Chris Paik: code is becoming free — creativity and agency are the new scarce resource

on the eight podcast. That was amazing. my last uh waking thought last night. It's good to be back. It's amazing. Uh anyway, welcome to the stream, Chris. Uh guys, how you doing? What's going on? Uh not too much, obviously. Uh yeah, right. Yeah, right. Not too much. Everything's a flat circle. Yes.

I can't even bl I mean, it seems like since we started the stream, the whole internet went down. So, I'm just happy to be here with you. Oh, he's going to be affected particularly because every time Chris posts, he posts a link to a Google doc, Google's down. You're cooked even though X is up.

This is this is the most content strategy insane thing about you is that you can you can break through the link ban somehow. It's just the ideas are so powerful. I love it. You know, nobody told me there was a link ban. Built different. Truly built different. Built different.

I had a post I had a post once that I was like uh like you know I I post links and they still do numbers google.

com and it just bomb John and I thought it was hilarious going to go you got to be built different to post links you yeah you have been built different uh we've loved all the Google docs that you've dropped maybe take us through the first one the end of software what was the thesis and then maybe we could reflect on some of that and how it's played out sure uh so admittedly kind of an incendiary title uh especially especially on Twitter uh to to this audience.

But I uh the the crux of the thesis was LLMs are were and are only getting better at producing code. Uh and generating code has largely been uh a translation task assigned to humans. And humans have been incredibly proficient but expensive translators in that regard.

And now that we have free translation from natural language to computer language, uh that should just completely change the economics and the production of software. Uh I think I saw something where CS grads are having a harder have a hard having a harder time to find jobs in art majors.

Yeah, we have our CS intern today studying art history for the next two hours to try to get us to You can see. Do you have do you have a do you have a fun fact for us? I got a fun fact. Okay. Um Okay. So, did you know that uh Greek statues were they were originally painted? They originally painted.

They weren't just white marble. Interesting. Okay. I think your your your job odds just went way up. Anyways, back back to the interview with Chris. Anyway, sorry to interrupt. Not at all. Uh yeah, but uh interesting fact about that. There's only 2,000 art history grads and there's a 100,000 CS grads.

So there is a little bit more sensitivity, but I think even though the the the the facts of that stat might be like a little bit early to say, like the trend is clear and we all see it coming. And so we're interested in like the impact of that.

In some ways, it's like the the death of the software engineer job application. Like the job application now is like produce software, like produce a piece of software.

the last the last engineer that we hired made us a piece of software that was good almost basically good enough for us to publish it immediately same day um same day and so like and at least the job application has been disrupted I mean I think it's this sort of uh inconvenient truth that a lot of us are incentivized not to want to accept because it really challenges uh a world view that most of our existence is constructed on top of um but I think the people who like rush head first into it and try to understand okay well how does this change the future what's going to be different um you know everybody else can be stuck clinging to uh the last vestigages of something that ultimately evaporates um I mean but what's really exciting is is uh I mean like imagine a world where where steel is free.

Like what does the world look like if steel is free? Probably a lot more steel. It's like the the world looks completely different. It looks completely different. We can build so much more incredible things. The frontier of innovation pushes out because we are pushing it out.

Uh but we're no longer limited by the cost of something the to produce traditionally. Be great. Um talk to me about the the dynamic of as as code becomes cheaper and cheaper and eventually free to instantiate. Uh there's there's two theories.

One is like we are in the age of the idea guy, the the person that can come up with an interesting thesis or contrarian insight uh can instantly go instantiate it without a team of engineers.

classic example of like the business guy who has the idea and just needs a team of software engineers to build it and can't do it.

The other side is something I saw Pavl Asperuv posting about which is that all those guys are going to be competing against the people with the software engineering mindset and yes the software engineers they won't be writing code anymore but they might be the they might be the future idea guys they might be able to think in systems and and and come up with interesting ideas and even though they aren't doing the instantiation themselves they are able to have an even bigger impact because they are the beneficiaries of this leverage.

So is there one side of the argument that you fall on? How are you thinking about that? I mean I think creativity and agency are going to be the scarce resource. Um because execution is just commoditized at this point.

