Sam Schillace: belief

Transcript context

…if the multimodal stuff gets really good so that they can both consume and produce dynamic UI like I was talking about? What if we figure out a good way to store state, this is my bots or docs thing. So what if do we figure out a good way for you to really highly personalize something so it knows you really well and you trust it with confidential information? If you have all of those things, you're just going to spend a lot of time talking to that agent. It's like, what would you do... If you imagine you're the richest person in the world, you've got 100 of the best people working for you, and a chief of staff, and they're tireless, and they never fight with each other, they do everything you want. With that staff supporting you, what are you doing with software? What are you doing when you're sitting in front of a screen? Well, you're probably communicating intention and you're probably consuming some either entertainment or some of the products of that intent. And that's about it. You're not messing around with pokey static apps and stuff. That doesn't work, right? You're just telling your staff to deal with stuff for you. So I think that's where we're headed, I think, in the world of software at least. Things are going to get more dynamic, more intentional, more semantic, more fluid, then more personalized. I think there's a ton of problems to be solved to make that vision real. But I think this feels to me a little bit like seeing the Palm maybe, or the early iPhone, where you're just like, "Okay, I get it. Phones are going to get interesting. That's a new device. Now we got to go do a whole bunch of engineering before they actually are as useful as they're today." Right? So I get it. I think software is going to change radically now. I had the same feeling when we started doing... This is going back to G Docs again. It's another lesson. It's another one of these category shifts. The second we got Writely up on its feet and I was like, "Ah, the browser is actually a platform that you can actually build real apps in. I get it, the world's going to change." And we had a ton of stuff to do, right? Nobody really understood distributed systems. Nobody understood how to build stuff in multiple places at once or how you deal with replication, how you deal with security, all kinds of hard... All the development patterns had to shift from Waterfall, to Agile, to CI-CD, all this stuff had to change to fully realize that world. But I remember back in 2005, this very quick... And the people who were the strong proponents, I think all saw this, instantly saw that the world had changed and there was this new category. And I have exactly the same feeling about generative AI. Like, yep, software's going to totally change. These businesses are going to totally change. It might take 10 years to really work through all of it, but yep, door open, new room, new game, start coloring in the blanks, right? Let's go. So that's where I think we're going. And that sounded really certain, it probably sounded more certain than I should sound. I think there's a lot of, probably a quarter at least, if not a half of what I just said is wrong in some way. g. And that sounded really certain, it probably sounded more certain than I should sound. I think there's a lot of, probably a quarter at least, if not a half of what I just said is wrong in some way. So we're going to learn a bunch of stuff along the way. And there's a lot of work to do, a whole lot of work to do and a whole lot of unanticipated side effects are going to pop out, and there's just a whole lot of stuff to get that to be real the way there was with all of the last transformations. But I think this is just a giant category shift. I think it's just incontrovertible that it is. It's kind of funny when Gemini came out, all the press take was like, "Oh, it's not that different from GPT-4. I guess we're done with AI now, we can go back to bed." I'm like, "That is the dumbest possible interpretation of that story that you could come up with I think." Of all the takes you could have had on that, I think that was the dumbest one honestly. It could say many things about either company. It could say many things about the science. But, "Guess there's nothing here to see." Is not one of them. For somebody listening that wants to not fall behind on this and or find opportunity for their product, other than just playing with it, which is what everyone is always saying, just like, "Play with it. Use ChatGPT, use Bard, and all these things." Is there any advice you'd give listeners for how to approach thinking about AI, how it integrates into the stuff they're doing?…

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