Speaker 1: As Media.
Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host ed
Speaker 2: ze Tron. We're here in the beautiful iHeart Radio Studios
Speaker 2: in New York City, and I've got a guest, of course,
Speaker 2: Charlie Meyer, the esteem blogger and CEO of Picko. Charlie,
Speaker 2: thank you for joining me. Yeah, thanks for having me. So, yeah,
Speaker 2: you've you've gained some I would say, notoriety recently by
Speaker 2: making blogs that go against the oinking of the hogs
Speaker 2: of the Valley. And I think your scaling laws piece
Speaker 2: was the one that really got going. Yeah.
Speaker 3: So I my blog gets some love and mostly hate
Speaker 3: on Hacker News. That's my distribution channel, right, and so
Speaker 3: I'm trying to get off of that. We're gonna try
Speaker 3: and build it like a newsletter type thing. But yeah,
Speaker 3: I'll burst on Hacker News and every once in a
Speaker 3: while I'll go something that blows up and I'll get
Speaker 3: my get my haters in there.
Speaker 2: So, so what is it that's pissing them off?
Speaker 3: So, like I had to post a few weeks back
Speaker 3: that was on I called it LLLMS or the Ultimate
Speaker 3: demoware right, And so I had to find demoware as
Speaker 3: software that you make the software, and it works well
Speaker 3: in the thirty minutes that you're showing off to executives
Speaker 3: or whoever's going to buy it, right, and then it
Speaker 3: doesn't do the thing right, It doesn't do the thing
Speaker 3: day to day. And so I listed some examples and
Speaker 3: my startups in etech, right, so we do, you know?
Speaker 3: And so like there's always something that I pick on.
Speaker 3: Is I really hate AI tutors and we can get
Speaker 3: into to that and how that all of courks. But
Speaker 3: so I said, oh, I listed out a few things
Speaker 3: that I thought were demoware. So it's like, oh, vibe
Speaker 3: coading that makes dashboards, right now, that's an easy thing
Speaker 3: to pick on. And I said, you know AI tutors,
Speaker 3: And I said, well, maybe the kid won't want to
Speaker 3: talk to an AI tutor. Yeah, that was the critique
Speaker 3: I made, right, It is like maybe they just don't
Speaker 3: want to talk to him, Yeah, won't want to talk
Speaker 3: to a post they want to maybe they want to
Speaker 3: have like a teacher who is like in the classroom.
Speaker 2: Crazy idea maybe, yeah. But did people know like that?
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, so some some people, uh, you know, we
Speaker 3: can name names of for me too, But I actually
Speaker 3: don't know how to pronounce them. So uh but anyway,
Speaker 3: so people are in there and they're like, you have
Speaker 3: no idea, Like if you think that AI can't tutor calculus,
Speaker 3: like you have never even tried, It's like it's a classic,
Speaker 3: Like you're missing out, Like you somehow are completely missing
Speaker 3: the point.
Speaker 2: And you know something's really good and the innovative when
Speaker 2: the only defense of it is you're a moron. You
Speaker 2: you well you have never tried it.
Speaker 3: And it's like, well, what if I like have like
Speaker 3: what if this is like actually the thing I spend
Speaker 3: my time on is thinking about this.
Speaker 2: You're a non AI I d E. Right, so coding.
Speaker 3: Environment, yeah, yeah, well and that yeah, we got yeah,
Speaker 3: lots of that, lots of that. But like so the
Speaker 3: software that I make batting around a little bit here,
Speaker 3: but Replet was a copy and so Replet was a
Speaker 3: very loved by Teacher's id online and their whole thing
Speaker 3: was like we teach like we held you teach coding
Speaker 3: online because it's a way for you to run Python
Speaker 3: and Java and all your code online and you can
Speaker 3: do it and you can do it on crumb books
Speaker 3: and you can collaborate and they had like teacher tools
Speaker 3: and they sold the software to schools. I was a
Speaker 3: teacher for a couple of years, so it's kind of
Speaker 3: like my background as an engineer and then a teacher,
Speaker 3: and I used replet and it's awesome. Well this was
Speaker 3: this before they used A or this is before they
Speaker 3: used AI. So so replate just for the listeners right now.
Speaker 3: Replate is an AI powered coding environment that claims to
Speaker 3: be able to vibe code software but doesn't really.
Speaker 2: But what did it used to be?
Speaker 3: So it used to be an excellent tool, just an
Speaker 3: absolutely fantastic tool. It was it was just you go on,
Speaker 3: you log on like Google Docs for coding, right, So,
Speaker 3: like you think, okay, well you back in the day
Speaker 3: you'd have to download Microsoft Word and whatever and that
Speaker 3: socks and you know, it's great to bring that online
Speaker 3: into the cloud. And they did that and they were
Speaker 3: like very innovative. They were kind of the first to
Speaker 3: market of having like a very fully featured online ide
Speaker 3: and that is useful for exactly one thing, and that
Speaker 3: is useful for teaching in schools, right because like you
Speaker 3: have kids and they have two hundred dollars chrumebooks that
Speaker 3: the school bought them, and so you get Replet and
Speaker 3: like boom, I have a great way to teach computer science.
Speaker 3: Now that is fantastic, and that's what it used to
Speaker 3: be USI yeah, and now it's just and now it's yeah.
Speaker 2: It's so listen this you probably heard me mentioned Replet
Speaker 2: in the past. It's one of my least favorite, most
Speaker 2: favorite companies. If you go on the replet reddit.
Speaker 4: It's just the wallet inspect And so now that's kind
Speaker 4: of like I've gotten rid of most of my like
Speaker 4: doom scrolling places, but like this is I don't know
Speaker 4: what type of scrolling it is, but like I go.
Speaker 2: On our replet Yeah yeah, yeah, exactly, and it's just
Speaker 2: so funny. It's just God being like, yeah, spend fifteen
Speaker 2: hundred dollars. It doesn't really work. Yeah, but I think
Speaker 2: if I spend five thousand more dollars it might. Well.
Speaker 3: I mean people are like, okay, well should I spend
Speaker 3: five thousand dollars? I mean we can we can be
Speaker 3: reasonable that you can bring the numbers down to reality.
Speaker 3: It's I spent fifty dollars, which for a person who
Speaker 3: has got a bad suffare, Yeah, that's that's a big
Speaker 3: waste of money. And they're like, okay, well it seems
Speaker 3: like I might need to spend two hundred and fifty
Speaker 3: dollars more or should I go on fiver her. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and then it's just people and Reddit. I mean it's Reddit,
Speaker 3: so they're just like skill issue.
Speaker 2: Well that and also the people who were like it
Speaker 2: am running into this problem.
Speaker 3: And then a lot of that yeah, where it's like
Speaker 3: and but replet just just for for anyone on there
Speaker 3: on replet right now? Yeah, like what did they do
Speaker 3: to teachers? So teachers? They had a product for teachers
Speaker 3: that worked, that was great, that was well teachers. And
Speaker 3: on this November somethink twenty twenty three, this is a
Speaker 3: big day for my business because this is the only
Speaker 3: reason I have my business is to replace replet. Because
Speaker 3: they turned on AI autocomplete for kids, no way to
Speaker 3: shut it off.
Speaker 2: Doesn't that defeat the purpose of learning? Yeah?
Speaker 3: So I had a I have a small YouTube channel
Speaker 3: with not you know, a million subscribers, but you know,
Speaker 3: I talked to teachers on there, and you know, we
Speaker 3: had a customer of mine on there and they were like, yeah,
Speaker 3: you know that year, it just seemed like the guy
Speaker 3: he just like he missed the fact the AI got
Speaker 3: turned on, no one sentiment announcement or an email or
Speaker 3: a warning.
Speaker 2: All of his students were just amazing. They were.
Speaker 3: He was like, yeah, everybody, everybody, everybody got an A
Speaker 3: that semester, Like, I wonder, you know did that actually?
Speaker 2: So did students actually end up getting great schools? Because
Speaker 2: no one knows the AI go?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean it took depending on who you If
Speaker 3: you're wandering around the classroom looking at students and you
Speaker 3: see them all tab completing, like because AI just.
Speaker 2: Just for the listeners as well spelled out. So with
Speaker 2: these AI platforms, you hit tab complete because it's basically
Speaker 2: like auto correct decoding.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and so so like AI for what it's worth,
Speaker 3: you know, we can be really balanced podcast. But AI
Speaker 3: can really well, it can solve intro to computer science
Speaker 3: for ninth grader problems with the incredible accuracy.
Speaker 2: Let's call Brown from the Internet bugs. He said. It
Speaker 2: makes the easy things easier and the hard thing's hort.