Uh I think you know if if we're going back to like word cell and shape rotator debate um for better force I think word cells won right. Bold. It's possible. Very possible. Brutal truth. Brutal truth for shape rotators.

But word cells just kind of came out on top because there's this Rosetta Stone that instantly translates words into shapes. Yes. Um the prompt can be rotate the shape. Exactly. Good writing the prompt. You're good. Just put put the fries in the bag. Yeah. I mean, no.

Well, the the the the wild I think moment for each of us is like we started going to chat GBT for tasks and you're just like count the number of objects like this in this image and it just writes like four minutes of like it it works for four minutes writing code doing work that would take you know at least a few hours to do as like a as a well-trained software engineer just to do a task that that in many ways you could just look at you could just look at it and count it.

Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Well, so here's an interesting if you guys want to talk about something that please. It's probably my next essay. Okay. There we go. So, hot off the press. Hot off the press.

Um, I think there's a frame that really clearly delineates what's going to be like eroded by AI and what will never be eroded by AI. And uh, for example, like we're never going to watch robots play sports. Mhm. right? Like that's just like never going to happen.

We don't watch we don't watch robots play chess and and robots have dominated in chess and yet chess. com has done well as a business. Magnus Carlson has done well as an individual chess player.

Hikaroo has a huge chess following online and you would think if you just wanted to watch the best chess possible we played you'd be watching Stockfish and no one does. We don't. We don't. Not only that, but like the Olympics, we're so Okay, so so here's the frame. Uh when it comes to utility, we are misanthropists.

We actually kind of hate other humans. When you're in an Uber and they like start talking to you, uh you wish you were in a Whimo. You're like, "What? I don't need this.

" When when somebody when you're at a coffee shop and they spin the iPad around asking for a tip, you're just like, I I'm just I want to buy this bottle of water. I I want to walk away with my coffee. Why are you like this? This is like a miniature ransom.

And and you're just you're you're frustrated because you know exactly what it is that we want to do and the human is preventing that from happening. Mhm. And so, uh, I don't think any of us walk into an elevator and think to ourselves, man, I wish there was a person here operating it. Mhm. Right. That's gone.

It's totally gone. We don't care. We're actually like very happy with humans being removed from that loop. And so, as as long as the thing is utilitarian and there's a drive towards efficiency, we actually kind of hate humans and we want them gone.

Now on the other side, if if we are if we're allocating a leisure hour, not a labor hour, if we're not trying to be productive, but we are trying to be consumptive, we are narcissists. We love other humans. We love other humans so much that we would refuse to watch anything other than another human do that thing.

So, think about like um you know, fine dining, right?

Omacaz you you go to a sushi restaurant you need that person there that's describing cutting you want to see how delicate the craft is part of the the craft and the and the social element to it is part of the product and it's part of a story it's a story you're paying for that experience you want that human experience you want to understand that this is something that they've dedicated their lives to so on one hand finding you you need humans you you you need the story you want to understand where it came from.

Like, and then on the other hand, we order food and we tell the driver to leave it at the door so we don't have to interact with them. Mhm. So, like we we we go through life with these two spheres.

Uh when we know we want to do something and we really hate other humans, like you know, when you call into a customer service line and somebody somebody like incompetent is on the other side, you just you're just reminded of the frustration of why you called in in the first place.

And then on the other hand, you know, let's look at uh modern art for example. I think like the the trope in modern art is like it's not that hard to make. Uh you know where the joke is like my kid could do that. Yeah. Well, like your kid didn't and also no one cares. Yep.

Uh the the thing that we prize is the constraints, the creativity, the mythos of the of the artist that went into creating that.

the story if Daniel Arsham goes to a rock wall with an axe and like hits, you know, hits the wall and it chips a piece of rock off, like that rock would would have like, you know, an immediate 10,000x premium on it and like somebody would buy it because it exactly. So, so I if if what you do Mhm.

basically is is gets in the way of people getting exactly what they want, your job's gone. Mhm. It's going to go away. But if if what you do is part of storytelling or human existence or entertainment, uh it's it's moed. It's it's a huge mode.

