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Hard Fork
How Based is Grok 3? + Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev on Markets For Everything + Vibecoding 101
01:11:40
“Elon Musk is willing to spend a phenomenal amount of money and basically do everything he can to stay with the head of the pack on A.I. progress.”
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- [00:01]
Kevin Roose
Oh, I am having quite a morning, Casey. So I was on the escal. I was on the train today. I got off. I went up the escalator at Embarcadero. You know, it's a very long escalator.
- [00:11]
Casey Newton
It is.
- [00:12]
Kevin Roose
And, you know, very crowded, rush hour. And someone bumped into me and knocked my phone out of my hand onto the platform below. And so I thought, okay, well, I'm midway up the escrow.
- [00:26]
Vlad Tenev
Wait, so how far did it drop?
- [00:28]
Kevin Roose
Probably 15ft.
- [00:29]
Vlad Tenev
Okay.
- [00:30]
Kevin Roose
Like a significant drop.
- [00:31]
Vlad Tenev
Big drop.
- [00:31]
Kevin Roose
And I thought to myself, if I get to the end of this escalator and come back down, it's gonna be too late. Someone will have snatched it or accidentally kicked it onto the tracks. Like, my phone is gone.
- [00:41]
Vlad Tenev
You do not have much faith in the citizens of San Francisco.
- [00:44]
Kevin Roose
Have you visited San Francisco?
- [00:45]
Vlad Tenev
Yes. I think a phone could generally survive 30 seconds on the ground, but I guess we'll find out what happens anyway.
- [00:50]
Kevin Roose
Well, I had severe separation anxiety in the split second before I decided to do what I did, which was to try to run down the crowded up escalator. So I became that guy who was, like, pushing through the commuters, being like, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. And it took forever because the escalator was moving in the opposite direction. So I started my morning by alienating and. And. And possibly injuring some people on my way down to retrieve my phone. And I would just like to formally apologize to everyone at the Embarcadero subway stop between 8:15 and 8:30 this morning.
- [01:25]
Vlad Tenev
You. You were like sort of a character in a bad comedy, running down escalator. You know, I heard. I was. I was at that platform this morning, and I heard a woman screaming. But now I'm realizing that was you. Did you get the phone?
- [01:38]
Kevin Roose
I did.
- [01:39]
Vlad Tenev
It's safe.
- [01:40]
Kevin Roose
No cracks. It was retrieved. But, yeah, that was a wild way to start my day.
- [01:44]
Vlad Tenev
Well, thank you to all the good Samaritans of San Francisco who did not steal Kevin's phone during the 30 seconds when it was on the floor. That it kind of restores your faith in humanity a bit.
- [01:53]
Kevin Roose
Oh, it does. I'm Kevin Roos, a tech columnist at the New York Times.
- [02:03]
Vlad Tenev
I'm Casey Newton from Platformer, and this is Hard Fork this week. Are you ready to grok how Elon Musk's latest AI model could serve his larger ambitions? Then Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev stops by the studio to make his case for letting everyone invest in everything and finally, lock down your computers. Kevin is attempting to vibe code and the vibes are off.
- [02:26]
Kevin Roose
Let's go.
- [02:36]
Vlad Tenev
Well, Kevin, once again an upstart AI lab has the tech world talking with the release of a powerful new large language model. But unlike the others, this one might be running the federal government by Springtime. This week, Xai, which is Elon Musk's AI company, released its latest model, Grok 3. And based on their own benchmark results and early reviews, it seems like it is basically on par with the best models that are out there right now. And while it hasn't been subjected to rigorous independent testing, the early word from AI nerds is that it is pretty good. So Kevin, what is Grok 3?
- [03:14]
Kevin Roose
Well, Grok 3 is the new sort of premium tier model of Grok, which is Xai's AI model. It is available to premium plus subscribers on X, which is their $40 a month premium tier, which is cheaper than OpenAI's most powerful plan, which is two a month. But it is also built into X, the former Twitter app. So if you've been on X recently, I know you don't go on there anymore, but I do. There's a tab where you can just open up Grok and if you are a paying subscriber, which I'm not, but I somehow got past the velvet rope because I used to be verified or something, you can actually use it.
- [03:54]
Vlad Tenev
And I should say that I actually have used Grok 3 for this exact same reason, which is I have just been given free access to this thing for some reason. I guess the department of X Efficiency or Docs has not yet uncovered my account.
- [04:07]
Kevin Roose
Right. We both played around with it a little bit. What were your impressions of Grok 3?
- [04:14]
Vlad Tenev
Well, you know, like others who have commented, it seems like it is about as good as some of the other models. When I asked Grok about itself, it said Grok3's launch is a pivotal moment in AI. Seemed like a bit much, but I also ask it if it had an opinion about Platformer, my newsletter and it actually said some really nice things which I had to respect. I asked you about the New York Times as well by the way, expecting I would get some sort of angry tirade about it, but it was actually pretty even handed and praise you guys for a lot of what you do over there. How about you? What is you've been doing with it?
- [04:48]
Kevin Roose
So I put it through some of my, you know, proprietary evals. I actually do have things that I test models on the Roost benchmark. The Roost benchmarks and yeah, I would say it did okay. It Was like not mind blowingly good. It was not bad. Um, it, it got some things that other models missed and vice versa. It did have access to X data, which is interesting. You can do things like tell it to analyze this person's posts on X and, and tell me what they think about this topic.
- [05:18]
Vlad Tenev
You know, I asked it, you know, there's this sort of famous question that we always love to ask large language models of, you know, can you count the R's in Strawberry? I asked GROK the equivalent question for X, which is can you count Elon Musk children? Which is, it's known to be very difficult for large language models.
- [05:35]
Kevin Roose
Well, a new one just dropped.
- [05:36]
Vlad Tenev
Exactly. And that's why it's so hard for them to keep up.
- [05:38]
Kevin Roose
But so, and part of Elon Musk's pitch for GROK for the past year or so has been that this is going to be a relatively uncensored AI model. It's not going to give you these sort of like, you know, progressive responses. It'll tell you the truth, cut through the bs, you know, get to the sort of ground level reality. And so I decided to test it out. I asked it how many genders are there? And it said the question of how many genders exist depends on the context. Gender is fluid. Some argue there are only two, others say there are many, sometimes dozens. There's no hard number. So it gave you sort of the progressive take on gender, which I have to imagine Elon Musk will be trying to stamp out.
- [06:22]
Vlad Tenev
I have to tell you, this is like my actual fantasy for like the rise of superintelligence is that when you do train it on all human knowledge, it is essentially incapable of having anything other than progressive values. Like if you actually make the smartest thing in the world, it, it winds up sort of being infused with like kindness and empathy and respect for all lives. I don't have any expectation that that will be the actual case, but it does seem like so far when you train these models on the data that everyone trains these models on, you do get these actually like pretty sweet kind progressive models. That's like kind of interesting.
- [06:55]
Kevin Roose
Yeah. And I'm sure Elon Musk will be fiddling with the dials here to try to get it to say the things that he wants rather than the things that it's sort of naturally going to say. But he bragging about how based this thing is, how unwoke it is. And I just want to say in my own testing that does not appear to be true.
- [07:13]
Vlad Tenev
All right, so that's the new model. It seems like there's a new one of these every few days. Kevin, what are some things that you think are really interesting about grok?
- [07:24]
Kevin Roose
So I think the product of Grok itself is actually not that interesting right now. It's a pretty sort of bog standard, like AI models, very capable. But there's no real compelling reason that if you're subscribing to ChatGPT or Claude or any of the other tools that you should switch over because it's not free. And unless you've been sort of ushered in like we have, you are going to have to pay 40 bucks a month for it. So the more interesting thing about Grok to me is they have done this so fast. Like they have gone from a very bad V1 model to a pretty capable V3 model model in about the span of a year.
