Twitter Spaces:与乔治·霍茨探讨 Twitter 的软件栈
Twitter Spaces: Twitter's software stack with George Hotz
机器翻译,已尽力保留原意与数字
内容摘要
马斯克加入了由程序员乔治·霍茨主持的一场 Twitter Space,讨论 Twitter 的软件栈、重写系统的理由以及公司的财务状况——期间还与一名前员工发生了激烈争执。
Musk joined a Twitter Space hosted by programmer George Hotz to discuss Twitter's software stack, the case for a rewrite and the company's finances — including a heated exchange with a former employee.
中文实录Transcript
718 个段落
联合主持人
比如图示。
乔治·霍茨
不,不,不。我是说,比如,你说的是什么意思。你疯了吗?
联合主持人
不,不,说真的,得了吧,伙计。
听众
得了吧。谁。
埃隆·马斯克
你是谁?
乔治·霍茨
你说我是谁是什么意思?我不知道。是你把麦克风给我的。
听众
我拿到。
乔治·霍茨
不,我没把麦克风给你。我在管麦克风。咱们。咱们保持。咱们在我的 Space 里保持文明。
听众
我是说。
乔治·霍茨
对,比如什么?不,不,伙计。
联合主持人
你负责服务器和编程。
乔治·霍茨
随便吧。比如什么?在我的 Space 里只谈技术。拜托。从上到下给我讲讲。现在这个技术栈是什么样的?
联合主持人
它到底有什么疯狂的?
乔治·霍茨
这个技术栈与……相比,到底有什么不正常的
联合主持人
地球上其他所有大规模系统?
乔治·霍茨
伙计,得了吧,告诉我吧。好吧,那么首先,太棒了。哇。
埃隆·马斯克
你就是个混蛋。
乔治·霍茨
好,好,好。行。不,不,不。
观众成员
我有。
乔治·霍茨
我毫无可信度。各位,我完全不知道。首先,我的状态。
观众成员
Sybil,你知道,就是,你把他从发言人中移除了。
埃隆·马斯克
很好。
乔治·霍茨
我可以深入讲讲吗?
观众成员
可以。
乔治·霍茨
好。最大的问题之一是,你无法在本地运行 Twitter。所以我在 Facebook 的时候,你可以在一台笔记本电脑上运行整个 Facebook。除了数据中心里一种非常定制的配置之外,根本没有办法运行 Facebook,运行 Twitter。这使得在它上面构建任何新东西都几乎不可能。
埃隆·马斯克
是啊,我是说,有2000万行 Scala。想想看。太疯狂了。
埃隆·马斯克
你发布那张图了吗?
乔治·霍茨
没有,我没发布那张图。但那张图的笑点并不是有那么多组件,而是当人们想到微服务时,他们想到的是200行代码,而不是200,000行。
乔治·霍茨
是的,而且大多数都是200,000行。
埃隆·马斯克
添加浏览次数这样的功能应该轻而易举。实际上,它应该就像在数据库里再加一行之类的。
埃隆·马斯克
这本该轻而易举,但由于 Twitter 软件栈疯狂的复杂性,它并不简单。
乔治·霍茨
我不同意关于浏览次数的说法。我认为浏览次数实际上本质上是一项很难的功能。但是,例如,现在有一项运行模型的服务,还有一项调用那个服务的服务,就像,有一个用来运行模型的 RPC。基本上,在 comma,那是一行代码。如果你想在 Twitter 把模型放进进程里,就要占用最优秀工程师两周的时间。
观众成员
对。
乔治·霍茨
那种事情实际上应该只需要一行代码。
乔治·霍茨
我不同意浏览次数应该很容易,即使是在世界上最好的软件栈上。但有些东西就是我想在搜索中上线的点赞功能。本来应该只需要5行代码。
埃隆·马斯克
是的,我知道。我。嗯,所以我想如果你。
埃隆·马斯克
我们确实会统计浏览量,只是会批量处理。所以,如果你降低对浏览量的要求,比如说,听着,我们不在乎浏览量是不是实时的,可以每100秒更新一次,而不是每1秒更新一次。显然,这样就能把负载降低2个数量级。
联合主持人
嗯,
乔治·霍茨
算是吧。
乔治·霍茨
对于那些一直有人浏览的推文,你肯定能把负载降低2个数量级。对吧。但对于每200秒才有人浏览一次的推文,负载是一样的。就是。如果你的意思基本上是每100秒读取表里的每条推文来获取浏览量,那就会有大量读取操作。
埃隆·马斯克
听着,我想说明的重点是,浏览量已经在统计了。就像这已经是正在发生的事情。但就浏览量而言,目前的问题是它会被发送到 Google Cloud,而不是本地部署的系统,浏览量正以批处理方式调用 Google cut,其速率比用当前管道渲染它所需的速度慢了接近一个数量级。这才是真正的问题。但如果你接着说,好吧,听着,我们不在乎它是不是实时的,因为像点赞这样的东西大约每秒都会更新一次。
