatting to Jason Lemkin before, and he said, you're number one ICP's product teams. As product teams kind of code or vibe more, what do they do okay in two to three years? How do they think about those functions?

A There's a, there's a big question about how product teams will look in the future. If I were to make a prediction, I would say that we'll still have engineers inside the organizations. Those engineers are responsible for more infrastructure, AI, ML, uh, embedded systems, you know, more, more, you know, low level engineering. And then you have product organizations and product organizations will have people that are like tilt a little more technical and have people tell it a little more design, have people tell it a little more product. But you're not really calling them anything different. They're like a, they're product builders, and their responsibility is to figure out what to build next. I agree with Jason that a lot of the ICP right now is product, but one thing I'm really excited about is operations teams, and they're kind of underserved. Like, operations teams are sitting at the nexus of a lot of data flow. And typically they'll buy a lot of SaaS software. They're typically not happy with it because there's all these SaaS softwares like styling the data. They try a lot of automation software that doesn't work very well. They have a lot of Excel sheets, a lot of manual work. And so, you know, we see a lot of our customers are building, you know, quote, uh, you know, quote configurators for their sales team, automating their deal desk, um, you know, automatic support, uh, …

AI assessment note: “If I were to make a prediction, I would say that we'll still have engineers”

Q Are IDs dead? Will we have IDs in two years?

A I think, I think for all intents and purposes, IDEs are dead. Uh, I think the, the, you know, the limp along because again, some engineers just love that, that control, but there's no future in them and that there's no one's going to be asking for like the latest feature of like IntelliSense or like what were IDEs? Like IDEs, like one part where like the code intelligence, we call it intelligence. It wasn't very intelligent. And so all of that is, is, is irrelevant. Like the autocomplete, the click to symbol, all of that stuff is irrelevant. So in that sense, ideas are dead because AI has like eaten all of that. But in terms of like, You know, people who want to see the code, I think there's still a population of users that want that. I think there's still, you know, engineers that are working with software that they want to actually verify that it works. For example, life or death software. If I'm writing, like, mission-critical software for self-driving cars or, or a NASA or SpaceX mission, I think there's always going to be a need for some kind of IDE.

AI assessment note: “I think for all intents and purposes, IDEs are dead.”

Q So, you know, starting with your younger brother, how much is like a gaming background part of kind of the recruiting target, the, uh, cultural organization target, the, the, how do you talk to people in Repl.it? In addition, of course, the dynamic of how the product operates itself, but how much does the gaming background inform That whole stack of the company.

A Yeah, it was, it was never explicit, but I think for whatever reason, like the way we design the product, the kind of people we attract, the kind of art we put together around the product, even the product itself kind of attracts those gamer mindsets. Uh, and actually, you know, I've always intuited that people who played games early on had a, you know, their clock speed was higher. They could like think faster, they could react faster, and turns out there's actually research around it. Like doctors who play video games, Have much better reaction times. So if you want to go to a surgeon, you want to do a surgery. I always ask him if they're a gamer.

AI assessment note: “it was never explicit, but I think for whatever reason, like the way we design”

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 of Wheaties they had in Jordan, but that's like, I had, you know, Lincoln Logs and Legos. Um, but then, you know, what's kind of crazy is then you had a one 80 basically from that, which is, is it true that afterwards, Not so long ago, you actually turned down a billion dollars, uh, as an acquisition price for your company when you only had six employees. What happened?

