Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:38:55 · Anish Acharya, Lenny Rachitsky
So, I really think that we have the makings of a sort of dramatically happier, more fulfilled, more productive society, and yet we're here talking about permanent underclass. [00:39:05] S0: I love all of that, that all feels so right. It's so hard to really believe that. But if you actually look at how things have gone so far with the rise of AI, unemployment's down, people are making a lot of money. Obviously a lot of people are struggling, there's a lot of downsides, data centers causing problems for people, things like that. A lot of issues, but it feels like as an economy and as a country feels like things are going well so far. They just almost cured some kind of cancer the other day.
00:39:05 · Lenny Rachitsky, Anish Acharya
[00:39:05] S0: I love all of that, that all feels so right. It's so hard to really believe that. But if you actually look at how things have gone so far with the rise of AI, unemployment's down, people are making a lot of money. Obviously a lot of people are struggling, there's a lot of downsides, data centers causing problems for people, things like that. A lot of issues, but it feels like as an economy and as a country feels like things are going well so far. They just almost cured some kind of cancer the other day. [00:39:33] S1: Yeah, you're right. Moderna just did. I mean, the fact that Dario can write a blog post and say, "What happens when we cure every disease?" And then we debate it as a serious topic, what world are we living in here? I also think that we're collectively worried always, these abstractions, the world, the average worker, the middle manager, the person who lives in the vicinity of a data center, these are abstractions, but our actual lives seem like they're getting more fulfilled, we're more capable, we're more empowered. So, I think that's also something that the revealed preferences tend to show how people are experiencing it individually, and the stated preferences tend to show how people are sort of observing it or believe it's playing out societally. If you ask people if they want a data center in their neighborhood, most will say no, but if you ask them if they use ChatGPT today, most people will say yes. So, that's kind of the dissonance.
00:39:33 · Anish Acharya, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:39:33] S1: Yeah, you're right. Moderna just did. I mean, the fact that Dario can write a blog post and say, "What happens when we cure every disease?" And then we debate it as a serious topic, what world are we living in here? I also think that we're collectively worried always, these abstractions, the world, the average worker, the middle manager, the person who lives in the vicinity of a data center, these are abstractions, but our actual lives seem like they're getting more fulfilled, we're more capable, we're more empowered. So, I think that's also something that the revealed preferences tend to show how people are experiencing it individually, and the stated preferences tend to show how people are sort of observing it or believe it's playing out societally. If you ask people if they want a data center in their neighborhood, most will say no, but if you ask them if they use ChatGPT today, most people will say yes. So, that's kind of the dissonance. [00:40:26] S0: The obvious issue is just the PR around AI has not been great. There's a lot of fearmongering. Thoughts on that, what's going on there? Do you think that'll change?
00:40:34 · Anish Acharya
[00:40:34] S1: The most important thing that we can do with AI to change the kind of conversation around it is make important things cheap. There's two things that are extraordinarily important in America that have only gotten more expensive, healthcare and education. If you look at healthcare, 45% is administrative. So, if you take a lot of that administrative burden out, you can actually see deflationary healthcare costs, also things like curing every disease. That sounds awesome. GLP-1s, also obviously not an AI thing but I think is a reason to be optimistic about deflationary health costs. And then, education as well. I think education now has the strongest form of competition, sort of traditional education that it's had in 200 years. And I think it's going to be very, very good to kind of unbundle learning from institutions. And also by the way, status from credentials. You don't need a Harvard degree, you just need to get, and that's pretty cool. I mean, without commenting on OpenAI specifically, I think that maybe I'm a little skeptical on some of these things where I think the aura that Anthropic got from having a model that was too dangerous to release was extraordinary. And maybe they had a GPU shortage. Now, maybe the capabilities were more advanced than they actually wanted. Maybe they actually wanted to keep that proprietary model internal to extend their own lead. So, I think there's a lot of sort of confounding factors that would cause you to pull back a little bit. Look, I do take the points about offensive cyber seriously, which is we should harden all of our systems before we make them trivial to penetrate. But I think the sort of concept of the model that's too dangerous to release, it kind of conflates marketing, inference capacity, and then also economic considerations like do you want to externalize your competitive advantage or use it to make yourself better?
00:44:06 · Lenny Rachitsky, Anish Acharya
[00:44:06] S0: Yeah, I always think about that when I have folks from Anthropic and OpenAI on the podcast, just how an advantage they have when they have the best model- [00:44:14] S1: It's crazy. [00:44:15] S0: It's crazy, right? Just that's a loop right there is just have the best model for longer and they can move so much faster. [00:44:20] S1: It's crazy though, to take the other side for a moment, it felt like Anthropic was unassailable and now OpenAI's had an amazing six months, and open weights are also ripping. So, despite the sort of scary concept of this supremely intelligent model that's totally proprietary to one company, so far the kind of industry trends haven't played that way at all. [00:44:41] S0: Yeah. Grok Bot just came out of nowhere and is now the most amazing AI kind of assistant tool. I'm just hooked on it. [00:44:48] S1: Oh, man. I mean, we should talk about the personal agents thing. Actually, the three big products that I love here, Grok Bot's totally nailed it, and also the model underneath it is awesome. They came out of, you're right, out of left field. And that's I know a lot of the good work the Cursor team did. I think ChatGPT Work, it's kind of buried in the UI but it's really, really good. It's one of the best products they've released. And then there's a startup that's really getting some buzz called Instinct, which has made some more aggressive and interesting trade-offs, but all in the same domain.
00:44:48 · Anish Acharya, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:44:48] S1: Oh, man. I mean, we should talk about the personal agents thing. Actually, the three big products that I love here, Grok Bot's totally nailed it, and also the model underneath it is awesome. They came out of, you're right, out of left field. And that's I know a lot of the good work the Cursor team did. I think ChatGPT Work, it's kind of buried in the UI but it's really, really good. It's one of the best products they've released. And then there's a startup that's really getting some buzz called Instinct, which has made some more aggressive and interesting trade-offs, but all in the same domain. [00:45:17] S0: That's amazing. I don't know if it was a strategy for someone tweeting this vague tweet about how awesome it is and everyone's like, "What the hell are you talking about?" That was really effective, because I was like, "How do I get that?" [00:45:29] S1: [inaudible 00:45:29] [00:45:29] S0: ChatGPT Work, the episode that will come out right before this is the PM in charge of that, Tara. [00:45:36] S1: Oh, really? [00:45:36] S0: Yeah. [00:45:37] S1: Oh man, they did such a good job on it. I don't know how much you use it, but it's really well done. [00:45:44] S0: What is better than Cowork there? Is it that it runs in the cloud? Is that the big differentiator?