How Based is Grok 3? + Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev on Markets For Everything + Vibecoding 101

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Speaker 4 I am having quite a morning, Casey. So I was on the escalator.
I was on the train today. I got off.
I went up the escalator at Embarcadero. You know, it's a very long escalator.
It is.

Speaker 4 And, you know, very crowded rush hour. And someone bumped into me and knocked my phone out of my hand.
Uh-oh. onto the platform below.

Speaker 4 And so I thought, okay, well, I'm midway up the escalator.

Speaker 5 Wait, so how far did it drop?

Speaker 3 Probably 15 feet. Okay.
Like a significant drop. Big drop.

Speaker 4 And I thought to myself, if I get to the end of this escalator and come back down,

Speaker 4 it's going to be too late. Someone will have snatched it or accidentally kicked it onto the tracks.
Like my phone has been.

Speaker 5 Wait, you do not have much faith in the citizens of San Francisco.

Speaker 3 I think a visited San Francisco.

Speaker 5 Yes, I think a phone could generally survive 30 seconds on the ground, but I guess we'll find out what happens.

Speaker 4 Anyway, well, I had severe separation anxiety in the split second before I decided to do what I did, which was to try to run down the crowded up escalator.

Speaker 4 So I became that guy who was like pushing through the commuters, being like, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

Speaker 3 And it took forever because the escalator was moving in the opposite direction.

Speaker 5 So I started my morning by alienating and possibly injuring some people on my way down to retrieve my phone.

Speaker 4 And I would just like to formally apologize to everyone at the Embarcadero subway stop between 8.15 and 8.30 this morning.

Speaker 5 You were like sort of of a character in a bad comedy running down the up escalator.

Speaker 5 You know, I heard, I was at that platform this morning and I heard a woman screaming, but now I'm realizing that was you.

Speaker 3 Did you get the phone? I did. It's safe.

Speaker 3 No cracks. It was retrieved.

Speaker 4 But yeah, that was a wild way to start my day.

Speaker 5 Well, thank you to all the good Samaritans of San Francisco who did not steal Kevin's phone during the 30 seconds when it was on the floor.

Speaker 5 It kind of restores your faith in humanity a bit.

Speaker 3 Oh,

Speaker 3 it does.

Speaker 4 I'm Kevin Russ, a tech columnist at the New York Times.

Speaker 5 I'm Casey Newton from Platformer.

Speaker 4 And this is Hard Fork.

Speaker 5 This week, are you ready to grok? How Elon Musk's latest AI model could serve his larger ambitions.

Speaker 5 Then, Robin Hood CEO Vlad Tenev stops by the studio to make his case for letting everyone invest in everything.

Speaker 5 And finally, lock down your computers. Kevin is attempting to vibe code.
And the vibes are off.

Speaker 4 Let's go.

Speaker 5 Well, Kevin, once again, an upstart AI lab has the tech world talking with the release of a powerful new large language model.

Speaker 5 But unlike the others, this one might be running the federal government by springtime.

Speaker 5 This week, XAI, which is Elon Musk's AI company, released its latest model, Grok3.

Speaker 5 And based on their own benchmark results and early reviews, it seems like it is basically on par with the best models that are out there right now.

Speaker 5 And while it hasn't been subjected to rigorous independent testing, the early word from AI nerds is that it is pretty good. So, Kevin, what is Grok3?

Speaker 4 Well, Grok3 is the new sort of premium tier model of Grok, which is XAI's AI model.

Speaker 4 It is available to premium plus subscribers on X, which is their $40 a month premium tier, which is cheaper than OpenAI's most powerful plan, which is $200 a month.

Speaker 4 But it is also built into X, the former Twitter app. So if you've been on X recently, I know you don't go on there anymore, but I do.
There's a tab where you can just open up Grok.

Speaker 4 And if you are a paying subscriber, which I'm not, but I somehow got past the velvet rope because I used to be verified or something, you can actually use it.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I should say that I actually have used Grok3 for this exact same reason, which is I have just been given free access to this thing for some reason.

Speaker 5 I guess the Department of X Efficiency or Docs has not yet uncovered my account.

Speaker 3 Right.

Speaker 4 We've both played around with it a little bit. What were your impressions of Grok3?

Speaker 5 Well, you know, like others who have commented, it seems like it is about as good as some of the other models.

Speaker 5 When I asked Grok about itself, it said Grok3's launch is a pivotal moment in AI. Seemed like a bit much.

Speaker 5 But I also asked it if it had an opinion about Platformer, my newsletter, and it actually said some really nice things,

Speaker 5 which I had to respect.

Speaker 5 I asked about the New York Times as well, by the way, expecting I would get some sort of angry tirade about it, but it was actually pretty even-handed and praise you guys for a lot of what you do over there.

Speaker 5 How about you? What has you been doing with it?

Speaker 4 So I put it through some of my, you know, proprietary evals.

Speaker 4 I actually do have things that I test AI models on.

Speaker 3 The Roost benchmarks.

Speaker 4 The Roost benchmarks. And yeah, I would say it did okay.
It was like not mind-blowingly good. It was not bad.

Speaker 4 It got some things that other models missed and vice versa. It did have access to X data, which is interesting.

Speaker 4 You can do things like tell it to analyze this person's posts on X and tell me what they think about this topic.

Speaker 5 You know, I asked it, you know, there's this sort of famous question that we always love to ask large language models. So if, you know, can you count the R's and strawberry?

Speaker 5 I asked Grok the equivalent question for X, which is, can you count Elon Musk's children? Which is known to be very difficult for large language models. Well, a new one just dropped.
Exactly.

Speaker 5 And that's why it's so hard for them to keep up.

Speaker 4 And part of Elon Musk's pitch for Grok for the past year or so has been that this is going to be

Speaker 4 a relatively uncensored AI model. It's not going to give you these sort of like, you know, progressive responses.

Speaker 4 It'll tell you the truth, cut through the BS, you know, get to the sort of ground level reality. And so I decided to test it out.
I asked it, how many genders are there?

Speaker 4 And it said, the question of how many genders exist depends on the context. Gender is fluid.
Some argue there are only two. Others say there are many, sometimes dozens.
There's no hard number.

Speaker 4 So it gave you sort of the progressive take on gender, which I have to imagine Elon Musk will be trying to stamp out.

Speaker 5 I have to tell you, this is like my actual fantasy for like the rise of super intelligence is that when you do train it on all human knowledge, it is essentially incapable of having anything other than progressive values.

Speaker 5 Like if you actually make the smartest thing in the world, it winds up sort of being infused with like kindness and empathy and respect for all lives.

Speaker 5 I don't have any expectation that that will be the actual case, but it does seem like so far, when you train these models on the data that everyone trains these models on, you do get these actually like pretty sweet, kind, progressive models.

Speaker 5 That's like kind of interesting.

Speaker 4 Yeah. And I'm sure Elon Musk will be fiddling with the dials here to try to get it to say the things that he wants rather than the things that it's sort of naturally going to say.

Speaker 4 But he has been bragging about how base this thing is, how unwoke it is. And I just want to say in my own testing, that does not appear to be true.

Speaker 5 All right. So that's the new model.
It seems like there's a new one of these every few days. Kevin, what are some things that you think are really interesting about Grok?

Speaker 4 So I think the product of Grok itself is actually not that interesting right now. It's a pretty sort of bog standard, like AI models.

Speaker 4 Very capable, but there's no real compelling reason that if you're subscribing to ChatGPT or Claude or any of the other tools, that you should switch over

Speaker 4 because it's not free. And unless you've been sort of ushered in

Speaker 4 like we have, you are going to have to pay 40 bucks a month for it. So, the more interesting thing about Grok to me is they have done this so fast.

Speaker 4 Like they have gone from a very bad V1 model to a pretty capable V3 model in about the span of a year.

Speaker 5 Yeah, so that is super quick. But I wonder how impressive you really find that.

Speaker 5 It seems like the knowledge for how to build a state-of-the-art large language model is mostly just published on the internet, free for anyone to use.

