BUILD ABUNDANCE

“Alpha School is our Tesla Roadster for AI schools. Well, it starts with McKenzie and Joe's philosophy that the kids have to love school and they love vacation. So the number one goal is they don't wanna go on vacation. They wanna stay in school because they love it so much. And so they do two hours on software a day where, you know, it's relatively practice and drilling and these kinds of things, but they have a coach really motivating and helping. And then they get the reward for that as they get to spend the rest of the day doing stuff they want.”

“And the simple way that I put this is that for us at Cognition, for example, our engineers don't type code anymore. Like, that's that's just reality. And this is within the last, yeah, three to six months, honestly, when the shift has really happened. You used to work with punch cards, for example, and now in many ways, the medium has shifted away from code, and a lot more of it has become basically English.”

“One of the fun stats actually is, today's March 9, and we actually, at this point, have already done more Devon sessions, in our customers in 2026 than we had in 2025. And so, basically, over the last, like, two months and change, we've already done more Devon, usage in total than than we had in all of 2025.”

“Well, let's see. You describe as some jobs as valuable, but, like, you know, teachers are very valuable and not paid very much. So I don't think pay follows value very much. It follows shortages and demand and supply. Okay? So the question is, for wages, what jobs will be in shortage? And I think it's all those jobs that are emotional that computers are not very good at because we'll we'll have a lot of need in those.”

“One of the stats that people talk about a lot is this METR report, which basically says for each different model that comes out, roughly how much human work can it do in an automated fashion before you have to go interrupt it. So just two or three years ago, the answer was, like, ten seconds or something. And at this point, it's already gotten to the point where it's in the scale of ten, twenty hours. The thing that's really crazy about the stat is you just see it very consistently double. For the last few years, it's doubled about four or five times every year.”

“My favorite line on this is, our cofounder Walton says this, which is for so long, we've all been living in Minecraft survival mode, and now we're gonna be in creative mode. And I think that's really what we're gonna see over the next, honestly, the next five or ten years is getting to a point where you're really only limited to your ideas and to your imagination where you can kinda just turn things into reality, and I think that's gonna be a great future.”

“So then that comes back to Satya made one incredibly ballsy, insightful decision, which is to invest in OpenAI back in 2018. So, you know, he bet big on AI, and that catapulted them both reputationally and in terms of other a little bit on the prop and in the Azure business. So it was the workload that then has grown Azure into a monster and a big success.”

“The earliest results that we where we saw them, we were like, oh, there's something here where they started with, basically, like, modernization programs. So people that had large legacy existing things they needed to transform. And if you sort of did the math, scope out how long it would take, maybe it would be like a two year project. And, you know, relatively quickly by, like, late twenty twenty four, we were measuring, somewhere between a six to 12 x productivity gain for those types of projects, meaning that one hour of human time spent managing Devon was worth like six to twelve hours of that human time doing the work themselves.”

“Now we're kind of in this state of the world where the government spends a $100,000,000,000 a year on just IT modernization. We have huge amounts of government still written in COBOL, with people who, you know, have left or no longer understand how the code works. And it's really holding us back. And I mean, you feel it as a citizen day to day, think about your interaction with the DMV or trying to pay your taxes.”

“STEM practically took over Stanford University. Okay? And now maybe what we'll see is a rotation, you know, back to the humanities into, understanding combination of, history and literature, but also kind of the the physiology of the brain and, you know, how we interact with each other. If I had a three year old today, I would be, like, doubling down on the emotional skills.”

“It's also, some comfort with non determinism. At Tesla, we had one mantra, which was, you know, never go to sleep while the GPUs are idling. If you let your cluster idle overnight, that's just a huge waste of resources. Just kick off some experiments before you go to bed. So you wake up, you get some more data and it's the same for all of software now. Like why would you go to sleep while the Devons are idling?”

“Oh, Reid Hoffman, Reid Hastings, both in deck. So I get introduced sometimes at conferences and someone's done the quick chat GPT and they, you know, do it on read or read h or something, and they call me the founder of LinkedIn. And I'm very excited cause that's a hell of a business.”

“Anything that lives in the emotional realm will be impacted not as much by AI because we humans react to these things emotionally. And so, again, I think we'll not watch robots playing basketball. And so it's the easiest example for people to get that things that are emotionally sip pleasure, emotional stimulation, will still do. So, you know, you like to give and get real flowers, not fake flowers.”

“We've seen in radiology, which is an interesting example because radiology is image processing. Computers and AI are much better than humans at and have been now for several years. And so you can now go into an MRI center, and if yourself pay $300 and get an MRI. It dramatically down in pricing. And so people are getting many more scans, and they're being read by AI with a radiologist approving them. So I had thought four years ago, gonna be devastation in radiology. Well, we have a shortage. Now. We have 35,000 radiologists. We need about 40,000. Wages are high.”

“I think there's gonna be an explosion in small businesses. I think AI is actually, like, an extremely small business enabling technology in particular where you think about what's hard about building or starting a small business. It's, you know, you don't have the resources of a large company that's specialization of labor in each part of the process. And I think AI, it's extraordinarily enabling. Think about the quality of quick legal gut check you can get from a chatbot, the quality of analysis of your financials, the quality of software that you build.”

“Okay. So let's look at electric cars. So 2007, we had self drive sorry. I I should say self driving cars. 2007 was the DARPA challenge, and it was like it actually did work in self driving cars in a limited lab. And now twenty years from now, it pretty much works. But the percentage of miles driven self driving by the machines by high end Teslas and by Waymos, it's gotta be less than 1% of global miles. So think of it as in twenty years, robots will do maybe 1% of the plumbing. At most.”

“Well, it turns out that operating personality is really different from allocating capital personality. So operating personality, you're like a dog with a bone. You never give up on a problem. You just work it. You work it. And investing personality is staying very broad, not falling in love with an idea, you know, cutting your losses and moving on.”

“If you are a middle power like Argentina, should you have an industrialization policy? Sure. Probably that makes sense. Will it work? Not clear at all because the power imbalance in The UK was so high. So they would they were laws preventing, you know, looms and various things from being in India. So the cotton, you know, from India had to come and then get processed in The UK, and they enforce those laws with their military.”

“We're going to enter this, like, hyper deflationary cycle of software where it's it's so easy to build. It's so abundant. That doesn't mean that people are gonna stop producing software. They're actually gonna produce thousands of times more software. And so you're gonna have this total software abundance, but basically, any problem that's kind of solvable in the digital realm should just get solved in the digital realm.”

“Either that or actually luxury might flip the other side because, artisanal handcrafted software is gonna be so rare. It's like, the early days of the industrial revolution was like, oh, great mechanized labor for goods. That was the higher status good. Of course the machines were more precise. And now it's totally flipped. If something's handmade that's obviously much higher status because it's so rare. This website was handmade. You can tell because of all the little bugs.”