埃隆·马斯克
但如果我们说的是你的推文。
乔治·霍茨
是的,对大多数人的推文来说。
埃隆·马斯克
不,不,我只是说,像它的更新频率,是接近实时的。
埃隆·马斯克
但我想说明的重点是,浏览量已经在统计了。只是它们会被批量处理,然后通过一条慢速管道发送到 Google Cloud 上的分析软件。而点赞使用的是本地部署的数据库。但你可以,那就像是一个任意做出的决定。它也可以使用本地部署的数据库。
乔治·霍茨
是的。
埃隆·马斯克
所以,如果当初没有任意决定脱离本地部署、转而使用 Google Cloud,那么添加点赞就会轻而易举。
乔治·霍茨
会容易得多。
埃隆·马斯克
添加浏览量不会很麻烦。
埃隆·马斯克
所以,如果你不那么在意具体有多少次浏览,如果你愿意,让它稍微,让它有一点浮动,而且偶尔漏掉一次浏览量,那个。所以因为,像,我们又不是在这里试图核对银行账簿,那么我认为浏览量实际上会相对容易
乔治·霍茨
如果浏览量和点赞在同一个数据库里。是的,那就会很容易。
埃隆·马斯克
是的,我说的就是这个。而且本来就应该这样,浏览量居然放在 Google Cloud 里一个完全不同的数据库中,而不是放在本地部署的
观众成员
系统。
埃隆·马斯克
所以无论如何,那算是一种不必要的复杂性。我的意思是,Twitter 目前的技术栈基本上就像是把3个不同世界的难题结合到了一起,也就是运行一个复杂的实时本地部署数据库,它位于亚特兰大的3个数据中心,
观众成员
1个
埃隆·马斯克
年在俄勒冈州,1个在萨克拉门托。萨克拉门托可能是设立数据中心最糟糕的地方,因为那里很热。然后,就像夏天的时候,天气热到数据中心发生故障,因为暖通空调系统无法运作。但除此之外,你还
乔治·霍茨
有
埃隆·马斯克
还在使用 AWS,也就是使用 Amazon 和 Google Cloud。所以要运营 Twitter Fleets,这3者缺一不可。
乔治·霍茨
Fleets 使用 AWS。他们把所有 Fleets 都建在了 AWS 上。是的,我还读了说明他们为什么这么做、为什么把 Fleets 放到 AWS 上的 Google Docs。基本上,他们无法从内部数据中心获得足够的资源配置。
埃隆·马斯克
是的,我的意思是,像 Sam Pilar 一直在帮忙,而且我想 Sam 当时说过,有相当离谱的数据存储量实际上是用于分析那些已经不存在的应用版本。是的,像我觉得大概是15%,也许20%,就像,真的在记录来自已经不存在的应用的数据。
埃隆·马斯克
这就像,好吧,那真是。哇。
埃隆·马斯克
无论如何,正在发生很多疯狂的事情。
乔治·霍茨
25%的 CPU 正在运行广告预测模型。那些 CPU 上的是最小的模型。实际上只有30%在运行模型。70%都在把数据序列化和反序列化为4种不同的格式。
埃隆·马斯克
是的,而疯狂之处就在这里。所以,认真想想,这确实有点令人难以置信,但我花了几周时间才真正理解这件事。Google Twitter 的广告实际上大部分是在进行不相关性优化。所以这就像,等一下,什么叫不相关性优化?嗯,当我问那些使用 Twitter 已有一段时间的人,就像,你在 Twitter 上买过多少东西?
埃隆·马斯克
答案通常是什么都没买。但就像,好吧,你在Instagram上买过多少东西?哦,我上周买了一大堆东西。就像,好吧,你不觉得有意思吗,这么久以来,你居然没有偶然在Twitter上买过什么东西?而你没有买过的原因,是广告在最大化不相关性。我感觉自己困在了一部道格拉斯·亚当斯的小说里。就像那艘宇宙飞船由最大不可能性提供动力。
埃隆·马斯克
所以你会想,等一下,到底为什么要最大化不相关性?好吧,因为团队接到的要求是最大化展示量,也就是广告展示次数。那么,如果你试图最大化广告展示次数,会发生什么?好吧,实际上你会最大化不相关性,因为如果你。如果某人在Twitter上花了5分钟,而这5分钟里有2分钟用来点击一个广告,你现在就损失了40%的展示量。
埃隆·马斯克
就像脑袋爆炸的表情符号。
乔治·霍茨
是的,对广告而言,停留时间可能是比展示量好得多的信号。
乔治·霍茨
我的意思是,这就是成就TikTok的东西。成就TikTok的东西。是什么让TikTok这么好?他们掌握所有视频的停留时间。你花在一则广告上的时间,可能比你是否看到了广告更有价值,不过我有些不同意。在极限情况下,如果有一个试图最大化展示量的理想机器学习模型,我认为最终会得到一个整天只滚动浏览Twitter和看广告的人。
埃隆·马斯克