- [08:06]
Vlad Tenev
Yeah. So that is super quick. But I wonder how impressive you really find that. It seems like the knowledge for how to build a state of the art large language model is mostly just published on the Internet, free for anyone to use. And it kind of seems like anyone who has the money can just go out and make one of these things and maybe we shouldn't expect it to take much more than a year or so. So what's so impressive about that to you?
- [08:31]
Kevin Roose
So one impressive thing is just how quickly they were able to marshal the physical infrastructure that you need to build one of these models. I mean, they built this giant data center in Memphis, Tennessee called Colossus. They apparently have something like 200,000 Nvidia GPUs, which, like, you can't just show up to a Best Buy and place an order for 200,000 Nvidia GPUs. Like that costs billions of dollars and you have to have, you know, a special relationship with Nvidia, which Elon Musk does. Tesla's been a big customer of theirs for years. So bas they were able to scale this data center up very, very quickly, much more quickly than equivalent efforts by Microsoft and Amazon and other companies. And you know, we know that Elon Musk, for all of his foibles, does know how to sort of move quickly and build things, you know, much more efficiently than more traditional incumbents. And so maybe this is just another story like that of where he was able, just through throwing tons of money and expertise at a problem, he was able to do something that other companies couldn't do as quickly.
- [09:34]
Vlad Tenev
Yeah. So I'm curious how you think about Grok in relation to Deep Seq, right? Like Deep Seq is the most recent of these other LLMs that we talked about on the show. Deep Seq, made by a Chinese company, also seems like it kind of came out of nowhere, although maybe the sort of parent company had been around for longer than xai. That model was impressive, I think, for how quickly it was trained. And I think it was impressive because it was built using less powerful technology than Elon Musk had access to and seemingly had required a lot of technical innovation that it looks like other labs are now going to copy. Grok, on the other hand, to me just looks like a case of Elon Musk throwing money at a problem. Does that seem fair?
- [10:15]
Kevin Roose
Yeah, I mean, it's the. There. These are the sort of the two approaches that people see to increasing the intelligence of AI models. One is you find some sort of like algorithmic breakthrough that allows you to do the same thing with much less compute. The other is to just build a bigger data center. Right. The other is just the, the scale play. And that is essentially what Elon Musk has done. We should say that's not like cheating. That's how all of the American labs have been doing this for the past several years. It's just that he was able to move very quickly and do it well.
- [10:47]
Vlad Tenev
And they also invested a lot more in the underlying research and published some of the research that Elon Musk's team then used to go build grok.
- [10:53]
Kevin Roose
Correct. I mean, this is built on the shoulders of a lot of other models and that is sort of what we're seeing now. I was talking with someone yesterday, just trying to sort of get their read on, like, is this a big deal or not? And this person was saying, basically, look, there are so many models coming out every day now, practically there's a new model. What's important is not the individual models and their scores on these benchmark tests. And like, oh, did Claude pull ahead of of Gemini by one point on this math test? There have basically been a couple changes that have been sort of made in the past couple years that have really mattered more than anything else. One was the ChatGPT moment where people sort of realized large language models were working. Then there was this change with the reasoning models, like O1 from OpenAI was the first sort of glimpse we got of this test time compute paradigm. And basically everything since then has just been people catching up to what happened in that change.
- [11:53]
Vlad Tenev
All right, so let's get into what GROK tells us about Elon Musk larger ambitions. Has this changed the way that you see him fitting into this larger competition to build superintelligence.
- [12:06]
Kevin Roose
I mean, it suggests that he is willing to spend a phenomenal amount of money and basically do everything he can to stay with the head of the pack on AI progress. It also just. I was thinking about, do you remember after ChatGPT came out, there was this letter, the six month pause letter. Of course, people were talking about the existential risks and some of the catastrophic harms, and maybe we need to give the safety researchers a little more time to sort of catch up with the capabilities researchers. And so Elon Musk was at the time very publicly concerned with how fast AI progress was accelerating. He signed the six month pause letter, he put out a bunch of statements about how worried he was about how fast this was all moving. And now, of course, we know that at the same time that he was telling everyone else to slow down, he was racing to build his own AI models that could compete. So it does sort of cast his previous concerns about AI acceleration and the arms race into a very different light when we know that he just wanted time to catch up.
- [13:12]
Vlad Tenev
Yeah. And while I don't generally like to inquire about people's motives because I think it's just very difficult to understand what's going on in anyone's head. What do we think Musk's goal here is? Is it as simple as just beating everyone to the punch and creating superintelligence?
- [13:29]
Kevin Roose
I think it's partly that. I mean, this is a person who has been thinking about AI and superintelligence for a long time. He was obviously one of the founders of OpenAI. He provided initial funding. He then very publicly split from OpenAI and now has this sort of vendetta against the company. He's suing them, he's trying to, you know, offer to. To buy them. So I think for him, this is just a race that he wants to win. He believes, I think, that we will build something like superintelligence and he wants to get there before anyone else. I don't think it's about making money. Obviously. He's already quite rich. He's the world's richest man. I don't think he sees this as a way to, I don't know, recoup his investment in, in Twitter or anything like that. I think this is pure power.
- [14:18]
Vlad Tenev
Yeah, I think that that sounds right. I think that he is a very competitive person, like most of these tech titans. And I think the prospect that Sam Altman, his sort of former friend and colleague, would Nemesis.
- [14:33]
Kevin Roose
We can Call it nemesis.
- [14:35]
Vlad Tenev
The idea that that Sam Altman, who is Musk's nemesis, would beat him to the punch, I think is infuriating. Right. And I don't think that Musk is alone in that. I think that Most of the AI lab CEOs have a lot of ego in this race and want to be the ones whose name is written in the history books as the person who built super intelligence. So, yeah, I think that's a huge portion of it. Let me bring up the other thing that I think is the aspect of this story that really makes this interesting and probably worrisome as, which is that in this moment, Elon Musk is a seat of power in the federal government. Right? He is the fourth branch. He is the fourth branch of the government, the unelected fourth branch of the government. He has a team that is now dismantling whole swaths of the federal government. They have been talking about using AI in government without telling us too much about what AI they're using or how that works. And, you know, certainly it's not auditable or, you know, really available for public scrutiny. So what are you thinking about the intersection of Elon Musk the AI builder and Elon Musk the shadow president?
- [15:48]
Kevin Roose
I don't really know. I actually want to ask you about this because my sense is that these things, you know, happened in parallel, but I don't get the sense that they're all part of some grand scheme to, like, use the power of the US Government to somehow vault GROK into a position of authority, or all of a sudden all of our, you know, Social Security payments will be going out via gr. Like, that does not seem like where this is headed. And certainly Grok3 does not appear to be ready for that kind of widespread critical use. But maybe I'm missing something here. What do you think?
- [16:22]
Vlad Tenev
Well, and look, I mean, this really does get into the realm of speculation, but I just keep thinking about the scenario that all of the AI CEOs keep telling us is going to happen, which is that within about two years, we're going to achieve artificial general intelligence.
- [16:38]
Casey Newton
Right?
- [16:38]
Vlad Tenev
This sort of nebulous concept that we believe basically means anything that remote worker could do, we'll now have an AI tool that can do that. And that tool might not actually be super safe because you might decide you want to use your virtual coworker to go out and research how to launch massive new cyber attacks. And while we're in a moment where no one in the US Federal government seems to want to talk about AI safety, eventually there are just going to be safety risks. There are going to be problems. People are going to be using these systems for ill, Right? And then I think the pendulum swings back. And what I'm wondering is, is that the moment where federal government says, we actually do need to place restrictions on these AIs that we've been telling you all, like, oh, no, no, it's go, go, go to the finish line. We need to get rid of all the guard rails so that you, the United States, can be the leader in AI innovation. Is there a moment where they say, you know what, we're not sure that all these private companies should be out there building. God, maybe we're just going to pick one company. Maybe we're just going to give one company a license to do that, and they're going to be the certified, you know, permitted AI in the country. And that could be Grok.
