YouSaid · the spoken record

Nat Friedman

lines on the record: 118
first: 2023-03-22
most recent: 2023-03-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“So, Vesuvius challenges that scrollprize.org S-C-R-O-L-P-R-I-Z-E.org. Yeah, check it out. And I think it's very likely that somebody listening to this could be the one who wins the grand prize and decodes the scrolls.”
2023-03-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was hooked up to HR systems, or if it could post jobs or something like that I don't know. I get on a gig worker site or something. I think it could have been scary.”
2023-03-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Plexes me is there's no open source technical alignment community. There's no one actually just implementing in open source the best alignment tools. There's a lot of philosophizing and talking and then there's a lot of behind closed doors interpretability and alignment work. And I think we're going to end up because the alignment people have this belief that they shouldn't release their work in a world where there's a lot of open source pure capabilities work and no open source alignment work for a little while and then hopefully that'll change. So yeah, I wanted to on the margin invest in people doing alignment. Seems like that's important. I thought Sydney was kind of an example of this. You had Microsoft essentially release an unaligned AI and I think the world sort of said, hmm, sort of threatening its users. That seems a little bit strange. If Microsoft can't put a leash on this thing, like, who can? And so I think there'll be more interest in it.”
2023-03-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. I'm not, you know, I guess we'll see. I'm not sure capabilities and alignment end up being these opposing forces. It may be that capabilities are very important for alignment. It may be that alignment is very important for capabilities. I mean, I think a lot of people believe, and I think I'm included in this, that AI can have tremendous benefits, but that there's like a small chance of really bad outcomes. Maybe some people think it's a large chance. And so I think the solutions, if they exist, are likely to be technical. There's probably some combination of like technical and prescriptive. So it's probably a piece of code and a readme file. It says, if you want to build aligned AIs, use this code and don't do this, you know, or something like that. And so, yeah, I think that's really important. And more people should try to actually build technical solutions. I think one of the big things that's missing is sort of”
2023-03-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Out to be incredibly nostalgic about the past. I don't keep like lots of trophies or anything like that. You go into some people's offices and there's like things in the wall and trophies of all the things they've accomplished. And that always seemed really icky to me. So I don't know. It just had a sort of revulsion to that.”
2023-03-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's very nice of Austin to say. I don't know. I mean, I think we talked a little bit about this before, but I think I just have a high willingness to try things. And get caught up in new projects, and then don't want to stop doing it. And so I think I just have a relatively low activation energy to try something. And I'm willing to sort of impulsively jump into stuff. And many of those things don't work, but enough of them do that. I've been able to accomplish a few things. The other thing I would say, to be honest with you, is that I do not consider myself accomplished or successful. My self-image is that I haven't really done anything of tremendous consequence. And I don't feel like I have this giant sort of bed of achievements that I can go to sleep on every night. I think, and I, you know, I think I've truly how I feel. I'm kind of an insecure overachiever. I don't really feel good about myself unless I'm doing good work. But I also have kind of cultivated, tried to cultivate a forward-looking view where I try.”
2023-03-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The second one is man, they are paying a ton of attention to AI. If you look at the prior platform revolutions like cloud, mobile, internet, web, PC, all the incumbents derided the new platform and said, you know, gosh, no one's going to use web apps. Everyone will use full desktop apps, rich applications. And so there was always this sort of laughing at the new thing. The iPhone was laughed at by incumbents. And that is not happening at all with AI. Now, we may be at peak hype cycle and we're going to enter the trough of despair. I kind of don't think so, though. I think people are taking it seriously and every live player CEO is adopting it aggressively in their company. So yeah, I think incumbents have gotten smarter.”
2023-03-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's been two really big shifts in the way incumbents behave in the last 20 years that I've seen. The first is that it used to be incumbents got disrupted by startups all the time. You had example after example of this in like the mini computer microcomputer era, et cetera, and then Claire Christensen wrote the innovator's dilemma. And I think what happened was that everyone read it and they said, oh, like disruption was this thing that occurs and we have this innovator's dilemma where we get disrupted because the new thing is cheaper and we can't let that happen. And they became determined not to let that happen and they mostly learned how to avoid it. They learned that you have to be willing to do some cannibalization and you have to be willing to set up separate sales channels for the new thing and so forth. And so we've had a lot of stability and incumbents for the last 15 years or so. And I think that's maybe why that's my theory. So that's the first major step change.”
