Pod Insights a16z Podcast The 1000x Developer with Amjad Masad About this episode A small minority – likely less than 1% – of the world can code. Yet also widely known that the skillset yields outsized returns, with developers generating some of the highest paying salaries out there.
But even this field is quickly shifting, especially with the advent of wide-scale AI. Today we get to chat with Amjad Masad, CEO and founder of Replit, about these foundational shifts.
We dive into how Replit has integrated AI into its platform and the implications on both current and future developers. It’s easier than ever to learn to code, but is it still worthwhile? And does the 10x engineer really exist? Listen in to find out.
Timestamps:
00:00 - Introduction
02:02 - What is Replit?
04:30 - Stories behind Replit
12:02 - The software hero’s journey
14:24 - Making coding fun
17:02 - AI powering software
21:03 - Training your own models
23:40 - Building UX around AI
26:03 - The developer landscape
29:43 - The 1000x engineer
32:39 - Should you still learn to code?
36:56 - What does AI enable?
43:40 - Developing on mobile
46:21 - A software labor market
49:42 - Differentiating a marketplace
51:39 - Building new market dynamics
54:10 - Looking ahead
Resources:
* Replit: https://replit.com/
* Replit Ghostwriter: https://replit.com/site/ghostwriter
* Replit Bounties: https://replit.com/bounties
* Find Amjad on Twitter: https://twitter.com/amasad
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Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.
Transcript 10,765 words · 2 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:01 Amjad Masad? We're seeing people making software at 30-minute increments. Someone the other day put a request for a landing page up. They attached a Figma file. They got it back in 30 minutes. That's really never been done before. And why shouldn't have existed like that before?
0:17 Steph Smith? It's hard to find concrete numbers, but some estimates predict that less than 1% of the world knows how to code. Yet, it's also widely known that the minority of people who know how to not only consume but create software yield outsized returns, with some developers generating some of the highest-paying salaries out there. But even this field is shifting quickly, especially with the advent of wide-scale AI. And in this interview, we get to chat with Amjad Massad, founder of Replit, an integrated development environment that allows you to code live in the browser. Here, we chat about how Replit has tackled the difficult problem of making coding fun, but also how it's now integrating AI into its platform via Ghostwriter and the implications of these shifts on both current and future developers, in addition to the applications that can be built.
1:00 Steph Smith? As a personal anecdote, I actually taught myself to code in 2018. And to this day, it's one of the best decisions I've ever made. And despite screaming this from the rooftops, still, many other people find it extremely daunting. My journey took around 300 hours. Yes, I tracked it. But with the advancements in tooling and technology, it may actually be easier than ever to learn to code. And I was surprised to hear from Amjad just how quickly he thinks people can get up to speed today. Let's get started. As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. For more details, please see a16z.com/disclosures.
1:57 Steph Smith? Amjad, thank you so much for joining the A16Z Podcast.
2:00 Amjad Masad? It's my pleasure. I've been listening to this podcast for a really long time, so it's great to be finally on.
2:05 Steph Smith? Yeah, well, we're happy to have you. So just to set the tone for listeners, you are the founder and CEO of Replit. I think you're also the head of engineering now, but we'll get to that. Can you just share what Replit is? And I'm probably getting a little ahead of myself, but how it differs from maybe other similar products or development environments?
2:25 Amjad Masad? I like to think about Replit as the technology that reduces the distance between an idea and a product. The moment any person in the world gets an idea for a piece of software. And so the distance between having that idea and making something in the world is typically very large. The internet has really reduced things down further. And, you know, we think Replit is the sort of the ultimate answer there where we want to get to a place where the moment you get an idea, you just Replit, you know, and that's sort of where the name came from. And we do that in a number of ways. One way is that we just simplify the development process.
3:08 Amjad Masad? Crucially, we'll make it stunted, like a lot of tools sort of think that to simplify is to reduce the power. We actually keep the power while also making the process a lot more enjoyable and learnable. We also superpower it with AI. If you don't know how to code, we have various courses and things that can teach you how to code. If you don't think coding is for you, then you can hire someone from our community to make the program for you. So we have this thing called Replit Bounties where you can put a price on a project you want to get done, describe the project, and then a combination of an AI and a human being will get that done for you.
3:51 Amjad Masad? And so it's really ultimately about that idea of like getting from idea to product. And we'll help everyone in the world have access to that superpower that we call software.
4:02 Steph Smith? I love the way you put that because you've kind of represented the different modalities, depending on where someone is and their proficiency in terms of being able to code. And regardless of where they sit, getting them to that end product, that end vision that they want. And we'll get to Ghostwriter, we'll get to Bounties. But I want to give people a real sense of some of the stories behind Replit, because that's something that's really gripped me as someone who's been following the company. And I'll call it too, but then I want to play a quick game so that we can share more of these stories with the audience. So two things that I remember. One is recently shared a 13-year-old kid that set up a sizable crypto mining operation via Replit.
4:43 Steph Smith? Another example that I saw a while back was these two kids, they looked maybe six years old, crashing a computer science teacher conference and sharing their startup pitch. So I've come up with five or so different scenarios. I have no idea if these scenarios have actually happened on Replit. I haven't shared them with you prior to this, but I think they might stimulate either other stories that have happened on Replit, or you can tell me if these things have indeed happened. So let's give it a shot. The first one is someone has started learning to code via Replit. They haven't gotten a computer science degree, they haven't done a bootcamp, they've learned within Replit, and since been hired as a developer at a Feng company.
5:28 Steph Smith? Has this happened yet?
5:30 Amjad Masad? I would say it happened, yes. So we've had someone who learned to code on Replit primarily on their own, became a very productive community member, and applied to work at Replit. And we thought they're very talented, but at the time, there wasn't like a really good fit for them. And so I helped them apply for other companies and they ended up at Google.
