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"The cost of writing software is going to zero." In an agent-native world, code can always be rewritten. The advantage now is in solving the most important problems. – Ben Scharfstein, Scale AI

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26,264 views • 11 months ago •via X (Twitter)

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Replit CEO Amjad Masad: Being 'terminally online' may be an advantage. "If you want to work on a skill, it's going to be about idea generation." "Because the cost of implementation of those ideas is going down rapidly. It's gonna go to zero at some point." "So the bottleneck becomes, 'how fast can you generate ideas?'" "Just looking around you in the world and seeing what's happening. What are the trends? Are you plugged in on social media?" "A lot of the vices that older generations think are vices, might actually become advantages. So if you're a brainrotted, terminally online person, that might be an advantage because you know what's happening in the world." "If you're someone who's ADHD, really interested in novelty... that's actually an advantage because AI really benefits people who can try a lot of things really quickly." Amjad Masad with

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Marc Andreessen says AI is hyper democratizing. “Is the future of the world going to be one or a small number of companies, or for that matter, governments or super AIs that kind of own and control everything?” “Or is this a technology that's going to diffuse out and be in everybody's hands?” “This is the time in which AI is actually hyper democratizing. It has spread to more individuals, both in the country and around the world in the shortest period of time of any new technology I think in history.” “The best AIs in the world are in the consumer products.” “This technology is going to be in everybody's hands. And everybody is going to be able to use it to optimize the things that they do, have it be a thought partner, assistant for building companies.” Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸
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Anish Acharya: We're going to see a "YouTube moment for software": "If you think about YouTube 20 years ago—we had lots of video and lots of television, and it was high production quality, and it wasn't clear that we needed more and 20 years later, YouTube's a $550 billion enterprise that would be one of the biggest companies in the world if it was independent." "I think the same thing is going to happen for software. People want to make software, and for the first time they can—and they can distribute it and they can consume it." "Sometimes it's going to be important software. Sometimes it's going to be totally trivial. It's going to be software for a bachelor party weekend, software for a joke, software for a prompt. We have this sort of seriousness about software that we had about video and television 20 years ago." "Now it's like—I just took a video on my phone. It's going to be like—I just made an app on my phone. Same energy." Anish Acharya on BILLIONS with Guillaume Moubeche
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Anish Acharya: We're going to see a "YouTube moment for software": "If you think about YouTube 20 years ago—we had lots of video and lots of television, and it was high production quality, and it wasn't clear that we needed more and 20 years later, YouTube's a $550 billion enterprise that would be one of the biggest companies in the world if it was independent." "I think the same thing is going to happen for software. People want to make software, and for the first time they can—and they can distribute it and they can consume it." "Sometimes it's going to be important software. Sometimes it's going to be totally trivial. It's going to be software for a bachelor party weekend, software for a joke, software for a prompt. We have this sort of seriousness about software that we had about video and television 20 years ago." "Now it's like—I just took a video on my phone. It's going to be like—I just made an app on my phone. Same energy." Anish Acharya on BILLIONS with Guillaume Moubeche

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Rohan Paul

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"When [an industry] expands, zero-sum thinking is deadly." From our GP martin_casado: "[AI] is clearly in an expansion phase… You should be aggressively investing." "In the collapse phase… you have consolidation." "The end state of consolidation will always be an oligopoly or a monopoly." "In none of this do you lose margins."

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Ben Horowitz: AI is the greatest equalizer of opportunity we’ve ever seen. "Starting from day one, it was completely democratized. The AI that anybody gets access to is a very powerful AI. Anybody with a phone—and now most people in the world, at this point, have smartphones—can get superintelligence in their phone." "Every child can have a super-advanced, amazing tutor/teacher. Great education is accessible to all now." “All systems end up with a lot of inequality, but you can try, systematically, to give everybody an opportunity. I think AI does a really good job of that.” Source: benahorowitz.eth on Invest Like the Best with Patrick OShaughnessy

a16z

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Cursor CEO Michael Truell on the future of writing code: "Our goal with Cursor is to invent a new type of programming." "It looks like a world where you have a representation of the logic of your software that does look more like English." "You can imagine kind of an evolution of programming language towards pseudocode. You have written down the logic of the software, and you can edit that at a high level." "It won't be the impenetrable millions of lines of code, it'll instead be something that's much terser and easier to understand and easier to navigate." Michael Truell with Lenny Rachitsky on Lenny's Podcast

a16z

1,015,754 views • 1 month ago

Cursor CEO Michael Truell on the future of writing code: “ Our goal with Cursor is to invent a new type of programming.” “It looks like a world where you have a representation of the logic of your software that does look more like English.” “You can imagine kind of an evolution of programming language towards pseudocode. You have written down the logic of the software, and you can edit that at a high level.” “It won't be the impenetrable millions of lines of code, it'll instead be something that's much terser and easier to understand and easier to navigate.” Source: Michael Truell (CEO Cursor) with Lenny Rachitsky on Lenny's Podcast
2:50