I mean, one of the most interesting things in entertainment, I would say, over the last few decades, was the invention of reality television. When we realized we would rather watch two people that we don't know fight than anything else, it's incredible. It's it's often incredible content.

It is guilty pleasure for for many people. On that note, I'm curious um on uh since we're streaming on X, are bots on X a feature or a bug?

Because they it see they're they're as far as I'm concerned, they've been designated a feature because they sort of went away for a little bit and now it seems like they're back and and and stronger than ever.

I think I think Twitter probably has the same stance towards bots that uh Louis Vuitton has towards counterfeits. where it's like this exists because there's value in the product. Replicating trying to imitate the authenticity of the engagement means that there's real value in the product.

The more that it exists and proliferates, the more it dilutes the core value of the thing. But the fact that it exists in and of itself is a testament to just how valuable the product is. Otherwise, people wouldn't try to imitate it. That's a good framework on this concept of the future of jobs.

Uh Sam Alman put out a fantastic blog post and talked about how if you went back hundreds of years and showed uh people what we do all day. They would say those are ridiculous fake jobs. You're that's not real. That's not hunting or farming. That's sitting in front of a computer just messing around talking to people.

um and yet we yet yet we get a lot of value out of them. Uh when we think about the future of work and jobs, do you think that we are adaptable enough as a society to create full employment with that new paradigm?

Can we have 30 million omocas chefs and 30 million athletes and 30 million reality TV stars such that people by and large have meaningful work even at some sort of scale or or do you think this is some there's some other way that this plays out? I think yes.

Like we will we're such a selfish race or or or species that we want to and the way the economics will work is is uh the jobs will basically ex job availability will expand to fill the leisure bucket that it sits inside of.

So we have more leisure hours today than any any era ever in the history of time because we're actually the most productive, right? Like if you if you want to go back to like the stone age, uh uh there's this really tight correlation actually between productivity boosts and the invention of leisure activities. Mhm.

So like tools get made all of a sudden we have free time. We didn't have free time before because every hour was meant was spent like surviving. What do we do with free time? We invent music. We invent bone flutes. Actually the first board games were invented concurrent with irrigation.

So all of a sudden you have this huge productivity boost and then you have all this free time. What do you do with the free time? Well, we we invent things to fill it. Modern sports were invented with the industrial revolution.

All of the oldest soccer teams, football teams were actually factory workers from the same factory competing against each other. M funny. And so we have these like huge booness to productivity and then on the other side of it, we have uh job creation to fill that leisure expansion.

So yeah, we're going to have more athletes than ever. This is hilarious because it's actually incredibly bullish for art history majors like because because I'm thinking about it like like so Ken Burns is about to drop a a new documentary about the American Revolution. Uh, and I am so excited to watch it.

And I know I could go to ChatBT and say, "Build me a deep research report on the American Revolution. " But I want to hear it through the Ken Burns lens. And I want to hear his voice narrated. And I want to hear him express his unique viewpoint and the connections that he makes, even if they're not the best.

even if I could get even if I could get more factualness or more truth or more more detailed insights from from Chachi PT I want the Ken Burns experience and so yeah I don't I don't know there's something interesting about that where like I mean you know this is we have a friend David Senro who runs Founders Podcast and the way he he he reads biographies about great history's greatest entrepreneurs and retells the stories in a way that's as compelling as the original material and as compelling as the real life and you're getting it through the experience of David.

And I just don't think that's going anywhere. Uh even though even though it is it is in some ways like the first thing that could be oneshot by AI with with with generative voice and and deep research products, but I think it'll be sticking around like you like you we're we're we're so narcissistic.

We love stories about each other. Yeah. And we love storytellers and we love telling stories. Yeah. Uh, and we hate inauthent inauthenticity when it comes to that. Um, I mean like the the ESPN ate the oo like is is a joke, but it's like we have more sports than ever. Yeah. Because we have more leisure time than ever.