听着,我只是说,就像,几周前我和一些工程师梳理这件事时,我花了一点时间。我只是。
埃隆·马斯克
这件事疯狂到了让我无法理解的程度。我花了一段时间才真正理解,因为我当时说的是,就像,不,我们希望人们点击广告。投放广告的全部意义,就是让你可能买些东西。这就是做广告的原因。所以,你知道,高度相关的广告就是内容。不相关的广告就是垃圾信息。所以我们希望广告尽可能贴合人们的需求。
埃隆·马斯克
然而,我看到很多广告,事实上大多数广告都不相关。当我问人们对Twitter有什么不满时,他们会说,好吧,Twitter总是一遍遍向我展示同一则我根本不关心的广告。我就想,好吧,这似乎太疯狂了。但后来我找到了原因,就是他们被要求最大化展示量,而不是最大化实际点击和购买,而后者才是他们应该做的。
乔治·霍茨
在Twitter上开展广告活动时,我想你可以选择。我不太确定后端做什么。我听说后端会设法最大化收入,但你可以选择是开展按展示量计的广告活动,还是开展按点击量计的广告活动。
埃隆·马斯克
是的,最近情况已经有所改变。所以我们,在,像,你知道,基本上从收购以来,我就说,不,伙计们,我们需要最大化相关性。而且在相关性优化这个方向上,确实已经开展了一些不错的工作。
联合主持人
所以,
埃隆·马斯克
这,你知道,所以,那,你知道,我无意在这里显得完全消极,但有很多,你知道,最近在真正让广告与这方面的问题相关这个方向上,已经开展了一些不错的工作。
联合主持人
我对广告技术方面的东西极其痴迷。我特别好奇Twitter要如何仅就身份网络而言与Google和Facebook之类的平台竞争,以及他们为了定向投放,把兴趣群体划分得有多好。比如,Twitter要怎么竞争?
埃隆·马斯克
实际上,我认为对于已经使用 Twitter 一段时间的人来说,Twitter 实际上可以说能做得更好。所以,如果你使用 Twitter,比如说,我不知道,几周,而且如果你已经用了好几个小时,那么它,它所拥有的信号,信号量就很高。你知道,人们,人们关注了什么、什么、什么话题,人们关注了什么、什么、什么账号,他们喜欢什么,他们,你可以说,你知道,当然还有浏览量。
埃隆·马斯克
有。而且其中很多东西实际上已经在 Twitter 上用于推荐推文,也就是有时所谓的主页时间线。你知道,如果你愿意,Twitter 界面的右上角有一个小星星图标,它会显示类似“为你推荐”或“最新”。所以“为你推荐”就是推荐推文。很多人实际上甚至没有意识到,右上角的星星图标可以用来在推荐推文和你实际关注的账号之间切换。
埃隆·马斯克
我敢说,目前参与这次通话的很多人都不知道那个星星图标是干什么的。
乔治·霍茨
所以。
埃隆·马斯克
但推荐推文其实相当不错。
乔治·霍茨
Home ML 比 adsml 好得多。Home ML 使用的模型大得多,特征也多得多。adsml 非常初级。
埃隆·马斯克
是的。但本质上,它们应该经过同一条流水线。
乔治·霍茨
对。
埃隆·马斯克
如果 Twitter 能准确地向你推荐你没有明确关注的推文,那么同样地,它也能展示与你相关的广告。
联合主持人
所以,很多平台销售广告的方式,以及很多购买方对广告的预期,并不一定是,我把这些广告交给你,并相信你会把它们投放给合适的人。通常几乎恰恰相反,是我想把广告定向投放给这个地区的这群人,他们在过去 72 天里去过 Jiffy Lube。如此精细的微定向是如今很多广告买家所期待的。而且,这也是平台上的 CPM 能变得如此之高的一大原因。
乔治·霍茨
比如 YouTube,不管它们有没有经过定向。如果你的目标是 C cpms,那么在向某人展示广告之前,你应该非常清楚他们会点击它。而你可以用 GoodML 做到这一点,
联合主持人
但有时这些广告商会投放同一个应用完全不同的版本。
乔治·霍茨
请把这家伙关掉。他只是在胡说八道。
埃隆·马斯克
谢谢。
乔治·霍茨
所以
埃隆·马斯克
我确实和广告商谈过。我就在今天,今天早上,和一些大型广告商谈过,而他们寻求的是,正如你所预料的,投资回报。因此,如果他们花了一定数额的钱,所获得的回报会不会超过花掉的钱?这非常理性,并非武断或随机。所以,我不会说是谁,但有大型广告商今年在 Twitter 上花了 6000 万美元。
埃隆·马斯克
然后他们说,我们计算了投资回报率。实际上,另一家公司帮助他们计算了投资回报率,而 Twitter 是最低的。这就是他们难以在 Twitter 上追加支出的原因,因为他们看到的确实是最低的投资回报率。我说,对,好吧,这非常合理。然后他们说,嗯,你知道,当回复中讨论到这个特定产品时,在那个时候提供一则广告是不是很合理,也许既然你正在讨论这个产品,也许你会想买它?
