From Software Engineers to AI Word Artisans: Filip Kozera of Wordware

0:00We have 30 million software engineers in the world, and we have 750 million active users of Excel. Now, you'll ask how this world will compare to Excel, and what Excel did in the 80s to data analytics and numbers, is what we're trying to do to AI. So in the 80s, you either had to have a team of data analytics, people or engineers, or you're using a calculator, And I would say the calculator equivalent here is the chat to PT that you every time you need to redo the conversation and you every time you need to instill your own needs into it. What WordWer is trying to do is saying, hey, a lot of the things that you do are repeatable, similar to Excel.

0:48And you can encode your taste into it with WordWer.

1:09Today we're joined by Philip Kazera, co -founder of Wordware, whose billing tools to help bridge the gap between human creativity and AI. Philip shares his vision for why English is becoming the new assembly language for LLMs. Why he believes that the future belongs not just to coders, but to people he calls word artisans, who can communicate effectively their creative vision to an AI system, and what that means for the future of programming computers. FILUP, thank you so much for joining us today. I'm excited to learn about you and wordware, and get your take on how programming computers is fundamentally going to change with large language models.

1:45Thank you for the if for the invite. Let's dig right in. I want to start with Andre Carpathy. He had a tweet in 2023 that went viral. The hottest new programming language is English. What do you make of that and what does it mean relative to what you are trying to build that word where? I think syntax will not be as important. You know, everyone will be somewhat of a coder. People used to have to know Python. Now English is enough. However, you still need to know what you're trying to say. And in that way, I would say, you know, not everyone will be able to use it because some people don't have that much to say.

2:21And I would maybe rephrase it a little bit, and a little bit more of an exciting way for us, is that the assembly language to LLM is English, but you still have to structure it in the right way, and you still have to use some of the concepts even from typical programming in order to actually make sure that it does what it's supposed to do. You heard it here first, okay? English is not the hottest new programming language. It is the new assembly language. and at word where you were trying to build that new programming language to work with that new assembly language. I think bringing structure to human AI collaboration is something that I've chosen to spend the next 10 years of my life on.

3:06And it's an exciting problem because right now we're trying to mix the structure of programming, which is very rigid and deterministic with something that's intrinsically fuzzy. And that marrying of these concepts and choosing the right affordances and the right obstruction layers for that communication to be incredibly easy yet enable people to do complex things is hard. And this is what we are trying to do with Wordware as the engine to enable the right mix of the two. Let's talk a little bit more about no code. I remember back when I first got to Sequoia in 2018, I remember no code was the hottest thing ever and it was like, you know, we're not gonna we're not gonna program anymore And you know, obviously some no code companies have done extremely well like retool for example But by and large we still have you know, we have software engineers today and so so far that no code promise hasn't really come to fruition What's different now like what has changed?

4:08I think coming back to what I just said as well on the assembly language is English and And I kind of have this small insecurity when people call Wordware a no code tool. Because we have not yet reached a ceiling with any of our clients. So you can achieve absolutely everything. We've created an ability to put in code execution blocks, which if you want an escape patch and Wordware is not fully capable of everything, you still can do it. And in that way, the document format of how to structure agents and how to write them down one by one is still very similar to how code works. We still have loops.

4:56We still have conditional statements and we have flows calling other flows, which really is function calling. So in a way, we don't see ourselves as a no -code tool. And we kind of believe that the word crafters, the word artisans of the future are still coding. It's just, you know, they are structuring the English in a very precise way to make sure that the prompt is populated in the right manner. Word crafters and word artisans. Wordware engineers, you've heard it here first. How are you using the English language then to make, you know, since you bristle at the no code term. How are you making no code more code -like?

5:39And maybe this is a good time to just give a 30 -second overview on the work where product and how people use it to build things. Sure. So by trying to bring that structure to the intrinsically fuzzy English language, we've created an editor where you can use the similar concepts to software engineering, looping, conditional statements, functions, calling functions. and marry it in that editor in that natural language, IDE, in a way that people can construct agents. Something that we're not, we're not coaching, we go straight to agents. And in my definition, agents are almost like they are still software, they are still a little bit like software taking in inputs and outputting outputs, but some of the stages of what they do is fuzzy.

