The Ledger, every show

“I think that software is now content. It's like so cheap to make that it's sort of like building an app is sort of like writing an essay or tweeting.”

“And so it becomes much more cost effective for American companies to hire people in the U.S. And I think the people in the U.S. Are going to be better in a, in, in a lot of cases at using these AI tools to do work. So I think it may actually make it more effec…”

“I think people are truly sleeping on how good cloud code is for non-coders.”

“Same thing for people inside of every, like, no one is manually coding anymore.”

“Finding those little speed ups where every time you're building something you're doing, you're making it easier to do that, that same thing next time, I think gets you a lot more leverage in your engineering team.”

“And we did the same thing for this recent round where we raised up to two million from Reed Hoffman and starting line VC. And we did it as what I've been calling a SIP seed round, which is. Basically they've committed two million dollars, but we can pull it do…”

“Media businesses don't follow the same pattern as tech startups, because if you're a media business and you Our founder who then hires people to make the product, which is right. If you have product market fit before you lose it. And maybe you hire people that…”

“Everyone's a data scientist because, like, everyone, anyone can just, like, prompt tune, like, GPT-IV to, like, find some, like, do something interesting with the data set.”

“The way that, like, science proceeds right now is, like, you're trying to find, like, underlying, underlying explanations for things by, like, doing high-end studies on, like, lots and lots and lots of people and, like, doing, like, a linear regression to, lik…”

“Kaggle was built for a time when the people who could do this stuff were people who, like, had, had, like, PhDs in data science. Yep. And it's, like, totally changed now, where, like, anyone can enter one of these competitions and, like, do better than a PhD c…”

“I think like books started out as luxury goods. And then because of the printing press, they became like, there is this push to make them cheaper because you needed ways to get more information into people's hands. And they're no longer necessary as cheap form…”

“Big companies are really limited in the risk, the amount of risks that they can take to like make their actual interface good for that specific thing. Cause they can't risk like pissing off their regular users. And that's a tremendous advantage for startups to…”

“It's much harder to grow a newsletter now than it was five years ago. I'd probably start with YouTube actually. I think, and funnel people into, from YouTube into a newsletter that feels like the right move.”

“It is like, Codex CLI is trash.”

“I think that five five was fine, but not quite good enough. Like, I would say generally the email responses here, so like this email draft, for example, is like, It's as if I wrote it, like it's, maybe there's something that I would slightly change, and I migh…”

“I think that people are sleeping on how, Flexible and powerful of a tool this is. Because, okay, so it's got the image model in it, and then it also has the ability, like it has the ability to change other threads. So, like, I can have this thread message anot…”

“It's because it's so, it's also so slow and it's so expensive that it's really only meant for Essentially like people who are doing machine learning or are orchestrating like fleets of agents, which is just a skill that most people don't have yet.”

“This is another nice thing about 5.6 that's pretty new is, it does this like design checkpoint. So it's really, they're trying to make it better at design, and I think it's not, Perfect. Like it always wants to do warm paper backgrounds for some reason. I don'…”

“I make this distinction between two different types of people in the AI age or two different types of builders between pirates and architects. So a pirate is like, I'm just going to get it to 70%. I'm just going to like explore the field of possibilities and b…”

“Like, one of the interesting things about Codex is it has this thing called Chronicle, which is it automatically takes screenshots of your computer and locally turns it into locally turns it into a, Feed that gives it context on who you are and what you're doi…”

“I think there's this little thing in people's heads where they really like to keep their personal and work agents separate. And I think there's a whole territory. Our COO Brandon Gell calls this computer errands. There's like this whole territory of using pers…”

“Take the AI agent that you use all the time on your computer and put a browser in it so it can see everything you're doing. And that is just like a magical combination that I think will be, is very uncommon now. You can't even do this in cloud code because the…”

“This is exactly why, you know, GitHub is having problems right now because the number of people using GitHub has skyrocketing exponentially and it's really just people's agencies in GitHub.”