埃隆·马斯克
我说,是的,那完全合理。我们当然应该这么做。他们说,对,那会非常棒。如果你们这么做,那么我们会很乐意投入更多广告费。他们非常理性,并非武断和随机。
乔治·霍茨
我要替 Theo 说句话,他在 Twitch 工作过。到目前为止,他在这个 Space 里提供了一些有价值的内容。就极限情况而言,我同意你的观点,但这需要重新培训广告商。我不是说你做不到,但广告商已经开始期待很多这种微定向功能了。Facebook 开创了其中的很多做法。
埃隆·马斯克
是的,听着,我认为归根结底,如果你能说,比如,如果你能建立一个清晰的等价关系,比如,就说,比如。假如你花费 X 的金额来产生利润 Y,只要 Y 大于 X,你就应该继续。而且只要你有良好的分析数据,能够证明无论广告商是谁,你都会成功。而 Twitter 目前还不是这种情况,但以后会是。
乔治·霍茨
你是想每一场仗都打,还是想,比如,比如。我的意思是,这是 Twitter 应该打的仗吗,还是我们就提供最标准、最无聊的广告界面,然后把它做好。就像 Instagram 的那样。
埃隆·马斯克
Instagram 有一个出色的广告界面,就,就真的是和任何人聊聊,他们很可能,只要他们使用 Instagram,就很可能买过东西。
乔治·霍茨
上周我就通过 Instagram 广告买了东西。对,Facebook 的数据中心里也有 GPU。他们正在对用户运行规模相当大的模型。
埃隆·马斯克
对,这,这。我不认为我们是在这里尝试分裂原子。你知道,我们实际上只是想向人们展示他们可能真的想买的东西的广告。
埃隆·马斯克
你知道,这不是曼哈顿计划,尽管这个数据库很奇怪地叫作 Manhattan。
听众
所以,
埃隆·马斯克
所以这只是,我只是,这些都是常识性的东西。所以,比如,对,比如,听起来这实施起来极其困难。它会得到实施,而且会很快完成。
乔治·霍茨
埃隆,是否可以提供
埃隆·马斯克
比如每月100美元、完全没有广告的更昂贵版本?
乔治·霍茨
我的意思是,可能有 1% 的人会
乔治·霍茨
愿意为此付费。
埃隆·马斯克
是的,当然。
埃隆·马斯克
我认为这是显而易见的。问题只是什么时候增加什么样的复杂度。好吧,所以说,很难,坦率地说,很难夸大添加东西、添加功能的难度。那些本应很容易添加的功能并不容易添加,因为这个技术栈的复杂度极其复杂。
乔治·霍茨
那我们能做重构吗?忘了。
埃隆·马斯克
所以,即使在过去几周里,我们也做了一些简化,但这个,走完整个技术栈会让你的脑子炸掉。就像,哇。
乔治·霍茨
嗯,你得在功能和重构之间做某种取舍。
联合主持人
对。
乔治·霍茨
比如,如果你有 X 数量的工程团队,你可以决定要如何分配。
埃隆·马斯克
是的,我的意思是,基本上我们会做,你知道,一系列我认为意义重大的短期产品改进。但之后我认为,为了保持高速度的改进,我们需要重写。不幸的是,我认为需要重写。
埃隆·马斯克
比如说,回头看看老派的 Apple,你知道,他们当时有自己的旧操作系统,然后乔布斯带着 osx 来了,你知道,那是一个新的技术栈。不是说,让我们,你知道,摆弄一下旧的 Apple os。而是他直接拿来 Next OS,把它改造给 Apple 用,然后说,对,你们的旧软件就是再也不能用了。太遗憾了。
乔治·霍茨
但操作系统并不是大规模运行的。像,这事可以做,但要做到,我认为要做到在保持连续运行的情况下推出这个新技术栈,并承诺彻底重写期间不停机,会相当困难。看起来非常、非常难。
乔治·霍茨
是的。
埃隆·马斯克
尽管如此,我认为从长期来看,这会是必需的。
听众
其实我有一个关于这个技术栈的问题。
埃隆·马斯克
当然。
听众
所以你之前提到了 2000 万行 Scala,并且提到微服务包含了 Twitter 系统的许多复杂性。所以我觉得微服务就像。我相信微服务对于复杂性来说,像那种规模的系统并不会真的微服务落地。
乔治·霍茨
抱歉,你现在断断续续的。
乔治·霍茨
你认为应该用微服务,还是不应该用微服务。
听众
我对微服务没意见。我担心的是你们正在使用的基础设施或技术栈,因为你们没有使用商业产品、开源产品或任何标准化产品,而是内置或内部实现了所有东西。当然,你们在使用 Kafka,但你们的 RPC 层是内部开发的 Thrift。你们的数据库是 Manhattan。
乔治·霍茨
等等,等等,等等,等等,等等,等等。Thrift 是 Facebook 的产品?
听众
哪一个?
