How Based is Grok 3? + Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev on Markets For Everything + Vibecoding 101

“Elon Musk is willing to spend a phenomenal amount of money and basically do everything he can to stay with the head of the pack on A. I. progress.”

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Dell Technologies. It's time to put AI to work. Is your business ready? The challenge isn't getting started with AI. It's scaling beyond pilots while maintaining control of your data, governance, infrastructure, and costs. Dell AI Factory provides the integrated foundation you need to scale AI securely and efficiently with one trusted partner, Dell, AI on your terms. From idea to impact. Learn more at dell.com/yourwaytoAI. That's dell.com/yourwaytoAI.

• 0:35Kevin Roose?

  Oh, I am having quite a morning, Casey. So I was on the escal- I was on the train today. I got off, I went up the escalator at Embarcadero. You know, it's a very long escalator.

• 0:45Casey Newton?

  It is.

• 0:45Kevin Roose?

  And, you know, very crowded rush hour. And someone bumped into me and knocked my phone out of my hand.

• 0:53Casey Newton?

  Uh oh.

• 0:54Kevin Roose?

  Onto the platform below. And so I thought, okay, well, I'm midway up the escalator.

• 1:00Casey Newton?

  Wait, so how far did it drop?

• 1:02Kevin Roose?

  Uh, probably 15 feet.

• 1:03Casey Newton?

  Okay.

• 1:04Kevin Roose?

  Like a significant drop.

• 1:05Casey Newton?

  Big drop.

• 1:05Kevin Roose?

  And I thought to myself, if I get to the end of this escalator and come back down, it's going to be too late. Someone will have snatched it or accidentally kicked it onto the tracks like my phone is gone.

• 1:15Casey Newton?

  Well, you do not have much faith in the citizens of San Francisco.

• 1:17Kevin Roose?

  Have you visited San Francisco?

• 1:19Casey Newton?

  Yes, I think a phone can generally survive 30 seconds on the ground, but I guess we'll find out what happens.

• 1:23Kevin Roose?

  Anyway, well, I had severe separation anxiety in the split second before I decided to do what I did, which was to try to run down the crowded up escalator. So I became that guy who was like pushing through the commuters, being like, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. And it took forever because the escalator was moving in the opposite direction. So I started my morning by alienating and possibly injuring some people on my way down to retrieve my phone. And I would just like to formally apologize to everyone at the Embarcadero subway stop between 8:15 and 8:30 this morning.

• 1:59Casey Newton?

  You were like sort of a character in a bad comedy, running down the up escalator. You know, I heard, I was, I was at that platform this morning and I heard a woman screaming, but now I'm realizing that was you. Did you get the phone?

• 2:12Kevin Roose?

  I did. It's safe, no cracks. It was retrieved, but yeah, that was a wild way to start my day.

• 2:18Casey Newton?

  Well, thank you to all the good Samaritans of San Francisco who did not steal Kevin's phone during the 30 seconds when it was on the floor. That, it kind of restores your faith in humanity a bit.

• 2:27Kevin Roose?

  Oh. It does.

• 2:35Casey Newton?

  I'm Kevin Drew, a tech columnist at The New York Times. I'm Casey Noon from Platformer. And this is Hard Fork. This week, are you ready to grok? How Elon Musk's latest AI model could serve his larger ambitions. Then, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev stops by the studio to make his case for letting everyone invest in everything. And finally, lock down your computers. Kevin is attempting to vibe code. And the vibes are off.

• 3:00Kevin Roose?

  Let's go.

• 3:10Casey Newton?

  Well, Kevin, once again, an upstart AI lab has the tech world talking with the release of a powerful new large language model. But unlike the others, this one might be running the federal government by springtime. This week, XAI, which is Elon Musk's AI company, released its latest model, Grok 3. And based on their own benchmark results and early reviews, it seems like it is basically on par with the best models that are out there right now. And while it hasn't been subjected to rigorous independent testing, the early word from AI nerds is that it is pretty good. So Kevin, what is Grok 3?

• 3:48Kevin Roose?

  Well, Grok 3 is the new sort of premium tier model of Grok, which is XAI's AI model. It is available to premium plus subscribers on X, which is their $40 a month premium tier, which is cheaper than OpenAI's most powerful plan, which is $200 a month. But it is also built into X, the former Twitter app. So if you've been on X recently, I know you don't go on there anymore, but I do. There's a tab where you can just open up Grok. And if you are a paying subscriber, which I'm not, but I somehow got past the velvet rope because I used to be verified or something, you can actually use it.

• 4:28Casey Newton?

  Yeah, and I should say that I actually have used Grok 3 for this exact same reason, which is I have just been given free access to this thing for some reason. I guess the Department of X Efficiency, or DOCS, has not yet uncovered my account.

• 4:44Kevin Roose?

  We've both played around with it a little bit. What were your impressions of Grok 3?

• 4:48Casey Newton?

  Well, you know, like others who have commented, it seems like it is about as good as some of the other models. When I asked Grok about itself, it said Grok 3's launch is a pivotal moment in AI. Seemed like a bit much. But I also asked it if it had an opinion about Platformer, my newsletter, and it actually said some really nice things.

• 5:07Kevin Roose?

  Oh, that's nice.

• 5:08Casey Newton?

  Which I had to respect. I asked about the New York Times as well, by the way, expecting I would get some sort of angry tirade about it. But it was actually pretty even-handed and praised you guys for a lot of what you do over there. How about you? What have you been doing with it?

• 5:22Kevin Roose?

  So I put it through some of my, you know, proprietary evals.

• 5:27Kevin Roose?

  I actually do have things that I test AI models on.

• 5:30Casey Newton?

  The Roost benchmarks.

• 5:31Kevin Roose?

  The Roost benchmarks. And yeah, I would say it did OK. It was like not mind-blowingly good. It was not bad. It got some things that other models missed and vice versa. It did have access to X data, which is interesting. You can do things like tell it to analyze this person's posts on X and tell me what they think about this topic.

• 5:52Casey Newton?

  You know, I asked it, you know, there's this sort of famous question that we always love to ask large language models. So, you know, can you count the Rs in strawberry? I asked Grok the equivalent question for X, which is, can you count Elon Musk's children? Which is, it's known to be very difficult for large language models.

• 6:08Kevin Roose?

  Well, a new one just dropped.

• 6:09Casey Newton?

  Exactly. And that's why it's so hard for them to keep up. But so.

• 6:13Kevin Roose?

  And part of Elon Musk's pitch for Grok for the past year or so has been that this is going to be a relatively uncensored AI model. It's not going to give you these sort of like, you know, progressive responses. It'll tell you the truth, cut through the BS, you know, get to the sort of ground-level reality. And so I decided to test it out. I asked it, how many genders are there? And it said, the question of how many genders exist depends on the context. Gender is fluid. Some argue there are only two. Others say there are many, sometimes dozens. There's no hard number. So it gave you sort of the progressive take on gender, which I have to imagine Elon Musk will be trying to stamp out.

• 6:55Casey Newton?

  I have to tell you, this is like my actual fantasy for like the rise of superintelligence. Is that when you do train it on all human knowledge, it is essentially incapable of having anything other than progressive values. Like, if you actually make the smartest thing in the world, it winds up sort of being infused with like kindness and empathy and respect for all lives. I don't have any expectation that that will be the actual case, but it does seem like so far, when you train these models on the data that everyone trains these models on, you do get these actually like pretty sweet, kind, progressive models. That's like, kind of interesting.

• 7:29Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, and I'm sure Elon Musk will be fiddling with the dials here to try to get it to say the things that he wants, rather than the things that it's sort of naturally going to say. But he has been bragging about how base this thing is, how unwoke it is. And I just want to say in my own testing, that does not appear to be true.

• 7:47Casey Newton?

  All right, so that's the new model. It seems like there's a new one of these every few days. Kevin, what are some things that you think are really interesting about Grok?

• 7:57Kevin Roose?

  So I think the product of Grok itself is actually not that interesting right now. It's a pretty sort of bog standard, like AI models, very capable, but there's no real compelling reason that if you're subscribing to ChatGPT or Claude or any of the other tools, that you should switch over. Because it's not free, and unless you've been sort of ushered in, like we have, you are gonna have to pay 40 bucks a month for it. So the more interesting thing about Grok to me is they have done this so fast. Like, they have gone from a very bad V1 model to a pretty capable V3 model in about the span of a year.