5:52 Steph Smith? That's awesome. Let's move on to the next one. Someone has used Replit to build over 50 projects. Now, you can use your own definition of project here. These don't need to be full-blown startups, but have you seen someone build that magnitude of projects on Replit?
6:07 Amjad Masad? Yeah, I think that's a fairly reasonable number of projects. So there's a six-year-old developer, his name is Rehan. He's one of our most prolific programmers. He actually built a bunch of interesting projects where he reverse engineered.
6:26 Amjad Masad? How Replit works and he built an unofficial API. One of his unofficial APIs is a security program that searches people's Replis to find Discord tokens. So a lot of people build Discord bots on Replit and they copy and paste the tokens in clear text as opposed to putting them in our encrypted service, the Secrets Manager. And so he would find those tokens, he would invalidate them because Discord has service to invalidate those. And then he would send them a notification. He would say like, hey, like we found that you've exposed your token. He was, and still is, one of the most prolific bounty hunters.
7:07 Amjad Masad? And he built one of our earliest bounties, which was a startup that wanted to build like a stable diffusion based T-shirt generator. So he was generating a T-shirt based on a prompt and then get it printed and send to you. Like there isn't one week where I don't see Rayhan producing like a new piece of software.
7:28 Steph Smith? That's amazing.
7:29 Amjad Masad? So I would say like 50 is probably on the low side of things here.
7:34 Steph Smith? Yeah, I undershot it, I guess. Let's rapid fire through the last three. The third one is someone has built an app on Replit and through that app has since made a million dollars or more from it.
7:45 Amjad Masad? A million dollars, I don't think that happened yet. There are people that are on trajectory to doing that right now. And so there are bounty hunters that are making thousands and thousands of dollars a week. And I think that'll continue to grow. There are startups that are starting entirely on Replit today. There are a couple of AI startups that have their entire stack built on Replit. And presumably one of those projects will maybe get to a million dollars. There are a couple of earlier examples of startups that sort of prototype their projects. For example, FIG is this command line autocomplete tool.
8:27 Amjad Masad? That this Y C startup, I think it was like Y C twenty or something like that, or Y C twenty one, and it's used by tens of thousands of engineers. And the original product was entirely built on Replit. They're starting to sell. I don't think they're making a million dollars, but maybe that's another example of maybe on the path to a million dollars. But I would say it would be a success if someone like an individual person just made a million dollars. I think that's really my dream, and I hope we can get to that this or next year.
8:57 Steph Smith? That's awesome. And I should mention, there's a time element to this. I believe Replit, was it founded in twenty sixteen?
9:02 Amjad Masad? That's right.
9:03 Steph Smith? So we're around six to seven years later. So let's see how things progress. The next one is someone over the age of ninety. I went a little crazy with this one. Someone over the age of ninety has used Replit. Has this happened?
9:18 Amjad Masad? Someone who ended up working at Replit, their grandpa in India is like a physics PhD. They do a lot of like physics sort of writing. And in one recent paper they published, they used Replit to write physics simulation. And Replit was published as part of that paper. I don't believe they're ninety, but they're they're definitely seventy plus.
9:43 Steph Smith? Okay, final one. Strangers have met via Replit. Maybe it's the forum, maybe working on a project together and have since gotten married.
9:52 Amjad Masad? Hmm. Man, that would be awesome to know. I haven't heard of it if that happened. I know there are some community members that like recently got married. I don't think they met on the community. But, you know, I've certainly like seen some people date and things like that. But married, I haven't heard that yet.
10:11 Steph Smith? Well, I had to ask it. Like I said, I hadn't shared these with you beforehand. So I went from what I think are maybe more ordinary scenarios and maybe more extraordinary.
10:19 Amjad Masad? One story, let me mention, there's a story in the news about the world's youngest Microsoft Azure AI certified programmer. And naturally someone looked them up and they found that they're on Replit. This kid is six years old.
10:34 Steph Smith? Oh, my goodness.
10:36 Amjad Masad? And if you go to their Replit profile, they have a thousand followers on Replit. And they have games with thousands and thousands of runs. And they're just like completely prolific. And I just can't wrap my head, especially now that I have kids. I can't wrap my head around like a six year old like doing this like every day. And that's like pretty freaking amazing.
11:00 Steph Smith? That's incredible because six years old, that's grade one, I believe. In grade one, I was learning to trace letters so that I could write the alphabet. Wow, that's incredible. Are there any other stories worth mentioning here? Any top of mind scenarios like a six year old who's coding on Replit?
11:21 Amjad Masad? One of my favorite stories is one day I wake up and I see my Twitter blowing up. And I go on Twitter, I find that this Indian mom and dad are tagging me and saying that I corrupted their child. Their kid is totally addicted to Replit. They're supposed to go to IIT. As you know, IIT requires a lot of preparation, but that kid is not interested in it. So not studying at all and just programming all the time. And I actually felt pretty shitty about it because it started going viral. And a lot of people were like pretty negative about the parents. Apparently it hit a nerve in some discourse in India about how parents push their children really hard on IIT. And so I reached out and tried to help.
12:03 Amjad Masad? I tried to talk to the kid and tell him like, hey, you should listen to your parents. And then a few months after that, India was hit pretty hard with COVID. If you remember the issue there. And that kid wrote the application that first responders were using to find equipment, to find oxygen, to find all these things. And it went totally viral. It brought down our website. That's how viral it went. And in my mind, I was like, his parents should be really proud now. And then something even more fantastic happened. Out of that experience and him going viral, using his skills, he got a job. And now he gets paid more than his entire family. And so you go, it's sort of this hero's journey.
