Raw Transcript
Welcome everybody to the standup. We have an extremely special episode of the standup. Casey has started his own podcast, a competing podcast in which he is how could you uh anyways sorry he and Dmitri are talking about and having a real conversation about what is the actual effects of AI and all that. And you're probably asking, well, why would they do that? Well, Dimmitri turns out to be a legend when it comes to AI. He knows a lot about it, been working in it for a very, very long time. and just like Casey is significantly more competent than TJ and I combined. And so therefore, their conversations are actually useful and good to listen to. And we thought we'd bring them on and ask some of our own very own questions. Kind of a podcast melding. >> The podcast was actually Dimmitri's idea. It wasn't even my idea. I It should have been my idea because I agree that I should ditch you guys and go with some like some higher quality co-hosts here. I mean, that's obviously clear, but but it wasn't. Uh cuz Dimmitri, you know, you were actually the one who was kind of like, I want to talk about AI because I'm just basically you weren't happy. You were like, I I don't like that. I don't like what's being said. It feels like >> Did you go on Twitter by accident? Is that what happened? You went on Twitter. >> But wait a second, we need a podcast immediately. >> Let me add a little bit to what Casey said there. >> So, actually, I did not set out to uh to have a podcast. uh I set out so I I get so I've been working this a long time like 20 plus years uh I have lots of friends who are not programmers or any kind of like you know lawyers, accountants, doctors whatever and they're frequently asking me you know first of all can I use this in my job and other things like how is this going to affect like I have kids in college should I stop sending them to college right you know all of those kinds of questions so uh at some point I thought I should just try to put this stuff together somehow and first I started writing stuff but that felt awkward then I thought maybe I'll record something, but I'm not really a recording personality. Uh, and then Casey and I have been talking about AI on and off for uh for years. And my suggestion was, what if we record like one session? Uh, and I had a list of things that we could talk about. And Casey said, well, there's so many things here that we could just turn this into a podcast. So, that's how we ended up uh ended up here. Uh, but let me add one one more thing to that, which is uh so you know, I know that there are a lot of people out there who are, you know, I see Casec personalities. I am that kind of personality as well. So part of uh part of what I want to do here is to um facilitate having more Casey out there uh on stuff where I can be the wingman, right? Uh that Casey understand. So one of the things that I appreciate about appreciate about him quite a bit is that um he wants to know what he's talking about before he says something which you know puts him in the top top 20% of podcasters at least. At least >> at least >> at least top 50% of this podcast. >> Wait a second. >> Hey, is that HTTP? Get that out of here. That's not how we order coffee. We order coffee via ssh terminal.shop. Yeah, you want a real experience. You want real coffee. You want awesome subscriptions so you never have to remember again. Oh, you want exclusive blends with exclusive coffee and exclusive content? Then check out CRON. You don't know what SSH is? >> Well, maybe the coffee is not for you. terminal coffee in hand. What I hope comes uh comes out of this uh in total is that uh we get kind of uh Casey culture aligned commentary on uh on AI and I mean Casey can I don't want to put words in his mouth but uh like we see software in a very similar way, right? I'm similarly skeptical about the quality of anything coming out of big tech these days about like questionable ethical business practices and so on. So, uh on on general software, not AI software, Casey and I see eye on on most things. Uh and so what I'm hoping is that I can be the the wingman and uh like give a platform for more Casey culture commentary specifically on this crazy AI thing that's taking over everyone's life, including my own, right? As I you know in our inaugural episode I mentioned that uh my life used to be much more quiet and nobody believed AI would work and we were just quietly doing fun stuff and uh and uh in a way things were better. I mean it's good that uh that things are working now or sort of working. Uh and the sort of working actually is a big part of uh of what I care about uh trying to make it better than sort of work. Um so I don't know. I've gone on long enough. Maybe Casey you should uh put a bow on it. >> I think you're I think you're being way too generous to me. Yeah, I'm I'm the wingman on our podcast because I don't really like I just don't work with AI stuff. So to me it was just like a good opportunity to like have somebody on who like I trusted to give solid perspective on AI because like it's really hard to you know the only real way I thought otherwise that I would be able to give any commentary is I'd have to go spend a ton of time with it, right? And I just didn't really want to do that. So so it's been great. Uh and I' I've