Sam Lessin on Technology Trends

Essays

From the Podcast

It's the most competitive. Like, basically, the West Coast is where technology starts and moves east. All culture and, like, culture trends start i- east and move west.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 159

Uh, look, I think it goes a little bit back to the thing we've talked about many times on the pod, which is, like, look, is everyone a developer or no one a developer? Is everyone a platform partner or is no one a platform partner? Like, from my perspective, the problem is, like, I have all sorts of software running just for me on these stuff. I wouldn't consider myself a platform partner. Like, I wouldn't even consider myself a developer on them. I'm literally just, like, making the shit I want. And, like, it's really, really hard to see, like, what that ecosystem looks like because it really does mean that these developers are just consumers, right? And if they're just consumers, then, like, how do you deal with... Like, what are you gonna deal in everyone, then you just don't charge them? Like, what does that even mean?

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 157

Ironic since we own the land there, but, like, it's true. The big problem with Tahoe this year was one of the best parts of Fourth of July in Tahoe is the military hardware that comes out and buzzes the lake.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 157

I, I'm like un- I'm completely, I'm completely uninterested in hardware. I like my iPhone. I think it's fine. I like my Garmin watch. I could imagine putting a button on my Garmin watch with a microphone. That would be kinda useful.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 158

But it i- but the problem is, it's, like, kinda like being like, you're talking about the, the stuff as though any one company can control it or any one country can control it. You can acknowledge the fact that giving technical, enormous amounts of technical leverage on all sorts of things has, could be bad for biological weapons or, like, this is, like, the... You can do all sorts of bad stuff with technology. You can do all sorts of good stuff with technology. You can do all sorts of bad stuff with technology. That's what technology is. If we had a monopoly on technology in the US, that would be different. We obviously don't, right? And so in some ways, like, having a, like... It's like all this stuff about global warming and the environment, where, like, one country can take action, but it's completely irrelevant because we live in a connected globe. So it's a dumb thing to do, right? Like-

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 158

The fact that, like, the AI war thing will not be decided by, like, technology. It won't just happen naturally and occur naturally by the laws of economics, which gets you the best product at the cheapest price. People are making plays which are political, not business, right? If that makes sense.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 158

Yeah, exactly. So I, I don't know. I mean, like, I just... I don't know. My, my thing more is just, like, I'm just depressed about the entire thing. I have... I offer no advice. Like, I think, I think this has gone... Like, all of AI, these AI wars are, like, politics and not business or technology at this point, and, like, that's a bummer.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 158

I just think at the end of the day, like stopping people from moving software around the world, it's the same thing as stopping them from moving like books around the world. It's just con- it, it's like really weird, right? As a concept to like push on. And like, I'm just like-

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 158

... this thing called the right to be forgotten, which is one of the dumbest laws ever written. Because you're like, how the hell are you gonna enforce that? Like you can't, it's like it makes no sense, right? Like, like from an intellectual, it's not how the internet works. It's like, you know, people used to make T-shirts with encryption algo- encryption, we can go back further. In the early internet, there was this big argument about whether encryption technology was a weapon and whether it could be exported from the US legally or not. And then all these like hackers would like literally just put encryption algorithms on T-shirts and walk around, 'cause they're so simple. It's like you can't stop this from moving cross border, right? And so the basic point with all this stuff again is like it, it's one thing if you're just like, okay, like the Chinese models are bad and like we're gonna put up a trade embargo on like copying like Chinese mo- using Chinese models from China, but we're gonna do it in the US. Like that, none of that's how the internet works. Like that's not how-

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 158

I'm just looking at OpenAI's hardware. Oh, it's supply... What is SupplyCo with OpenAI? Is there, is this their thing?

