Before the Trillions, There Was Once Joy in Silicon Valley

Before the trillion-dollar IPOs, before the data centers and the doom, before “Silicon Valley” became shorthand for unaccountable power and unimaginable wealth, there was a teenager with an Atari — a gift from his NASA-engineer father — certain he could build any world he could imagine.

That teenager was Matthew Stepka, and the world he helped build is the one we’re all now straining to make sense of.

This week on the WhoWhatWhy podcast, Stepka — early internet-café founder, McKinsey alum, nine-year Google veteran who shepherded many of the company’s mission projects including the first self-driving cars, and now an investor in what he calls “enlightened AI” — walks us back through the Valley’s reinventions and asks what each one cost.

It’s a conversation about corporate reasons for being. Tech, nearly alone among industries, has always needed one — a reason its products are not merely lucrative but good for society. Stepka was inside the rooms where those stories were told without irony, and where they curdled into punchlines.

He’s candid about how the land of the nerds, where you felt you could solve any problem, drifted into something harsher.

But this is no eulogy to a more innocent age. It’s an argument that the innocence is recoverable — that AI might amplify our humanity rather than hollow it out. Stepka would rather be called hopeful than optimistic. The difference, it turns out, is the whole story.

As today’s headlines fill with the SpaceX IPO, here’s a longer view.

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Full Text Transcript:

Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. Silicon Valley has always needed a story, not a product, not a business model, a story, something that lets brilliant, ambitious, fundamentally decent people pour their lives into a profit machine and still feel like they’re on the side of the angels. “Information wants to be free.” “We’re connecting the world.” “Move fast and break things.” And the most famous of all, the one that’s curdled so completely it now lands as a kind of punchline. “Don’t be evil.” My guest today was there for that one. For nine years, he was inside Google in the era when that motto was still spoken without irony, when the company genuinely believed and persuaded much of the world to believe that it could do well by doing good. He ran the mission projects, bringing the internet to remote parts of Africa, investing in clean energy, the early work in robotics and self-driving cars. He had a front-row seat, in other words, as one of the most powerful companies on earth tried to hold on to its own conscience. But his story starts well before that, and it’s really a story about the whole arc of this thing we’re living through. He was writing video games at 17 — good enough that a software company tried to hire him straight out of high school. He went on to McKinsey, to running operations at some of the early internet commerce companies. And along the way, he co-founded one of the first internet cafes, back when simply getting online was itself the product. He has, in other words, been present for every reinvention that Silicon Valley has staged. The dot-com frontier, the long consolidation when the internet stopped being a frontier and became plumbing. And now, the moment we’re all standing inside of: trying to understand. And it is that arc that we want to talk about today, because there’s a thread running through all that that is genuinely fascinating. Every era of this industry seems to require a new moral premise, a new way of explaining to itself why it’s building is not just lucrative, but good. The technology changes completely, dial-up to search to artificial intelligence. But that need, that hunger for moral permission, seems to be the one constant. Which brings us to where my guest sits now. He is an investor in artificial intelligence, and the animating idea of his work is something he calls “enlightened AI.” Technology meant, in his words, to amplify our humanity. A remarkable place to arrive at at this particular moment, because at a time when so much of the culture has decided that AI might be the great threat of our age, he is someone making the opposite case, an optimist, arriving at something like AI altruism and arriving at it, of all places, straight out of the company whose old promise not to be evil we now find so easy to laugh at. This isn’t going to be a conversation about whether AI is good or bad. There are thousands of people lined up to have that argument. What we’re looking for is something more interesting: the journey, what it means that Silicon Valley keeps needing to tell itself a new story every time it remakes the world, what 40 years on the inside teaches you about which of those stories were real and whether the one we’re being told right now is something genuinely new or something very old in new clothes. It is my pleasure to welcome Matthew Stepka here to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. Matthew, thanks so much for joining us.

Matthew Stepka: It’s great to be here.

Jeff: Well, it is a delight to have you here. I want to go back in your life a little bit. You were 17 years old and you were writing video games good enough for Silicon Valley at the time. Talk a little bit about what that world was like then, what you saw in that world at that time.