really enjoyed it. Obviously, Demetri and I have recorded a couple things that, you know, we haven't posted yet. So, but I Yeah, it's it's been really great having you on. So, and I I should kick it back to to Prime and Te. So, like we don't want to just talk about our podcast here. So, like you guys had some AI questions you wanted to talk about. Uh or I don't know, >> take take it wherever you guys want to take it. We are here. We are here at your disposal. >> I do want to start with some things which is Demetri, can you please uh we didn't give you really like an actual qualifying intro other than you're legendary. Yeah, I was just going to say I I appreciate the kind words like I I consider myself relatively competent, but I mean there are like big names in the industry who are uh either friends or friends of friends and it's uh useful for me to keep uh keep myself calibrated relative uh you know uh relative to people of uh much more at least public uh uh public renowned. Um so yeah I I don't know I guess uh in terms of introduction we uh I've been doing um broadly AI related uh research for 20 plus years. I shipped uh shipped to many people my very first custom design AI in 2025 uh at Google. It was one of their first >> uh 25 >> uh sorry 20 2005. >> Yeah I was going to say like that's like 20 years old. >> That's like banana nano banana if you're shipping that one. Okay. Okay. Yeah, exactly. >> Uh so anyway, um I've been doing this for a long time and seen uh lots of the ups and downs in the business and also I I study the history of the business as well. So I know about um you know the ups and downs for like the preceding 50 years um like going back to you know going back to even the the 60s. Uh and so um one of the things that really interests me is how this is going to affect other people um like people that I work with for example who are now I mean uh in the first episode we just talked about the impact on junior engineers and separately >> probably should talk about the impact on senior engineers right because there's they face a different problem which is if you're like let's say you're whatever uh 45 years old now uh you've been doing this a long time you have a good stable career making good money uh and now you're wondering ing what happens if they like crack the nut and in 5 years I'm useless, right? And I know I know people who are wondering this myself. >> Mhm. >> Um and that's an especially bad time to be useless, right? If you're like late midcareer, what do I do if I'm 50 years old and I don't know like what do I do next? Right? uh and there there it's not anything like the the problems that the junior engineers face where it's I mean again big problem for the junior engineers but they have their whole lives ahead of them and they can't they have time to try to do something else uh but if you're 50 years old and uh don't have you know 15 years of uh building up a new career ahead of you what do you do uh so that's that's something that I see people worrying about a lot as well um yeah I don't I guess maybe let me not talk talk too much about myself. >> You can't talk too much. We're used to hanging out with Casey. All right, it's fine. You know, >> we like it when people talk. That's why we bring smart guests on. >> Uh yeah. So I guess another thing I I will add and this this connects back to kind of having a Casey style perspective on the industry is that >> um I've seen a lot of how the sausage get made uh both in terms of like the the technical side but also uh also the business side and this is something that uh we we talk about in later episodes about uh how how much can you take certain claims at face value and how to evaluate which claims can be taken at at face value and so on. Um so what I'm uh in the same way that um like you can't take whatever Microsoft claims at face value about improvements in Windows performance. Um right you can same >> this is going to be the best Windows yet that's going to be perfect and flawless will be safe. >> It was going to be the last Windows ever as well. >> Well I did I they are still working on making it the last Windows ever. >> That's a good point. the Linux desktop is what TJ's trying to say. >> They they put that into the AI and it gave them a plan back of how to make it the last Windows ever. They're executing on that flawlessly. >> Yeah. They're like, "We got this thing called Windows 11 and it will ensure that Windows 10 is the very last version of Windows." >> All right. And if that doesn't work, we have Windows 12. >> Yeah. I um so I I've just got a few topics that I thought would be fun. We can just see where uh like they lead us and what happens. I think there's similarly to on on the episode at least that I've listened to. Um you start on a topic and there's like 95 different branches that we can go off of. So I I'm not if we don't get to all of them, it's whatever. I I think it uh it'll be fun. But um one of the things I'm interested in and like it's just hard to get anybody's like unbiased everyone's got a biased whatever just like a more rational take on like this current state of token cost and what that's looking like going forward. I don't know if you have any thoughts Dimmitri about like is it going to be that Sam Alman was right and we're going to get 10x