Karpathy’s AI gap, free Adobe clones, and AI’s effect on persistence

What happens to software businesses when AI makes their products easier to recreate? Reid Hoffman and Aria Finger explore what a developer’s effort to rebuild seven Adobe apps with Claude means for software pricing, competitive moats, and intellectual property. They also unpack Andrej Karpathy’s AI capability gap: why everyday users and researchers inside frontier labs have very different views of what AI can do. Then, they examine a randomized study showing that brief AI assistance caused—not just correlated with—reduced persistence after that help was removed. Reid makes the case for AI as a cognitive exoskeleton—and for designing tools that build grit alongside capability. For more info on the podcast and transcripts of all the episodes, visit https://www.possible.fm/podcast/

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Software is definitely not over. That's hyperbole. But the key thing to track is it's now much cheaper to make software. Even when you get to not just the how does AI doing coding change all knowledge work? Even if you just say software becoming cheaper, what does that mean?

• 0:16Speaker 01

  George Danzig in 1939, he was a mathematician in class. He came to class late and there was two math problems on the board and he wrote them down in his notebook and you know, he went home and solved them and then came back into his teacher and said like, oh, so sorry, I was late on the homework. And his professor was like, homework? Those were two of the famous unsolved math equations. He didn't realize he shouldn't persist. If we can reverse engineer with AI, a way to increase people's persistence, how many more mathematicians would we have solving these unsolved problems?

• 0:45Speaker 00

  AI is a cognitive exoskeleton. Part of exoskeleton, you realize you can do a lot more. Like, oh, my gosh, you can do these things. Wow, I can jump faster. I can run faster. And so I'm now more excited and interested in doing it.

• 0:57Speaker 01

  Morning Reed, great to be here with you.

• 0:59Speaker 00

  Good morning.

• 1:01Speaker 01

  All right, let's jump right in with something that Andrej Karpathy posted last week. And his sort of verdict was that the AI adoption gap has widened into a sharp funnel. So the way he sees it, there's 6 billion people on the planet who have barely touched LLMs. There's one to 2 billion people who have seen sort of a free tier chatbot. There's another 20 million professionals that we're talking about a lot, but specifically in math and code, and they're watching agents complete in hours what used to take weeks. But then there's roughly 5,000 people with internal frontier access and they're seeing something else entirely. They're seeing autonomous agents running cyber operations,

• 1:43Speaker 01

  advancing mathematics, and they are doing years of expert work. And so his phrase for this last group was the vertigo of the curve going vertical. And it's something felt by almost nobody. It's felt just by these 5,000 people. And so is this just a normal way that technology moves? And you know, eventually the market will catch up and people will will get to this sort of group of 5,000? Or is something structurally different about AI? And so this gap will take a lot longer to narrow or maybe never narrow at all?

• 2:18Speaker 00

  So narrowing gaps is kind of a little bit unclear. What I do think will happen is in terms of, you know, and Karpathy is always super smart in terms of how he looks at these things, that the whole funnel, like, like the, like, people will up these levels. It's almost like he is kind of describing a pyramid. And what it is, actually, people will be going through the pyramid. Now, whether or not a gap will be narrowing, I think is a unclear question. What I do think is the thing is that most people have very little substantive experience of, you know, of the 8 billion people of what AI adds in their life. And that's one of the

• 3:02Speaker 00

  reasons why I was like, look, I think part of how we should, you know, help people understand about how AI can be very humanity positive, society positive, is, you know, do the medical assistant and the tutor and the legal assistant and the government services and all of these things in order to get out there. And I think it's one of the things that any government that wants to help its people into the AI age should be doing with vigor and strength. And, you know, I've been recommending this to whenever governments over the years. And because they're so slow at trying to figure out technological deployment for their citizenry, for their society, for, you know, kind of for industries, that I'm just writing about it now.

• 3:45Speaker 00

  So that people who actually want to go do something can talk to me about it. Now, that being said, I think that the, the most notable thing about Karpathy's statement is not, is there a narrowing of this gap? But as much as the, a couple of things. One, the fact that the, the folks who are working at these frontier models are seeing something that is very cutting edge. And I think this is one of the things that, like, I'm, I'm very strongly in favor of OpenAI's having released its mathematical proofs and so forth. And I did see the various reactions of some mathematicians on this.