2023-03-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“OpenAI were themselves surprised by how explosively ChatGPT has grown. I don't think they put ChatGPT out expecting that to be the big announcement. I think they thought GPT ChatGPT really surprised them, and I think that's, you know, it's hard to predict what people will do with it and what they'll find valuable and what works. And so you need Tinker. So it basically goes from hardware to researchers to tinkerrs to products. That's the pipe. That's the cascade.”
2023-03-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right now, back to the memetic point, they're all pretty similar, I would say. I mean, basically the same rough techniques. What's happened is an alien substance is sort of landed on Earth, and we are trying to figure out what we can build with it. And I think we're in this multiple overhangs here. We have sort of a compute overhang where there's much more compute in the world than is currently being used to train models, like much, much more. I think the biggest models are trained on maybe 10-ish thousand GPUs, but there's millions of GPUs. Okay, there's the compute overhang. Then we have, I think, a capability and technique overhang where there's lots of good ideas that are coming out and we haven't figured out how best to assemble them all together, but that's just a matter of time, kind of until people do that. And then those capabilities haven't reached because many of them are in the hands of the labs. They haven't reached the tinkerers of the world. And I think that is where the new, like what can this thing actually do? Until you get your hands on it, you don't really know.”
2023-03-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so there's just a lot of low hanging fruit on the technique side of things. And so we're seeing it happen. I mean, it's happening this week and it's happening this year is that we're getting a lot of proliferation. The only case against proliferation is that you'll get concentration because of training costs. And I don't know that that's true. I just like, I don't have confidence that the trillion dollar model will be much more valuable than the hundred billion dollar model and that even it will be necessary to spend a trillion dollars training it. Like maybe there will be so many techniques available for improving efficiency that like how much are you willing to spend on researchers to find techniques if you're willing to spend a trillion on training that's a lot of bounties for new techniques and like some smart people are going to take those bounties”
2023-03-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there will probably be wide scale proliferation. And he sort of asked me, what are the structural forces that are proliferation and the structural forces that are pro-concentration? So I think the proliferation case is a bit stronger. So the proliferation case is they're actually not that hard to train. You can kind of, the best practices will promulgate. You can kind of write them down on a couple sheets of paper. And to the extent that secrets are developed that improve training, those are relatively simple and they get copied around easily. Number one, number two, the data is mostly public. It's mostly kind of data from the internet. Number three, the hardware is mostly commodity and the hardware is improving quickly and getting much more efficient. And then I think there's a lot of techniques that kind of overcome. I think some of these labs potentially have 50, 100, 200% training efficiency improvement techniques.”
2023-03-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably over optimistic case. From both the people who are fearful of what will happen and from people who are expecting great economic benefits is that We're definitely in this realm of diminishing returns from scale. So, for example, I think GPT-4 is my guess, is two orders of magnitude more expensive to train the GPT-3, but clearly not two orders of magnitude more capable. Now, is it orders of magnitude more economically valuable? That would also surprise me. And so I think it's possible when you're in these sigmoids where you kind of are going up this exponential and then you start to asymptote, it can be difficult to tell if that's going to happen. So I think Yeah, the idea that we might not run into hard problems or that scaling will continue to like be worth it on a dollar's basis, I think are reasons to be a little bit more pessimistic than the people who have high certainty of, I don't know, GDP increasing by 50% per month or something like that, which I think some people are predicting. But on the whole, I'm very optimistic. So you're asking me to make the bear case for something I'm very bullish about.”
2023-03-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of usage. I've got early access to GPT 4 and I've gotten to use it a lot. And I honestly can't tell you the answer to that because it's so hard to discover what these things can do that the prior ones couldn't do. I just was talking to someone last night who told me, oh, GPD4 is actually really good at Korean and Japanese and like GB3 is much worse at those. And so it's actually a real step change for those languages. I think people didn't know how good GPT-3 was until it got instruction tuned for ChatGPT and was put out in that format. And so I think there's kind of, you can imagine the pre-trained models is kind of unrefined crude oil. And then once they've been kind of RLHF'd and trained and then put out into the world, people can find the value.”