cheaper every year or whatever. I don't know. That's what Twitch chat always tells. >> That's what Sam Sam has it on the record. He said it twice now. He said it he said it twice and made projections into the future saying it's 100x cheaper. GP2 5.2 high will be uh 100x cheaper in uh two years. >> Okay. >> Uh so a lot of that is infrastructure development and algorithm development that is trade secrets that >> like I can't evaluate uh and even like even an open AI insider it would be illegal for them to to evaluate in public right. Um I I don't know what they're cooking up there. I mean they have an extremely talented team. Uh 100x cheaper seems hard to believe, but uh I guess wait and see. So I mean one of the thing one of the problems with these um with evaluating claims in this business is that um the timing matters as much as the content of the claim. So like uh like Musk is a good example just to take Sam out of this for a moment >> where uh MK was Musk was saying you know we'll have uh I mean we'll have uh you know reusable rockets in I think he first made the claim in 2005 or something like that and it took many years before that actually worked later you know when was the first promise of uh Tesla full self-driving that was like 2016 that he was saying >> and then every six months after that >> right um so So, I would um I found it useful to try to separate out the content of the claim from the timing of the claim. >> So, I I would not be surprised um I would not be surprised if eventually we can get uh 100x cheaper token cost. Whether or not they can do it now, I that's beyond my knowledge because that's that's uh partly that's infrastructure, partly that's uh like custom hardware, partly that's can you get cheaper electricity, part like there so many things that go into the into the business that it's hard uh hard for me to to claim one way or another. Uh what I can tell you is that it has been as I'm sure you've seen uh it has been a um land rush mentality, right? So, everyone's building as quickly as they can, whatever they can. Put it out. Does it work? Does it barely work? Okay, move on to the next thing. >> Um, and uh some of that is >> uh some of that is maybe um recklessness, but some of that is just market forces, right? Because the um right now there are multiple really big players and probably there won't be as many big players in 10 years. And so they like given how much money they've all put into this already, they really don't want to be the ones caught out, right? And so the like the the arms race is uh rational from a business perspective whether or not it's it's producing um you know completely rational engineering artifacts. So uh all of that is to say uh I'm sure that there is very substantial um opportunity for uh for improving efficiency in the current stock and I don't know if they so my biggest question would be um is the is the internal stock stable enough that you can optimize it now right because like say you spend a year optimizing it to get the token cost down and then there's >> whatever the next archite architectural innovation is does that invalidate your optimization or not. So I I don't know, right? Um and so you you will hear me say I don't know perhaps more than most uh people talking about AI just because it's uh there's a lot that's unknown even to people who are deep like uh deep inside these companies about what's what's going to happen in like two or three years, right? Um >> yeah, I I would add one thing to that that you know um it's not not adding something as in information, adding something as in sort of like a thing to think about and that is that uh it's worth noting that I if the costs were really going to get that low that fast, I think I would have expected Google's costs to be very low already. And I know it's a weird thing to say, but >> if you assume that there's any hardware component, like if you think that that all 100x is going to come from software, then that seems okay, maybe that could happen. But if we're counting on a substantial portion of that 100x coming from infrastructure builds, it feels to me like Google has kind of been building AI centric like stuff for quite some time and has gotten their thing that like their TPUs are very much just like we built machines whose only purpose is to do this job as opposed to like say for example Nvidia who's not doing that like the Nvidia cards are kind of like still in a weird like hybrid state where only the only the very latest Nvidas could be said to be focusing on AI really and even those are still a little bit hybrid feeling to me. So I could imagine if someone said, well, you know, if all we had was Nvidia to look at, maybe you could believe that like, you know, there's a very long lead time on hardware. So, you know, we don't know what they, you know, when they shifted probably four or five years ago to going like, "Oh my god, AI is going to be the biggest thing. We need to completely redesign everything to just focus on that." That stuff will only be, you know, we'll only be seeing the end of that pipeline, you know, now or something like that, right? So, I could see that, but I feel like Google's kind of I mean, am I wrong about this speech? I feel like Google's been doing this for a long time. If there was a huge if there was