Uncapped with Jack Altman
· Harj Taggar, Garry Tan, Jack Altman
[00:00:00] S2: We have 26-year-olds. [00:00:00] S3: We started with going back to colleges. This was kind of driven by them though. I think big tech stopped hiring and simultaneously to that, there’s a real vibe inside the batch sometimes among the young founders that this is the last time to participate in capitalism. I definitely don’t think so, but it’s a powerful idea. [00:00:00] S0: I think a lot of people feel that way. [00:00:00] S3: Why is that? [00:00:00] S0: I think there are a lot of people who feel like, if AI is going to stay on this trend, what are we possibly going to be better at? So I’ve got to do it while I’m still better at something. [00:00:00] S3: I feel like that is so shortsighted. It’s unbelievable. Ryan Petersen always talks about this. Don’t you think that human capacity for desire is virtually unlimited? We have a god-shaped hole in our heart. We’re just going to want more and more stuff. The thing is, we can do it now. I was just thinking about that turn of phrase. I’m sure you’ve been in business meetings or making decisions about products where it’s “whoa, let’s not boil the ocean now.” I love that turn of phrase. I’ve said it a lot. I’ve used it to justify not doing things. But in the age of intelligence, why not? [00:00:00] S0: You can just do things.
· Jack Altman, Garry Tan
[00:00:00] S0: You can just do things. [00:00:00] S3: Maybe not boil the ocean, but let’s boil a few lakes. Why not? Actually, this is the moment. When you connect that to what Ryan says, that’s what that would look like. If you’re an investment firm and you beat the market, you have 20% net IRR back to back, what does this stuff mean? Does that mean you fire all your analysts and have the AI do it, and this one person who runs the firm makes all the money? Why would you do that? Because your competitor isn’t going to do that. Your competitor is going to say, “You know what, we have AI now. I want 50% IRR.” [00:00:00] S0: That’s the thing I have not understood about the “we won’t need capital” argument. Why would you only want five engineers if your competitor has 50? Unless they can’t do anything productive with all the agents, it doesn’t make any sense to me. [00:00:00] S3: Let’s boil a few lakes first and then we can boil the ocean. I’m not serious about that, obviously there are limitations to it. But the invective against AI, this idea that society is going to fall apart, is so extreme that we need some alternative turn of phrase, other than apocalypse, for this.
· Garry Tan, Jack Altman, Harj Taggar
[00:00:00] S3: Let’s boil a few lakes first and then we can boil the ocean. I’m not serious about that, obviously there are limitations to it. But the invective against AI, this idea that society is going to fall apart, is so extreme that we need some alternative turn of phrase, other than apocalypse, for this. [00:00:00] S0: Totally. It’s been a weird thing watching the efforts to both manage and also impact societal understanding of what AI is. I feel there is still a lot of fear embedded. Outside of San Francisco, you go to other places in the country… I’m from St. Louis. I don’t think everybody trusts AI fully. Whether that’s right or wrong, I do think it’s important to get out of our bubble sometimes just to know where the world is at a bit more. [00:00:00] S3: That’s for real. [00:00:00] S2: It’s interesting though. It feels different this time because clearly in our little bubble here, everyone is all pro-AI. On the other extreme, I have immigrant parents who don’t speak great English. My mom is totally into ChatGPT because now she can do all this stuff. She can send letters and reply to people in a way that’s super empowering for her. It’s the middle, the people who are threatened by it. Is AI going to take my job? Has it really been a threat to knowledge work or white-collar people? I feel like the people who aren’t early adopters — who usually tend to get on the train immediately after the San Francisco train takes off — are now resistant to it. It’s sort of bypassed them and gone to the other end.
· Harj Taggar, Garry Tan, Jack Altman
[00:00:00] S2: It’s interesting though. It feels different this time because clearly in our little bubble here, everyone is all pro-AI. On the other extreme, I have immigrant parents who don’t speak great English. My mom is totally into ChatGPT because now she can do all this stuff. She can send letters and reply to people in a way that’s super empowering for her. It’s the middle, the people who are threatened by it. Is AI going to take my job? Has it really been a threat to knowledge work or white-collar people? I feel like the people who aren’t early adopters — who usually tend to get on the train immediately after the San Francisco train takes off — are now resistant to it. It’s sort of bypassed them and gone to the other end. [00:00:00] S3: I sympathize with that. As labor that became management and capital, I totally feel that. I think it is actually about, in the Marxist sense, where you fit in there. My argument would be that it has been way more important to become a founder — which is management that becomes capital — now than ever. It’s way more possible. That fear that workers have about what is going to happen is something that management and capital has to take responsibility for. [00:00:00] S0: It’s serious. I think so too. It’s very easy to be like, “In the arc of history, there’s always new technology and people find new jobs.” Well yeah, but there’s a lot of structural unemployment that happens in the middle of that, and that’s real.
· Jack Altman, Garry Tan
[00:00:00] S0: It’s serious. I think so too. It’s very easy to be like, “In the arc of history, there’s always new technology and people find new jobs.” Well yeah, but there’s a lot of structural unemployment that happens in the middle of that, and that’s real. [00:00:00] S3: But that unemployment only happens in zero-sum games. It happens in a case where my company does X, makes widgets that will never change, never get better. Some of it exists in the context of no competition. One of the things we learned from hard tech companies, for instance, is that it’s impossible to get a certain block of metal. You have to get it fabricated or smelted in China. America’s lost the ability to do it. When you have a market so broken that you can’t get it inside America, how did this happen? I would go back to capital and management and say, “this is a lack of fucking imagination. We’re not here to just shave off one or two percent every single year and increase net profit and that’s it.” We need to think way more about how to use this technology to radically change how businesses work, what products are. How much better they could be?
· Garry Tan, Jack Altman
[00:00:00] S3: But that unemployment only happens in zero-sum games. It happens in a case where my company does X, makes widgets that will never change, never get better. Some of it exists in the context of no competition. One of the things we learned from hard tech companies, for instance, is that it’s impossible to get a certain block of metal. You have to get it fabricated or smelted in China. America’s lost the ability to do it. When you have a market so broken that you can’t get it inside America, how did this happen? I would go back to capital and management and say, “this is a lack of fucking imagination. We’re not here to just shave off one or two percent every single year and increase net profit and that’s it.” We need to think way more about how to use this technology to radically change how businesses work, what products are. How much better they could be? [00:00:00] S0: I completely agree. I think if capital and management don’t take some responsibility there, it’s not just unemployment, there’s reduced employment. There’s the whole world getting more expensive. Home prices are going up while there might be pressure on wages because you can do more cheaply with AI. So you have inflation happening alongside wage pressure at the same time. I do think it’s a more real thing than our echo chamber wants to… Again, I’m totally for it too, but I think it’s an important thing.