Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch: Building the Generative Web with AI

27:21We also wanted to make sure that everybody that works at Versailles, you know, we've hired some of the best hardest working people that have mastered the ins and outs of web and cloud infrastructure. And a lot of companies come to us saying, can I hire you for professional services or support? And typically the answer has been, look, we have over a hundred thousand customers. Our ability to give comprehensive professional service support is extremely limiting, but it would love to help you out. Now we have a mechanism because we can sell them our AI agent and they can get as much of a direct access to my brain and my CTO's brain to answer their problems.

28:06And then we have V0 which actually tries to go even more ambitious, right? Let's write the code for them. So in many ways, actually, you can look at all of this disruption from the lens of the most excellent customer service you could give on the planet. Customers have been asking us, hey, Rouch G, can you give a workshop? I gave a workshop many, many years ago and I wish I had the bandwidth to do more of those. AI, I feel, is that human amplifier of our business, that token factory that Jens and talks about for our business. And the other big change is that as you look at all of the other areas of our business, like firewall and security, like observability, all of the foundations of our cloud, we are also disrupting those with AI.

28:51So imagine an agent that instead of reporting that your workload is experienced in 500 errors, can actually give you a poor request with a solution. And it will be rooted in the same systems that are making us good at generating applications, will use them to repair production applications and to optimize them. How far are we from just fully self -driving infrastructure? I know you've automated it a lot. How far are we from the picture you just painted? I think we're practically almost there. So it depends on each domain. The best case scenario we have for sale being able to automatically scale for any kind of workload.

29:29And in the worst case scenario, we can give you a really good investigation of whatever problem you're experiencing that is completely autonomous. So going back to the evolution of the company, I think the biggest sticking point was you have to land the developer experience in order to get all of this upside in the autonomous infrastructure. What I'm excited about is that if you now know you don't even have to convince the developers if it's the agents that are falling into those pits of success with the frameworks then you can have much broader impact with this autonomous infrastructure. Maybe on a related point why has chat GPT been such an effective source of new customers and leads for you?

30:17Yeah we shared recently that this sourcing of signups to herself from chatGbD has been growing exponentially. So I think there's a couple factors. When we created the AISDK, which you can think of as the next share of AI, it's a framework to allow developers to connect to LLMs. We put out this playground that essentially allows you to talk to multiple LLMs at the same time. So it creates this column layout. And you can say, what's better? Color Pepsi. You can see all the different LMs respond with their opinions. We've used this system over time to understand what are the innate vibes of the LLMs around different technologies.

31:03And I can tell you exactly how and why this neural network is thinking. In fact, LLM interpretability is its own field of study. But over time, if you ask it, what is the best way to deploy a React application? Do do all of its training data, do do all of the sourcing of all of the opinions and writings and solutions and GitHub issues and everything it's trained on, it's chosen for sale a lot of the time. We had an anecdote the other day which was fascinating at the AI engineering. I think this is a sign of the changing times. At the AI engineering conference in San Francisco, we had a booth and one of our colleagues told me that people would come to our booth and tell them that they'd learned of their sell because chat GPD told them to use Versel.

31:49This kind of changes how marketing is done. Because it used to be that people would find out about Versel because they watch the podcast like this. And you know, to some extent that will still happen. Things for having me. But now there is this, you know, you're going directly to your AI buddy to learn about the world. How many? The other aspect is that AI's are still grounded in themselves in search. To get access to the cutting edge, breaking news, new data, etc. So they are performing Google searches. So I always advise our customers to still be mindful of like, look, you still have to rank high and create good content.

32:24The kinds of content I think that you're going to be writing in the future are different. I think you're going to have to be thinking about, look, people are no longer doing keyword -based searches for certain kinds of problems. They're asking questions. The questions may be more precise in some senses, the questions might be in some other aspects might be broader. And so we've been trying to think LLM first in how we also publish the internet. And I think we've had some good results. People are hypothesizing that just creating FAQ type content helps a lot because you're kind of matching one to one when people could be asking.

33:02I think overall it's a great outcome for the internet. Like we're all asking questions and we have these machines that can digest the answers and help us navigate the immense sea of content that is the web. So you don't have to promise your firstborn kid to open AI in the robots .txt file? That's right. That's right. So you still have the navigate. Does OpenAI like me? Does Grog like me? So hopefully you're in good terms with all of them. I love it. Could you say where the competitive chessboard playing out? And the way I say it, everyone is trying to get to this ultimate goal of you have an idea of the thing you want to build.