• 4:29Speaker 00

  And, you know, I, you know, we can spend a little bit of time debugging what is right and what is simply ludicism in the mathematicians, you know, reactions. But it's to show these internal models are doing really amazing things. Like the things you see when you use ChatGPT, or Claude, or Gemini, or Copilot from the outside, and from the kind of everyday users are not actually, in fact, the cutting edge of what's actually doable and possible now. And that, I think that's one thing to really note because, and, and part of that is, is like, you know, part of the lens of that was OpenAI saying, but, you know, we still

• 5:13Speaker 00

  have amongst the most leading models in the world. Look, we can do all this mathematics stuff. Let's just release a bunch of the results, which, you know, is not surprising when you go, there were some mathematicians who were like, well, I was working on this for 10 years and now AI has solved it. Uh, well, it's like, well, look, I was, I was, you know, walking to work and now there's cars. You know, it's kind of like, okay, you know, that's part of what happens, part of what the adoption is. And sure, you can say that the walking to work is part of the journey. I get fitness and I get time to think and da da. And this driving car thing is kind of barbaric. But actually, there's all kinds of utilities and new expanses of driving car. Not to say you shouldn't still walk sometimes. So anyway, that's one

• 5:58Speaker 00

  comment from the Karpathy thing. The other is that, that there's this kind of levels that go through it. And that most people's exposure to AI, part of the reason why they have skepticism around data centers, skepticism to say, you're telling me that my job may be threatened, transformed, lost, et cetera. But what I'm seeing from my own use of AI is like an enhanced search. And that's not a good trade for me, right? Like, search works pretty well. I'm happy to have enhanced search, but I don't want to have a transformed job for that. And it's actually, most people aren't yet at the point where they're seeing

• 6:40Speaker 00

  that their work is substantively changed in ways they go, oh, my God, this is really amazing. And that's why they also don't have the exposure to go, well, where is the place that I would still be working? Where is the stuff that I would be doing? Like, if you have, you know, you know, AI doing all of this work, where is the place for me? Now, those of us who are using it still see huge roles for using AI and huge roles for us in decisioning and metacognition, a bunch of other things. And so I think it's, it's also getting through these levels of the pyramid, going up to the major thing. And then, of course, the idea is to get as many people into the most productive and useful things for their lives, for their work, for their societies, for doing it. Now, back to the

• 7:25Speaker 00

  kind of closing of the gap, if the top is asymptoting, then the gap will close. But the top may still be increasing. So it may actually be the gap is widening, even as the water raises all of the boats potentially a lot. So that was the reason why I was like uncertain on that particular part of it.

• 7:45Speaker 01

  Let's stick with power users today. So what are power users doing with AI? Actually, I was talking to my husband last week and he told me about this story, that a developer named Brandon Thomas, motivated by Adobe's cancellation fees, he's a power user, he used Claude's Opus 5.5 to build seven free open source replacements for Adobe's Creative Cloud, so Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, and four others. And he built it from scratch. There was no Adobe code touched. And so he called this a clean room reimplementation. His comment was that software was over, especially because it's not as if he was using discarded code or things from, he was just using Claude. And he recreated this thing

• 8:28Speaker 01

  that people do complain about a lot. And he said, here's the open source version. And so this is new and different because something similar had been happening in gaming for a while, where AI had made decompilation cheap enough to be a hobby. And so modders were reverse engineering binaries, porting console exclusives to PCs, they were reviving abandoned titles. And so all of these things are happening where people are essentially recreating software using AI. And so AI is really collapsing the cost of replicating what took these large teams years to build. And so is software over? Is it hyperbole? Like, what is going to be this next generation when someone can just vibe code Adobe Photoshop

• 9:13Speaker 01

  in, you know, a few days, a few weeks, you know, a few afternoons?

• 9:16Speaker 00

  Software is definitely not over. That's, that's hyperbole. But the key thing to track is it's now much cheaper to make software. So previously, it, and, and all kinds of things change from that app. Like, it's, even when you get to not just the how does AI doing coding change all knowledge work, which is interesting. Even if you just say, software becoming cheaper, what does that mean? Well, for example, part of the reason why there was a difference between open source projects and commercial projects was because essentially, like, software was so expensive to build that only limited set of things that were within the cost envelope could be built and deployed within

• 10:01Speaker 00

  an open source environment. Because part of it is, software doesn't just live, it's like you build once and you're done. It has to have security updates, it has to have functional updates, it has to have new OSs, it has to have new integrations, you know, and, and so it doesn't, it doesn't, like, once a piece of software is deployed, it starts aging right away. And in the modern accelerated environment, it ages even quicker. And so that meant that very limited role room for open source. Now, you make it much cheaper.