12:47 Amjad Masad? You go from getting blamed for someone ruining their future to actually turns out that they actually did a huge favor to their future. And I think that's the sort of power of software and the internet.
12:59 Steph Smith? That's beautiful. And something that also stands out to me from that story, which we'll touch on throughout this interview is this idea of coding being fun. Like this kid really just wanted to code all the time. And as someone who taught myself several years ago, prior to learning, I thought coding was really dull, just something more prescriptive instead of creative and artistic. And again, using this word fun. And after I learned to code, I saw it in a different light. And I think that's really important is this idea where it's like, how do you make coding fun? So what are your thoughts there? How have you been able to design Replit to actually enhance people's creativity and make them want to come back? And make them see this skill in a new light?
13:43 Amjad Masad? So I think most things that are fun tend to be devoid of a lot of drudgery, routine work, right? You know, when you're playing a video game, you're not like building the video game every time or setting up the TP or doing some rote IT task, right? When you are doing a sports hobby, you're in the flow. You're doing the thing you're excited about doing. The problem with coding is that a lot of the maintenance around the development environment and the packages and the integration of all the different components was the thing that engineers were spending most of their time doing. The moments they were coding, they were an absolute bliss.
14:28 Amjad Masad? But those moments were actually very little in terms of the, if you think about the pie charts of what it meant to work as a programmer. So the first thing that Replit does is remove the need to do all this setup. That in itself made programming a lot more fun. And then at the collaborative aspect, like a lot of what we find fun in life has to do with other people. We're just social animals, right? And so if I can share my program with you with just a link, that's really fun. That's what makes Figma fun. That's what makes any other collaborative tool fun is that I can just like send you a link and you're in there with me or you can play it and try it out.
15:10 Amjad Masad? And then finally, there's a lot of explicit gamified elements of Replit. For example, we have a built in currency called Cycles. Cycles allow you to earn, you know, from bounties. You can spend it on AI or compute, or you can cash it out. And it's built with a mindset of like, it feels like Roblox. It feels like one of those in-game currencies.
15:33 Steph Smith? Well, I like your analogy of the setup or the admin that goes into coding at times being a lot more overhead, where if you compare it to other activities out there, like I love playing soccer, for example. If playing soccer required me to like put on my shoes and shin pads for an hour before every hour long game, I'd be like, man, this is really frustrating. Like, I just want to get on the field. And so that ratio is actually important. Let's take a left turn and go straight to AI, which is, you know, the theme, I feel like of the last six months with many companies. But why don't you give listeners a quick overview of what Ghostwriter is and how it works?
16:13 Amjad Masad? So Ghostwriter is like a pair programmer that is an AI. It helps you in every aspect of software creation, whether that's typing code. So we're going to provide this great text to either complete lines of code or entire functions or entire classes. So you're going to see that happen as you're typing. You also can generate sort of entire programs. So you can do right click, generate, and you can give it a prompt. In the same way, you could stable diffusion, Dolly, a prompt and generate entire images. You can give it a prompt and generate entire programs, entire programs that run entire like applications. And then you could highlight a piece of code and you can right click and you can transform it.
16:55 Amjad Masad? Finally, the ability to talk to Ghostwriter is the final piece here. And we're actively working on it and it's our number one priority. It'll be like a chat box inside Replit. And it'll both chime in when things happen that it could help. So for example, if you get an error, it would be like, I can help you with that. Like a Clippy thing, hopefully not as annoying, but Clippy was way ahead of its time. So that'll be like, you got an error, like if you want, I can try to help you with that. Or you can just sort of ask it like, I wrote this code, can you write tests for it? It's really remaking the IDE as we know it.
17:36 Steph Smith? I would also say it's less binary in a way. Something I've been thinking a lot about as I've learned more about how AI is being implemented with code is when I learned, one of the most frustrating aspects of learning was just the binary nature of code. When you get into a bad error, it's just like, no, no, no, no, no, no. And then eventually you hit a yes. And sometimes that takes way longer than is comfortable. And so what I like about this idea of having this sidekick is just the nuance to that of AI being able to say, oh, have you tried this yet? Oh, did you mean this by your code? Like, this is what your code is trying to do? Is that what you intended? Getting suggestions and again, having the learning curve be less like a no, no, no, no, yes,
18:19 Steph Smith? and more like a gray that evolves into a yes.
18:24 Amjad Masad? Like a gradient descent, sort of how you train an AI actually. So yeah, I hundred percent agree with that. I think it humanizes the process as opposed to this like mechanistic sort of trial and error thing. It allows us to iterate a lot faster on tools. Traditional IDEs are very hard to build. They're super complex, classic algorithms. I'm sure you remember stuff, but like some of these IDEs are super big. Like you download Intellige, that's like a couple of gigabytes of stuff. And they're clunky, they take up a ton of RAM, like try starting Xcode, you know? It just consumes your computer. And the cool thing about the AI revolution is that the AI is going to be running in the cloud.
19:07 Amjad Masad? You're going to give it a prompt, like, you know, what you're talking about, what your code is about. And it'll be able to implement suggestions and implement features and tools without having this heavy, algorithmic, hard to maintain sort of piece of software.
19:24 Amjad Masad? So I'm really excited about that. And as a startup, you always want to catch a new platform shift. And with Replit, I feel like we're catching this platform shift. And the older ideas will not be able to adapt as fast as we can.
19:39 Steph Smith? Well, something that I've heard you talk about is also a decision that you made, which was to build Ghostwriter on top of your own models. So something like a Copilot is built on top of GPT-3, 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?