乔治·霍茨
Thrift 是 Facebook 的产品。
听众
我的重点是
埃隆·马斯克
我们有 TFE,我们有 GraphQL,我们有 Product Mixer,我们有 Ranker,我们有 Manhattan 数据库,我们有 Strato,我们有 Tweety Pie,我们有 Gizmo Duck,我们有 Twitter memcache,然后等到
乔治·霍茨
你发现它们全都构建在 Finatra 和 Finagle 之上,而这两个完全是 Twitter 定制的开源 Scala 项目。
听众
是的,我明白。我的重点是,如果你有这么多定制的、而不是那种高度标准化的产品,而现在碰巧有 80% 的员工离开了,那么对新人,甚至对现有员工来说,使用这种基础设施并能够、能够对它进行迭代会困难多少,更不用说重构它了?
乔治·霍茨
我的意思是,我觉得我能做到,但我认为这会花我 6 个月。
埃隆·马斯克
太好笑了。
听众
所以,乔治,你提到在 Facebook,一切都可以在本地运行。我曾在一些公司工作过,我们有一支专门负责开发者体验的团队,他们的工作实际上就是把所有东西 Docker 化和容器化,然后让应用程序运行起来,这样会写代码的人就能写代码。而听起来 Twitter 正缺少这个。
乔治·霍茨
对,你会想为 Twitter 招聘那些人。我认为 Twitter 确实缺少那样的人。所以,我是说,埃隆,你们离,离
观众成员
让一名工程师,比如一名新工程师,在第一天就能上手还有多远?就是,你知道,走进来,快速完成入职介绍,然后运行一个独立的开发实例,并且当天就能提交一个 PR,或者也许同一个。
乔治·霍茨
开发实例。不,Twitter 不信那一套。我们有过产出,而且有时候。
观众成员
或者本地环境。任何一种本地环境。
乔治·霍茨
它就是本地的。
埃隆·马斯克
不,我认为就你说的这一点而言,这需要一段时间。定制的东西太多了,光是弄明白一切都在哪里、又是如何相互连接的,我认为就至少需要几周时间。
埃隆·马斯克
所以我认为,如果没有至少1个月的密集投入,很难真正做出成果。我是说,那个。对。而且我得说,如果你能在1个月内做出有用的东西,那说明你真的很擅长软件。
乔治·霍茨
我想我已经理解了其中大部分,但我认为很多问题并不在于理解。我认为它们只是工具和工作流程方面的问题。
乔治·霍茨
比如,我无法在数据中心以外的任何地方把 Twitter 跑起来,有些服务在开发时,你必须。它们会打包。这是一个 1.6 GB 的二进制文件。它必须上传到数据中心。那需要 20 分钟,然后你把它解包,接着,好吧,30 分钟后,你测试完了那一行改动,然后。哦,你打错了一个字。
埃隆·马斯克
对,我只是说,基本上,乔治说的这一点是个很好的观点,就是。
埃隆·马斯克
这里有太多复杂性,并且在太多不同层面上存在太多相互作用,因此要取得进展非常困难。进展正在取得,但要取得进展确实非常困难。当你触碰系统中的,比如说一个元素时,它会影响另外大约 17 个元素。
埃隆·马斯克
所以,你知道,比如支持采用一大堆微服务的一个理由是,如果它们真正相互独立,你就可以添加额外的微服务,而不影响系统的其余部分。但 Twitter 的情况并非如此。
埃隆·马斯克
就像我说的,我们面临着尝试给推文添加浏览次数的挑战,我认为这确实会让这个网站一下子活跃起来,因为你会看到实际上有多少人浏览了你的推文。
埃隆·马斯克
这对视频来说完全正常。所以,即使你看 Twitter 上的一段视频,它实际上也会向你显示这段视频获得了多少次观看。这会让你在一定程度上了解视频的受欢迎程度,人们对这段视频有多感兴趣。所以 Twitter 有观看次数,可怜的视频,但推文没有浏览次数。所以你可以发一条推文,然后想,天啊,有人吗。是不是就像一条推文掉进森林里,却没人听见?
埃隆·马斯克
有人看到我的推文了吗?实际上,很多人都看到了你的推文,但你不知道,因为他们不想通过。通过真的点赞、转推或回复来公开表态。所以,只要显示推文的浏览次数,这个网站就会在很大程度上活跃起来,人们会意识到,我的天。实际上有很多人在看我的推文。那很酷。然后,就像我之前说的,我们需要添加一种功能,让你可以点赞一条推文,而不会让它变成。
埃隆·马斯克
不会向全世界宣告你点赞了它,或者能够表达,也许你不是以一种。我喜欢那件事发生了。就像地震的例子。你不喜欢地震,但它无疑值得注意。而在地震旁边放一颗心。这很奇怪。所以对于你如何。你对一条推文的看法,你希望能有更精细的表达,而且你希望可以选择是否公开自己对那条推文的感受。
埃隆·马斯克
那些算是,相当显而易见的东西。但对现有 Twitter 系统做出这些改变非常困难。
乔治·霍茨
为什么不先重构,之后再做这些改动?为什么必须现在做?