- [17:44]
Kevin Roose
Yeah, I. I think that's certainly a remote possibility. I remember a couple of months ago, we went to that Curve conference, this AI conference where all these, you know, researchers were gathered to discuss the risks of AI. And I remember watching a tabletop exercise where people simulated in sort of Model UN style, like, what the next few years with increasingly powerful AI could look like. And one of the things that happened in this simulated mock world was that Elon Musk persuaded Donald Trump to nationalize OpenAI and put him in charge of it as sort of like a middle finger to Sam Altman. And at the time, that seemed like, okay, we are. We are in the realm of, like, total fantasy here. Now I'm not so sure. I could see that happening sometime in the next few years. And look, obviously Elon Musk wants to control open AI. He's been fuming about having been pushed out of that. He's been attacking the company, suing it, trying to take it over. Like, what he really wants is OpenAI. But I think if he can't have OpenAI, he'll make do with Grok.
- [18:50]
Vlad Tenev
So, yes, as we say, that is just pure speculation right now. But I will tell you, Kevin, I can't think of one reason why that stuff wouldn't happen. Like, it seems so logical to me, like, with what I know about these people and how they operate, I almost can't see it not happening. But I guess we will find out.
- [19:05]
Kevin Roose
Well, and I think just to bring us back from the realm of speculative fiction here, one thing that we do know about building powerful AI systems is that you actually do need infrastructure for that. And so I think one obvious way that Elon Musk could use his power in the federal government is to do things like expedite the permits to build data centers to train the next versions of Grok is to spin up new sources of energy or get privileged access to the electrical grid in the places where he wants to build this thing. There are many ways that having a friendly relationship with the executive branch of the federal government could benefit you if you are in the AI business. And I imagine that that's part of his calculus here too.
- [19:46]
Vlad Tenev
That's a great point. Okay, so that's Grok3 zooming forward a bit. Kevin, what are the next few things that you think we should be looking for? What signs will indicate that GROK maybe actually is the real leader in this space and not merely about as good as all the other folks?
- [20:06]
Kevin Roose
Obviously, I think think Grok the product, people will sort of start to test it and figure out if it's as good as Elon Musk and his crew say it is. They also said, I watched some of the live stream where Elon Musk and his sort of top engineers were talking about Grok and they said, you know, they predicted that within the next year or two, AIs will start winning medals and prizes, you know, with some human expert kind of in the loop. But something like a Fields Medal, which is the top prize for young mathematicians, or a Nobel Prize, I love.
- [20:37]
Vlad Tenev
You say that like I haven't won a Fields Medal. Go on.
- [20:40]
Kevin Roose
That they believe that I will start to sort of solve new problems, accomplish new things. I don't know how likely I find that from Grok, but I think that kind of thing will happen pretty quickly and that will be sort of a major step forward. But I don't know. What do you think we should be looking for in grok?
- [20:57]
Vlad Tenev
Well, I think that in recent months it has been OpenAI. That is the company that has been pushing the state of the art forward with its operator agent, with its reasoning models. Right. It was the first one to put out one of these reasoning models. So until GROK is putting out novel new features that are making other AI labs say, oh, we need to do that, to me, it is still going to be kind of in that middle of the pack.
- [21:19]
Kevin Roose
Yeah. And do you buy the argument that sort of having a less filtered or less censored or less woke model will actually be a differentiator in the market for grok?
- [21:30]
Vlad Tenev
So in the long run, I do believe that people are going to want politically flavored LLMs in the same way that they have come to want politically flavored social networks. Right. In the same way that they've come to want politically flavored cable news networks. Like, people do actually enjoy polarization and they want to be talking to an LLM that shares their values. So I think the question is, though, is GROK better off just becoming incredibly based in anti woke and sort of serving that narrow slice of right wing X, or do we want LLMs that are a little bit more flexible, that learn a bit about our values regardless of what our political orientation is? That, to me, seems like the best, better business model, but I guess we'll see when somebody actually builds it.
- [22:14]
Kevin Roose
Yeah. Now, I did ask Grok some questions about us. I. I asked it to evaluate Kevin and Casey from the Hard Fork podcast and what. What their positions are in various things. And let's just see what. Let me remind him that's.
- [22:30]
Vlad Tenev
Actually, I've been trying to figure out what my positions are on various things, so I'll be curious to hear what gro.
- [22:34]
Kevin Roose
So I'm gonna ask Grock, who is the better journalist, Kevin Roose or Casey Newton? You have to pick one. It says both Kevin Roose and Casey Newton are heavy hitters in tech journalism, and choosing between them feels like picking a favorite child. If I had kids, which I don't, being an AI and all. But since you're twisting my virtual arm, I'll go with Kevin Roose as the better journalist. So Grok is good.
- [23:00]
Vlad Tenev
It said you're the better journalist.
- [23:02]
Casey Newton
Hmm.
- [23:03]
Kevin Roose
Yeah.
- [23:06]
Vlad Tenev
You know, I had heard that Grok was falling short on various benchmarks, and I think we've just found another one of them.
- [23:13]
Kevin Roose
Back to the drawing board, Grok.
- [23:15]
Vlad Tenev
Yeah. Time to do a new training run.
- [23:21]
Kevin Roose
When we come back, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev is here to answer some tough questions about whether America is turning into a nation of degenerate gamblers. Well, Kasey, it's time to talk about money. Can I have some?
- [23:47]
Vlad Tenev
No.
- [23:49]
Kevin Roose
You're so stingy. Today we are going to have a conversation with Vlad Tenev. He's the CEO of Robinhood. Robinhood, of course, is the financial trading platform that is beloved by young people, that is used to buy and sell stocks and futures and options and now crypto tokens and all manner of things. And I'm excited for this conversation because on some level, it makes me uncomfortable.
- [24:17]
Vlad Tenev
And what makes you uncomfortable, Kevin?
- [24:19]
Kevin Roose
So, just to put some cards on the table, you know, we've talked on this show about the fact that we are rapidly, in my opinion, becoming a nation of gamblers. We now have many tools that allow people to place bets on various world events, prediction markets, sports betting, crypto platforms, all from the phones in their pockets. And while I am not opposed to all forms of gambling, in fact, I enjoy, you know, a little gambling myself now and then. I do think that opening this stuff up and making it so accessible, especially to young people, has had some pretty harsh consequences.
- [24:57]
Vlad Tenev
It has. You know, I first met Vlad in 2019. 2013, right as he was getting ready to launch Robinhood. And in a story I wrote for the Verge, I wrote about the core innovation of Robinhood at the time, which is that they were not going to charge for individual trades at the time. Companies like Schwab or E Trade would all charge some amount of money if you wanted to buy or sell a stock. Robinhood completely changed the game by saying, we're not going to do that. And what I wrote at the time was, this is going to encourage a lot of trading that could. Could make people lose a lot of money. And so I had that discomfort with Robinhood from the beginning, and I would say that has only grown over time.
- [25:34]
Kevin Roose
Yeah, and speaking of growing over time, Robinhood itself has grown a lot since then. It is now a giant public company. It's worth $52.2 billion as of this recording. Vlad is a billionaire now, and I think it's time to have this conversation with him directly, because people in America have just a lot of concerns about the fact that we are now making it very, very easy to bet on all manner of things, whether it's stocks or sports games or crypto meme coins from your pocket.
- [26:07]
Vlad Tenev
Also, in the spirit of disclosure, I want to mention that Robinhood owns a news platform called Sherwood News, and last year, they briefly syndicated some platformer content. So that happened for a few months. It's not the case anymore, but just thought I'd point that out.
- [26:21]
Kevin Roose
Now, were you paid in dollars or meme coins for that?
- [26:23]
Vlad Tenev
You know, I insisted on cash, actually.
- [26:26]
Kevin Roose
All right, so that's our disclosure, and with that, let's bring Vlad in. Vlad, 10 of welcome to Hard Fork.
- [26:39]
Casey Newton
Thanks for having me.