• 10:32Speaker 00

  It's easier for individuals to do, it's easier to create open source, it's easier to upgrade it, it's easier to to maintain it. And so that means software is massively more plentiful. And that means that your moat of we pay a thousand engineers to be maintaining a piece of software, and that's why you buy our software, goes down a lot. And it's not, goes down to zero, but it goes down a lot. And that means the usual, because you know, the margins, which caused the investment in the business and caused revenue and all the rest, become more challenging. And that's part of the reason why people were talking about SaaSpocalypse. Now, part of the reason I was like, in the earlier thing was saying not SaaSpocalypse is, I think it's a tale of two software companies, you know, tale of two cities,

• 11:18Speaker 00

  which is, you know, those that are really adopting AI and figuring out what does AI mean now for how they're providing their services, what their moats are. You know, for example, because software is plentiful, it could now mean that as opposed to one piece of software that is given to everybody and everybody to kind of most, like, everyone collectively dislikes it. But it's a little bit like the Churchill on democracy. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's the worst, except for everything else. Now, actually can be much more personalized, given all the AI, and maybe like software becomes more of a platform uh, in terms of how it operates. And then AI builds on top of it and people still want the depth of the platform elements of it. And, and you can still have things. And so I think that, you know, that's one possible path.

• 12:00Speaker 00

  I think there's a number of paths by which people will still be paying for software. My belief is you actually can even still get to like, kind of good business margins on software. It's just not what it was before, because software is a lot cheaper. Now, you know, one part of it that I find to be very interesting about the, the, the, the, you know, the asymptoting to very low and still not zero for, for software, not just because, you know, someone who was a really good developer might, you know, create a whole bunch of open source stuff. And then it might be out there, but actually how you deploy and package and trust and open source packet. Now there's going to be forty open source versions of, you know, uh, Creative Cloud.

• 12:45Speaker 00

  And so like, which ones do you use? They'll have different versions and all the rest, like, there's just that. But it's also, of course, a question of what happens now that software is so easily constructable? You know, does everyone have their own software running the house? For example, I mean, just, there's just all these different expansions. That was meant to be deliberately somewhat trivial, but like, there's just range of possibilities. And that's one of the things that's been exciting me about this. And it's also one of the things that suggests that, you know, part of, part of what people frequently think entrepreneurship is, is I have a eureka, I have a new product idea. And, you know, that's great and important. But then obviously it's eureka, I have a new way of doing product distribution, go to market,

• 13:29Speaker 00

  which is frequently more important when especially there's plentiful products, which is, I think, you know, part of, you know, kind of the internet revolution, the mobile revolution bring up. And then there's the eureka, I have new business model ideas, um, which is the most rare, but when it does hit, it's huge, à la Google AdWords, et cetera, et cetera. And so, so I think this software going to, you know, kind of asymptoting to extremely cheap, I think creates a wide range of additional, you know, kind of, um, not just software products and ranges and new what it could be, but new go to market and new business models. And, and it's across this whole spectrum that I think is really interesting.

• 14:11Speaker 00

  So the, the software is over is the thing that's specifically wrong about that is actually software is amplified in importance and is changing across all these things. It just, the software game has like massively transformed. And that's what I think is most interesting about creating the future.

• 14:31Speaker 01

  And what do you think this does to IP? Like, do IP laws just become unenforceable? Do people try to enforce things even more aggressively because of where we're at? Like, how, how does that change things?

• 14:42Speaker 00

  So IP law is a human construction in order to create the incentive to create investment in IP that ultimately benefits, you know, humanity in society. And, you know, the, the simple definition, which I think we'll probably need to change is we essentially give you a monopoly on something as a first constructor. And, you know, that's, uh, I think still the right thing to do in pharma, because it's so expensive and so important to do. You know, part of the reason why, you know, AI for monus and, you know, it's a, it's, it's creating, you know, kind of monopoly drugs, you know, kind of as, as a way it's operating.

• 15:21Speaker 00

  And so I think there's still some places, but I think there's like, like, like, it'd be interesting to, to think about like, how would you from first principles reinvent, you know, IP law? Now, we've always known that software IP law is amongst the most bizarre. It's like the, well, I have an idea that you can click on something and with one click you can buy it. And that should be patentable. And you're like, what? Like, you know, as a, because it wasn't like, it wasn't that it cost a billion dollars of risky investment in order to do this, which is part of what you're trying to incent, uh, in order to make it happen. And it doesn't mean that there shouldn't be any software IP.