huge gains to be had by doing just AI hardware, I would have thought they'd have them already. Is that am I way off? >> I'm not sure they don't. Right. So, the first the first time I heard about >> uh TPU uh I think the first time I heard that they were starting to work on it was like 2014 or something like So, that's just when I heard about it, right? like >> I am not a Google insider so I'm sure like uh knowing how Google works I'm sure that they were talking about that like 3 years before I heard about it in public right but when I heard when I first heard about TPU development was somewhere around 2014 >> so I guess I I have not been studying the uh like whatever internal economics reports uh Google puts out it's possible that they are already substantially cheaper than um >> I would think >> on on operating cost substantially cheaper than open I don't So uh and but I mean this is a something that's a common uh folk belief in the industry which is um like Google is sort of the quiet monster in the business because like they if you compare them for a moment to say open AI uh they have had they have been infrastructure leaders forever. They have been AI leaders forever. Uh unlike open AI they have uh they have u I'm trying not to say the word surveillance but I'm just going to say surveillance. on the entire internet, right? So, they have just a constant flow of >> uh potentially trainable information and you know, XAI has um uh has that flow that uh that is their own proprietary flow of data. >> Um so, uh many people have have this feeling of Google was kind of slowed on the on the product side. I emphasize on the product side uh with uh like chat uh chat LLM products. Uh but there is many people have this feeling of um possibly Google is just going to quiet quietly leverage all those advantages that uh nobody else has. Uh and like XAI is the only one that's sort of sort of close in um in having that capability. It's interesting to note that uh as far as I've seen in public XAI, they're merging with uh Starlink. They're talking about sorry with uh >> SpaceX. Yeah, >> SpaceX. Uh and they're talking now about orbital data centers. And something that I I thought was interesting there um was uh that the designs that they've talked about are GPU based, not TPU based. And I don't know if that's because >> they don't think they can build it up as well as Google did or they don't think they can license it. So I don't I don't know, right? But the thing I will point out the the designs I've seen uh I mean I guess I haven't looked looked in like 3 months but the designs I've seen were uh estimates based on uh you know Nvidia style GPUs and not TPUs. So they must know something because this is this is the kind of thing that they do, right? Like the big um the biggest competence advantage that I would put in the kind of Musk category of companies is uh the relentless execution on on uh building and optimizing and streamlining physical stuff. That's something that they've been doing really well for a very long time. So if um anyway that caught my eye that the designs I saw were based on GPUs and not TPUs. >> Um and I I do know that they're working on their own um uh their own AI chips. I don't I don't know that much about how far they are there, but it's interesting that that when they were talking about the orbital data center designs, they were talking about u get conventional GPUs as we understand them. >> I got to say orbital data center is like the coolest sounding thing to build. >> Yes. Like I it seems really not practical. I get like I get there saying, "Oh, we're going to have robots do it and it'll be outer space and it's really cool." Um but I got I mean you I feel like everyone's got to admit orbital data center is probably the coolest thing to say you could work at in software development. So >> I think like yeah based on what I've seen for orbital data centers it sounds like it's it is either much cooler or much less cool than what you're thinking about depending depending on your perspective. Right? So, excuse me. If you're imagining like a giant building in space, like >> like it it sounds like uh the kind of more leading designs that are like more plausible. They're more like Starlink. They're more like satellite clusters where you just have lots of little things that talk to each other over light links basically for high-speed communication. Um, >> well, and giant giant radiators, right? >> And huge. >> Yep. >> It's almost all radiator. And then there's a little like nub in the center contains that contains the GPUs, right? >> Yeah. >> That doesn't sound as cool as what I had in my head of a big skyscraper in outer space where we've got racks of GPUs and you can walk around in it and it's like really cool. >> Um, but that's okay because when you tell your parents that you work at an orbital data center, they won't know. So it's fine. >> That's what they imagine is that >> Yeah. Yeah. I say it's exactly like Star Wars mom and dad. Trust me. Trust me. >> Unfortunately, like heat is just very >> I guess the as the the kids say say problematic in space. Like you don't have anywhere it >> like it's very hard to get rid of heat in space. So this is a problem. As Demetri was saying, you you end up having to have a lot of surface area per chip, like