33:41And then you actually have a full, kind of finished application hosted deployed. But there's different approaches people are taking, everything from your approach to, you know, let me, let me win the IDE to let me go from the design back. The way Figma is going. How do you think all this plays out and does it all converge? Yeah, I have a couple frameworks. I think nobody will have the exact answer at this point, but I'll give you a couple frameworks of thought that I have one is this idea of virtual co -workers so Adversail we have you know designers developers marketers etc. We'll now have virtual designers virtual marketers virtual developers Probably you can think of this as agents, but there is a wrinkle.

34:26These are expert agents I think over time people will always start with the double final of like the broad safety net of I'll go to chat GBD or I'll go to quad for my broad knowledge questions But then I think over time you're gonna realize well like I'm coming back to this thing With this very specific set of problems. Is there something better? I think it'll come naturally, right? Like we've spoken extensively about Very successful for sell customers like open evidence and if you've heard of it and gc .ai. I love these two examples because one is my expert, you know, healthcare physician, they have a chat chat, but they source it in the frontier data and they continue to improve their models to provide better accuracy, domain expertise, et cetera, not unlike V0, right, but for web development.

35:19And the other one is gc .ai, which I love because the same thing, law, legal, you have Harvey in the same space. You have Thin Tool and Hebrew and Perplexity sort of answering some of the financial, agent questions, etc. So I see a world of millions, if not hundreds of millions of agents, and I think companies have to think about, you know, if I was a digital native and I came to market with a SAS style dashboard UI, if I came to a market with a marketing website or a content website, etc. You must be asking yourself the hard question of like, all right. If I was reinvented today, my interface would probably be agentic.

36:00And I have two broad categorizations of agents. You have the synchronous agents. This is open evidence or chat -gbd. You go there and you ask a question and you get an answer right away. I think that was kind of the first generation. And then you have the more potentially interesting long term, which is the asynchronous agents. These are the agents that can work and solve broader problems and can collaborate with other agents potentially, with other humans, not just you, and can work for prolonged amounts of time. So we're starting to blur those lines with products like V0 because sometimes we might go deeper into a task that you give us and we might orchestrate several steps in a row.

36:42Think of it as like, well, if you come to us and you say, build me an interface that's optimal for e -commerce. Maybe the agent will do some research first on what it is exactly that you need. So that's almost like an extra step, right? The other class that is super emergent is you look you see this with the IDE market your IDE with AI is your synchronous agent interface But then you're vibing from bed and you have a new idea and you're like, hey, I Just came up with the idea to fix that problem and you tell the agent to cook on it and come back to you with a poor request And so what I encourage people to think about the front -ends are still immensely important You have to think about the output frontend because at the end of all that work, there is something that comes out.

37:31Your artifact, it might be a website, it might be a port request, it might be a chat message that asks you for your confirmation or whatever. You also have to think about capturing people's attention, the input side. You have to, if I'm a doctor, I have to memorize, okay, what is the interface that I go to? And you have to make that really ergonomic. One thing that I've noticed by studying UI a lot is, there is a sense that agents actually are their own modality, and that it's very hard to like, merge them together with the existing things. This is why, for sale, we chose to create a new entry point and a new app, v0 .dev.

38:12If you are Google, you have a tough challenge ahead of you. This is why they're calling their agent to interface AI mode. It's almost like a separate product. Kind of like Google Maps is a separate product. So there is a type of final you go to Google, but then you have to like choose your warrior. Do I go AI mode? Do I go maps? Do I go images? Or do I go traditional keywords search? So I still encourage people to sort of sweat the details on how are you finding the customer? And are you creating a very ergonomic entry point into that intelligence agent? Can you say more about why in your case, it makes sense for it to be a separate product?

38:53Yeah, so think of it as there's two classes of users. You have the developer that might be thinking about creating more of a platform, right? You might be thinking about the developer that is more experienced and maybe already has an existing infrastructure project, maybe they have already get how repository, et cetera, they're not going to come into an interface that is purely conversational. Right? And so they're seeking a different style of engagement with Versel. So that's why I always encourage people to think about, look, if you're creating the V0 of the future, go to Versel because you're going to need a different set of tools to create a platform.

39:36The world, I think, is splitting almost into two classes of developers, the ones that are apps and the ones that are creating platforms. And so if you're creating an app, we want you to have the easiest possible onboarding journey that is, again, more conversational. If you're creating a platform, we're still making it really easy for you. So like we give you templates, we give you starting points that are really meaningful, but there's still a sense of like you're going to have to roll up your sleeves and like have to do a little bit more of a traditional like developer work and engagement. This is why the metaphor that I use for the VCR style products is think of it as Waymo where in the ideal experience there's never a human operator But there's still a very small chance that there is a disengagement and Waymo calls home and a human has to intervene So I think of her cell as a platform that has like the human is more center on the human intervention where you're creating a platform by your more of an expert, and you're still going to have a lot of AI tools in your journey.

