00:25:20 · Amjad Masad
[00:25:20] S0: Yeah, but then we a plateau, and the plateau for a bunch of reasons. One is there wasn't a lot of data left in the world. Another is the training infrastructure got a little too complicated for growing these models a lot more. And so we entered the sort of RL and thinking era. So like, say, 2024, 'twenty five, starting with one and deep seq and all that, you had this moment of time where the training regime changed and we entered this moment of you're doing reinforcement learning and these models are getting more autonomous because not only the raw intelligence is improving, but they're staying coherent longer over time. I think the big unlock that happened just in late December, November, December, I think the coherence just became almost indefinite. Interesting. Like, Agent three was kind of the most autonomous agent in September 2025, and we struggled to make it run for an hour. Right now, if you have enough evaluation in the middle, if you have computer use or unit tests or whatever, really the models can run indefinitely. The other thing is models also gained some self consciousness almost. I think that's too much of a loaded word, but they started training on their own context window. So they actually also got really good at compression and really good at taking context and storing it into files and being able to search across these files and recollect the contacts based on the next tasks that you're going to do. And all these things culminating together created these different models. The other big thing, at least this is the rumor, is that it looks like the big labs have figured out how to scale pre training again. So I think we're gonna enter another phase of scaling where we're gonna see bigger and bigger models. So Opus is like a really big model, and I think they're gonna get even bigger. And I think the reason token prices are not going down is because the models are getting bigger. But it's sort of ebbs and flows and easy to understand what stage we're sort of in. So I expect the raw capabilities to continue improving in the near future. That being said, I still feel that there's a lot of white space between the AGI providers and what the users want. And the kind of thing that is actually fun and exciting to use, that doesn't change. 100%. That's human, and humans don't change all that much. We're visual creatures.
00:28:06 · Amjad Masad, Aditya Agarwal, Ruchi Sanghvi
We always want to have visual feedback as opposed to just pure terminal. [00:28:12] S2: Yeah, no, I strongly agree. And I think that if you take the other side of that, if you're the kind of founder who believes that in an AGI world there will not be that much for humans to do, well then my real question is why are you starting a company, right? [00:28:25] S0: Yeah, go shopping. [00:28:29] S2: Go learn how to certify, I guess. [00:28:33] S3: That's what I'm doing. So you could believe that. Okay. [00:28:36] S2: Perhaps Ruchi should we move on to company building beliefs? [00:28:39] S3: Yeah. I mean, Replit has a pretty fascinating internal company culture. Like, how many of you have heard about it? Come on, guys. Well, this is your opportunity to learn. So one of Replit's core values is seek pain. I cannot imagine putting up on my walls, seek pain. But where does that come from? And do you scare people away?
00:29:06 · Haya Odeh, Amjad Masad
[00:29:06] S1: Yeah. So I'm gonna answer because this is mine, actually. I created it. Seek pain comes from curiosity when something is working or not working, and going deep, deep, and trying to understand what the hell is going on. It's really difficult to de attach yourself from the work and not feel that it's personal. It's not personal. It's not about you. It's just work. And this is very difficult for people to go to users or go to actually people and ask them, Hey, can you use this thing? Or like, Can you let me know what, like, can you tell me how does this feel to you? And they tell you it suck. And like, you don't feel, you know, like you're now demotivated. So it's such a skill to master that skill. So it's just like learning that, right? So, and then like there's the growth into it, and there's like a lot in seek pain, seek pain in hard conversations, seek pain in understanding like what's going on in the product, seek pain is how can I get better in X, Y, Z? So all of that is a principle that I take to heart, and I wanted to bring it to Replit. And every time someone is shipping something and they're celebrating, and it feels like a bubble that they're celebrating something and they're saying, oh, this is working, yay. And I'm like, can you tell me what's not working? [00:30:37] S0: So anytime everyone's celebrating in the company, Haya will be like, why are you happy? What sucks about this? [00:30:43] S1: What sucks? Can someone tell me what suck about it? Because if I know, I would be like more fulfilled, to