Speaker 3: Yes, and so yeah, so if you need to, if
Speaker 3: you're in ninth grade and you're writing your first program,
Speaker 3: yeah you can. You can tab complete the whole thing
Speaker 3: in one go. It'll one shot at d that's incredible.
Speaker 3: It'll one shot program.
Speaker 2: It's this term that term just listeners is like it
Speaker 2: means that you just give it a problem and it
Speaker 2: solves it correctly. Yeah.
Speaker 3: So it's like count to ten and the AI can
Speaker 3: count to ten, which is incredible.
Speaker 2: That's revolutionary. But fun fun fact if you try and
Speaker 2: make chat GPT count to a million, it freaks out
Speaker 2: if you do the voice mode. Adam Kinna told me
Speaker 2: this one. If you go like counter a million, it
Speaker 2: stops around nine or ten and then says should I continue,
Speaker 2: and it just won't do it. It's very funny. I
Speaker 2: love living in the future. Yeah.
Speaker 3: So they they though they turn on the AI and
Speaker 3: then they were like, we're not doing education and companies
Speaker 3: have deprecated things.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it happens actually not their main product whatever.
Speaker 3: So that I mean, I'll tell you, you know, I'm
Speaker 3: an indie developer whatever. Like our software does not make
Speaker 3: a ton of money because there isn't that much money
Speaker 3: selling an online ide to schools. There's money, but it's
Speaker 3: not it's not a billion dollar business.
Speaker 2: It's fine. I don't know this replet but yeah, but
Speaker 2: you can't write billions of valuations.
Speaker 3: No, no saying hey, we're you know, kids have chromebooks
Speaker 3: and we're gonna you know, charge ten dollars a student
Speaker 3: or whatever. Like you can't of course that you're not
Speaker 3: going to raise a bill.
Speaker 2: You're not.
Speaker 3: That's not a billion dollar business, no, But the AI
Speaker 3: thing seems magical. And then you know, the vibe coding
Speaker 3: thing happened. And you know, as soon as the vibe
Speaker 3: coding stuff started happening, they were like, we're all in
Speaker 3: on this, and they deleted. They deleted every lead, so
Speaker 3: not just deprecated. Right, So it's one thing to deprecate software.
Speaker 2: So it's like and deprecate is when you stop supporting together.
Speaker 3: You say it's it's no longer supported. When you put
Speaker 3: up a big red scary banner on the top saying
Speaker 3: your work is read only, you cannot create anymore. Right,
Speaker 3: that is a really mean thing to do with. But
Speaker 3: it happens. Software changes, you know, repl it for what
Speaker 3: it's worth to be nice and fair to them, Like
Speaker 3: they have investors and they're under the gun to provide
Speaker 3: some returns and so whatever. The teacher thing isn't gonna
Speaker 3: make them a ton of money. But they deleted the stuff.
Speaker 2: Just why And when you say the stuff was this
Speaker 2: like projects that schools have been working on.
Speaker 3: It was so a teacher says, I'm going to spend
Speaker 3: two three years putting in all my curriculum, all these
Speaker 3: markdown files, all this stuff, all these tests. I'm going
Speaker 3: to configure all this stuff. No deleted, gone.
Speaker 2: Monsters deleted actual monsters and now but they sent the
Speaker 2: warning email ed, Wow in July. When are teachers online
Speaker 2: looking at their work email in July? Yeah? Classic, classic,
Speaker 2: big month for teachers to.
Speaker 3: Be on the well for American teachers, Yeah, it's not
Speaker 3: a huge month. So yeah, in July we say we're
Speaker 3: going to delete all your stuff and then it's gone.
Speaker 2: Was there any way to back it up? Well there
Speaker 2: wasn't until they deleted it.
Speaker 4: All.
Speaker 2: That's so cool. It's awesome.
Speaker 3: So they're an awesome Like if you're a replet developer,
Speaker 3: you know when when the next big thing comes up
Speaker 3: and Replet may decide to delete all your stuff.
Speaker 2: Well replet they launched Asient three. Oh yeah, that was
Speaker 2: my favorite launch of product I've ever seen. Because I've
Speaker 2: mentioned this on the show before, but they it's like, oh,
Speaker 2: it's an autonomous coding thing and it's just the digital
Speaker 2: mister bean, it's just like, why don't you go off
Speaker 2: and build me a software thing? And it just fucking
Speaker 2: spends one hundred dollars and goes, I am, I don't
Speaker 2: know you like this. I don't fucking care. And then
Speaker 2: they had to release the thing where you could make
Speaker 2: it think less. They had to like add tweaks to
Speaker 2: it because it was so bad. It's I actually feel like,
Speaker 2: and I'm not putting words in your mouth there, I
Speaker 2: feel like vibe coding maybe just fraud. I think it's
Speaker 2: a fraud. I don't it should not be legal to
Speaker 2: lielight because it is a fucking lie.
Speaker 3: So so I will. I'll defend the vibe coder platforms.
Speaker 3: But the defense now, I mean it's it's it is.
Speaker 3: It's fraudulent, right, I mean like if you say, hey,
Speaker 3: you don't know how to code at all, and uh yeah,
Speaker 3: just sign on to this website and I mean look
Speaker 3: at their marketing page.
Speaker 2: That's exactly what I'm loading loading. It's with a nice
Speaker 2: blue iPhone Air. Oh yeah, beautiful. I have the I
Speaker 2: have the Space Black. Hell yeah, the iPhone app Rise up.
Speaker 2: It's a great phone. It's a great phone. I'm not
Speaker 2: Apple made me pay for it. Yeah, turn your ideas
Speaker 2: into apps? What will you create? The possibilities are endless.
Speaker 2: And then it's a fake prompt that says, make me
Speaker 2: a business tool for marketing teams that helps generate professal
Speaker 2: business proposals and then add automated back up and recovery.
Speaker 2: If I think if you asked Replet to do that,
Speaker 2: it would cost three hundred dollars and nothing would happen.
Speaker 2: I think it would just yeah on count a light
Speaker 2: like barely functional code.
Speaker 3: So I wrote a post on this and I was excited. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and I was. I was excited to end the post
Speaker 3: saying there has never been a successful thing.
Speaker 2: Ever.
Speaker 3: Unfortunately, Replet has added a set of case studies, and
Speaker 3: I think that they use it. And so the case
Speaker 3: studies are we sold to enterprises and we're going to
Speaker 3: do prototypes of internal dev tools, not dev tools, internal
Speaker 3: like you know, management software for inside your back office software.
Speaker 2: So they haven't had a case study since what looks
Speaker 2: like August, and one of them is how Zinus says
Speaker 2: one hundred and forty thousand dollars with replet and it
Speaker 2: but it also cuts development time by fifty percent.
Speaker 3: But so then The question is did the person typing
Speaker 3: stuff into uplet did they know how to code?
Speaker 2: Exactly? See, that's if they know how to code whatever
Speaker 2: the stuff, it's not vibe coding. It's just you could
Speaker 2: have used custom you could use stuff. You could have
Speaker 2: used any vs code or was it what's the free
Speaker 2: one Amazon's doing now? Kiro? Maybe Kiro. And then there's
Speaker 2: the I like the one that came out from China
Speaker 2: and everyone was like, that's gonna send information to that
Speaker 2: Chinese It's like will it? I don't know, but I
Speaker 2: don't think they're going to Your clone of Flappy Bird
Speaker 2: has got to be taken up. Yeah.
Speaker 3: The way that the word vibe coding has the meaning
Speaker 3: that it has today I believe is you do not
Speaker 3: know how to code. You type prompt and you get
Speaker 3: app out. And I'm not going to dock this person
Speaker 3: because they were nice to me once, but like there's
Speaker 3: a person online like they just do like, oh, here's
Speaker 3: one hundred days of AI and I'm going to make
Speaker 3: a fully functional software as a service company fully and
Speaker 3: I don't know how to code. And then you look
Speaker 3: at this person and they're typing in the prompts. It's
Speaker 3: like they clearly have like a pretty strong technical background,
Speaker 3: and then the thing still doesn't work. By the way,
Speaker 3: that's like.
Speaker 2: Cool, Like they know how things work and it's still broken.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so I mean whatever, this person was like a
Speaker 3: product manager or something, so like they know what an
Speaker 3: API is, and they know what a web server is,
Speaker 3: and they know the names of the different technologies, and
Speaker 3: like that's going to get them part of the way there.