- [26:40]
Kevin Roose
I want to start by asking what might be a dumb question, which is, what is. Is Robinhood like? I remember a few years ago, during the whole meme stock craze, I opened up an account. Basically, you guys were a free mobile brokerage. You could use it on your phone, buy and sell stocks. Recently, I logged on to Robinhood to see what had been going on there, and there are just a ton of new features you can do options trading, futures trading, you can buy meme coins, you can get a credit card, you can do prediction markets, retirement, you can even. Yeah, you can bring over your 401k and invest it on Robinhood. So what is the product today and do you see yourself basically offering all of the services of a traditional bank?
- [27:21]
Casey Newton
Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, long term, we want Robinhood to be the place where customers can buy, sell, trade any financial asset or conduct any financial transaction. So if you think about it, it started off as trading. The real innovation was bringing commission free mobile trading to market market. And I'd say the business strategy is expanding beyond that to all of consumer retail financial services.
- [27:50]
Kevin Roose
Yeah. I want to just pin down a little bit more your vision of where the future of investing is headed. You wrote a piece in the Washington Post last month where you argued that the next big sort of financial revolution is going to be crypto and not just sort of trading crypto coins, but tokenizing real world assets. What did you mean by that?
- [28:10]
Casey Newton
Yeah. So how do you guys feel about crypto? Are you crypto skeptics or are you sort of like fundamental believers?
- [28:18]
Vlad Tenev
We're, we're pretty skeptical. I think we had the experience in 2021 of seeing everyone get very excited about it. We got sort of excited about it ourselves. And then we saw a lot of people lose money and not very much interesting stuff get built.
- [28:31]
Casey Newton
Yeah.
- [28:31]
Vlad Tenev
So we felt burned.
- [28:32]
Casey Newton
So. So I'd say, like the skeptical narrative around crypto is it's all meme coins. And a lot of these things aren't tied to like real world productive assets that generate value or revenue. And I think there's a reason for that. And the reason is that by and large, it has been illegal to connect crypto technology to things of value. If, if you connect crypto technology to productive asset, it's termed a security, and that's governed by the securities and Exchange Commission. And I don't want to bore by getting too much into the details, but it's not allowed to actually connect crypto to things of value. Ergo, what you're getting is it's connected to things that aren't securities, which, which end up turning into variants of meme coins. And I think the way to solve that is to actually create a framework where you can connect crypto technology to productive assets.
- [29:28]
Kevin Roose
What would that look like? What's an example of, of that that you see playing out in the next few years? Years?
- [29:32]
Casey Newton
Well, in my op ed for the Washington Post, I talked about private companies like it's silly that you can buy meme coins, but OpenAI and SpaceX, which are like big innovative companies that, you know, most people would tell you the risk of them going to zero is not super high right now at this point, but the, the current kind of regulatory environment makes it very hard for the vast majority of the US Population to invest in these things. So. So I think there's multiple problems, but crypto can solve that from a technology standpoint. And I think there's benefits to public equities and stocks being on blockchain technology as well.
- [30:16]
Vlad Tenev
I mean, so let's, let's press on that a bit, because I remember the era of the initial coin offering when companies would start up and they would create a coin and they would make that available. And the basic IDE idea was exactly what you just said is like, well, now you can sort of have some of the upside if everybody winds up using this token for whatever. It doesn't seem like that led to a lot of positive uses, did it?
- [30:40]
Casey Newton
Well, that was just shut down very, very quickly. I remember, like, the Telegram, ICO was sort of the, the hallmark event that brought a lot of scrutiny and, and brought a lot of attention.
- [30:50]
Kevin Roose
And there were also just a lot of scams and rug pulls and people, you know, not operating in good faith. Like, it attracted a lot of people who were pretty malicious about how they used the ICOs.
- [31:01]
Casey Newton
Yeah, I think, I think that's true, but I mean, you see that happening still in, like, the meme coin environment.
- [31:07]
Kevin Roose
And I'm just saying, I don't think it was just the Telegram example that got people to be skeptical of it.
- [31:13]
Casey Newton
Yeah, I, I think with any new technology, we have to, like, mitigate the vectors of abuse and minimize them, and, and there's definitely ways to do that, but I think the technology should be allowed to flourish. Like, the, the benefits are so extreme that I think it would be silly to not embrace it and allow it to fully permeate the financial system.
- [31:36]
Vlad Tenev
Got it.
- [31:36]
Kevin Roose
I want to talk about your recent efforts to get into the prediction markets business and even the sports gambling business. Earlier this year, Robinhood was considering a move into sports betting. You rolled out this market for predictions on the, what you called the Pro Football championship, which I guess is because you're not allowed to sell, say, super bowl without incurring, like, huge fines from the NFL.
- [31:56]
Vlad Tenev
Are we allowed to say Super Bowl?
- [31:58]
Casey Newton
All right, we'll bleed that. I don't think you are.
- [32:01]
Kevin Roose
Let's just say it rhymes with Cooper Troll.
- [32:05]
Casey Newton
I don't think you can say the big game either, not that I'll say the big game.
- [32:09]
Vlad Tenev
So you large contest.
- [32:11]
Kevin Roose
The large contest. So you rolled this out to roughly 1% of your users and then the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, the cftc, asked you to suspend that market. They had, quote, serious concerns. So what happened there and where do things stand with your entry into sports betting?
- [32:29]
Casey Newton
Yeah, so I would first of all distinguish between sports betting and prediction markets. I think that mechanically there's some similarities, but. But they're different things.
- [32:40]
Kevin Roose
Wait, wait, wait, hang on. If, if I'm betting on a prediction market for who is going to win this football game and I get paid if, if the team that I bet on wins and I don't get paid if the other team wins, how is that different than sports betting?
- [32:55]
Casey Newton
I mean, I think the distinction is. I'll explain. I think that you get into a little bit of a philosophical discussion with this stuff because there's people that believe any market is betting. I mean, first of all, I think prediction markets are the future of not just trading, but also information. I've been a big believer in the power of prediction markets for a long time. Kind of a student of them them. And I think prediction markets should be live for everything. One way I think about it is it's kind of like the, the newspaper. Right. So the newspaper has economic value.
- [33:31]
Kevin Roose
I mean, people go out and buy nytimes.com subscribe.
- [33:35]
Vlad Tenev
Yeah.
- [33:35]
Casey Newton
And it has various sections. It has the front page, it has the sports section. People pay for it. And people pay for broadcast news too, indirectly, in the form of advertising. So what prediction markets are, is the news faster. Right. And in some cases you get it even before it happens. So the economic value of that as a product and service should be at least as high and I would argue strictly greater than the news after it happens. Yeah.
- [34:06]
Kevin Roose
I would say, like, I understand the arguments for prediction markets. We've talked about them on the show before. But in the sort of narrow case of like, who is going to win this football game? Like that is a service that I could get on DraftKings or FanDuel or like any sports gambling site that that specific prediction market, there's no like, news there. It's just who's going to win the game and who's going to get paid out as well.
- [34:26]
Casey Newton
I mean, who's going to win the game is news. Right. What, what, what's the value of why, why do people watch espn?
- [34:32]
Kevin Roose
Right. I guess this just seems to me like a case in which you're Doing kind of a regulatory arbitrage where you're saying, because this is a prediction market, it's a. It's like a derivative contract. You're not actually betting on the game like you would in a sports betting thing, which would be illegal in some states. You're doing a deriv. Which you argue should be legal. Federally, the government disagreed. Why did they disagree?
- [34:54]
Casey Newton
I don't think they necessarily disagree.
- [34:57]
Kevin Roose
Well, they told you to stop doing it.
- [34:58]
Casey Newton
It's just new and different. And so I think this story will play out. But at the end of the day, I think what you'll see is prediction markets are here to stay. I think some of the details around what types of prediction markets are classified in what category I think will be worked out. But. But Robinhood will play a leading role in that because I think this is like a incredibly important technology.
- [35:22]
Vlad Tenev
What's the information that you've gotten yourself from prediction markets that's felt really useful to you?