2023-03-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Marketplace like Upwork, for example, like what fraction of Upwork jobs can GPT-4 do? I think is sort of an interesting question. My guess is extremely low right now autonomously. But over time it will grow. And then the question is, what does that do for upwork? I mean, it's, I don't know, it's probably a five guessing of a $5 billion GMV marketplace, something like that. Does it grow? Does it become $15 billion or $50 billion? Does it shrink because the cost of text to text tasks goes down? I don't know. My bet would be that we find more and more ways to use text to text to sort of advance progress. And so overall, there's a lot more demand for it. But yeah, I guess we'll see.”
2023-03-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, it's a good question. We've done the sort of Bureau of Labor Statistics analysis of this. And yeah, it's not the majority of the economy or anything like that. We're in the low double digit percentages. The thing that I think is hard to predict is what happens over time as the kind of cost of text to text goes down. And yeah, I don't know. I don't know what that's going to do. But yeah, there's plenty of revenue to be got now. I mean, one way you can think about it is okay. We have all these benchmarks for machine learning models. And there's Lombata and there's this and there's that. And those are really only useful and only exist because we haven't deployed the models, really, at scale. And so we don't have a sense of what they're actually good at. The best metric would probably be something like what percentage of economic tasks can they do or like on a gig.”
2023-03-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The question always does that scale, right? And the answer is it does not scale. It doesn't. But the set of people who really do have great judgment, like the experience that I had as CEO was I was terrified all the time that there was someone in the company who really knew exactly what to do and had excellent judgment, but because of cultural forces, that person wasn't empowered, right? That person was not allowed to exercise their judgment and make decisions. And so when I would think and talk about this, that was the fear that it was coming from is they were in some consensus environment where their good ideas were getting whittled down by lots of conversations with other people and a politeness and a desire not to micromanage. And so we were ending up with some kind of average thing. And I would rather kind of have more high variance outcomes where you either get something that's excellent because”
2023-03-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Go wrong when you do that, but on balance, you will get far more excellence out of it. And we should empower individuals who have great judgment.”
2023-03-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of this, that we have too much micromanagement. I think the other problem that people have is that Don't like micromanagement because they don't want bad managers to micromanage, right? So you have some bad managers, they have no expertise in the area. They're just kind of people managers and they're starting to micromanage something that they don't understand where their judgment is bad. And my answer to that is stop empowering bad managers. Don't have them. Just don't have bad managers. Promote and empower people who have great judgment and do understand the subject matter that they're working on. If I work for you and I just know you have better judgment and you come in and you say, Nat, like you're launching the scroll thing and I think you've got the final format wrong, you know, here's how you should do it. I would welcome that, even though it's micromanagement because it's going to make us more successful and I'm going to learn something from that. I know your judgment is better than mine in this case, or at least we're going to have a conversation about it. We're both going to get smarter. So I think on balance, yeah, there are cases where people have excellent judgment, and we should encourage them to exercise it. And sometimes, you know, things will...”
2023-03-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so imagine you go into some company, they hire Dorkesh, and you do a great job with the first project that they give you. Everyone's really impressed. Man, Dorkesh, he made the right decisions. He worked really hard. He figured out exactly what needed to be done and he did it extremely well. And so over time, you get promoted into positions of greater authority. And the reason the company is doing this is they want you to do that again, but at bigger scale, right? Do it again, but 10 times bigger. The whole product instead of part of the product, or 10 products instead of one. And so the company is telling you you have great judgment and we want you to exercise that at a greater scale. Meanwhile, the culture is telling you as you get promoted, you should suspend your judgment more and more and defer your judgment to your team. And so there's some equilibrium there, and I think we're just out of equilibrium right now where the cultural prohibition is too strong. And, you know, I think maybe in the, I don't know if this is true or not, but maybe in the 80s I would have felt the other side.”
2023-03-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Much cheaper software, do you create more special purpose software? That's a possibility. Every company, just a custom piece of code in a sense. Maybe that's the kind of future we're headed towards. So yeah, I think we're going to see enormous amounts of change in software development”
2023-03-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So much of what's happened in AI has been sort of soft fictional work. You know, you have mid journey, you have copywriting, you have gosh, Claude from Anthropic is a literary, it writes poetry so well, except for co-pilot, which is this real hard area where the code has to compile, you know, has to be syntactically correct. It has to work and pass the tests. And we see this steady improvement curve where now already on average more than half of the code is written by copilot. I think when it shipped, it was like low 20s. And so it's really improved a lot as the models have gotten better and the prompting has gotten better. But I don't see any reason why that won't be like 95%. It seems very likely to me. And so I think I don't know what that world looks like. It seems like we might have more special purposes and less general purpose software. Like right now we use general purpose tools like spreadsheets and things like this a lot, but part of that has to do with the cost of creating software. And so once you have”
2023-03-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but I think it increases the productivity of it definitely increases the productivity of the average engineer to bring them higher up. And I think it increases the productivity of the best engineers as well. Certainly a lot of the people I consider to be the best engineers tell me that they find it increases their productivity a lot. So yeah, I think AI is going to completely change. Like it's really interesting how”
2023-03-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sense, I think, are in that category, then yeah, I think, and then we have this belief that the world's efficient and it isn't, and I think that's part of it. The other thing is that the world is so fractal and so interesting. I mean, Herculean papyri, right? Is this corner of the world that I find totally fascinating, but I don't have any anticipation that 8 billion people should be thinking about that, or that that should be a priority for everyone.”