Matthew: Well, it’s interesting. I mean, at that time, my dad was an aerospace engineer at NASA, and I wanted to be an artist before that, and I still like to dabble. But he gave me a computer, an Atari computer, and I just found my best friend for a while. I was totally immersed in that world. And the thing about it, which gave me the most of anything else, gave me a sense of agency, like, I could create anything, any world I want. If I could imagine it, I could make it happen. And for a teenager that felt all powerful, that felt so wonderful, and it felt so boundless. And I love video games. I love playing them. I love making them even more because you can decide how you want it to go and where it would go. And that did feel like a real opportunity. And I think technology kind of has that kernel in it, I hope.

Jeff: What did computers mean then? What did you see them as besides this possibility into another world?

Matthew: Yeah, it was interesting. I mean, to some degree they weren’t connected with each other that much at all. So it really wasn’t a way of connecting with other people directly, although I was part of these enthusiast clubs and so forth. So actually, we did connect indirectly. I started the computer club in my high school, and ironically, that was a great way to socialize with people who were also equally as nerdy as I was at the time. So there was a bit of that sense of belonging in that group, in that club. But I think for a large degree, it was a thing that you just felt you could solve almost any problem. You almost felt like there was a chance that we could do anything. And around the time WarGames came out. And just then we started thinking about how could this all go badly as well. I remember that movie was really interesting because 1984 was when I graduated from high school. And so it was when I really started realizing, wow, this is kind of the double-edged sword of something obviously very powerful, but also very scary.

Jeff: A little while later, you co-founded these cyber cafes, the Cyber Java. Talk a little bit about that. The early internet cafes.

Matthew: Yeah, this is in the mid-’90s. I was living in Los Angeles on a sailboat. And some of my friends from college, engineers as well, were hanging out with me. And we loved going to cafes and we started playing around with the internet a little bit. And we thought, wouldn’t it be great to mix them together? And so my friend, he bankrolled it and we all got together and we basically started serving coffee and internet and it was quite fun. It was quite an interesting time because, like you said, people couldn’t even find a way to get on. They kept hearing about it in the news, and it became this thing that everyone wanted to get a hold of and get to touch it and feel it. And news organizations wanted to report on it — they didn’t know where to go to even look at it. How do you see the internet? And so they would come to our cafe just as the backdrop to talk about the internet. And it became an interesting thing. I ended up teaching a lot of classes there. We had a little classroom up top and I would teach you in class about how to get online, how to start a business. But we do joke, it’s the most ridiculous thing we did was starting an internet cafe. We should have started anything else but an internet cafe in terms of making a lot more money. But I guess we just did what we loved.

Jeff: But there was a sense that the product was the access itself. That that was what you were selling.

Matthew: Yeah. And coffee too, oddly enough. But we sold both. And it was interesting. It was also, people wanted to know, they just needed help, they needed someone to hold their hand and they were afraid of it. They were afraid to break something or do something wrong. Because technology for a lot of people is very scary. And this was a very friendly environment. You know, we had music in the background and kind of a cool environment. It kind of demystified it and made it feel a little bit more friendly. And we did some events around celebrating this connection between people. We even had an early version of what they call a see-you-see-me camera, which was these round cameras, they let people connect with each other and they were a really bad technology, black-and-white, really, really low-res, but people started using them. This is, you know, the early ’90s or mid-’90s. And they started talking to each other. And when we actually had a party and all the people could come together and talk to each other at the same time. It was extremely dorky and weird, but it was kind of an early version of what we do now. We don’t think twice about Zooming or all that kind of stuff.

Jeff: When you look back at that time — and you just touched on it a moment ago in terms of what you were offering people at the cafe — the technology, that the internet was all kind of scary at the time. People didn’t know what to make of it. They didn’t know where it was going. And it had a little frightening quality about it. And so much of what we’re dealing with today, jumping way forward, is also, to a lot of people, very scary. That one consistent thing seems to still be there, and in fact, maybe has gotten worse as technology has advanced.

Matthew: Oh, without question, it’s gotten worse. I think it’s gotten worse in two ways. One, if you don’t understand how to use it, you feel at a disadvantage. And that lack of knowledge and understanding is just, it sounds very scary. And even people who are more technical, there’s different levels of being technically astute, and it’s hard to know and to know when you know what’s going on, what’s really happening. And that’s one kind of scary. The other thing is it’s gotten more powerful and more ubiquitous. It’s this bigger part of our lives now. And so the idea of you’re giving up so much control to technology, especially when you don’t understand how it’s working, seems very scary. And then you layer on top of that, how powerful it is, and it’s much more powerful than it ever has been before. Every number is more powerful. But just obviously, its capabilities are just mind-boggling now. And I think that is something which makes it even more — I think rightly so, I understand why people are anxious. You’re dealing with a very powerful thing in your room, in your life, surrounded with you all the time. And there could be people behind it that are not good, or itself, it could do things unintentionally, that you don’t mean. All these reasons are reasons to be, I think, anxious.