Yeah. We care so much. You know, I I I I'll watch competitive darts. We watch competitive darts a hundred. We didn't have time to watch. got really into bull riding recently and all the narratives there. JB Many, the the greatest bull rider of all time. I know the whole history. I love it. Yeah.

Getting into these obscure obscure sports is uh yeah, maybe that's the future. I just get just get just spend all my time watching bull riding. That's that's post scarcity for you. Switching gears a little bit.

Uh, I mean I I wish we had a full hour to talk because there's so many different directions we could go, but um I wanted to see get your reaction to WWDC this year, Apple's news around how they're going to be working with developers. I mean, there's there's a ton to dig into. What what stood out to you? Sure.

Uh, I know that everybody has like lost their mind about Liquid Glass and the new UI. Um, I think buried in a lot of the press around WWDC is actually Apple's stance towards LLMs and AI. Uh, so there's a machine learning team inside of Apple.

Um and they are uh really they're starting with this library called MLX which is um uh allows uh inference on device for Apple iPhones and laptops for for M m silicon or or Apple silicon.

And what's what's really interesting about that is as a developer right now, uh when you when you think about creating an application that has enduser inference embedded inside of it, you also kind of have to do the mental math of how much it's going to cost you because it's all metered.

It's like, okay, well, yeah, I'm gonna, you know, drop this endpoint into OpenAI or anthropic. You can make a viral app and then blow through your entire credit card limit. Yeah. And that's like we've had bunch of founders on the on on the show that have like accidentally done that.

So, and you think about our early mobile days, like we're seeing an explosion of AI apps right now, but but that's been gated by developers thinking in their heads, well, if I make something amazing and free, I could actually just end up going into debt over it. That that's not fun, right?

And and in the early venture capitalists will save us in those situations. Thankfully, they will come back if you have plenty of VCA checks on a handshake. No, but still there's just so many part dynamic dynamic.

Part of the beauty of of it being easier than ever to create software is there's a bunch of software that can and should exist that historically shouldn't have existed because it was expensive for development cost reasons. Now we we've been through this era of expensive inference. Yeah. Yes.

And so it's it's it's that point highlights the entire dynamic or like you know imagine if game developers had to pay per pixel that was rendered by their the people who play their games. It would be insane like like there would be no games made. Yeah.

And so what's so exciting is that it feels like we're starting to shift into better uh you know Apple's Apple's really in my mind uh in a perfect position to put the tools in the hands of developers and enable ondevice inference which really means free inference. Yeah.

So, we're so if we were in this era where game developers had to pay for for the pixels that were rendered on on end user devices, we're moving to like wow like people can render the graphics for free on their device and that just opens the floodgates for the things that can happen.

I think haters will say, well, like, you know, models are bad. You know, you know, the the the battery life is terrible. Your iPhone heats up. You know, the the models are small. Yeah. Today. Yeah.

But tomorrow, two, a year from now, two years from now, you know, all of a sudden, 80 90% of the queries that you would run through a cloud hosted model is just doable on your phone or on your laptop. Y and for free and natively it can be offline whatever you want and private.

Uh and so that's a that's such an exciting future and from from my takeaway from WWC that was that was the most exciting one. Um and I feel like yeah and you combine that with again they're not really getting any credit for partnering with Anthropic on Xcode which will enable some of this activity as well. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean we need we need AI our AI Flappy Bird moment. Like Flappy Bird, I remember was built by like a single developer and it's that perfect example of like leveraging all the hardware to just build something that went mega viral. We've seen a few of these moments for images.

There was that uh magic avatar app that would make you look like Superman. That kind of went viral, but of course it had high inference cost. When you drop that inference cost to zero, you put on the edge.

I think we will have our our our our flappy bird moment for LLMbased interactions on the iPhone and I I'm really excited for that. It's completely unpredictable what that will be, but I imagine it'll be very fun and everyone will be playing with it when it happens.

Uh I I I want to stay on the on the topic of Apple and and just this idea of taste. A lot of people have been writing about taste and coming back to taste as something that's uh potentially a permanent differentiator in a post AI world. Uh there's an idea of like agency plus taste uh being more valuable than skills.

