Y Combinator Startup Podcast
00:35:44 · Paul Graham, Amjad Masad
[00:35:44] S1: But Okay. Yeah. Black shirt, the bald Me sitting there like, oh, no. What's happened to my beloved programming? And you're like, I already knew. I've thought... I've been thinking about this for years, mister Bond. [00:35:57] S0: I I do I do think I have an ability to kill the sacred cow in a way. I think I've always had this sort of when computers got really good at something, like, all right, it's done. Let's move to the next thing. I'm not so tied to what I do. I'm fine with throwing away things and starting over. In my career, I've started over many times. And so [00:36:27] S1: I remember you were always rewriting things within rep Yeah. [00:36:29] S0: Rewriting things. And so... But I think most people, they just like... They're sort of rigid about, this is my identity, this is what I do. I mean, they should read, keep your identity small, one of your essays. But I think this moment requires a ton of adaptability. A lot of people ask me, oh, how do you raise children and what do you teach them? And it feels like the main thing What do you teach [00:36:57] S1: them about AI? [00:36:58] S0: Is like flexibility and adaptability and like being a lifelong learner.
00:36:58 · Amjad Masad, Paul Graham
[00:36:58] S0: Is like flexibility and adaptability and like being a lifelong learner. [00:37:03] S1: What I tell them is that if you have this tidal wave approaching the beach, the safest place to be is surfing on it, not standing on the beach holding onto a palm tree. It'll just get washed away. And so that's what your users are doing. Right. Your users, like, to the extent anybody can see the future and be protected against bad things happening, your users are it because they're all using AI. Like, if you want to use AI, you like, Replit is the way to use it, right? And using it is the best way not to be squashed by it. [00:37:37] S0: Right. And this is why we feel our mission is, there's like a moral angle to it almost where you want to help these companies transform. [00:37:46] S1: Get those people off the beach and get them all on the surfboard. [00:37:50] S0: That's right, exactly. Exactly. We did this hackathon with a very large telecommunication company, and they did this thing where they did a survey before they used Replit, and a survey after they used Replit. And the survey asked them like, How anxious are you about AI? How worried? And so on. And so pre using Replit, just for like an hour, like 80% were anxious and were worried about their jobs or whatever. And after they used Replit, it flipped. Like 80% were optimistic and 20% were something. [00:38:23] S1: For one hour?
00:38:23 · Paul Graham, Amjad Masad
[00:38:23] S1: For one hour? [00:38:24] S0: One hour, yeah. And I think people in Silicon Valley constantly underestimate how the rest of the world have not experienced what we've experienced just yet. They're just going to take a long time [00:38:39] S1: for Because things are moving so fast. [00:38:42] S0: Right? Things are moving so fast here. Well, no. [00:38:45] S1: But that's what I'm saying. If they're just two years behind, that's forever behind. [00:38:48] S0: Right? Because two [00:38:49] S1: years ago, Vibe coding didn't exist. [00:38:51] S0: Yeah. I mean, most banks are using, like, ChatGPT, like, twenty twenty three, basically. Like, the thing that is rolled out in most banks... Like, other than engineering, I think, in the, like Like, [00:39:02] S1: ChatGPT three or something like that. [00:39:03] S0: It's just an LLM. It's, like, barely connected to anything, so it's not that useful. And so, like, there's, like, a real lag of of... For, like, how... What people what people use. And, like, Silicon Valley already, like, went to, like, you know, these agents that are doing things for you. But most companies are still kind of trying to figure out what to do with all the sort of legacy software that they have that they want to rewrite and so on. [00:39:31] S1: And they have to. They have to. They can't just ignore it. Yeah. Right? That's landscape. That's the software landscape within the company. Maybe all this COBOL code will finally get rewritten. [00:39:41] S0: It is starting to get rewritten then. Really?
00:39:41 · Amjad Masad, Paul Graham
[00:39:41] S0: It is starting to get rewritten then. Really? [00:39:43] S1: Yes. The COBOL's finally going away. COBOL would eat up a lot of tokens. That is not very powerful. [00:39:49] S0: Early on in our AI journey, a lot of companies would be like, oh, this Replit thing is cool, but why don't you use it and come rewrite on a COBOL? I was like, we're not gonna write your code for you. We'll teach you how to use this thing. But now there's a bunch of AI companies that do that. [00:40:03] S1: That will come and rewrite your COBOL. Yeah. So there is one last question I want to ask you. This whole Replit, for its entire history, the reason it has worked is because you're living in the future to such an extent. Like, you personally, right, are living in the future. How do you do that? Why are you living in the future? [00:40:27] S0: Yeah. I mean, I I sort of started answering some version of that early on in our conversation. And I was saying... And and you had a good point that it's not just about sitting and and thinking about it, but I think a component of it at least is that I actively try to predict things, and I actively revise my predictions and look at them. And I think it's a skill you can get good at. And there are some sort of principles that you can follow. Early on, I I read Ray Kurzweil. Ray Kurzweil's whole thing is if you look at... If you chart, like, log linear chart of, like, old compute flops in the world, it's this, like, freaking straight line. And, actually, AI didn't bend it,
00:40:27 · Amjad Masad, Paul Graham
[00:40:27] S0: Yeah. I mean, I I sort of started answering some version of that early on in our conversation. And I was saying... And and you had a good point that it's not just about sitting and and thinking about it, but I think a component of it at least is that I actively try to predict things, and I actively revise my predictions and look at them. And I think it's a skill you can get good at. And there are some sort of principles that you can follow. Early on, I I read Ray Kurzweil. Ray Kurzweil's whole thing is if you look at... If you chart, like, log linear chart of, like, old compute flops in the world, it's this, like, freaking straight line. And, actually, AI didn't bend it, [00:41:11] S1: which is Interesting. It's still a straight line. It needed AI to happen. [00:41:15] S0: It needed AI to happen. It's almost a religious sort of thing. It's like, it'll happen anyways. Yeah. I saw someone tweet this. He said, It's not that AI brought on the compute, the compute brought on AI. That's true. Which is a fascinating thing. Deep learning would not have happened without the compute. [00:41:35] S1: Everybody thought neural networks didn't work. Back in the '80s, that was the thing about neural networks, they didn't work. But it turns out if you give them 10,000,000,000 times as much resources, then they start to work. [00:41:45] S0: Who knew? So that line, there's a lot of predictions you can make by truly understanding a line. More broadly, is
00:41:45 · Amjad Masad, Paul Graham
[00:41:45] S0: Who knew? So that line, there's a lot of predictions you can make by truly understanding a line. More broadly, is [00:41:54] S1: Okay, so the reason you're so good at living in the future is because you have normalized that line. You assume that you're not living in a static world. In fact, that you're living in an exponential world. [00:42:05] S0: Yes, exponential world, and a lot of what you talk about in your essays is understanding the exponential. And I think once you truly understand the exponential, like you can look at an LLM. I can look at GPT-2 and extrapolate a lot better than than most people and just say, I I imagine chats, I imagine agents, I imagine personal assistant, all of that back in 2018 when I first saw GPT-2. So I think... But you just have to, like, believe, and you have to... Because most people have, like, this... Almost like, you know, this suspension of disbelief, like, suspension of... Like, you you have to actually believe... You have to truly embrace that and go against your instinct to... Because I think there's a human instinct, ah, there's all these reasons why this would not work and all [00:42:55] S1: these Well, implicitly treat things as static. Yeah. And the difference with you is that your default assumption is that things will change exponentially. That's what's unusual about