First Time Founders with Ed Elson – This Physicist Is Building AI Droids

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31:00We're back with First Time Founders. In terms of AI legislation, there seems to be a lot of debate right now on how do you regulate AI. and California is trying to be a leader in regulating. What are your views on AI regulation? Are people going over the top, trying to regulate? Is it warranted? How do you think about that? Maybe just to draw some parallels. In my mind, I view things like climate regulation, nuclear regulation, and AI regulation to be similar in that they are global, and local regulation doesn't really matter. like for example pick any one of those three if you make rules about in california you can't have a gas car or you can't build like nuclear weapons or you can't build ai to in the extreme in california that doesn't really matter because that says nothing about the rest of the world and if the rest of the world does it it affects what happens in california for climate for nuclear for ai and so i think for ai in particular the regulation that is interesting is less like i like I think California just it doesn't matter regulating AI state by state at least at the macro level maybe it's like in terms of usage for like interpersonal things sure but in terms of like training models the relevant um stage there in my mind is the global stage and how does it affect like US uh regulation versus European regulation versus China let's say from what I've seen thus far the time spent on like state regulation is kind of wasted at least as it relates to foundation models.

32:38I think there is a concern probably in Silicon Valley that everyone's so afraid of AI. I mean, I've seen these surveys that, you know, I think more than half of Americans are more worried about AI than they are excited. I guess that's something to philosophically tackle on your end because you're building it. But then I would imagine that in In Silicon Valley, there's this feeling of everyone's just too scared because they've watched all these movies and they've watched the Terminator. And so these people are getting too, too worried about it to the point that we're regulating in a way that actually doesn't make sense.

33:19It's pretty interesting. I think two things come to mind. So one, there's the classic phenomenon of, you know, you're a startup, you want no regulation, then you become big, then suddenly you want regulation. Yes. And we've seen that happen with, I think, basically every foundation model company, which is always a shame to see. And then the second, this is more just like a comment on the Silicon Valley and some of the culture there. I know so many people who work at the foundation model labs who don't have savings. Like they just do not believe in like putting any money in their 401k. They like spend it all because of this like vision of like something's coming or something.

33:53Yeah. Which is very weird. But then there are equally as many who work at these who are like, you know, these guys kind of drink too much of the Kool-Aid. It's really important to have these conversations and think about these things because I think it's actually, it reminds me a lot of thinking about like in theoretical physics, like thinking about the big bang and like black holes in the universe. The first time you think about it, it's kind of like scary existential crisis. What is everything for in such a large universe? Nothing has meaning, whatever. I think thinking about AI, like getting exponentially better kind of leads to similar, like existential questions like what are we like what value do humans have if there's going to be something that's smarter than any one of us and then you have the maturity of like wait intelligence is not why humans have value that's not the source of intrinsic value we don't think someone's more valuable because they're smarter so having these conversations and thought processes is i think very important for both people working in ai and people who aren't but yeah there's some there's some pretty weird um people who kind of like are really really in the bubble inundated in it and who kind of get these interesting worldviews of like, you know, the singularity is coming.

34:56So I want to, you know, spend everything that I have now. Yet at the same time, if they think it's not going to be good, they remain working on it. So these AI engineers who are not saving any money, they're doing it because they think like the end of the world is coming or because they think that there's going to be some transformative event that will make them really rich? Like, is it more of a Doomer perspective or? It's a pretty big mix. Like some people think we will just become in a world where we're like post-economic. and just like money will be irrelevant. And like for anyone, there's some like base level, whether it's like some UBI type thing or some have like the Doomer perspective.

35:31It's pretty bizarre. It sounds irrational to me. Yes, I would agree. Okay, you'd agree. Yes. Yeah. And I think that it brings up an interesting thing in AI, which is there's this incredibly transformative once in a generation technology that has come along and it causes humans when that happens to act strangely. That behavior not saving while you're building AI because you think that it's going to mean some event that, you know, could either end the world or, you know, dismantle the system. Maybe they're onto something. To me, it seems irrational. And I also think it says something about the potential of a bubble that is emerging that a lot of people in the last few weeks have been getting more and more concerned about and that more and more people seem to believe.