A Yeah. Um, you know, we, we had, uh, uh, started the company in 2016, and the mission behind the company is to create a billion coders, billion programmers, billion developers, whatever you want to call it. And I just felt in my heart of hearts that, We're at a point where anyone can make software. I felt like the AI is progressing really fast, just the cloud systems, everything that was coming online made it so that anyone could really be able to do this thing that have fundamentally changed my life, you know, got me from, from Jordan in a sort of lower income family all the way to the US, become an entrepreneur, joining Y Combinator, the most prestigious startup accelerator. And, uh, in 2018, just after we did Y Combinator, we kind of bootstrapped for a couple of years, then we did Y Combinator. Um, maybe 2019, we got this acquisition offer from a really big, big company. Um, and, uh, obviously it was a lot of money, and I, I, we didn't, we didn't have, I didn't have a lot of money at the time, but I just, I just felt like they're gonna take the, they're gonna take the company, not gonna do anything interesting with it. And, and I'll make the money and maybe I'll quit two or three years after that and create the same company. So I thought, I like this company. I might as well keep going. And I always felt like if we get to a point where we achieve even one percent of our missi…

AI assessment note: “we got this acquisition offer from a really big, big company”

Q in revenue. If that's interesting to you, you can click the link and get on a consulting call with my team. So if you're like a young person who hasn't figured out how to make money yet, and you don't know what you want to do with your career, but you're curious about this AI thing, what would you tell them to do today? Where does a young person start?

A I would say, do the same thing that you've always done, you know, get a job, find an industry you like or you're interested in, and go into that, and what you're going to find is massive inefficiencies. People do things, it's still like, you know, there's still faxes around in many businesses. People use pen and paper for so many things. Old software still exists. You know, um, there's so many, like whatever field you go into, just have an eye for what people around you are doing, and, and what are the things that could be automated, Or what AI could be good at. And the way to learn what AI could be good at is to spend a lot of time with GPT, spend a lot of time messing around with video AI, messing around with Replit and Code AI. Just be plugged into the AI world, and you're going to build an intuition. Just jump into it, you're going to build an intuition. At the same time, find a real world problem. And the way to do that is to go literally into any domain or incident, And just open your eyes, and you're going to find a problem to solve. And then solve that problem and sell it to the people. I mean, um, there's this story, uh, I just want to show also that entrepreneurship is not always about taking massive risk, quitting your job, and, uh, and, you know, and going, going for broke. There's this guy, his name is Ahmad George. He works in a skincare company in, in DC, and he'…

AI assessment note: “get a job, find an industry you like or you're interested in, and go into that”

Q And had you graduated? At some point, you were at Yahoo in Jordan, right?

A Yeah, so I, at that time, I had graduated, yeah. My, my time at the university was pretty tenuous because, um, I just like, I didn't like Sitting in class all that much. Initially, um, I also, you know, I'm sure we'll get into more into that, but I, I was, um, I was reading a lot of sci-fi. I was like really into AI and really into, you know, how do you build a, build a brain, and I was like reading a lot about cognitive science and neuroscience. Um, there wasn't a way to study that in Jordan, but that was like a personal interest of mine, and I felt like we're on the cusp of like, You know, solving intelligence, and I felt like computers will be able to program themselves. So I, so I was like, okay, if computers can program themselves, so what, what can I do with computers? And I was like, okay, well, someone still needs to build these computers and run them. So I went into electrical engineering, computer engineering, as opposed to programming. Uh, and then like two or three years in, I'm like, you know, um, I don't, I don't think machines are gonna be coding themselves anytime soon.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, so I, at that time, I had graduated, yeah.”

Q Assuming that any run of the mill A programmer with Replit, with coding agents, can create amazing applications, then what's the next bottleneck? Is it creativity? Is that, what is it?

A Well, I think, I think if you think about it as a sort of a, as like a factory line or a pipeline, um, you know, uh, the bottleneck has always been sort of like the, uh, the making of the thing, right? So you have an idea, um, and, uh, you need to make, make the thing, uh, and then you need to sort of sell it and distribute it. And we have all these, Ways where sales and distribution has gotten easier over time, like PLG is an example of one. Um, ads, you know, things like that. So there's a lot of innovations and ways in which companies can grow fast today. Um, so the bottleneck is like, oh, how do you, you know, how do you create the thing? And even if you have the capital, it's actually still quite hard to make things, right? And you know that as an investor, sometimes you invest in a company, it's still not working. You can give it as much money as you can. I mean, What is it? Like all these companies, um, Magic Leaps and Quibi or whatever, and like, uh, there's a ton of examples of companies that sucked up a lot of capital and went nowhere. Um, but, you know, uh, if, if, in fact, uh, software creation gets dramatically easier and, and better, then I think, uh, the bottleneck will shift somewhere else. Uh, and my, uh, Prediction, ah, is that the bottleneck will become on the idea side of things, which is counterintuitive because the, um, Silicon Valley, um, dogma is like, i…