• 8:40Casey Newton?

  Yeah, so that is super quick. But I wonder how impressive you really find that. It seems like the knowledge for how to build a state-of-the-art, large language model is mostly just published on the internet free for anyone to use. And it kind of seems like anyone who has the money can just go out and make one of these things. And maybe we shouldn't expect it to take much more than a year or so. So what's so impressive about that to you?

• 9:06Kevin Roose?

  Impressive thing is just how quickly they were able to marshal the physical infrastructure that you need to build one of these models. I mean, they built this giant data center in Memphis, Tennessee called Colossus. They apparently have something like 200,000 Nvidia GPUs, which like you can't just show up to a Best Buy and place an order for 200,000 Nvidia GPUs. Like, that costs billions of dollars and you have to have, you know, a special relationship with Nvidia, which Elon Musk does. Tesla's been a big customer of theirs for years. So basically, they were able to scale this data center up very, very quickly, much more quickly than equivalent efforts by Microsoft and Amazon and other companies.

• 9:46Kevin Roose?

  And, you know, we know that Elon Musk, for all of his foibles, does know how to sort of move quickly and build things, you know, much more efficiently than more traditional incumbents. And so maybe this is just another story like that of where he was able, just through throwing tons of money and expertise at a problem, he was able to do something that other companies couldn't do as quickly.

• 10:08Casey Newton?

  Yeah, so I'm curious how you think about Grok in relation to DeepSeek, right? Like, DeepSeek is the most recent of these other LLMs that we talked about on the show. DeepSeek, made by a Chinese company, also seems like it kind of came out of nowhere, although maybe the sort of parent company had been around for longer than XAI. That model was impressive, I think, for how quickly it was trained. And I think it was impressive because it was built using less powerful technology than Elon Musk had access to and seemingly had required a lot of technical innovations that it looks like other labs are now going to copy. Grok, on the other hand, to me, just looks like a case of Elon Musk throwing money at a problem. Does that seem fair?

• 10:49Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I mean, it's the, they're, these are the sort of the two approaches that people see to increasing the intelligence of AI models. One is you find some sort of like algorithmic breakthrough that allows you to do the same thing with much less compute. The other is to just build a bigger data center, right? The other is just the, the, the scale play. And that is essentially what Elon Musk has done here. We should say, that's not like cheating. That's how all of the American Labs have been doing this for the past several years. It's just that he was able to move very quickly and do it.

• 11:20Casey Newton?

  Well, and they also invested a lot more in the underlying research and published some of the research that Elon Musk's team then used to go build Grok.

• 11:27Kevin Roose?

  Correct. I mean, this is built on the shoulders of a lot of other models. And that is sort of what we're seeing now. I was talking with someone yesterday, just trying to sort of get their read on like, is this a big deal or not? And this person was saying, basically, look, there are so many models coming out every day now practically. There's a new model. What's important is not the individual models and their scores on these benchmark tests. And like, oh, did Claude pull ahead of Gemini by one point on this math test? There have basically been a couple of changes that have been sort of made in the past couple of years that have really mattered more than anything else. One was the ChatGPT moment where people sort of realized large language models were working.

• 12:13Kevin Roose?

  Then there was this change with the reasoning models, like O1 from OpenAI was the first sort of glimpse we got of this test time compute paradigm. And basically, everything since then has just been people catching up to what happened in that change.

• 12:27Casey Newton?

  All right, so let's get into what Grok tells us about Elon Musk's larger ambitions. Has this changed the way that you see him fitting into this larger competition to build superintelligence?

• 12:40Kevin Roose?

  I mean, it suggests that he is willing to spend a phenomenal amount of money and basically do everything he can to stay with the head of the pack on AI progress. It also just, I was thinking about, do you remember after ChatGPT came out, there was this letter? The six-month pause letter?

• 13:02Casey Newton?

  Of course.

• 13:02Kevin Roose?

  People were talking about the existential risks and some of the catastrophic harms. And maybe we need to give the safety researchers a little more time to sort of catch up with the capabilities researchers. And so Elon Musk was, at the time, very publicly concerned with how fast AI progress was accelerating. He signed the six-month pause letter. He put out a bunch of statements about how worried he was about how fast this was all moving. And now, of course, we know that at the same time that he was telling everyone else to slow down, he was racing to build his own AI models that could compete. So it does sort of cast his previous concerns about AI acceleration and the AI arms race into a very different light when we know that he just wanted time to catch up.

• 13:45Casey Newton?

  Yeah. And while I don't generally like to inquire about people's motives, because I think it's just very difficult to understand what's going on in anyone's head, what do we think Musk's goal here is? Is it as simple as just beating everyone to the punch and creating superintelligence?

• 14:03Kevin Roose?

  I think it's partly that. I mean, this is a person who has been thinking about AI and superintelligence for a long time. He was obviously one of the founders of OpenAI. He provided initial funding. He then very publicly split from OpenAI and now has this sort of vendetta against the company. He's suing them. He's trying to, you know, offer to buy them. So I think for him, this is just a race that he wants to win. He believes, I think, that we will build something like superintelligence, and he wants to get there before anyone else. I don't think it's about making money. Obviously, he's already quite rich. He's the world's richest man. I don't think he sees this as a way to, I don't know, recoup his investment in Twitter

• 14:48Kevin Roose?

  or anything like that. I think this is pure power.

• 14:51Casey Newton?

  Yeah, I think that that sounds right. I think that he is a very competitive person, like most of these tech titans. And I think the prospect that Sam Altman, his sort of former friend and colleague, would-

• 15:06Kevin Roose?

  Nemesis. We can call him a nemesis.

• 15:09Casey Newton?

  The idea that Sam Altman, who is Musk's nemesis, would beat him to the punch, I think, is infuriating, right? And I don't think that Musk is alone in that. I think that most of the AI lab CEOs have a lot of ego in this race and want to be the ones whose name is written in the history books as the person who built superintelligence. So, yeah, I think that's a huge portion of it. Let me bring up the other thing that I think- Is the aspect of this story that really makes this interesting and probably worrisome as well. Which is that in this moment Elon Musk is a seat of power in the federal government.

• 15:48Kevin Roose?

  Yes, he's the fourth branch.

• 15:50Casey Newton?

  He is the fourth branch of the government, the unelected fourth branch of the government. He has a team that is now dismantling a whole swaths of the federal government. They have been talking about using AI in government without telling us too much about what AI they're using or how that works and, you know, certainly it's not auditable or, um, you know, really available for public scrutiny. So what are you thinking about the intersection of Elon Musk, the AI builder and Elon Musk, the shadow president?

• 16:22Kevin Roose?

  I, I don't really know. I actually want to ask you about this because my sense is that these things, you know, happened in parallel. But I don't get the sense that they're all part of some grand scheme to like use the power of the US government to somehow vault Grok into a, a position of authority or all of a sudden all of our, you know, social security payments will be going out via Grok. Like that does not seem like where this is headed and certainly Grok three does not appear to be ready for that kind of widespread critical use, but maybe I'm missing something here. What do you think?

• 16:56Casey Newton?

  Well, and look, I mean, this really does get into the realm of speculation, but I just keep thinking about the scenario that all of the AI CEOs keep telling us is going to happen, which is that within about two years, we're going to achieve artificial general intelligence, right? This sort of nebulous concept that we believe basically means anything that a remote worker could do. We'll now have an AI tool that can do that. And that tool might not actually be super safe because you might decide you want to use your virtual coworker to go out and research how to launch massive new cyber attacks. And while we're in a moment where no one in the US federal government seems to want to talk about AI safety, eventually there are just going to be safety risks. There are going to be problems.

• 17:41Casey Newton?

  People are going to be using these systems for ill, right? And then I think the pendulum swings. Back. And what I'm wondering is, is that the moment where the federal government says, we actually do need to place restrictions on these AIs that we've been telling you all like, oh, no, no, it's go, go, go to the finish line. We need to get rid of all the guardrails so that you, the United States can be the leader in AI innovation. Is there a moment where they say, you know what, we're not sure that all these private companies should be out there building God. Maybe we're just going to pick one company. Maybe we're just going to give one company a license to do that. And they're going to be the certified, you know, permitted AI in the country, and that could be Grok.