埃隆·马斯克
我认为我们需要在近期做出一些改进。而且我认为我们能在近期做出一些改进。
乔治·霍茨
所以我今天早上运行了 Git log,查看有多少提交正在进入代码库,以及它们实际上是什么。大片绿色的差异
埃隆·马斯克
是用于浏览次数,还是用于其他东西?
乔治·霍茨
各种各样的东西。也许其中 10% 与浏览次数有关。
埃隆·马斯克
好的。
乔治·霍茨
但其他这些仍然存在。它们仍然是绿色差异。如今有很多人在写大量代码。Timeline Mixer 已被弃用,改用 Home Mixer。很好。它已被弃用,改用 Home Mixer。Timeline Mixer 被删除了吗?哦,没有。现在我们同时有 Timeline Mixer 和 Home Mixer。
埃隆·马斯克
它们正在同时运行。
乔治·霍茨
是的。
埃隆·马斯克
嗯,显然,如果某个东西仍在运行,那么说它已被弃用并没有多大意义。
乔治·霍茨
对,正是我所说的。没错。在 Twitter,实际上没有任何东西会被弃用。所以 Twitter 有3个 API,如果你打开 Chrome 检查器,就能在公开的 Twitter 上看到这一点。Twitter 有1个 1.1 API、1个 2.0 API、1个 GraphQL API。它还有1.1 developer 和2.0 developer。我能找到5个 API。而且还有其他一些人们谈到过的,我不知道该怎么找到,因为我的电脑上没有 Android Emulator。
乔治·霍茨
这些东西需要清理,但没有人在做。
听众
不是吗,这很常见。
乔治·霍茨
嘿,各位,介意我问个……
听众
当然。
乔治·霍茨
好的。所以我只是想知道。
听众
埃隆。
乔治·霍茨
所以显然,如你所知,我想,就那个,那个 Tesla,你知道,还有
埃隆·马斯克
你们在自动驾驶方面所做的,
乔治·霍茨
你们正在重新创建和重写大量代码。而 Twitter 这边听起来,听起来简直像是一场噩梦。
埃隆·马斯克
那么,你是如何确定修复什么、要实现什么的优先级的,比如浏览量,你是如何对所有事情进行优先级排序的,尤其是如果完成这些事情要多花很多额外时间。
埃隆·马斯克
嗯,要记住,你知道,这项收购才完成了大概,也就6周前,5周左右。所以,这可能是有史以来一次收购中发生的最大规模的变化。
埃隆·马斯克
你知道,我们现在有略多于2,000人。我们以前接近8,000人。网站仍在运行,我们正在上面这一事实就证明了这一点。
埃隆·马斯克
所以,你知道,这是相当不错的进展。在 Twitter,最需要做的事情是削减资金消耗率,使 Twitter 不至于明年就直接破产。那就是,你知道,头号任务。这方面仍有工作要做,但大部分已经完成了。然后还有,把收入基础从实质上完全依赖广告商转变过来也很重要,而且不仅仅是依赖广告商,还是依赖模糊的品牌广告,而不是具有明确投资回报率的广告。
埃隆·马斯克
而随着我们正走向一场看起来要发生的经济衰退,企业首先会削减的就是可自由支配的品牌广告。因此,对 Twitter 来说,拥有订阅用户基础很重要。这就是推出 Twitter 认证的原因。
埃隆·马斯克
我们之所以能够推进 Twitter 认证,是因为它利用了一款算是原本就存在、但不太有用的产品,叫作 Twitter Blue。
埃隆·马斯克
所以,能够转向一个。让订阅收入成为 Twitter 收入中有意义的一部分,对于 Twitter 的繁荣生存将至关重要。
埃隆·马斯克
所以这就是为什么头号优先事项实际上是让 Twitter 认证运作起来,然后还要让面向企业和组织的 Twitter 认证运作起来,这样,你现在正开始看到它推出,组织可以真正识别谁属于该组织。比如,究竟是谁,哪些账号实际上属于 Disney,并且可以代表 Disney 发言,或者代表比如 Stanford 或任何组织发言。
埃隆·马斯克
比如,如果有人说自己与某个组织有关联,除了他们在个人简介中这样说,你怎么知道。嗯,我们现在正在后端建立这种关联,以便有人,组织可以说,是的,这些 Twitter 用户名确实属于该公司,并且已经通过认证。
埃隆·马斯克
而这显然也是,你知道,商业收入、企业对企业收入的一条途径。所以,在我们看到品牌广告迅速下滑之际,订阅收入和某种后端商业收入确实非常重要。
乔治·霍茨
但这些全都是功能,而且它们全都是以牺牲和重构为代价的。
埃隆·马斯克
是的,没错,确实如此。
乔治·霍茨
好的,谢谢你承认这一点。
埃隆·马斯克
我认为,如果我们不做这些改变,就没机会进行重构。
听众
为什么?
埃隆·马斯克
因为我们以前是破产的。
乔治·霍茨
现金跑道有多长?
