Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:19:25 · G2 Patel
[00:19:25] S0: Years ago I'd had a chance to meet with Ray Kurzweil. He's the chief scientist at Google for a while, and I think he still is. And he had talked about, he was writing this book called Live Long Enough to Live Forever. And so I was talking to him, I'm like, "What is the impact to human population if all of a sudden you can have 15 generations living simultaneously, because we have an indefinite span of life? Because now all of a sudden everything has to change. How does housing work, housing work? How does agriculture work? How does transportation work? How does ... Everything changes?" And he looked at me and he had the most profound answer and he said, "Most people can't think exponentially, because they always think exponentially maybe on a single dimension." But what ends up happening in these things is you can sometimes you have to keep in mind that exponentiality happens across multiple dimensions all at once. So, if you do have an indefinite span of life, you have to assume that humans are creative enough that they're going to find a way to have a three-day crop cycle. And they probably will have 5,000 story skyscrapers, and there will be a bunch of things in society that we have assumed are not solvable that'll now be solvable. So, when you go back to your question and say, what changes in this entire equation that has not been factored in well? I think today AI is looked at largely as a productivity tool and an aggregation mechanism. I have data all over and I'm going to be able to make sure that language can be used to compose the data in a way that I can give you, Lenny, the answer to the question that you're looking for that I think is the 0.0001% of the tip of the iceberg. The reality is, is we will have original insights generated that don't exist in the human corpus of knowledge, and we will have the physical world get augmented to language where capacity is augmented to humans. And what we have to be careful of is that that capacity is working on behalf of humans, but if that capacity is augmented to humans, you can now do things that you really care to do, and not do things that you don't care to do. And so our biggest realization that we had when we were using Codex, for example, when we were writing a code with OpenAI's kind of model and development tool, was the first three months we were screwing around with this.
00:22:05 · G2 Patel
And then there was this light bulb that runoffs. In fact, there was a former deployed engineer from OpenAI that told us about this, which is, "Hey, stop trying to think of this as a tool. Think of this as a teammate that got added to your team, and your framing will change, and the way in which you actually use the technology will change." And that essentially, if you compound that to how society operates, that's going to be pretty profound as an implication, while keeping in mind that these safety and security risks are non-trivial and they're real. And you can't be completely flippant about them, because how an AI identifies its own success and its own ambition will really matter. And we have to make sure that we actually keep guardrails around that, because it is in service of humans, it is not to go out and build a society by itself. And I do think that those are important kind of checks and balances you have to keep in mind. But the thing that people sometimes miss out in this very polarized narrative, which is we are either going to have nothing to do in society, or this is going to be completely useless as a piece of technology. I think that's not a helpful narrative. In fact, what is helpful is saying, "As we reconstruct society for the next phase, how can we make sure that life gets infinitely better? How can we make sure that diseases get solved? How can we make sure that poverty gets eradicated? How can we make sure that how people learn and find excitement and joy out of life gets compounded meaningfully?" If that happens, I think there's goodness that comes out of this.
00:23:55 · Lenny Rachitsky, G2 Patel
[00:23:55] S1: A line that I often think about is, Huang has had this thought that the best case scenario with AI, because he was a very AI doomer for a long time, and I think the reason he got leaned into AI is like, "I need to help steer this in a direction that isn't going to harm the world." The way he described it is, "The best case scenario for humanity is we're the house cat, where AI is just like, 'Okay, nice. Just keep sitting here with me and I'll take care of you.'" [00:24:20] S0: But by the way, the things that he is doing right now are nothing short of extraordinary. And for all the critique that one can have, the level of deep thinking that's going on with his company, it's just crazy. [00:24:36] S1: So, as you've been thinking about where things are heading, I've been liking to ask this question with people with kids, is there anything you're kind of shifting in how you raise your daughter, keeping in mind where things are heading? Are there skills you're trying to instill in her values you're trying to instill in her that will help her thrive in this future?
