#1256 Amjad Masad | The Company Arming Coders With Superpowers

Amjad Masad is the co-founder & CEO of Replit. The conversation was recorded at the BUILD Summit in New York. In this conversation, we discuss the customer obsession that Replit has, importance of being technical, current state of artificial intelligence, culture of Replit, e/acc movement, and why we must accelerate the adoption, creation, & scaling of technology. ======================= Auradine, a leader in web infrastructure solutions including blockchain, AI, and privacy, has unveiled the world's first 4nm Bitcoin mining systems, featuring breakthrough EnergyTune™ technology, setting new standards in performance and energy efficiency. The Teraflux™ product line from Auradine offers best-in-class performance, efficiency, and total cost of ownership (TCO), positioning it as the optimal choice for Bitcoin mining needs. With EnergyTune™, a patent-pending technology, Auradine's Teraflux™ systems enable rapid demand response and optimal energy usage, fostering a symbiotic relationship with electrical grids, and contributing to sustainable energy practices. Designed and manufactured in the US, Auradine's Teraflux™ product line not only ensures cutting-edge technology but also mitigates supply chain risks and provides increased supply chain resiliency. Visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.auradine.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for more information the Teraflux bitcoin mining systems. ======================= Get Better Crypto Data: Do you want faster, easier crypto data? Sign up for Velo Data, a new product that we have been working on to solve this problem: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠velowaitlist.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 250,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. The following episode is with Amjad Masad. He's the co-founder and CEO of Replit. This conversation was recorded during the Build Summit, where 700 founders came together in New York City. In the conversation, we discussed the customer obsession that Replit

• 0:45Anthony Pompliano?

  has, the importance of being technical as a founder and a builder, the current state of artificial intelligence, how Replit works, how they built such a culture of shipping and shipping very quickly at Replit, and exactly what goes on with the EX movement, and why we must accelerate the adoption, creation, and scaling of technology. I really enjoyed this conversation, and I hope you do as well. Here's the episode with Amjad Mashad.

• 1:12Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 1:37Anthony Pompliano?

  This episode is brought to you by Aradine. They are a brand-new startup led by a number of Silicon Valley legends who just raised $81 million to build the future of internet infrastructure. You're probably wondering what that means. Let me explain. There are numerous new disruptive technologies that are being adopted simultaneously, from blockchain to artificial intelligence to zero-knowledge technologies. In order to ensure that these technologies thrive in this new world, we need new infrastructure, and that is where Aradine comes in. They just launched their first product line called Terraflux, which is a Bitcoin miner powered by The world's first four nanometer silicon chip technology. These air-cooled, single-phase and dual-phase immersion cooling miners have unrivaled

• 2:18Anthony Pompliano?

  speed and efficiency. They have superior uptime and they leverage a brand-new innovation called energy tune that allows miners to dynamically adjust the energy consumption and Bitcoin hash rate based on demand response needs of the electrical grids. Auradine is an ambitious company working on hard problems. I'm really impressed with them. And if you want to check out more, you can go to auradine.com. That's A-U-R-A-D-I-N-E.com. Go check them out at auradine.com today. Before we get into this episode, I also want to tell you about a brand-new product called Velo. Velo is faster, easier crypto data. Everyone in the industry is always looking for it. What's the price? What's going on on the exchanges? Where are assets flowing or not flowing?

• 3:03Anthony Pompliano?

  How is things like open interest and derivatives actually playing out in the market? Well, that's where Velo comes in. It's faster and easier crypto data. You can go to velowaitlist.com today. Myself and a couple of friends, we invested in the business, we're advising the founder, and we think it's pretty cool. This one is something that keeps me informed on a daily basis, so you should check them out at velowaitlist.com. That's V-E-L-O waitlist.com.

• 3:32Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, our next speaker is Amjad Masad from Replit.

• 3:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Come on up here. We're going to start off with, what was Paul Graham's quote about Replit?

• 3:51Speaker 02

  Which one? Is that a few?

• 3:53Anthony Pompliano?

  You know the one.

• 3:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, he was like, "Replit is the next Microsoft."

• 3:58Anthony Pompliano?

