If you just look at the rate of change and the rate of new models coming out at new techniques, it doesn't seem like we've hit the scaling wall.
And again, if you believe that, which I happen to believe, and you just project forwards, this stuff is going to get better and better.
Hello, this is Dalton plus Michael and today we're going to talk about AI.
It's officially blowing our minds.
If you are watching this video, you probably also agree that AI is working.
But are you leveraging this knowledge?
Like, if you are living in the future yourself, what should you be doing differently knowing what's coming?
How can you prepare for the future?
What's interesting is that we've seen stuff like this happen before.
You know, we live through the first static web pages.
We live through the dynamic web apps.
We live through smartphones happening.
We live through Bitcoin happening.
Knowing that this is not a fad but a trend early is maybe one of the most strategic things you can know.
So like if you're watching this video, you
have a goldmine, literal goldmine of insight on how the world's going to change.
And if you sit on the information, you're not going to be able to take advantage of it.
If you change something right now, or more than one thing right now, you might look back 10 years from now and say, oh, wow.
That was really, really great.
So let's go through some of the things you should do.
Just to kind of give you some mental context, we can look back in time a little bit and we could say, imagine that you were using the first web browsers and you were using the first websites and you're like, oh, this is a thing.
Yeah, most people didn't have the web, but there were some folks that were very early on that stuff.
A lot of leverage, right?
Imagine you were one of the first users of Gmail and you were like, oh my god, like a really responsive dynamic web app that's just like instantly like, oh crap.
Imagine you were the first users of iPhone.
Imagine you were one of the people who saw Bitcoin come out its first year.
like these are the kinds of like, there were ways at the time with the benefit of hindsight to leverage that information.
To profoundly improve your lives or impact your lives, right?
And you were like, oh, this seems like a good thing.
And you and you acted on it.
It can completely change your life.
Let's talk about what you should do, right?
So first, if you were ever interested in starting a company, I can't really imagine a better time.
I would argue that like most of the best companies were created after this kind of tech sea change, seeing the sea change and then dreaming what we could do with it.
So like, if you were ever inclined to start a company and people are saying to you, oh, this like AI thing is overhyped or like, oh, there's too many.
Again, you can look to history.
You needed there to be enough users and the tech to get.
good enough for internet startups to really take off.
If you started an internet startup in 94, 95, that would have been too early, I think.
But it's much better doing it later.
Same with all these other platform shifts, is there's now enough of an install base, there's now the models are actually good enough, the tools are good enough, the info is good enough.
It still is like a good time.
Yeah, you can build applications that were unimaginable.
And like, you know, we won't go into any details, but like, we literally have seen YC companies be transformed in the last six months.
Like businesses that weren't working, like started working, started working.
And margins that were underwater are now suddenly positive.
Customers that were loop warm are now like,
you're selling me magic, I would like to buy more of that.
So don't let the haters like... Imagine the haters that were like, don't buy Bitcoin, it's a fad.
It's like, it's gonna go to zero.
That was expensive advice to follow.
I remember having a friend being like, Blackberry will never lose to iPhones.
Like, oh, don't listen to those people.
And of course, we should throw in a plug, right?
YC applications are open.
There are four batches a year.
So we can certainly help if you're interested.
Let's say you don't want to start a company.
probably should be considering where you want to work knowing this knowledge.
I would think really hard about where you choose to work.
You want to work somewhere that is adopting these tools and is going to benefit from the adoption of the tools.
and where you could be surrounded by people that are very smart at adopting AI tools that you can learn from versus the folks that are just hoping this all goes away or that the AI, good luck with that.
There were a lot of people that hoped the internet would go away.
That was definitely a lot easier for business if you commerce didn't exist.
A lot of newspapers, that was the plan.
Anyway, you also want to work somewhere where you could be mentored by the folks that are really excellent.
If you're just imagining this is going to be very important skills in the future and for how we live our lives, working in a place where the tools are great and the people using the tools are also great and can teach you about them, that is really smart.
Again, imagine it's 2001 and you could work at a place like Google or another internet-native company that was on the cutting edge of building internet software versus
some insurance company or something.
Even if it's a programming job, there's very difference on how much you could learn and upskill yourself between those types of jobs.
I'd argue that startups are adopting these tools faster than big companies.
a really interesting question of like, are you going to get more experience being a first 10 or first 20 employee out of startup that's using AI versus working at that big company where using AI is a political decision and a PR decision and a bureaucratic nightmare.
Like be careful because like the learning that's happening in startups right now is far outstripping what's happening in most large companies.
Of course there are exceptions, but in most.
Let's talk about skills, right?
I remember there was always this funny joke within the first year of the App Store coming out where some big company was hiring iOS developers and they were like, oh, you need to have five years of experience building iOS apps.
And everyone was like, it came out a year ago.
But what's really cool at this moment is that if you start learning today, you're almost at ground zero.
And like, there's so much leverage, right?
High school, college, post-college, you know, you pointed this out when we were talking before, dropping everything to become an iOS developer in 2009, 2010 was a strong career.
Like, if you saw the iPhone come out, you're like, oh, this is cool.
I'm going to go to, like,
bootcamp and teach myself to code and become an iOS programmer, that was a really good career move for folks.
Or if you were a web developer inside of a company and they were spinning up a new iOS team, join it like being like, yeah, that was a very smart move.
Or just building an app on the side.
A lot of people built side projects, and that's how they learned to become iOS developers.
And they benefit in tremendous ways.
