Evidence receipt / evaluation
Published · transcript-backedLenny Rachitsky: evaluation
2 Mar 2025 Lenny's Podcast The creator of WordPress opens up about becoming an internet villain, why he’s taking a stand, and the future of open source | Matt Mullenweg (founder and CEO, Automattic)
“Something else that I think is really interesting when it comes to AI and open source, you wrote about this and it blew my mind, such a good point, that the code that these models were trained on was open source code because that's all they have access to.”
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Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Lenny Rachitsky
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- evaluation
- Recorded
- 2 Mar 2025
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
Transcript context
…Yeah. And there's actually an open source OSI. There's a formal definition for what makes an open source license. And there's actually many dozens of open source licenses, and sort of public domain licenses and other things. So, it's also their stance that this is not an open source license. Something else that I think is really interesting when it comes to AI and open source, you wrote about this and it blew my mind, such a good point, that the code that these models were trained on was open source code because that's all they have access to. They don't have Windows code, they don't have Shopify code. And what a cool, I don't know, another success story slash... I don't know. I guess, how do you feel about that, that all these AI models are trained on code you wrote in open source community? That's beautiful. It's one of the safest things to train on, right, because the license of open source very explicitly allows that. I also like to think about I have some window where my creative output is useful to society. And if you fast forward like 50 or 100, I do believe that the utility for proprietary software eventually approaches zero. When we're sending people to Mars, the operating system of the rockets and the devices and everything like that is not going to be built on the Windows NT kernel, as amazing feat of engineering that that proprietary kernel is. It's going to be built on an open source kernel, Linux or BSD or something like that. And so if you want to be part of something that sort of becomes the fabric of humanity's foundation, like things that allows a Cambrian explosion of things built on top of it, a renaissance of ideas, you want to be involved with open source. And so I really hope that more and more people... I'm a little bit of an evangelist here. I'm a missionary, where I really want to encourage more and more people to consider at least making part of their time, even if just a few hours a week, contributing to open source because you could be part of something that is a huge impact. And it's fun, especially if you're a younger developer or designer or PM or whatever, you can't walk up to Facebook and change your home page or say, "I'd like to change this feature," but you could come to an open source project, some of which have hundreds of millions of users. You could go to WordPress or, gosh, Bitcoin. Or there's all these things are open source, Chromium, Firefox, and you could actually change a feature or project management things or change the design or improve it. And that's I think really, really special. And sort of the thrill for me of knowing that code I wrote is now executing millions of times per seconds and millions of servers around the world, that kind of thrill, that high is, when I first had my first open source contribution, such a thrill. And I've been sort of chasing that and enjoying that ever since.…
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