We talked to Scott Bellski about that on Tuesday. Uh how how do you think uh is taste a moat? Is it something that can be learned? What is the value? Is it still alive and well at at Apple? There was a lot of criticism about liquid glass and yet when we looked at it looked pretty cool. I don't know.

I thought it looked nice. Um I think tasted alive and well. Maybe I'll describe Apple if you if you'll permit me to to to describe another one of my frameworks uh that we've developed here at Pace is is top down and bottom up companies.

So top down companies started by visionary charismatic founders um Apple, Tesla, SpaceX, Amazon, Epic Games. And what's notable about these visionary founders is they're largely unattached to how they execute and what the products actually end up looking like.

And so what what what happens is top these top down companies uh ship multiple flagship products over their life cycle. So you know uh we're we're all on you know Apple laptops and have Apple iPhones and AirPods. Um you know Tesla's obviously created everything from cars to power walls and solar panels.

Uh SpaceX not only makes rockets but also satellite internet. Mhm.

Um, awesome, amazing, amazing constructs and and what's interesting is the market only sees the products and so they don't understand that the core innovation engine is the uh company itself because these top down companies hire innovators and and build up this core core ability to summit the next hill and launch the next product.

Uh bottomup companies conversely are started by tinkerer founders. They're hackers. They try to uh pick locks basically and they they they combined with perfect timing capture lightning in a bottle. And what's what's interesting about bottom companies is that they they only ever ship a single flagship product.

This is Google, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Airbnb. uh most actually venture uh Twitter the where where we are um and and and they are actually fundamentally incapable of shipping a second flagship product.

It's because the the product market fit for that is so violent that every person that gets hired into that company is an optimizer. It's it's so so imagine like a you're creating a jawbreaker around this core product market fit. Every single person is hired as this optimizer. There are no innovators.

Why why would you stick your neck out to try something new when you can just make the core thing 1% better? Y um and so they're actually fundamentally inc they you can't ship a second product as a bottomup company. And a lot of bottom-up companies don't know that they're bottom-up companies.

Uh because success is a terrible teacher. Um a lot of bottom-up companies expand through M&A because the businesses are so good. They're so good.

Uh you you and then if you can buy great products, you can optimize them really well and grow them and you look like you're you know you're look you can kind of mask the fact that you didn't actually make two of those sort of flagship products with scale going to meta.

It's like yeah 15 billion is a lot but what if it moves the market cap 1%. Yeah. What if it optimizes their AI stack 1%. It's like yeah itself Instagram. Yep. you know, uh, uh, uh, bike dance buying musically. Sure.

These are in like maybe some of the best investments over the last couple decades, and they were M&A events.

Um, and so if you're a bottom-up company and you can apply that pattern match really well to identifying similar shaped assets, that's your core innovation lever because you you actually are incapable of shipping something internally. Um, so going back to taste, do I think taste is alive and well at Apple?

Yes, because culturally that organization has been built out to hire this innovative DNA. Uh it's not the same at every company. Uh you know, I don't know I don't know if tastes famous last I don't know if taste exists at I don't know if true taste exists at bottomup companies. Mhm.

I I wonder actually if what we what we can see from bottomup companies is just ornamental window dressing that we misidentify as taste because it's yeah it's hiring a good design agency at the right time and and you're like oh this this companyy's so tasteful, but it's like well you had to spend 250 grand to be tasteful.

It's just the most legible thing. But when when actually like Craigslist just works great. I mean Craigslist is a perfect example of a bottomout company. No taste required. Interesting. Um I I can I would be rattling off like 20 other examples that kind of fit this framework, but I would piss off too many people.

So we'll let we'll let the audience imagine uh for themselves. But but I think it's powerful. Yeah, this was fantastic. We could go way deeper into all of these frameworks. These are great like kickoff points for big discussions. I have so many more questions.

So we'll have to have you on back soon because this was fantastic. Amazing. Thanks so much for taking the time. Thanks for the time. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. And in the meantime, we will talk to you about AdQuick. Adqu. com. Out ofome advertising made easy and measurable.

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