Speaker 3: But the idea that you can end to end create
Speaker 3: a software product that has some value.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's crazy. We would have heard about it. No,
Speaker 2: that's kind of your demo. Workpost was really good about
Speaker 2: this because it was kind of like, look, you can
Speaker 2: do the proof of concept. You can do this, but
Speaker 2: we've never seen the next stage. And someone else did
Speaker 2: a really good one was like shovel weear. They said,
Speaker 2: where's the shovelwear? Where's the crap software? They I remember
Speaker 2: the first times I was on the Internet, the amount
Speaker 2: of weird shareware. Shit, there was just like different forms
Speaker 2: of IRC clients and shit, there were people making weird software.
Speaker 2: Why isn't that happening?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean so you'll see, Okay, I made flappy Bird,
Speaker 3: I made a weird thing I made like you can
Speaker 3: make little small pieces of software for yourself that maybe
Speaker 3: have a little bit of value. It is fun, it
Speaker 3: is an novel, yes if you know like.
Speaker 2: But then it then it doesn't work like it's so,
Speaker 2: I do not know.
Speaker 3: I'm a web developer, so I know how to do
Speaker 3: web apps. I call it code for shits though, yeah whatever,
Speaker 3: but like it's that, that's what I know. That's that's
Speaker 3: what I've been doing. I've been coding for whatever, and
Speaker 3: I know how to do that. I do not know
Speaker 3: how to make iPhone apps. So I was like, okay,
Speaker 3: you know what I'm gonna do. They just announced Claude
Speaker 3: whatever because I'm interested in this stuff. I'm an early adopter.
Speaker 2: I don't And also, if it did, what however I
Speaker 2: may feel about AI If it actually did well, if
Speaker 2: Vibe coding was real, that would actually be a huge dal.
Speaker 2: That would be a huge fucking dal. I wouldn't I
Speaker 2: would have all my ethical concerns. If I could actually
Speaker 2: build software without knowing anything, Wow, that would be great.
Speaker 2: Never been the case.
Speaker 3: But you tried, though, well, so I tried. So so
Speaker 3: my idea was like, Okay, I use my phone too much.
Speaker 3: I'm gonna make an app called app snooze. It takes.
Speaker 3: So you say I want Gmail, I want it snooze
Speaker 3: for a half hour. Got it so that when I
Speaker 3: open up the Gmail app, it used this screen time
Speaker 3: thing and it says blocked, and then thirty minutes is up.
Speaker 3: I get it back, right. That is impossible to make
Speaker 3: using iOS essentially without like a substantial amount of work.
Speaker 3: It's it's based on like the limitations of how Apple
Speaker 3: does their stuff with screen time. It just cannot be done.
Speaker 3: So I type this stuff in claude is like sitting there.
Speaker 3: It's like, oh, yeah, you're You're awesome. You are killing me, dude,
Speaker 3: this is a great idea. You got this, you got this, yeah,
Speaker 3: which it actually does say in one off there. I've
Speaker 3: been watching like the World Series or whatever, and a
Speaker 3: lot of NFL and like the chatchypt Ads. We can
Speaker 3: hopefully talk about those.
Speaker 2: I haven't told any of those, Okay, well, oh no, no,
Speaker 2: I love to hear about this because I'm a Raiders fan. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and I try not to watch. If I needed to
Speaker 2: watch a poorly conceived product, I could just use my
Speaker 2: season tickets, but I solved them, so wait, but keep going.
Speaker 3: Though, okay, well but see so it's like you got this,
Speaker 3: but then it's this is the whatever. So they have Haiku,
Speaker 3: and they've sonn It, and they have Opus. Yes, so
Speaker 3: whatever awesome names. But so they have son It, which
Speaker 3: is the really good one. You know, it's very well respected.
Speaker 3: It's supposed to be it's supposed to be the cloud
Speaker 3: is supposed to be a good one for coding. And
Speaker 3: so I was like, I'm gonna pay. I'm gonna pay
Speaker 3: twenty dollars. I'm just gonna see what happens. If I
Speaker 3: can get this thing on the app Store, that'll be great.
Speaker 3: I'm gonna charge ninety nine cents. Let's see if I
Speaker 3: make a hundred bucks. Sure, see if I make my
Speaker 3: Apple Developer account back, Yeah, dump a hundred bucks into
Speaker 3: the Apple Developer account. Awesome on Apple. By the way,
Speaker 3: you can't actually do have the app coding that you
Speaker 3: need to without paying on a hundred bucks. So good,
Speaker 3: that's a business, that's that's Apple bang. But anyways, so
Speaker 3: I do that. I want to make my hundred bucks back,
Speaker 3: but it cannot be done.
Speaker 2: Well, the app you couldn't build the Apple though it sounds.
Speaker 3: But because because of like literal limitations in how iOS
Speaker 3: works in terms of like you can't have a timer
Speaker 3: that goes off and messes with screen time. That's just
Speaker 3: not a thing that Apple was.
Speaker 2: This thing called Brick, whether it's a physical device as well,
Speaker 2: but that feels like a Bluetooth. Something's going on with Brick.
Speaker 2: I don't know. But here's here's the thing as well.
Speaker 2: With all of this, you just made me think it
Speaker 2: is weird that the app doesn't just go yeah, I
Speaker 2: can't build that NTE.
Speaker 3: It'd be nice if it did say that, and it
Speaker 3: was this was weird. I had never observe this behavior before.
Speaker 3: And again I've posted online like okay, you know this,
Speaker 3: you know three bees in Blueberry that thing?
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: Whatever, and people I posted that on LinkedIn and someone
Speaker 3: was like, you are lying, and I post my link. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I post the link to the chat and they're like,
Speaker 3: you had a secret prompt that told it to be stupid.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's prompt injection. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like you have a system prompt that says like
Speaker 3: it's like stupid as ship did.
Speaker 2: Yeah a piece of ship. Dude.
Speaker 3: I messed up. I put be stupid in my system.
Speaker 3: I should have put I should have put be smart.
Speaker 3: If I put smart, it would have worked.
Speaker 2: So on this. You just reminded me when I was
Speaker 2: dicking around with clode code. So I did the story
Speaker 2: a few months ago about how you know, I don't
Speaker 2: know if you've seen like vibrank where it's got like
Speaker 2: people in cloth spend fifty thousand dollars. I love those people.
Speaker 2: I think that's awesome. Well to try this myself, I
Speaker 2: went on. I was like, what is the most token
Speaker 2: intensive software you could build me. It's like, oh yeah,
Speaker 2: an autonomous car and a bet of us. I'm like, cool,
Speaker 2: build all of that. It just sat house just and
Speaker 2: I don't even know what's sped out at the end.
Speaker 3: Well, I mean it certainly, well you could have a
Speaker 3: trillion dollars start up on your hands, but it's just
Speaker 3: you should check out that code.
Speaker 2: It's so sick that these things don't even go like, yeah,
Speaker 2: we can't do that, Like I can't do an autonomous
Speaker 2: car starts up. I don't have any training data. Very basic.
Speaker 3: But if it was, if it was, if that thing
Speaker 3: was smart or useful, right, it has the ability to
Speaker 3: look things up online. Yeah, you should have looked through
Speaker 3: the documentation, and it sort of said, well, what can
Speaker 3: we do with timers? What can we do a screen time?
Speaker 3: Can you hook up a timer to screen time. I
Speaker 3: will let you do this in the background and get
Speaker 3: the half hour time incorrectly, And it's like it's it's
Speaker 3: it's demoware and it allows you to build demoware.
Speaker 2: But it didn't even build a demo of this. Well,
Speaker 2: so now it.
Speaker 3: Built me something I was kind of excited about because
Speaker 3: it it let me pick the app. So I picked Gmail,
Speaker 3: and I picked thirty minutes and then it it it worked.
Speaker 3: Gmail's turned off, right, thirty minutes elapse?
Speaker 2: Right? Gmail is not back on? Oh so you just
Speaker 2: cut Gmail? Well, I mean it's not been in your
Speaker 2: email since.
Speaker 3: No, exactly, Sorry customers, if you have been emailing me,
Speaker 3: it's messed up. No, but it it was like it's
Speaker 3: just lied, right, I mean, And so like that's imagine
Speaker 3: being someone I'm a software developer. Okay, whatever, I'm gonna
Speaker 3: I don't know iOS, but like I'm gonna go on
Speaker 3: the Apple pages and see what's up, and I'm gonna
Speaker 3: ask some meaningful follow ups and determine that this didn't work.
Speaker 3: And Okay, I lost my hundred bucks in the developer
Speaker 3: yeah account. But if you don't know how to code,
Speaker 3: you're going to be like, what are you going to do?