听众
我能快速插个问题,打破这里关于现金跑道的沉默吗?
乔治·霍茨
可以,当然。
听众
好的。所以我觉得,你知道,埃隆,你是我们的哲学家国王。柏拉图会为你感到非常骄傲。你知道,你在技术方面极其胜任,而且,你知道,我认为你确实懂得如何推动事情朝好的方向发展。但是,你知道,我也非常喜欢你同时也在积极听取人民的声音,并让他们也有发言权。但你不可能有100万个坐在后座指挥的人。所以我想问你的是,当有很多人根本没有正确的信息来作出决定时,你如何整合人民的声音?
听众
以及,你如何创建正确的治理体系,真正从所有噪声中找到信号,让 Twitter 变得更像一个共和国,而不是独裁政权,你知道吗?
听众
很好奇你怎么看。
埃隆·马斯克
是啊,嗯,我是说,你知道,在、在相对较近的时期,如果 Twitter 在财务上已经垮掉了,这些事情就都有点无关紧要了。所以我一直在思考资金还能支撑多久的问题,就是想稍微,你知道,让大家了解一下情况。按照原本的趋势,Twitter 明年将支出约50亿美元。
乔治·霍茨
我们需要那趟去 Disneyland 的旅行。
埃隆·马斯克
是的,没错。然后,由于这笔交易的性质,其中有125亿美元的债务,而美联储利率一直在疯狂上涨,因此需要偿付大约15亿美元左右的债务。所以我们说的是,如果你不做任何改变,明年的净现金流出大约会是60亿、65亿美元,而收入可能会趋向于30亿美元。
埃隆·马斯克
所以这相当于每年负现金流30亿美元。情况不妙,因为 Twitter 有10亿美元现金。
埃隆·马斯克
所以这就是为什么过去5周我一直在疯狂削减成本。
乔治·霍茨
我认为我们也必须把广告商争取回来。
埃隆·马斯克
是的,是的,我们确实需要把广告商争取回来。但就像我说的,我已经和多家广告商谈过了。他们。他们的要求并不含糊,也不荒谬,或者诸如此类。他们的要求相当合理。他们就说,只要向我们展示一个合理的投资回报率。我就说,是的,我同意。如果我处在他们的位置,我也会想要一个合理的投资回报率。尤其是在即将进入经济困难时期之际,这些问题会比繁荣时期被问到更多次。
埃隆·马斯克
在繁荣时期,广告预算很充足,即使投资回报率不明确,你也能蒙混过关。但在日子艰难的时候,投资回报这类尖锐问题就会被提出来。而当你没有明确答案时,广告商就不想投放广告,因为他们很理智。这是主要问题。
埃隆·马斯克
所以这很重要。现在,随着我们在这里作出这些改变,大幅降低资金消耗速度并建立订阅收入,我现在认为 Twitter 明年事实上会没问题。我认为我们将会,希望如此,大致实现现金流收支平衡。这是我对明年的预期。
埃隆·马斯克
但这会相当。这会很困难,但我认为将会发生的情况是大致实现现金流收支平衡,而不是在有价值10亿美元现金的情况下出现大约负30亿美元的现金流,那样的话就会死掉。所以这就是我采取这些行动的原因。它们有时可能显得没有根据、古怪,或者随便怎么说。这是因为这不是。我们手头有一个紧急的火灾滚动。这就是原因。不是因为我天生反复无常,或者至少从愿望上说,我并非天生反复无常。
埃隆·马斯克
所以。但是,如果你稍微,如果你说你从我的立场来看这件事,你会说,好吧,哇,这家公司就像、就像,基本上你身处一架正高速冲向地面的飞机上,引擎着火,而且控制系统失灵。
乔治·霍茨
我在 comma 也用过同样的比喻,我们负担得起好吃的食物吗?
埃隆·马斯克
是啊,嗯,
乔治·霍茨
这对我真的很重要。
埃隆·马斯克
不,我认为我们负担得起好吃的食物。
埃隆·马斯克
例如,总部餐饮预算的疯狂之处在于,无论有多少人来,它都是每年固定1300万美元。所以,如果大楼满员时,一顿普通餐的价格本来会是20美元,而且实际上是相当不错的午餐,食物很好。
埃隆·马斯克
但如果入驻率降到5%,实际餐费现在就被乘以了20,这就是一顿午餐要400美元的原因,真的是这样。
乔治·霍茨
完全正确。食物很棒。我喜欢奇亚籽布丁和早上的冰沙。但没错,你得让所有人都来办公室。人们认为自己可以有一份不用来办公室上班的工作,这在我看来很疯狂。
埃隆·马斯克
对。而且,如果、如果有一栋大楼的入驻率真的只有5%,你会设法重新协商餐饮预算,不会,你知道,让它比应有的水平高出20倍,这似乎合乎逻辑。但实际情况确实如此。所以我,你知道,食物是个
乔治·霍茨
现在比以前差多了。差多了。
观众成员
是的。
埃隆·马斯克
嗯,我们肯定能改善这一点。
埃隆·马斯克
我认为那并不是什么无法克服的事情。
观众成员
所以
埃隆·马斯克
这不会,你知道,这不会让我们破产。问题更多在于,你不能为一栋大部分时间空着的大楼里的午餐每年支付1300万美元,而且这甚至还不包括晚餐。
乔治·霍茨
单是把广告预测从 TF Serving 切换到 ONNX Runtime,我就能节省1300万美元。
埃隆·马斯克
是的,我是说,我们完全可以吃上一顿不错的午餐。
埃隆·马斯克
我们不会从此永远陷在午餐炼狱里。
埃隆·马斯克
我的意思是,我们可能做得太过头了。我承认,在削减午餐成本方面,我们可能做得太过头了,那、那可能确实如此。所以我们得设法处理一下。我们在这方面可能纠正过头了,而我们可以修复它。这并不是一个无法克服的问题。
埃隆·马斯克
所以。
乔治·霍茨
是的,所以我想说,重构食物。那言论自由呢?