00:24:56 · G2 Patel
[00:24:56] S0: We made a choice, and I didn't know how that choice was going to go. That was actually not even an active choice, it was a passive choice. Frankly, even might have been slightly intellectually lazy in the way that we did it, but it actually worked out pretty well in the sense that we didn't really deprive her of the use of technology. There's a school of thought that says, "Keep technology away from the kids for a while." We didn't do that. And frankly, I didn't know how it was going to work out, because there are things about the way that the generation is, and by the way, all of us, not just new generation, but this kind of constantly being glued to your phone all the time and not being able to actually put that down and have a conversation. I think it's an important skill in humans to have and preserve over time. And in fact, as AI does more for us, we should be able to have more of this time. I don't have to worry about every notification that's coming on my phone every minute of the day, because maybe I can be more present in the moment that I'm in. She just turned 15 and the night before she was turning 15, what I realized is she is so emotionally mature. We were sitting down one night and she's like, "Hey dad, just so you know, I feel really good right now about having a very strong value system." I'm like, "Oh, okay, what does that mean? And say more." And she's like, "Well, can you name five things that you feel so convicted about that if the entire world disagreed with you," this is the day before she's turning 15, okay? "The entire world disagreed with you. You would still feel like you were right on that and that would waver you." She's like, "I have a certain core set of things that I believe in where I am completely confident that if everyone disagreed with me, I'm still good." Now, by the way, I have to kind of coach her on the, "Hey, when you get new data, be open-minded to changing your mind." But it was actually a very interesting dynamic, which is, if we can have them be exposed to technology but have the right value system, you might actually have the best of both worlds. And the day ain't over yet. She's 15. There's a lot of chances for her getting influenced by external factors and all of that.
00:27:24 · G2 Patel, Lenny Rachitsky
But what you have to do is make sure that you instill the right values, but then also expose them to the reality of what the world is today and not completely insulate them from that. And so, the way that it worked out, it did end up working well, and we were lucky for no credit to us she was able to use technology to get her EQ higher and higher, and we were lucky on that front. And we know it can go sideways the other way too. But I do feel like right now, at least for my one daughter, what we try to do is get her exposed to the technology, but make sure that we focus a lot more on the values that we need to have that govern us on a day-to-day basis. Kindness, not being arrogant, hard work, work ethic, those things matter. And those are timeless in my mind. I don't think those change, because take risks, be creative, that kind of stuff. [00:28:20] S1: Jeetu, these are parenting goals. As I hear this, I have a two and a half year old Ms, it sounds like you've done an amazing job raising your daughter. [00:28:28] S0: I would take zero credit for it. I think she deserves a lot of credit for growing up to be who she's become. And her mother. [00:28:37] S1: Got to shout out mom. What's interesting is that I know Anthropic is really big, this idea of values and just how you operate. Anthropic has this constitution they released of how the values essentially of Claude. And it's so interesting how much similarity there is to how to raise a great person and to how to steer an AI correctly.
00:28:37 · Lenny Rachitsky, G2 Patel
[00:28:37] S1: Got to shout out mom. What's interesting is that I know Anthropic is really big, this idea of values and just how you operate. Anthropic has this constitution they released of how the values essentially of Claude. And it's so interesting how much similarity there is to how to raise a great person and to how to steer an AI correctly. [00:28:58] S0: That's right. And by the way, some of your beliefs and your system around you might change, but values tend to be pretty long lasting. And culture and a company tends to be pretty long lasting. Ben Horowitz talks about this very eloquently. The culture is just a set of norms that accompany action. It's not a set of beliefs, it's a set of behaviors that you exude within the company. And it's actually very, very true, because when things aren't going right, how do people behave to go solve problems and come together? And that actually forms your cultural norms. And I think those cultural norms, it's very important to be intentional about it. And as you have more automation in the world, being intentional not just with humans but also with machines and what you want to do to create the guardrails, I think is pretty important. [00:29:47] S1: I'm going to take us in a different direction. I talked to Aaron Levie, your former boss at Box. [00:29:54] S0: Dear, dear friend.