per per heat generating Nvidia, like GB200 or whatever. I mean, it won't be a GB200 by the time they get these things launched, but the uh you know, >> that's the thing I didn't I didn't get. I don't >> What is the advantage then? Because in in like I get that it feels like if you talk to like a regular person about putting it in outer space, they're like, "Well, it's cold in outer space, so that's going to be really good for GPUs." But it's the opposite, I think. Right. I mean, I So, I don't get >> It's not that it's not cold in outer space. Cold is the lack of available, you know, like not having energy. There's just there's no density, so you have nothing you can >> Yeah. I meant like more like they said it cooling would be super easy. I feel like that's like the normie thing if you say put something out cuz like it'll be cold. Sick. It's like a huge refrigerator, bro. But that's not how heat works. Like so I get that part. So then what is the advantage? Why this is we also don't have to go way down this route, but I have been wondering this myself. So what like why do they want to put it in outer space? >> Incredible investment TJ. Like the amount of investments that are coming in will be >> the TAM the TAM for outer space is big. Think about how many data centers we can put in outer space. Well, it's so it's free power and difficult but free cooling, right? So, if you if you can make the physics work and I don't I don't know, right? Like they have really really good like thermal people at you can imagine they have very good thermal people at uh >> uh at SpaceX. So, uh I I assume that they have done simulations that that suggest to them that this can be made viable. Um but yeah, so it's free power and also like more free power than you would get for the same panel on Earth because there's no right >> atmosphere eating up your atmosphere or weather for that matter. >> Yeah. No clouds, >> right? So free power and uh tricky but free cooling. Um as >> so it's like when you build a really complicated thing, but then it's passive in a video game. I understand. This is this mechanic makes sense to me. And one thing I would add uh this so this is entirely business strategy speculation. Um so whatever like take like poor big >> it's financial advice. Got it. >> Exactly. Right. >> Investing right now. If it works, if it works and you are uh Musk's AI team and you just get to launch your AI into space and everyone everyone else is like fighting local governments and can I build a hydro plant here? Oh, how much do I have to pay you to? Right. And you'll just be like, we're going to space, right? Like you losers can hang out here. We're going to space. And by the way, if you want to go to space, you have to come through me, right? >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Yeah. He pretty much owns the the passage to space. So it's >> it's pretty >> they can't ask Katy Perry. She's the nautace. >> Well and also like it's pretty trivial for like when you look at the projections for these sorts of things. It's all about launch cost. Like whether or not it makes sense to put a data center in space, a quote unquote data center in space. It's like here is the launch cost. like at this launch cost we think we could do it because that and that's based on like the failure rate of the thing how you know long it's expected to be able to be up there you know all those sorts of of things >> and so at the end of the day if you know if you look at somewhere like SpaceX and they're like well for us we could get our launch cost down to $50 a kilogram or whatever it you know the magic number is >> we just charge everyone else $75 a kilogram and then it's it's not worth it for them to put it in space or theirs will always be worse than ours, right? It's a very good position to be in and a and a strangely profitable bet for SpaceX if it turns out that these are actually useful in the future. So, >> so I think we should probably attempt to get a little bit more on uh on a more practical approach to AI. I do think orbital data centers does sound amazing. >> You don't want the title of this video to be orbital data centers. THERE'S GOING TO BE AI in space. That's going to How many clicks is that going to generate? Come on, man. space. Go ahead. >> That's my That's my rock opera I'm writing. That's crazy. How did you know? Case >> cuz I am also writing a rock opera called Ali in Space as it turns out. >> Oh, we could collab. >> Yep. >> That's not going to happen. Uh he's just he's just going to take it all from you. Okay. So, I guess we should we should probably uh talk. I think the number I get a lot of concerns uh from people and one of the most frequent questions I've been getting lately is is my future just reviewing code. >> Yeah. So, quite possible. Um let me let me try to be measured in what I like how likely I think that is. Um so look one one thing that I've been um I I have discovered in my own work and that I've been saying publicly for a while now is uh so I I try to work on um like repeatable and reproducible AI results. So like the bucket term I use for that is has been reliable AI but it turns out that there's a company called reliable AI and so anyway so uh so anyway uh the thing that I I I I think you can do right now like completely handsoff