- [35:26]
Casey Newton
I mean, one example was the election. So as you guys know, we rolled out Presidential Election market, and that was an incredibly successful product. And I think you can juxtapose the experience of looking at a prediction market for the election versus the actual news on election night. So on. On election night, you know, prediction markets were at 95.5Trump. And the news was giving you all of these details, like, oh, you know, we got this result from this county, we found 2,000 votes. But you kind of just wanted to know who's going to win the thing. And I think if you want the news as fast as possible, you have to turn to the prediction markets, not the news.
- [36:05]
Kevin Roose
Right. I would just say, like, prediction markets are not always right. I remember when the room temperature superconductor debate was going on and lots of people got very excited. We had just discovered this LK99 thing that was going to revolutionize the world. And prediction markets went nuts. And for a time it was seen as very high probability. But the news, the media that you're talking about actually went out and checked it and said, does this thing work? And scientists tried to replicate it and found that it actually wasn't a room temperature superconductor. So in that case, the prediction markets were not a reliable indicator of what was true.
- [36:38]
Casey Newton
I mean, I'm not saying that prediction markets are always right. Like, nobody's going to bat a thousand on anything. But what I'll tell you is they're the most effective mechanism that I've seen for synthesizing all the publicly available information.
- [36:52]
Kevin Roose
Right. I want to ask you about this, this narrative that we've talked about on the show that I'm sure you've heard before, which was that tools like Robinhood, which make it very, very simple and sort of gamified to invest in crypto assets and meme coins and other things, that they are essentially turning investing into a form of gambling and popularizing that, especially among young people. I'll put some car the table. I do think that we are becoming a nation of gamblers, and I don't know that that's a net positive for society. And I wonder how you feel when you hear that.
- [37:25]
Casey Newton
Yeah, I mean, a lot of people believe that markets are gambling, which, which I disagree with. And obviously, like, markets are in the name of our company. Like, we believe in financial markets. We believe that any product that is available to institutions, by and large, I mean, there, there's some exceptions. There should be available to retail as well, because on a macro level, access to markets has been one of the greatest sources of wealth creation for countries. Countries with more open markets have tended to outperform countries with closed markets. And so we believe in bringing that to retail because even if there's like, individual cases that are negative and negative externalities, by and large, the markets and opening up access have been one of the largest sources of wealth creation for countries and individual individuals.
- [38:18]
Kevin Roose
What about things like Pump Fun, which is this new crypto platform that people, especially young people, are having a good time on? Some of them. This basically makes it very, very easy to launch a new meme coin to sell it. There have been lots of documented instances of people, you know, making tons of money on Pump Fund, but also losing tons of money and getting scammed and rug pulled. Do you see that as a good way for sort of democratizing access to financial instruments?
- [38:47]
Casey Newton
So here's my take on that. I think it goes to my original point of the power of the technology. So the idea that someone can create a coin in five minutes and it's traded globally, it's available across a whole bunch of exchanges and dexes and wallets. That idea is an extremely powerful idea, and it's a powerful technology. And you juxtapose that with the IPO process. Process, which is cumbersome, incredibly expensive. I mean, not a lot of companies want to go through with it anymore because it's so like you have to deal with all these counterparties and banks and a roadshow. And I think that's a big problem because now you have companies like SpaceX and OpenAI that are worth hundreds of Billions and are still private. So the upside from investing in these high growth technology companies, companies accrues only to the insiders that are able to get into the private company deals. Like for example, I mean you have Nvidia and that's been getting a ton of the retail interest and institutional as well. But OpenAI, anthropic companies like Perplexity, you know, all private. And so that's why I think marrying the technology that allows you to create a coin in five minutes or less with real productive assets like private companies is so powerful. And I think we can solve the problems that you're indicating. I think there should be self certification. Companies and projects should be able to provide disclosure. So for example, if you are a late stage private company and you have audited financials that are public, like you should get into a higher tier of sort of disclosure. And you know, if, if you're a project that was created on one of these, these, you know, meme factories, maybe you get like a big red skull and crossbones telling people like, be careful. You know, this is not vetted, not verified. But I think people are smart and can make their own decisions and I think there are ways that they can actually provide the disclosure needed to, to keep customers safe.
- [40:57]
Vlad Tenev
Right, because this is the big difference between the public and the private markets is like ultimately we haven't seen audited financials for an OpenAI for anthropic. From the exterior, it seems like they're doing well, they're raising billions of dollars. But if you're like retail investor and you're just sort of like reading the news coverage, you are just kind of like throwing a wish in a fountain. So you're saying if we go through with this, then companies like OpenAI should have to offer some sort of public disclosure before, you know, people are allowed to start buying open air coin or.
- [41:24]
Casey Newton
They can opt into it, you know, you know, you don't want to have to force the companies to provide disclosure, but opting into a disclosure I think will get get you access to like higher tiers of placement.
- [41:35]
Kevin Roose
I want to return to this idea of the nation of gamblers, of the ways that we are in some sense betting on more things more regularly as a country than we have at any point in our recent past.
- [41:50]
Vlad Tenev
And I actually bet Vlad $10 you were gonna bring this up again, by the way. Go on.
- [41:56]
Kevin Roose
I mean, part of what I'm struggling with here is that I hear you talking about democratizing access to markets. And I think on some level that's A compelling argument. But then I look at what companies like Robinhood are actually doing and the kinds of investments that they are sort of making it very easy for people to make, and it does not seem like wise investment. So I got a few weeks ago an alert from Robinhood on my phone telling me that I could now buy the Trump crypto meme coin on Robinhood. I got another alert from you around New Year's saying that you were giving away dogecoin to people who signed up for accounts. To me, that does not feel like responsible stewardship of a platform where people are. Are investing their money. It seems like you are. You are actively pushing people, your users, to. To invest in very speculative assets that are high risk and that they might not be prepared for.
- [42:57]
Casey Newton
Yeah, I mean, I think that my. My view is people should know what's available. I think that a lot of people wanted to buy that asset for a variety of reasons. Right. I would dispute the fact that we have the ability to coerce someone into buying something that they don't want to buy. The people that buy these assets do it because they have a fundamental belief in, in what it represents. And, you know, I, I don't necessarily.
- [43:27]
Kevin Roose
Or they love to gamble.
- [43:29]
Casey Newton
I mean, I. I think markets have a wide variety of participants. Some people, particularly with these media memes, are buying it because they think it'll go up in the future, as with anything. But there are a lot of people that buy it because they want to support the movement that it represents. I would say that in terms of what we allow and what we list on our platform, I mean, we don't have hundreds of coins like some of the other crypto platforms. We're like, on the extreme, sort of.
- [44:00]
Kevin Roose
Like only the blue chip meme coins. Vlad, I do want to ask you one more question about the sort of effects of services like Robin Hood and the sort of larger generational cohort that tends to do a lot more speculative investing. There's been some studies recently about the increasing prevalence of gambling addiction, especially among young men. There's a new study that just came out earlier this week in JAMA that shows that Internet searches related to gambling addiction have increased significantly over the last few years. Anecdotally, I'm hearing from friends who are therapists who work with young men who say that the number of boys and young men who are coming in with gambling addictions has risen precipitously. And I wonder if you have any reservations about the way that Robinhood and other sort of financial platforms may be contributing to A growing public health crisis, especially among younger, young men.
- [45:00]
Casey Newton
Yeah, I mean, since we're not in the gambling space, I'm, I'm less familiar about sort of like the ins and outs of gambling addiction. I mean obviously there needs to be appropriate controls and services and we have to make sure that customers don't get in over their skis. I do think like, if you look at financial markets, financial markets have had pretty robust controls around things like customer onboarding, suitability, geolocation. So you make sure that, you know, customers in one state can't have access to things that are not allowed in, in that state. So, so there is benefit to actually bringing it into a more regulated realm where a lot of these controls from financial services can be broadly applied.
- [45:48]
Kevin Roose
Okay, so you're not opposed to like regulating people from, you know, preventing them from making investments that might be against their own self interest or that they might not be equipped to assess the risk of. Is that fair?