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 158

Yeah. Well, it's fascinating. We had a story over the weekend that Amazon had reached out to the government finding some vulnerabilities, and then someone else reported they only reached out to the government after Dario didn't pick up the phone call, which makes no sense. And then someone else reported it was part of their regularly scheduled meeting with the government. But now you have Anthropic's own partners that are involved in kind of talking about, you know, this model. Although they weren't necessarily talking about the power of it. And I think one of the most interesting things to come of this latest round with Anthropic in DC is the growing scrutiny on foreign nationals inside AI companies and what they can have access to. The government's now said that foreign nationals inside Anthropic can't have access to it. I kinda worry about that. I, I, I think we'd be in a very bad place if all of a sudden the software you have access to working on is dependent on your nationality when you're employed by a US company. That seems bad.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 154

But this is so funny, right? Like, what are we s- they're just selling... It's, whether it's a markdown file, which was the original basey harnesses or now we have fancier ways of talking about them. Like, it's really funny to be in this world where, like, everyone's like, "Software is dead," except for these things that are software.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 151

Two things can be true at the same time. Thing one is this stuff is so fun to build software with, and I have better software for myself than I've ever had, and I'm loving it, right? Two, it's actually a bad business, right? And, like, that's very hard for people to wrap their heads around that both things can be true at the same time.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 146

Yeah. But you know, I guess, like, one of the things that I've been thinking about a- along the lines of all of this, and Sam, I, I read your essay about meaning, and I think that there's a counter-narrative that needs to emerge, which is that the, the thing that gives people meaning is agency, like, their ability to create what they want to create. And if you look at the sheer... like, the number of people that use software in the world right now, it's around, whatever, 6 billion, right? People are using software. There's only 50 million people that, that write software, uh, in the world. And the idea that AI is going to unlock tens of millions of more people, if not hundreds of millions of more people, to create software that the 6 billion people use, to me is, like, an incredibly powerful story. Like, and Sam, I know you've done some events recently to teach people that don't know how to, you know, use software and how to, how to make things with AI. You know, we had 3,000 students show up last week in, at the University of Michigan on Thursday night for ClawCon. Um, the University of Michigan is launching an institute for agentic computing. And you know, 3,000 students that feel deeply empowered by this new software called OpenClaw that enables you to build any software that you want for any reason. Like, to me, that's, like, really, really i- inspiring. And you know, I'm, I'm hearing stories now every day of people that, uh, have built a small business. Stuff that's, like, really basic. Like, we've got this guy in, um, Switzerland that used OpenClaw to brew beer, and then the, it built him a website, and it set up Stripe, and now he's got a lobster lager that he's selling on, you know, on the internet. And he doesn't care. He's, I think, 70. He doesn't care that any of this was written by code that he doesn't understand. He's just really psyched that he gets to have a relationship with the customers that are drinking his beer. And like, I think that's, like, really pretty inspiring, and like, the idea that this stuff, the, like, hard work of, like, using all the computers that people have done in these, like, big tech companies kind of starts to go away might actually be a really good thing, in that people can create what they wanna create. And I don't know. Like, I, I guess I'm just, like... I'm far more optimistic that, like, we may actually be at a local maximum right now, that, um, the inequality that we see in the Mag 7 and in the sto- software stocks in the market is so concentrated into this, like, priesthood of 50 million people that can write software today. The distribution of more people being able to write software is actually gonna be a huge bonus for meaning in the world. And yes, we might lose some jobs that were otherwise moving data around in spreadsheets, but like, I don't know. Like, I'm, like, much more optimistic about this than, than many-

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 145

For not very much, right? But, like, the reality is, every single model company is out of data, and they need more human-generated data in order to make and improve their models. And specifically, we have seen Anthropic specifically in the last six months has, y- you know, we all know their revenue numbers. They've gone through the roof, and this is based on models that can write code and can use tools that code knows how to use, right? Unix, Bash, like, being able to generate software using the Unix operating system is, like, the whole thing driving the most value. It's the reason why I get a call, like, every other day from somebody, like, begging me to get into Anthropic s- you know, invest in Anthropic. Like, that is what is driving that. And they too still need more data to improve the model's ability to write code. The only place you can get that is from being in the work stream of software engineers, and specifically now it is in the what we call traces, uh, in the industry, which is the actual, like, what the software engineer used as their prompt, what the response of the model was. Like, there is a sort of private set of data that is extremely valuable to the model companies right now for improving the coding models, and Cursor has a huge one.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 145

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