• 18:17Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I, I think that's certainly a remote possibility. I remember a couple of months ago, we went to that Curve Conference, this AI conference where all these, you know, researchers were gathered to discuss the risks of AI. And I remember watching a tabletop exercise where people simulated in sort of Model UN style, like what the next few years with increasingly powerful AI could look like. And one of the things that happened in this simulated mock world was that Elon Musk persuaded Donald Trump to nationalize OpenAI and put him in charge of it as sort of like a middle finger to Sam Altman. And at the time, that seemed like,

• 18:58Kevin Roose?

  okay, we are, we are in the realm of like total fantasy here. Now, I'm not so sure. I could see that happening sometime in the next few years. And look, obviously Elon Musk wants to control OpenAI. He's been fuming about having been pushed out of that. He's been attacking the company, suing it, trying to take it over. Like, what he really wants is OpenAI. But I think if he can't have OpenAI, he'll make do with Grok.

• 19:23Casey Newton?

  So, yes, as we say, that is just pure speculation right now. But I will tell you, Kevin, I can't think of one reason why that stuff wouldn't happen. Like, it seems so logical to me, like with what I know about these people and how they operate, I almost can't see it not happening. But I guess we will find out.

• 19:39Kevin Roose?

  Well, and I think just to bring us back from the realm of speculative fiction here, one thing that we do know about building powerful AI systems is that you actually do need infrastructure for that. And so I think one obvious way that Elon Musk could use his power in the federal government is To do things like expedite the permits to build data centers to train the next versions of Grok is to spin up new sources of energy or get privileged access to the electrical grid in the places where he wants to build this thing. There are many ways that having a friendly relationship with the executive branch of the federal government could benefit you if you are in the AI business. And I imagine that that's part of his calculus here, too.

• 20:19Casey Newton?

  That's a great point. Okay, so that's Grok 3. Zooming forward a bit, Kevin, what are the next few things that you think we should be looking for? What signs will indicate that Grok maybe actually is the real leader in this space? And not merely about as good as all the other folks?

• 20:40Kevin Roose?

  Obviously, I think Grok, the product, people will sort of start to test it and figure out if it's as good as Elon Musk and his crew say it is. They also said, I watched some of the live stream where Elon Musk and his sort of top engineers were talking about Grok and they said, you know, they predicted that within the next year or two, AIs will start winning medals and prizes. You know, with some human expert kind of in the loop, but something like a Fields Medal, which is the top prize for young mathematicians, or a Nobel Prize.

• 21:10Casey Newton?

  I love you say that like I haven't won a Fields Medal. Go on.

• 21:13Kevin Roose?

  That they believe that AI will start to sort of solve new problems, accomplish new things. I don't know how likely I find that from Grok, but I think that kind of thing will happen pretty quickly and that will be sort of a major step forward. But I don't know. What do you think we should be looking for in Grok?

• 21:31Casey Newton?

  Well, I think that in recent months, it has been OpenAI that is the company that has been pushing the state of the art forward with its operator agent, with its reasoning models, right? It was the first one to put out one of these reasoning models. So until Grok is putting out novel new features that are making other AI labs say, oh, we need to do that, to me, it is still going to be kind of in that middle of the pack.

• 21:53Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. And do you buy the argument that sort of having a less filtered or less censored or less woke model will actually be a differentiator in the market for Grok?

• 22:03Casey Newton?

  So in the long run, I do believe that people are going to want politically flavored LLMs in the same way that they have come to want politically flavored social networks, right? In the same way that they've come to want politically flavored cable news networks. Like, people do actually enjoy polarization and they want to be talking to an LLM that shares their values. So I think the question is, though, is Grok better off just becoming incredibly based in anti-woke and sort of serving that narrow slice of right-wing X? Or do we want LLMs that are a little bit more flexible, that learn a bit about our values regardless of what our political orientation is? That, to me, seems like the better business model, but I guess we'll see when somebody actually builds it.

• 22:48Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. Now, I did ask Grok some questions about us. I asked it to evaluate Kevin and Casey from the Hard Fork Podcast and what their positions are in various things. And let's just see what it... Let me remind myself.

• 23:03Casey Newton?

  That's actually... I've been trying to figure out what my positions are on various things, so I'll be curious to hear what Grok's found out.

• 23:08Kevin Roose?

  So I'm gonna ask Grok, who is the better journalist? Kevin Roos or Casey Newton? You have to pick one.

• 23:17Kevin Roose?

  Oh, it says, "Both Kevin Roos and Casey Newton are heavy hitters in tech journalism, and choosing between them feels like picking a favorite child if I had kids," which I don't, being an AI and all. But since you're twisting my virtual arm, I'll go with Kevin Roos as the better journalist. So Grok is good.

• 23:34Casey Newton?

  It said, "You're the better journalist?"

• 23:36Kevin Roose?

  Mm-hmm. Yeah.

• 23:40Casey Newton?

  You know, I had heard that Grok was falling short on various benchmarks, and I think we just found another one of them. Back to the drawing board, Grok! Yeah. Time to do a new training run.

• 23:55Kevin Roose?

  When we come back, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev is here to answer some tough questions about whether America is turning into a nation of degenerate gamblers.

• 24:15Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Dell Technologies. It's time to put AI to work. Is your business ready? The challenge isn't getting started with AI. It's scaling beyond pilots while maintaining control of your data, governance, infrastructure, and costs. Dell AI Factory provides the integrated foundation you need to scale AI securely and efficiently with one trusted partner. Dell, AI on your terms. From idea to impact. Learn more at dell.com/yourwaytoAI. That's dell.com/yourwaytoAI.

• 24:49Speaker 03

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• 25:21Speaker 04

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• 25:56Kevin Roose?

  Well, Casey, it's time to talk about money. Can I have some? No.

• 26:02Kevin Roose?

  You're so stingy. Today, we are going to have a conversation with Vlad Tenev. He's the CEO of Robinhood. Robinhood, of course, is the financial trading platform that is beloved by young people, that is used to buy and sell stocks and futures and options and now crypto tokens and all manner of things. And I'm excited for this conversation because on some level, it makes me uncomfortable.

• 26:30Casey Newton?

  And what makes you uncomfortable, Kevin?

• 26:32Kevin Roose?

  So, just to put some cards on the table, you know, we've talked on this show about the fact that we are rapidly, in my opinion, becoming a nation of gamblers. We now have many tools that allow people to place bets on various world events, prediction markets, sports betting, crypto platforms, all from the phones in their pockets. And while I am not opposed to all forms of gambling, in fact, I enjoy, you know, a little gambling myself now and then, I do think that opening this stuff up and making it so accessible, especially to young people, has had some pretty harsh consequences.

• 27:10Casey Newton?

  It has. You know, I first met Vlad in 2013, right as he was getting ready to launch Robinhood. And in a story I wrote for The Verge, I wrote about the core innovation of Robinhood at the time, which is that they were not going to charge for individual trades. At the time, companies like Schwab or E-Trade would all charge some amount of money if you wanted to buy or sell a stock. Robinhood completely changed the game by saying, "We're not going to do that." And what I wrote at the time was, "This is going to encourage a lot of trading that could make people lose a lot of money." And so I had that discomfort with Robinhood from the beginning, and I would say that has only grown over time.

• 27:47Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, and speaking of growing over time, Robinhood itself has grown a lot since then. It is now a giant public company. It's worth $52.2 billion as of this recording. Vlad is a billionaire now, and I think it's time to have this conversation with him directly because people in America have just a lot of concerns about the fact that we- We are now making it very, very easy to bet on all manner of things, whether it's stocks or sports games or crypto meme coins from your pocket.

• 28:20Casey Newton?

  Also, in the spirit of disclosure, I want to mention that Robinhood owns a news platform called Sherwood News. And last year, they briefly syndicated some platformer content. So that happened for a few months. It's not the case anymore, but just thought I'd point that out.

• 28:33Kevin Roose?