AI assessment note: “my Prediction, ah, is that the bottleneck will become on the idea side of things”

Q You are a self-described civilizationist? Yes. I'm not even sure I can pronounce the, the word. Uh, what, what is, what is that, and why is it, um, Important to you.

A Yeah, I've always kind of struggled to kind of describe my, my worldview or outlook, and the, I think the best way I could, I could think about it is like, um, I'm like, in awe of civilization, and I feel like if you restart the world, um, you know, a hundred times, perhaps, uh, only the minority of time will get to the level of civilization that we're in. Um, you know, it's, it's quite hard, uh, you know, to go from a single, uh, cell organisms to, to, to, to multiple cell organism, and it's quite hard to get to more complex, and there's all these ways in which, uh, evolution could have stopped, but I do think no one talks about how, you know, you could have, you know, human civilization could have stopped at, um, sort of the stone age or the agricultural age. There's no reason for it to actually continue developing further.

AI assessment note: “I'm like, in awe of civilization”

Q And how do you think in the general context about, um, evaluation? Uh, so, you know, for hallucination and all the things, but I can, in general, like evaluation is like the, the big problem of those, um, Of, of one of the big problem of AI engineering. So where does that fit there?

A So software agents, um, There's a, there's this benchmark called, uh, SWE bench. So software engineering, uh, bench. Uh, and that's what everyone's competing on. Uh, we don't really compete on that. And the reason is because we are building for a different audience. The people who are building SWE bench, um, are building agents that go from, uh, issue or GR ticket to a PR request. What we go from is a high level product description to an app. And that's like a fundamentally different problem. And so the, uh, the tough thing for us is that there isn't academic benchmarks, which gives you a headstart, right? So we've had to build our own benchmarks. And, you know, as you get users, you get more data and you're, You're able to get some of that data and create benchmarks from it, and, and that's like a quite a, a tough problem. So we have our own internal evals and benchmarks.

AI assessment note: “So we have our own internal evals and benchmarks.”

Q I thought it'd be great to start with just having you explain what is Replit? What's the vision? Where is this going? What job does it do for people?

A The idea behind Replit is that, uh, making software today is, is very difficult, and, uh, we want to make it easier. Uh, one of the reasons for the difficulty is that, um, it is very fragmented. So you would need to download, uh, what's called an IDE. It's basically a code editor. You need to download the runtime, basically Python or JavaScript. You need to figure out a package manager to configure your kind of open source packages. And once you've done all of that, you need to figure out how to deploy it, how to share it, how to, and so it's, it's a very hard process. And that's one of the ways, uh, where people get stuck And never learn how to code because it just feels like this cumbersome IT process. And so the vision, uh, for Repl.it has always been is like, okay, making software is fun is great. More people should do it. But, uh, so for more people to do it, it needs to be, um, easier to do. It needs to be in one place and it needs to be learnable. It's easy to learn. And so, so that's the product today. It is, I think, One of the more easier, um, IDEs slash environment slash deployment environment, uh, on, on the internet. And, uh, and I think we make it really easy for people to just jump in, even without prior experience of coding, especially now with the new AI products that we built.

AI assessment note: “And so the vision, uh, for Repl.it has always been is like”

Q These days, what have you, how are people actually using this, say, that are, say product managers or just like non-technical people within startups or bigger companies?

