Uncapped with Jack Altman
· Jack Altman
[00:00:00] S0: I asked Kyle Vogt from Bot Co. I was like, “Will we get to a place where I can just text my robot to order Instacart, get the steak, prepare it, serve it, slice it up, clean it all up?” He’s like, “Yeah, that’ll happen.” At Benchmark, I spend probably three-quarters of my time in software land, but sometimes I do step back and think—and this is maybe a little easier for me when I’m not in San Francisco and I’m touching grass in some other city—”Okay, what’s actually going to raise the standard of living for everybody in the world? We need more and better houses. We need better transportation. We need better food. We need better healthcare. We need good education.” All these things that aren’t software. Sometimes I think about some alien watching us all and we’re just sitting behind our little boxes typing. Everything’s going better in typing land, and it’s all bopping about in software land. But we really do need it to get into the physical world. Because the standard of living, on some level, is all physical.
· Tobi Lutke, Jack Altman
[00:00:00] S1: Absolutely. It completely is. I think this is actually the missing ingredient. People talk about looking at the incredible infrastructure we used to build in the ‘60s, or just even before that. There’s the Hoover Dam and this kind of stuff. Lots of individual stories about these infrastructure projects, how quickly we built subways, and now it takes forever, and so on. There is an observed degradation of a lot of these projects. It’s multifactorial. There’s not one reason behind it. But one of them that really is true is because we are building the modern wonders, which are no less impressive, entirely in software. The web browser, Linux, all these kinds of things are projects at a scale beyond what the pyramids are, and easily so. Without compulsion and just by volunteers, sometimes people who have never met each other in the open source world, or at companies building things like Google or the social networks, they’re incredibly, incredibly impressive pieces. If they had physical manifestations— [00:00:00] S0: They would be the most impressive thing in the world. [00:00:00] S1: You go to something like a refinery and you see the pipes and so on. It’s so impressive. It’s not even in basis points territory in terms of complexity compared to a browser. We just don’t appreciate that. [00:00:00] S0: I don’t think I appreciate a browser. Is a browser near the top of complexity? [00:00:00] S1: I would put it… it’s one of the wonders of the world, for so many reasons. It could never, ever be introduced today.
· Tobi Lutke, Jack Altman
[00:00:00] S1: I would put it… it’s one of the wonders of the world, for so many reasons. It could never, ever be introduced today. [00:00:00] S0: Can you give a small flavor? I’m sure it’s hard to even explain why it’s so complicated, but can you give a flavor of what makes it such an unbelievable thing? [00:00:00] S1: In so many ways. Okay, you go to a website. We don’t trust that website. We just run code. It’s actually your computer in front of you magically reconfiguring itself into someone else’s vision for what should be there, without limits. You download software that then just exists for this one moment to do literally everything. It’s self-responsible. Shopify is an over $100 billion market cap company hosting millions and millions of businesses that might otherwise not exist, and all of this just happened because anyone can just put a server online, and get an IP address automatically. It’s insane. [00:00:00] S0: And it all hangs together. It doesn’t come down. Why doesn’t it all crash?
· Jack Altman, Tobi Lutke
[00:00:00] S0: And it all hangs together. It doesn’t come down. Why doesn’t it all crash? [00:00:00] S1: It’s the most reliable thing. No app store on planet Earth would allow the web browser if it were introduced today, if it didn’t exist. No one would allow this because it sounds like an insane pitch, yet it exists and we just don’t think about it. The font rendering alone is one of the most complex things. The font rendering alone is a Turing-complete system, just because we want to be able to read text slightly better than our displays can allow them. It just keeps going and going. I can go full nerd-core on this, but the larger point is the following. We have not stopped, as humanity, building incredibly impressive infrastructure. What has changed is the infrastructure that needed building over the last 30 years. The reason why other infrastructure didn’t happen is because the people who could— [00:00:00] S0: So much went into this. [00:00:00] S1: What planet Earth needed from us was a digital infrastructure. [00:00:00] S0: But imagine if all those people worked on robotics. [00:00:00] S1: And this is happening now. We are— [00:00:00] S0: This is happening with AI. [00:00:00] S1: It is happening with AI. All the software we built was a bootstrapper for AI. Software becomes, due to this achievement, something that can become personal again. Now you can have basically a web browser, but the websites don’t even need to exist for what you would like to see.
· Tobi Lutke, Jack Altman
[00:00:00] S1: It is happening with AI. All the software we built was a bootstrapper for AI. Software becomes, due to this achievement, something that can become personal again. Now you can have basically a web browser, but the websites don’t even need to exist for what you would like to see. [00:00:00] S0: It’s so true when you say it like that. The easiest example to identify with for most of us is probably an iPhone. We’ve probably all just, randomly one day, looked at our iPhone and been like, “How is this possible? How does this thing exist?” It’s crazy. [00:00:00] S1: As beautiful as it is, and as reliable as it is, and as personal as it is. The iPhone is a lucky exception in that you can appreciate it as a physical thing. Everyone is right when they say, “Why is everything just standing still or not getting better around me?” Because from our ability to observe it, all the infrastructure is digital. But we are almost done with this. We are at the end of the opening chapters. Now I think we will see vastly more impact in the real world. [00:00:00] S0: We put all of our energy against this thing because it was the foundation, but now all these people will, in some sense, be free to not write software. [00:00:00] S1: That’s exactly right. So I think we will have a huge influx of the brightest and most creative and driven people to make things which are going to be much easier to relate to and have much more direct impact on people’s lives.
· Tobi Lutke, Jack Altman
[00:00:00] S1: That’s exactly right. So I think we will have a huge influx of the brightest and most creative and driven people to make things which are going to be much easier to relate to and have much more direct impact on people’s lives. [00:00:00] S0: How important is it for you, as CEO of Shopify, to have an opinion on where AI will be in two years? There’s one worldview you could take, which is, “This is so unpredictable. I’m going to take it as it comes. I’m going to try to know six months ahead, but I’m going to do what I can do.” And then there would be another which is, “Now I’m actually going to spend a lot of time with the labs, and I’m going to try to have an understanding of two, three years out and try to care about the farthest out I can see.” What do you think is the right position? [00:00:00] S1: Yeah, if my friends would listen to this question, they would laugh, just because it’s my predominant obsession. I try to have as many data points on as many people, which I can then try to match to the right superlinear or sublinear curves, and just figure out how they all connect and what therefore will happen in the future. To me it’s the most fun game in the world: to have a pretty clear-eyed view of what the future is like. [00:00:00] S0: What in particular are you trying to figure out?