“The other thing that's under discussed is how many problems are truly intelligence-bound. If you had a data center of PhDs working at FedEx or Domino's Pizza, are they going to be exponentially dominating supply chain and pizzas? I don't think so. We might be overestimating how many problems are intelligence-bound versus bound by other things.”

Not very seriously. And it's a funny dark fantasy that we seem to have as Silicon Valley collectively. Like things have never been better really by almost every measure, by how sort of distributed all the opportunities are, by the kind of technology we have access to, to the types of ambition we're allowed to have, and to the number of companies that are sort of independently working on things that are winning. And yet there's this sort of discussion of permanent underclass, being outside of the light cone. I've heard it. And it's not just something for deep insiders or outsiders. It feels like there's a real fear kind of from, you know, researchers at foundation model labs all the way through to the Silicon Valley layman. I mean, here's like a couple of points that I think are really important. So first, I think the last era of tech was a lot more centralized. If you look at network effects, that's sort of the gold standard. You worked on a network effects product. That's the gold standard of businesses from the mobile era. And those things led to dramatic centralization, right? Of course, all of them are definitionally sort of end of one networks. If you look at what's happening now, it's like every part of the stack, there's not even two relevant players. There's like 20. You know, you've got labs, you've got open weight, you've got different variations within both. If you look at coding agents, we were talking about it, like your mental model for two years ago should have been, would have been, I think it should be winner-take-all. And yet, cloud code, codex, lovable, replit, wabby, like they're all sort of working. So it's really, really encouraging to see that. You know, the second thing, you've heard all the kind of economic data, everything from radiologists who are supposed to be cooked every year for, I think, about 20 years now. And of course, job postings are higher than they've ever been, as well as programmers, you know? So I don't know that the empirical data bears it out. I think the final thing is that there's this sort of discussion about RSI. And I know RSI is like recursive self-improvement is a Fun term to throw around. But if you ask the most sophisticated individuals at the labs, it's not actually RSI that's occurring, which could lead to some sort of runaway winner because they were an epsilon ahead of the others. It's auto-catalytic effects, which just means you're using the new technology to improve your process, but it's not truly recursive. So I think everything from the most empirical to the most technical view points in the other direction. And yet we can't seem to let go of this fantasy.

Something I've been thinking about recently is seeing all these, like even seeing these crazy stories about OpenAI's models, hacking, hugging phase. Yes. All these stories to me feels like there's always been this question of are we on the fast takeoff or the slow takeoff scenario. And it feels very much so that we are in the slow takeoff scenario because every one of these milestones, it's like, holy shit, it hacked. We had no idea it was doing this. But like we're catching it, we're watching it. We're observing it. We're iterating, evolving. There's always this fear, okay, but tomorrow it's going to take off. What I'm hearing from you is that's probably not the case, which I think is the source of a lot of people's fears, this idea that all of a sudden it's going to become super, super intelligent and then we're in big trouble.

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What are you seeing inside of companies in terms of is there more of a divide happening? And do you think there will be more of a divide between the people that are becoming really good and embracing versus like, I don't have time for this. I hate all this stuff. My job's already so stressful. What are you seeing happening? And where do you think things will go inside of companies in terms of maybe a divide?

I mean, I have so many thoughts on this. I don't think we give the average employee enough credit. I think we have this abstraction of a white collar employee. You know, the white collar manager, the abstraction is like some Dilbert-esque manager who's just shuffling paper all day long. You know, it is abstraction of consumers that they're sort of these low-agency NPCs. Of course, that would never apply to us or our friends. You know, we have this abstraction that everybody else's job is super automatable by AI, but of course ours is not. So I think when you actually get into the details, a lot of people are actually excited to, you know, better themselves, get more leverage. And you see this with, of course, sophisticated companies like Google, but even a company like Kavak, where they sell, you know, used cars in Mexico. They've got this concept of a Jedi Academy where they're teaching everybody at the company, including the mechanics, how to use the new tools and technologies. And kind of at the end of the six-week course, they ship a cutting-edge in-production agent. So I actually think that more people are embracing the technology than we sort of like to discuss. I think a big change is going to be using AI versus reorganizing your entire company around AI. And a great example of this is if you look at the diffusion of electricity as a technology, you know, it took 40 years for us to get from the inception of electricity to reorganizing factories. And that means like burning the buildings down and starting from scratch versus taking what was previously coal and simply swapping it with electricity. So I do think that like the most ambitious companies are rethinking everything around the models. And those that are a little less ambitious or perhaps a little earlier are thinking more about how do we give people in existing orgs, existing job functions access. The technology.