A On the SMB side of things, a lot of people are building kind of back office, uh, tools, right? So we have real estate agents That, you know, have a lot of data, have a lot of, um, things they, they want to manage in their business. So that they're building a lot of these, these tools that they otherwise would have to buy. But typically when you buy, it's, it's actually not exactly what you need. And that's kind of the problem with SAS. It's like, it's, it's like one size fits all. And so a lot of people are seeing it as sort of a SAS replacement for in-house tools and, and, and things like that. And then when you go to the like bigger companies, um, it's anywhere from, from prototyping to, to, to, to actually production apps, uh, to, to tools as well. So, um, we've seen, uh, product managers build, like I said, like a V one of an app and actually go out and test it with the users. Uh, and I can't name the company, but, uh, you know, I, it's a, you know, there's a public company that, that have used Replit to test a V one of a, of, of an app. Um, and obviously after, after that sort of works, they, they take it to the engineers and they're like, okay, we built this thing. We think it's a, we think it's a great thing. We test it with some users. Uh, let's go actually put it on the roadmap and, and built it and build it into the actual product. So you are sort of unblocking produc…

AI assessment note: “we've seen, uh, product managers build, like I said, like a V one”

Q be and get 100 dollars credit on your next campaign. Just go to linkedin.com slash pod Lenny to claim your credit. That's linkedin.com slash pod Lenny. Terms and conditions apply. Let's go down this thread. Actually, while this is happening, just like what, what allows for this to be possible technology wise? Like what is the kind of a stack, whatever you can share that enables this to exist that?

A Yeah, for sure. First of all, is, uh, it's the, uh, uh, all the abstractions that we built. So, uh, the way replet works is, um, you know, the, you know, very bottom layer, it's, um, our runtime. So This is the operating system. This is the package manager. This is the language runtimes. Uh, we built a system that, uh, is able to install packages in any language, including native packages. So the AI, anytime, um, it needs a, it needs a package. I can, I can go here and show one of those. By the way, the AI can take screenshots as well, so that it checks it works. So here, uh, you can see it's, it's, it's taking screenshots to make sure that the homepage is rendering. Here you can see, uh, you know, uh, oh, it wanted to drag and drop library. And so it installed, uh, installed that. And so it has access to all, all the packages across all languages, including Linux and, and all of that. And then the layer on top of that is the editor and the infrastructure that runs the editor, including what I described as the multiplier editor. And then we expose all of that infrastructure to the AI. And, um, there's like, almost like a new discipline, um, called, um, AI computer interfaces. So sort of like HCI is now ACI. And it turns out like LLMs need interfaces that are actually quite different than humans. Uh, they're trying to make them use human interfaces like Anthropix computer use, b…

AI assessment note: “the very bottom layer, it's, um, our runtime. So This is the operating system.”

Q And do you mind just zooming in a little bit as well?

A Yeah. So this is Replit's homepage. So we're going to use the agent at least as the access point. So we'll, we'll go into the coding as well, but Replit agent is like great at setting up the project. So we're going to use that to kind of set up the project, get the initial, get the initial prototype going. Um, and you could, of course, create the project manually, and we'll cover that in a bit, but let's go through the agent now. So I just type, like just in a sentence, like a map of scenic drives in the Bay Area. I have no idea where it's going to pull the data from. I have no idea what libraries it's going to use. And again, just a simple idea, and we can hit start building now. So this tells me it's still in early access. Um, Now, uh, any minute now we should go into a chat interface. Um, and the agent should start working on proposing, uh, a plan for me.

AI assessment note: “Yeah. So this is Replit's homepage.”

Q And I don't think people realize how amazing this is. As, you know, I'm a pretty bad engineer, and the fact that you've abstracted all of this away, and just basically you press a button and it's deployed securely, like this is How big of a deal is this?