40:40But V0 is the dream of that self -driving car that end -to -end you never disengage. If you happen to have to disengage, we have integrations, we're building integrations to code editors, where you can say, okay, this is as far as I got, let me eject into something like cursor or VS code. But I think as LLMs continue to improve, you're going to see this V0 side of the world, and take more and more and more and more of that type of final. I myself as a coder have not used the more traditional coding tools in a while. I just use B0 because again, it's with my limited time in bandwidth as a CEO, I'm obsessed about like time to, from idea to online and B0 fits that bill perfectly.

41:24So, B0 and kind of the overall trend of making it easier and more seamless for people to produce software is almost certainly going to lead to more apps, more software in the world. Will it also lead to better apps, better software in the world, or will it just produce more noise? I think it'll lead to better apps for sure. To check myself, what I do very frequently is, I analyze the categories of errors that our customers are falling into or ourselves are falling into. And I always ask myself, could a model have solved this problem? And this takes a form rigorously of evaluations into our product.

42:06So whenever we see, I kind of mentioned that it seems silly, but like the, you know, the background color between the Safari bar and your content has to match. That is easily and trivially trainable so that we can embed it and then we can put it into the hands of millions of people. The other thing we do is our security research team is constantly on the lookout for what are the broad classes of vulnerabilities that are impacting websites and web applications. And I shared a story not too long ago that our CTO found the vulnerability in an open source framework. Luckily, we helped them catch it and repair it before this version of the product broadly went out.

42:51What we did right after is we created an e -vow against all of the frontier coding models. We gave the task of the models of like, look, this is the poor request. Do you notice something wrong? And I can't remember how many of them got it right, but several of them got it right. It was a pretty non -trivial vulnerability. And I remember at the time I thought to myself, the next version of this, is that we can give LLMs existing code basis and have them spend tokens and tokens and tokens until they find problems like this. Lo and behold, recently a news came out that in the Linux kernel, someone found that use after free vulnerability, which is considered very high severity, because you can lead it to a segmentation fault, a crash, a denial of service type of attack at best, or at worst, you can lead it to data leaks, cryptographic secret leaks, etc., etc., remote code execution vulnerabilities, the worst kind of vulnerabilities on the planet.

44:01And this was done by 03, almost exclusively. There was some prompting, but it wasn't like nothing extraordinary. And I've spoken with people that are very seasoned Linux kernel engineers and they told me, look, the reality is that there is a lot of those. And one of them kind of trivialized the finding because he said, look, if I spend all of my time doing this, I could find other use after free will vulnerabilities. But the problem is that exactly that there isn't that many Linux kernel experts and that they don't have the bandwidth to find these kind of vulnerabilities. So the reality is that I think, you know, you're going to see LLMs that create code that is secure by construction.

44:46This is as LLMs get better at more formal languages, as they get better at rust, as they get better at safe languages of which, by the way, TypeScript is one of them. You're going to see that LLMs are producing more secure code for the world. You're going to see that the next hard bleed won't happen in a world of AI written code. Now for people that are listening to me, they're really like, wow, this guy is so optimistic. We're also hearing that LMS are leaking secrets into web browsers, like literally shipping database secrets into client -side code. What I'm very happy to report is that V0 has prevented tens of thousands of such vulnerabilities.

45:28Last I checked with one of our AI research engineers, it was a thousand vulnerabilities prevented per day relative to what the LM had the inclination to ship. And this is where you were asking me what are some of the intrinsic advantages that Versel has. Well, Versel has really a really powerful set of infrastructure primitives where we can ship code that the LM generates to the server side and deploy it instantly. If it's interactive, we can ship it to the client side. So our ability to guide the LLM towards the secure outcome is really, really high. We can basically do what I would recommend and what we in the documentation would recommend the human do.

46:09We can do an autopilot, but it's not just security. It's also performance. We're very excited about bringing agents that automatically do the performance optimizations that I still recommend to entrepreneurs by hand. Like a kid you're not. I will DM you an X where I will text you saying, oh, I noticed this glitch here That is non trivial to find by frameworks. Why is it non trivial to find because they happen at runtime? One of the things that it makes web engineering actually extremely complex is that it's not a discrete process It's not a function that takes an input and immediately produces a result It's in in programming language lingo.