36:21I mean, you know, I think Sam Altman himself said the word bubble. There have been other tech leaders who are saying that. As someone who is building in this space, how do you think about that? Does it concern you? Or is it something that you're not too worried about? Obviously, just to be a responsible CEO, I need to have priors that there is some chance that's something like that happens in like the broader economy where you know there's some corrections yeah my priors are very low in particular because like the ground truth utilization of gpus is just like fully fully saturated now it would be one thing if we're building out all these data centers for like the dream of okay we're going to saturate this compute at someday but like we are doing that today and it's like people are still hungry for more of that compute.

37:12Now, I think there's a good argument that a lot of compute is subsidized. So like NVIDIA might subsidize the foundation model companies, the foundation model companies subsidize companies like us and maybe give us discounts on their inference. And we might subsidize new growth users. And there's a little bit of that, that I think that's the part that there's a concern of like actually drawing a similar comparison to Uber. I don't know if you remember when Uber first came out, rides were super cheap because it was very much subsidized. VCs were paying for us. VCs. And so the LPs, all the like pension funds were basically subsidizing people's Ubers in a very indirect way.

37:47And like people kind of, you know, sometimes can make jokes about that, even as it relates to LLMs. The reason I'm less concerned is that the ROI is just so massive and like the productivity gains from in particular coding. It's like the fact that we have built factory with basically less than 20 engineers. that is something that pre-AI we just would not have been able to do. And so I think the leverage that people are getting is what makes me less concerned and also the speed of adoption. Like I think even some of these enormous enterprises that we're speaking with, they missed like mobile by like five years.

38:22But for AI, they are on it because they know if we have 50 ,000 engineers, we need to get them AI tools for engineering because of how existential it is. If there is a correction, and the way I see it is there will be a correction that won't wipe out AI like some people seem to think, but it'll be similar to the internet. There's a correction, valuations come down, there is some pain, and then long term you will see massive adoption and massive value creation. That's just my perspective. Say there is a correction. Who wins in that scenario? Like, what happens to open AI? What happens to startups like yourself?

39:07Who are going to be the winners and losers in that scenario where we do see some sort of pullback? So one core principle is Jensen always wins. So for the last few years, Jensen's going to stay winning. So that's, I think, not going to change. And why do you say that? Because he's just at the very base of the value chain? Yes, yes, yes. And at the end of the day, all of these circular deals, they all come back to nvidia anytime anyone announces hey we're doing like free inference that's free but you know someone's paying jensen at the end of the day okay um so i think that's kind of one baseline there i think another and this actually maybe relates to what we were talking about earlier about you know these companies and the acquisitions is um as it relates to like startups and how many there are there was a period that i think has been dying down at least a little bit um in san francisco where if you're an engineer who like worked at ai for a month you basically just get stapled a term sheet like onto your forehead the second you leave and you know you show up to show up to a VC which I think is not good because you don't get like the Travis Kalanick's or the Brian Chesky's in a world where you're encouraged to do things like that like anytime anyone asks me like hey Matan you know I'm thinking about starting a company I will always say no always because if me saying no discourages you from starting a company then you absolutely should not have done it and I think like there's almost like too much help and too much like yeah you know go do it go start it because then it leads to some of these things we were talking about where the second the going gets tough it's like all right acquisition time and this is maybe my localized view because i live in san francisco and that's like you know what i see more day-to-day than some of like the more macro trends but i think the first place we would see a correction like that is in i mean coding for example there are like 100 startups in the coding space you know perhaps there will be less that are funded because it's like hey you know what at this point maybe it's not as relevant or, you know, the Nth AI personal CRM.

40:56Like that's another one that's, there's been like a million companies there. Uh, the correction might look like at least at that level, you know, funding being a little more difficult, um, let's say. And then the way that that relates to the foundation model companies is I think eventually you'll get to a point where they can subsidize inference less, which just means growth probably slows like open AI and their revenue has been, you know, ridiculously large, but also the margin on that has been pretty negative. And so it's basically like, how long can you subsidize and like deal with that negative margin?

41:27They're obviously a legendary company. Uber is a great example. Amazon's a great example where you can like operate at a loss for a period of time in order to build an absolute monster of a company and then just turn on margin whenever you're ready. The question is, how long can you sustain that? And so if there were a correction, I think that would affect that. Yeah, it does feel increasingly that AI, the danger of AI isn't adoption or technology. It's a timing and financing problem. And, you know, I look at OpenAI and the amount that they're spending. I'm starting to believe that the AI companies who are going to win are the ones who manage their balance sheets the best.