Speaker 2: Well, there's nothing you can do, because the reason I
Speaker 2: read the replic pages and the cursor pages and the
Speaker 2: Curse of One, it's people that can code a little
Speaker 2: be at least a little bit. But replet is just
Speaker 2: it's fifty percent and same with lovables. Read it as well,
Speaker 2: Lovables and other listeners. It's another AI coding platform sold,
Speaker 2: a survived coding thing, and it's all it's fifty percent
Speaker 2: people being like I've spent three hundred dollars, and then
Speaker 2: like ten percent people just lying. People be like I
Speaker 2: just reached twelve thousand M or monthly recurring revenue. It's
Speaker 2: all good for and everyone being like can I see it?
Speaker 2: And they never respond. And then there's the there's the
Speaker 2: people who are like looking for a REDPLT developer, and
Speaker 2: it's like, so you're looking for someone that can write software,
Speaker 2: because write and build software interesting, like a software developer
Speaker 2: might say, and I don't know where to find one. Yeah.
Speaker 3: It's almost like there are like hundreds of thousands, millions
Speaker 3: of people trying to do that, but yeah, we don't
Speaker 3: need them. We can just we talk into the thing
Speaker 3: and turn your app into reality except you.
Speaker 2: It's just it is really crazy how much vibe coding
Speaker 2: is proliferate considering how fucking it's nothing.
Speaker 3: Well so, but so if you need, like if you
Speaker 3: need a prototype, So if like this whole thing boils
Speaker 3: down to if if the expectations were real, if it
Speaker 3: was like, yeah, turn your app, turn your sentence into
Speaker 3: a prototype of an application in minutes. Okay, yeah, like
Speaker 3: an MVP. MVP is like, oh yeah, used to work,
Speaker 3: but well okay, oh sorry, I thought you were saying.
Speaker 2: Hypothetical world where it works.
Speaker 3: Well no, yeah, sorry, Well now in a hypothetical world
Speaker 3: and where it does what it does today, you can
Speaker 3: get like a mock up. If it's a build a
Speaker 3: semi functional wireframe mockup of your application that you could
Speaker 3: show to kind of validate your idea to your friends
Speaker 3: in minutes. Yeah, for thirty dollars or whoever it's your
Speaker 3: credits and up being. That's fine, But does that happen?
Speaker 2: Doesn't it? You could kind of do that. You're lucky,
Speaker 2: it's you roll the dice. That's the thing. It's always
Speaker 2: if you're lucky. There's enough asterisks on this. It's just
Speaker 2: insane that it's got this far because I've read a
Speaker 2: lot of vibe coding articles and if you read like
Speaker 2: Kevin Ruce of course in the Times and people like that,
Speaker 2: you read these articles and you'd think, Wow, you can
Speaker 2: just do this, you can just go and do this.
Speaker 2: This is the future is today. But it's not really
Speaker 2: not really the case at all.
Speaker 3: But I think that the thing that's so like pernicious
Speaker 3: about it is that it's so easy to just say
Speaker 3: skill issue.
Speaker 2: You just two words. You're prompt you're prompting it wrong,
Speaker 2: David devait Yer old thing. But now it's yeah, you're
Speaker 2: prompting it wrong.
Speaker 3: You're prompting it wrong. And so and there's no real
Speaker 3: way to disprove that because can we go back in
Speaker 3: time and like, because it's all this probabilistic stuff. And so,
Speaker 3: so I have a post that I've put up and
Speaker 3: it's it's code doesn't happen to you, that's my thing
Speaker 3: is So it's it's my because you know top programming
Speaker 3: for a while, and so if you're teaching a new programmer,
Speaker 3: sometimes if they have like if they've kind of gotten
Speaker 3: unlucky and they have a bad attitude. They're you know,
Speaker 3: and it's not their fault, but they might think, like
Speaker 3: coding is really mysterious and it's really weird, and I
Speaker 3: type code in and I press run, and it doesn't
Speaker 3: always do what I want, and so I'm just gonna
Speaker 3: like mess around, right and like vibe coding is like
Speaker 3: a productionized version of code happens to you. It's like
Speaker 3: you press button, code pops out, it does a mysterious thing,
Speaker 3: and then like, you know, it's so it's like it's
Speaker 3: like that idea, which was the wrong way to program,
Speaker 3: but like that's the way we're doing it, like and
Speaker 3: we're going to what is the right way, though the
Speaker 3: right way would be. A computer is like you operate
Speaker 3: a computer. You turn it on, You open the coding
Speaker 3: software that you're going to use, whether it's an online
Speaker 3: software like my Wonderful software or you know, something like
Speaker 3: vs code, like something for professionals, whatever, and you type
Speaker 3: in code and you run it, and then the computer
Speaker 3: like executes it runs the code according to the.
Speaker 2: Programming like code is instructions.
Speaker 3: Code is instructions, and the code like happens de terministically
Speaker 3: and maybe if you're, you know, developing a game, maybe
Speaker 3: there's some random elements to the software that you're developing,
Speaker 3: but there's no randomness, like the randomness is under your control.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so it's true. It's the difference between treating it
Speaker 2: as this mystic force that you pull together versus instructions.
Speaker 3: It's instructions and so like if you're if you're a
Speaker 3: really good programmer and maybe you're whatever, maybe you use
Speaker 3: AI to save you some typing and you still have
Speaker 3: that good attitude whatever, like you can use to say typing,
Speaker 3: that's fine.
Speaker 2: I mean, that's the only real vapp like that that
Speaker 2: feels like the only consistent thing is just filling in
Speaker 2: blanks that you know you code yourself. Like it feels
Speaker 2: in it's also correct, and I'm like, I'm which may
Speaker 2: be useful. I'm not gonna lie like I use it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, like I but I used to have a
Speaker 3: paid GPT account, but I don't trust it to do
Speaker 3: like the models. And this is one of the things
Speaker 3: that I brought up in my post is the models
Speaker 3: like aren't better now right that Well, GPT three was
Speaker 3: okay and GPT four was like much genera and then
Speaker 3: GBT five is trash. Yeah, I mean right, relatively speaking,
Speaker 3: maybe it's a little bit better, and maybe it costs
Speaker 3: open a eye more, which is a big development.
Speaker 2: It was very very great for them and whatever you
Speaker 2: had to cost them less, but it costs more, costs.
Speaker 3: More, but so stop getting better. So that there was
Speaker 3: a time where I was like, I'm gonna I'm gonna
Speaker 3: buy into this. IM an earlier after.
Speaker 2: I'm kind of I'm kind of a booster, Like I
Speaker 2: I was cured going to where's your head? Dot at?
Speaker 2: That's is it? Dot com? It's just where's your adult at? Oh,
Speaker 2: where's your Okay, well, where's your head? Dot At?
Speaker 3: Cured me a little bit of this because I'm like,
Speaker 3: and I've just had some situations where it's just failed
Speaker 3: me so poorly. Like there was a confluence of events
Speaker 3: this summer where I was just like, no, what happened?
Speaker 3: I'm done with this. First of all, I got a
Speaker 3: strong recommendation from uh GPT to buy a software called
Speaker 3: a script, which is like editing, because I have I
Speaker 3: have a YouTube channel and I want to like I
Speaker 3: say a lot of ums and ohs, and maybe I'm
Speaker 3: saying some ums and ohs right now whatever, who cares? Yeah,
Speaker 3: And but I'm like, okay, I'm gonna make this YouTube channel.
Speaker 3: I want the production quality to be decent. If there's
Speaker 3: a shortcut for me, it seems like a I might
Speaker 3: be able to do this. So I'm like to GPT,
Speaker 3: I'm like, what is good AI get rid of ums
Speaker 3: and OS software just.
Speaker 2: Descript kind of like a Google search.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah or whatever. It's an okay Google search
Speaker 3: ye whatever. And so he said you got to use
Speaker 3: the script, and I was like cool. And so I
Speaker 3: put in my credit card twenty bucks or thirty bucks
Speaker 3: or whatever whatever it was, just I put it in
Speaker 3: a recording and just completely mangled it.
Speaker 2: Yep.
Speaker 3: And it's just like the audio was unusable. It was
Speaker 3: it was off by an eighth of a second off
Speaker 3: my voice, and it's just like there's no way there's
Speaker 3: I have no recourse and I'm not an audio engineer,
Speaker 3: and so I just okay, like I vibe, I vibe
Speaker 3: edited my my video and just ruined it.
Speaker 2: It's almost like every promise they make is it's going
Speaker 2: to automate everything. It's like, ah, not really, as long
Speaker 2: as you know what you're doing.
Speaker 3: But this was like a meta level thing where the
Speaker 3: AI recommended me either AI also screwed me over, and
Speaker 3: so I'm like, okay, this is like this may this
Speaker 3: is like because I was using it a search, right yeah,
Speaker 3: and so but it failed me a search because it's
Speaker 3: just emphatically And then you look, because then I was like, well,
Speaker 3: what's wrong?