Cursor CEO Michael Truell on the future of writing code: “ Our goal with Cursor is to invent a new type of programming.” “It looks like a world where you have a representation of the logic of your software that does look more like English.” “You can imagine kind of an evolution of programming language towards pseudocode. You have written down the logic of the software, and you can edit that at a high level.” “It won't be the impenetrable millions of lines of code, it'll instead be something that's much terser and easier to understand and easier to navigate.” Source: Michael Truell (CEO Cursor) with Lenny Rachitsky on Lenny's Podcast

a16z

812,698 views • 9 months ago

Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch on why AGI is too simple of a concept: “There’s no such thing as one system that is going to be solving all of the problems of the world... It’s never going to exist.” “Just like you don't have any human that is able to solve every task in the world, you of course have to have some level of specialization to actually solve problems.” “We are back from magical thinking to system thinking.” “In real life enterprises are just complex systems. You can’t solve that with a single abstraction, which is AGI.” Arthur Mensch on Big Technology Podcast
1:05

Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch on why AGI is too simple of a concept: “There’s no such thing as one system that is going to be solving all of the problems of the world... It’s never going to exist.” “Just like you don't have any human that is able to solve every task in the world, you of course have to have some level of specialization to actually solve problems.” “We are back from magical thinking to system thinking.” “In real life enterprises are just complex systems. You can’t solve that with a single abstraction, which is AGI.” Arthur Mensch on Big Technology Podcast

a16z

37,667 views • 6 months ago

$NVDA CEO Jensen Huang: This is actually an incredible time to be a software company. But the software has to be presented to the agent in a way that the agent can use it.
1:36

$NVDA CEO Jensen Huang: This is actually an incredible time to be a software company. But the software has to be presented to the agent in a way that the agent can use it.

Wall St Engine

68,076 views • 2 months ago

"The one thing that's going to be truly future proof is judgment. What is the biggest challenge when you have a thousand AI engineers writing code? AI slop. In an era when you can do everything, the question is which of these things matter. On the engineer side, it is evaluating the code. Which of this code is even valuable? You can have AI engineers writing beautiful code that could be wrong, that could have bugs in it, that could be vulnerable. Someone needs to review it. Make sure to have a human review at some point, especially critical code that is in the core of your system. On the product side is judgment around what needs to be built and evaluating. And similarly in design, you have to have judgment around, does it make sense in the broader design system. I think this judgment is the number one thing that humans are going to bring in an era of infinite productivity."
1:12

"The one thing that's going to be truly future proof is judgment. What is the biggest challenge when you have a thousand AI engineers writing code? AI slop. In an era when you can do everything, the question is which of these things matter. On the engineer side, it is evaluating the code. Which of this code is even valuable? You can have AI engineers writing beautiful code that could be wrong, that could have bugs in it, that could be vulnerable. Someone needs to review it. Make sure to have a human review at some point, especially critical code that is in the core of your system. On the product side is judgment around what needs to be built and evaluating. And similarly in design, you have to have judgment around, does it make sense in the broader design system. I think this judgment is the number one thing that humans are going to bring in an era of infinite productivity."

Patrick OShaughnessy

24,818 views • 6 months ago

Elon Musk on scaling AI in space: Earth is the bottleneck. "It’s harder to scale on the ground than it is to scale in space." "You’re going to get about five times the effectiveness of solar panels in space versus the ground, and you don’t need batteries. I almost wore my other shirt, which says, 'It’s always sunny in space.'" "In 36 months (but probably closer to 30 months), the most economically compelling place to put AI will be space." "Once you start thinking in terms of what percentage of the sun’s power are you harnessing, you realize you have to go to space." Source: Elon Musk with Stripe’s John Collison and Dwarkesh Patel
2:50

Elon Musk on scaling AI in space: Earth is the bottleneck. "It’s harder to scale on the ground than it is to scale in space." "You’re going to get about five times the effectiveness of solar panels in space versus the ground, and you don’t need batteries. I almost wore my other shirt, which says, 'It’s always sunny in space.'" "In 36 months (but probably closer to 30 months), the most economically compelling place to put AI will be space." "Once you start thinking in terms of what percentage of the sun’s power are you harnessing, you realize you have to go to space." Source: Elon Musk with Stripe’s John Collison and Dwarkesh Patel

a16z

408,524 views • 5 months ago

Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev's hot take about jobs in the AI era: "There will be more software engineers in 10 years than there are today, and there will be more lawyers." "It's going to become much easier to start a venture and run it autonomously." "You'll be a software engineer, de facto. You've got your Claude Code agents writing code for you." "There will be more businesses." "The need for the legal profession actually scales with business activity." "If you have a million businesses incremental per year, each of those is going to need legal support." Vlad Tenev on Basis Points with amit and Steven Fiorillo
1:57

Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev's hot take about jobs in the AI era: "There will be more software engineers in 10 years than there are today, and there will be more lawyers." "It's going to become much easier to start a venture and run it autonomously." "You'll be a software engineer, de facto. You've got your Claude Code agents writing code for you." "There will be more businesses." "The need for the legal profession actually scales with business activity." "If you have a million businesses incremental per year, each of those is going to need legal support." Vlad Tenev on Basis Points with amit and Steven Fiorillo

a16z

133,537 views • 4 months ago