  So Paul Graham, who started Y Combinator, knows you guys pretty well, thinks that you guys are the next Microsoft. Let's talk about why. And not so much from his perspective, but you've been working on this for a while. You have not focused on making money. You have not focused on all the bullshit. You basically have just been building a product that really solves a problem for customers. Where does that kind of discipline and focus come from?

• 4:28Speaker 02

  By the way, just before we get started, I was so engrossed by the talk with Howard. He, I don't know if people realize, but he dropped some really serious alpha. Uh, like a lot of what he talked about, I, I sort of had to learn the hard way. Yeah, for example, the one on ones thing, you know, I um, I used to like get, get so drained. Uh, just doing these therapy sessions with everyone and it's like, I like, is this why you started a company to be a therapist? I was like, no, I'm just gonna pay for coaches for all of you. And you can just go talk to coaches, but a lot of his, a lot of what he said is like really deep wisdom that it took me a long time to. I was basically like vigorously nodding my head over there, uh, which is really awesome.

• 5:12Speaker 02

  Uh, so I hope I can sort of match that, but um, yeah, so I think, you know, started working on Replit. Um, or the idea that became Replit like back in college. Uh, so I was doing computer science, uh, at, at university back in Almond Jordan, where I'm from. That was two thousand eight, nine, um, and you know, I, I, I thought that, um, I could open a browser window and start coding in the same way that I could open a browser window, go to my email, go to Google Docs. Turns out, nobody has built that. I was like, wow, what? This is crazy. Uh, i- i- it's sort of like, it's sort of like finding a hundred dollars on the, on the floor of Grand Central Station.

• 5:54Speaker 02

  It's like, it's impossible. Like, why is this idea nobody has worked on? Pretty quickly, I found out it's pretty fucking hard. That's why nobody's done that. Uh, so that started kind of my obsession with this idea of like, um, why hasn't this been done before? And also, what, what does it mean for the world of actually software creation becomes as accessible as creating a document, as posting a picture, as all of this stuff? And kind of the more I thought about it, uh, the, the more the implications felt that it was gonna be really big. Like, uh, i- if we, like on the order of the, of the creation of the printing press, like the.

• 6:37Speaker 02

  Impressed made it such that um uh uh sort of reading and writing uh became such an important things thing civilisationally um and you know all the democratic scientific all the revolutions we saw since since the Gutenberg uh press in the you know fifteen hundreds or something like that were the result of that right like we wouldn't be where we are as civilization if um we're in had this concept of you know anyone can write and and you can broadcast anyone can read it obviously the internet brought it to the next step.

• 7:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, I I would take a step even further, right? Shopify has this um mantra of like arm the rebels and they're talking about arming e-commerce uh kind of smaller businesses that want to go sell things on the internet compared to the Goliath of unsaid Amazon and you all though almost feel like you are arming the rebels of the next generation that basically you're saying look learn to code and then we will give you this sandbox to go build anything that you possibly can and like go take over the world.

• 7:45Speaker 02

  Right.

• 7:46Anthony Pompliano?

  What are you seeing in terms of that first customers that come in because I I think part of what I'm so impressed by your business is the long term thinking it takes to not just go and say hey I want you know the best coders in the world to be able to go on to this webpage and be able to code. You literally start with like well if we need enough users we should teach them how to code and then you're so far upstream that you can capture a lot of the value along Microsoft.

• 8:13Speaker 02

  Which actually gonna be bigger than Microsoft uh if we if we did it right, right? Because Microsoft uh ultimately relied on sort of people already knowing how to build things and how to code and what Howard said about kind of not letting your VCs dictate your growth rate that's something that really benefited us uh us a lot because um you know the conventional wisdom is that you built a good product okay now you go sell it to companies uh you figure out what the companies want and you build for that but actually. When you go to enterprises and you ask them what they want, they want the past, they don't want the future.

• 8:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Hmm.