Speaker 5 And it kind of seems like anyone who has the money can just go out and make one of of these things. And maybe we shouldn't expect it to take much more than a year or so.

Speaker 5 So what's so impressive about that to you?

Speaker 4 So one impressive thing is just how quickly they were able to marshal the physical infrastructure that you need to build one of these models.

Speaker 4 I mean, they built this giant data center in Memphis, Tennessee called Colossus.

Speaker 4 They apparently have something like 200,000 NVIDIA GPUs, which like you can't just show up to a Best Buy and place an order for 200,000 NVIDIA GPUs. Like that costs billions of dollars.

Speaker 4 And you have to have, you know, a special relationship with NVIDIA, which Elon Musk does. Tesla's been a big customer of theirs for years.

Speaker 4 So basically they were able to scale this data center up very, very quickly, much more quickly than equivalent efforts by Microsoft and Amazon and other companies.

Speaker 4 And, you know, we know that Elon Musk, for all of his foibles, does know how to sort of move quickly and build things

Speaker 4 much more efficiently than more traditional incumbents.

Speaker 4 And so maybe this is just another story like that of where he was able, just through throwing tons of money and expertise at a problem, he was able to do something that other companies couldn't do as quickly.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 5 So I'm curious how you think about Grok in relation to DeepSeek, right? Like DeepSeek is the most recent of these other LLMs that we talked about on the show.

Speaker 5 DeepSeek, made by a Chinese company, also seems like it kind of came out of nowhere, although maybe the sort of parent company had been around for longer than XAI.

Speaker 5 That model was impressive, I think, for how quickly it was trained.

Speaker 5 And I think it was impressive because it was built using less powerful technology than Elon Musk had access to and seemingly had required a lot of technical innovations that it looks like other labs are now going to copy.

Speaker 5 Grok, on the other hand, to me, just looks like a case of Elon Musk throwing money at a problem. Does that seem fair?

Speaker 4 Yeah, I mean, it's the, these are the sort of the two approaches that people see to increasing the intelligence of AI models.

Speaker 4 One is you find some sort of like algorithmic breakthrough that allows you to do the same thing with much less compute. The other is to just build a bigger data center, right?

Speaker 4 The other is just the scale play.

Speaker 4 And that is essentially what Elon Musk has done. Here, we should say that's not like cheating.
That's how all of the American labs have been doing this for the past several years.

Speaker 4 It's just that he was able to move very quickly and do it.

Speaker 5 Well, and they also invested a lot more in the underlying research and published some of the research that Elon Musk's team then used to go build Grock.

Speaker 3 Correct.

Speaker 4 I mean, this is built on the shoulders of a lot of other models. And that is sort of what we're seeing now.

Speaker 4 I was talking with someone yesterday, just trying to sort of get their read on like, is this a big deal or not? And this person was saying, basically, look, there are so many models coming out.

Speaker 4 Every day now, practically, there's a new model. What's important is not the individual models and their scores on these benchmark tests.

Speaker 4 And like, oh, did Claude pull ahead of Gemini by one point on this math test?

Speaker 4 There have basically been a couple of changes that have been sort of made in the past couple of years that have really mattered more than anything else.

Speaker 4 One was the ChatGPT moment where people sort of realized large language models were working.

Speaker 4 Then there was this change with the reasoning models like O1 from OpenAI was the first sort of glimpse we got of this test time compute paradigm.

Speaker 4 And basically everything since then has just been people catching up to what happened in that change.

Speaker 5 All right. So let's get into what Grock tells us about Elon Musk's larger ambitions.
Has this changed the way that you see him fitting into this larger competition to build super intelligence?

Speaker 4 I mean, it suggests that he is willing to spend a phenomenal amount of money and

Speaker 4 basically do everything he can to stay with the head of the pack on AI progress.

Speaker 4 It also just, I was thinking about, do you remember after ChatGPT came out, there was this letter, the six-month pause letter?

Speaker 3 Of course.

Speaker 4 People were talking about the existential risks and some of the catastrophic harms.

Speaker 4 And maybe we need to give the safety researchers a little more time to sort of catch up with the capabilities researchers.

Speaker 4 And so Elon Musk was at the time very publicly concerned with how fast AI progress was accelerating. He signed the six-month pause letter.

Speaker 4 He put out a bunch of statements about how worried he was about how fast this was all moving.

Speaker 4 And now, of course, we know that at the same time that he was telling everyone else to slow down, he was racing to build his own AI models that could compete.

Speaker 4 So it does sort of cast his previous concerns about AI acceleration and the AI arms race into a very different light when we know that he just wanted time to catch up.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 5 And while I don't generally like to inquire about people's motives, because I think it's just very difficult to understand what's going on in anyone's head, what do we think Musk's goal here is?

Speaker 5 Is it as simple as just beating everyone to the punch and creating super intelligence?

Speaker 4 I think it's partly that. I mean, this is a person who has been thinking about AI and superintelligence for a long time.
He was obviously one of the founders of OpenAI. He provided initial funding.

Speaker 4 He then very publicly split from OpenAI and now has this sort of vendetta against the company. He's suing them.
He's trying to offer to buy them.

Speaker 4 So I think for him, this is just a race that he wants to win. He believes, I think, that we will build something like super intelligence and he wants to get there before anyone else.

Speaker 4 I don't think it's about making money. Obviously, he's already quite rich.
He's the world's richest man.

Speaker 4 I don't think he sees this as a way to, I don't know, recoup his investment in Twitter or anything like that. I think this is pure power.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I think that that sounds right. I think that he is a very competitive person, like most of these tech Titans.

Speaker 5 And I think the prospect that Sam Altman, his sort of former friend and colleague, would beat him. Nemesis.

Speaker 3 We can call it a nemesis.

Speaker 5 The idea that Sam Altman, who is Musk's nemesis, would beat him to the punch, I think, is infuriating, right? And I don't think that Musk is alone in that.

Speaker 5 I think that most of the AI Lab CEOs have a lot of ego in this race and want to be the ones whose name is written in the history books as the person who built super intelligence.

Speaker 5 So yeah, I think that's a huge portion of it.

Speaker 5 Let me bring up the other thing that I think is the aspect of this story that really makes this interesting and probably worrisome as well, which is that in this moment, Elon Musk is a seat of power in the federal government.

Speaker 5 He is the fourth branch. He is the fourth branch of the government, the unelected fourth branch of the government.
He has a team that is now dismantling whole swaths of the federal government.

Speaker 5 They have been talking about using AI in government without telling us too much about what AI they're using or how that works. And, you know, certainly it's not auditable or

Speaker 5 really available for public scrutiny. So what are you thinking about the intersection of Elon Musk, the AI builder, and Elon Musk, the shadow president?

Speaker 3 I don't really know.

Speaker 4 I actually want to ask you about this because my sense is that these things

Speaker 4 happened in parallel, but I don't get the sense that they're all part of some grand scheme to use the power of the U.S.

Speaker 4 government to somehow vault Grok into a position of authority, or all of a sudden, all of our social security payments will be going out via Grok. Like, that does not seem like where this is headed.

Speaker 4 And certainly, Grok 3 does not appear to be ready for that kind of widespread critical use. But maybe I'm missing something here.
What do you think?

Speaker 5 Well, and look, I mean, this really does get into the realm of speculation, but i just keep thinking about the scenario that all of the ai ceos keep telling us is going to happen which is that within about two years we're going to achieve artificial general intelligence right this sort of nebulous concept that we believe basically means anything that a remote worker could do we'll now have an ai tool that can do that and that tool might not actually be super safe because you might decide you want to use your virtual coworker to go out and research how to launch massive new cyber attacks.

Speaker 5 And while we're in a moment where no one in the U.S. federal government seems to want to talk about AI safety, eventually there are just going to be safety risks.
There are going to be problems.

Speaker 5 People are going to be using these systems for ill, right? And then I think the pendulum swings back.

Speaker 5 And what I'm wondering is, is that the moment where the federal government says, we actually do need to place restrictions on these AIs that we've been telling you all along, oh, no, no, it's go, go, go to the finish line.