6:28So, marrying that structure in the editor, whatever you build there, whatever you iterate on there, you then have three different ways of deploying it. You can deploy it as an API that will power your product or that AI button or that AI chatbot that is a little bit more complex than just doing a vanilla API call to cloud or open AI. That's number one. Number two is you can deploy it as a workflow where the main part of the workflow is not like Zapier. It's more AI native, and really the brain of the AI is a little bit more complex than a couple of prompts strung together. And the third thing that we're building is the GitHub for AI, let's say, for people to share and what they've done, and other people are able to then fork it and use these things as components.

7:21Again, marrying some concept from software engineering, you need other people's components and libraries. And you want to be building on top of the shoulders of the giants of these AI thinkers. So again, Wordware Engine, Editor, way to actually create these agents and then three different ways to deploy. I think what the beauties of code is just its expressability and its precision, you know, exactly what you were telling the machine to do. And you were expressing it in some languages in the most precise way possible. English is not like that. So your point, it's fuzzy. And so as you are turning the English language more code like, should I think about that as helping with the controllability and the sterability of that or what is the abstract thing you were doing with English to make it more programmable?

8:07Yeah, I think you're exactly correct. We are trying to bring a little bit more structure. It's not all the way because if you go all the way to a programming language, you lose the fuzziness and you lose the power of it. But it's hard. And right now, most of the people, you know, we had this way for evaluations off to our companies at some stage. And what we've realized with a bunch of companies that we work with is that they don't know, like they don't have these datasets to use for EVAS. And what we came up with is that editor very quickly gets you to understand and develop an intuition of what works and what doesn't work.

8:47And for now, this is the most important thing. It's clicking around 100 times quickly and making sure that what you've written here has enough structure in order to output things on the right side that you want. And in that way, as long as you know what you're trying to achieve, and this is very hard, you know, we have a lot of companies coming in and just saying, hey, I predict weather. I literally had a big customer say, can you guys like predict weather for me? And that's not the case. You need a document where you outline what you're trying to do. And even that document, that has enough structure.

9:23If you have done an intro, those are the inputs. You'll be playing around with images and PDFs, and then you'll manipulate it in this way, and then you'll get some outputs. And developing that intuition is just enough structure for today. Soon maybe we'll be able to do better evals. But for now, a lot of people really don't know at the moment when they start playing around with Wordware They don't know what we are trying to achieve and one of our customers coined this term of Speed of creativity with Wordware is Is higher? So they learn what they are actually trying to do as they encounter problems with underlying models and they realized Gemini 2 .0 Pro might be better and maybe Gemini can take huge PDFs and Cloud can kind of take PDFs but smaller and then GPT -4 can all take PDFs.

10:23And you know, they develop that understanding and that helps them to structureize their faults. How do you instruct the machine to go from intent to outcome? Like let's say I'm a brilliant filmmaker and I want, you know, I want to use Wordware to create the next hit. What do I do in WordWare in Ords make that happen? Yeah, so for now we focus on knowledge workers, where that is a little bit easier. I think using your example for figuring out how the future will be. If we have, let's say, George Lucas playing around, hypothetically playing around with GPT -7 and then trying to create Star Wars.

11:10He might type in just a prompt being like the two sentences. And he would just say, hey, create a movie about the words between Star Systems. And that's just enough to give a model an ability to run on its own. And this is actually not what you want. You want to convey your creative vision, but for now in order, it's just knowledge work. But soon it will be all work where it needs that human sprinkle of human taste and These are the things that I really value is like People say oh nobody will have a job whatsoever. I don't agree with it at all I think the human taste and how you do things will matter even more and I use this George Lucas example Just it's a little bit easier to understand how taste is influencing that but everywhere.