20:03 Amjad Masad? Well, first of all, how crazy it is that Microsoft had 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 it's their separate things. But if you're serious about making products, you know, famous Alan Kay quote to Steve Jobs. He told Steve Jobs, if you're serious about making software, you have to make hardware. And that's why Apple's a 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, if this is going to be a core interaction with our platform,
20:48 Amjad Masad? we have to be able to optimize it. And we have to get the latency down to the point that 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 of our API. Because the latency will be all over the place. We couldn't get the caching right. We couldn't get the 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 the other part is the strategic part, which is if you believe that this is primary platform shift, and this is going to be a core part of your technology, then you have to build it. If you call yourself a technology company, that means you built technology, right?
21:32 Amjad Masad? It doesn't mean you're just like building glue code on top of like existing technology. Finally, we think that we have a bit of a data advantage, and that data advantage will compound over time. And so will allow us to train more advanced AIs over time. So all these three reasons just made sense for us to bring at least part of it in-house. I should say that we still use OpenAI for a lot of the bigger workloads that require really large models.
22:03 Steph Smith? Something that I found really interesting was Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman were on the Stratechery podcast. And they talked about how they ultimately, I mean, they're investors. They're not the creators of Copilot, but how Copilot ultimately got to the interface that it now is. And originally, they actually wanted to create it as a chatbot. They thought, oh, people will run into an error. They're going to want to talk to someone and ask, hey, how do I fix this? And they're going to get a response and implement it. But ultimately, they ended up kind of pivoting to what you might imagine as like a robot on your shoulder that only speaks up when it has confidence. And so I know it's the early days of Ghostwriter, but thoughts on how you got to the specific interface that is Ghostwriter today?
22:44 Steph Smith? And how you, as you said, kind of linked the UX that people see to what's happening in the backend as you're building these models?
22:52 Amjad Masad? So I think there's two modalities. One is pull and one is push, right? So pull is the human knows what they want and they're going to ask for it. You write a prompt, you're going to wait a little bit and you've got to get it. And then there's push, which is the robot on your shoulder that is like continuously suggesting improvements. And there are trade-offs to both. The push model is actually fairly expensive because you're computing all the time. It needs to actually be fairly low latency. So that commits you to a small model. So again, you use a super large model. On the other hand, on the sort of pool model, like I'm asking something, I'm actually going to formulate my question in a way that the AI could understand it better.
23:35 Amjad Masad? I'm going to be able to wait to give the AI time to think or to compute. And so I would say it's not either or, you have to do both. And I think that's the fundamental UX innovation we brought to the space is that we call it society of models. Copilot uses a single model, Raphlet uses like three different models of different sizes. So the smallest models is the model over your shoulder continuously giving you suggestions. Then a medium sized model to do the transformations and things like that. Then a super large model, the kind of model that you would want to talk to, ChatGPT style model.
24:07 Steph Smith? That's great. And I guess that shows a concrete example of the capabilities you get from developing your own models and really being able to fine tune them to specific use cases. Let's zoom out a little bit and talk about, you know, right now, we're at the beginning of this phase where AI is being applied to code. Copilot came out, what was it, like a year ago or so? Ghost Rider came out recently. But we're in, you might say, the first inning. So if we extrapolate to maybe say Ghost Rider V4 or Copilot V6 many years from now, I want to think about how you see the overall environment for developers emerging or evolving. So on one hand, I could see how people might argue, you know what?
24:51 Steph Smith? Having this technology, being able to just tell a computer, hey, I want to create this app. Go basically build it for me, or at least build the fundamentals for me, is going to create this wave of really low quality developers who don't really know what they're doing. We're just relying on this AI crutch to be able to do a lot for them. I could also see an argument, though, if we're talking about some of these suggestions within their development environment. This actually creating better developers, they understand a little bit more about how their code is being executed. Maybe they more quickly pick up new skills, new languages, new frameworks because they have this assistant. And so just curious to know how you see this all evolving and again, this kind of ecosystem of engineers changing.
25:36 Amjad Masad? Yeah, I mean, anytime you make something more accessible, you just get. The entire gamut of things like Instagram made photography way more accessible. And you get like a long tail of crappy photographs. But you also discover people who would have never been photographers, right? You know, everything in the world is like that, like YouTube. Most of their creators don't get any views. But then few creators like PewDiePie, pre YouTube, would have been just a kid in Sweden, not a super celebrity, right? And so making things accessible gets you a lot more people involved. And the trade off you're making is that you're going to get a lot of noise.
26:18 Amjad Masad? But you're going to discover talent that wouldn't otherwise be discovered. I think that's good for the world. And so with software engineering becoming more accessible because of AI. I do think we're going to get a lot more developers. I think we're going to get way, way more developed, probably 10x. So right now there's like 30 million developers in the world. There's probably 300 million developers by the end of the decade. And the way I see so the developer market evolving to accommodate this new technology. Is that there's going to be this bit of a bimodal distribution. So bimodal distribution, meaning there's no middle end. There's a large tail on both sides, right?
26:58 Amjad Masad? So the middle end is the sort of the glue code plumber type developer that we have today. I think that'll go away. And the reason that'll go away is because platforms are going to be a lot more expressive. They're going to be able to be programmed using natural language. A lot of the cloud platforms are just building better abstractions. Things like Rappel will just like make backends a lot more accessible. And so the middle end, I think, will probably disappear because of that, because of pressure from both sides. The front end engineer is just going to get way, way more powerful. So front engineer will be able to build full stack products just because they have access to all those really powerful platforms and they're going to be able to just produce a lot
27:40 Amjad Masad? more, be able to use AI in every part of the coding process, whether it's testing, C I C D, design, everything is going to be sort of powered by AI and just made a lot better, including quality control, by the way. So that's the sort of on the front end side. And then on the sort of backend low level sort of platform engineering, I think those people are just gonna get a lot more powerful. Like imagine John Carmack, right? John Carmack is what we call a 10x developer today. Imagine giving him a army of AI developers that he could delegate work to, that he could, you know, ask questions of, you're just gonna make
28:21 Amjad Masad? him 100x, 1000x more productive. And so you're gonna have maybe fewer of those sort of low level 10x engineers, but they're gonna be 1000x engineers. And so maybe a single company would need two or three like elite engineers and then maybe dozens of front engineers kind of building all these products and maintaining with the customer see. But those, the core group of elite engineers, their impact is just gonna be tremendous. They're gonna be demanding a lot more money. They're gonna be making a lot more money. So if engineering is really your craft, it's not going away and you're gonna be able to actually accentuate your power.