2023-03-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's number one. I think number two is most people really are quite memadic, and I think we all are, including me, we get a lot of ideas from other people, and so, you know, our ideas are not our own. We kind of got them from somebody else. It's kind of copy-paste. And so you have to work really hard not to do that and to be decorrelated. And I think this is even more true today because of the internet. I don't know if Albert Einstein as a patent clerk, wouldn't he have just been on Twitter just getting the same ideas as everybody else? Would he have his decorrelated ideas? So I think the internet's correlated us more. The exception would be really disagreeable people who are just naturally disagreeable. And so I think the future belongs to the autists in some sense because, you know, they don't care what other people think as much, those of us on the spectrum.”
2023-03-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I don't know exactly. It's a good question. I ask people that a lot. I mean, the more I've sort of done in life, the more I've been mystified by this. Like, oh, somebody must be doing X, and then you hear there's a few people doing X, and then you look into it, they're not actually doing X, they're doing kind of some version of it that's not that. And so, all the kind of best moments in life occur when you find something that to you is totally obvious that clearly somebody must be doing, but no one is doing. I mean, Mark Zuckerberg says this about founding Facebook. Like, surely the big companies will eventually do this and create this social and identity layer on the internet.”
2023-03-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I say on my website, I say probably because there are some examples where I think people set out to kind of raise the floor and say no one should ever die of smallpox again, right? No one should ever die of guinea worm again. And they succeed, and I wouldn't want to discourage that from happening, but I think on balance, we have too many attempts to do that that look good, feel good, sound good, and don't matter, and in some cases have the opposite of the effect they intend to.”
2023-03-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At the time. That was a ceiling raising technology. It eventually went down the learning curve and became cheap and the cell towers and cell phones eventually, you know, we've got now hundreds of millions or billions of them in Africa. And it was sort of that initially ceiling raising technology and then the sort of force of capitalism that made it work. In the end, and it was not any deus ex machina technology solution that it was intended to kind of raise the floor. And so I think there's something about that that's not just an incidental example.”
2023-03-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Meaning gosh, we are fine, but they are not, and we need to go help them. With our superior prosperity and understanding of their situation. And many of those projects fail. So, for example, there were a lot of attempts to bring internet to Africa by large and wealthy tech companies in American universities. And I won't say they all had no effect. That's not true, but many of them were far short of successful. There were satellites, there were balloons, there were high-altitude drones, there were mesh network laptops that were pursued by all these companies. And by the way, by perfectly well-meaning, incredibly talented people who I think did in some cases see some success, but overall probably much less than they ever hoped. But if you go to Africa, there is internet now. And the way internet got there is the technologies that we developed to raise the ceiling in the richest part of the world, which were cell phones and cell towers. I mean, in that movie Wall Street from the 80s, you know, he's got that gigantic brick cell phone. That thing costs like 10 grand.”
2023-03-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, well, first I say probably, but he doesn't mean to raise the ceiling or the floor. I mean, I've just observed a lot of projects that set out to raise the floor.”
2023-03-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've done, and I miss the team, and I miss working on GitHub. It was really an honor for me. But yeah, it was time for me to go do something. I was always a startup guy. I always like small teams, and I wanted to go back to sort of a smaller, more nimble environment.”
2023-03-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think as much as I loved Microsoft and certainly as much as I loved GitHub, I really truly like, I still feel tremendous love for GitHub and everything that it means to the people who use it. And I didn't really want to be a part of a giant company anymore. And I think building co-pilot was an example of this. It wouldn't have been possible without OpenAI and Microsoft and GitHub, but building it also required navigating this really large group of people between Microsoft and OpenAI and GitHub. And you reach a point where you're spending a ton of time on just navigating and coordinating lots of people. And I just find that less energizing back to enthusiasm. Like, just my enthusiasm for that was not as high. And I was torn about it because I truly love GitHub, the product, and there was so much more I still knew we could do. But I was proud of what...”