• 8:54Speaker 02

  So you're sort of, it's a premature optimization that locks you into the ways of the past and doesn't really let you innovate. Whereas what we wanted to do is actually make the active software creation radically different, radically more accessible, more fun, more interesting, more exciting, faster. And to do that, we had to go arm the rebels, right? We had to go after the entrepreneurs, the hobbyists, the misfits, the weirdos, the students, the kids, everyone that was really underserved by the enterprise of opportun market. Um, and, um, and so, uh, you know, the, uh,

• 9:34Speaker 02

  le- learning is just a means to an end. Uh, learning, you know, it could be fun to just learn something for fun, but people learn to code in order to create something. And people wanna create all sorts of things with code, you know, from art to science, but also companies. And we've been so focused on this idea of enabling entrepreneurs. Um, and in- initially it started on a small scale, like, you know, someone who built like a, uh, like an app or something like that, and that would go viral, maybe they they make a few dollars off of it or game. But, uh, just, uh, yesterday, someone, um, uh, sent me a tweet, um, built this company called spellbook.ai. They just raised eleven million dollars. He's like, I couldn't have done it without Replit.

• 10:19Speaker 02

  It allowed us to move on a week by week basis, create new MVPs and new prototypes and get it in front of customers. And he's like, I wouldn't be here without, without the, the speed that this, this gave me.

• 10:32Anthony Pompliano?

  So let's talk about artificial intelligence. Um, it is this, I'll call it a new technology, even though it's not really new. Um, it seems to have caught the world, uh, by surprise in some degree, but also people very quickly are wrapping their heads around this is going to touch every industry. You all are heavily involved, both, I think, in terms of, uh, many of your users are using this new technology. Uh, you all are doing everything from hackathons to, you know, incorporating the technology into your product. Um, and then you personally are very interested and involved in terms of how this is gonna get regulated and, and kind of, uh, some of the pros and cons of current approaches. Talk just about when you see something that is so potentially fundamentally shifting, how do you even wrap your head around what is the technology and like what the implications are and how you can adapt your business to it?

• 11:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, I I think the most important thing is to really understand what the what the technology does um from as close to an axiomatic understanding of the technology as possible, right? So for us, uh, we were focused on the act of software creation. Uh, so what are the things that actually make like so in the ideal scenario, you have an idea and you turn that idea into a product or a piece of software instantaneously, right? That's you want a zero friction, uh, you know, zero milliseconds between idea to software, right? So, okay, what are the steps that actually make it so that it's not zero milliseconds, like it's actually hour to week, month, whatever it is. Um, and there's

• 12:00Speaker 02

  all these complexities that has to do with software, with coding, things like that. And so, okay, let's let's take the act of actually coding the MVP or the prototype. A lot of that is just boilerplate and it's just, um, like keystrokes to just, uh, help the computer understand what's in your mind. And a lot of that could be automated. And we did a lot of classical automation of these things, like it's, uh, you know, just running scripts and, um, and and kind of presetting up things and configuring a lot of what makes Replit special. But I always thought that the next level is going to be about generating code. And we looked at it when I started the company around twenty

• 12:45Speaker 02

  sixteen seventeen, and there were some interesting experiments there, actually using very primitive language models. But, uh, it wasn't just there. Look at it again in twenty eighteen nineteen. It was kind of G P T one, two. It's like, oh, that's an interesting thing. But like, hey, that generates like a lot of crappy code and syntax doesn't compile or whatever. And then G P T three happened. I was like, okay, it's now here. And went kind of all in in in twenty twenty twenty one, released our first drive of A I product. Uh, and twenty two, released Ghost Rider, our flagship kind of code generation product.

• 13:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Describe a little bit about what Ghost Rider does.

• 13:21Speaker 02

  Ghostwriter has a lot of different modalities and like the most simple way is like as you're coding, it actually predicting what you're going to code next and just doing it for you. So it'll present a suggestion similar to, you know, Copilot or Gmail kind of autocomplete, kind of background suggestion. If you like it, you just hit tab. If you don't like it, you just keep coding. That's like the main modality people use it with. The other thing is if you actually want to stop and construct a prompt to generate like a function or a class or an entire file, you can do right click, generate code and actually give it a natural language prompt. And this goes to the largest model that we have or on offering so that we can generate an entire file. So this is,

• 14:03Speaker 02

  this has to be accurate. The error rate needs to be really low here. If you want to talk about any of these things, if you want to talk to the AI about what it just generated, if you're going to ask questions about it, you could, if you want to plan a larger refactor or change, we have a chat modality as well where you can like go and have a, have a multi-turn conversation with the AI.

