Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Lenny, I'm excited. Good to see you. The timing of this conversation is so amazing. You're just coming off running the most insane assembling of AI thought leaders and tech leaders I've ever seen. Let me just read a few of the names that you guys had at the summit that just happened a couple of days ago. You had Jensen, you had Sam Altman, and you had Marc Andreessen, you had Fei-Fei Li, you had the CEO of Intel, AWS, Mike Krieger, Kevin Weil. That's just like a third of the guests you guys had. I don't know how you did this, but it feels like you have this fire hose of information coming at you. You interviewed a lot of these people on stage, and so while it's fresh in your mind, I want to ask you, after doing this summit, after hearing from these folks, what's something that you've changed your mind about, or what's just like an insight that has been lodged in your head ever since doing the summit? It was an amazing thing to pull off, because we never thought we'd be able to do it, and we were really worried going into it, thinking, "Well, we're trying to do fireside chats for 12 hours, and there's a capacity of human absorption that we're trying to challenge." And so, we tried to put a lot of breaks in there and we started at nine a.m and we ended at nine p.m., and we had a couple hour break in the middle, but everyone stayed and everyone was engaged and we could have gone until 11 and it would've been fine. And it's because the quality of the conversations and the caliber of the guests that were there made a world of a difference. What was the takeaway from it? I'd say a few things. One is the capabilities overhang is real. I think there's more functionality, on one end there's kind of this paradox of progress. On one end we are solving all these amazing problems with science, on the other end you talk to the enterprise, they're like, "We're struggling with adoption." And I feel like there's help that's going to be needed within organizations. And the reason we pulled this thing together, the goal was, what is happening in the industry and how can we help customers make sure that they can make the most of it? Because we are in one of the most foundational movements that we have seen in human history, and it's we got to make sure that we make the most of it. So, that was one is, the capabilities overhang is real. The second area is, I'd say that it's harder when you go beyond some of the more obvious use cases. For example, coding is a very, very good use case that you're starting to get a lot of success in. I mean, we just had our first product that we think we'll be in the next two weeks, 100% written with AI. I don't think that's as easy when you go into every other function of the business. And that was actually very apparent that hey, this is going to require some nuance and understanding of how every business works. And then the third one, which is a really interesting takeaway, and Marc Andreessen talked about this in your podcast a few days ago. In fact, when I talked to him, I actually started with your podcast, because it was so interesting, and then we dug into it a little bit more. And then Kevin Scott was also talking about this, but this notion of the fact that birth rates are going down and we have a demographic shift that's happening in the world and there's going to be more people that are in the older age bracket than the younger age bracket, and those older people are going to need folks to take care of them. And historically in society, that's actually always been the case, but we might be at a point where that might not be the case. And when that's not the case, we worry about AI taking our jobs, I think that survival of humanity depends on a successful AI.…

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