• 16:02Speaker 00

  There's definitely, obviously, you know, one of the places where there's also IP is brand and other kinds of things which are important because it's liquid with my identity and, and building in trust and reliability and, and all of these, these features. So I hedge up my brand. But then the question of like, well, maybe certain kinds of intellectual property construction are, you know, rare and risky and tricky enough that we need to kind of award some protection to doing it. And so, but I think that what it does definitely mean is that the current IP laws around software, which were already pretty mostly, you know, kind of frail and broken,

• 16:42Speaker 00

  are now even more so from a, like, like I, I, uh, trying to patent the action of the software.

• 16:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 16:51Speaker 00

  Versus other things. And it's unclear to me which parts of the actions of the software should actually in fact be patentable.

• 17:00Speaker 00

  In a new thing, I haven't really given much thought, partially because we're terrible at, at, at rethinking from first principles. Like, you know, what should IP law generally speaking be in this case? And it ends up mostly becoming a political fight where, you know, like, for example, software companies say, of course, one click for purchase should be patentable because that adds value to us. And, you know, this is a little bit like, you know, one of the things that I was learning about recently is,

• 17:27Speaker 00

  for a number of years, uh, you know, kind of started in Obama and wiped out by Doge.

• 17:35Speaker 00

  There was a, uh, you know, the IRS sending the tax return to people saying, hey, this is a tax return of, of the data we have on you. Tell us if this is, if there's anything you want to change or anything that's incorrect here. But it means that you don't have to go hire, you know, HR block or TurboTax or all the rest in order to submit it. And it's much easier and da, da, da. And, you know, easier for the person, easier for the government, easier all around. And, you know, Doge got rid of this maybe because of industry pressure. Um, and so therefore is costing the entire society and all those people more. You, you, you want to have that kind of function and feature. And that's part of the reason why you have to be much more careful about like which things you're actually creating IP protection around.

• 18:20Speaker 00

  Because that's the kind of, of, of, of, you know, kind of, uh, free to all society is the kind of thing you want.

• 18:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's interesting when you bring up brand as it relates to IP, because I think some people could argue that brand's going to matter less, because then you can vibe code something over the weekend. Who cares about brand? But I think other people, and I'm, I'm probably in this camp for the moment, are going to argue that brand matters more, because the only thing that's going to matter is trust. And so when you're using AI or when you're deciding what to do, sort of the trust of that brand is going to be huge for security, for fidelity, for sort of all the things that you want. Um, and so I think people will aggressively, um, protect their IP as it relates to brand. But let's go back to the cognitive space. You again, mentioned tutor. And I think a lot of the criticism that people have about AI, they talk about cognitive offloading. They say, oh, you know, you're not going to remember the things that you need to know.

• 19:15Speaker 01

  And people always say, well, you know, the calculator was just like that too. You don't need to, you know, uh, multiply two digit numbers in your head anymore because you have a calculator in front of you. But I want to ask about a different kind of cognitive debt. So recently, a randomized trial of twelve hundred people, and this was out of CMU, Oxford, MIT and UCLA. They found that just ten minutes of AI use eroded people's persistence. So once the AI was removed, people abandoned hard problems twice as often. And the authors called this cognitive debt. And so this is essentially like grit persistence. It's like, I am going to try to solve that problem as hard as I can. Well, now that I've used AI, I am so used to sort of getting a quick fix or a quick answer.

• 19:57Speaker 01

  Or this is what people could posit, that I'm going to quit more quickly. And a lot of people have been talking to this, but this study presented at C O L M this week is the first to establish causation, not just correlation. And so this is if you use AI, you will be less likely to be persistent. And so AI clearly makes people more capable in so many ways, but perhaps it also makes you less persistent. Like, what do you think, you know, obviously we need a lot more studies, but what do you think of that trade off? Does that concern you that you could be more capable, but sort of have less grit?

• 20:32Speaker 00

  Well, as a macro, um, and that my answer will completely not surprise you or probably many of our listeners, which is, look, there might be a challenge here. And if there is a challenge, it's just a question of how we shape AI. So part of the reason why it's worth doing this is say, well, actually, in fact, we should shape AI to be increasing the capability of persistence. So like, for example, you know, how do I learn things, you know, in kind of better ways and so on? Then I get it that they were contrasting the, you know, I'm given a hard problem without AI. And will I stay on it? And if I have a tool, it's kind of like, like, for example, when I only had a bicycle, I might bicycle an hour into town. And now that I have a car, maybe I'm not going to bicycle so much because I'm like, I'm either, I like, and if I don't have my car,

• 21:17Speaker 00

  I'm just not going to go because I'll wait for the car or for a car to be fixed or something else. And that's not necessarily a bad function.