2023-03-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dynamics that make it hard. It's easier to spend $100 million on employees internally to do a project than to spend $100 million to buy a company. The dollars are treated differently. The approval processes are different. The kind of cultural buy-in processes are different. And then to the point of the discussion we had earlier, many acquisitions do fail. And when an acquisition fails, it somehow louder and more embarrassing than when some new product effort you've spun up doesn't quite work out as well. And so I think there's lots of internal reasons somewhat justified and some less so that they haven't been doing it, but just from an economic point of view, it seemed like it makes sense to see more acquisitions than we've seen.”
2023-03-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know if it's good, but I think there are, yes, it is certainly efficient in many ways. And I think we are seeing agglomeration occur because the math is sort of pretty simple. Like if you are a large company and you have a lot of customers, then the thing that you've achieved is this very expensive and difficult thing of building distribution and relationships with lots of customers. And that is as hard or harder and takes longer and more money than just inventing the product in the first place. And so if you can then go and just buy the product for a small amount of money and make it available to all of your customers, then there's often like an immediate, really obvious gain from doing that. In that sense, acquisitions make a ton of sense. And I've been surprised that the large companies haven't done many more acquisitions in the past until I got into a big company and started trying to do acquisitions. And I saw that there are strong elements of the internal”
2023-03-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the thing you need to do though to build a good end user application is not only have a good aesthetic and idea, but somehow establish a tight feedback loop with a set of users where you can Torquetch, try this. Oh my gosh, okay, that's not what you need. Okay, and so doing that is so hard even in a company where you've total hierarchical control of the team in theory and everyone really wants the same thing and everyone's salary and stock options depend on the product being accepted by these users, it still fails many times in that scenario than additionally doing that in the context of open source. I think it's just like slightly too hard”
2023-03-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Open source. I mean, this happens in programming languages. Languages can't be designed. I mean, they often are eventually sort of set in stone and then advanced by committee But yeah, I mean, certainly you have these sort of benign dictators of languages who enforce a strong set of ideas. They have a sort of vision master plan. So that would be the argument that's most kind of on Dylan's side. It's like, hey,”
2023-03-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Draining. So I think that where that coordination burden is lower is where open source tends to succeed more and probably software and other new forms of governance can improve that and like expand the territory that open source can succeed in.”
2023-03-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've had debates with Dylan Field, the figmos, to why it is that we don't have lots of good open source applications. I've always thought it had something to do with this governance dynamic of, you know, gosh, it's such a pain to coordinate with tons of people who all sort of feel like they have a right to try to push the project in one way or another. Whereas in a hierarchical corporation, there can be a head of those product or a CEO or founder or designer who just says, we're doing it this way. And you can really align things in one direction very, very easily. Dylan has argued to me that it might be because there's just fewer designers, people with good design sense in open source. I think that might be a contributing factor too, but I think it's still mostly the governance thing. That's what Nadia is pointing at also. You're running a project. You gave it to people for free. For some reason, giving people something for free creates the sense of entitlement. And then they feel like they have the right to demand your time and push things around and give you input and you want to be polite.”
2023-03-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think by and large I would say that there is not a problem, meaning open source software continues to be developed, continues to be broadly used, and there's areas where it works better and areas where it works less well, but it's sort of winning in all the areas where large scale coordination and editorial control are not necessary. And so it tends to be great at infrastructure, standalone components, and very, very horizontal things like operating systems. And it tends to be worse at user experiences and things where you need a sort of dictatorial, aesthetic, an editorial control.”
2023-03-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are out places where freedom is really valuable, but there's always this thing of like, I have a prescriptive ideology that I'd like to impose on the world versus this thing of like, I will try to develop the best observational model for what people actually want, whether I want them to want it or not. And I think Richard is strongly in the former camp.”
2023-03-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think those are the things that he wants. And I think the thing that maybe he hasn't updated is that maybe not everyone else wants that. He has this idea that people want freedom from the tyranny of a proprietary intellectual property license. But what people really want is freedom from having to configure their graphics card or sound driver or something like that. They want their computer to kind of work.”