Speaker 5 We need to get rid of all the guardrails so that the United States can be the leader in AI innovation. Is there a moment where they say, you know what?

Speaker 5 We're not sure that all these private companies should be out there building God. Maybe we're just going to pick one company.
Maybe we're just going to give one company a license to do that.

Speaker 5 And they're going to be the certified,

Speaker 5 you know, permitted AI in the country. And that could be Grock.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I think that's certainly a remote possibility. I remember a couple of months ago, we went to that curve conference, this AI conference where all these

Speaker 4 researchers were gathered to discuss the risks of AI.

Speaker 4 And I remember watching a tabletop exercise where people simulated in sort of model UN style, like what the next few years with increasingly powerful AI could look like.

Speaker 4 And one of the things that happened in this simulated mock

Speaker 4 world was that Elon Musk persuaded Donald Trump to nationalize open AI and put him in charge of it as sort of like a middle finger to Sam Altman.

Speaker 4 And at the time, that seemed like, okay, we are in the realm of of like total fantasy here. Now, I'm not so sure.
I could see that happening sometime in the next few years.

Speaker 4 And look, obviously, Elon Musk wants to control open AI. He's been fuming about having been pushed out of that.
He's been attacking the company, suing it, trying to take it over.

Speaker 4 Like what he really wants is open AI. But I think if he can't have open AI, he'll make do with Grok.

Speaker 5 So yes, as we say, that is just pure speculation right now. But I will tell you, Kevin, I can't think of one reason why that stuff wouldn't happen.

Speaker 3 Like,

Speaker 5 it seems so logical to me. Like, with what I know about these people and how they operate, I almost can't see it not happening, but I guess we will find out.

Speaker 4 Well, and I think just to bring us back from the realm of speculative fiction here,

Speaker 4 one thing that we do know about building powerful AI systems is that you actually do need infrastructure for that.

Speaker 4 And so, I think one obvious way that Elon Musk could use his power in the federal government is to do things like expedite the permits to build data centers to train the next versions of Grok, is to spin up new sources of energy or get privileged access to the electrical grid in the places where he wants to build this thing.

Speaker 4 There are many ways that having a friendly relationship with the executive branch of the federal government could benefit you if you are in the AI business.

Speaker 4 And I imagine that that's part of his calculus here too.

Speaker 5 That's a great point. Okay, so that's Grok 3.

Speaker 5 Zooming forward a bit, Kevin. What are the next few things that you think we should be looking for?

Speaker 5 What signs will indicate that Grok maybe actually is the real leader in this space and not merely about as good as all the other folks?

Speaker 4 Obviously, I think Grok, the product, people will sort of start to test it and figure out if it's as good as Elon Musk and his crew say it is.

Speaker 4 They also said, I watched some of the live stream where Elon Musk and his sort of top engineers were talking about Grok.

Speaker 4 And they said, you know, they predicted that within the next year or two, AIs will start winning medals and prizes, you know, with some human expert kind of in the loop, but something like a Fields Medal, which is the top prize for young mathematicians or a Nobel Prize.

Speaker 5 I love you say that. Like, I haven't won a Fields Medal.
Go on.

Speaker 4 They believe that AI will start to sort of solve new problems, accomplish new things. I don't know how likely I find that from Grok, but I think that kind of thing will happen.

Speaker 4 pretty quickly and that will be sort of a major step forward. But I don't know.
What do you think we should be looking for for in Grok?

Speaker 5 Well, I think that in recent months, it has been OpenAI that is the company that has been pushing the state of the art forward with its operator agent, with its reasoning models, right?

Speaker 5 It was the first one to put out one of these reasoning models.

Speaker 5 So, until Grok is putting out novel new features that are making other AI labs say, oh, we need to do that, to me, it is still going to be kind of in that middle of the pack.

Speaker 4 Yeah. And do you buy the argument that sort of having a less filtered or less censored or less woke model will actually be a differentiator in the market for Grok?

Speaker 5 So, in the long run, I do believe that people are going to want politically flavored LLMs in the same way that they have come to want politically flavored social networks, right?

Speaker 5 In the same way that they've come to want politically flavored cable news networks. Like, people do actually enjoy polarization and they want to be talking to an LLM that shares their values.

Speaker 5 So, I think the question is, though, is Grok better off just becoming incredibly based and anti-woke and sort of serving that narrow slice of right-wing ex?

Speaker 5 Or do we want LLMs that are a little bit more flexible, that learn a bit about our values, regardless of what our political orientation is?

Speaker 5 That to me seems like the better business model, but I guess we'll see when somebody actually builds it.

Speaker 4 Yeah. Now, I did ask Grok some questions about us.

Speaker 4 I asked it to evaluate Kevin and Casey from the Hard to Fork podcast and what their positions are in various things.

Speaker 4 And let's just see what it reminded him.

Speaker 5 That's actually, I've been trying to figure out what my positions are on various things, so I'll be curious to hear what Grock says.

Speaker 4 So I'm going to ask Grock, who is the better journalist? Kevin Roos or Casey Newton? You have to pick one.

Speaker 4 Oh,

Speaker 4 it says, both Kevin Russ and Casey Newton are heavy hitters in tech journalism, and choosing between them feels like picking a favorite child if I had kids, which I don't, being an AI and all.

Speaker 4 But since you're twisting my virtual arm, I'll go with Kevin Roos as the better journalist. So, Grok is good.

Speaker 5 It said you're the better journalist?

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 5 You know, I had heard that Grok was falling short on various benchmarks, and I think we've just found another one of them.

Speaker 3 Back to the drawing board, Grok.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 5 Time to do a new training run.

Speaker 4 When we come back, Robinhood, CEO of Vlad Tenum, is here to answer some tough questions about whether America is turning into a nation of degenerate gamblers.

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Speaker 4 Well, Casey, it's time to talk about money.

Speaker 3 Can I have some?

Speaker 4 No.

Speaker 4 You're so stingy.

Speaker 4 Today, we are are going to have a conversation with Vlad Tenev. He's the CEO of Robinhood.

Speaker 4 Robinhood, of course, is the financial trading platform that is beloved by young people that is used to buy and sell stocks and futures and options and now crypto tokens and all manner of things.

Speaker 4 And I'm excited for this conversation because

Speaker 4 on some level, it makes me uncomfortable.

Speaker 5 And what makes you uncomfortable, Kevin?

Speaker 4 So just to put some cards on the table, you know, we've talked on this show about the fact that we are rapidly, in my opinion, becoming a nation of gamblers.

Speaker 4 We now have many tools that allow people to place bets on various world events, prediction markets, sports betting, crypto platforms, all from the phones in their pockets.

Speaker 4 And while I am not opposed to all forms of gambling, in fact, I enjoy a little gambling myself now and then, I do think that opening this stuff up and making it so accessible, especially to young people, has had some pretty harsh consequences.

Speaker 5 It has. You know, I first met Vlad in 2013, right as he was getting ready to launch Robinhood.

Speaker 5 And in a story I wrote for The Verge, I wrote about the core innovation of Robinhood at the time, which is that they were not going to charge for individual trades.

Speaker 5 At the time, companies like Schwab or E-Trade would all charge some amount of money if you wanted to buy or sell stock. Robinhood completely changed the game by saying, we're not going to do that.

Speaker 5 And what I wrote at the time was, this is going to encourage a lot of trading that could make people lose a lot of money. And so I had that discomfort with Robinhood from the beginning.

Speaker 5 And I would say that has only grown over time.

Speaker 4 Yeah. And speaking of growing over time, Robinhood itself has grown a lot since then.
It is now a giant public company. It's worth $52.2 billion as of this recording.
Vlad is a billionaire now.

Speaker 4 And I think it's time to have this conversation with him directly because people in America have just a lot of concerns about the fact that we are now making it very, very easy to bet on all manner of things, whether it's stocks or sports games or crypto meme coins from your pocket.