Jeff: How did you wind up at Google?

Matthew: It’s funny, I kind of tried to avoid it for a while. My thinking was… I was at McKinsey and I went to a couple startups after that, and I was enjoying what I was doing and I kind of thought, oh, search must be dead. It’s like, it’s so, it’s just an old idea. And it clearly had and still does have a long path ahead of it, apparently. So I was completely wrong on that. But eventually a friend said, you really should come. I just left my last startup that was doing okay, but I thought, I want to do something different. I want to come back to the Bay Area. And he encouraged me to come. And that was a big difference. And I really did. I went there at a time where they had kind of hit that inflection point where they were becoming a bigger company. They’re around 10,000 employees at that time, and they were public already as well. And so they were well known, but people didn’t understand their business model yet. They were kind of just, they had so much buoyancy. People felt very good about Google. And they really… As you mentioned earlier in the introduction, people really did believe in the ideas behind it. And the founders were very actively involved, as well as the CEO.

Jeff: Was it your sense that the leadership of the company, that the founders and other leaders really did believe that or they convinced themselves of that for whatever reason?

Matthew: Well, I can’t say I can peer too deep into their hearts, but I did work with them enough to say, I definitely believe that they believed it and they really wanted to do this. They wanted to build a company that was a net benefit for the world. And they were willing to bet it all over and over again to make that happen. They were very committed to it. I ended up doing all this work in the company, which was extraordinarily mission-driven. And so it was very easy from my perspective to see how that was true. But the company was always making a lot of money, but it could have made a lot more money had they been more near-term focused or a little bit more cutthroat in some ways. But they did intentionally make it kind of a balanced environment in terms of this marketplace they created for advertisers and all that kind of thing. And they always had to think about being focused first on the users and protecting that trust. And I think they really felt that. And that feeling would come down to all the engineers that worked there. I felt there was a good amount of people buying into that idea. A good example is the idea of church and state between organic search results and the paid search results. They were very sincere about that. And there were a lot of people who would stand up and would make a point of, if something felt like it was violating that trust. I can’t speak about it as much now, today, and I think things are a little more complicated now. But I do think it definitely was that way at the time.

Jeff: I remember there was a project, and you’ll probably know what it is, I can’t remember the name of it. But there was a government project that Google was asked to do that the employees just revolted against and prevented the company from doing it.

Matthew: Yeah. This is Project Maven. This was a government project to help use AI, that the tech companies had, to help drones at least identify what they’re looking at. It was not meant to be used for targeting per se. Of course that line is pretty blurry. And then, as I understand it, about a few thousand engineers found out about it and they signed a petition to the CEO at the time, Sundar, and they asked him to cancel the project, this is not consistent with our values as a company. And I think there’s a long process. A lot of this unfolded online in the public eye because eventually it was leaked out and they tried to respond in the way they best they could to deal with it. It’s an interesting question. I think the culture has always been that you have the right to bring up any issue internally, but there also was a company culture of secrecy, which is you don’t air your dirty laundry outside. And so that last part was obviously violated by the disclosure. But I think it became harder and harder to let that be true. I personally believe in whistleblowers having a very important role. And I think sometimes people are held to a higher standard and higher calling in terms of what they do, not just what the company wants them to do. So I do think it’s harder. That’s an example of what is the nature of what a company should be doing? It’s an American company. It should not be helping the American military. And at that time, it was definitely becoming more true that the military capabilities were being outstripped by commercial ones. And this is true today on the battlefields of Ukraine. In every place you’re finding out that, frankly, really cheap technology that’s commercially available is starting to beat very expensive technology that the government is building. And that is a problem for governments to deal with. And that’s a longer discussion on that one.

Jeff: You’ve been involved in a lot of companies. You were at McKinsey, as you mentioned, you were involved in a lot of startups, and certainly you’ve been around the Valley for a long time, and all these companies. Talk a little bit about the culture of these companies, what you have seen that is consistent in their culture and even in some cases, unique in the culture of some companies.