29:03 Steph Smith? I think it's funny that you mentioned the 10x engineer because a lot of people make fun of this concept of a 10x engineer because you don't see, for example, 10x plumber because you're a little bit limited in the leverage that you can get with your time in a scenario like that. But we know that one of the reasons there truly can be 10x engineers is because software can actually give you leverage. And so if you enhance the power that software can provide, it's actually not crazy to your point to imagine 100x engineer or 1000x engineer if you basically have these like robot developers that you can rein in and apply in a specific direction.
29:40 Amjad Masad? It's scale, right?
29:41 Steph Smith? Yeah, exactly.
29:43 Amjad Masad? It's a concept of, you know, it's kind of like this is what technology has allowed us to do since the dawn of humanity. You know, you go from collecting crops manually by hand and doing everything to using animals, to then using robots, and now a single farmer can maintain entire acres of farms just because of all the technology they're using. That's technology, right? I mean, the 10x denialism is kind of funny to watch. Like, every one of those people that say 10x engineers don't exist, knowing their heart of hearts that 10x engineers exist, and they probably worked with someone they highly respect and admire. The reason they say that is just politically motivated.
30:25 Amjad Masad? They just don't like the fact that some people can be better than other people, and that's just a fact in life.
30:32 Steph Smith? 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?
30:48 Amjad Masad? To me, it feels like it's more worth it today because it's a tide that raises all boats, right? Like we said, the 10x becomes a thousand x, but like a point one x becomes a 10x, 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 an internet is very hard. Right now, you can just use GPT-3 to do parsing, right?
31:33 Amjad Masad? So you're doing the basic coding, and then anytime you find something that's like a little difficult, you can plug in GPT-3 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 before, because you're gonna get more done. You're not gonna get as stuck.
31:54 Steph Smith? Yeah, I think too, how quickly people can probably learn. I wonder if you have any data on this, but when I learnt, I don't know why I did this, but I decided to track how many hours I was spending from when I first started to when I actually felt proficient. And for me, that number ended up being three hundred hours. Maybe I was slow, maybe I was fast, I don't know. But it kind of shocked me in a way because if you actually distill three hundred hours down to if you were learning full time, which I know not everyone can do, that's less than two months. And now I think to the tools we have today, and I'm like, gosh, like, we can probably do it way faster than three hundred hours. So any thoughts on how quickly someone can actually get to proficiency with the tools that we have?
32:38 Amjad Masad? So I know you're fond of biology and he was on your podcast. You know, he has this beef with media and so he wanted to show that the New York Times is a bunch of bots, right? And so he put in a bounty on Replib. He was one of our early adopters of bounties and he wrote, it's like, I want someone to build the GPT Times. It's sort of like New York Times, but just totally based on tweets. You give it a tweet and it goes and generate an article written in the style of the New York Times. So actually it should be up now. So if you go to the GPTtimes.com, that's basically like the site that was built using the bounties.
33:21 Amjad Masad? And the person who built it was on day eighty, I think, of Hundred Days of Python. So Hundred Days of Python is one of our programs to learn how to code. And we say you can do a day of Python in basically twenty minutes. So if he was on day eighty, spending twenty minutes, how many hours is that? That's twenty-six hours. So in twenty-six hours, they would be able to build an entire website using AI and earn eighteen hundred dollars from biology. Right. So that's your answer. I mean, maybe that guy was an outlier, but we're seeing it all the time where it's taking weeks for someone to get to a place where they can build things. And I think that's really what matters.
34:03 Steph Smith? I think that's incredible because I think one of the best decisions I made was learning to code because to me, it really was like a foundational shift in understanding the world around me. Because again, so much of what we do is digital, it is online. And so even if you don't want to go and be the developer that's hired to build products, just having that understanding and it's kind of crazy when you think about it. If you were to actually position that like before and after to people and say, well, now it only takes 30 hours. You could do that in a week. You could take four days off from your job, go through this. And I know there's a difference between the 20 minutes a day and, you know, a straight shot, but that's pretty incredible. So the final thing I want to ask you about when it comes to AI
34:47 Steph Smith? is how this might shift, not just how quickly we can code or how quickly we can learn to code, but how this may fundamentally change what we can do with code. So let me give you two examples to kind of shape up the question. The first is when we learned that computers were better at chess than humans. We didn't just learn that fact. We also learned that there were all these other moves or modalities to chess that we had never considered. Right. It kind of reframed the way we saw the game. And then another example is one that our games team shared recently where basically if you've heard of the flight simulator game, you can in the digital world, fly and land an airplane. And it's got this 3D model of the earth that was built off of the 2D model from Google Earth.
35:32 Steph Smith? And that 3D model was built with AI and it only could have been built with AI. So those are two examples of how this technology not only maybe made things faster, but actually made things possible, things that weren't prior available. So have you seen any glimpses of that or any thoughts around, you know, we could position it as somewhat of a superpower, having that superpower accessible. What does that change?