• 14:25Anthony Pompliano?

  So as you're using these technologies, what's interesting to me is the people who use the technology is very different. If somebody goes in and uses ChatGPT and it's, you know, your mother, your friend, who maybe isn't as technical, doesn't have kind of the hacker mentality, they may ask it somewhat primitive questions.

• 14:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:43Anthony Pompliano?

  When you put these tools in the hands of people who have that hacker mentality and have the skillset to leverage them,

• 14:50Anthony Pompliano?

  they can move incredibly quickly and they can really stretch the limitations of what these technologies do. Can you tell us one or two, you know, stories of things you're seeing people do that even you who are in this every single day and you have a good sense of the technology, you're like, I cannot believe that people are building this stuff?

• 15:05Speaker 02

  So I, I kind of knew that this made coding easier. What I was surprised by is like one day. This guy built two hundred and fifty K R R, single guy on Replit business, right? Uh, in, in a few months. Um, and I started talking to him, just trying to understand how he's using the product. And he asked me a question, uh, and I like to provide some support our customers as well. So he asked me a question, it's like, how do I do? How do I lock a file and make sure I'm not editing it while I'm changing another file? He was describing Git, he was describing version control. So here's a guy who built a quarter million dollars, probably going to one million R R without knowing Git.

• 15:50Speaker 02

  You know, and the conventional wisdom is that, oh, you need to learn all this. You go to college and you go through, you know, you go through the motions, you learn Git and all of that. And you start a project, get in it, whatever. All this bullshit doesn't matter. What matter is actually being able to create a product. And I asked him like, how are you able to do it? And he's like, yeah, just the AI. And, you know, I'll go back and forth with AI. Um, you know, I'll produce an error. Uh, when the error happens, I'll either use Ghostwriter or paste it in ChatGPT if I wanted like a longer conversation. And he uses all the AI tools, he's Bard and ChatGPT and Replit Ghostwriter and everything. Um, and it, it's just this iterative thing between that person, the environment and the AI that actually produces the code at the end.

• 16:35Speaker 02

  And this is, this is a non-coder that built a co- startup with code. Uh, and I, I didn't think that was possible.

• 16:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Is that really that different? Like one of the jokes, I think, if you go to hang out with developers is like, it's all just Googling. Right? You're laughing because that is the joke, right? Um, and, and so like to some degree, are we just now outsourcing the Googling to the AI? And it's coming back with the code? Or is there something different that's happening?

• 17:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I, I think that's, um, I think that's part of it. I think what's different is that Google doesn't talk back to you. The AI actually can ask you clarifying, uh, clarifying questions, can provide feedback. It's a lot more personalized. So it's like Google taking to its ultimate conclusion. The other thing that I found interesting in how a lot of these entrepreneurs are building businesses is. You know, thinking about generative AI as a suite of tools that allow you to build fundamentally new experiences. We have another startup founder, Priya, who built this very interesting app

• 17:41Speaker 02

  that basically takes a document and creates a multimedia presentation from that document. And it is a pipeline of a lot of different L L Ms and a lot of different generative tools, such as audio, video. And it's kind of obvious, like you want to put these things together, but the extent to which people are pipelining these tools to generate an end creative product is really surprising and makes me really excited because we're getting to a point where the way to think about these AIs is more like employees, is more like extensions of yourself.

• 18:20Speaker 02

  It's more like, you know, a team members that have different specialties that you can kind of bring in depending on the task you want to do. And that's really how the people who embrace these tools the most use them as, they kind of view them as extension of their teams or themselves.

• 18:39Anthony Pompliano?

  You all, I think more so than any company I've seen, seem to hire your users or hire your customers. And this seems like a great hack to really get high quality people who believe in the mission. Talk a little bit as to like what that process looks like and do you think other companies should be doing this more often?

• 18:56Speaker 02

  The process is that it's just so natural, it's just so organic. Like we, sometimes, like some users force themselves into the company in a way.

• 19:09Anthony Pompliano?

  How?