Matthew: Well, I do think McKinsey and Google have one thing in common, at least when I was there. They were very values-driven. They were both places that literally everybody in the company would know the mission statement and would often bring it up as an argument for doing something or not doing something. And so they really believed in it, and they felt it was both a shield and a sword to keep ourselves consistent with that culture. I know for sure that’s not true in both those organizations quite as strongly as it was. People may not feel as strongly that they can bring up those ideas and object to other decisions that the senior management might do. And so it can only last for a while. I think, especially if the founders are not actively involved to keep it alive, I think it’s hard to do. There’s so many other shareholder pressures that will come up, I think, over time. Some of the startups I’ve worked at definitely had some of that. It’s very hard to sustain that in a company which is growing very fast and the people are coming quickly in, especially if they don’t really adhere to those values. But I think it gives an advantage in terms of actually attracting the best people and getting them to really sacrifice themselves for the work of the company. You can obviously incentivize people with stock options and money and so forth, but really most people ultimately are much more driven, I think, by values and a mission. And I think it was authentic for these companies. I mean, McKinsey may not have it as perceived as well more broadly, but I believe in McKinsey vision and its mission, which was to serve his clients and to build a great firm. And it really was focused on that very much so. I won’t get into what happened, how it might have gone astray, but it definitely, I think it started off that way for many years.

Jeff: And in the Valley among technology companies, do you think it’s as true today that the people that are working there are mission-driven?

Matthew: Yeah, I know a lot of individuals are. I would like to say that, and maybe I’ve been around the block too much where I feel like it is a little bit, I get a little cynical, and I hear a lot of startup pitches, right? And sometimes people tell me what they’re trying to do is save the world. And I’m trying to say, well, I’m not sure I see how that saves the world or even how that is good for the world. And so I’m not sure I believe that people believe that. Well, they know they’re supposed to say it. So there is a little bit of that. The Valley has definitely become a parody of itself sometimes. Because people feel like they have to say certain things and be a certain way, but I think authenticity comes through and there are definitely startups I look at and it’s a filter for me if I believe that they do have a mission behind what they’re doing. I think in general, I believe, I’m not sure who said this, so you can research this later, but a very famous VC said he’s looking for missionaries, not mercenaries. And I do think ultimately that is part of the Valley’s success. The ones that really do well, like Apple. Steve Jobs was clearly a missionary. The guy was obsessed with the beauty of fonts and the beauty of design, to a point where it could have driven the company out of business. But he happened to strike rich and because he did the right thing obsessively and got to something that really mattered to people and would change their lives, like the cell phone, for example, and so forth. It’s amazing that that kind of thing does drive ultimate value oftentimes. Probably lots of examples of people who failed even though they did all that. So it is a little bit of luck and timing too, but I think the ones we know about, the ones we talk about are the ones that are focused that way.

Jeff: Why do you think that has been so important to the Valley, to technology, that these companies be mission-driven? I mean, as you said a moment ago, that some of the pitches you hear, some of the people feel like they need to say the right things and sort of pitch it the right way within the context of a mission. And yet we can look at other businesses and other areas, whether it’s Wall Street, whether it’s manufacturing or whatever, and you don’t see companies with the same mission-driven approach. They may be excited about what they’re doing, but it isn’t the same need to craft that vision around what they do.

Matthew: Yeah. It’s interesting. I remember the films that came out and the ideas that came out around Wall Street in the ’80s almost celebrated their lack of morality.

Jeff: Right.