35:56 Amjad Masad? And this is such a brilliant question. I actually haven't thought about it as much and I think I should. Your example with chess also happened with Go, you know, with the Lissie Doll game. Do you remember that move that basically what happened is the AI made a strange move that made it give it this advantage in the near term and a huge advantage in the long term. And they were so confused about it because it's almost like alien intelligence intruding on this thousand year old game, right? And producing this fundamentally novel move. So I don't think we've seen that entirely in programming yet, but I'd be definitely on the lookout for that.
36:38 Amjad Masad? What I would say we've seen is that tasks that previously would require a ton of work, like a ton of insane amount of laborious work getting done like that. You know, for example, a parsing question. GPT three is incredibly good at parsing. If you give it a malformed JSON, it will still parse it. Writing parcels is one of the hardest things you can do in programming. Writing parcels in GPT three is one of the easiest thing you could do. You could just spend fifteen minutes in the OpenAI playground. So really that goes from a task that requires hours and maybe days and weeks of building and testing to something that takes a fifteen minute. And so that's a fundamental phase shift in how we do things.
37:21 Amjad Masad? That's actually quite clear. I think there are ways in which we haven't totally explored how to use L L M's in programming, like can you create backend as a service using L L M's? So basically Firebase, but entirely using natural language. Firebase is this great project that Google Cloud acquired. And Firebase allows you to have a backend without any backend knowledge. You just start storing data and I'll just retrieving data and it just works. Can you have a backend that's completely programmable using natural language? Can I describe my application and just write the frontend for it and just have the backend taken care of?
38:02 Amjad Masad? I think that if that's possible, that'll cut down on how many engineers you need on your team. That'll cut down on time to create a prototype. And so I think that will be incredibly exciting. But your question was more like, what is something fundamentally not possible that became possible? I don't think we've seen that yet, but I do wanna think a little harder about it and really be opening my eyes wide about it. Maybe one direction that could happen is the action model. Have you looked at action models at all?
38:34 Steph Smith? No, no, it'd be great if you could describe what they are.
38:37 Amjad Masad? Yeah, so transformer models are the models underpinning large language models, right? So that's what everyone knows GPT. GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer. So you take a transformer, that's a type of model architecture, and you threw a huge corpus at it and it learns a ton of things. And then you can program it using prompt, right? That's basically what GPT is. Now you can do a different type of transformer where you take a transformer. Instead of throwing a ton of text at it, you throw a ton of actions at it. So what are actions? So for example, actions could be all the mouse and keyboard events in a browser. So I'll just take a raw stream of data and just train a transformer to do that.
39:21 Amjad Masad? So now the transformer encodes knowledge about how to use a browser.
39:27 Amjad Masad? That's wild. All right, what can you do with that? You can now instruct the transformer to go book an Airbnb for you. To go do like more complex tasks like find the place with the best weather in this time of year and book an Airbnb for me and my family. So that's quite interesting. I would say that wasn't possible before. So I think that's a fundamental area. If action transformers became mainstream and as powerful as GPT, then I think it'll unlock a new programmable platform. Because now it's almost like everything has an API suddenly.
40:08 Steph Smith? In the past, it's like a specific database has an API that you can plug into. But now this idea where anything in the browser, anything on the web could potentially be transformed into its own API without setting up the like specific API yourself, like the language model could actually figure that out. That's fascinating. And I think to your point, we haven't seen these specific examples of wasn't possible, now possible yet because we're really early. But even just as we've discussed so far, the amount of foundational development that is required from engineers today that will soon be abstracted just opens that time up, that brain capacity up to apply to something new.
40:50 Steph Smith? So I think it's a little bit inevitable for something to emerge. We're just not sure what that something is. I want to ask you very quickly about mobile as well. Because up until now, desktop has really captured most of development. I can't think of many developers who code on their phone, but it sounds like this might be changing. In fact, I heard you actually say that you think millions of people will code on their phone.
41:14 Amjad Masad? If you think about what we've been talking about with AI, the idea that your primary development experience will include a big portion of chat. And like the best way to do chat is on your phone. Everyone texts on their phone. Everyone talks on their phone. And I think that being able to generate software by talking to your phone is going to be a very clear thing that will happen. At minimum, being able to instruct your AIs while you're on the go and review their work, that's obviously going to happen. But as typing becomes less of an issue on the phone, then actually making complete pieces of software just will make a ton of sense.
41:56 Amjad Masad? Because you're just prompting and you're reviewing and then prompting or reviewing or prompting. That iterative loop is very clearly going to work very well on the phone. And actually, it could be more delightful on the phone because it could do a lot of swiping sort of activity. Like I, you know, with my team, we joke, we call it like Tinder for code, where sort of you prompt the AI and it gives you a piece of code. You could say yes or no. Say no, then it give you another piece of code. And maybe you give it another prompt or maybe it asks you another questions. So that iterative piece of. Making software using AI, I think, really lends itself nicely to the concept of a phone.
42:40 Amjad Masad? And then the other thing is that it's not just the phone, it's the tablet. Like, how crazy it is, stuff that, you know, wouldn't like have good IDEs on the tablet. It's kind of surprising that Microsoft has made VS Code for the tablet. So we're the first kind of major IDE for the tablet as well. And I think you can do everything that you could do on desktop, on tablet. You can attach a keyboard to that, and you can go to any coffee shop in the world. Everything happens at cloud. Your store's in the cloud, your AI is in the cloud. You don't need that much local capability, and you could just write software on that.
43:18 Steph Smith? Yeah, I haven't thought of that, actually, but it's true. I have never seen someone coding on a tablet, just like I've never really seen someone coding on mobile. But let's see how that evolves. Another feature you've developed that you alluded to earlier was bounties. So can you tell listeners a little bit more about what this is, this idea of bounties? And also just a little bit more about how it's going so far?