• 19:10Speaker 02

  Where you sort of like, they apply, they send an email to our jobs, they apply on whatever, you know, portal we use for jobs. They send emails to individual employees. They go to contribute to our, to our open source repos. They'll do everything to be useful. And suddenly we just see them as part of our team. I'm like, okay, I guess we're gonna let this 15 year old kid like, you know, join our team. And, you know, a lot of these kids stay for a long time. I mean, we've had, we've had people join when they're 18. Yeah, and um, and actually recently someone left, they were like twenty five. It was like, oh, I kind of want to see other things in the world.

• 19:54Speaker 02

  And so it's like, okay, you know, you've uh, you've you've earned your keep in a way. The rich as as well, right? They made a lot of money. Uh, you know, they got stock options at Replit like really, really early on. Um, and uh, it's awesome, like seeing all these hackers and and these people that wouldn't otherwise be getting jobs, like get jobs at Replit.

• 20:16Anthony Pompliano?

  And a lot of them are younger, right? That you guys are specifically seeing because of kind of the hacker culture and and the product itself. And you're teaching people to code, but can it be replicated in other businesses?

• 20:31Speaker 02

  I think so. So we we've had it, we've had instances where where people, look, actually, I would say that everyone who almost everyone who joins Replit has used the product and has loved the product and loved the mission and the vision. Um, and so there's like some selection effect that you can apply onto a lot of other companies. So I think the way traditionally recruiting works is you hire recruiting team or recruiting agency. And they go out into the world and they cold email a bunch of people. And you kind of need to do that at least early on. But you know, you have a lot of low context people coming in. And you have to sell them on the vision. They have to actually believe it.

• 21:14Speaker 02

  And and you know, some seasoned executives will get themselves to believe anything, right? To, you know, they just want to be team players. But it's not as strong as when you actually get people who believe. And I think you could do that by actually just interacting with your customers all the time, uh, with your partners. Uh, and you're going to be building these relationships again, that will make it very organic to just hire from.

• 21:39Anthony Pompliano?

  So as you guys are building, there's a philosophy along with the actual product itself. Uh, there's been a rise of EAC. Um, and this is idea of just like, everything needs to accelerate. Rather than have people tell us to slow down or to over regulate or to um, stop using energy. And you know, we can go down the line of all kind of the stupid arguments that are being made in the world. How important is it for the philosophy to be aligned with the business? And like, how do you kind of take that and incorporate it into the company culture? Because I think that really, if I talk to anyone at Replit, like there's a, it's like, of course you work at Replit. And that seems like a really important part of the success of the business.

• 22:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, um, yeah, I think there's like a radical streak at Replit in what we're doing, which is,

• 22:29Speaker 02

  how do you take this sort of arcane art of software creation? That's been sort of created a lot of wealth, typically for a small population of people, typically in Silicon Valley, and actually make that so that anyone in the world can put spit in it. And my story, where I came from, and being able to come here and become a founder and build this company that has a big impact, I think that story could be done a hundred, a thousand, a million times. And a lot of the reason it hasn't been done is because of artificial constraints. Whether it's constraints on the tools and how accessible they are, and a lot of times it's regulations,

• 23:11Speaker 02

  it's certain ways of doing things that perhaps not so explicitly, but sometimes implicitly, is about trying to centralize power. AI is where we see that happening right in front of our eyes in a very accelerated manner, where there's like a clear power grab by incumbents, you know, going to DC, telling them, hey, I'm building something very dangerous. You should create a mode around it so that I'm the only one building it.

• 23:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Why would they say that?

• 23:50Speaker 02

  I mean, it's kind of comical.

• 23:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Let's just get into it.

• 23:52Speaker 02

  It's kind of comical, like if I was, if I was like, if I'm like making a sci-fi about like an evil executive that wants to, like, to do a record of capture, yeah, I wouldn't go as absurd as what we're seeing now with the CEOs going in front of Congress and literally saying, saying that.

• 24:13Anthony Pompliano?

  So before we get to

• 24:14Speaker 02

  So naked.

• 24:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, before we get to the critiques of what they're doing, let's maybe put ourselves, and for those that don't know, maybe some context is helpful. So AI is huge. There's a number of companies, probably three, four, or five of them, who have been building various components or technologies around AI. And rather than take the normal stance that most technology companies have done forever, and then like, hey, government, you stay over there, we'll stay over here and like, you know, leave us alone, we'll leave you alone. These people are basically going and knocking on the door in Washington and they're saying, regulate me, bro.