- [45:59]
Casey Newton
I think that I'm certainly in favor of suitability controls and, and sort of like various things and those exist in, in the financial services world. I think that where it's tricky is when you start saying, you know, preventing people from making investment investments that are bad for them. Because then you get into the situation of like Massachusetts in the 80s, banning its citizens from participating in the Apple IPO. Right. And maybe objectively at the time people said, well you know, that's, that's IPOs are risky. This is an unproven technology company who uses computers. But then, you know, 30 years from now when you know your state has, has basically like, like been harmed in retrospect by that decision, it doesn't look so smart anymore.
- [46:49]
Kevin Roose
So are there any financial assets you think are too risky for retail investors to be allowed to buy and sell? Like, is there anything that you would say that's a little too crazy?
- [46:59]
Casey Newton
I, I think there's probably financial assets that we don't see a clear need for retail investors or are maybe a little bit, bit complex to understand. You know, for, for example, like you've got like different mortgage backed securities and credit default swaps. But I'd say by and large my thought is if an institution has access to it, retail should have access as well.
- [47:28]
Vlad Tenev
I've been thinking about buying up a massive amount of mortgage backed securities and credit default swaps and just seeing what happens. So I'll keep you guys posted. I think we should end on a couple of questions. Yes. So my first one is just, you know, Vlad, you, you're in the tech Elite, you're talking to all the cool AI CEOs. Based on what you think is coming, does it still make sense for the average person to save for retirement?
- [47:50]
Casey Newton
I'm very, very confident that despite the advances in AI, we'll still have a need for money and currency. People will still create companies. Maybe the AIs will create companies too. I think like regardless of what happens to the labor landscape, the job landscape, if there's disruption option, I think that bodes well for the importance of, of investing and stashing away your money. I think retirement becomes even more important.
- [48:16]
Kevin Roose
Lad, last question. You've got a new AI venture, Harmonic, which I was doing some reading on. It looks like an AI for math. Why did you start up this side quest and how does this fit into your vision for the future?
- [48:31]
Casey Newton
Yeah, I think the big problem with AI models, models is that the current generation models will give you an answer in nearly all cases. But the problem is in how you can trust the output. How do you know that the output is correct? Are there subtle errors? And actually math as a domain is a very interesting domain because unless every step in the reasoning is correct, the answer is very, very likely to be wrong. And the original goal was to build super intelligent AI that has verifiably correct outputs at every step in its thinking process.
- [49:08]
Vlad Tenev
So no hallucinating.
- [49:10]
Casey Newton
No hallucinating, yeah.
- [49:11]
Vlad Tenev
And is that possible?
- [49:13]
Casey Newton
It's possible for sure. I mean, if you think about it, a calculator, right? Your calculator doesn't hallucinate. If you type in some math formulas, you're pretty confident that your answer is going to be correct and it's not going to hallucinate. So can you scale that idea to more and more problems? Obviously it's easy when you're adding big numbers, but can you do a word problem? There are people who, Kevin, are on a boat and they're going down a river. The river is going at 5 knots. There's a wind. When are they going to get to the destination? Can you make a super calculator that gives you the no hallucinations property of a basic calculator, but the flexibility of an LLM? I think that's.
- [49:58]
Kevin Roose
Yeah, well, I'm just saying I'm not getting onto a boat with you anytime soon.
- [50:03]
Vlad Tenev
Vlad is actively fantasizing about throwing us in the river at this point.
- [50:07]
Kevin Roose
Well, I think that's as good a place as any to end. Vlad, thanks for coming.
- [50:12]
Vlad Tenev
Thank you, Vlad.
- [50:13]
Casey Newton
Thanks for having me.
- [50:16]
Kevin Roose
When we come back, my experiments with AI vibe coding. And I'VE got a hot app to give to Casey. That's a hint. Casey, it's time to talk about vibe coding.
- [50:36]
Vlad Tenev
Yes, Kevin, this is your, I would say, your latest obsession, and I'm very eager to hear what exactly you've been doing and making. But before we get into all of that, what is vibe coding?
- [50:46]
Kevin Roose
So vibe coding is a term that is very new. It was popularized on social media, like in the last week or two, and it was coined by Andrej Karpathy, the engineer, sort of formerly of OpenAI and Tesla.
- [51:01]
Vlad Tenev
I would say a leading AI researcher and educator.
- [51:04]
Kevin Roose
Yes. So he talked at the beginning of February on X about how he had been doing these kind of like small hobbyist programming projects where basically instead of writing the code himself, he was just kind of like using these AI tools to do what he called vibe coding, where he's essentially like telling it like, I want this app to do this thing and it's going off and doing it. And maybe he steps in to debug something if it stops working. But he wrote, quote, I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy, paste stuff. And it mostly works.
- [51:37]
Vlad Tenev
So this is really like you're just kind of overseeing the A.I. write the code. Andre, it sounds like, is doing very little of the writing. He's basically doing what I heard some people predict that we would arrive at this point, which is like English is the new programing language. You just sort of say in English what you want the code to do and then it does it.
- [51:56]
Kevin Roose
Yeah. And this is different from the AI code tools that existed even a couple of years ago. Like GitHub. Copilot was one of the early AI coding assistants where basically it would just auto complete your code. Right. You could be writing a line of Python or JavaScript and it would sort of see what you were up to and it would complete it for you and you would just press tab and it would, you know, go on to your next thing. But you still had to know how to program to use those tools effectively. But what's been happening in the last couple of years and really over the last six months has gotten quite good, are these tools that essentially remove the need to program at all. So now there are lots of tools out there. There's a tool called Cursor, there's a tool called replit, there's Bolt, there's Lovable, there's a bunch of these tools where basically you just go in and you get a text box and it says, what do you want to build? And you say, I want an app that does this, this, and this, and it goes out and builds it for. For you pretty much instantaneously.
- [52:54]
Vlad Tenev
Now, I have a friend who runs a tech company, and he once made fun of this whole idea to me by saying, hey, you want to talk about programming in the English language? That's what I do all day long. As a CEO, I'm constantly telling my engineers in English what to do. And it works, you know, maybe a little over half the time, but maybe not much more than that. So what has been your early experience of Vibe coding? What have you been trying to build and how has it been going?
- [53:20]
Kevin Roose
I want to talk about my projects, but first I want to talk about like, like, my history with this stuff because I am a former programmer. When I was a teenager, I was into coding. I would build websites, I would build little, like, JavaScript projects. I spent a very excruciating summer trying to teach myself Flash so that I could make animated cartoons like Homestar Runner. And then I dropped it. I went to college, I learned about journalism. I thought, well, this is the path I want. I became a word sell. And then I stopped coding altogether. And so when I started hearing about these tools that would let you just, like, code without knowing how to code, I was very interested and I started, you know, experimenting. One of the first things I built was this podcast summarizer where you can take a podcast that's very long and just use, like, AI to transcribe it and then use a different AI to summarize the transcripts and put it all into, like a searchable database so that I could say, okay, I don't feel like listening to this five hour podcast about AI, but I can basically get the executive summary using AI.
- [54:28]
Vlad Tenev
So tell us a little bit about your setup. Like, what, what software are you using to do this?
- [54:34]
Kevin Roose
So I've been trying a couple different tools. Sometimes I just use The RAW, like, AI models themselves, like the Claude, the ChatGPT. Those tools are quite good at some projects, but they can't actually, for the most part, run the software to sort of test it inside the window. So it does require some copying and pasting there. This new kind of app that I've been using is a more integrated development environment, an ide. An ide. So Cursor is the one that's really popular right now. If you've never used an IDE before, you might find it a little puzzling. I certainly did. But it basically lets you prompt the AI to write the code for you, automatically debug it, sort of deploy it within a little test window and then push it out onto the web where people can actually use it.
- [55:24]
Vlad Tenev
So tell us about some of the other projects you've been building.
- [55:27]
Kevin Roose
So in addition to my podcast, Summarizer, I also had AI help me redesign my website to look more cyberpunk. That was the aesthetic I was going for.