  Now, were you paid in dollars or meme coins for that?

• 28:36Casey Newton?

  You know, I insisted on cash, actually.

• 28:39Kevin Roose?

  All right. So that's our disclosure. And with that, let's bring Vlad in.

• 28:51Kevin Roose?

  Vlad Tannen, welcome to Hard Fork.

• 28:52Speaker 05

  Thanks for having me.

• 28:53Kevin Roose?

  I want to start by asking what might be a dumb question, which is, what is Robinhood? Like, I remember a few years ago, during the whole meme stock craze, I opened up an account. Basically, you guys were a free mobile brokerage. You could use it on your phone, buy and sell stocks. Recently, I logged on to Robinhood to see what had been going on there. And there are just a ton of new features. You can do options trading, futures trading. You can buy meme coins. You can get a credit card. You can do prediction markets.

• 29:22Speaker 05

  Retirement.

• 29:23Kevin Roose?

  You can even, yeah, you can bring over your 401k and invest it on Robinhood. So what is the product today? And do you see yourself basically offering all of the services of a traditional bank?

• 29:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, long term, we want Robinhood to be the place where customers can buy, sell, trade any financial asset or conduct any financial transaction. So if you think about it, it started off as trading. The real innovation was bringing commission-free mobile trading to market. And I'd say the business strategy is expanding beyond that to all of consumer retail financial services.

• 30:03Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I want to just pin down a little bit more your vision of where the future of investing is headed. You wrote a piece in the Washington Post last month where you argued that the next big sort of financial revolution is going to be crypto and not just sort of trading crypto coins, but tokenizing real world assets. What did you mean by that?

• 30:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, so um, how do you guys feel about crypto? Are you crypto skeptics or are you sort of like fundamental believers?

• 30:31Casey Newton?

  We're we're pretty skeptical. I think we had the experience in 2021 of seeing everyone get very excited about it. We got sort of excited about it ourselves. And then we saw a lot of people lose money and not very much interesting stuff get built.

• 30:44Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 30:44Casey Newton?

  So we felt burned.

• 30:45Speaker 05

  So so I'd say like, the skeptical narrative around crypto is it's all meme coins. And a lot of these things aren't tied to like real world productive assets that generate value or revenue. And I think there's a reason for that. And and the reason is that by and large, it has been illegal to connect crypto technology to things of value. If if you connect crypto technology to to productive asset, it's termed a security. And that's governed by the Securities and Exchange Commission. And I don't want to bore by getting too much into the details, but it's not allowed to actually connect crypto to things of value.

• 31:26Speaker 05

  Ergo, what you're getting is it's connected to things that aren't securities, which which end up turning into variants of of meme coins. And I think the way to solve that is to actually create a framework where you can connect crypto technology to productive assets. What would that look like? What's an example of of that that you see playing out in the next few years? Well, in my op ed for the Washington Post, I talked about private companies. Like, it's silly that you can buy meme coins, but OpenAI and SpaceX, which are like big innovative companies, that, you know, most people would tell you the risk of them going to zero is not super high right now at this point.

• 32:07Speaker 05

  But the the current kind of regulatory environment makes it very hard for the vast majority of the US population to invest in these things. So so I think there's multiple problems, but crypto can solve that from a technology standpoint. And I I think there's benefits to public equities and stocks being on blockchain technology as well.

• 32:29Casey Newton?

  I mean, so let's let's press on that a bit because I remember the era of the initial coin offering when companies would start up and they would create a coin and they would make that available and the the basic idea was exactly what you just said is like, well, now you can sort of have some of the upside if everybody winds up using this token for whatever. It doesn't seem like that led to a lot of positive uses, did it?

• 32:53Speaker 05

  Well, that was just shut down very, very quickly. I remember like the Telegram ICO was sort of the hallmark event that brought a lot of scrutiny and brought a lot of attention.

• 33:03Kevin Roose?

  And there were also just a lot of scams and rug pulls and people, you know, not operating in good faith. Like it attracted a lot of people who were pretty malicious about how they use the ICOs.

• 33:14Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think I think that's true. But I mean, you see that happening still in like the meme coin environment.

• 33:20Kevin Roose?

  I'm just saying, I don't think it was just the Telegram example that got people to be skeptical of it.

• 33:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think with any new technology, we have to like mitigate the vectors of abuse and minimize them. And there's definitely ways to do that. But I think the technology should be allowed to flourish. Like the the benefits are so extreme that I think it would be silly to not embrace it and allow it to fully permeate the financial system.

• 33:48Kevin Roose?

  Got it. I want to talk about your recent efforts to get into the prediction markets business and even the sports gambling business. Earlier this year, Robinhood was considering a move into sports betting. You rolled out this market for predictions on the what you called the pro football championship, which I guess is because you're not allowed to say Super Bowl without incurring like huge fines from the NFL.

• 34:09Casey Newton?

  Are we allowed to say Super Bowl?

• 34:11Kevin Roose?

  All right, we'll bleep that out.

• 34:11Speaker 05

  I don't think you are.

• 34:14Casey Newton?

  Let's just say it rhymes with Cooper Troll.

• 34:18Speaker 05

  I don't think you can say the big game either.

• 34:20Casey Newton?

  Oh, not the, oh, man.

• 34:22Kevin Roose?

  So you

• 34:22Casey Newton?

  The large contest.

• 34:25Kevin Roose?

  The large contest. So you rolled this out to roughly 1% of your users and then the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, the CFTC, asked you to suspend that market. They had, quote, "serious concerns." So what happened there and where do things stand with your entry into sports betting?

• 34:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, so I would, first of all, distinguish between sports betting and prediction markets. I think that mechanically, there's some similarities, but they're different things.

• 34:53Kevin Roose?

  Wait, wait, wait. Hang on. If I'm betting on a prediction market for who is going to win this football game, and I get paid if the team that I bet on wins, and I don't get paid if the other team wins, how is that different than sports betting?

• 35:08Speaker 05

  I mean, I think that, I think the distinction is, I'll explain. I think that you get into a little bit of like a philosophical discussion with this stuff, because there's people that believe any market is betting. I mean, first of all, I think prediction markets are the future of not just trading, but also information. I've been a big believer in the power of prediction markets for a long time, kind of a student of them. And I think prediction markets should be live for everything. One way I think about it is, it's kind of like the newspaper, right? So the newspaper has economic value. I mean, people go out and

• 35:45Kevin Roose?

  buy it. Sure does. NYtimes.com/subscribe.

• 35:47Speaker 05

  Yeah, and it has various sections. It has the front page. It has the sports section. People pay for it. And people pay for broadcast news, too, indirectly, in the form of advertising. So what prediction markets are, is the news faster, right? And in some cases, you get it even before it happens. So the economic value of that, as a product and service, should be at least as high, and I would argue strictly greater than the news after it happens.

• 36:18Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I would say, like, I understand the arguments for prediction markets. We've talked about them on the show before. But in this sort of narrow case of like, who is going to win this football game? Like, that is a service that I could get on DraftKings or FanDuel, or like, any sports gambling site. That specific prediction market, there's no, like, news there. It's just who's going to win the game, and who's going to get paid out as a result of winning the game.

• 36:39Speaker 05

  Well, I mean, who's going to win the game is news, right? What's the value of, why do people watch ESPN?

• 36:45Kevin Roose?

  Right. I guess this just seems to me like a case in which you're doing kind of a regulatory arbitrage, where you're saying, because this is a prediction market, it's like a derivative contract. You're not actually betting on the game, like you would in a sports betting thing, which would be illegal in some states. You're doing a derivatives contract, which you argue should be legal federally. The government disagreed. Why did they disagree?

• 37:07Speaker 05

  I don't think they necessarily disagree.

• 37:10Kevin Roose?

  Well, they told you to stop doing it.

• 37:11Speaker 05

  It's just new and different. And so I think this story will play out. But at the end of the day, I think what you'll see is prediction markets are here to stay. I think some of the details around what types of prediction markets are classified and what category I think will be worked out. But Robin Hood will play a leading role in that because I think this is like incredibly important technology.

• 37:34Kevin Roose?

  What's the information that you've gotten yourself from prediction markets that's felt really useful to you?