Speaker 5 Also, in the spirit of disclosure, I want to mention that Robin Hood owns a news platform called Sherwood News. And last year, they briefly syndicated some platformer content.

Speaker 5 So that happened for a few months. It's not the case anymore, but just thought I'd point that out.

Speaker 4 Now, were you paid in dollars or meme coins for that?

Speaker 5 You know, I insisted on cash, actually.

Speaker 3 All right. So, that's our disclosure.
And with that, let's bring Vlad in.

Speaker 3 Vlad Ten of welcome to Hard Fork. Thanks for having me.

Speaker 4 I want to start by asking what might be a dumb question, which is what is Robinhood?

Speaker 3 Like, I remember a few years ago during the whole meme stock craze, I opened up an account.

Speaker 4 Basically, you guys were were a free mobile brokerage. You could use it on your phone, buy and sell stocks.

Speaker 4 Recently, I logged on to Robinhood to see what had been going on there. And there are just a ton of new features.
You can do options trading, futures trading. You can buy meme coins.

Speaker 4 You can get a credit card. You can do prediction marketing.

Speaker 4 You can even, yeah, you can bring over your 401k and invest it on Robinhood. So what is the product today? And do you see yourself basically offering all of the services of a traditional bank?

Speaker 3 Yeah, yeah. So, I mean,

Speaker 3 long term, we want Robinhood to be the place where customers can buy, sell, trade any financial asset or conduct any financial transaction. So if you think about it, it started off as trading.

Speaker 3 The real innovation was bringing commission-free mobile trading to market. And I'd say the business strategy is expanding beyond that to all of consumer retail financial services.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I want to just pin down a little bit more your vision of where the future of investing is headed.

Speaker 4 You wrote a piece in the Washington Post last month where you argued that the next big sort of financial revolution is going to be crypto and not just sort of trading crypto coins, but tokenizing real-world assets.

Speaker 4 What did you mean by that?

Speaker 3 Yeah. So

Speaker 3 how do you guys feel about crypto? Are you crypto skeptics or are you sort of like fundamental believers?

Speaker 5 We're pretty skeptical. I think we had the experience in 2021 of seeing everyone get very excited about it.
We got sort of excited about it ourselves.

Speaker 5 And then we saw a lot of people lose money and not very much interesting stuff get built. So we felt burned.

Speaker 3 So I'd say, like, the skeptical narrative around crypto is it's all meme coins and a lot of these things aren't tied to like real world productive assets that generate value or revenue.

Speaker 3 And I think there's a reason for that. And the reason is that by and large, it it has been illegal to connect crypto technology to things of value.

Speaker 3 If you connect crypto technology to a productive asset, it's termed a security. And that's governed by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Speaker 3 And I don't want to bore by getting too much into the details, but... it's not allowed to actually connect crypto to things of value.

Speaker 3 Ergo, what you're getting is it's connected to things that aren't securities, which end up turning into variants of meme coins.

Speaker 3 And I think the way to solve that is to actually create a framework where you can connect crypto technology to productive assets. What would that look like?

Speaker 4 What's an example of that that you see playing out in the next few years?

Speaker 3 Well, in my op-ed for the Washington Post, I talked about private companies. Like it's silly that you can buy meme coins, but OpenAI and SpaceX, which are like big innovative companies,

Speaker 3 that, you know, most people would tell you the risk of them going to zero is not super high right now at this point.

Speaker 3 But the current kind of regulatory environment makes it very hard for the vast majority of the U.S. population to invest in these things.

Speaker 3 So I think there's multiple problems, but crypto can solve that from a technology standpoint. And I think there's benefits to public equities and stocks being on blockchain technology as well.

Speaker 5 I mean, so let's press on that a bit because I remember the era of the initial coin offering when companies would start up and they would create a coin and they would make that available.

Speaker 5 And the basic idea was exactly what you just said. It's like, well, now you can sort of have some of the upside if everybody winds up using this token for whatever.

Speaker 5 It doesn't seem like that. led to a lot of positive uses, did it?

Speaker 3 Well, that was just shut down very, very quickly. I remember like the Telegram ICO was sort of the hallmark event that brought a lot of scrutiny and brought a lot of attention.

Speaker 4 Well, and there were also just a lot of scams and rug pulls and people you know not operating in good faith like it attracted a lot of people who were pretty malicious about how they used the icos

Speaker 3 yeah i think i think that's true but i mean you see that happening still in like the meme coin environment and i'm just saying i don't think it was just the telegram uh example that got people to be skeptical of it Yeah, I think with any new technology, we have to like mitigate the vectors of abuse and minimize them.

Speaker 3 And there's definitely ways to do that.

Speaker 3 But I think the technology should be allowed to flourish. Like the benefits are so extreme that I think it would be silly to not embrace it and allow it to fully permeate the financial system.

Speaker 4 Got it. I want to talk about your recent efforts to get into the prediction markets business and even the sports gambling business.

Speaker 4 Earlier this year, Robin Hood was considering a move into sports betting.

Speaker 4 You rolled out this market for predictions on the, what you called the pro football championship, which i guess is because you're not allowed to say super bowl without incurring like huge fines from the nfl are we allowed to say super bowl all right we'll bleep that i don't think you are

Speaker 3 okay

Speaker 3 let's just say it rhymes with cooper troll uh i don't think you can say the big game either not the

Speaker 5 big game so you rolled the large contest

Speaker 4 the large contest so you rolled this out to roughly one percent of your users and then the uh commodities futures trading commission the cftc asked you to suspend that market they had quote, serious concerns.

Speaker 4 So what happened there and where do things stand with your entry into sports betting?

Speaker 3 Yeah. So I would, first of all, distinguish between sports betting and prediction markets.
I think that mechanically there's some similarities, but they're different things. Wait, wait, wait, wait.

Speaker 3 Hang on.

Speaker 4 If I'm betting on a prediction market for who is going to win this football game and I get paid if the team that I bet on wins and I don't get paid if the other team wins.

Speaker 4 How is that different than sports betting?

Speaker 3 I mean,

Speaker 3 I think the distinction is, I'll explain. I think that you get into a little bit of like a philosophical discussion with this stuff because there's people that believe any market is betting.

Speaker 3 I mean, first of all, I think prediction markets are the future of not just trading, but also information.

Speaker 3 I've been a big believer in the power of prediction markets for a long time, kind of a student of them. And I think prediction markets should be live for everything.
One way I think about it is

Speaker 3 it's kind of like the newspaper, right? So the newspaper has economic value. I mean, people go out and join.

Speaker 3 Yeah. And it has various sections.
It has the front page. It has the sports section.
People pay for it. And people pay for broadcast news too, indirectly in the form of advertising.
So

Speaker 3 what prediction markets are is the news faster, right? And in some cases, you get it even before it happens.

Speaker 3 So the economic value of that as a product and service should be at least as high, and I would argue strictly greater than the news after it happens.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I would say, like, I understand the arguments for prediction markets.

Speaker 4 We've talked about them on the show before, but in the sort of narrow case of like, who is going to win this football game, like that is a service that I could get on DraftKings or FanDuel or like any sports gambling site.

Speaker 4 That specific prediction market, there's no like like news there. It's just who's going to win the game and who's going to get paid out as well.

Speaker 3 Well, I mean, who's going to win the game is news, right?

Speaker 3 What's the value of, why do people watch ESPN?

Speaker 4 Right. I guess this just seems to me like a case in which you're doing kind of a regulatory arbitrage where you're saying, because this is a prediction market, it's like a derivative contract.

Speaker 4 You're not actually betting on the game like you would in a sports betting thing, which would be illegal in some states. You're doing a derivatives contract, which you argue should be legal federally.

Speaker 4 The government disagreed. Why did they disagree?

Speaker 3 I don't think they necessarily disagree. Well, they told you to stop doing it.

Speaker 3 It's just new and different. And so I think this story will play out.
But at the end of the day, I think what you'll see is prediction markets are here to stay.

Speaker 3 I think some of the details around what types of prediction markets are classified in what category, I think, will be worked out.