• 24:48Speaker 02

  Regulate me daddy.

• 24:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, which like, if you kind of think about it, like, what, why would you do that? And so like, what is their thought process? Or what is the advantage? What's the incentive for them to go do this?

• 25:03Speaker 02

  I, it's, it's pretty obvious. Like, I, I kind of like, um, look, there are true believers that believe that AI is actually going to kill everyone. Uh, it's like a fringe theory started in like Berkeley. They wrote this blog post, a blog, um, site called Less Wrong. You can go read it. It's pretty insane.

• 25:23Anthony Pompliano?

  And they, they misnamed it. It should have just been wrong.

• 25:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, just wrong. Just keep it simple. Um, but, but, and, and I think those, those guys are true believers. I actually have more respect for them than, uh, you know, they, you know, a lot of the, a lot of the people, um, that are actually asking for regulation are using the same arguments. And Mark Andreessen, um, actually wrote this blog post about AI recently, and, um, he kind of drew parallels to the period of, um, uh, what's the period where they banned alcohol?

• 26:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, prohibition.

• 26:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, the prohibition. And he, he said that during the prohibition, there was actually like true believers, and there were actually profiteers. And so what we're seeing, a lot of the, you know, executives that are asking for regulation are profiteering from the natural fear that people have from AI and the very potent message that some of those true believers have actually

• 26:23Speaker 02

  Put together over many, many, many years. And the immediate, the immediate need to create a mode is because open source is actually catching up at a rate that never happened before, you know. Typically, um, sort of, uh, so typically there's a lead time between software and open source competitors. Uh, in AI, we've actually, that that lead time has been shrinking. Well, and and thanks to people like Zuck, who's emerged as a hero in the situation with Lama and Lama Code and Lama two.

• 27:03Speaker 02

  You know, the lead time is only a year or so, or a year and a half, like, you know, I think G P T four level uh, open source AI is probably Lama three, which I know they're training right now as we speak. So, uh, th- there's a, there's a impeding threat that would eat into the bottom line of a lot of the, the AI agglia, agglia poly right now, so.

• 27:26Anthony Pompliano?

  And is this compounded by, I saw a report recently that chat G P T traffic is down for three months in a row. Do you feel like, um, there's kind of these short term pressures of, obviously, there's more of these products on the market, some of them are open source, some of them are just closed source competitors. And so people kind of got through the threshold, hey, we're the market leader at the moment, and they want to close the door behind them, and that's really what they're doing?

• 27:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I mean, it's pretty obvious, like, do you have another explanation for it? Like, I can't, I can't think of any, like, even if I want to be extremely charitable. Like, do you actually believe that those CEOs are actually like, uh, think they can kill everyone in the world, uh, like existential risk, they actually, like, if they thought that, why are you working on it? You know, um, and and so I just can't, I, I like, when I really try hard to kind of think, uh, for an explanation that is actually. Um, as tradable as possible, like the best I can come up with, if you're actually worried about,

• 28:30Speaker 02

  say, um, like effective AI on fraud, effective AI on critical infrastructure, you would regulate the applications of these, right? So, for example, uh, the US government can say, we can't apply AI to utility companies managing electricity or whatever, whatever. That that would be a reasonable thing to say, oh, you have to kind of meet a certain threshold for applications and X, Y, and Z. But what they're asking, the policy proposal that OpenAI, Anthropic and others have put forward, is that AI that has used X amount of flops of compute should be banned,

• 29:11Speaker 02

  uh, or should be banned from the open, and only a small group of people should be able to train that. And again, that's like a, that's like a pretty clear, they're not even trying, sort of like, pull the ladder type of approach. And look, I, I mean, a lot of these people I respect and are my friends, I've, we've worked with them for a long time. But my, uh, my ultimate goal and the reason I'm working at Replit and I've done a lot of open source, I was part of the React JS core team, React Native, and, you know, most of my career has been done in open source. And I think open source is one of the best tools for, um,