2023-03-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, GitHub had made such a pledge, and so I think, in part, acquiring GitHub, we had to either try to annul that pledge or sign up to it ourselves. And so there was sort of a moment of a forced choice, but everyone at Microsoft thought it was a good idea to. So I think in many senses it was a moment whose time had come and the kind of GitHub acquisition was a forcing function.”
2023-03-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“GitHub we pledged all of our patent portfolio to open source. That was one of the things that we did as part of it. And so that was a kind of poetic moment for me, having been on the other side of patent discussions in the past to be a part of an instrumental in Microsoft making that pledge. That was quite crazy.”
2023-03-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think that's true. Yeah, I think we all have this image when we're young that these institutions or these implacable edifices that are evil and all-powerful and are able to substantiate with master plans substantially orchestrate the world. And that is sometimes a little bit true, but they're very vulnerable to these new ideas and new forces and new communications media and stuff like that. So right now, I think maybe I wouldn't right now I think our institutions overall look relatively weak and certainly they're weaker than I thought they were back then. So I thought Microsoft, honestly, I thought Microsoft could stop open source. I thought that was a possibility. They can do some patent move and kind of there's a master plan to ring fence open source in. And that didn't end up being the case. In fact, Microsoft, when we bought”
2023-03-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On your sales team, where your sales reps know the process they need to follow to exercise this repeatable sales motion and get a deal closed. And so, you know, I just had bad ideas there. I didn't know that that was how the world worked. Software is a way to systematize and scale out a valuable process extremely efficiently. And I think the more digitized the world has become, the more valuable software becomes and the more valuable become the developers who can create it, essentially.”
2023-03-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, software is kind of magic, right? You can write a for loop and do something a lot of times. When you build large organizations at scale, one of the things that does surprise you is the degree to which you need to systematize the behavior of the people who are working. Like when I first was starting companies and building sales teams, I had this wrong idea coming from the world as a programmer that salespeople were like hyper-aggressive, hyper entrepreneurial, you know, making promises to the customer that the product wouldn't do, and that the main challenge you had with salespeople was like restraining them from going out and aggressively cutting deals that shouldn't be cut. And what I discovered is that that does exist sometimes, but the much more common case is that you need to build a systematic sales playbook, which is almost a script that you run.”
2023-03-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think there's a labor market dynamic in software where the Really high quality talent is so in demand and the supply is so much less than the demand that it shifts power onto the developers such that they can require of their employers that they be allowed to work in public. And then when they do that, they develop an external reputation, which is this asset they can port between companies. And if the labor market dynamics weren't like that, if programming well were less economically valuable, then they would not have companies wouldn't let them do that. They wouldn't let them publish a bunch of stuff publicly. They'd say, that's a rule. And that used to be the case, in fact. And so as softwares become more valuable, developers, the leverage of a single super talented developer has gone up and they've been able to demand over the last several decades the ability to work in public.”
2023-03-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But in other communities, like in machine learning research, this is not how you, you know, there's a thousand people, the reputation is more on archive than it is on GitHub. So I don't know that it'll ever be comprehensive.”
2023-03-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But you didn't grow up in a highly connected or prosperous network family, et cetera, and yet you know you're really capable and you just want to get connected to kind of the most elite communities in the world. And so if you're good at programming, you can join open source communities and contribute to them. And you can very quickly accrete a global reputation for your talent, which is legible to many companies and individuals around the world. And suddenly you find yourself getting a job and moving maybe to the US or maybe not moving. You end up at a great startup. I mean, I know a lot of people who've deliberately pursued the strategy of building reputation in open source and then kind of you've got the sail up and the wind catches you and you've got a career. And so I think it plays that role in that.”
2023-03-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a good question. I mean, I think they're a contributing element to how people try to understand a person now, but I don't think they're a definitive resume. We introduced README's on profiles when I was there, and I was excited about that because I thought it gave people some degree of personalization. I think some people have, you know, many thousands of people have done that. Yeah, I don't know. There's forces that push in the other direction too on that one, where people don't want their activity and skills to be as legible. And there may be some adverse selection as well where the people with the most elite skills, you know, it's rather gauche for them to signal their competence on their profile. So there's some weird social dynamics that feed into it too. But I will say, I think it effectively has this role for people who are breaking through today. Like one of the best ways to break through, I know many people who are in this situation. You were born in Argentina. You're very sharp.”
2023-03-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source