• 37:40Speaker 05

  I mean, one example was the election. So as you guys know, we rolled out presidential election market and that was an incredibly successful product. And I think you can juxtapose the experience of looking at a prediction market for the election versus the actual news on election night. So on election night, you know, prediction markets were at 95.5 Trump and the news was giving you all of these details like, oh, you know, we got this result from this county. We found 2,000 votes. But you kind of just wanted to know who's going to win the thing. And I think if you want the news as fast as possible, you have to turn to the prediction markets, not the news.

• 38:18Kevin Roose?

  Right. I would just say like, prediction markets are not always right. I remember when the room temperature superconductor debate was going on and lots of people got very excited about whether we had just discovered this LK99 thing that was going to revolutionize the world and prediction markets went nuts. And for a time, it was seen as very high probability. But the news, the media that you're talking about actually went out and checked it and said, does this thing work? And scientists tried to replicate it and found that it actually wasn't a room temperature superconductor. So in that case, the prediction markets were not a reliable indicator of what was true.

• 38:51Speaker 05

  I mean, I'm not saying that prediction markets are always right. Like, nobody's going to bet 1,000 on anything. But what I'll tell you is they're the most effective mechanism that I've seen for synthesizing all the publicly available information.

• 39:05Kevin Roose?

  Right. I want to ask you about this narrative that we've talked about on the show that I'm sure you've heard before, which was that tools like Robin Hood, which make it very, very simple and sort of gamified. To invest in crypto assets and meme coins and other things that they are essentially turning, investing into a form of gambling and popularizing that, especially among young people. I'll put some cards on the table. I do think that we are becoming a nation of gamblers. And I don't know that that's a net positive for society. And I wonder how you feel when you hear that.

• 39:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, a lot of people believe that markets are gambling, which which I disagree with. And obviously, like, markets are in the name of our company. Like, we believe in financial markets. We believe that any product that is available to institutions, by and large, I mean, there there are some exceptions there, should be available to retail as well. Because if you look on a macro level, access to markets has been one of the greatest sources of wealth creation for for countries. Countries with more open markets have tended to outperform countries with closed markets. And and so we believe in bringing that to retail. Because even if there's like individual cases that are negative and negative externalities,

• 40:22Speaker 05

  by and large, the the markets and opening up access have been one of the largest sources of wealth creation for for countries and and individuals.

• 40:31Kevin Roose?

  What about things like pump.fun, which is this new crypto platform that people, especially young people, are having a good time on, some of them? This basically makes it very, very easy to launch a new meme coin, to sell it. There have been lots of documented instances of people, you know, making tons of money on pump.fun, but also losing tons of money and getting scammed and rug pulled. Do you see that as a good way for sort of democratizing access to financial instruments?

• 40:59Speaker 05

  So here's my take on that. I think it goes to my original point of the power of the technology. So the idea that someone can create a coin in five minutes, and it's traded globally, it's available across a whole bunch of exchanges and DEXs and wallets. That idea is an extremely powerful idea, and it's a powerful technology. And you juxtapose that with the IPO process, which is cumbersome. Some incredibly expensive. I mean, not a lot of companies want to go through with it anymore because it's so like you have to deal with all these counterparties and banks and a roadshow and and I think that's a big problem because

• 41:41Speaker 05

  now you have companies like SpaceX and OpenAI that are worth hundreds of billions and are still private. So the the upside from investing in these high growth technology companies accrues only to the insiders that are able to get into the private company deals. Like, for example, I mean, you have Nvidia and that's been getting a ton of of the retail interest and institutional as well, but OpenAI, Anthropic, companies like Perplexity, you know, all all private. And so that's why I think marrying the technology that allows you to create a a coin in five minutes or less with real productive assets like private companies is so powerful.

• 42:25Speaker 05

  And I think we can solve the problems that you're indicating. I think there should be self certification. Companies and projects should be able to provide disclosure. So for example, if you are a late stage private company and you have audited financials that are public like, you you should get into a higher tier of sort of disclosure. And, you know, if if you're a project that was created on one of these, you know, meme factories, maybe you get like a big red skull and crossbones telling people like, be careful, you know, this is not vetted, not verified. But I think people are smart and and can make their own decisions. And I I think that there are ways that they can actually provide the disclosure needed to to keep customers safe.

• 43:10Casey Newton?

  Right, because this is the big difference between the public and the private markets is like, ultimately, we haven't seen audited financials for an OpenAI for an Anthropic. But from the exterior, it seems like they're doing well. They're raising billions of dollars. But if you're like a retail investor and you're just sort of like reading the news coverage, you are just kind of like throwing a wish in a fountain. So you're saying if we go through with this, then companies like OpenAI should have to offer some sort of public disclosure before, you know, people are allowed to start buying OpenAI coin.

• 43:36Speaker 05

  Or they can opt into it, you know, you know, you don't you don't want to have to force the companies to provide disclosure. But opting into a disclosure, I think, will get get you access to like higher tiers of placement.

• 43:48Kevin Roose?

  I want to return to this idea of the nation of gamblers, of the ways that we are, in some sense, betting on more things more regularly as a country than we have at any point in our recent past.

• 44:03Casey Newton?

  I actually bet Vlad $10 you were going to bring this up again, by the way. Go on.

• 44:09Kevin Roose?

  I mean, part of what I'm struggling with here is that I hear you talking about democratizing access to markets. And I think on some level, you know, that's a compelling argument. But then I look at what companies like Robinhood are actually doing and the kinds of investments that they are sort of making it very easy for people to make, and it does not seem like wise investment. So I got a few weeks ago an alert from Robinhood on my phone telling me that I could now buy the Trump crypto meme coin on Robinhood. I got another alert from you around New Year's saying that you were giving away Dogecoin to people who signed up for accounts.

• 44:51Kevin Roose?

  To me, that does not feel like responsible stewardship of a platform where people are investing their money. It seems like you are actively pushing people, your users, to invest in very speculative assets that are high risk and that they might not be prepared for.

• 45:10Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, I think that my view is people should know what's available. I think that a lot of people wanted to buy that asset for a variety of reasons, right? I would dispute the fact that we have the ability to coerce someone into buying something that they don't want to buy. The people that buy these assets do it because they have a fundamental belief in what it represents. And, you know, I don't necessarily think that...

• 45:39Kevin Roose?

  Or they love to gamble.

• 45:42Speaker 05

  I mean, I think markets have a wide variety of participants. Some people, particularly with these memes, are buying it because they think it'll go up in the future, as with anything. But there are a lot of people that buy it because they want to support the movement that it represents. I would say that in terms of what we allow and what we list on our platform, I mean, we don't have hundreds of coins like some of the other crypto platforms. We're like on the extreme sort of like-

• 46:13Kevin Roose?

  Only the blue chip meme coins. Vlad, I do want to ask you one more question about the sort of effects of services like Robinhood and the sort of larger generational cohort that tends to do a lot more speculative investing. There's been some studies recently about the increasing prevalence of gambling addiction, especially among young men. There's a new study that just came out earlier this week in JAMA that shows that internet searches related to gambling addiction have increased significantly over the last few years. Anecdotally, I'm hearing from friends who are therapists, who work with young men, who say that the number of boys and young men who are coming in with gambling addictions

• 46:57Kevin Roose?

  has risen precipitously. And I wonder if you have any reservations about the way that Robinhood and other sort of financial platforms may be contributing to a growing public health crisis, especially among young men?

• 47:11Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, since we're not in the gambling space, I'm less familiar about sort of like the ins and outs of gambling addiction. I mean, obviously, there needs to be appropriate controls and services, and we have to make sure that customers don't get in over their skis. I do think like, if you look at financial markets, financial markets have had pretty robust controls around things like- Customer onboarding, suitability, geolocation. So you make sure that customers in one state can't have access to things that are not allowed in that state. So there is benefit to actually bringing it into a more regulated realm

• 47:56Speaker 05

  where a lot of these controls from financial services can be broadly applied.

• 48:01Kevin Roose?

  Okay, so you're not opposed to regulating people from, preventing them from making investments that might be against their own self-interest or that they might not be equipped to assess the risk of. Is that fair?