• 29:49Speaker 02

  freedom and software self-determination and, uh, opportunities for people to build businesses all over the world. Uh, it just decentralizes the opportunity in software in the same way that that Replit as well does. Um, and, um, and AI is the future of software. It's literally just software, right? Um, and i- if, if the future of software is bottlenecked by these regulations, then they get, that's going to be really bad for the world. We're, we're basically. Cutting off a potential much better future. You know, the other day I was, um, I was looking, there was a, this research that come out after like a

• 30:30Speaker 02

  multiple years of study showing that metformin, um, during, when you have symptoms of COVID, if you take metformin, it reduces your, um, your long COVID incidence by forty percent. The, the thing that generated the hypothesis for this is an AI. So in, in April twenty twenty, a, a group of scientists at, at some university, uh, use computer simulations and actually natural language processing, um, to understand how COVID kind of works and what potential interventions. And they hypothesized at the time that metformin could be actually a good way to, I think based on protein synthesis, whatever, a, a good way to, to actually intervene. And turns out it's right.

• 31:15Speaker 02

  AI is already generating scientific hypothesis. It's, uh, generating scientific research. We had the, you know, alpha fold with protein folding. It's amazing for the future of healthcare, for the future of education. You and I are investors in, in synthesis. They're working, um, on an AI tutor. AI tutors solve the two sigma problem. The, uh, two sigma, Bloom's two sigma problem is that what he found is there's no education intervention in the world that could be as good as one-on-one tutoring. Uh, so the whole, uh, idea behind the startup is to provide one-on-one tutoring for everyone in the world. And that really raises the global IQ. And so AI is the future of software, is the future of humanity, in my opinion. Now, back to the EAC question.

• 32:01Speaker 02

  EAC takes it a little further, which is, uh, the idea that we need to accelerate all sorts of human progress. And it's not just AI, it's also energy. What's happening in, uh, you know, with the degrowthers in Europe and the anti-nuclear people. Uh, and, and, and the idea behind EAC is how do you build a coalition of technologists and pro-humans, pro-humanity ultimately, uh, folks that actually are countering the, the sort of degrowth, uh,

• 32:30Speaker 02

  Cult that has plagued the the West and the idea behind it is the kind of Peter Thiel formulation is that some people kind of divide the world into devolved versus developing. And the implicit assumption behind developed is we already were developed, we're done. It's time to cut off the resources now. Whereas the EAC idea is like, we're not developed at all. We're still primitive as to where we could go as a civilization.

• 32:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Which camp are you in?

• 32:58Speaker 02

  Take a guess.

• 33:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Let's talk about training data real quick. I recently saw that a bunch of very well known bestselling authors got together and they filed a class action lawsuit, I think against OpenAI and ChatGPT. And they basically were like, hey, you took our work and used it as training data, among other things. And you should have paid us for it. We've seen Elon Musk really kind of lock down Twitter. It seems like Twitter was a huge source of training data for these models. Where do you think it all shakes out? Like, will will anything on the Internet be fair game for the training models? Will people have to, if they want to train a model, go buy a bunch of data? How does this work out?

• 33:38Speaker 02

  So here's where I'll show I'm not like a total like anarcho capitalist, free radical.

• 33:45Speaker 02

  I think that there's probably some

• 33:51Speaker 02

  there's probably something a government here could could could could actually provide clarity on. I think at least the the problem, as it happened with crypto, is when there's so much regulatory uncertainty, the players in the market become kind of deranged. And so no one knows what to do. There's a bunch of lawsuits and maybe eventually we'll arrive at something. But having some clarity around what does it mean? And I think that there's like fair arguments on both sides. Those people affected by the training where the value of their labor is cheapened

• 34:31Speaker 02

  because the output of their labor went into the input of the of training of this model. It's actually like a very like, like, there's a moral argument there that you've taken, you've taken my labor, you obviously mix it with your own labor, but but now you've reduced the need for my labor by this new model that you created. What we've done at Replit is we trained a large language model for code. It's the smallest, most economical, fastest model for code. It's a three billion parameter model. We trained it in April. What we did is we trained on open source data and we released the model as open source

• 35:15Speaker 02

  because we thought that it's the ethical thing to do. If you train on public data, at minimum, what you should do is have your model be publicly accessible, publicly downloadable. And then we had, we wanted to keep some advantage for Replit. And so the data that Replit has and collects as part of our service, we trained a model that was 50% better and that we kept for our users or customers, right? I think that's a fair trade. If you're OpenAI and you're training all the data of the internet, you should at least contribute something to the internet as part of the open source. And maybe there's some advantage you keep for your company.