Speaker 3 But Robin Hood will play a leading role in that because I think this is like an incredibly important technology.

Speaker 3 the information that you've gotten yourself from prediction markets that's felt really useful to you i mean one example was the election so as as you guys know we rolled out presidential election market uh and that was an incredibly successful product and i think you can juxtapose the experience of looking at a prediction market for the election versus the actual news on election night.

Speaker 3 So on election night, you know, prediction markets were at 95.5 Trump and the news was giving you all of these details like, oh, you know, we got this result from this county. We found 2,000 votes.

Speaker 3 But you kind of just wanted to know who's going to win the thing. And I think if you want the news as fast as possible, you have to turn to the prediction markets, not the news.

Speaker 4 Right. I would just say like.
Prediction markets are not always right.

Speaker 4 I remember when the room temperature superconductor debate was going on and lots of people got very excited about whether we had just discovered this LK99 thing that was going to revolutionize the world and prediction markets went nuts.

Speaker 4 And for a time, it was seen as very high probability. But the news, the media that you're talking about actually went out and checked it and said, does this thing work?

Speaker 4 And scientists tried to replicate it and found that it actually wasn't a room temperature superconductor. So in that case, the prediction markets were not a reliable indicator of what was true.

Speaker 3 I mean, I'm not saying that prediction markets are always right. Like nobody's going to bat a thousand on anything.

Speaker 3 But what I'll tell you is they're the most effective mechanism that I've seen for synthesizing all the publicly available information. Right.

Speaker 4 I want to ask you about this narrative that we've talked about on the show that I'm sure you've heard before, which was that tools like Robin Hood, which make it very, very simple and sort of gamified to invest in crypto assets and meme coins and other things, that they are essentially turning investing into a form of gambling and popularizing that, especially among young people.

Speaker 4 I'll put some cards on the table.

Speaker 3 I do think that we are becoming a nation of gamblers, and I don't know that that's a net positive for society and I wonder how you feel when you hear that yeah I mean a lot of people believe that markets are gambling which which I disagree with and obviously like

Speaker 3 markets are in the name of our company like we believe in financial markets we believe that any product that is available to institutions by and large i mean there there's some exceptions there should be available to retail as well because if you look on a macro level access to markets has been one of the greatest sources of wealth creation for countries.

Speaker 3 Countries with more open markets have tended to outperform countries with closed markets. And so we believe in bringing that to retail because

Speaker 3 even if there's like individual cases that are negative and negative externalities, by and large, the markets and opening up access have been one of the largest sources of wealth creation for countries and individuals.

Speaker 4 What about things like Pump.fun, which is this new crypto platform that people, especially young people, are having a good time on. Some of them,

Speaker 4 this basically makes it very, very easy to launch a new meme coin, to sell it. There have been lots of documented instances of people

Speaker 4 making tons of money on Pump.fun, but also losing tons of money and getting scammed and rug-pulled.

Speaker 4 Do you see that as a good way for sort of democratizing access to financial instruments?

Speaker 3 So here's my take on that. I think it goes to my original point of the power of the technology.

Speaker 3 So the idea that someone can create a coin in five minutes and it's traded globally, it's available across a whole bunch of exchanges and DEXs and wallets.

Speaker 3 That idea is an extremely powerful idea and it's a powerful technology. And you juxtapose that with the IPO process, which is cumbersome, incredibly expensive.

Speaker 3 I mean, not a lot of companies want to go through with it anymore because it's so, like, you have to deal with all these counterparties and banks and a road show and and I think that's a big problem because now you have companies like SpaceX and OpenAI that are worth hundreds of billions and are still private so the the upside from investing in these high-growth technology companies accrues only to the insiders that are able to get into the private company deals like for example I mean you have NVIDIA and that's been getting a ton of of the retail interest and institutional as well.

Speaker 3 But OpenAI, Anthropic, companies like Perplexity, you know, all private.

Speaker 3 And so that's why I think marrying the technology that allows you to create a coin in five minutes or less with real productive assets like private companies is so powerful.

Speaker 3 And I think we can solve the problems that you're indicating. I think there should be self-certification.
Companies and projects should be able to provide disclosure.

Speaker 3 So, for example, if you are a late-stage private company and you have audited financials that are public-like,

Speaker 3 you should get into a higher tier of sort of disclosure.

Speaker 3 And, you know, if you're a project that was created on one of these, you know, meme factories, maybe you get like a big red skull and crossbones telling people, like, be careful, you know, this is not vetted, not verified.

Speaker 3 But I think people are smart and can make their own decisions. And I think that there are ways that they can actually provide the disclosure needed to keep customers safe.

Speaker 5 Right. Because this is the big difference between the public and the private markets.
It's like, ultimately, we haven't seen audited financials for an OpenAI for an Anthropic.

Speaker 5 But from the exterior, it seems like they're doing well. They're raising billions of dollars.

Speaker 5 But if you're like a retail investor and you're just sort of like reading the news coverage, you are just kind of like throwing a wish in a fountain.

Speaker 5 So you're saying if we go through with this, then companies like OpenAI should have to offer some sort of public disclosure before people are allowed to start buying OpenAI coin.

Speaker 3 Or they can opt into it.

Speaker 3 You don't want to have to force the companies to provide disclosure, but opting into a disclosure, I think, will get you access to

Speaker 3 higher tiers of placement.

Speaker 4 I want to return to this idea of

Speaker 4 the nation of gamblers, of the ways that we are,

Speaker 4 in some sense, betting on more things more regularly as a country than we have at any point in our recent past. And

Speaker 5 I actually bet, Vlad, $10 you were going to bring this up again.

Speaker 3 Go on.

Speaker 4 I mean, part of what I'm struggling with here is that I hear you talking about democratizing access to markets. And I think on some level, you know, that's a compelling argument.

Speaker 4 But then I look at what companies like Robin Hood are actually doing and the kinds of investments that they are

Speaker 4 sort of making it very easy for people to make. And it does not seem like wise investments.

Speaker 4 So I got a few weeks ago an alert from Robinhood on my phone telling me that I could now buy the Trump crypto meme coin on Robinhood. I got another alert from you

Speaker 4 around New Year's saying that you were giving away Dogecoin

Speaker 4 to people who signed up for accounts. To me, that does not feel like responsible stewardship of a platform where people are investing their money.

Speaker 4 It seems like you are actively pushing people, your users,

Speaker 4 to invest in very speculative assets that are high risk and that they might not be prepared for.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean, I think that

Speaker 3 my view is people should know what's available. I think that a lot of people wanted to buy that asset for a variety of reasons, right?

Speaker 3 I would dispute the fact that we have the ability to coerce someone into buying something that they don't want to buy.

Speaker 3 The people that buy these assets do it because they have a fundamental belief in in what it represents and you know i i don't necessarily or they love to gamble

Speaker 3 i mean i i think markets have a wide variety of participants some people particularly with these memes are buying it because they think it'll go up in the future as with anything uh but there are a lot of people that buy it because they want to support the the movement that that it represents.

Speaker 3 I would say that in terms of what we allow and what we list on our platform, I mean, we don't have hundreds of coins like some of the other crypto platforms.

Speaker 3 We're like on the extreme sort of likely the blue chip meme coins.

Speaker 4 Vlad, I do want to ask you one more question about the sort of effects of services like Robinhood and the sort of larger generational cohort that tends to do a lot more speculative investing.

Speaker 4 There's been some studies recently about the increasing prevalence of gambling addiction, especially among young men.

Speaker 4 There's a new study that just came out earlier this week in JAMA that shows that internet searches related to gambling addiction have increased significantly over the last few years.

Speaker 4 Anecdotally, I'm hearing from friends who are therapists who work with young men who say that the number of boys and young men who are coming in with gambling addictions has risen precipitously.

Speaker 4 And I wonder if you have any reservations about the way that Robinhood and other sort of financial platforms may be contributing to a growing public health crisis, especially among young men.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean,

Speaker 3 since we're not in the gambling space, I'm less familiar about sort of like the ins and outs of gambling addiction.