43:39 Amjad Masad? Yeah, so bounties is part of our sort of portfolio of products that make it easy to make software. So we realized that not everyone in the world wants to be a coder. And I think a combination of the network effects on Repland and being able to discover a lot of software engineers, like the kind of guy who made the GPT times for biology, and the AI revolution, and, you know, sort of what's happening in currencies, whether cryptocurrency or centralized currency, there's a lot of interesting things. I think it's a sort of a bit of a trifecta that allows us to kind of build what I think is a fluid software labor market.
44:23 Amjad Masad? This theory, or the theory of the firm, is by this famous economist. His name is Ronald Coase, and the fundamental observation is that full-time employment is a bug. It's not a feature of the market. The reason why full-time employment exists is because the transaction cost of doing something is really high. Uber is an example of something bringing the transaction cost almost down to zero. And by doing that, it creates a huge amount of flexibility in the market. So anyone can enter the market, anyone can do the work and they can do it at their own terms. And there's no binding contract between the different parties. Software has been something that's been like very hard to actually contract out.
45:05 Amjad Masad? And when you do contract out, you get a lot of problems, a lot of issues running the software. You get a lot of quality issues. So the fact that Rapplet is a fully integrated place with high quality software engineers using it allows us to be a place where someone can go put a description for a piece of software that they need to get done. And then a developer, high quality developer can go and using AI can make that software very quickly. And we're seeing people making software at thirty minute increments. Someone the other day put a request for landing page up. They attached a Figma file, they got it back in thirty minutes. That's really never been done before. And why shouldn't have existed like that before?
45:49 Amjad Masad? And so I think the combination of all the technologies we're building allows us to create this marketplace.
45:55 Steph Smith? How are you thinking about this marketplace among the existing marketplaces? Because it sounds like, and let me know if I'm wrong, this is more peer to peer. I post a project, someone within the community puts their hand up or maybe they're matched. But when I think about the existing marketplaces for developers out there, their job in many of these cases is to vet a bunch of developers and say, okay, you have this skillset. You're this good of a developer. And 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
46:40 Steph Smith? differentiating or maybe providing something new to people within the community?
46:47 Amjad Masad? 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 ask 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 Repland, I just sent you a link, a link to a computer that's running your application. That's like fundamental innovation on top of that. And then like
47:29 Amjad Masad? all the services just being integrated right there, like your open AI API key, the cloud runtime, like all that stuff, the database, just Replant being this complete platform, just like makes this process a lot more efficient.
47:42 Steph Smith? That's actually a great point because when I think about other scenarios where people hire developers, I think one of the massive gaps is, as you said, the standardization. But it's also if we think about the AI tools that you're integrating, if someone gets a project and they can actually read the code, and maybe they're not a developer, but have some level of understanding of like, this was what I got back. I think that's actually massive differentiation because in the past, they just get back this code that they can't understand at all. If they need to refactor anything or change anything or get a new developer to work on it, they really struggle and they really also struggle to have some sort of sentiment in terms of how good the code is.
48:23 Amjad Masad? Yep, exactly. And we want to create more market dynamics in the future that are more interesting. Like, for example, this concept from crypto called staking and the idea that people being able to stake their money in order to say, I'm going to build this, I'm going to build this better than anyone. So I'll put up a bounty for a thousand bucks and you staff will say, I'm so sure of my ability to do that. I'm willing to put up a hundred bucks that'll be able to deliver on time. And if I don't, you can take my hundred bucks.
48:53 Steph Smith? I love that.
48:54 Amjad Masad? And so I think there's a lot of innovation to do in markets and you could also integrate some kind of AI things on top of that. So for example, you can have a sort of AI project manager where now I takes one bounty and like splits it into. Ten bounties. So we have this experimental product that Twitter about recently, but basically the more you put in a bounty, we actually generate the scaffolding for the code. What's scaffolding in programming is basically the structure of the code. And then every function that is not implemented, that function could be its individual bounty. So I think once you add all these sort of innovations together, I think you're going to get this like super fluid market of AIs and humans
49:39 Amjad Masad? that you can go from an idea to a product just like that. And crucially, like you said, the product that you're going to get is something that you're going to be able to iterate on the future and get more bounty creators to contribute to. It's a living artifact that's working on the platform as opposed to like, again, like a zip file for over the wall to you.
49:58 Steph Smith? I love the idea of people being able to like legitimately bet on themselves. If they want to participate, if they want to take on a bounty. Because actually, when I talked to Balaji in our interview, we talked about this idea of evidence versus confidence. So someone can have a lot of confidence and say, hey, I have these requisites on my CV or I have this degree from somewhere. And that distills a lot of confidence in other people that they can get something done. But what's better than confidence is evidence that you can actually get it done. And if you can show, hey, I've done this project before, like literally here's my work. And also I'll, as you said, put $500 down to say, hey, if you don't like it, like you can have my $500. Like that is more than confidence.
50:39 Steph Smith? That is like evidence that you can do the work and you're willing to put your money where your skills are. So I love that idea. With that said, let's move on to the very final section and we'll just rapid fire go through these questions. They are questions that I've actually seen Sam Altman from OpenAI talk about as four different important questions that he thinks are relevant to this advent of AI, especially as it progresses, again, taking the lens of not just Ghostwriter V1, but Ghostwriter V10, quite a ways away from now and how good, how proficient it can get. So. I'll just read you each question. I just wanna get your like raw take on each of these. So the first question is, with that technology,
51:24 Steph Smith? how do you think that fundamentally changes society?