• 35:52Anthony Pompliano?

  The last thing I want to talk about is AI agents. I think when people first kind of realized we're going to be able to do this, there was, it felt like every single day, multiple things were going viral on Twitter where it was just like, holy shit, look what this can do. What do you think is actually like commercial available, maybe five years from now versus hackers on the internet, you know, make it, order them food or kind of do cool things, but there might not actually be like business opportunity there?

• 36:21Speaker 02

  I actually think agents are going to be huge, but like, A, there's like a lot of infrastructure to build. We actually, three or four months ago, Took a pause on a lot of the AI features we're building. Because we just realized that the amount of hacks that you have to do to get anything working was just like growing exponentially. And AI was getting worse over time. And so we took a step back and what we do at Raplet is build abstractions. So we built an abstraction, we call it a chat service, not a very inspiring name, but basically, uh, it figures out, i- i- i- it's like a multi-component system.

• 37:01Speaker 02

  Where there's like an intent detection layer, without getting too much into the details, but I think a lot of people are just thinking about one model and maybe you recursively kind of prompt this model and this is an agent. But wha- what I'm saying, agents are gonna be a society of models. There's gonna be, uh, there's gonna be different models at every part of the chain doing different things. And some of these models are gonna be hyper-specialized and trained to be more agentic. And maybe at the core, there's the mega models, the GPT four, the Gemini's, GPT five, whatever it's gonna be. But it's a system. And I think a lot of researchers, the way they think about AI is they think about just the model and the end-to-end learning of the model. As engineers, we need to think about systems.

• 37:44Speaker 02

  And to think about systems mean that you would need different tools for different part of components of this, of the system. So I think agents are coming. Um, I would probably, I probably think by next year, we're gonna have pretty compelling, uh, use cases, both in the consumer and enterprise side and on the software creation side. Uh, but I would probably give it another, uh, uh, year or two, probably twenty-five, twenty-six. Uh, a lot of our lives are gonna be touched by AI agents, uh, such that, you know, everything will, uh, you, whenever you're interacting with robots today, it's kind of sucks. Like, wh- when you get, wh- when you're on the phone and kind of press one for customer

• 38:29Speaker 02

  service, whatever, this, this sucks, it'll get a lot better, you'll be able to just talk to it. Um, a lot of the back office stuff is gonna get automated. Um, and, uh, and it's, so I think, I think everything in the economy will just like get behind the scenes better, but also a lot of consumer interactions will be a lot more delightful.

• 38:49Anthony Pompliano?

  It is funny that you call a phone tree and it asks you to talk now, or you just press zero a bunch of times and you feel like you hacked the matrix a little bit, and then they just loop you back and you're like, fuck, alright, they're smarter than me. How can businesses leverage Replid? Or how could some of the founders who are here who either have businesses or thinking about certain businesses leverage the product?

• 39:13Speaker 02

  So I don't think we're ready to run entire businesses on Replid yet, but what I will say, if you're starting from scratch, I would just do it on Replid. Like, if you're starting a product from scratch, you would move 10x faster by doing it on Replid. If you're a bigger company, you want to start or adopt it, think about a microservice or a back office task or internal tool or Slackbot or whatever, that could be an isolated thing that people can spin up really quickly. That way you can sort of start adopting it. It can also be helpful for internal prototyping and sharing between people inside the company. But yeah, definitely if you're starting, if your founder's starting from scratch, like, I used to, like, for the first time, I'm comfortable saying

• 39:58Speaker 02

  it would be a bad decision not to do it on Replid. So, because recently we just released our deployments feature, and so you can actually deploy and scale up to infinity if you'd like, any kind of application. So I think it's really wise to start there.

• 40:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Thank you so much for doing this.

• 40:16Speaker 02

  Of course, my pleasure.