Speaker 2: Am I? Is it a skill issue? Am I stupid?
Speaker 2: And so I look and Reddit is just filled with
Speaker 2: like this is the worst software, this is the worst
Speaker 2: I used the script very briefly, and all I wanted
Speaker 2: to do was take a bit of audio and turn
Speaker 2: it into a video with the text happening. That's the
Speaker 2: way you read their marketing material. You would look at
Speaker 2: it and think it would take two seconds. Took me
Speaker 2: about forty five minutes, and it was just by the
Speaker 2: end of it, I'm like, I don't even want to
Speaker 2: fucking that. I'm so angry because it's like, this should
Speaker 2: be a button press. The whole point of AI bullshit
Speaker 2: is meant it should be a button press, and it
Speaker 2: never is. Bo wait, well there are other events though.
Speaker 3: Well, so there's that, and so there's that, and then
Speaker 3: it's like, so I'm also I'm a web developer, right,
Speaker 3: and so I'm not very good. I can't program mobile apps.
Speaker 3: That's a thing that I can't do, don't know how.
Speaker 3: I'm also not a very good like infrastructure systems programmer
Speaker 3: whatever that's you know, cloud stuff whatever. I'm not great
Speaker 3: at that, but that is an aspect of my job
Speaker 3: that I have to do. Our website requires some infrastructure
Speaker 3: difficult stuff. Over the years, I've actually gotten quite a
Speaker 3: bit better at that, and so that used to be
Speaker 3: a use case for me for GPT was like, oh,
Speaker 3: it'll I'll ask you some infrastructure related questions, like I
Speaker 3: know how to code, I can piece of I can
Speaker 3: put the puzzle together, and you know, this is actually
Speaker 3: going to save me a little bit of time. But
Speaker 3: I have outpaced GPT's ability and infrastructure developments, so it's okay,
Speaker 3: well I'm doing this project. It's not helping. Yeah, it's
Speaker 3: just wasting my time. Okay, no need for that. The
Speaker 3: descript thing is BS And then I learned from at
Speaker 3: Tetron that this stuff is horrendously expensive. So it's like
Speaker 3: if this was just regular software's service and it costs
Speaker 3: pennies to operate, and you know, it's like kind of helpful.
Speaker 2: Whatever, yeah, be in offensive. It would be like.
Speaker 3: It's fine whatever. There's a company they offered me this
Speaker 3: eight this thing and it didn't work, and you know
Speaker 3: it happens. Yeah, but it's like in the context of
Speaker 3: a world in which this is the future, this is
Speaker 3: magic in a click of a button you get perfect
Speaker 3: audio out if that's the promise in the midst of
Speaker 3: all this and an AI is recommending to it, this
Speaker 3: is like meta leveled like off like dog shits a
Speaker 3: situation and then it's and then it's the dressed disastrously expensive. Yeah,
Speaker 3: like what is the point? What is the point of
Speaker 3: all of this?
Speaker 2: The point is we need to sell GPUs every and
Speaker 2: literally in the car here they announced a seven years,
Speaker 2: thirty eight billion dollar a day between open ai and
Speaker 2: Amazon Web Services. It's just like, why so that we
Speaker 2: can so that they can do sora to more so
Speaker 2: they can generate more copyright infringement. It's and have do
Speaker 2: you have you in the past used these coding models
Speaker 2: a lot or is it just kind of like on
Speaker 2: the side.
Speaker 3: I have so even like I will say, even like
Speaker 3: two weeks ago, I had a very discreete task where
Speaker 3: it's like, in this one situation, I want to do
Speaker 3: this one little thing. Yeah, and I knew exactly what
Speaker 3: it was, and I was lazy, and so I said, right,
Speaker 3: write the code, and so I put in and then
Speaker 3: this is a joke comment and people should do this
Speaker 3: more often. I put in a I paste it in
Speaker 3: the code, and I said, this code comes courtesy of
Speaker 3: chatch ebt. If you have any issues with this software,
Speaker 3: please contact open AI. That's what I wrote in my code, and.
Speaker 2: I should did and it worked great. Whatever. Okay, that's cool.
Speaker 2: It's saved me twenty minutes. That's that's good. And that's
Speaker 2: the thing that's the whole AI bubble. It's like, but
Speaker 2: I'm not a paying subscriber anymore. Oh, that's even worse
Speaker 2: for them.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I know, I just you know, because it's it's
Speaker 3: the stupidest model of theirs could have come up with
Speaker 3: that code because it was so easy, you know, it
Speaker 3: was it was finicky, it was annoying. There are bit
Speaker 3: situations where I f saying, you know, I say, oh
Speaker 3: there's a bug in this code. I paste it in
Speaker 3: and it looks it over and it saved me in
Speaker 3: aggregate tens of hours in the last three years.
Speaker 2: That's fine. It's like, if it was regular sass, I'd
Speaker 2: be like cool, yeah.
Speaker 3: I if it was I think that's kind of part
Speaker 3: of why I canceled the subscription, because if it was
Speaker 3: you know, whatever you needed value your time, you know,
Speaker 3: I could if it was twenty bucks a month and
Speaker 3: it saved me an hour a month, hey, you know yeah,
Speaker 3: it's like.
Speaker 2: Like trip it or flighty, like it's a little bit
Speaker 2: of software we pay for it does a thing. And
Speaker 2: if it was it was ceiling from everyone and burn
Speaker 2: down like it's just it. It only makes sense if
Speaker 2: it was cheap, and it's the literal opposite. If this
Speaker 2: was like cheap, like cheap CPU driven shit, and fine, sure,
Speaker 2: but it's like I one day, I think we're going
Speaker 2: to find out how expensive this is and it's going
Speaker 2: to scare the shit out of people. But you know what,
Speaker 2: that that actually makes me want to move to a
Speaker 2: specific post. You made your scaling laws posts. Let's talk
Speaker 2: about this. So you were a booster at one point
Speaker 2: and you read the stuff short, but you wrote a
Speaker 2: very eloquent piece about the scaling laws about how and
Speaker 2: I've tried to work this into my work, but it's
Speaker 2: we can have I don't know if i'd call it empathy,
Speaker 2: but some understanding of how we got here with the
Speaker 2: AI bubble, because when GPT four came out, it does
Speaker 2: seem like tech people had a reason to be excited.
Speaker 2: I was so excited. What was exciting? It was awesome.
Speaker 3: You talked to it and it was just like this.
Speaker 3: I would ask it coding problems that I found. So
Speaker 3: I was still a teacher at the time, and I
Speaker 3: was like, oh, man, like I have the APE Computer
Speaker 3: Science exam coming up, and I need to like come
Speaker 3: up with practice problems. And I was like generators out
Speaker 3: of thirty practice problems, I obviously read them over it
Speaker 3: to my due diligence, and I, you know, I tried
Speaker 3: the I did a good job putting them together. But
Speaker 3: it's like these are decent, Yeah, these are decent practice problems,
Speaker 3: and like this is this is useful software. I did
Speaker 3: not understand how expensive it was, but there was there's
Speaker 3: a the number of things that would like the hell.
Speaker 2: Will also give you, so the read the listeners don't
Speaker 2: get mad. To be clear, GPT four was twenty twenty three. Yeah,
Speaker 2: we had we were very early in understanding. I mean
Speaker 2: the environmental damage was there, really sure, but they were
Speaker 2: also promisingly effects. But it took a full year until
Speaker 2: June twenty twenty four when they it came out the
Speaker 2: Open Eye would burn five billion dollars. So like early on,
Speaker 2: we didn't really know the costs either. And if I'm
Speaker 2: sure someone will find a fucking link anyway, keep going.
Speaker 4: Well.
Speaker 3: So I was I was pumped up because I saw
Speaker 3: GPT three, was I I you know, I'm a tech person,
Speaker 3: and so I remember seeing early demos a GPT three
Speaker 3: and it was like interesting novelty. It would say stupid
Speaker 3: things and it was kind of cool that it could
Speaker 3: even generate sentences. That was awesome. Three point five came
Speaker 3: out and GPT whatever chat GPT. It's like, that's pretty cool. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I can use it as a search thing and it
Speaker 3: says that I'm good, which I like when people say
Speaker 3: I'm good? Do you like when people say you're good?
Speaker 2: Ed doesn't happen very much, but I think, I, you
Speaker 2: know what, I'll be honest, I knit that there's something
Speaker 2: I think mentally about me where all of the anthwerpomorphization
Speaker 2: pisses not even pissed milf. I'm just like, okay, shut up,
Speaker 2: shut up, shut up. Yeah, it was bullied too much
Speaker 2: as a kid that like, confidences don't work on me anymore.