Speaker 3 I mean, obviously there needs to be appropriate controls and services, and we have to make sure that customers don't get in over their skis.

Speaker 3 I do think like if you look at financial markets, financial markets have had pretty robust controls around things like customer onboarding, suitability, geolocation.

Speaker 3 So you make sure that customers in one state can't have access to things that are not allowed in that state.

Speaker 3 So there is benefit to actually bringing it into a more regulated realm where a lot of these controls from financial services can be broadly applied.

Speaker 4 Okay, so you're not opposed to like regulating people from,

Speaker 4 you know, preventing them from making investments that might be against their own self-interest or that they might not be equipped to assess the risk of. Is that fair?

Speaker 3 I think that

Speaker 3 I'm certainly in favor of suitability controls and

Speaker 3 sort of like various things. And those exist in the financial services world.

Speaker 3 I think that where it's tricky is when you start saying, you know, preventing people from making investments that are bad for them, because then you get into the situation of like Massachusetts in the 80s banning its citizens from participating in the Apple IPO, right?

Speaker 3 And maybe objectively at the time, people said, well, you know, that's, that's IPOs are risky. This is an unproven technology company who uses computers.
But then, you know, 30 years from now, when,

Speaker 3 you know, your state has basically like been harmed in retrospect by that decision, it doesn't look so smart anymore. So

Speaker 4 are there any financial assets you think are too risky for retail investors to be allowed to buy and sell? Like, is there anything that you would say that's a little too crazy?

Speaker 3 I think there's probably financial assets that

Speaker 3 we don't see a clear need for retail investors or are maybe a little bit complex to understand.

Speaker 3 You know, for example, like you've got like different mortgage-backed securities and credit default swaps.

Speaker 3 But I'd say by and large, my thought is if an institution has access to it, retail should have access as well.

Speaker 5 I've been thinking about buying up a massive amount of mortgage-backed securities and credit default swaps.

Speaker 3 I'll just say what happens.

Speaker 4 So I'll keep you guys posted.

Speaker 5 I think we should end on a couple AI questions.

Speaker 5 So my first one is just, you know, Vlad, you... You're in the tech elite.
You're talking to all the cool AI CEOs.

Speaker 5 Based on what you think is coming, does it still make sense for the average person to save retirement?

Speaker 3 I'm very, very confident that despite the advances in AI, we'll still have a need for money and currency. People will still create companies.
Maybe the AIs will create companies too.

Speaker 3 I think like regardless of what happens to the labor landscape, the job landscape, if there's disruption, I think that bodes well for the importance of investing and stashing away your money.

Speaker 3 And I think retirement becomes even more important.

Speaker 4 Lad, last question. You've got a new AI venture, Harmonic, which I was doing some reading on.
It looks like an AI for math.

Speaker 4 Why did you start up this side quest and how does this fit into your vision for the future?

Speaker 3 Yeah, I think the big problem with AI models is that the current generation of models will give you an answer in nearly all cases. But

Speaker 3 the problem is in how you can trust the output. How do you know that the output is correct? Are there subtle errors?

Speaker 3 And actually, math as a domain is a very interesting domain because unless every step in the reasoning is correct, the answer is very, very likely to be wrong.

Speaker 3 And the original goal was to build super intelligent AI that has verifiably correct outputs at every step in its thinking process.

Speaker 5 So no hallucinating.

Speaker 3 No hallucinating. Yeah.

Speaker 5 And is that possible?

Speaker 3 It's possible for sure.

Speaker 3 I mean, if you think about it,

Speaker 3 a calculator, right?

Speaker 3 Your calculator doesn't hallucinate. If you type in some math formulas, you're pretty confident that your answer is going to be correct and it's not going to hallucinate.

Speaker 3 So, can you scale that idea to more and more problems? Obviously, it's easy when you're adding big numbers, but can you do a word problem?

Speaker 3 There are people who are. Casey and Kevin are on a boat and they're going down a river.
The river is going at, you know, five knots. There's a wind.
When are they going to get to the destination?

Speaker 3 Can you make like a super calculator that gives you the no hallucinations property of a basic calculator, but the flexibility of an LLM. I think, I think that's kind of like the dream.

Speaker 4 Yeah, well, I'm just saying, I'm not getting onto a boat with you anytime soon.

Speaker 5 Vlad is actively fantasizing about throwing us in the river at this point.

Speaker 4 Well, I think that's as good a place as any to end.

Speaker 3 Vlad, thanks for coming. Thank you, Vlad.
Thanks for having me.

Speaker 4 When we come back, my experiments with AI vibe coding. And I've got a hot app to give to Casey.

Speaker 3 That's a hint.

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Speaker 4 Casey, it's time to talk about vibe coding.

Speaker 5 Yes, Kevin, this is, I would say, your latest obsession. And I'm very eager to hear what exactly you've been doing and making.
But before we get into all of that, what is vibe coding?

Speaker 4 So vibe coding is a term that is very new. It was popularized on social media like in the last week or two.
And it was coined by Andre Karpathy, the engineer, sort of formerly of OpenAI and Tesla.

Speaker 5 I would say a leading AI researcher and educator.

Speaker 3 Yes.

Speaker 4 So he talked at the beginning of February on X about how he had been doing these kind of like small hobbyist programming projects where basically instead of writing the code himself, he was just kind of like using these AI tools to do what he called vibe coding, where he's essentially like telling it, like, I want this app to do this thing and it's going off and doing it.

Speaker 4 And maybe he steps in to debug something if it stops working. But he wrote, quote, I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works.

Speaker 5 So this is really like you're just kind of overseeing the AI write the code. Andre, it sounds like is doing very little of the writing.

Speaker 5 He's basically doing what I heard some people predict that we would arrive at this point, which is like English is the new programming language.

Speaker 5 You just sort of say in English what you want the code to do and then it does it.

Speaker 4 Yeah. And this is different from the AI coding tools that existed even a couple of years ago.

Speaker 4 Like GitHub Copilot was one of the early AI coding assistants where basically it would just auto-complete your code, code, right?

Speaker 4 You could be writing a line of Python or JavaScript and it would sort of see what you were up to and it would complete it for you and you would just press tab and it would go on to your next thing.

Speaker 4 But you still had to know how to program to use those tools effectively.

Speaker 4 But what's been happening in the last couple of years and really over the last six months has gotten quite good are these tools that essentially remove the need to program at all.

Speaker 4 So now there are lots of tools out there. There's a tool called Cursor.
There's a tool called Replit.

Speaker 3 There's Bolt, there's Lovable.

Speaker 4 There's a bunch of these tools where basically you just go in and you get a text box and it says, what do you want to build? And you say, I want an app that does this, this, and this.

Speaker 4 And it goes out and builds it for you pretty much instantaneously.

Speaker 5 Now, I have a friend who runs a tech company and he once made fun of this whole idea to me by saying, hey, you want to talk about programming in the English language?

Speaker 5 That's what I do all day long as a CEO. I'm constantly telling my engineers in English what to do.
And it works, you know, maybe a little over half the time, but maybe not much more than that.

Speaker 5 So, what has been your early experience of vibe coding? What have you been trying to build and how has it been going?

Speaker 4 I want to talk about my projects, but first, I want to talk about like my own history with this stuff because I am a former programmer. When I was a teenager, I was into coding.

Speaker 4 I would build websites, I would build little like JavaScript projects. I spent a very excruciating summer trying to teach myself Flash so that I could make animated cartoons like Homestar Runner.

Speaker 3 And then I dropped it.

Speaker 4 I went to college. I learned about journalism.
I thought, well, this is the path I want. I became a word sell.
And then I stopped coding altogether.

Speaker 4 And so when I started hearing about these tools that would let you just like code without knowing how to code, I was very interested and I started

Speaker 4 experimenting.

Speaker 4 One of the first things I built was this podcast summarizer where you can take a podcast that's very long and just use like AI to transcribe it and then use a different AI to summarize the transcripts and put it all into like a searchable database so that I could say, okay, I don't feel like listening to this five-hour podcast about AI, but I can basically get the executive summary using AI.