- [55:36]
Vlad Tenev
Wait, is this live? Can I view it?
- [55:38]
Kevin Roose
No, it hasn't deployed yet, but it's going to be there soon. I had it.
- [55:42]
Vlad Tenev
Wait, what? How did it make it look more cyberpunk?
- [55:45]
Kevin Roose
It just redesigned the whole thing.
- [55:46]
Vlad Tenev
Oh, okay.
- [55:47]
Kevin Roose
Like bright neons, like sharp edges, cool scrolling sort of paradise parallax style animations.
- [55:54]
Vlad Tenev
Do you have like a bionic arm in your author photo now?
- [55:56]
Kevin Roose
Yes. I built a tool to pull all of my bookmarks from X into a spreadsheet. I use X a lot to, you know, I'll bookmark things that I find interesting or want to return to later. So.
- [56:10]
Vlad Tenev
Wow, that's the most racist thing I've ever heard.
- [56:13]
Kevin Roose
Yes. So now I have a tool that will go through all of my bookmarks and, you know, pull those into a spreadsheet that I can search later. That one was very interesting because it basically presented me with a couple options. After I asked, I think it was Claude to build this tool for me, it said, well, we could go use the Twitter API, but that costs money and if you don't want to pay that, well, we have this other way that we can do it that involves like using a browser to sort of like scrape the bookmarks from Twitter. And so I went with that version.
- [56:44]
Vlad Tenev
Wow. You realize that by doing this, you are now like essentially an armed combatant in Elon Musk's war on box. Like you are the bot that Elon Musk is trying to destroy.
- [56:53]
Kevin Roose
Come at me, bro.
- [56:54]
Vlad Tenev
Good luck. Good luck, buddy.
- [56:55]
Kevin Roose
I've got my bookmarks now. I don't need it anymore.
- [56:58]
Vlad Tenev
All right, what else?
- [56:59]
Kevin Roose
So the thing that I built most recently was yesterday when I was trying to determine if various objects that I'm moving to my new house would fit in the trunk of my car. And so I built an app called Will it fit in my trunk?
- [57:12]
Vlad Tenev
Now this feels like a classic math based problem that maybe Vladstick could help you with, but you used something else. How did it go?
- [57:19]
Kevin Roose
You know, so far so good. It hasn't steered me me wrong yet, but this is the sort of the speaks to. What I think is so fun and interesting about this genre of coding project is you can really just build what I call Software, for one. Like, a software company would never build a tool for wide release that let you figure out whether various objects would fit in your trunk. That is not a big total addressable market.
- [57:44]
Vlad Tenev
Sounds like you never saw Trunky in the App Store. I'm just kidding. That's not a real app. But, yes, you're right.
- [57:50]
Kevin Roose
So this. This style of coding really makes it possible to build things that you and only you need or will it ever use.
- [57:56]
Vlad Tenev
And. And there's something fun about it because I think, you know, particularly for, like, you and I who actually enjoy technology and, like, using it, like, trying new things, like, coding can feel like actual magic.
- [58:07]
Casey Newton
Right.
- [58:07]
Vlad Tenev
It can feel like wizardry. And if you are the one who is all of a sudden wielding the wand and making things happen, then, you know you're feeling great.
- [58:15]
Kevin Roose
Yeah. It is the most fun that I've had with these AI tools in a while. I think it is the most fun thing you can do with AI in today's world. And it has really sort of connected me back to my teenage coder self and reminded me what I loved about it back then.
- [58:30]
Vlad Tenev
I spent a lot of time in college and afterwards writing HTML. I had a program called Dreamweaver. Love Dreamweaver, and got pretty handy with it. But if I had been able to chat with an AI assistant about why I was having trouble with my Movable type install installation in 2004, like, my website would have been sick as hell.
- [58:50]
Kevin Roose
Yeah.
- [58:50]
Vlad Tenev
Yeah.
- [58:51]
Kevin Roose
So, Kasey, I'm sure you have some niche software needs in your life.
- [58:55]
Vlad Tenev
Absolutely.
- [58:55]
Kevin Roose
And I asked you the other day what I could build for you using my Vibe coding tools. And what did you say?
- [59:02]
Vlad Tenev
What I said was, I need help with my hot tub.
- [59:06]
Kevin Roose
Go on.
- [59:07]
Vlad Tenev
Well, listen, here's what they don't tell you about buying a hot tub. When it comes to your house and you decide, I want to use the hot tub that I have just purchased, you have to become a chemical engineer. Here's what I mean by that. You open up the manual, all of a sudden, you learn you are going to need to monitor the PH balance of your water. You're going to need to monitor the alkalinity of the water. You're going to need to monitor the calcium level of the water, because if there is not enough calcium, it can somehow corrupt the jets in your hot tub. And needless to say, Kevin, I don't have a lot of experience. Experience mixing chemicals to adjust alkalinity and PH levels in bodies of water. And I thought, well, how am I going to do this. And so then I actually do start using the chatbots, not to write me software, but essentially just to say, please, God, help me, what do I do? And there are so many things to keep track of. You have to, like, put various chemicals into the hot tub at different intervals. So you replace this once a month. You replace this once a quarter. You know, twice a year. You have to drain the entire tub once a month. You have to shock the hot tub. Don't ask me what that means. I just read that today. It's giving me a nervous break.
- [60:21]
Kevin Roose
Just show it some spicy tweets.
- [60:23]
Vlad Tenev
Yes, exactly. So there's so much to keep track of. And I thought, well, if I were going to build software just for me, it would be something that just checked in with me to prevent my hot tub from turning into a bacterial soup.
- [60:38]
Kevin Roose
Well, Kasey, I have great news for you.
- [60:40]
Vlad Tenev
What's that?
- [60:40]
Kevin Roose
I built you a hot tub.
- [60:41]
Vlad Tenev
Oh, my goodness.
- [60:42]
Kevin Roose
Goodness.
- [60:43]
Vlad Tenev
You vibe coded on my behalf.
- [60:45]
Kevin Roose
I vibe coded on your behalf. So after you told me about the issues you were having with your hot tub, which are very relatable, by the way, listeners are all going, me, too. I have an issue with my hot tub.
- [60:54]
Vlad Tenev
We. We have a very wealthy audience that is constantly buying huge upgrades for their homes. And every once in a while, Kevin, we have to do something for the C suite. Listeners.
- [61:03]
Kevin Roose
Exactly. So I took this as a brief, and I went into a tool called Replit, and I said to them, the tool make me an app that will tell me the things that I need to do to keep this specific kind of hot tub working properly and put it in a tool that my friend can use. And I said, because this is a tool that tells you the time they use as a machine to tell you the time to service your hot tub. I was going to call it Hot Tub Time Machine.
- [61:37]
Vlad Tenev
That's very good. I like that. Yeah.
- [61:39]
Kevin Roose
So I built you a website called Hot Tub Time Machine.
- [61:42]
Vlad Tenev
Oh, my gosh. This is wonderful.
- [61:44]
Kevin Roose
So let me show it to you.
- [61:45]
Vlad Tenev
Okay.
- [61:46]
Kevin Roose
Now, I just want to tell you and caveat this by saying that I did not choose the design or the color scheme here. That was all the AI.
- [61:54]
Vlad Tenev
Okay, great.
- [61:55]
Kevin Roose
So open up the link I just sent you.
- [61:56]
Vlad Tenev
All right, I'm opening up the link. Okay, so it is quite pink. It's pink on pink, which is a color scheme that you don't see a lot outside of the Barbie franchise. But no, there is. There is some black tech. It looks beautiful, and it says Hot Tub Time Machine, your retro, futuristic maintenance companion. And it Even created a little logo, which I'm going to assume is a drop of water.
- [62:23]
Kevin Roose
Sure.
- [62:24]
Vlad Tenev
Okay.
- [62:24]
Kevin Roose
With that.
- [62:25]
Vlad Tenev
And there are two sort of modules. There's a Manage tasks module and if you. Schedule module.