Speaker 2: I do want to write a.
Speaker 3: I do want to write a thing at some point
Speaker 3: about how if it wasn't chat GPT, if it was
Speaker 3: like box get text yeah, and there was no inn promorphization,
Speaker 3: if it was just like this is a thing that
Speaker 3: can generate usable or interesting or like code for you,
Speaker 3: but there's no chat element to it, that would actually
Speaker 3: make it a lot better to me, like the answer
Speaker 3: pomorphization of like, oh you're talking to a person that
Speaker 3: really makes me mad.
Speaker 2: Yes, And also I find every time it goes you
Speaker 2: got it, you got to just shut up, shut up,
Speaker 2: shut there.
Speaker 3: So in one of these NFL ads, literally I don't
Speaker 3: know if they're like doing a nod to the haters
Speaker 3: or what, but they like, take, we're going, we're going a.
Speaker 2: Couple, make sure the link is in the world.
Speaker 3: Well yeah, no, there's like four of them. Hopefully they
Speaker 3: aren't know you. But uh, it's like a guy doing
Speaker 3: he's trying to do pull ups and it's like here's
Speaker 3: your pull up plan, Like you need to do one
Speaker 3: pull up and then you should do two pull ups,
Speaker 3: and then you should do four or five pull ups,
Speaker 3: and like, I'm actually you will be able to do
Speaker 3: several pull ups and then at the end it's like
Speaker 3: you got this.
Speaker 2: Okay. If so the plan is you do more pull
Speaker 2: ups of a time, you could probably just work that
Speaker 2: out by doing doing pull ups with text in it. Mate,
Speaker 2: I nobody said you got this, but yeah, exactly. Actually no,
Speaker 2: my friend Mac, when I text him about pull ups,
Speaker 2: he says much, He's like, you fucking got this. I
Speaker 2: think he may have. Literally, it's just that's the commercial.
Speaker 2: That's the commercial. That's the commercial. But it's the commercial.
Speaker 2: People watching the NFL and they're like, oh shit, why
Speaker 2: should I use chat GPT. Oh it's gonna tell me
Speaker 2: a pull up plan where I increased from one to several,
Speaker 2: one to seven. You got this? You got this? I
Speaker 2: mean I didn't pause.
Speaker 3: I mean maybe I did not pause the commercial, but
Speaker 3: I it could it could have said some really interesting
Speaker 3: stuff in the middle. I don't know, but the bullet,
Speaker 3: because it has to have a bullet of the list,
Speaker 3: I am pretty sure and I might be lying, and
Speaker 3: so whatever, you know, send me some hate mail, but
Speaker 3: like I'm pretty sure it said like do a couple
Speaker 3: wait a week, you know, drink a protein shake and like,
Speaker 3: you know, do a couple more.
Speaker 2: It's just Google Search, except it makes up the results.
Speaker 2: That's all three fucking years.
Speaker 3: So I have a new idea, which is that it's
Speaker 3: Yahoo Answers but the person has a lobotomy and was like,
Speaker 3: it just did cocaine.
Speaker 2: That's who answers. Yeah, I want it. That's just Yah
Speaker 2: or Cora. But it's like but it's like light speed, yeah,
Speaker 2: like the fast. Well Cora now is GPT like they
Speaker 2: did because Adam DeAngelo is on the board of open Ai.
Speaker 2: So it's just got GPT answers and GPT questions now.
Speaker 2: So cool. But early on it was exciting and there
Speaker 2: were these scaling laws walk me through through the listeners
Speaker 2: who might not understand.
Speaker 3: So yeah, so the post that I wrote, which very
Speaker 3: nicely called eloquence. So if I could pay you twenty
Speaker 3: hours a month to kind of just send me stuff
Speaker 3: like you've got this.
Speaker 2: I'll just I'll email those you got.
Speaker 3: This, Okay, that's great, I'll put it on a schedule. Yeah,
Speaker 3: if you could just do that, I'll pay you twenty
Speaker 3: bucks a month. No, but so so there was an
Speaker 3: idea that if you increase the size of the models.
Speaker 3: I'm not an AI that's right, I'm an AI scientist,
Speaker 3: and so in this post I said, I'm not an
Speaker 3: AI expert or an economist. But like, you look at
Speaker 3: this chart, this chart that they had and you can
Speaker 3: link the thing. And I actually think I cited my sources,
Speaker 3: the original like paper basically about the scaling laws. They
Speaker 3: have this chart that is incredible. It is like, make
Speaker 3: model ten times bigger, get the nice jump in performance.
Speaker 3: Make model ten times bigger, get nice jump in performance.
Speaker 3: And then the idea is like, okay, well if we
Speaker 3: just keep making it ten times bigger, we will get
Speaker 3: who knows how good they can get? Yeah, and it
Speaker 3: kind and it did work, like it was working for
Speaker 3: a minute. That's how they went, to the best of
Speaker 3: my knowledge, that's how they went from three point five
Speaker 3: to four.
Speaker 2: I mean there's a.
Speaker 3: Number of they have smart people over there, yeah, Like
Speaker 3: I mean, we can be honest that like they're doing
Speaker 3: clever stuff.
Speaker 2: Small is also a very subjective. Sure, these are people
Speaker 2: who want experts in mathematics.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they're doing hard, real math and they're getting results.
Speaker 3: Like the fact that it can do what it does
Speaker 3: is incredible.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's kind of crazy that they can do it.
Speaker 3: If that was all they were saying, If that was
Speaker 3: all they were saying, if they were just like, we
Speaker 3: did research, We've created this incredible piece of technology that
Speaker 3: feels almost alien at this point, I mean, or at
Speaker 3: the point when we discovered it. Now it feels like,
Speaker 3: you know, just we take it for granted that it's
Speaker 3: kind of this trash thing. But like at the moment
Speaker 3: when it was released, it was like, oh my gosh,
Speaker 3: like this is actually crazy. Yeah. And the idea was
Speaker 3: we make it ten times bigger and we will get
Speaker 3: a similar jump in performance, and that is GPT four
Speaker 3: point five. It's just like a footnote in history.
Speaker 2: Oh that was that was released.
Speaker 3: And sam Altman was just like, uh, yeah, well we
Speaker 3: made a big model.
Speaker 2: It was the best announcement ever. I'm actually gonna put it,
Speaker 2: but from what I remember, miss miss Clammy Sammy was like, yeah,
Speaker 2: you know, it's I'm just gonna do it from memory.
Speaker 2: I it's it was like, yeah, good news. It's really
Speaker 2: good for writing bad news. It's really compute intensive. And
Speaker 2: I was like yay.
Speaker 3: And in that announcement I did quote this in the
Speaker 3: post because I don't want to make stuff up and
Speaker 3: like whatever, but they literally said, with each ten x,
Speaker 3: with each order of magnitude, you know, ten x increase
Speaker 3: in model size, we will get an improvement in performance.
Speaker 2: Yes, but like, where's the like worth the big improvement?
Speaker 2: Like it's gone? I don't.
Speaker 3: I think that was them. I think that was the moment.
Speaker 3: I don't know what day they announced four point five,
Speaker 3: but I think every into twenty that was the that
Speaker 3: was a game over. Yeah, and then they did the
Speaker 3: reasoning stuff, and the reasoning stuff was the reasoning.
Speaker 2: Thing was September twenty twenty four. And my favorite thing
Speaker 2: about that was reading all the tech press writing about
Speaker 2: it and being like, can any of you tell me
Speaker 2: what this does? Can any of you tell me why
Speaker 2: this matters to this day? And I'm, by the way,
Speaker 2: I'm not. Actually, it took a minute for me to
Speaker 2: work out what the fuck? And it's just a hat
Speaker 2: on a hat thing. It's like, instead of spitting out
Speaker 2: an output, it goes what would the output be? Oh,
Speaker 2: I will I will go through it and choose these steps,
Speaker 2: which is it's test time compute and it's.
Speaker 3: Mantle and I could have had a moment of reflection
Speaker 3: when the reasoning models came out where because I was.
Speaker 2: Like, okay, it was still the height of the fever, though.
Speaker 3: I know, but I so I asked it a hard question.
Speaker 3: So I did a maths degree and a computer science
Speaker 3: degree in right, So I was like, take this topic
Speaker 3: from sophomore year abstract algebra and do this like visualization
Speaker 3: of the thing, right, And I took one of the
Speaker 3: early reasoning models, which everyone is like, oh, oh one,
Speaker 3: so sure, because it's like you have a PhD level
Speaker 3: thing in the pocket. Okay, so PhD level thing should
Speaker 3: be able to take real sophomore math sophomore and college
Speaker 3: math concept and visualize it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you should be able to do that. And then
Speaker 2: it didn't, and then I kind of just did it.