and not have to review anything right so this is what I mean by reliable right that like if I ask you th to whatever go implement uh like download this thing from this HTTP endpoint and like save it into the database and give me a dashboard that whatever calculates the averages of some things, right? >> I can just tell you that and expect a result and it will work and I don't have to talk to you about it again, right? So that's what I mean uh in this completely hands-off style. Uh right now I think the limit of that is somewhere around a couple thousand lines of like relatively standard junior level code. Uh and I want to emphasize because some people some people have uh justifiably pushed back on this a bit. I'm not saying you can't do more by having oversight and doing multiple tries and having algorithmic test suites. I'm not saying you can't do more right now. What I'm talking about is what's the limit of what you can do hands-off and you can mostly just trust that it happens. Mhm. >> Um I think I think at a at a minimum we are going to go through a um reviewheavy phase because the the businesses are as as I'm sure you know um the businesses are trying to shove this into everyone's workflow whether they like it or not. Right. And I I get lots of people lots of people even in the AI business who tell me like I hate how much they're trying to push us to use these things, right? I just >> I just want to do my job. Uh but like they're monitoring my token usage, right? I mean this this >> anecdotally too not just like literally like I have friends who are like we have to use this tool >> part of my KPI is like we use we have to use clawed code >> only. That's and my manager has a dashboard with my token count for the month and it is a thing we talk about and review. Not even like oh you can use whatever one you want. We just want to see you guys experimenting. They're like you have to use cloud code. You have to do this. Yeah, it's crazy. >> Yeah. Think about Amazon Curo. That's a lot of people are talking about that right now with the whole Amazon accidentally having several SE ones. >> Yeah. They're like, you have to use our stuff to take ourselves down. If anyone's going to bring it down, it's going to be me. Okay. That's >> We want to make sure we our but we want to make sure our site goes down and our AI looks bad at the same time. We don't want like someone else's AI to look bad. >> No, that would be mean. Okay. If it's going to if it's going to go down because of AI, it's our AI. They're putting the eye in AI. Okay. >> There you go. Very good. Yes. >> So yeah, Prime on on that point I think it's very likely that we will go through a u reviewheavy phase. Uh I think I think that at some point um uh like the workers will object to this enough that we're going to have to find something something more acceptable, right? because I don't know if you have tried it, but if you're just like reviewing stuff like you know claw dumps another thing on you every you know five minutes you're like okay now I have to review this and approve and merge whatever or or I mean you can just yolo right and but but we've seen what happens if you just yolo um so uh I do think we will at a minimum go through a like reviewing mostly reviewing phase and I think people are not going to like it that's my expectation I don't So I don't know how uh I don't see what the alternative is right now because like e so the either >> the two possibilities I see right now are uh like they're going to be monitoring your token count and so you need to be consuming and generating tokens and then that has to go that has to get uh linked which uh you know in some places they actually link the like the tokens to PRs right >> uh and so >> you need to be generating lots of PRs you need to be consuming lots of tokens How can you do that other than just generating many many PRs with AI and reviewing and like hoping that you're not taking down, you know, taking down fraud by by missing something in your review, right? So, I I don't know how we get out of that other than uh at some point the business side says, "Okay, like we can cool it, right? we're going to um we're going to stop monitoring your token use, which I mean I I personally I feel like that's not that different from a desktop monitor or like a keyboard monitor or something. It feels very invasive to me. Like, hey, you know, I understand you're asking me >> I think it's fair to ask me, hey, can you use this tool? Can you try to do better work? I think that that's fair, right? Like I'm ultimately you're like you're being paid to do something for the business. I think it's fair for them to ask, hey, we'd we'd like to be using these tools and we think you can do whatever like 20% more work if you can if you use this. I think that's fair. I think >> the micro micro tracking feels worse than the past. And um >> it's really easy to game too, right? You just like sequentially look at every single file and it's just going to be like dang dang dang like crushing the tokens. I know people who are like at big tech who are working on stuff and they have to do what exactly what you're saying and they're saying I I like I do I do this just to keep up appearances for my AI use and you know by the end like my output changes maybe 10%. Right. I do