46:51You can think of it as a generator It produces multiple values over time. It's like a set. So when you go to a website, it's giving you information over time. So for a website to be performant, everything that is coming through your retinas has to fall in the right place. Companies like Avable are amazing at this because so much of this is like literally the human testing. Does it feel right? They do a lot of demos. They have a culture of like putting it into people's hands before it goes out into the world. So what I want to do is give all of this tasks to an AI that performs that quality judgment, that performs the performance of optimization and is rooted in all of the data that gets captured in production, so that by the next generation your software gets better.

47:40Another computer use agent is getting good, you can actually go and look through and see how the experience is. Absolutely, like an agent that just uses the product and finds problems, right? So many of the startup pitfalls that I see is I literally cannot log in or sign up to your product Like literally like you give me a rel and something happened in that critical path. So fun, finance boat. This week, this past weekend my fun hobby task was I'm gonna try every product in the Speech to Text operating system category which is super hot right now. There's three products that people are using very broadly.

48:20Two of them, I had problems in that critical phase of getting to the aha moment. So that meant, you know, coming to the website, downloading the app, signing up, giving operating system permissions, it's a very delicate process. It's actually like hardcore distributed systems problem. Everything can fail and it's a very delicate time to aha that you're optimizing for. And the system is so dynamic that I'm sure that the entrepreneur's thought at some point, this is rock solid. Trust me bro. Like it does that it works perfect. But so many things can go wrong that what you actually want is a QA agent that is just constantly checking this stuff.

49:02Especially for the critical paths. Totally. Buying something, signing up, contacting sales, downloading the thing, and in the real world things or the city of Amazon has this meme or phrase is, everything is failing all of the time. And so you need robots that are constantly watching everything and repairing it. Do you think that we end up in a world of a lot of disposable apps or like what happens in the world where everyone is creating lots of apps all the time? Yeah, I think I've always thought the idea that an app is a permanent thing. The idea that you download and install, the idea that you, obviously on the Mac, you download at DMG, which is a kind of temporary volume.

49:52It's a relic of the paths that we get to experience very frequently. You mount a temporary volume that later you have to eject from finder and then you have to drag and drop from the volume to applications folder. And now at that point it's installed. And it's like a responsibility. like this is your puppy now, like take care of him, feed him over time. And then you have to launch it. And so that's insane to me because I'm team web where everything is instantaneous. Go to chatgbd .com, go to v0 .dev, right? And so I've always been on this philosophical fight against on one side, the gatekeeping of the app stores and so on, not only on sort of like this like idealistic and philosophical sense, but also on the latency and friction they introduce for end users.

50:38It's insane. You go to the app store on iOS and yes, you don't have a DMG that you mount, but you have to download the app which has, takes hundreds of megabytes and it takes forever to download. So the web has always fell to me as the end means of distribution and the best platform to actually host a GI. And I think of the web as being the place where everything will be generative just in time for everybody. So I think it's even more ambitious that personal software or ephemeral apps. I think you won't even notice it's an ephemeral app. Everything will be ephemeral for that matter. And the battle here or the realization from me here was, and it happens very frequently still, I have this aversion now to searching for software because the idea that it can generate it seems in my mind to beat the total latency of finding the software installing it.

51:41So we're in this race between if the generations continue to get better, quality, performance, security, reliability, then it's gonna be an unwinnable battle for the downloadable installable procurable God forbid. Like you have to procure the software. It's just an impossible battle to win. So I'm team, yeah, fully generative software forever. That's interesting. I'm thinking about that in the context of your comment earlier about how you have to think about your customer who is the developer and also your customer's customer who is the end user. Does that mean that eventually your developer customer is not producing a single app that's going to serve a bunch of users?

52:24Those users are each somehow interfacing. Yes. Something the developer has done on V0 or on Vercel. That's right. It's generating applications on the fly. That's right. For each individual user. That's right. That's wild. Yeah. It's almost like a direct human to agent interface, right? Yeah, yeah. And yes, I think developers will be creating agents. As agentic platforms is kind of my distinction, right? That's why I was mentioning, if that's your goal, you probably are going to oversell. But if your goal is to actually generate apps, you're going to be zero. in VZero itself might become sort of the engine of generation of this future internet.

53:00You know, we're starting to see some integrations into web browsers, especially now with the model where people can just call VZero just in time from existing applications and existing distribution channels. The battle will continue for where users go in. What are the frontents that they're spending time in? And I think those are the things that we need to continue to Pay attention to. Reminds me of that Jensen quote, AI sense. If like, little pixels will be generated not rendered. Yes, yes. Like that for your web experience as well. Really cool. Should we wrap up with some rapid -fire questions?