42:03And it's really going to be a question of financial management because of the thing that you say there where all of this money is being plowed in. And it is a question of how long can you go at an operating loss, which, you know, Uber crushed it. Amazon crushed it. There were many other companies that died that did not crush it from that perspective. So it will be really interesting to see how that plays out. But as someone who is building in Silicon Valley, in San Francisco, you've built this incredible company that's generated a ton of heat and press. Like you are in AI. What does that feel like?

42:48Like, what does it feel like to be one of the AI people? Does it feel like you're in some special moment in time? Like, what is it like? It feels very much like we are still in the trenches because there's a ton that we want to do and that we need to get done. I think for me, the most surreal thing is the team that we've assembled. Like every day coming in person in our office in San Francisco, it is such a privilege working with, now we're 40 of the smartest people that I've ever met in my life. We're in New York right now. We're starting to open up an office here. I think that's where it's a little bit like, whoa, like we're now, you know, we have two offices on the opposite sides of the country.

43:25It's more just like, I think it's just really cool to see over the last two and a half years how dedicated effort can actually like build something that is concrete and meaningful. And some of the largest enterprises that we're working with, it's just kind of crazy to sometimes stop for a bit when it's not like the nonstop grind to think like this organization now doesn't have to deal with these problems because of something that we built because of this random cold email, because of this random hackathon that I met Eno at. But I think it's just, it's a very cool, visceral reminder that you can do things that affect things.

44:02And if you are really driven by a good mission, you can make people's lives better in relatively short order. And I think that's a really empowering thought. What is something that you think the American population sort of gets wrong about AI and also about AI founders and the people building this technology? most of the world only knows chat gpt very few people know about like in san francisco everyone's like oh which model is better like open ai anthropic google gemini the rest of the world it's just like it's basically just chat gpt which i think on one hand is interesting wow um i think on the other hand it is really important for basically every profession to kind of rethink your entire workflow and it is in fact i would say it's almost an obligation to like basically take a sledgehammer to everything that you've set up as like your routine and how you do work and rethink it with AI.

44:52For me, this is actually something that's really important because I'm like the most habit oriented, like routine person and like constantly, you know, every few months being like, let me try and see how I could do this differently with AI in a way that's not like, oh, technology is taking over, but more just like it makes things more efficient and faster and more convenient. So I think that's one thing is there is so much time that can be saved by spending a little bit of time to, you know, try out these different tools, whether it's something like chat GPT, or, you know, if you're an engineer trying out, you know, something like factory, I think regarding AI founders, it's hard to say because there's so many tropes that unfortunately can be really true sometimes.

45:32And sometimes it's even frustrating to me because like, I grew up in Palo Alto and hated startups. Like hated it. Like I grew up like in middle school, we would spend time like, you know, walking around downtown Palo Alto. And I remember, I have a very concrete memory when Palantir moved into downtown Palo Alto. There were all these people in there like Patagonias with like the Palantir logo. And I remember looking so like scornfully at all these people walking by with these Patagonias. Um, but yeah, I mean, I think, I think it's maybe actually, I think the thing is less for the rest of the world about AI founders and more like some of these AI companies, it's really important to leave San Francisco, like exit the bubble.

46:12Like it's a cliche, but like touch grass, go to see the real world because Because while San Francisco is very in the future, you know, I've taken a Waymo to work for the last like two years. The rest of the world is still like kind of how it was in San Francisco five years ago. And I think it's important to have that grounding because if you don't leave and if you don't have that grounding, you could do things like not put money in your 401k. And things like not that you need to put in your 401k, but you kind of get these little bit warped perspectives sometimes. That is really interesting. Does that, I mean, this idea that there is a bubble connotes the wrong thing, but there is this, it's an echo chamber.

46:51Um, and the fact that you're building and you're saying, you know, we're building these offices in New York and the thing that is important for AI, and I think it's probably really true is to kind of go out into the world and understand like, what are some real use cases where this was really going to provide value for people, not just in your enterprise SaaS startup in San Francisco, but anywhere else throughout America. Does that worry you as you go further up the chain of power and command in Silicon Valley? Does it worry you perhaps that people at the very top aren't doing that enough? They're not getting out there and understanding what this technology really needs to be and do for America?

47:36I would say yes. And I think that's also just a very common problem, just generally as organizations scale or as organizations get more powerful, the people running those organizations inherently get separated from the ground truth of like, let's say the individual engineers or individual people who are going and delivering that product to people. And I think similarly, they lose touch with their customers as well. I think the best leaders have really good communication lines towards the customers they're serving or the people who are like kind of in the trenches, like hands-on doing the work.