like how it's literally just setting money on fire and they're like this makes me look fast because so that actually before we got distracted on the orbital data centers which I'll repeat coolest name ever >> super cool command >> I uh was I was interested in you know some of your thoughts about sort of the tokconomics side of things because right now it feels like people are burning a bunch of money trying stuff out and exploring and willing to just be like oh yeah you just spent $5,000 this month. Whereas before, like you couldn't get like a $45 like online course approved and they're like, "Oh, but yeah, yeah, $5,000 of tokens for nothing. Yes, we're totally down for that. Do that every month." because I I was interested to if you know uh like if we're going to see a big you know or your thoughts on if we're going to see a big push on like generating less or like more focus on like we're going to use more tools to check what's being gener you know because at some point you know Claude Claude just released their thing about code review and they're like yeah usually it's like 15 or 25 bucks a review >> and you're like well that adds up kind of fast especially at the rate people are saying I'm shipping 10,000 lines of code today or I made a 30 300,000 line Ruby on Rails application for my blog. That's Gary Tan by the way Casey in case you didn't see that tweet. >> Okay. Um, hey, he's boiling a lake and then he's going to boil the ocean. All right. That's what he told us. >> Yep. >> I side note, I cannot tell if he's the most genius rage baiter of all time, but we can circle back to that on a different episode. >> Yeah. >> Um, >> yeah. So, because I'm I'm interested in in sort of that angle because I do find like some tasks I can get done like a lot faster with letting agents work on it or like agents spin on something like forever. It has a really clear outcome. There's some stuff I already have a bunch of patterns in my codebase spin. But I'm like, is is everyone just going to be chill forever with me spending $500 of tokens overnight on this? That doesn't seem like what a business would like. I don't think we're going to get $500 of value back from this feature. So, I don't know if you have any thoughts like in that vertical or >> um Yeah. >> So, this is speculation. >> Yeah. Speculation. Uh a lot of this is >> um like principal agent problems for the business. It's like >> the So there are for sure uh like CEOs and like one step down from CEOs who one way or another um their uh their personal benefit is tied to claiming that they did a lot with AI. >> Yes, it's true. >> Yeah. >> Um and as you know uh like in any big organization you never just evaluate something for whether it's good or not. It has to be evaluated through some KPI, right? Uh, so >> yes, >> there are people I'm sure like I haven't seen this personally, but I'm sure that something close to this exists that um there is someone with many millions of dollars worth of bonuses tied up to uh can I get our token usage to double this year and can I get our PRs to increase by 20% as attributed to that token increase? Right. Right. Like extremely bureaucratic thinking about using this new technology. Right. So I'm sure that there are many people like that. Um, and so, uh, those to those people, they're not they're not spending their own money, right? They're spending the company's money. They're tell they're telling you to spend the company's money to do something that makes the metric go up that gets them a bonus, right? >> Yeah. >> Um, so I don't know how long that's going to last, but there's certainly right now >> um, a very large premium at multiple levels of the kind of the business stack where people are like, you know, why why isn't your token usage double, right? And >> yes, >> some people some people that sounds like a joke. I have friends who literally they say my boss came and asked me why hasn't my token use usage doubled right but you only used $300 of cloud last uh last month >> honey you barely touched your cloud last month what's going on >> is something wrong sweetheart >> okay so I do actually want to follow up on that because this is the you know this was one of the big things that has been going around is this Amazon hero thing taking down everything and now they're saying hey we're going to make it so that juniors and mid-level people who use generative AI must have a senior sign off on this. >> Can I do a quick question on that as well, Prime? Which is, was there a policy before seniors didn't have to review junior's code just in general? >> I assume I assume I assume it's like a lot of companies, which is that a junior could have a mid-level person review the code and say, "Hey, this is not really good." Like, not every change needs to have, you know, the same cuz you you effectively will exhaust and lose your senior population if they have to review every single PR. And so, kind of >> that makes sense. So excluding the personnel problem that will likely develop from this with Amazon, is this like the first sign of people realizing that token measurement isn't necessarily the best metric? Because I assume that's what's hurting Amazon is that they really push super hard as token metric is the the greatest thing that has ever existed and you must only push on this