The Ledger, every show

“Unless you are an AGI research lab, doing pre-training on a model I believe is just burning capital.”

“Python is probably the most common generated code just because how much it's in the training data and data scientists love Python and I love Python too. It's such a comically bad thing for AI to generate just because it's one of the most inefficient programmin…”

“And if you want a contrarian take on this, I think it will help with the disinformation problem a bit. People don't assume everything coming out of these agents is a hundred percent accurate and they like verify it. And my hope is the combination of these AI t…”

“And so it's not like impossible for an agent to use those things, but the idea that you can like straight line from coding agents to writing the Stripe annual letter, I don't totally buy.”

“I wonder if in the short term, it might just be one of those idiosyncrasies of history, like mimicking a code base is actually the best way to make a general purpose agent work. And maybe over time we'll get fancier than that, but it's actually like a relative…”

“Where there's a lot in, in the code that is more transient. You know, you might be fine to Delete that. What was the intention? What was the PRD? Like, what was the customer problem? Is actually the more durable asset.”

“I feel like I won't be like a self, Self-actualized software engineer in the future, if I'm too precious about that artifact, which used to be so central to me.”

“I feel like this view of a multi-agent world was you have all these agents that do tasks that are fraud detection. You know, another one over here for, you know, personalization, and then you make a super agent, it does all these things, and it looks really go…”

“My sense is we're making true agents over time the way we think about context and how that context is sort of like shared so that the agent that's orchestrated it actually understands sort of what's behind all these APIs and why and the history will maybe look…”

“And so then you look at AI agents, and I believe most businesses, it will be their primary digital interface, and it's because it works over WhatsApp, and it works over the phone.”

“If every single company in an industry has access to technology, I would say it's an imperative, not a competitive advantage.”

“Will these companies be less valuable 10 years from now than now? I think the answer is probably yes. Will that be true for every individual company? I don't think that's true.”

“My theory is the closer you get to literally the database is the value, i.e. A ledger, the more durable it is. The closer you get to be in a system of engagement, the less durable it is.”

“I think if we paused model development, we'd still have trillions of dollars of economic value. That have yet to be realized.”

“I actually think one of the main things impeding adoption of AI is the lack of existence of all those other companies. And so many of the startups, particularly around here in San Francisco are basically doing relatively rote kind of tools around the AI rather…”

“Software engineering was the most scarce access asset in a company, and now it's the most plentiful, and I don't think we've ever lived in that world.”

“I think the atomic unit of productivity in AI is a process, not a person.”

“And my point on it is, if you look at it through the lens of like an end-to-end business process, you can turn science into engineering. And I think solving legal through AI, that's a science problem.”

“With the presence of Codex, you can produce amazing results. Those people are truly worth a thousand X other people, because it's relatively easy to find someone who's a great infrastructure engineer. Not easy easy, but like relatively. Finding someone with go…”

“And then the other thing is I think most companies in Silicon Valley won't write code by hand.”

“The future of software is agents. So, rather than having a web browser with forms and fields that we click on, we will delegate tasks to agents that will operate against a database somewhat autonomously.”

“It's a disruptive moment in technology because the incumbent software players, their advantages all of a sudden start to look a little bit like disadvantages, and it doesn't mean they won't all pivot, by the way, but it opens the door for, I'll say, AI native …”

“I think the importance of dashboards will go down. A point of a dashboard is so a human can stare at it and derive some insights. I think that probably AI can serve a very meaningful role in deriving insights from your data”

“I think the interesting maybe counterintuitive point that I would make is I think business model transitions are harder than technology transitions. I think it was harder for most on-premises software companies to move to ratable subscription revenue. Than it …”

“I would argue that actually, I think agents will go the way of outcomes based pricing where, you know, for example, at CIRA, we charge per resolved case for our customer service agents. I think if you made an agent to Audit your financials. You should pay per …”

“I think ChatGPT is already the front door for the internet for many people, and I would say, if you look at, like, ChatGPT, Gemini, and the like, I think your personal AI agent will be your front door to the internet.”

“And consumers over the next three or four years will have their own agents.”

“In those moments where you're delegating basically decision making to your agent, it really changes a lot of the mechanics and economics of the internet. SEO, SEM, all these things that have been awesome, optimized towards persuasion of humans, all of a sudden…”

“Your AI agent is going to be your digital front door, and most of your customer interactions will happen via your AI agent, not by, from your mobile app or your website, even if they exist in those platforms,”

“In my lifetime, hopefully, 25 years from now, there will be things that today I wouldn't understand, and jobs I don't understand technologies that were hopefully discovered by AI”

“I self-identify as a software engineer, and even over the past four months, that job has changed dramatically. The skills that made me what I am are less valuable now than they were, you know four years ago.”

“And put another way, if we paused innovation at the foundation model layer, we would still have, I think, trillions of dollars of value in the economy with current technology.”

“Where you had a dynamic where a company was outsourcing software development to save costs, the cost of the AI agent might be less than the cost of the outsourced I'll say resource even, so it's somewhat a dehumanizing term, but Often the term used in the indu…”

“Sam probably has the most ambitious vision of any founder that I've worked with, and his superpower is aligning people to that vision. I was, didn't have the good fortune of really knowing Steve Jobs, but they always talked about the reality distortion field a…”

“I think there'll be a period of consolidation. Well, that was always my joke. Your perspective on the dot-com bubble is very different if you went all in on buy.com versus amazon.com. And so you're gonna have some companies go out of business. I think more lik…”

“Probably the greatest entrepreneur of our time. I mean you know, he's a company, he's created everything from SpaceX and look at the impact of Starlink, let alone Tesla and X. So you know, had some complicated interactions, but sort of the undisputed leader in…”

“The actual craft of software engineering that we're doing right now I think it's literally a fact that it'll be completely different two years from now.”

“I think it was a time when like Twitter had the fail whale and it was down half the time and people couldn't even use it. And, you know, we, our product, we were innovating faster. We had more features. People liked it. We could. And we were up a hundred perce…”

“Folks like the PayPal mafia, I think learned a lot more about entrepreneurialism than like a typical PM at Google.”

“I do think the act of creating software is going to transform from typing into a terminal or typing into Visual Studio code to operating a code generating machine. I think that is the future of creating software, but I think operating a code generating machine…”

“I think just like what I was good at will no longer be useful in the future or certainly not like valuable in the future and that's okay.”

“And I think computer science especially at least sort of the foundations of it will continue to be the foundations of how we build software and understanding that when you're interacting, particularly with something that's smarter than you producing code, you …”

“I'm super excited about vibe coding, but I don't know, like generating a prototype has been the limiting factor in software ever. It's actually like building increasingly complex systems and actually changing them with agility. You know, if you look at the fam…”

“And also the models deteriorate in value fairly quickly as an asset class. And so you need just a lot of scale to make a return on the investment for a model that deteriorates in value so quickly.”

“I think today, you know, getting an orchestration, orchestrating an agentic process on top of the models is like, sounds really fancy and it's really hard and all that stuff. You know, I'm pretty sure that's gonna be easy in three or four years. It's just like…”

“I think we're going to go through a similar transition. Like the whole market is going to go towards agents. I think the whole market is going to go towards outcomes based pricing. Not because it's the only way, but it's going to be like the market is going to…”

“I don't think, I think there's a huge difference between outcomes based pricing and usage based pricing, because especially in AI, they're not necessarily even correlated and you could have a long phone call, not solve the customer's problem. And they give you…”

“I've actually seen more recently, a lot of AI companies, direct sales come a little bit more back into fashion because I think so many of the opportunities in AI are actually meet that quality Application where the buyer and the user are not necessarily the sa…”