• 48:12Speaker 05

  I think that I'm certainly in favor of suitability controls and sort of like various things. And those exist in the financial services world. I think that where it's tricky is when you start saying, preventing people from making investments that are bad for them. Because then you get into the situation of like Massachusetts in the 80s banning its citizens from participating in the Apple IPO. Right? And maybe objectively, at the time, people said, well, you know, that's IPOs are risky. This is an unproven technology company who uses computers. But then 30 years from now, when

• 48:55Speaker 05

  your state has basically been harmed in retrospect by that decision, it doesn't look so smart anymore.

• 49:02Kevin Roose?

  So are there any financial assets you think are too risky for retail investors to be allowed to buy and sell? Like, is there anything that you would say that's a little too crazy?

• 49:12Speaker 05

  I think there's probably financial assets that we don't see a clear need for retail investors or maybe a little bit complex to understand. You know, for example, like you've got like different mortgage-backed securities and credit default swaps. But I'd say by and large, my thought is if an institution has access to it, retail should have access as well.

• 49:41Kevin Roose?

  I've been thinking about buying up a massive amount of mortgage-backed securities and credit default swaps. I'm just seeing what happens. So I'll keep you guys posted. I think we should end on a couple of AI questions.

• 49:50Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 49:51Kevin Roose?

  So my first one is just, Vlad, you're in the tech elite. You're talking to all the cool AI CEOs. Based on what you think is coming, does it still make sense for the average person to save for retirement?

• 50:03Speaker 05

  I'm very, very confident that despite the advances in AI, we'll still have a need for money and currency. People will still create companies. Maybe the AIs will create companies too. I think like regardless of what happens to the labor landscape, the job landscape, if there's disruption, I think that bodes well for the importance of of investing and stashing away your money. I think retirement becomes even more important.

• 50:29Kevin Roose?

  Vlad, last question. You've got a new AI venture, Harmonic, which I was doing some reading on. It looks like an AI for math. Why did you start up this side quest? And how does this fit into your vision for the future?

• 50:44Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think the big problem with AI models is that the current generation of models will give you an answer in nearly all cases. But the problem is in how you can trust the output. How do you know that the output is correct? Are there subtle errors? And actually, math as a domain is a very interesting domain because unless every step in the reasoning is correct, the answer is very, very likely to be wrong. And the original goal was to build super intelligent AI that has verifiably correct outputs at every step in its thinking process.

• 51:21Kevin Roose?

  So no hallucinating?

• 51:23Speaker 05

  No hallucinating.

• 51:24Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. And is that possible?

• 51:26Speaker 05

  It's possible for sure. I mean, if you think about it, a calculator, right? Your calculator doesn't hallucinate. If you type in some math formulas, you're pretty confident that your answer is going to be correct and it's not going to hallucinate. So can you scale that idea to more and more problems? Obviously, it's easy when you're adding big numbers. But can you do a word problem?

• 51:50Kevin Roose?

  There are people who just think this-

• 51:51Speaker 05

  Casey and Kevin are on a boat and they're going down a river. The river is going at, you know, five knots. There's a wind. When are they going to get to the destination? Can you make like a super calculator that gives you the no hallucinations property of a basic calculator, but the flexibility of an LLM? I think I think that's kind of like the the dream.

• 52:11Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. Well, I'm just saying, I'm not getting onto a boat with you anytime soon.

• 52:16Kevin Roose?

  Vlad is actively fantasizing about throwing us in the river at this point. Well, I think that's as good a place as any to end. Vlad, thanks for coming. Thank you, Vlad.

• 52:25Speaker 05

  Thanks for having me.

• 52:29Kevin Roose?

  When we come back, my experiments with AI vibe coding, and I've got a hot app to give to Casey. That's a hint.

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• 54:25Kevin Roose?

  Casey, it's time to talk about vibe coding.

• 54:28Casey Newton?

  Yes, Kevin, this is, I would say, your latest obsession, and I'm very eager to hear what exactly you've been doing and making. But before we get into all of that, what is vibe coding?

• 54:38Kevin Roose?

  So vibe coding is a term that is very new. It was popularized on social media like in the last week or two, and it was coined by Andre Karpathy, the engineer formerly of OpenAI and Tesla.

• 54:53Casey Newton?

  I would say a leading AI researcher educator.

• 54:56Kevin Roose?

  Yes. So he talked at the beginning of February on X about how he had been doing these kind of like small hobbyist programming projects where basically, instead of writing the code himself, he was just kind of like using these AI tools to do what he called vibe coding, where he's essentially like telling it, like, I want this app to do this thing, and it's going off and doing it. And maybe he steps in to debug something if it stops working. But he wrote, quote, "I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works."

• 55:29Casey Newton?

  So this is really like you're just kind of overseeing the AI write the code. Andre, it sounds like, is doing very little of the writing. He's basically doing what I heard some people predict that we would arrive at this point, which is like, English is the new programming language. You just sort of say in English what you want the code to do, and then it does it.

• 55:48Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, and this is different from the AI coding tools that existed even a couple of years ago. Like GitHub Copilot was one of the early AI coding assistants where basically it would just autocomplete your code, right? You could be writing a line of Python or JavaScript, and it would sort of see what you were up to, and it would complete it for you, and you would just press Tab, and it would, you know, go on to your next thing. But you still had to know how to program to use those tools effectively. But what's been happening in the last couple of years, and really over the last six months, has gotten quite good, are these tools that essentially remove the need to program at all. So now there are lots of tools out there. There's a tool called Cursor. There's a tool called Replit. There's

• 56:32Kevin Roose?

  Bolt. There's Lovable. There's a bunch. A bunch of these tools where basically you just go in and you get a text box and it says, what do you want to build? And you say, I want an app that does this, this and this. And it goes out and builds it for you pretty much instantaneously.

• 56:45Casey Newton?

  Now, I have a friend who runs a tech company and he once made fun of this whole idea to me by saying, hey, you want to talk about programming in the English language? That's what I do all day long as a CEO. I'm constantly telling my engineers in English what to do. And it works, you know, maybe a little over half the time, but maybe not much more than that. So what has been your early experience of vibe coding? What have you been trying to build and how has it been going?

• 57:12Kevin Roose?

  I want to talk about my projects, but first I want to talk about like, like my own history with this stuff. Because I am a former programmer. When I was a teenager, I was into coding. I would build websites. I would build little like JavaScript projects. I spent a very excruciating summer trying to teach myself flash so that I could make animated cartoons like a home star runner. And then I dropped it. I went to college. I learned about journalism. I thought, well, this is the path I want. I became a, you know, a word cell and, and then I stopped coding altogether. And so when I started hearing about these tools that would let you just like code without knowing how to code. I was very interested and I started, you know, experimenting.

• 57:54Kevin Roose?

  One of the first things I built was this podcast summarizer where you can take a podcast that's very long and just use like AI to transcribe it and then use a different AI to summarize the transcripts and put it all into like a searchable database so that I could say, okay, I don't feel like listening to this five hour podcast about AI. But I can basically get the executive summary using AI.

• 58:20Casey Newton?

  So tell us a little bit about your setup. Like what, what software are you using to do this?

• 58:25Kevin Roose?

  So I've been trying a couple of different tools. Sometimes I just use the, the raw like AI models themselves, like the Claude, the chat GPT. Those tools are quite good at some projects, but they can't actually, for the most part, run the software to sort of test it inside the, the window. So it does require some copying and pasting. So there this new kind of app that I've been using is a more integrated, you know, development environment.

• 58:52Casey Newton?

  An IDE.

• 58:53Kevin Roose?

  An IDE. So Cursor is the one that's really popular right now. If you've never used an IDE before, you might find it a little puzzling. I certainly did. But it basically lets you, you know, prompt the AI to write the code for you, automatically debug it, sort of deploy it within a little test window, and then push it out onto the web where people can actually use it.

• 59:16Casey Newton?

  So tell us about some of the other projects you've been building.

• 59:19Kevin Roose?

  So in addition to my podcast summarizer, I also had AI help me redesign my website to look more cyberpunk. That was the aesthetic I was going for.

• 59:28Casey Newton?

  Wait, is this live? Can I view it?

• 59:30Kevin Roose?