53:33Let's go. OK. Favorite AI app right now? Well, it's zero. OK. Favorite AI app I've been doing. Outside of the zero. Outside of your own baby. OK. I'm really into this new, as I mentioned, talk about self -disruption. I grew up known as the kid that typed really fast. I'm really into this new category of super whisper, whisper flow, the speech to text that involves people's minds. It's fascinating to play with. Pat types really slow, so he must be excited about that. It's funny. I actually started taking typing lessons. I'd get better at that. We did a typing competition one day when we were bored.

54:13Oh, that's so cool. It's the one. I won. Okay, nice. Me and an Andrew. I was like a bear so far behind. But I'll tell you what it is impressive that I can do 90 words per minute with like Two to four fingers. By the way, so It's it's indicative of future success at Versailles that we hire people that are fast typists. Yes, so You should buy. Okay, by the way, by the way, by the way, the the really cool thing is There's something about intelligence having evolved through modern, dexterity. Like the things that you do for a kid when they're growing up, like the tests that you give them when like they're very little is like how is their speech evolving like them like clear sign of like development, but also how is their dexterity can they can they grab can they grasp so you should we all collectively should continue to learn how to type fast, but it's really cool that now there's a speech that takes things are so mind -bogglingly fast.

55:15Love that. Who do you admire in the world of AI? Carpathi. So funny enough, when he introduced a term vibe coding, he talked about using super whisper as I'm just going to speak and applications will be generated. I think he laid out a great vision of the future that is coming into fruition. and obviously he did it also before at Tesla with self -driving. So I think it's hugely inspiring. Recommended reading. Recommended reading. Your Twitter. I do love X. Okay, so there's a bunch of engineering articles that I love. But okay, so one that comes to mind is there was an article that was called The Five Wise.

56:04And I think it was called like the five wise and why the world is about to get weirder Hmm. It actually talks about Irreplane crashes sadly it was one today and and he talks about how rare they are and Because they've gotten so rare the world has been Studying and adding patches and protocols and fixes so that nothing bad happens again And it's a very interesting sort of mental model on what the world of AI, this article doesn't deal with AI, but it talks about a future in which we've perfected and refined so many things. The things that bubble up, the things that are going to come into your X feed of the future are going to be the wildest.

56:51Because yeah, everything is getting so good so fast that it's whatever breaks the norm goes from zero to taking over the world. You'll start to see a little bit of this with startups. I don't even notice that the pace at which they're growing. How weird sometimes the things that they do to get big or get attention are, which I'm not exactly a fan of, but this article was fully predictive of. In the world of AI, what's overhyped? What's underhyped? I think underhyped is so easy. LLamps are so capable and there's so many great applications, so many agents to be created and shipped. And so I'm a team, all right, even if we froze everything as it exists, the amount of value that the world will get, the amount of successful entrepreneurs will see in the future building on this new platforms.

57:46It is a new platform, it's a platform shift. It requires that you rewire your brain, which is very hard to do. And luckily for some people, they're just going to be born into this and they're just going to see a lot of upside, right? It's very good underhived, like being an engineer that never learned anything of the old world. And now can, you know, one of my banger tweets recently was almost like a confession. I feel like the more honest and like the more I confess, you know, AI's are like this confident that you trust with everything and especially around like not asking silly questions. Like there's nothing that's a silly question.

58:27There's no embarrassment. And so the right of improvement over world models, mental models, the things that you're going to be competent at, you were before constrained by either what your personality was. If we're kind of Aspie, maybe you had a lower bear filter for asking important and interesting questions. Now you can just ask any question in the world and get good at anything. You can truly know it all. I'm really jealous of someone's growing up today with his psychic magic powers. Overhyped. I take such a long -term view that it's hard for me to find something that's truly overhyped. I'll be hyped about Bitcoin at its peak.

59:12I'll be hyped about crypto. I've been hyped about crypto for years through laws, winter, summers, whatever because you know All money will be digital of course and all software will be AI So it's very hard for me to like say well that's over hyped if you take a very long long long -term view Yeah, great answer. Okay last question time lines. When do you think we'll get to that Utopia of the kind of generative web. I think in the next five years, we'll see the biggest transformation to the web in its interfaces, in the habits of people, in the number of creators that are coming into participating in the web, even five cents like a lot.

59:56I will even say in the next three years, we're going to see kingdoms collapse in a sense of like, you know, companies that were born on the internet that have not been able to make those adjustments fast enough in the new AI native companies rise to, as we were speaking earlier, like unprecedented heights very, very quickly. Wonderful. Garemo, thank you so much for taking the time to share with us your vision for the future of the web and the generative web and Vercels role in creating that. Thank you for having me. That was fun. Thank you.