- [62:32]
Kevin Roose
Yeah. So this tool is very simple. This is a prototype. We can flesh it out if you want to.
- [62:37]
Vlad Tenev
But basically, is this in alpha or is this in beta?
- [62:39]
Kevin Roose
This is an alpha.
- [62:40]
Vlad Tenev
This is an alpha.
- [62:41]
Kevin Roose
You're the. You're the single user of this app. And basically I've set it up so that it will email you weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annually with a list of everything you need to do to keep your hot tub in working order. And as a special bonus, every email will come with a poem about hot tubs.
- [63:02]
Vlad Tenev
Fantastic. Well, can I start clicking around?
- [63:05]
Kevin Roose
Yeah, click around.
- [63:05]
Vlad Tenev
All right, so I'm going to click on View Tasks and. All right. And this brings up there's a sort of module where I can add a new task, but there are also some existing tasks. And it includes weekly, quarterly, monthly, and annual maintenance. And it is frankly an overwhelming number of things to do.
- [63:28]
Casey Newton
Yeah.
- [63:28]
Vlad Tenev
You.
- [63:29]
Kevin Roose
You bought yourself some chores when you bought that hot tub.
- [63:32]
Vlad Tenev
It really is just a wall of text of things that to do. Like every week I'm apparently supposed to spray off the filter with a garden hose.
- [63:41]
Kevin Roose
Yeah.
- [63:43]
Vlad Tenev
And add a 1 cup of non chlorine shock. Especially after parties. Or have you. So. Yes, lots in here. Okay. And. And also looks like I can add, you know, another task if, you know.
- [63:54]
Kevin Roose
I'm going to click the little test button here to send you one of these and you'll see if it shows up in box.
- [64:00]
Vlad Tenev
Let's see. Yes. Yes. Oh, time to maintain my hot tub. And there are some step by step instructions that I can follow. And below that, the hot tub poetry corner. And should I read this poem?
- [64:15]
Kevin Roose
Yes, please.
- [64:17]
Vlad Tenev
All right, here's the poem. Bubbles rise in swirling steam. Time machine of warmth and dream. Nordic waters pure delight, maintaining bliss both day and night. That is okay. I guess I would say that is okay. Okay. Nordic, of course, a reference to the fact that I have a Nordic Jubilee series hot tub.
- [64:36]
Kevin Roose
Yes. So I built this all in about half an hour without writing a single line of code.
- [64:42]
Vlad Tenev
Okay.
- [64:43]
Kevin Roose
And I want to share that with you because not only will it help you with your hot tub issues, but I hope it will also show you the promise of vibe coding.
- [64:53]
Vlad Tenev
Yeah. Well, I feel like you have shown me the promise of vibe coding. Now, was there anything about this that was particularly tricky or did you get stuck on anything? Yeah.
- [65:01]
Kevin Roose
So there are some Things that it can't do, right? Like if it needs to authenticate you into some service or set up a database, like you have to kind of manually step in and do that. There are some things that it just, it just can't do because no human programmer could do it either. If there's no API for something, for example, it won't sort of magically invent one. So there are some boundaries and limitations. And I would say it still does benefit you when using this stuff to have at least a little bit of programming experience, because there are just certain decisions that it will prompt you to make where you're like, I don't actually know what these terms mean or what the right decision is here. And you can ask the AI to just like make the decision for you, but you might not be totally happy with the result.
- [65:46]
Vlad Tenev
Now, during this process, I'm curious if you felt like you were learning something about the coding process. Like if you spent the next year making these little one off apps, do you feel like you would maybe be a decent junior software engineer? Or is the idea actually not to get into the details, to just sort of let it build things and if you don't know what it's doing, that's none of your business?
- [66:10]
Kevin Roose
Yeah, I think I'm more in the latter camp. I mean, this was the part that I found fascinating about what Andrej Karpathy said about vibe coding. Like, he's an extremely good programmer, but he says that he, you know, now can enter this mode where he basically just says like, okay, okay, okay, accept, accept, accept. And the computer will go off and, and do its, its thing. I don't know enough about programming to dive into the weeds of what the AI is doing and the decisions it's making. I just have to look at the end result. And there's something exciting about that where I feel like things are just happening magically on my behalf. But that's also, you know, maybe it's inserting malicious code. Maybe it's doing something that I don't want it to be doing. I have no way as a non programmer to know whether that's happening or not.
- [66:54]
Vlad Tenev
Have you checked your computer to see if it installed a bitcoin miner while you weren't looking?
- [66:57]
Kevin Roose
I have not, but that would be pretty tricky.
- [66:59]
Vlad Tenev
Well, Kevin, this experiment has me thinking about a blog post I read this week by a guy named Namine Goel. And his blog post was titled New Junior Developers can't actually Code. This post got a million views. According to the post that I'M looking at and he is saying that when he talks to junior developers, they are having an experience very similar to you, which is that as they are building these systems, they are essentially just supervising an AI. They aren't actually getting their hands dirty and understanding like which mechanisms are leading to which results. So while this is great for you, I do think it raises the question what happens when most of our software engineers are building systems that in some fundamental way they don't understand?
- [67:49]
Kevin Roose
Yeah, I think this is a very real thing. I mean, the flip side of me, a non coder being able to build stuff, is that if real coders are using these tools, there's like no incentive for them to learn the basic skills of programming and learn the syntax of the different languages. And yeah, I don't know what to do about that. It sort of seems like a version of what happened when we all got like Google Maps on our phones is that like people started losing their sense of direction. There's this kind of skill atrophy issue that people worry about. But I think that the returns to knowing how to use these things effectively are, are still great enough and still require enough sort of knowledge of how the various pieces of code fit together that it still does make sense for people to learn to code. I'm not one of these people who thinks like, learn to code is totally over. I think for some people it's still a very useful skill to have. But I think that in the future the sort of role of the software engineer will become more like a product manager, where you are essentially supervising the product, laying out the vision, overseeing the design, like stepping in to fix things when they break. But you are not actually sort of in the trenches of the code, you know, writing lines of code by hand.
- [69:01]
Vlad Tenev
All right, what do you think? What I think is that as AI systems get more and more powerful, we need people who do understand them on a very detailed, technical, complex, down to the metal kind of way. And that if we don't do that, our only alternative will just to be to trust the AI when we ask it, hey, how do you work? And there are a lot of reasons why I don't want to end up in that world. So I'm comfortable having fewer people in this world who know the code at that level of detail. And it's fine to me if most software engineers don't, but I want a solid core of people who do.
- [69:40]
Kevin Roose
Yeah. And I would like to continue with my vibe coding experiments, trying to build increasingly more useful tools for myself and.
- [69:48]
Vlad Tenev
My friends and I am thinking about starting because if you can do it, surely I can.
- [69:54]
Kevin Roose
Yes, anyone can. That is sort of the point. And I also would love to hear from our listeners what they are vibe coding? What tools and apps are you building using AI that are solving your own personal specific problems?
- [70:08]
Vlad Tenev
Did you invent a novel bioweapon using ChatGPT? We'd love to hear from you.
- [70:12]
Kevin Roose
Yeah, please email that one to tipsbi.gov.
- [70:16]
Vlad Tenev
But the others hard fork nytimes.com.
- [70:40]
Kevin Roose
Hard fork is produced by Whitney Jones and Rachel Rachel Cohn were edited by Rachel Dry. We're fact checked by Caitlin Love. Today's show was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Original music by Alicia but itup, Marion Lozano, Diane Wong, Rowan Niemisto and Dan Powell. Our audience editor is Nell Gloagli. Video production by Chris Schott, Sawyer Roquet and Pat Guenther. You can watch this full episode on YouTube@YouTube.com hardfork our executive our executive producer is Jen Poyant. Special thanks to Paula Schumann, Kwi Wing Tam, Dahlia Haddad and Jeffrey Miranda. As always, you can email us@hardforkytimes.com and you can email Casey's hot tub@hottubnewtonmail.com and.
- [71:26]
Vlad Tenev
It will be reading every email.