12:01Writing a good email is dependent on good taste. Figuring out, I was just hiring for an executive assistant and like everyone in our company needs to show that taste and needs to show a little bit more conviction in the way that they do things. So for executive assistant, like she needed to choose a right restaurant for our off site, you know. And that also has I don't want to trust NAI with this. So yeah, that's kind of that sprinkle of human touch is very important. So taste as the last bastion of humanity? I think so. I think creativity and taste. Do you think machines can learn human taste?

12:43I think they can, but that's not the point. There is an interesting analogy here. They put humans into an MRI machine and they've shown them two different pieces of art. Both of them were done by AI, and they told the people, hey, one is created by a human artist, and another one is created by AI. Our brains work completely differently and our different parts of the brain fire when we assume human intent behind something. So, you know, I can create a song and just like it will be a good song with Suno, whatever and send it to my friend and he'll be like yes a cool song but if I ingrained my intent and I'll create a song about our skiing trip to Chamonix and I'll make it funny and that intent will be there I'm pretty sure his brain will be firing in a completely different way giving him like giving him a completely different experience in that way does that make sense?

13:47It makes a lot of sense. Yeah I love it. I'm going to transition to talking about the next billion developers. And you've alluded to this a few times in the conversation that I really want to just pull in that thread. So you started this, you know, this conversation by saying, you know, there's a certain set of people in the world that know how to code, but there's a difference of the people in this world that have creativity and have ideas. Do you think that's how the people is larger? Is that how we get to the next billion developers? There's an interesting analogy here. We have 30 million software engineers in the world, and we have 750 million active users of Excel.

14:26And now you'll ask, like, how does Wordware compare to Excel? And what Excel did in the 80s to data analytics and numbers is what we were trying to do to AI. So in the 80s, you either had to have a team of data analytics, people or engineers, or you were using a calculator. And I would say the calculator equivalent here is the chart to PT that you every time you need to redo the conversation and you every time you need to instill your own needs into it. What WordWer is trying to do is saying, hey, a lot of the things that you do are repeatable, similar to Excel. And you can encode your taste into it with WordWer.

15:11And I believe that that taste will be important, as mentioned before. And I think the next 500 million or a billion users of AI might be calling them, I don't know it will be the term, hopefully it's word -wred engineer, but word artisan or whoever. And the really important part here is that they need to know what the AI is supposed to do. many, many, many times, you know, we are a horizontal tool and people come to us and they say, hey, what can I do with AI? And I tend to explain it as if for now it's an intern, but intern after university. And you need to write out on a piece of paper, like a piece of paper, get a couple of things that you would want to do with the intern.

16:01So you need to say, hey, This is your job. This is the title of what you're trying to do. Here are some of the documents or input that you'll be working with. Here are the data sources and here's the output that I'm expecting of you. And the important caveat here that people don't often understand is that the data sources has to be something that you trust. You can't just say, hey, go and search the internet Because often you end up with things that you don't agree with. And if the intern works on top of that, that's a problem. And another one is, and this is very important, is that you're going to trust the intern with this.

16:40So, you know, if you want to send a thousand emails to every person that needs a response in your inbox, with some people you just want trust and intern to do this. And this is how AI works right now. So as long as you have a job right now that you say, hey, if I haven't one enter and I could easily explain it to them and a lot of our work is like this right now. We often read an email, go search and dropbox, go search notion, and then we create a response that is essentially based on this database that we curate. Then you can be using AI and I think more and more this knowledge work is going to be automated.

17:22And I think, no, in that way, the next billion people are going to be, they're going to need two things. Intent, what actions to happen, and taste, how do you want to do this? And all of the rest will feel like CEOs of the biggest enterprise because we will have a thousand knowledge workers working beneath us and trying to actually execute on these two things. What I heard just now was a lot of automation about knowledge work. I mean, the thing that I'm most intrigued about within AI and within Geraintube AI is its generative capacity, including the ability to create, you mentioned the George Lucas example, but also to create new applications, new marketplaces, new products.