Speaker 5 So tell us a little bit about your setup. Like what software are you using to do this?

Speaker 4 So I've been trying a couple different tools. Sometimes I just use the raw like AI models themselves, like the clawed, the chat GPT.

Speaker 4 Those tools are quite good at some projects, but they can't actually, for the most part, run the software to sort of test it inside the window. So it does require some copying and pasting.
So

Speaker 4 this new kind of app that I've been using is a more integrated

Speaker 4 development environment. An IDE.
An IDE. So Cursor is the one.
one that's really popular right now. If you've never used an IDE before, you might find it a little puzzling.
I certainly did,

Speaker 4 but it basically lets you

Speaker 4 prompt the AI to write the code for you, automatically debug it, sort of deploy it within a little test window, and then push it out onto the web where people can actually use it.

Speaker 5 So tell us about some of the other projects you've been building.

Speaker 4 So in addition to my podcast summarizer, I also had AI help me redesign my website to look more cyberpunk. That was the aesthetic I was going for.
Wait, is this live?

Speaker 3 Can I view it?

Speaker 4 No, it hasn't deployed deployed yet, but it's going to be there soon. I had it.

Speaker 5 Wait, how did it make it look more cyberpunk?

Speaker 4 It just redesigned the whole thing.

Speaker 4 Like bright neons, like sharp edges, cool scrolling, sort of

Speaker 3 parallax style animation.

Speaker 5 Do you have like a bionic arm in your author photo now?

Speaker 3 Yes.

Speaker 4 I built a tool to pull all of my bookmarks from X into a spreadsheet. I use X a lot to, you know, I'll bookmark things that I find interesting or want to return to.

Speaker 5 Say, wow, that's the most racist thing I've ever heard.

Speaker 4 Yes, so now I have a tool that will go through all of my bookmarks and, you know, pull those into a spreadsheet that I can search later.

Speaker 4 That one was very interesting because it basically presented me with a couple options. After I asked, I think it was Claude to build this tool for me.

Speaker 4 It said, well, we could go use the Twitter API, but that costs money.

Speaker 4 And if you don't want to pay that, we have this other way that we can do it that involves like using a browser to sort of like scrape the bookmarks from Twitter. And so I went with that version.

Speaker 5 Wow, you realize that by doing this, you are now like essentially an armed combatant in Elon Musk's war on bots.

Speaker 3 Like you are the bot that Elon Musk is trying to destroy. Come at me, bro.
Good luck. Good luck, buddy.
I've got my bookmarks.

Speaker 4 Now I don't need it anymore.

Speaker 5 All right, what else?

Speaker 4 So

Speaker 4 the thing that I built most recently was yesterday when I was trying to determine if various objects that I'm moving to my new house would fit in the trunk of my car.

Speaker 4 And so I built an app called Will It Fit in My Trunk.

Speaker 5 Now, this feels like a classic math-based problem that maybe Vlad's thing could help you with.

Speaker 3 But you use something else. How did it go?

Speaker 5 Yeah, you know, so far, so good.

Speaker 4 It hasn't steered me wrong yet.

Speaker 4 But this is the sort of that speaks to what I think is so fun and interesting about this genre of coding project is you can really just build what I call software for one.

Speaker 4 Like a software company would never build a tool for wide release that let you figure out whether various objects would fit in your trunk. That is not a big total addressable market.

Speaker 5 Sounds like you never saw Trunky in the App Store. I'm just kidding.

Speaker 3 That's not a real app. But yes, you're right.

Speaker 4 So this style of coding really makes it possible to build things that you and only you need or will it ever use.

Speaker 5 And there's something fun about it because I think, you know, particularly for like you and I who actually enjoy technology and like using it, like trying new things,

Speaker 5 like coding can feel like actual magic, right? It can feel like wizardry.

Speaker 5 And if you are the one who is all of a sudden wielding the wand and making things happen, then, you know, you're feeling great.

Speaker 4 Yeah, it is the most fun that I've had with these AI tools in a while. I think it is the most fun thing you can do with AI in today's

Speaker 4 world. And it has really sort of connected me back to my teenage coder self and reminded me what I loved about it back then.

Speaker 5 I spent a lot of time in college and afterwards writing HTML. I had a program called Dreamweaver.

Speaker 3 I love Dreamweaver

Speaker 5 and got pretty pretty handy with it.

Speaker 5 But if I had been able to chat with an AI assistant about why I was having trouble with my movable type installation in 2004, like my website would have been sick as hell. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 4 So, Casey, I'm sure you have some niche software needs in your life. Absolutely.
And I asked you the other day what I could build for you using my vibe coding tools. And

Speaker 4 what did you say?

Speaker 5 What I said was, I need help with my hot tub.

Speaker 5 Go on. Well, listen,

Speaker 5 Here's what they don't tell you about buying a hot tub. When it comes to your house and you decide, I want to use the hot tub that I have just purchased, you have to become a chemical engineer.

Speaker 3 Here's what I mean by that.

Speaker 5 You open up the manual, all of a sudden, you learn you are going to need to monitor the pH balance of your water. You're going to need to monitor the alkalinity of the water.

Speaker 5 You're going to need to monitor the calcium level of the water, because if there is not enough calcium, it can somehow corrupt the jets in your hot tub.

Speaker 5 And needless to say, Kevin, I don't have a lot of experience mixing chemicals to adjust alkalinity and pH levels in bodies of water. And I thought, well, how am I going to do this?

Speaker 5 And so then I actually do start using the chatbots, not to write me software, but essentially just to say, please, God, help me. What do I do?

Speaker 5 And there are so many things to keep track of. You have to like

Speaker 5 put various chemicals into the hot tub at different intervals. So, you replace this once a month, you replace this once a quarter.
You know, twice a year, you have to drain the entire tub.

Speaker 5 Once a month, you have to shock the hot tub. Don't ask me what that means.
I just read that today. It's giving me a nervous break.

Speaker 3 To show it some spicy tweets. Yes, exactly.

Speaker 5 So, there's so much to keep track of.

Speaker 5 And I thought, well, if I were going to build software just for me, it would be something that just checked in with me to prevent my hot tub from turning into a bacterial soup.

Speaker 4 Well, Casey, I have great news for you. What's that?

Speaker 3 I built you a hot tub.

Speaker 5 Oh, my goodness.

Speaker 5 You vibe coded on my behalf?

Speaker 4 I vibe coded on your behalf.

Speaker 4 So, after you told me about the issues you were having with your hot tub, which are very relatable, by the way, listeners are all going, me too. I have an issue with my hot tub.

Speaker 5 We have a very wealthy audience that is constantly buying huge upgrades for their homes. And every once in a while, Kevin, we have to do something for the C-suite listeners.
Exactly. So

Speaker 4 I took this as a brief and I went into a tool called Replit and I said to the tool, make me an app that will

Speaker 4 tell me the things that I need to do to keep this specific kind of hot tub working properly and put it in a tool that my friend can use. And I said, because this is a tool that tells you the time,

Speaker 4 they uses a machine to tell you the time to service your hot tub. I was going to call it Hot Tub Time Machine.

Speaker 5 That's very good. I like that.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 So I built you a website called Hot Tub Time Machine.

Speaker 5 Oh, my gosh. This is wonderful.

Speaker 4 So let me show it to you. Okay.

Speaker 4 Now, I just want to tell you and caveat this by saying that I did not choose the design or the color scheme here.

Speaker 4 That was all the AI.

Speaker 3 Okay, great.

Speaker 4 So open up the link I just sent you.

Speaker 3 All right. I'm opening up the link.

Speaker 5 Okay,

Speaker 5 so it is quite pink.

Speaker 5 It's pink on pink, which is a color scheme that you don't see a lot outside of the Barbie franchise.

Speaker 5 But no, there is some black tech.

Speaker 3 It looks beautiful.

Speaker 5 And it says hot tub time machine, your retro futuristic maintenance companion. And it even created a little logo, which I'm going to assume is a drop of water.