one thing and now they're feeling some of the effects of maybe moving too fast. Is there a world that's going to exist where people are going, okay, instead of trying to double metrics, maybe we should double some other thing. Say, I don't know, uptime. Maybe like uptime could be the thing that we're like, you know, that we're valuing and then that can be that could be it. Like is is this an actual >> like path forward or are we >> I don't from your perspective, are we just going to see continued push on double your token usage, double your token usage? because they both sound super appealing I guess from a purely theoretical point of view of like oh more features we could know we could get all the features or no let's be stable. >> Uh again I think they so as we as we discussed with Casey and Casey you should you should jump in on on this part. Um like we've seen these cycles of like everything has to be you know like 25 years ago everything had to be online and then everything had to be uh web 2.0 And then everything had to be uh like social local mobile app and then everything had to be crypto right and that right so um we are in that phase absolutely right now where separate from any utility that the technology is offering there's just this social mania of everything has to be this right now uh >> I don't know when that fever will break um I think certainly events like the Amazon um Amazon event will will help with that and I I do think that at some point people someone is going to say, "Okay, look, like um we just can't be burning this kind of money all the time and also like setting our infrastructure on fire and driving our engineers crazy." At some point, at some point, we should actually get a benefit from this instead of hurting ourselves. >> You can only pick two points on that triangle. Drive engineers crazy, burn a lot of money, uptime. You get to pick two of those points. >> Yeah, it's true. >> Um but, uh I think I think this could last for years. And the reason I say it could last for years, I know people will not like that. Uh I think the reason this can last for years is uh it's easy to underestimate um like on like you know you guys or like people who watch this uh you know watch the stream how far how far up the the like power law curve of uh early adopter you are. And I >> just meet lots of people all the time who >> still conceptualize AI as like it's a better search engine, right? And I I mean it's uh it's easy to forget that actually the vast majority of people don't know much about this and aren't really trying to use it. And um so all those people somehow will have to be carried through the uh the fever swamp. Um and I don't know like I think that could take years. Um, >> I would agree with that uh for and add the sort of the chaser which I think we did talk about on that first episode of the podcast which was I don't see it as mattering whether it takes down proud all the time either is the problem because like at least my experience for the past 20 years has been it doesn't matter how bad the practice is. If it's just something that is in the zeitgeist, then people do it and you can show them >> clearly like you can literally demonstrate, look, if you had done it this way, this is how much better it would be. They don't care because the best practices is that you do it this other way. The best practice is you use Python, then we're using Python or whatever it is. And you're like, look, if you had just written it this way, it's a hundred times faster. And you're like, we don't care. That's how this industry has operated. And so it would be very weird to think that in the special case of AI that anyone would care one way or another whether it even was better. Right? So you can almost take your take your guesses about how uh good AI will be in practice about generating code in the first place. You could even put that aside. I think the fact that it has this much momentum is enough to know that this will be here for uh a long time. the current way we're doing things. Even if it never gets any better than it is right now, even if it stayed exactly as good as it is right now, no improvements literally at all, >> I I don't think that would change the outcome. Honestly, I really don't. >> Well, and there's like a trillion dollars invested in it, too, right? So, they're like, well, even if even and it's I mean, >> it's not really even Sunk fallacy. It's just like literally sunk cough truthy which is like we really we really need this to work guys or we're really underwater right it's not like >> so it will become the workflow I think that's like inevitable uh and >> like I wish that it I wish that we could say like well if the AIS don't improve uh substantially then people would like rethink the I don't I don't think that's true like I think whether or not they're able to push the quality up. I mean, hopefully they are cuz, you know, everyone is putting a lot of money into pushing the quality of the ads. So, hopefully they do get better. But even if they don't, I don't think it's going to matter, personally. Hey guys, if you like this episode, you can watch the rest of it on the Spotify. And don't forget to like and subscribe. Woo! See you later. >> Boot up today. Five errors on my screen. Terminal coffee and living the dream.