18:08And so, do you imagine, do you see where primarily serving, making the knowledge worker more productive or do you see it also assisting in kind of the creation of new products, services, you know, pieces of art? For now, it's mostly about the productive work, I would say. It's, you know, the AI engine is the AI heart of your product, this word, where currently we have not dipped into the generative UI part of things. We're not lovable. We've actually used Lovable to wrap our AI heart for some of our customers. And that has worked great. I'm just so impressed with their product. Talk more about this.

18:54Lovable, I think, also sees themselves as enabling the next billion developers. You see, you have a similar vision. How do you think your view of how the world will go, with their view. And like why didn't you choose to make that style of no code tool? Yeah, because the way that I see the word developer is a little bit different. They see the word developer as what developers do today, which is a lot of SAS is a wrap around a database with some dashboard and ability to manipulate that data. They are creating a much more personalized dashboard, you know, and a lot of people are going to create incredible vertical sas based on lovable.

19:44And I think that's incredible. And the one thing that was missing through all of this is that they not only grab the UI part, they also grab the database part, which many people do not know how to manipulate and the hands they unlocked a lot more use cases. Whatever, but what we are trying to say is that this part of like creating a creating a UI on top of a database is not the future. The future is to actually utilize this reasoning engine that an LMLAM is in a productive manner and we focus on that, that, you know, substance of AI at the beginning. In the future, we might want to expose that engine in a UI, maybe it's a chatbot, maybe it's digesting some images, etc.

20:35But the real important part is the AI engine. If you think about an app as there's the UI, there's the application logic, and there's a database. What you're saying is, you really want to just knock it out of the park on the application logic, so to speak. Yes. And I think, you know, the databases that we use to work on, where discrete. And right now, we're able to work on a lot more data, which is not structurized. And this is the big, big difference right now. A lot of sases right now will still work in a similar manner. Just the database is fuzzy. And the database might be what you see every day.

21:17And how the hell would you put that in a typical normal, you know, database? And I think working on top of that context is the really exciting part for me. Let's go back to this concept of word, artisans, or wordware engineers if everything goes right. You know, what's your vision of what a wordware engineer looks like in 10 years? Oh, that's the first one. I've been thinking a lot about what does work look like in 10 years for human beings. And I was struggling with this at the beginning because it's really hard to understand people's jobs even today. And often I boil it down to the software that they use.

22:06They can talk a big game about strategy and I said the mission. And in the end of the day, I ask them, do you do meetings, do you do email, do you do PowerPoint presentations, do you work in Excel? What exact or do you work in code? And I just wanna understand what does work look like in 10 years and like what are you really working with? Is it a hair like the movie hair, like interface when you just talk to the AI and it does a lot of work for you. I think to be honest, voice is kind of not the best modality to express that. Hence, I kind of think that in its simplest form, WordWare is a document where you jot down your thoughts and you do it in a more structured way.

22:51WordWare, a copilot AI is helping you throughout structuring it. And in the end of the day, you behave like a CEO, which sets the strategy intent and all of us on that piece of paper, essentially, on this blank canvas. And you draw that vision, maybe it's even more than words, it's just you generate this vision of how your own enterprise works. And I look at different things around us, and I see furniture, shoes, or whatever. And I think there is taste and grain into what kind of shoes you like to make. So in 10 years, if somebody wants to become a creator of the best brand of shoes, that shoe becomes a luxury object, which has ingrained taste and intent in it.

23:44And then a bunch of things in the end will happen on its own. There are really tough parts, even manufacturing it and so on, will happen on its own. But what's your job in the future is talking to other CEOs. I think we will not, humans don't want to lose that control. So you will talk with other CEOs about maybe doing a partnership with your shoe brand and somebody else. You will have to be still critical about the intent of the other person and you have to instill taste and your own creative vision into that shoe. Do you think that, you know, Do you think a billion people globally will be capable of programming a machine in English language the way you describe or in wordwear documents the way you describe because it does require you know it's almost like pseudo coding and you know there is logic there's there's loops and things like that.