51:28 Amjad Masad? Something I care deeply about, which is equality of opportunity. So I think just the ability that anyone in the world, being able to contribute and build something is just beautiful. It's just amazing. It allows us to include everyone and anyone who's willing to work hard. That's like the real Americanism, in my opinion. That's like what America is built upon. The idea is that if you're willing to do the work, you're gonna get the chance at doing the work. And if you do the work right, you're gonna get rewarded for it. And I think that's beautiful. However, I think that comes with also increased inequality. I think the pie is gonna be bigger, but also there's gonna be differences between, again, like the 10x difference becomes a thousandx difference.
52:13 Amjad Masad? And that's gonna create some political issues, because I think it is gonna create envy and it's gonna accentuate some differences. And I think that part's not gonna be fun. And I think reasonable people should be able to say it like it is. And that's why I think, you know, the 10x denialism is a small sort of symptom of a larger issue and the issue of just being uncomfortable of people being rewarded more because they have a better ability of doing something. So that's just gonna be a big issue that society is gonna have to deal with.
52:49 Steph Smith? I agree. Exponential technology means potentially exponential gains from certain people and not others. And that's 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?
53:21 Amjad Masad? I think as much as possible, having competition is gonna be important. I think a world in which just one company controls the biggest AI models.
53:32 Amjad Masad? It's not gonna be great, but neither do like 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 monoculture like Silicon Valley, you're gonna have similar decisions made. And so how do we prevent that in the world of AI? That's something that's very important. I think open source plays a part in that, I think as much as possible. You know, pushing this technology to be easy to run and 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.
54:13 Amjad Masad? 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 gonna be more freedom, more decentralization.
54:32 Steph Smith? Ultimately, these models are a tool. The tool itself is neutral, but the application of the tool or the technology doesn't always happen to be neutral.
54:42 Amjad Masad? And they hate the fact that it can be neutral and they think that neutral is bad. And I think that's where we really need to push back is that, no, actually it should be neutral. And then the user have to decide what to do with it.
54:54 Steph Smith? Yeah, I think that's a good modifier. I'm gonna combine the final two into one question. You can maybe touch on either or both of them. But the question is, given, again, if we imagine the exponential nature of this technology, the evolved form of it, how do we deploy it safely? And you can kind of interpret the word safe in your own terms. How do we deploy it safely? And also maybe how does governance play a role in that?
55:21 Amjad Masad? You know, I dislike the word safety. And I think a lot of the problems in the world today. And so the way our world is shaping up is this concept of safetyism. This concept that like companies need to ensure our safety. And then they encroach on our freedom to ensure our safety like. It's such a stupid topic, but there was the recent gas stove debate, right? Whatever government official that kind of said like they might consider banning gas stoves. That kind of impulse of like, we know better than you. So the nanny state impulse. I think it's bad and I think it actually, every time governments have created sort of atrocities have come from that idea like.
56:05 Amjad Masad? The government wanted the American people to be safe from the Japanese. That's why they create Japanese internment camps, right? You can use safety to do the most abhorrent thing in the world. And so I think we need to be skeptical. Anyone's talking about safety, they probably want something bad for you. But so that would be my bias. At least when they want to impose something under the guise of safety, I would be super skeptical. And then on the question of governance, I would also be skeptical of that. So maybe I'm showing my sort of libertarian
56:37 Amjad Masad? uh impulses here, but I don't think anyone is inherently responsible for governance of technology. Look, I think government has a role to play. The government sort of moves slow and that's good that it moves slow because it needs to learn what's happening. You know, the government moved really fast on regulating cars, they would have gotten super wrong. And it's now like making self-driving move a lot slower than it should be. It's because the regulation just mounted up. But I think the process in the U S is actually fine for regulation, just like move it slow. And let's learn what's happening in the real world. And then let's have a reasonable debate and discussion.
57:17 Amjad Masad? I think a democracy at the end of the day will arrive at the right decisions if there's sufficient freedom. And I'm a big fan of debate and vicious debate in order to arrive. The truth, but that's just gonna take time. And the problem now is that there are some people talking about AI takeoff being so fast that, you know, you need to react to it really quickly. And I think that'll get us into trouble, actually. If you're gonna force politicians to understand this technology before it's even deployed, you're really asking for trouble.
57:49 Steph Smith? Yeah, but I do think on the flip side of that, something beautiful that's happened in the last year or so is that the technology has taken off really quickly, but it also has done so in a way where it's gotten in the hands of consumers. And you see this, if you look at the charts of like ChatGPT, for example, their speed to 10 million users was so much quicker than, you know, Facebook or Snapchat or other apps in the past. And so I think while it is inviting some skepticism to say, oh, my gosh, this is happening so quickly, this is scary, we don't know the implications. I also think you're going to see a level of pushback, right? Because at that point, you're taking something away from people, this superpower, as we talked about it.
58:29 Amjad Masad? It's important to notice stuff that nothing catastrophic happened, right? Like this technology and its now massive deployment and nothing as bad as the sort of less wrong sort of AI safetyism sort of part of the debate have said it's gonna happen. And so it's important to recognize this because the people that are gonna be arguing for extra controls and everything are gonna, you know, always paint a future picture of catastrophe. But like the question to ask them is like, okay, now there are millions of people already using this, nothing really bad happened. So, you know, what are you actually worried about in concrete terms?
59:10 Steph Smith? Yeah, and I think your time dimension is so important here because to your point, you look at technologies like cars and they were worried in the early days about cars scaring horses. And I think just having a layer of humility to say, we don't know how this is gonna shake out.
59:25 Amjad Masad? Absolutely. I'm super optimistic about the future of the technology and everything that's happening. I think that's really lovely and it's like the best time to be a builder.
59:38 Steph Smith? Thanks for listening to the A16Z Podcast. If you liked this episode, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review, or tell a friend. We also recently launched on YouTube at youtube.com/A16Z underscore video, where you'll find exclusive video content. We'll see you next time.
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