Speaker 2: I was kind of just like, oh, I guess I hmm.
Speaker 2: And then I just didn't think about it.
Speaker 3: And then I just kept on kind of hoping that
Speaker 3: something exciting would happen.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I can a bit of empathy here, I
Speaker 2: get if you're and at that time, so it was
Speaker 2: September twenty twenty four. A month later, they'd raise six
Speaker 2: point six billion dollars to get a credit facility of
Speaker 2: four billion dollars. Like they it looked like open Aye
Speaker 2: was going places. Unless you're like me and you've read
Speaker 2: every single possible financial thing you can get hand on,
Speaker 2: and you've obsessed with the numbers. But I can get
Speaker 2: why someone it was stick within the booster ring might
Speaker 2: not immediately be like fuck because yeah, I don't know,
Speaker 2: people hadn't built things of reasoning, and it did actually
Speaker 2: take a few months for people to work out products
Speaker 2: with reasoning.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, and whatever. I mean, I don't know
Speaker 3: what the improvements were. And they improved on the benchmarks.
Speaker 2: That's fine.
Speaker 3: It's kind of like and I'm sure that the coding
Speaker 3: results are marginally better.
Speaker 2: That's the thing. Though marginally.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's always margin, but now it's marginally. But that's
Speaker 3: the thing. Three to four was sick, huge jump.
Speaker 2: That was sick.
Speaker 3: That was not marginal. If you had, if you had,
Speaker 3: if your lights were on, if you were paying attention
Speaker 3: and you typed a thing into three and you typed
Speaker 3: a thing into four, you should be impressed.
Speaker 2: Oh, I remember the jump. I wasn't doing better off
Speaker 2: alone at the time, didn't do that until February twenty
Speaker 2: twenty four. But I remember being like, oh that'sk but
Speaker 2: I remember just being like okay, now I was I
Speaker 2: was it was like, wow, we made a computer do
Speaker 2: this and this cool?
Speaker 3: Okay now yeah, And so like I was vaguely aware
Speaker 3: of the of the line chart that I mentioned in
Speaker 3: that post, and so I was like, oh, like all
Speaker 3: they had to do it was like it is a
Speaker 3: freight train toward like actual really cool thing because it's like,
Speaker 3: just make it bigger. And therefore if we just need
Speaker 3: to make it bigger, then we do need more compute
Speaker 3: and the reasoning models.
Speaker 2: Would you finally got another way to throw compute because
Speaker 2: it's the training compute and well compute to generate and
Speaker 2: on so test time compute. Wow.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so like that's that's where the freight train's over. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and I and I just four point five came out,
Speaker 3: didn't really think about it that hard. They started doing
Speaker 3: the reasoning stuff and it's like, okay, well they have
Speaker 3: marginal improvements and they say it did really good on
Speaker 3: a math Olympiad or whatever, and like that's that's interesting.
Speaker 3: But but then it's like another whole year goes by
Speaker 3: and then and then GPT five comes out and like
Speaker 3: what what was that?
Speaker 2: It was nothing and it was so strange.
Speaker 3: And so that that was the final So when I'm
Speaker 3: talking about my confidence and the guns, that cured me
Speaker 3: of my boosterism. Like I started reading your stuff about
Speaker 3: it being expensive. Yeah, but then I was like, this
Speaker 3: is interesting. I've started reading this guy Ed's posts. GPT
Speaker 3: five is coming out next week. I wonder if this
Speaker 3: guy is going to have an extraordinary amount of egg
Speaker 3: on his face. Yeah, like you might have been scared.
Speaker 2: I wasn't because I have the stonewell of the Buddha.
Speaker 2: But it's I was also just like when it when
Speaker 2: reasoning was coming up, going back to twenty twenty three,
Speaker 2: they did was some real shit. The rumors around that
Speaker 2: Q star, Yeah, it was like wit. The reason Samuton
Speaker 2: got fired was they found a terrifying new AI they
Speaker 2: kind of like drummed up. There were leaks about it.
Speaker 2: There were leaks about levels of intelligence. There was all
Speaker 2: of these big leaks. There was really no leaking around
Speaker 2: GPT five other than a Wall Street Journal story towards
Speaker 2: the end of twenty twenty four where it was like, yeah,
Speaker 2: it's costing a shit ton of money. It isn't working
Speaker 2: very well, like the leaks. The reason I because the
Speaker 2: thing is, I mean this to this day. If I
Speaker 2: am wrong about all this, I don't think I am.
Speaker 2: I will admit it. I will explain why. But GPT
Speaker 2: five I wasn't particularly worried about because it did I
Speaker 2: could not fucking tell you what the what it was
Speaker 2: going to be like, no one really if you go
Speaker 2: back to twenty twenty three and you look up GPT
Speaker 2: five stuff, the shit that people are saying is insane.
Speaker 2: That was someone saying it would be completely autonomous and
Speaker 2: it would turn weapons systems against people. There's bonk as ship.
Speaker 2: But getting up to it, yeah, it was kind of
Speaker 2: a proving point, but it was just another fucking model.
Speaker 3: Well, and so that you and I had started exchanging
Speaker 3: emails because whatever, I sorry podcast, and I said them
Speaker 3: on my post over and it was it was it
Speaker 3: was interesting talking to you and then I I when
Speaker 3: that when announcement was going on, I emailed you and
Speaker 3: you got a lot of emails coming through. But I said,
Speaker 3: ed ed ed ed ed ed ed. They announced paywalled
Speaker 3: chat colors.
Speaker 2: Yes, I go through. No, no, I remember this but go
Speaker 2: through this. In the announcement of GPT five, the biggest
Speaker 2: thing ever, They're like, for our paid subscribers, you can
Speaker 2: turn your chat yellow, which they still haven't released.
Speaker 3: They still haven't released that. I don't I'm not I'm
Speaker 3: not a paying subscribers. I've never seen a yellow.
Speaker 2: I'm paying for chat JPT plus. See you can turn
Speaker 2: it yellow. I want to see if I can do this,
Speaker 2: live on it yellow, pink, green, change my window color well, GPT,
Speaker 2: GPT No, I'm going to ask it because it's fucking insane.
Speaker 2: If this doesn't searching the web, yes, you can change
Speaker 2: they did well. They did well. Can you though? On
Speaker 2: some platforms you can change the accent color. God, this
Speaker 2: fucking stinks. The fact that you can't ask a product
Speaker 2: what it does.
Speaker 3: Well, if you if you can't ask, like, I don't know,
Speaker 3: what's it good? But I mean, if you can't ask,
Speaker 3: if you can't type into a Google doc in two
Speaker 3: thousand and seven, what does Google docs do? That's unsurprising.
Speaker 2: But that's because Google Docs is a place to write woods.
Speaker 2: This is meant to answer the thing.
Speaker 3: Well, no, that's what I'm saying. But it's like they've
Speaker 3: they claimed that it's this all you know, all all
Speaker 3: knowing omniscion thing and it cannot tell you how to turn.
Speaker 3: Shouldn't it have just done it for you?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 2: H like give me the bus.
Speaker 3: It should have it should have said edit, great question,
Speaker 3: would you like it to be blue?
Speaker 2: Yellow?
Speaker 3: Pin or or chars are orange? And and like? But
Speaker 3: where was the But where was That's what it should
Speaker 3: have done.
Speaker 2: And also the idea that that was one of the
Speaker 2: announcements is very very cool. I love the idea that, like,
Speaker 2: it's the biggest moment ever and you can now make
Speaker 2: chair GPT brown. It's insane. It's insane.
Speaker 3: Brown is one of the supportive colors. Probably not next year. Yeah,
Speaker 3: that that relies on the compute actually the oracle deal.
Speaker 2: Yeah it's brown, I'm brown. Oh my god. It's so
Speaker 2: cool that we've built our entire economy on top of
Speaker 2: this as well. But but the GPT five thing is
Speaker 2: it was such a weird moment because watching everyone try
Speaker 2: and be excited about it was really good. There was
Speaker 2: the whole THEO white weight, not THEO weight, and that's
Speaker 2: the information THEO there's this fucking guy. Now I'm gonna
Speaker 2: I really shouldn't have blanked. I've mentioned him. He did
Speaker 2: a whole thing about GPT five. I'm gonna look this
Speaker 2: up live on this professional show, where he did a
Speaker 2: whole thing saying GPT five is the most amazing thing ever,
Speaker 2: and and then had to be like, yeah, actually yes,
Speaker 2: THEO THEO Brown. There we go, THEO Brown. He did
Speaker 2: the thing saying I'm scared of how good GPT five is.