24:38I guess maybe talk about today like do you need to be technical in order to use wordwear like who is the ICP today and what is needed to move that ICP so that you can reach a billion developers. Yeah, I think right now what we've enabled is people who are somewhat technical CEOs, technical PMs, high up in the org chart to and grain their own like kind of think that they know what needs to happen and get their quicker, you know, so, um, mocks from Instacart, for example, he is a founder and he spent four days just, refining his idea in Wordware instead of hiring a whole team, but he is somewhat, you know, analytically minded.

25:23And for now, that's the case. We did not want to make too much magic, because the models were not there. Right now, what we're doing is we're moving more into that blank canvas when you just describe the idea and we take care of guessing the right structure. And you still will be able to, you know, in a very fine, great way, edit it, but you will start playing a lot more. We'll probably use O3 to get you to the first draft of how that flow works. And when we kind of loop back to the future of how it will look like and really whether we'll have 1 billion developers, you know, working in Wordware, it becomes a much bigger question here.

26:06It becomes a question of like, will a billion people want to do productive work? Like, you know, we just talked about the shoe. Many people will have the drive to put out something to the world and they will want to express that create a vision. Maybe in, post -resource scarcity world, most of it will want to work. But I think we'll still have the equivalent of billionaires. And it will be about influence, it will be about taste, and it will be about how you utilize your own resources and how do you multiply it to have the equivalent of future money. And I went a little bit deep here, but I don't know.

26:43For what it's worth, I think that the innate drive to create is a deeply human drive. And I think that exists in a post -capulistic world. I also have that opinion, and I really believe in humans. Like I want them to succeed. Like somebody asked me one of our prospective employees, ask me what like Philip and Teniers, what do you want there to be like what what what what have you done? And I want to save like the human creative vision. I don't want everything to be AI. I really have the pleasure when I go to an artisan shop on my holiday and I know that somebody put in the intent and put in the work and I want to interact with it and I want to interact with the story of it.

27:25Okay, so today your ICP is the analytical creative which is a little bit of a unicorn And over time, as you can lower, as the models get better, as you iterate on your interface, you'll lower the bar. So they'll really be just more of the creative as your ideal user. You're going to lower the bar of how analytical you need to be in R2Us. Yes, but at the same time, my use of the word creative is not to what most people associated with right now. I think a good creative is also using growth channels in the right They are creative about everything that they do in this new uncertain word of AI where everything is changing.

28:04And, you know, I'm not thinking only about an artist that's painting on the canvas. It's, I think creativity is, can basically show itself in so many different aspects of work. Let's talk about user in our faces and, you know, the future, GUIs, the GUIs of the future. right before we filmed this podcast, you made the analogy that, you know, Transformers are the new transistor. Maybe say a little bit more about that and what you think the new GUI is going to be. So I think the analogy here is that if the LLM is the, well, if Transformers, the new transistor and it's being packaged as the model, the model is kind of the mainframe.

28:47Let's call it, you know, and then we took our sweet time to to utilize the power of that mainframe in a GUI that's accessible by billions of people. There has been really two big spikes there. The first was the desktop and Apple came coming up with their GUI. And the second one's mobile. Right now we are almost like exposing the numbers and the logic in a chat style thing and nobody has had a better idea. We think that the document style is better for creating, like doing kind of more complex work. Because often when you're trying to achieve something, you just give it two sentences and the model just runs on its own.

29:37And it's just enough that two sentences, our lead investor recently said that the two sentences is just about enough for a model to hang itself on. And you know, you will get something completely different than what you actually wanted. And this is a problem like lovable and devins of this world as well. But I basically think that there are better GUIs coming and you know whether they will be based on AR or you know there will be an assistant that's listening to everything that we do. I was actually my first company augmenting human memory of always on listening devices using GPT2 and Bert. I've been in this I mean, I might research was done into LSTM's, which are the burgers or do the transformer architecture.