“When we are benchmarking against humans, AI against humans, we're actually really always talking about one human using AI versus another human using AI, because AI doesn't use itself. It may be able to in this like slightly somewhat recursive way, but there's …”

“You can expect that a higher percentage of your company or your users are going to be doing things that previously only technical users can do. And what that does is it creates all this pressure on the other end for the people who have to deal with all of the …”

“I consistently get AI-generated stuff, and there is a difference between an AI-generated document that's slop and not, and the slop one is it took them less time to make it than it takes me to read it, and they don't stand behind every line.”

“So the other people that I think are going to be like super, superpower people, and I, again, I, this is because we see this internally is full stack designers.”

“What a new model drop does, or what models do in general, is they make yesterday's human competence cheap.”

“We raised 600 K in 2020, which is when we started the business. And then we just raised another round From Reed Hoffman and starting line DC. And that was a two million dollar round, but we raised it as what I call a sip seed round. So they have committed up t…”

“And I think the investors, this, in this round also are aware that we're probably not going to go raise, you know, ten million ten million dollar series A from Sequoia or whatever. I don't even know if ten million, maybe ten million is too small now for a seri…”

“We're all using AI to do everything from coding to writing to editing to design to marketing, all that stuff. And if you're not doing it with AI first, you're kind of weird which I think is the reverse of how things are in pretty much every other company.”

“I have a recipe on there that I made that I really liked it, that was really cool, which is, Go through all of my internal meetings and write our company handbook from what you see. And I want you to capture all of the unspoken ways that every works as a compa…”

“Good ghost writers. When you say, Hey, I want you to tweet about this or blog post about this ghost, ghost writers. Don't go ahead and say, great. I did it. Here it is. What they do is they say, okay, well, what was interesting to you about this article? What …”

“Claude is very, very good right now at, you know, longer horizon agentic tasks. And so I would, And it now also has file use. So I would bet that we're getting close to, if not currently at a place where if you pointed it at a notion page and said, read the no…”

“And to do all of the things you need to do in order to set up the eval is a job. And so the eval is what I'm saying is smuggling a lot of human intelligence into it because in order to take a like complex and dynamic activity, like doing a job and turn it into…”

“I think it's really important to do vibe checks and to call them vibe checks because they're about how does it feel to use this thing and how does it feel to use it for work, for things that you would normally use it for like in your job or in your life. Becau…”

“Having an AI operations lead lets you basically identify those things and have them solved without people who are doing the work actually getting getting, like having to take time to do it, which I think makes it much more likely it happens.”

“Like Quora, I think all in to build Quora, we've spent maybe 300 K maybe.”

“So a really good example is there's a big complaint that it's like, well, how can I have an AI do this? Like, I can't trust that they're going to do it well. So I just do it myself. And I'm just like, yeah, that's exactly what every first time manager says. Yo…”

“The thing that is true about this Wave of AI is it's taking storytelling and it's making it way cheaper than it has ever been before. And I don't think that that replaces professional storytellers, but what it does is it allows you to tell stories in places th…”

“I think, and I think that's a new sort of trend in the AI pricing realm is not charging per month, but charging like per successfully completed task or something like that. And I think that's going to work really well.”

“And I think one, there's tons and tons and tons and tons of students that, like, need to, like, read this for school. And there are all these, like, sites like CliffsNotes or whatever, or SparkNotes that, like, are just so last generation. And I think that mar…”

“I think that trend will continue with AI stuff. So I look at what is AI making cheaper and then look at what, like that thing will become more expensive just for a smaller percentage of the population.”

“Parents didn't want to give their kids phones for obvious reasons and so the compromise position was an Apple Watch. And the thing that Apple Watch has is, like, obviously, like, the screen is, like, it's really hard to do anything on the screen, so kids just …”

“I think one of the interesting things about the AI wave right now is it sort of resets the playing field where there's a lot of low hanging fruit of things to build. And so it becomes that that's a real opportunity to build things for yourself that like was no…”

“I'm training a model to do copy edits. And this goal is four hours, it's been going for four hours, and I just like let it go, but four hours is honestly very short, like I, over the weekend I had one or two that went for like 20 hours each, and so it's just a…”

“And the way it works is you can just you just start it by saying, can you just watch me do this? And it will record your screen as you do a task and then turn that automatically into a skill to do it in the future.”

“One of the things that we talk about internally is what I call the reach test, which is like, do you just like, when you wake up in the morning, do you like reach for it organically?”