• 21:26Speaker 00

  But what you do want is you want persistence à la, it is so like, for example, I have an amazing tool, the tool's not there, I wait to have the amazing tool to work on it. That's not a problem of persistence. A problem of persistence is I just am not really exercising my brain. I'm not trying to get better. I'm not trying to do it. And so you want that persistence in the use of the tool and generally to be kept high. And I think AI can shape it. The other interesting question about the banning hard problems is part of what intelligence is, is making a, you know, kind of, and this is where prediction is important, is like, well, do I think I can solve this problem?

• 22:08Speaker 00

  So for example, you could spend 10 years like working on a hard problem and getting nowhere. And obviously, maybe there was a chance you could get somewhere and you should have spent it and it was just an acceptable risk. But part of what we learn in wisdom and in judgment is, well, which problem should we actually, in fact, you know, kind of can persist on? Which should we put down and come back to later? Which should we consult someone else on? Which we say, well, that's one's probably just beyond me or beyond us and I'll, I'll see if someone else gets there. And I think that the, you know, and that kind of gets back to, look, AI is a cognitive exoskeleton. And actually, in fact, having that exoskeleton is actually, in fact, generally really good for us.

• 22:53Speaker 00

  And part of exoskeleton, you realize you can do a lot more. And part of it is to like, you know, what I think, you know, mine and yours and all of our team has gotten into is like, oh my gosh, you can do these things. Wow, I can jump faster, I can run faster, I can, you know, did it up mentally. And so I'm now more excited and interested in doing it. It's part of the thing about like AI being a really good tutor is I now want to learn a bunch of things that I wouldn't, I wouldn't, I would, otherwise would have gone, ah, going and learning that thing would have been too hard to do because it's like, oh, you just buy a book and you work your way through the book and you have enough time and you don't really have someone to talk to about it and da, da, da, da. And all of a sudden it's, you know, personalized and you have an infinitely patient tutor to talk to about it and so on.

• 23:35Speaker 00

  So it's not that I don't think there's anything, like, they may well have discovered a real issue. Oh, and then the last point for this is, this is for, it's a little bit like saying, hey, a person's never seen a TV, now they've seen a TV and they're a little bit mesmerized by it. Right? And it's like, okay, so that, that's a known thing. And the question is, obviously, as it gets to, as people grow up with it, there is, what is their persistence going to be? And that's the most important thing. And keeping persistence high mentally learning is a good feature. And that's a feature we should be paying attention to. How do we shape the AI to make it happen?

• 24:17Speaker 01

  It's funny, this is reminding me, and I forget why I heard it recently. It was the, it was a UC Berkeley guy, I think George Danzig in 1939. He was a mathematician in class and I, I mean, it's apocryphal, but it's so fantastic. He came to class late and there was two math problems on the board and he wrote them down in his notebook and, you know, he went home and solved them and then came back into his teacher and said like, ah, so sorry, I was late on the homework. You know, these seemed harder than usual. And his professor was like, homework? Those were two of the famous unsolved math equations that I just wrote on the board. You solved two of them. Because he didn't realize he shouldn't persist. He just thought this was a homework. Of course, this is expected of me.

• 24:57Speaker 01

  And so if, you know, people say like, if we can reverse engineer with AI, a way to increase people's persistence, like, how, you know, how many more mathematicians would we have solving these unsolved problems? So to your point, we just need to be able to tune it so that we can get sort of the persistence and grit that is the optimal amount because there can also be too much. We know people who, who run through walls in a, in a bad way. So.

• 25:21Speaker 00

  Or keep trying to run through walls and never get through it.

• 25:23Speaker 01

  Right. And never actually run through them. Reid, always a pleasure. Thank you so much.

• 25:28Speaker 00

  Yep, likewise. Great to see you. Possible is produced by Palette Media. It's hosted by Ari Finger and me, Reid Hoffman. Our showrunner is Sean Young. Possible is produced by Tanasa Delos, Katie Sanders, Spencer Strasmore, Imo Zoo, Aman Suri, Danny Garrison, Trent Barboza, and Tifadzwa Nima Rundwe.

• 25:47Speaker 01

  Special thanks to Surya Yalimanchili, Sayida Sabieva, Ian Alice, Greg Beato, Parth Patil, and Ben Ralas.