Uncapped with Jack Altman
· Jack Altman, Bret Taylor
[00:00:00] S0: It’s interesting because you have software engineers on one end and then somebody who’s in some part of the country where AI has not yet gotten its tentacles fully extended into. There’s a wide gap in people’s current comprehension of what AI’s going to do. It’s a little bit unknown. There are a lot of blog posts going on right now that are breathlessly saying it’s all over. I’m probably more in the camp of, maybe software is solved? I don’t know if it’s that. But I’m curious if you have a view on whether Codex and Claude Code, the latest in coding, is going to change the way companies are built? Here’s one easy straw man question there. People, like my brother, have been claiming there’s going to be these 10-person billion-dollar companies. Are we at the precipice of that? Does that make sense? Are there other changes? What’s going to happen now? [00:00:00] S1: There probably will be a 10-person billion-dollar company, but I don’t necessarily think it’ll be the norm. The reason for that is competition. If you imagine the mobile phone market in the United States, there are three main competitors: Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile. They’re all competing for a fixed pie of mobile subscribers. It’s why it’s extremely competitive. There’s promotions, there’s ads. [00:00:00] S0: They can’t make more of us.
· Jack Altman, Bret Taylor
[00:00:00] S0: They can’t make more of us. [00:00:00] S1: They can’t make more of us. They can build up their network, they can do pricing and packaging. It’s a really complex business to run. All of them have access to AI, every single one. So the idea that you could deploy AI and not have to do things that you’re currently doing because of AI is probably true. But if any one of them figures out a way to use a person to gain market share against the other one, they’re going to do it. As a response, their competitors will do it too. We spoke about this earlier. It’s the reason why when automated teller machines were introduced to banks, the teller job went away, but there are no fewer bank branches and no fewer people in those bank branches. Because JPMC or someone figured out, “Hey, if we put financial advisors in there and other things, we can actually make more revenue per branch.” My personal take is that in a competitive market—and that’s the key, you need competition so people can’t just pass the cost savings onto shareholders or dividends—the second-order effect of the efficiencies of AI will be investment to compete, lower prices or customer acquisition or whatever it might be. [00:00:00] S0: We won’t have fewer engineers per company. They’ll just be way more productive, so you end up with way better software.
· Jack Altman, Bret Taylor
[00:00:00] S0: We won’t have fewer engineers per company. They’ll just be way more productive, so you end up with way better software. [00:00:00] S1: Or you might have fewer engineers and more of something else. Or you might have more engineers, I’m not sure. But the idea that it’ll be what it is today but just more efficient, I think that’s a lack of imagination, in my opinion. The interesting thing though is that software engineering does feel special. I think people extrapolating too much from software engineering are being a bit simplistic. [00:00:00] S0: You’re saying the same thing might not happen to every other function. [00:00:00] S1: I’ll be really simple about it. Finance and software engineering might be limited by intelligence, meaning they’re largely digital. They’re largely manipulating digital things. You could imagine AI automating that. Most of the economy isn’t exclusively digital. If you need to ship a t-shirt from Vietnam to here, you could automate some of that stuff, but at the end of the day, that cargo ship still needs to be in the water. Imagine you run a pharmaceutical company. You can think about how to make a therapy, but you probably need a wet lab. That intersects the real world. Maybe you could do robotics. But then you need a clinical trial. A lot of the economy is real. It definitely will change the way companies are built, but I think when people say everything will be 10 people, billion dollars— [00:00:00] S0: It’s maybe just the stuff that lives in bits.
· Jack Altman, Bret Taylor
[00:00:00] S0: It’s maybe just the stuff that lives in bits. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah, that’s right. Which is a lot of the economy, but not the economy. [00:00:00] S0: It’s easy to talk about this, but you’re right. If you just move around the physical world and you get off of this podcast and this computer and into the world, there’s trucks moving dirt around and people who need a building that has lights in it. There’s a lot of physical things. I tend to think the value of that stuff’s all going to go up until maybe robots happen. But in general, I think the value of bits goes down, the value of stuff goes up. [00:00:00] S1: I think you’re probably right. Robotics will have a big impact as well. But I think people are thinking about this a bit simplistically. Intelligence is clearly on the cusp of going up exponentially, but it doesn’t mean adoption of that can be absorbed by the economy perfectly exponentially. I just think people are being a little bit simplistic. [00:00:00] S0: Do you think there are any cognitive things that are immune from intelligence? Dylan Field, when he was on this podcast, gave the example of “Brat Summer“ as something where he was just like, “That would’ve been such an insanely hard call for an AI to make. You needed so much context and taste and opinion.” Where my head was going is, with coding, whatever’s happening there is happening. But what about brand or storytelling? I’m asking you this both as an operator and as somebody who’s very deep with OpenAI. Do you think that these other parts of intelligence also go the way of AI?
· Bret Taylor, Jack Altman
[00:00:00] S1: I don’t know if taste is necessarily related to intelligence. It might be. I’ve got three kids, including a 16-year-old and a 15-year-old. When they decide what they’re going to wear to school, I don’t think they would consider ChatGPT’s opinion. They care more about what the person in class next to them is wearing. Similarly, if you go to the most elite, competitive college preparatory school, or the worst school in the world, there’s always going to be the smart kid in class and the dumb kid in class, the strong kid and the fast kid, and all these other things. It’s all relative and it’s all very local and it’s all very human. The idea that because AI is smart, it takes something away from us as humans, I don’t necessarily subscribe to that. You see these things that go around online where people are lamenting older technology like the bicycle. We’ve been weaker than machines for my entire life. I don’t think it makes me feel weak as a person. This is the first time we have computers that are going to be more intelligent than us. The emotions I had about Codex writing code that was high quality was an experience, because I might have some of my identity tied up in that task. The next day I woke up and I’m using it as a tool and now I can make better software. I’m like, “This is great.” [00:00:00] S0: Probably actually a good self-actualization anyway to go through that and be like, “Oh, I’m not my ability to code.”
· Jack Altman, Bret Taylor
[00:00:00] S0: Probably actually a good self-actualization anyway to go through that and be like, “Oh, I’m not my ability to code.” [00:00:00] S1: People’s vocations and their identities are often very intertwined. But once you absorb the technology, I don’t think it’s actually your identity. I’m actually quite optimistic that we will be human. We’ll all be status-seeking animals. We’ll all compete for the real estate here in San Francisco. Even though our standard of living will go way up, we will all be jealous of people still. We will all compete. As a consequence, I think humanity will be just fine. That’s my view on it. It’s hard to imagine, but it doesn’t mean it’s going to be catastrophically bad. I think it’ll be largely good for humanity. [00:00:00] S0: Everybody’s already completely addicted to their phones and it’s a disaster. Now you have all this AI happening. A friend of mine was saying that he basically thinks it’ll actually become a status signal to become increasingly offline. That might be an interesting call. I do think people will hit a tipping point with a lot of this stuff where all of it will happen. Intelligence will get so good and then people will just be like, “Enough of all of this.” Hopefully there’s a big screen time reduction. You saw parents revolting about social media for their kids. A bunch of schools now, all the parents are like, “Nobody takes a phone. Everybody agrees.” So that’ll be an interesting thing. Is there an essential humanity that gets sharpened?