48:07and I think you probably end up seeing this in results of a lot of these companies because I think it's hard to be a successful company if you don't have some of that ground truth. Any good leader I think should be concerned about that and should always be paranoid of like, you know, am I surrounded by yes men or am I in an echo chamber and I'm not getting the real like ground truth? Yeah, so that is something that's still in mind. We'll be right back.

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52:21We're back with First Time Founders. Who is like AI Jesus right now? Is it Jensen? Is it Sam Altman? Is it Mark Zuckerberg? Like in San Francisco, who's the guy? Who do people revere? I mean, it's got to be Jensen. Like Sam, you know, a lot of wins, some losses. Zuck, a lot of wins, a lot of losses. Jensen, that guy just grinded for 30 years. I remember when I built a computer at home to play like video games on a PC, I bought an NVIDIA chip and in my mind it was like NVIDIA you know they're the video game graphic card company now they are the most valuable company in human history with no signs of stopping and he just grinded it out for 30 years like it is the most respectable thing he's also the nicest dude and he has no like he doesn't have enemies he's so you've met with him I have he's extremely generous with his time he also know this guy's like knows every little detail about factory like I don't know how he has the time to do these things, but he is a killer.

53:19He's really good. When you think about sort of the long-term future of AI, and there was, you know, for many years, it was AGI is coming and think about all the things it can do. Think about how it could solve diseases. Think about how it could solve, cure cancer. And then I see like erotica, GPT, and I see the Sora AI TikTok feed, I'm sort of like, what happened to the big vision? We're back to sort of Pornhub meets TikTok, but it's got AI. How do we expand the vision of AI? What is the ground vision for AI? And do you think it's going to really come true? Well, so I think on one hand, like, you know, the pure slop that is these like AI Sora or the one that Meta announced.

54:14I think on one hand, it's very, it's very, in a certain weird sense, it is beautiful in that it is just like pure human nature. Like, what do we do when we have really good technology? Like, let's make porn. Like that's the first thought. And in a certain sense, it's like, okay, I'm glad that even though we're generating all this technology, we're still humans at our core. We overestimated ourselves when we thought we'd cure cancer. But on the other hand, there are still people who are doing really great work. Like one of my friends, Patrick Su, who runs ARC Institute, they're doing AI for biotech research and biology.

54:49And I think they're doing a lot of really cool work. And maybe this actually relates to something we were talking about earlier, which is, you know, people kind of at a first glance might have a little bit of an existential crisis of, you know, intelligence is now commoditized. So there's now, like some people are saying, you know we both live in a world where if we have children at some point our children will never be smarter than ai right like we both grew up in a world where we are smarter than computers for at least a period of time and our kids would never know that world which is a little bit crazy because you know a huge part of growing up is going to college becoming really smart in some certain area um and so i think now we're having a little bit of a decoupling of human value being attributed to intelligence.

55:31But then there's a natural question of like, okay, well, you know, we were sold this vision about, you know, let's say even the American dream of like, if you work really hard, get really good at this one thing, then you'll have a better life. But now it's like, you're never going to be the intelligence of this computer. So what is the thing to strive for? And I think this actually relates to like the AI porn versus the AI curing cancer, which is, in my mind, the new primitive or the new, maybe like North Star for humans is agency. and which humans have the will instead like yes you can like hit the hedonism and just watch ai porn and play video games all day but who has the agency to say no i'm going to work on this hard problem that doesn't give me as much dopamine but like because of the will and agency that i have i'm choosing to work on this instead and i think that might be the new valuable thing that if you have that in large quantities that maybe that's kind of what brings you more meaning why do you go to agency versus many other things for example you know uh you mentioned your your friend who's working on issues in biotech maybe that is a question like having the right values or or um i mean not to get like mushy but maybe a value would be kindness or a value would be creativity there are lots of things out there that you could pick and choose from why is it agency in your mind I guess the way that I think about it, it's like the agency to go against maybe like the easiest path for dopamine or like the like the natural like human nature.

57:01Like, just give me like the good tasting food, the porn, the video games, the like, you know, easy, fun stuff. And I think maybe part of agency has to do with values. Like if you value creativity and if you value kindness and, you know, I think that is something that might motivate more agency. But agency is basically, at least the way I think about it, it's like the will to endure something that is more difficult for maybe a longer term reward, whether that's the satisfaction of, you know, bringing this, you know, better health care to people or satisfying that curiosity. It's interesting because you say the word agency and you are building agents and there's like a parallel there.