Speaker 2: Then a week laters like actually it's not the same
Speaker 2: as when I used it, which is craziest that that
Speaker 2: should have been a scandal, Like why was that the case?
Speaker 2: But everyone just kind of moved on. But I I
Speaker 2: don't know what women to be excited about next GPT six. Well, yeah,
Speaker 2: it's just But also, what's that meant to? Because JPT
Speaker 2: five was this weird kind of like myth in the future.
Speaker 2: It's like when we reach this, everything will get better.
Speaker 2: But now it's like we're gonna get Claudes on it five.
Speaker 3: I guess yeah, whatever, I mean, you're gonna get the
Speaker 3: next one. But that's the thing is like, if it's
Speaker 3: just continued marginal improvement, what am I? Yeah, what what
Speaker 3: are we doing? It doesn't make it doesn't make me.
Speaker 3: That did not make me excited. And yes, it can
Speaker 3: save software engineers typing time and whatever. I mean, if
Speaker 3: you know what you're doing, you can get a lot down.
Speaker 3: I guess that's fine. If that's the way you like
Speaker 3: to work, If you like to type stuff in and
Speaker 3: wait on moting screens and get your code out and
Speaker 3: review it, that's a way to do programming.
Speaker 2: That's fine. Yeah, And it's it's literally fine.
Speaker 3: I'm actually saying like it sounds super sarcastic, but like
Speaker 3: that's literally fine.
Speaker 2: No, but that's literally fine. Would be if this was
Speaker 2: a ten billion dollar industry, if they were selling it
Speaker 2: as like the equivalent of virtualization or like some side
Speaker 2: thing to the great de cloud compute, not the entire
Speaker 2: future revenue engine because it isn't. I mean.
Speaker 3: And so you know, I run a business and I
Speaker 3: think that So a thing that started people say is
Speaker 3: they say, like you have product market fit, which is like, oh,
Speaker 3: your product is good. Yeah, if like one of the
Speaker 3: criteria is if it went away today, would your users
Speaker 3: like throw a fit?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Would you throw a fit of chat GPT you got
Speaker 3: uninstalled from your front You would not, But like you know,
Speaker 3: would the general person be that upset, and I don't
Speaker 3: think they would.
Speaker 2: I think that there would be a contingent of people
Speaker 2: who'd be very upset if you have a like parasocial
Speaker 2: exact the right word. Yeah, if you're like in love
Speaker 2: with your GPT, then that would be like a death
Speaker 2: in your family and that's very sad, which would be horrible.
Speaker 2: And indeed they But it's like I've been saying this
Speaker 2: for what it's like, say it to boosters, like if
Speaker 2: this disappeared, would your life change? Would it really change
Speaker 2: that much? And like, well I used it for baby names.
Speaker 2: I've used it for it's.
Speaker 3: Like you named your baby after No. I'm just saying, like,
Speaker 3: if you like, if.
Speaker 2: You've got a baby name from chat GBT, that's that's tough. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that's really bad. The more that was said to me
Speaker 2: by a booster and the more I think about, the
Speaker 2: more I'm like, brother, one day, your child is going
Speaker 2: to hear this, because all they do is they.
Speaker 3: Sell a book called like the Baby Name Book, and
Speaker 3: it has like a list of names in it.
Speaker 2: I don't fucking know read some books like just think
Speaker 2: about it. Yeah, I'm gonna one of the most important
Speaker 2: choices the identity of a future human. I'm going to
Speaker 2: send it to incorrect Google search. Yeah, it's it's depressing,
Speaker 2: but it's also quite funny because I feel like this
Speaker 2: era has really revealed who just doesn't know anything about
Speaker 2: sucking it. The people who are just like will believe
Speaker 2: anything or will just believe that they are smart at
Speaker 2: something because of machine told them they are, that they
Speaker 2: got this. You got to you go.
Speaker 3: So someone online posted I can't wait for the day
Speaker 3: when there's an AI agent that'll tell me when my
Speaker 3: friend's birthdays are.
Speaker 2: Fuck, there's no other way to do that. There's no
Speaker 2: way to do that. I don't have like some kind
Speaker 2: of calendar.
Speaker 3: No, No, it's going to be a reminder. And so
Speaker 3: that's like, that's what's happening now. Is that in the
Speaker 3: like startup space or just people building technology, it's like, well,
Speaker 3: we're going to get or if you like watch the
Speaker 3: ads on the NFL or whatever, it's like you were
Speaker 3: going to agent is going to do the thing that
Speaker 3: software is supposed to do. Like software. So like I
Speaker 3: got sold at one point accounting software. Right, that was AI, Right,
Speaker 3: the AI is going to categorize your transactions. Sure can't
Speaker 3: do it I bought. I was at a conference and
Speaker 3: it was, you know, whatever, May May twentieth, May twenty first,
Speaker 3: May twenty second. I go to Starbucks, I go to pizza,
Speaker 3: I go to thing. They're all travel related expenses. Yeah,
Speaker 3: one is travel and then the Starbucks is client conversation.
Speaker 2: That's what I decided client conversation. And so I I
Speaker 2: had a meeting with this the founder of the thing,
Speaker 2: and I was like, dude, like, what are you? What
Speaker 2: is it? What is this? What did they say? Well,
Speaker 2: they were just like, you know, sometimes it makes mistakes.
Speaker 2: We should get on that. Fuck. Yeah, that's that's my accountant. Yeah, you.
Speaker 2: My whole thing is I know, it's I think with
Speaker 2: all of this AI coding stuff in the big in
Speaker 2: the big tech realm, something's gonna break something. Really, but
Speaker 2: someone's gonna someone's gonna do something stupid. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Well, so so back to replet. I mean I think
Speaker 3: that they I kind of hope that they're I don't
Speaker 3: know if I hope that they're first to go. I
Speaker 3: mean whatever, they're nice people working there. So that's the
Speaker 3: unfortunate thing is there are nice people working at these
Speaker 3: There are people with jobs like it will involp people.
Speaker 2: I don't I wouldn't want.
Speaker 3: To ask for people to get laid off who are
Speaker 3: hardworking people, and some of them are like cool scientists
Speaker 3: who have studied hard and they're like the nice people.
Speaker 2: And it's the grimpa of all this is like people
Speaker 2: are gonna lose fucking job.
Speaker 3: But it's I mean, it's the executives who you know
Speaker 3: obviously pissed me off for just yes lying through their teeth, right,
Speaker 3: I mean, those people deserved it, and but you know,
Speaker 3: they're never actually going to have a bad outcome happened.
Speaker 2: To them this, which is why we need to write
Speaker 2: things to put their it because at some point there
Speaker 2: needs to be a record of this, of course. Yeah,
Speaker 2: so I'm going to wrap it there. Charlie whek came
Speaker 2: people find you?
Speaker 3: So I have a blog blog dot Charlie Meyer dot co,
Speaker 3: which is like where kind of my writings go. But
Speaker 3: I'm also trying to set up a newsletter. So that's
Speaker 3: Csmeyer dot substack dot com. And my name is spelled
Speaker 3: m E y e R.
Speaker 2: Hell yeah, and I of course amed Zytron. You can
Speaker 2: find me on the internet at Google dot com. That's
Speaker 2: where I live. I will put all the links to
Speaker 2: Charlie's stuff of course in the episode notes, but it's
Speaker 2: good for you to hear it now. And yes, should
Speaker 2: have a monologue coming up this week. I know I
Speaker 2: did an announcement where I said I was going to
Speaker 2: have a big story that is on hold, not because
Speaker 2: anything went wrong, but because the scale of the information
Speaker 2: I got has changed dramatically. When I eventually talk about this,
Speaker 2: it will be a lot of fun. Otherwise, catch you
Speaker 2: sim Thank you for listening to Better Offline.
Speaker 5: The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song
Speaker 5: is Matasowski. You can check out more of his music
Speaker 5: and audio projects at Matasowski dot com, M A T
Speaker 5: T O s O W s ki dot com. You
Speaker 5: can email me at easy at better offline dot com,
Speaker 5: or visit better Offline dot com to find more podcast
Speaker 5: links and of course my newsletter. I also really recommend
Speaker 5: you go to chat dot Where's youreed dot at to
Speaker 5: visit the discord, and go to our slash Better Offline
Speaker 5: to check out our reddit.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much for listening.
Speaker 1: Better Offline is a production of cool Zone Media. For
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