Matthew: They said greed as good. Right, the fundamental idea. And I think it is a bit of ethos. I think there are a lot of reinforcing mechanisms around this. The Bay Area is a very unique place, culturally speaking. I think long term, it has a certain wild side to it. It’s where we had the Barbary Coast and all that. And we had, of course, Barbary Coast, the Burning Man, all these things, everything in between. So it has a lot of that going on, as well as the hippie movement and all these kind of things. It seemed to really crystallize in the Bay Area’s idea that it’s okay to be a rebel, to be a little different. But then having a higher purpose somehow gives you a legitimacy around that, that you can do all those things. And I think, yeah, for whatever reason, I think that still is a big part of the underlying culture of the area. But I think also you have so many cynical examples, what happened with Theranos and other companies where the people do a couple TED talks and they get really well practiced in what they’re talking about and everybody starts saying, well, that’s great. And then I was talking to a friend who had been to TED with me a long time ago, and we were talking about, hey, whatever happened to X, Y, and Z? We saw that great TED talk on curing cancer or whatever it’s about. And then we never heard about that again. And you start realizing there are a lot of, I wouldn’t say snake-oil salesmen, but people who get a little ahead of their skis in terms of believing in something. And there’s that notion of, I think Peter Diamandis said this, that basically something is crazy until it’s done or something along those lines, which is basically saying the people who say, hey, the idea of having 4,000 satellites up in the air providing broadband to us anywhere in the planet with a pizza-box size thing or even smaller. That seemed like it was not possible 20 years ago. And I think now is something which we almost take for granted it’s so available, that kind of thing. And I do think, so there’s that notion that, hey, it’s crazy until someone does it and flight, all these things are these big innovations which did require them to take a leap. But of course, you have to remember that some people did fail and fail miserably or terribly or tragically. And so it’s not always going to yield results. But in aggregate, there will be many celebrated successes that do push humanity forward because of that willingness to take risks sometimes. The one problem I think it’s always important to realize is sometimes those ultimate risks are being put on other people, right? And I’m always amazed how that sometimes gets forgotten. Sure, it’s great to take a risk for yourself, but t if you do something which is dangerous to other people, you should probably think about it. Is society agreeing to that experiment?

Jeff: Talk a little bit about how you personally got caught up in all of this when you were at Google as part of this mission projects that you were doing?

Matthew: Yeah. So I mean, that part, it’s hard to explain because I just happen to have a law background as well and a business background and tech background. So I became a very good generalist. And so when they wanted to take on, the founders or the CEO, Eric Schmidt at the time, wanted to take on a new project. And it happened to be a good person to kind of shepherd it through, at least the first phases and incubate it. So that was part of it. So I was kind of a jack-of-all-trades in that sense. But I think the mission-driven part of these things, a lot of times they really were based on, you could tie it back to a business purpose. Like the renewable energy investments we did were all actually very good investments. They weren’t necessarily the best use of capital by Google, because the best use of capital was to pour back into search. And that was a real problem. Everything else was just a bad idea in comparison. But we were still making good money on those investments. Africa, also long term, would be arguably a good investment, but it would take a long time to get that money back. And even though you look at it from an investment perspective, you’re going to have a lot of failures along the way because it just has more inherent risk. So that kind of thing. So just putting things in that framework, I think, is a healthy thing. And that’s my view on whenever you do philanthropy or do something for the good you want to think about, well, how do I use the rigor of capitalism to make this as efficient as possible so that it can actually scale and deliver even more value to more people. So if I have a good idea that can help people, let’s make sure I do it for a lot of people. And I think that is a good filter and a good approach to take to even doing good.

Jeff: And you were involved in robotics and the earliest days of self-driving cars there at Google as well.

Matthew: Yeah. So the last thing I did at Google was we had purchased a bunch of robotics companies and try to figure out what to do with them all. And it was one of those things where it just kind of happened. And definitely Larry Page was very enthusiastic about it. And we definitely saw it as part of the future. Mostly they got folded into Google X. And I think robotics is a hard field because it’s really… specialized robotics make a lot of sense, so robots that do one specific thing really well in a relatively semi-controlled environment, but try to do robots around humans and actually normal people and children and pets and home environments — really difficult because things are very unpredictable and we probably still have a ways to go before that really is something you would feel completely safe about. Self-driving cars are a good example. That’s an extraordinarily difficult problem, but there are a lot of people behind every one of those cars, even though they’re self-driving, right? There are people that actually have to monitor those cars, to service those cars, keep them going. So there’s really not,,, it’s an illusion that there’s no person involved. There’s actually a lot of people involved and there probably always will be for the foreseeable future.

Jeff: Tell us a little bit about what you’re doing now, your fund, the enlightened AI, etc.

