Lenny Rachitsky: preference

Transcript context

…I think that's right. And that's why I always feel like tough decisions almost always afterwards feel like a relief. And that's true for the product. That's true for people on a team as well. Let's shift to talking about AI, which I'm really excited about because I know you've been spending a lot of time talking with people about AI, building AI products. You all launched Firefly, which a lot of people are really excited about. You also have this newsletter where you kind of just share your implications on how AI and technology is going to impact the world. So I have a lot of questions I'm excited to ask you around this. And I'll just start really broad and maybe this is too big of a question, but just how different do you expect the world to be in, say, five years as a result of AI, both for product builders and then just people in general? Listen, I'm an optimist. And I feel like our human potential has always been held back by the laws of physics essentially. The mundane, repetitive labor you need to do to get anything done is what holds back our ingenuity. It's the friction. It's the work in workflows that wouldn't it be great if we could just have flow and no work? And I think that that's what AI kind of does, is it gets us from workflow to flow. It gets us into this flow state where any idea in your mind's eye, you can start to develop it. I was having this discussion with Howie who runs Airtable actually just earlier today where we were talking about the leader at IBM who announced that he's not going to hire 8,000 people that he would've hired because AI is going to be able to do that work. And what we were talking about was, and how he made the point, as engineers have become much more productive over the years, that doesn't mean that companies have wanted fewer engineers. It actually just means that they demand more of their engineers. And engineers have more possibility to do more. And so, if human ingenuity goes up, maybe we actually want to hire more people because if you have more ingenuity per human being, maybe you can actually do more as a company. And maybe, companies that used to have three products will have five products or seven products or 30 products. And maybe, that's actually the trend that we're forgetting is that humans bring this level of ingenuity to every problem and every opportunity. Whereas computers remember like ChatGPT is basically just giving you what it would look like if, right? It's not truly finding edges that will become the center. It's actually just mining the center. And it's trying to regurgitate the center, which is also very helpful by the way. So I'm optimistic. I think that there will be far more people engaged in delivering experiences. I'm very long the experience economy because I think that there will be some people liberated to focus more on the non-scalable things that really move the needle for experiences for customers. And then, I also am excited about humans having less grudge work to do.…

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