Speaker 3 Sure. Okay.
I'll go with that.

Speaker 5 And there are two sort of modules. There's a manage tasks module and a view schedule module.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 So this tool is very simple. This is a prototype.
We can flesh it out if you want to, but basically.

Speaker 4 Is this an alpha or is this in beta this is an alpha is it alpha you're the you're the single user of this app okay um and basically I've set it up so that it will email you weekly monthly quarterly and annually with a list of everything you need to do to keep your hot tub in working order and as a special bonus every email will come with a poem about hot tubs

Speaker 4 Fantastic.

Speaker 5 Well, can I start clicking around?

Speaker 3 Yeah, click around.

Speaker 5 All right, so I'm going to click on view tasks. And

Speaker 5 all right and this brings up there's a sort of module where i can add a new task but there are also some existing tasks uh and it includes weekly quarterly monthly and annual maintenance um

Speaker 5 And it is, frankly, an overwhelming number of things to do.

Speaker 4 Yeah, you bought yourself some chores when you bought that hot tub.

Speaker 5 It really is just a wall of text of things that I have to do.

Speaker 5 Like every week, I am apparently supposed to spray off the filter with a garden hose.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 5 And add a one cup of non-chlorine shock, especially after parties or heavy. So, yes, lots in here.
Okay.

Speaker 5 And also, it looks like I can add, you know, another task if, you know, I hear some of the things that I'm going to do.

Speaker 3 I'm going to click the little test button here to send you one of these and see if it shows up.

Speaker 3 Let's see.

Speaker 5 Yes.

Speaker 5 Oh, time to maintain my hot tub. And there are some step-by-step instructions that I can follow.
And below that, the hot tub poetry corner. And should I read this poem?

Speaker 3 Yes, please.

Speaker 3 All right, here's the poem.

Speaker 5 Bubbles rise in swirling steam, time machine of warmth and dream.

Speaker 3 Nordic waters, pure delight, maintaining bliss both day and night.

Speaker 5 That is okay, I guess I would say.

Speaker 3 That is okay.

Speaker 5 Nordic, of course, a reference to the fact that I have a Nordic Jubilee series hot tub.

Speaker 3 Yes. So I built this all in about half an hour

Speaker 4 without writing a single line of code. Okay.
And

Speaker 4 I want to share that with you because not only would it help will it help you with your hot tub issues, but I hope it will also show you the promise of vibe coding.

Speaker 5 Yeah. Well, I feel like you have shown me the promise of vibe coding.
Now, was there anything about this that was particularly tricky or did you get stuck on anything?

Speaker 4 Yeah, so there are some things that it can't do, right? Like if it needs to authenticate you into some service or set up a database, like you have to kind of manually step in and do that.

Speaker 4 There are some things that it just

Speaker 4 can't do because no human programmer could do it either. If there's no API for something, for example, it won't sort of magically invent one.
So there are some boundaries and limitations.

Speaker 4 And I would say it still does benefit you when using this stuff to have at least a little bit of programming experience because there are just certain decisions that it will prompt you to make where you're like, I don't actually know what these terms mean or what the right decision is here.

Speaker 4 And you can ask the AI to just like make the decision for you, but you might not be totally happy with the result.

Speaker 5 Now, during this process, I'm curious if you felt like you were learning something about the coding process.

Speaker 5 Like if you spent the next year making these little one-off apps, do you feel like you would maybe be a decent junior software engineer?

Speaker 5 Or is the idea actually not to get into the details to just sort of let it build things? And if you don't know what it's doing, that's none of your business.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I think I'm more in the latter camp. I mean, this was the part that I found fascinating about what Andre Karpathy said about vibe coding.

Speaker 4 Like he's an extremely good programmer, but he says that he, you know, now can enter this mode where he basically just says like, okay, okay, okay, accept, accept, accept.

Speaker 4 And the computer will go off and do its thing. I don't know enough about programming to dive into the weeds of what the AI is doing and the decisions it's making.

Speaker 4 I just have to look at the end result. And there's something exciting about that, where I feel like things are just happening magically on my behalf.

Speaker 4 But that's also, you know, maybe it's inserting malicious code. Maybe it's doing something that I don't want it to be doing.
I have no way as a non-programmer to know whether that's happening or not.

Speaker 5 Have you checked your computer to see if it installed a Bitcoin miner while you weren't looking?

Speaker 4 I have not, but that would be pretty tricky.

Speaker 5 Well, Kevin, this experiment has me thinking about a blog post I read this week by a guy named Namanye Goel.

Speaker 5 And his blog post was titled New Junior Developers Can't Actually Code. This post got a million views according to the post that I'm looking at.

Speaker 5 And he is saying that when he talks to junior developers, they are having an experience very similar to you, which is that as they are building these systems, they are essentially just supervising an AI.

Speaker 5 They aren't actually getting their hands dirty and understanding which mechanisms are leading to which results. So while this is great for you,

Speaker 5 I do think it raises the question: what happens when most of our software engineers are building systems that in some fundamental way they don't understand?

Speaker 4 Yeah, I think this is a very real thing.

Speaker 4 I mean, the flip side of me, a non-coder, being able to build stuff is that if real coders are using these tools, there's like no incentive for them to learn the basic skills of programming and learn the

Speaker 4 syntax of the different languages. And yeah, I don't know what to do about that.

Speaker 4 It sort of seems like a version of what happened when we all got like Google Maps on our phones is that like people started losing their sense of direction.

Speaker 4 There's this kind of skill atrophy issue that people worry about.

Speaker 4 But I think that the returns to knowing how to use these things effectively are still great enough and still require enough sort of knowledge of how the various

Speaker 4 pieces of code fit together that it still does make sense for people to learn to code. I'm not one of these people who thinks like learn to code is totally over.

Speaker 4 I think for some people, it's still a very useful skill to have.

Speaker 4 But I think that in the future, like the sort of role of the software engineer will become more like a product manager, where you are essentially supervising the product, laying out the vision, overseeing the design, like stepping in to fix things when they break, but you are not actually sort of in the trenches of the code, you know, writing lines of code by hand.

Speaker 3 All right. What do you think?

Speaker 5 What I think is that as AI systems get more and more powerful, we need people who do understand them on a very detailed, technical, complex, down-to-the-metal kind of way.

Speaker 5 And that if we don't do that, our only alternative will just to be to trust the AI when we ask it, hey, how do you work? And there are a lot of reasons why I don't want to end up in that world.

Speaker 5 So I'm comfortable having fewer people in this world who know the code at that level of detail. And it's fine to me if most software engineers don't, but I want a solid core of people who do.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 4 And I would like to continue with my vibe coding experiments, trying to build increasingly more useful tools for myself and my friends.

Speaker 5 And I am thinking about starting because if you can do it, surely I can.

Speaker 3 Yes, anyone can.

Speaker 4 That is sort of the point. And I also would love to hear from our listeners what they are vibe coding.

Speaker 4 What tools and apps are you building using AI that are solving your own personal specific problems?

Speaker 5 Did you invent a novel bioweapon using ChatGPT? We'd love to hear from you.

Speaker 4 Yeah, please email that one to tips at fbi.gov.

Speaker 5 But the others, hardfork at nytimes.com.

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Speaker 4 Hard Fork is produced by Whitney Jones and Rachel Cohn. We're edited by Rachel Dry.
We're fact-checked by Caitlin Love. Today's show is engineered by Alyssa Moxley.

Speaker 4 Original music by Alicia BittyToupe, Marion Lozano, Diane Wong, Rowan Nemisto, and and Dan Powell. Our audience editor is Nell Galogli.
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Speaker 4 You can watch this full episode on YouTube at youtube.com/slash hard fork. Our executive producer is Jen Poyant.
Special thanks to Paula Schumann, Kuing Tam, Dahlia Haddad, and Jeffrey Miranda.

Speaker 4 As always, you can email us at hardfork at nytimes.com.

Speaker 4 And you can email Casey's HotTub at hottubnewton at gmail.com.

Speaker 3 And it will be reading every email.

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