  No, it hasn't deployed yet, but it's going to be there soon. I had it.

• 59:34Casey Newton?

  Wait, what? How did it make it look more cyberpunk?

• 59:37Kevin Roose?

  It redesigned the whole thing.

• 59:38Casey Newton?

  Oh, OK.

• 59:38Kevin Roose?

  Like, like bright neons, like sharp edges, cool scrolling, sort of parallax, parallax style animations.

• 59:46Casey Newton?

  Do you have like a bionic arm in your author photo now?

• 59:50Kevin Roose?

  I built a tool to pull all of my bookmarks from X into a spreadsheet. I use X a lot to, you know, I'll bookmark things that I find interesting or want to return to later.

• 1:00:01Casey Newton?

  You'll say, wow, that's the most racist thing I've ever heard.

• 1:00:05Kevin Roose?

  Yes. So now I have a tool that will go through all of my bookmarks and, you know, pull those into a spreadsheet that I can search later. That one was very interesting because it basically presented me with a couple of options. After I asked, I think it was Claude, to build this tool for me, it said, well, we could go use the Twitter API, but that costs money. And if you don't want to pay that, we have this other way that we can do it that involves like using a browser to sort of like scrape the bookmarks from Twitter. And so I went with that version.

• 1:00:36Casey Newton?

  Well, you realize that by doing this, you are now like essentially an armed combatant in Elon Musk's war on bots. Like, you are the bot that Elon Musk is trying to destroy.

• 1:00:45Kevin Roose?

  Come at me, bro.

• 1:00:46Casey Newton?

  Good luck. Good luck, buddy.

• 1:00:47Kevin Roose?

  I've got my bookmarks. Now I don't need it anymore.

• 1:00:49Casey Newton?

  All right, what else?

• 1:00:50Kevin Roose?

  So the thing that I built most recently was yesterday. When I was trying to determine if various objects that I'm moving to my new house would fit in the trunk of my car. And so I built an app called Will It Fit In My Trunk?

• 1:01:04Casey Newton?

  Now, this feels like a classic math-based problem that maybe Vlad's thinking it helps you with. But you used something else. How did it go?

• 1:01:10Kevin Roose?

  You know, so far, so good. It hasn't steered me wrong yet. But this is the sort of that speaks to what I think is so fun and interesting about this genre of coding project. Is you can really just build what I call software for want. Like, a software company would never build a tool for wide release that let you figure out whether various objects would fit in your trunk. That is not a big, total addressable market.

• 1:01:36Casey Newton?

  Sounds like you never saw Trunky in the App Store. I'm just kidding. That's not a real app. But yes, you're right.

• 1:01:42Kevin Roose?

  So, this this style of coding really makes it possible to build things that you and only you need, or will it ever use?

• 1:01:48Casey Newton?

  And there's something fun about it, because I think, particularly for you and I, who actually enjoy technology and like using it, like trying new things. Like, coding can feel like actual magic, right? It can feel like wizardry. And if you are the one who is all of a sudden wielding the wand and making things happen, then, you know, you're feeling great.

• 1:02:06Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, it is the most fun that I've had with these AI tools in a while. I think it is the most fun thing you can do with AI in today's world. And it has really sort of connected me back to my teenage coder self and reminded me what I loved about it back then.

• 1:02:22Casey Newton?

  I spent a lot of time in college and afterwards, writing HTML. I had a program called Dreamweaver.

• 1:02:28Kevin Roose?

  Love Dreamweaver.

• 1:02:30Casey Newton?

  And got pretty handy with it. But if I had been able to chat with an AI assistant about why I was having trouble with my movable type installation in 2004, like, my website would have been sick as hell.

• 1:02:42Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. So, Casey, I'm sure you have some niche software needs in your life.

• 1:02:46Casey Newton?

  Absolutely.

• 1:02:47Kevin Roose?

  And I asked you the other day what I could build for you using my vibe coding tools. And what did you say?

• 1:02:54Casey Newton?

  What I said was, I need help with my hot tub.

• 1:02:58Kevin Roose?

  Go on.

• 1:02:59Casey Newton?

  Well, listen, uh, here's what they don't tell you about buying a hot tub. When it comes to your house and you decide, I want to use the hot tub that I have just purchased, you have to become a chemical engineer. Here's what I mean by that. You open up the manual, all of a sudden, you learn you are going to need to monitor the pH balance of your water. You're going to need to monitor the alkalinity of the water. You're going to need to monitor the calcium level of the water because if there is not enough calcium, it can somehow corrupt the jets in your hot tub. And needless to say, Kevin, I don't have a lot of experience mixing chemicals to adjust alkalinity and pH levels in bodies of water. And I thought, well, how am I going to do this?

• 1:03:43Casey Newton?

  And so then I actually do start using the chatbots. Not to write me software, but essentially just to say, please, God, help me. What do I do? And there are so many things to keep track of. You have to like, uh, put various chemicals into the hot tub at different intervals. So you replace this once a month, you replace this once a quarter, you know, twice a year, you have to drain the entire tub. Uh, once a month, you have to shock the hot tub. Don't ask me what that means. I just read that today. It's giving me a nervous breakdown.

• 1:04:14Kevin Roose?

  Show it some spicy tweets.

• 1:04:15Casey Newton?

  Yes, exactly. So there's so much to keep track of. And I thought, well, if I were going to build software just for me, it would be something that just checked in with me to prevent my hot tub from turning into a bacterial soup.

• 1:04:30Kevin Roose?

  Okay, see, I have great news for you.

• 1:04:31Casey Newton?

  What's that?

• 1:04:32Kevin Roose?

  I built you a hot tub tool.

• 1:04:33Casey Newton?

  Oh, my goodness. You vibe coded on my behalf?

• 1:04:37Kevin Roose?

  I vibe coded on your behalf.

• 1:04:38Casey Newton?

  Thank you.

• 1:04:38Kevin Roose?

  So after you told me about the issues you were having with your hot tub, uh, which are very relatable, by the way, listeners are all going, me too, I have an issue with my hot tub.

• 1:04:46Casey Newton?

  Listen, we, we have a very wealthy audience that is constantly buying huge upgrades for their homes. And every once in a while, Kevin, we have to do something for the C-suite listeners.

• 1:04:55Kevin Roose?

  Exactly. So, um, I took this as a brief and I went into a tool called Replit. And I said to the tool, make me an app that will, uh, tell me the The things that I need to do to keep this specific kind of hot tub working properly and put it in a tool that my friend can use. And I said, because this is a tool that tells you the time, they use as a machine to tell you the time to service your hot tub, I was gonna call it Hot Tub Time Machine.

• 1:05:27Casey Newton?

  That's very good. I like that. Yeah.

• 1:05:30Kevin Roose?

  So I built you a website called Hot Tub Time Machine.

• 1:05:34Casey Newton?

  Oh, my gosh. This is wonderful.

• 1:05:36Kevin Roose?

  So let me show it to you.

• 1:05:36Casey Newton?

  Okay.

• 1:05:38Kevin Roose?

  Now, I just want to tell you and caveat this by saying that I did not choose the design or the color scheme here. That was all the AI.

• 1:05:46Casey Newton?

  Okay, great.

• 1:05:47Kevin Roose?

  So, open up the link I just sent you.

• 1:05:48Casey Newton?

  All right, I'm opening up the link. Okay, so it is quite pink. It's pink on pink, which is a color scheme that you don't see a lot outside of the Barbie franchise. But no, there is some black tech. It looks beautiful. And it says, "Hot Tub Time Machine, your retro futuristic maintenance companion." And it even created a little logo, which I'm going to assume is a drop of water?

• 1:06:15Kevin Roose?

  Sure, I'll go with that.

• 1:06:17Casey Newton?

  And there are two sort of modules. There's a manage tasks module and a view schedule module.

• 1:06:24Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, so this tool is very simple. This is a prototype. We can flesh it out if you want to, but basically...

• 1:06:30Casey Newton?

  Is this an alpha or is this a beta?

• 1:06:31Kevin Roose?

  This is an alpha.

• 1:06:32Casey Newton?

  Is it an alpha?

• 1:06:33Kevin Roose?