57:43And it's almost as if the people who are really going to win are the people who can have some level of command and directive agency over these AI agents. It's the person who isn't just going to do what they're told by the guy who controls the AI agent and says, okay, create this code. It's the person who can actually tell the agents what to do. And that's the direction that you believe humanity and work should be headed. 100 % and I think that's also like if you think back to like the people that you've met in your life that come across as like particularly intelligent or like you know remarkable in whatever capacity oftentimes it's not raw iq horsepower like you'll note that when you meet someone with high iq it's pretty easy to tell but growing up in the bear there are so many that are very high iq but aren't that aren't that like high agency or like independent minded and I think those are the people that oftentimes it's like really like leave a mark when you remember like Like, oh, like that person was, you know, maybe they weren't even that high IQ, but they were very like independent high agency.

58:51And I think that now is going to be much more important because great, you know, you might be born, have a lot of high IQ. Everyone has access to the AI models that have this intelligence. So it's not really a differentiator anymore. The differentiator is, do you have the will to use those in a way that no one has thought of before or in a way that's difficult, but to get some longer term task done? It's really interesting because what you're describing is like, how do you, what can I do that AI cannot do? And what you're saying is AI cannot think for itself. It cannot be an independent, creative-minded creature.

59:24It can be a math genius. It can solve problems within seconds, but it can't have the willpower to decide this is what I want to do. This is what is important to me. This is what has value, which I think is definitely right. we have to wrap up here I just want to note I saw a tweet I think from yesterday that you put out there and it shows this competition of all the different coding agents so you've got Cursor and you've got Gemini and you've got OpenAI's coding agent you are number one in agent performance that's right what does that mean what does it mean to be number one and how are you going to take that moving forward this is a benchmark that basically does like head-to-heads of coding agents and they use like an elo rating system so it's like chess where um you know at a high level you could have in chess let's say uh if you have a hundred losses against you know someone that's equal skill to you but then you beat magnus carlson you can have an incredibly high chess rating so this is like an elo rating system where it gives these agents two tasks and then it just has humans go and vote which solution they liked better like the one from let's say factory versus open air or anthropics um and we have the highest elo rating so in these head-to-heads um we beat them which is pretty exciting i think it's exciting on a couple fronts one we've raised obviously very little money compared to a lot of the competitors that are on that and i think that It goes to show that in a lot of these cases, being too focused on the fancy, like train the model, let's do the RL, let's do the fancy fine tuning and all this stuff.

1:01:11Sometimes it doesn't give you the best ground truth, like what is the best performing thing for an engineer's given task. Benchmarks are very flawed. They're not fully comprehensive of everything that it can do, but I think it's helpful when developers have a lot of choices out there to try and say, okay, well, like which one should I use? This one is nice because it's pretty empirical of developers seeing two options and picking them and then consistently our droids win, which is pretty fun. Final question, what does the future of Factory look like? What do you think about when you look at the next 10 years?

1:01:4310 years is very hard because AI is pretty crazy and I think humans are bad at reasoning around exponentials. I would say in the next few years, bringing about that mission of, you know, that world of developers being able to delegate very easily and just have a lot more leverage. Developers not needing to spend hours of their time on code reviews or documentation. And I think more broadly, that turns software developers into like more cultivators or orchestrators and allows them to use what they have trained up for so many years, which is like their systems thinking. That's what makes engineers so good, is they're really good at reasoning around systems, reasoning around constraints from their customers, from the business, from the underlying technology, and synthesizing those together to come up with some optimal solution.

1:02:28And with Factory, they get to use that to its fullest extent much more frequently in their day-to-day. And I think that is a net good for the world because that means there will be more software and better software that is created, which means we can solve more problems and solve problems that weren't solved before, which I think on the net is just better for the world. Mattan Grinberg is the founder and CEO of Factory. This was awesome. Thank you. Thank you, Ed.

1:02:58This episode was produced by Alison Weiss and engineered by Benjamin Spencer. Our research associates are Dan Chalon and Kristen O'Donoghue and our senior producer is Claire Miller. Thank you for listening to First Time Founders from ProfG Media. We'll see you next month with another founder story.

1:03:15Thank you.