Matthew: Yeah. I mean, this is, again, for two reasons. I think the idea of if you approach AI as a tool that can actually amplify people’s capabilities and actually enhance our humanity. I mean, technology often and sadly leads to people being more lonely, more disconnected, more anxious, not necessarily happier. And that’s true. And so you started off by saying, you might say I’m an optimist. I prefer the term hopeful. I think there’s lots of reason to believe that AI can be a very positive thing for the world. And there’s lots of reasons to point to that could be true. It’s not a guaranteed outcome. And I don’t want to pretend that it is. And I think we should be very vigilant about all the steps along the way. But how do we make it more helpful, more enhancing of our humanity? And I think part of that is what your objectives are. So one way of thinking about AI is saying is your… If your design goal is to replace humans and get them out of the picture, then that’s what you’re going to build —and you’re probably not going to do that well at it, by the way, because AI is pretty good; not usually good enough to do that completely, and it’s almost always… More, the question is how much of this can be done, that’s better done by AI than a human. And then what part of it is really better off being done by a human? And what’s the part that humans like doing as well? And what’s the part that gives joy to people in their work, gives them a sense of meaning and fulfillment? And what parts are the dangerous or boring parts that they would be much happier to hand off to their AI minion friends, right? Like that. And so thinking about the relative capabilities of humans and AI, I think, and designing that way, you’ll get to a better outcome in terms of the humans interacting with it. They’ll be more supportive of it being rolled out. So if you’re working with doctors or lawyers or anybody who’s going to be using AI, they’re going to be more supportive, they’re not going to fight it and it’s probably going to be more successful in that sense. And then on top of that, it’ll probably be a better product because you can have the best of both worlds. And so I think it’s also more sustainable as a business. I mean, it’s a lot harder for someone else to come in and dislodge you because you’ve done a great job making that interface between human and AI really work. So I think those are all those reasons that kind of come together on both sides. I mean just, fortunately, it’s both a good thing, I think, for the world as well as being, I think, a good business approach.

Jeff: And certainly both those things can be true and the dangers can be true as well. I mean, whether we talk about the automobile or the earliest days of even commercial aircraft, where planes crashed in the early days, there wasn’t the kind of safety record that we see today, that all of this technology is both good and bad. But you also have to look at it in terms of the potential time horizon, not just judge it by where it is at any particular moment today.

Matthew: Yeah, I definitely agree. In fact, I was thinking as you went through the intro about how, yeah, time will tell for a lot of these things. I think we already know that social media, I should say, we know so far that social media causes a lot of harm. And it probably is more like a drug than we thought about it before. And it’s not always a good drug in that sense. It’s not always good for people’s psyche. For young people especially, it preys on people’s insecurities, lots of things like that. So that’s one example of how unintended consequences from how something is deployed could have been avoided or mitigated better if we thought about that more ahead of time. So that’s where I think it’s important to really think about how we deploy technology in our day-to-day life, especially around children and more vulnerable people, or people who don’t understand what they’re doing or what they’re using. I think that’s… for all those reasons, I think it’s good to have a certain amount of caution. You’ll see this in businesses, by the way, businesses are much more cautious about how they use AI than people are. They do think about these things, about reliability and predictability and so forth, and can I actually use this thing? Is this actually not going to be a long-term better thing? And you’ll see that adoption rates are a little bit slower than people kind of expected in some cases for that reason.

Jeff: Cost has certainly been part of that as well.

Matthew: Oh sure. Yeah. And the thing is you have a big upfront cost and there’s a hope they will have a big payoff. It probably will be true. I think it will drive a lot of productivity gains and cost reductions. But hopefully it also will create new worlds of possibilities. But again, we don’t know that yet. So to your point about the ‘we’ll see’ is true. And that’s not a very satisfying answer for people, people entering the job market, people who are looking at their savings or where they invest their money or what to do. There’s so many things that people are kind of saying, well, you can’t tell me “Just trust it. See, I hope it works out.” Or even just existential threats for humanity. And there’s some of that risk out there as well, I guess. So I think it is hard for folks to feel comfortable with that when we have so much uncertainty about the future. We can look at analogies about other technologies and what happened. We can see the internet or almost every technology. Sure, people lost their jobs, but then many more people got new jobs. That may not be true again. That may not happen. It doesn’t have to happen every time. It’s not a law of nature or something. But it’s been true so far, almost every time.

Jeff: There’s also the sense right now, I don’t know if you agree or not, that much of the fear and negativity that is surrounding AI — and certainly you look at some of these poll numbers and how people are perceiving it, and there’s an awful lot of negativity out there — that is driving it to move forward in its development even faster than it might have otherwise, because there seems to be this fear among developers and people in the business that they better move quickly now, because if people continue to be afraid, something might stop it.