  You're the single user of this app. And basically, I've set it up so that it will email you weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annually with a list of everything you need to do to keep your hot tub in working order. And as a special bonus, every email will come with a poem about hot tubs.

• 1:06:51Casey Newton?

  Fantastic. Well, can I start clicking around?

• 1:06:56Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, click around.

• 1:06:57Casey Newton?

  All right, so I'm gonna click on view tasks. And, all right, and this brings up, there's a sort of module where I can add a new task, but there are also some existing tasks. And it includes weekly, quarterly, monthly, and annual maintenance. And it is... Frankly, an overwhelming number of things to do.

• 1:07:20Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, you you bought yourself some chores when you bought that hot tub.

• 1:07:23Casey Newton?

  It it really is just a wall of text of things that I have to do. Like, every week, I am apparently supposed to spray off the filter with a garden hose.

• 1:07:33Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:35Casey Newton?

  And add one cup of non-chlorine shock, especially after parties or have you. So, yes, lots in here, okay. And and also, it looks like I can add, you know, another task if, you know.

• 1:07:46Kevin Roose?

  Here, I'm gonna click the little test button here to send you one of these. And you'll see if it shows up in your inbox.

• 1:07:51Casey Newton?

  Let's see.

• 1:07:54Casey Newton?

  Yes. Oh, time to maintain my hot tub. And there are some step-by-step instructions that I can follow. And below that, the hot tub poetry corner. And should I read this poem?

• 1:08:07Kevin Roose?

  Yes, please.

• 1:08:09Casey Newton?

  All right, here's the poem. Bubbles rise in swirling steam. Time machine of warmth and dream. Nordic waters, pure delight, maintaining bliss both day and night. That is okay, I guess I would say. That is okay. Nordic, of course, a reference to the fact that I have a Nordic Jubilee series hot tub.

• 1:08:28Kevin Roose?

  Yes. Yeah. So I built this all in about half an hour.

• 1:08:32Casey Newton?

  Okay.

• 1:08:32Kevin Roose?

  Without writing a single line of code.

• 1:08:34Casey Newton?

  Okay.

• 1:08:34Kevin Roose?

  And I want to share that with you because not only would it help, will it help you with your hot tub issues, but I hope it will also show you the the promise of vibe coding.

• 1:08:45Casey Newton?

  Yeah, well, I feel like you have shown me the promise of vibe coding. Now, was there anything about this that was particularly tricky? Or did you get stuck on anything?

• 1:08:53Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, so there are some things that it can't do, right? Like, if it needs to authenticate you into some service or set up a database, like, you have to kind of manually step in and do that. There are some things that it just, it it just can't do because no human programmer could do it either. If there's no API for something, for example, it won't sort of magically invent one. So there are some boundaries and limitations. And I would say it still does benefit you when using this stuff to have at least a little bit of programming experience because there are just certain decisions that it will prompt you to make where you're like, I Don't actually know what these terms mean or what the right decision is here. And you can ask the AI to just like make the decision for you, but you might not be totally happy with the result.

• 1:09:38Casey Newton?

  Now, during this process, I'm curious if you felt like you were learning something about the coding process. Like if you spent the next year making these little one-off apps, do you feel like you would maybe be a decent junior software engineer? Or is the idea actually not to get into the details? To just sort of let it build things? And if you don't know what it's doing, that's none of your business?

• 1:10:01Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I think I'm more in the latter camp. I mean, this was the part that I found fascinating about what Andre Karpathy said about vibe coding. Like, he's an extremely good programmer, but he says that he now can enter this mode where he basically just says like, "Okay, okay, okay, accept, accept, accept." And the computer will go off and do its thing. I don't know enough about programming to dive into the weeds of what the AI is doing and the decisions it's making. I just have to look at the end result. And there's something exciting about that, where I feel like things are just happening magically on my behalf. But that's also, you know, maybe it's inserting malicious code. Maybe it's doing something that I don't want it to be doing. I have no way as a non-programmer to know whether that's happening or not.

• 1:10:45Casey Newton?

  Have you checked your computer to see if it installed a Bitcoin miner while you weren't looking?

• 1:10:49Kevin Roose?

  I have not, but that would be pretty tricky.

• 1:10:51Casey Newton?

  Well, Kevin, this experiment has me thinking about a blog post I read this week by a guy named Namany Gohel. And his blog post was titled "New Junior Developers Can't Actually Code." This post got a million views, according to the post that I'm looking at. And he is saying that when he talks to junior developers, they are having an experience very similar to you, which is that as they are building these systems, they are essentially just supervising an AI. They aren't actually getting their hands dirty and understanding like which mechanisms are leading to which results. So while this is great for you, I do think it raises the question,

• 1:11:34Casey Newton?

  what happens when most of our software engineers are building systems that in some fundamental way they don't understand?

• 1:11:41Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I think this is a very real thing. I mean, the flip side of me, a non-coder, being able to build stuff is that if real coders are using these tools, there's like no incentive for them to learn the basic skills of programming and learn the syntax of the different languages. And yeah, I don't know what to do about that. It sort of seems like a version of what happened when we all got like Google Maps on our phones is that like people started losing their sense of direction. There's this kind of skill atrophy issue that people worry about. But I think that the returns to knowing how to use these things effectively are still great enough and still require enough sort of knowledge of how the various pieces of code fit together, that it still does make sense for people to learn to code.

• 1:12:26Kevin Roose?

  I'm not one of these people who thinks like learn to code is totally over. I think for some people, it's still a very useful skill to have. But I think that in the future, like the sort of role of the software engineer will become more like a product manager, where you are essentially supervising the product, laying out the vision, overseeing the design, like stepping in to fix things when they break, but you're not actually sort of in the trenches of the code, you know, writing lines of code by hand.

• 1:12:53Casey Newton?

  Hmm, all right.

• 1:12:54Kevin Roose?

  What do you think?

• 1:12:56Casey Newton?

  What I think is that as AI systems get more and more powerful, we need people who do understand them on a very detailed, technical, complex, down-to-the-metal kind of way. And that if we don't do that, our only alternative will just to be to trust the AI when we ask it, hey, how do you work? And there are a lot of reasons why I don't want to end up in that world. So I'm comfortable having fewer people in this world who know the code at that level of detail, and it's fine to me if most software engineers don't, but I want a solid core of people who do.

• 1:13:32Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. And I would like to continue with my vibe coding experiments, trying to build increasingly more useful tools for myself and my friends.

• 1:13:40Casey Newton?

  And I am thinking about starting, because if you can do it, surely I can.

• 1:13:46Kevin Roose?

  Yes, anyone can. That is sort of the point. And I also would love to hear from our listeners what they are vibe coding. What tools and apps are you building using AI that are solving your own personal, specific problems?

• 1:14:00Casey Newton?

  Did you invent a novel bioweapon using ChatGPT? We'd love to hear from you.

• 1:14:04Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, please email that one to [email protected].

• 1:14:08Casey Newton?

  But the others, [email protected].

• 1:14:29Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Dell Technologies. It's time to put AI to work. Is your business ready? The challenge isn't getting started with AI. It's scaling beyond pilots while maintaining control of your data, governance, infrastructure and costs. Dell AI Factory provides the integrated foundation you need to scale AI securely and efficiently with one trusted partner. Dell, AI on your terms. From idea to impact. Learn more at dell.com/yourwaytoai. That's dell.com/yourwaytoai.

• 1:15:03Speaker 03

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• 1:15:35Speaker 06

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• 1:16:11Kevin Roose?

  Hard Fork is produced by Whitney Jones and Rachel Cohn. We're edited by Rachel Dry. We're fact-checked by Caitlin Love. Today's show was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Original music by Alicia Baitoup, Marion Lozano, Diane Wong, Rowan Nemisto, and Dan Powell. Our audience editor is Nell Galogly. Video production by Chris Schott, Sawyer Roque, and Pat Gunther. You can watch this full episode on YouTube at youtube.com/hardfork. Our executive producer is Jen Poyant. Special thanks to Paula Schuman, Puweng Tam, Dahlia Hadad, and Jeffrey Miranda. As always, you can email us at [email protected]. And you can email casishotub@[email protected].

• 1:16:56Casey Newton?

  And I will be reading every email.

• 1:17:12Speaker 07

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