00:30:43 · Haya Odeh, Aditya Agarwal, Ruchi Sanghvi, Amjad Masad
[00:30:43] S1: What sucks? Can someone tell me what suck about it? Because if I know, I would be like more fulfilled, to [00:30:50] S2: be honest. I mean, Ruchi, you say you don't wanna put this on the wall, but that describes you completely. It does. Like every time we have a victory lap about SPC, you kinda smack me down with this 10 things that are not yet great about it. Or mean, you could be better. Could be better, exactly. [00:31:05] S3: You could [00:31:05] S1: be better. Can I add another layer into it? Please. It comes also from like discipline in the army. It's like when you are operating as a soldier, it's very important to just like keep going and showing up every single day. And like sometimes, feelings has its own time, but sometimes you just need to do what it needs to be It's really, [00:31:29] S3: yep. [00:31:30] S0: Counterintuitively seeking pain reduces pain because I think most companies delay pain and that accumulates over time, like a pivot that is really hard or conversation or firing someone that, yeah, firing someone was always painful and most people delay it and becomes more painful over time. And so I think it actually over the long term just reduces pain. [00:31:57] S3: So one other thing, and this is especially relevant for our founders here, that in the early days, Replit hired from hackathons, very niche communities, indie game worlds. Where do you think elite talent still hides? [00:32:13] S0: That's it. I mean, Haya mentioned the Army. Actually, a lot of our salespeople are like Marines and all sorts of
00:32:13 · Amjad Masad, Ruchi Sanghvi, Haya Odeh, Aditya Agarwal
[00:32:13] S0: That's it. I mean, Haya mentioned the Army. Actually, a lot of our salespeople are like Marines and all sorts of [00:32:21] S3: I'm mostly asking this because it's really difficult to hire people. And usually people tend to ignore these areas for recruiting. So army is one. [00:32:29] S0: If I'm being honest, that awkward young sort of engineer, a lot of companies still overlook them. And now there's this mindset around new grads that you don't need them or you don't want them. And I think there's a lot of amazing new grads that are coming up right now that there isn't a lot of demand on them. So I think you can find a lot of young people. I think it keep changes. It's sort of like Moneyball. If you haven't watched this movie, it's about a baseball team that assembles the weirdest people that have some kind of value, but they're not in demand in the market. So every moment of time sort of changes. I do think that it's shifting to... There's so much doom and gloom about younger new grads, new talents that I think is probably a good place to go look. [00:33:22] S1: So when Aditya came to Replit to speak, I wish you were there, he spoke about hunger. Like people needs to be really hungry all the time to fit in the culture. That stuck with me so much. So I was like, how can we create principles when we are interviewing people? Because I'm still in the top [00:33:43] S2: of the
00:33:43 · Aditya Agarwal, Haya Odeh, Amjad Masad, Ruchi Sanghvi
[00:33:43] S2: of the [00:33:43] S1: funnel when a designer, we're interviewing them, they meet me first, right? Because I'm the most opinionated person. So where do we find them? They must use Replit. They are from the Replit community and they need to be hungry. [00:34:02] S2: Hungry. [00:34:03] S1: And when I like, okay, how do you measure hunger? And I'm like, okay, I kept thinking about that. It's like, do they have site projects? Are they actually opinionated about this AI world? Do they wanna add impact in Replit? So that's a venue that we, and hackathons that we are partnered with hackathons. So we like, oh, this is a really cool project. You should come join Replit. [00:34:29] S2: Yeah. I mean, for what it's worth, my take is if you're trying to hire an engineer today for your startup and that person cannot immediately pull up 10 things that they have built over the last just two weeks for their personal life to optimize stuff, to look up. It would be insane if you haven't done that. That demonstrates a fundamental lack of either hunger or curiosity, both of which [00:34:51] S0: are just critical to, I think, early stage engineers. Here's a sort of a mispriced asset right now. Silicon Valley always sort of looked down on consultants. Actually think consultants probably are very well set up for the AI age because I think AI benefits the journalists and who's the ultimate journalist is sort of like the consultant types. [00:35:17] S3: I'm skeptical, but [00:35:20] S2: what happens think next you're gonna say MBAs, okay. [00:35:23] S0: Well, I mean, maybe MBAs too.