And I argue at any stage, like I said, pre-college, college, post-college,
You can upskill yourself.
I think another thing that's really cool is, again, this is Meta.
You're probably watching this on YouTube.
There are amazing YouTube videos of explaining how all this stuff worked.
And in prior major platform shifts, you had to read books or no people or go to the right school or something like that.
watch people building in public, building models explaining how transformers work, you name it.
There's a lot of stuff that's open source.
And so if you are technical or
or aspiring to be technical, which you should be, go watch the videos and learn how all of this stuff works from scratch.
It will profoundly help you for the rest of your life.
I can't think of a downside to knowing how all this stuff works.
And I think what's so funny is like all of the trends, tech trends that we mentioned or breakthroughs we mentioned before, all of them happen in public.
This isn't happening in some back room you don't have access to.
The issue is people being skeptical.
It's not that it's not available for you to learn.
So, no, I think that's incredibly prescient.
Yeah, there's no gatekeepers to learn this stuff.
That's what we're trying to say.
The only gatekeeper is ambivalence.
Or hearing, you know, negativity and buying into it.
And negative people don't tend to get lucky.
You know, they don't tend to have really great stuff happen to them on accident.
So, you know, maybe lead into positivity on this one.
Yes, we're giving you the hint.
I would say next, become a user, right?
Like many of these products are available.
And, you know, I remember previous waves of technology where people were like, oh, it's not ready yet.
Like, oh, I don't need to switch.
And I think this is different.
You should be actively looking for better products.
Like, I mean, we remember when Google came out and it was fundamentally a better web search product.
And like, there are a bunch of people like, oh, web search, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
It's like, no, people with access to Google got more done.
And so if you've been waiting
Sign up and it's worth the money.
That gets worth paying money.
I mean, I, when I was a founder working on consumer stuff, I would download every consumer app that came out.
And I would study every onboarding flow and I would study everything about the service.
I would study the viral loops and just constantly be trying to challenge myself to make sure I knew more than anyone else about what the new products were.
And so there's, again, I don't know why you wouldn't be looking at every AI coding tool that comes out or every workflow tool that comes out and signing up and trying to earnestly use them and try to use them to get your job done, not just to research them as startups.
You're going to learn, again, you will be living in the future.
And I would say this, like there is a bit of a learning curve.
Like I remember teaching my dad how to use Google and it was counterintuitive.
that every question he had for me on the phone, all I would do is type that question in Google and produce an answer.
Like that wasn't, you know, that wasn't intuitive to him.
There are some learning curves.
Like, you know, I was, I was having this like hilarious back and forth with an LM agent and I was realizing I am using this incredibly different than I use Google.
Like the things that I type, how I respond to answers, like all of it is different.
And I got to be comfortable just kind of
It's a small learning curve, but that's a learning curve.
And then maybe last but not least, don't do nothing.
I think that's maybe the meta point of this entire video, change something in response to this.
Yeah, you know something that other people don't know.
capitalize on that knowledge.
The knowledge isn't going to have any interest.
You got to do something with the knowledge.
And man, the earlier you do it, the more leverage you're going to have.
Now, a lot of people talk about the idea that maybe in this world, being technical, being a programmer isn't strategic.
What do you think about that?
I mean, this is an opinion.
But I think all of the tools getting better means that some aspects of being a programmer, like having all the APIs memorized, is maybe, OK, that part is less valuable.
I would argue knowing how all of this stuff works is going to be just more and more of a premium in modern society because someone has to fix this stuff when it breaks and someone has to understand what the heck the AI is doing.
All of your technical knowledge atrophies and you have no idea how many this stuff works.
It's just like a magic box No, that is not a great place to be and so in my opinion Really understanding how this stuff works at a low level will Increase the value of you being a technical person.
Because no one else will know how to debug it when things go wrong.
And just because you start using cursor to program does not mean that people that have never programmed before are going to be programming just as well as you.
And so again, I know there's different opinions.
Maybe some people, I've heard people predicting the death of programming as a career for many, many, many years.
Again, maybe, again, maybe I'm wrong.
I just, I wouldn't make that bet.
I would bet on being extremely technical, just having a premium that will increase over time with the proliferation of these tools.
And that has been, again, backwards looking, that has always been the case.
And if you're not technical, I can't imagine... I mean, it's always been strategic to work with someone who is a programmer.
It's still incredibly strategic.
Never has it been more important to have a technical co-founder if you're not technical.
We are seeing YC companies doing amazing things with the current models.
We're kind of giving you a straightforward observation, not a prediction.
But there is this question, is there another step change improvement coming?
And you know, let's push the issue of AGI aside.
I think there's a big gap between step change improvement and AGI, but like, what is your prediction?
How likely do you think it is that we have another step change that'll be here in the next year or two years?
like we are not near the wall.
And if you just look at the rate of change and the rate of new models coming out and new techniques, it doesn't seem like we've hit the scaling wall.
And again, if you believe that, which I happen to believe and you just project forwards, this stuff is going to get better and better.
And it already is getting, it already works.
Yeah I think this is one of those moments we've seen it with internet adoption or smartphone adoption where it's like when the products get good they go through this s-curve where they start getting good and I think that smart founders would assume that these products or the tools they have access to will get better over time.
And I hate describing where that limit is.
I think it's irrelevant, really, where that limit is.
But it's just your argument for why it's even more strategic to get involved today.
Because you're riding on a wave, and almost everyone we know those who's successful found the right wave and wrote it.