A It's a pretty big deal. Like, uh, like again, when, uh, I mean, if you, if you want to try to, like, figure out, you know, for example, like how to deploy to, how to deploy to AWS, uh, let's see here what Google tells us. Uh, first of all, you need to look for something is AWS Amplify. It gives you a choice code deploy or amplify. Okay. What does that mean? Uh, so you get started under deliver, you choose deploy and continue, name your app and environment, just like the app and the code of the console is save deploy. And so you need to figure out how to use the AWS CLI. You need to figure out how to, uh, put your application code in there. So you need to use something called SCP and FTP. What the hell is this? Like, What is SCP and how do you use it? So now you're down this thing called secure copy protocol and you need to be able to, uh, use it, you know, open a shell and, and, and type a command and know how to use it. And you're already down a rabbit hole that you really don't want to be down. And so for us here, we're just really trying to make it a couple of clicks. You get all the security and all the features you need out of really any kind of, um, the best, uh, cloud providers available. And, and, uh, uh, I will say also our prices are very, very affordable, are in line with, are very competitive in line with, uh, really top, top cloud providers.

AI assessment note: “It's a pretty big deal.”

Q For example, how are you provocative in phrasing? Cause I find everyone's like, we look for a team player who's good at communication and shared interests and alignment. And you're like, Fuck off.

A Yeah. Zuck said, um, said something very, uh, very interesting, uh, about like move fast and break things. I think a journalist was asking him about it. And he said, like one heuristic to know whether you're saying something meaningful is that like reasonable people can disagree with it. And the opposite of it is also reasonable. So like move fast and break things could be like move slow and don't break anything. And that could be like a value at IBM. Right. Uh, you know, or steady or slow, you know, you can phrase it like a little more charitably. And so if something where the opposite of it doesn't make sense, or nobody would actually, it's, it's not a value anyone would hold, they're actually not saying anything. Uh, it cancels each other out. And so to be provocative, um, you need to say something that people will disagree with, and the opposite of is also somewhat reasonable. One of our values, for example, is like seek pain. And so the idea behind seek pain is that there's a lot of painful things in, in building a startup. Talking to customers is actually extremely painful. When your product is not working or there's like some fundamental, you know, lack of product market fit or some issue you're dealing with, you know, founders and entrepreneurs typically don't want to face that. And facing that is painful. At Replit, we've, you know, had some things in the past, uh, tha…

AI assessment note: “One of our values, for example, is like seek pain.”

Q I totally get you. Ah, the joys of hindsight. The final one, my friend. Uh, twenty-twenty-eight, so five years time, say. Where's Replit then?

A There's all sorts of ways you can, you can answer that, you know, um, obviously, you know, financial company, all of that, but I, I, I would focus on sort of impact. Like what I want is, uh, I want like a kid in, you know, rural Jordan to be able to have started a startup or successful business. Um, I, I want one, like, people anywhere in the world to, like, be able to come to Replit, teach themselves how to code, go do a few bounties, and generate some income, and then start a startup, and put it up in our, um, app store community, and, like, start generating income from that, maybe start growing it, and I really want that opportunity, uh, to be available for every, uh, everyone in the world. So I want Replit to be a full stack service, From your, like, first line of code, to your first app, to your first company, to your first dollar.

AI assessment note: “I want Replit to be a full stack service”

Q Well, I think you managed to do that with your personal brand. Don't worry. I'm just, you mentioned that kind of like the big risk taker. You said something, uh, before on Twitter that I thought was fascinating. You said great startups are examples of conspiracies to change the world. And I thought, God, that sounds great. What does he mean by that? So what do you mean by that?