Matthew: Maybe. I don’t think anybody was holding back at all. I don’t sense that really. There’s a lot of talk of holding back, but everybody’s saying, hey, I think you should hold back. Every point to someone else. Elon Musk was saying a while back, and now, of course, he’s thrown that out the window. No, I think people are going as fast as they could in general. I think some companies are being more cautious, and in some contexts be more cautious. I think the European regulatory model in general is a little bit not helpful. But one area I think makes sense is that it talks about the idea of different application areas requiring different levels of care. And that seems like an obvious idea, but it’s a good one. If you’re a self-driving car, it should be a lot more careful than a video game character that has AI in it, right? So I think that kind of thing. So for example, I think Google is being very careful with Waymo as a self-driving car. And I think that’s appropriate. Now are they being really aggressive, more aggressive on AI in other areas? Probably so, and definitely more recently when they realized they kind of had to, because they were in competition with other people who were doing it anyway. So I think that’s inevitable. Yeah, I think there’s a lot of competition among them. There’s no clear winner yet. And because of that, everybody is extremely aggressively trying to beat each other out. Anthropic is doing very well in coding, and so that’s driving other people to go very, very strong after coding, for example. Yeah, I do think anxiety may get people to motivate, to encourage regulation, or potentially even like, well, people could try boycotting it, but then they feel like they’re disadvantaging themselves if they don’t use it. So I think that’s the problem. The people who don’t feel much agency here, that drives even more of their anxiety.

Jeff: Do you feel that the Valley is a different place in this kind of AI era and soon to be, you know, post-AI era?

Matthew: Well, the leaders in the space, frankly, some of them are not as inspiring, partly because they don’t even try to put things in terms of inspiration. I can say some more than others, I will say, but in general, we don’t have as much of that sense of mission-driven language, even perhaps there’s some of it, but not nearly as much. So maybe that creates one sense of brashness, which I find a little not tasteful. But in real terms, you could argue that most of these leaders have been pretty ruthless and aggressive and audacious, all those things. Everyone from Steve Jobs, even back before to other industries. But I think even within the Valley, that’s been true for a while. So I’m not sure. I do think, though, that there’s been a lot more concentration of wealth that’s been created in the last few years. It’s just unprecedented by any measure. And that has created a little bit of a sense of fear that, well, a few companies will have so much power and value. And I think that’s true at the moment. That may not be true much longer. I think some of that value will dissipate over time as people start deploying technology. And also as the technology evolves, it will naturally commoditize. As we hit some natural limits on the road, assuming we hit those limits. But yeah, if I look at prior technology developments, you have these S-curves, right? The curve that very quickly you see incredible improvements and capabilities, but at some point it starts hitting a shoulder, a limit. And unless they come up with a new technology, you kind of start shouldering out and then it becomes more of a cost game. I think we haven’t gotten there yet with AI, but I think we will get there soon, probably post-IPO for a lot of these companies because they want to prove that they can grow, grow, grow, grow before they do that. So I do think that’s going to be the next phase where people start realizing, wait a minute, we can just do a pretty good answer, that’s one-tenth the cost money that’s good enough. And when that starts percolating through and the pricing gets adjusted, it will change the nature of the Valley to be much more rational and a little bit less driven by big personalities and a few very powerful companies.

Jeff: And finally, Matthew, this whole notion that you’re working in, of enlightened AI. To what extent do you see that catching on and making a real difference?

Matthew: Well, I definitely think the thing that gets people motivated by solving real problems. I think we see close to a real problem and work backwards from that. You have a very different approach to just building technology, which has a general purpose. So I think for a lot of entrepreneurs, that’s what draws them in. They want to solve a specific problem that they saw out there they believe can be solved. And they see these tools being so amazing that they can do something so quickly and so easily that can solve those problems. And that, I think, is creating this Cambrian moment of new startups and ideas being out there. And it can be very small companies, it can very quickly get out there and do things. So I do think there’s a lot of almost individual people just doing these mission-driven efforts. Obviously, they want to build a big business too. They actually simultaneously want to be another startup success, but they do want to solve a problem and they really believe in that. And I think that is very inspiring. And I think a lot of people are doing this, next generation of founders will be like that. So yeah, I see that out there. And also the amount of cynicism about the bigger companies and not wanting to be part of the big monoliths and, culturally speaking, that feels less attractive than it might have been a decade ago.

Jeff: Matthew Stepka, I thank you so much for spending time with us today.

Matthew: It’s a real pleasure. It was great talking to you as well. Thank you very much.

Jeff: Thank you. And thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you join us next week for another WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to WhoWhatWhy.org/donate.