A You know, um, I think, uh, if you read a bit of history, you find that most of history is actually Built and changed by like a small number of people. I think we're actually living through a moment of history right now, especially given the AI revolution in, in tech. And, you know, you could argue that open AI is at the center of it. And it's really a small group of people, you know, there are like 300 people now, and they were like much smaller before. Uh, they had a conspiracy and their conspiracy was that if you get a lot of talented people together, that's what the original thing and, and, and you work and really interesting AI research, you're going to find something. And then they found something and, you know, most of the world wasn't paying attention to it, which is if you scale language models, uh, and if you scale, keep scaling them up and up and put more computing data in them, you're going to find that it becomes more and more intelligent to the point that it's actually Reaching some kind of general intelligence, uh, obviously not AGI as, as it's defined, but there's some generality in GPT based models. So that was a conspiracy theory, you know, and that was like a, basically, um, you know, that was like a small group of people with a secret planning for, for a long time. And so they were like conspiring as, uh, as it were. Um, and now they're at a point where they'…

AI assessment note: “that was like a small group of people with a secret planning”

Q software, and you tweeted before the best job description is doing stuff. I find that we live in this generation of planners. They love meetings. They love taking notes. They love planning. Let's brainstorm. Fuck, why didn't you just do something for once? Um, I'm just venting now. Um, so you said the best job description is do stuff. What did you mean by that? Just unpack that for me.

A You know, I, I said that, um, outside of design and engineering, because in design and engineering, you actually can be somewhat specific about what people do. You can hire a machine learning engineer, and, you know, they're going to be training neural networks, or you can hire, um, you know, uh, a, uh, sort of drivetrain engineer at a, at a car company, and they'll be working on that. So, but outside of that, I, I think, and even in engineering, in some cases, People just need to be entrepreneurial and need to get stuff done, right? So at Replit, we actually have, maybe we're not known for that, but we have a very talented sort of business, legal, PM, um, biz ops teams. We're still a small team, but they're actually all very entrepreneurial and they're all just get stuff done. And so like, we get a lot done because they're behind the scenes instead of being the connective tissue of the company. They don't let any ball drop. You sort of like, See them figure out anything and jump into anything and learn it. And, um, and as a CEO, you know, I do that and try to Exemplify that as well.

AI assessment note: “People just need to be entrepreneurial and need to get stuff done”

Q uh, which is always dangerous. Never trust a VC who's an armchair economist. Terrible trades. Um, but like, you know, when you look at simple demand and supply theory, when you actually allow the world to create code, and when you create this access within developer time, you have an access of supply. Uh, will we see the price and the real wages of developers go down as a result?

A You know, Probably like the, I think there are developers today that are commanding insane, uh, amount of salaries while actually working very little. And like, it goes to what we talked about. I'd like the value of hard work and all of that. The idea that you can like go coast at big tech and still be like a millionaire, I think it's absurd. And I think that will go away. I think that's not just a, there's just the effect of an inefficient market, right? And perhaps a zero interest rate market. But, but I, I think that was an unnatural thing that happened. And so in that regard, yes, maybe the average, you know, developer salary would go down, but I think the, the most creative, um, you know, most hardworking developers will actually be able to earn a lot more.

AI assessment note: “yes, maybe the average, you know, developer salary would go down”

Q that causing such controversy, and then you look at the app store and see their three top placed consumer apps, and I'm like, well, they're sucking data from three hundred and twenty million phones, but you're right, we should shoot down a balloon, um, and be worried about it. Um, my question to you is, How do you feel from a security standpoint about Chinese domination in U.S. consumer apps?

A Look, I mean, I, I moved to the U.S. because I, I like, uh, sort of Western values of, of freedom and, and democracy and individualism, and I think the Chinese Communist Party embodies none of that. Uh, like, it's pretty obvious they say it, they don't like individualism, And so, they're clearly at odds with our, with our values. Um, but, but, you know, part of our values is free, free market and free competition. And so shutting them down just because we don't agree with them is also bad and corrosive to future investors and future sort of countries, uh, and other players all over the world that want to invest in the US, right? So like we, we need evidence that they're actually doing something bad, but if we don't have that evidence, I would, I would think it's an, it's government overreach to go and try to ban them.

AI assessment note: “we need evidence that they're actually doing something bad, but if we don't”

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”