埃隆·马斯克
嗯,我是说,言论自由,我告诉你,服务器总得有人付钱,好吧,所以言论至少得花8美元,否则我们怎么支付那该死的服务器账单?你知道,所有与服务器有关的成本加起来大约是15亿美元,你知道,我们正努力把它降下来,但这是一大笔钱,不是微不足道的,而且至少,你知道,就像,总得有人来付账单。
埃隆·马斯克
所以广告肯定是一方面,但也需要一定程度的订阅。然后在、在言论方面,我的一般理念是,我们应该紧贴任何特定国家的法律,你知道,所以
乔治·霍茨
是啊,埃隆,这让我太高兴了。如果政策实际上真是这样的话。看到保罗·格雷厄姆因为提到 Mastodon 而被封禁,我很不爽。
埃隆·马斯克
是的,那是个错误。
乔治·霍茨
好。
乔治·霍茨
我的意思是,是啊,我觉得这差得太远了,你知道,听着,你可以为坎耶·韦斯特辩解,可以为埃隆·杰克辩解,但你没法为保罗·格雷辩解。
埃隆·马斯克
不,我同意,那是个错误。
乔治·霍茨
好?人们现在可以发 Mastodon 了吗?
埃隆·马斯克
可以,他妈的一整天尽管发 Mastodon。我不在乎。
乔治·霍茨
是啊,因为我们会做出比 Mastodon 好得多的东西,对吧?拜托,打败这些家伙能有多难?
埃隆·马斯克
你知道,从进化的角度来看,那些乳齿象最后怎么样了?
乔治·霍茨
我不知道乳齿象是什么。
听众
不过,我还是觉得开源项目有一些值得说道的地方。你知道,比如 Linux,你知道,它在竞争中胜过了 Windows。像是由大批志愿者组成的庞大网络,可以维护,你知道,相当复杂的东西,比如,是啊,当然,Linux 也许确实有点像君主制那样运作,就像乔治之前在这个 Space 里说的。但你知道,我确实觉得一般而言开源软件有一些值得说道的地方,你知道,而且它,它就像具有反脆弱性。
乔治·霍茨
我的意思是,Linux 完全就是按君主制运作的,但 Linux 不是 Twitter。Linux 拥有庞大的代码库,是因为它需要支持许多不同的设备驱动程序和许多不同的设备。Twitter 需要支持基本的核心功能,而我觉得把它开源。代码本身没有价值,对吧?操作系统的价值在代码里。Twitter 的价值在网络里,
听众
我想是吧,但仍然存在比如,你知道,可组合性方面的论点,对吧?比如你们可以复用,其他人也可以在其上构建。
乔治·霍茨
如果 Twitter,如果 Twitter 明天开源,你会构建什么?
埃隆·马斯克
老实说,我觉得我们就应该把源代码发到某个地方。说真的。
听众
那就太酷了,埃隆。
乔治·霍茨
永远不会有人能把它运行起来。
埃隆·马斯克
嗯,我的意思是,听着,那就会,我觉得,最终解释清楚。
听众
做吧。
埃隆·马斯克
那是用文字解释的,因为你可以直接看它。
乔治·霍茨
把 Twitter 源代码的 tar 包扔出来。难以置信。
听众
所以我有2个我会采用的想法。
乔治·霍茨
全发出来。
埃隆·马斯克
2000万行 Scala,你可以尽情地看、尽情地读,因为。
联合主持人
哇。
乔治·霍茨
我觉得实际上,我觉得那些只是用到的代码行。
埃隆·马斯克
大概的数字,大概的数字,你知道。
乔治·霍茨
对,对。
埃隆·马斯克
我们就算100万。
乔治·霍茨
哦,是啊,嗯,那只是 Scala,你知道,我们还有很多 Python。
埃隆·马斯克
是啊,但实际上有很多,
听众
很多,大多数开源代码的质量都非常差,而且在 Linux 上,大多数贡献者是由英特尔和其他大公司之类的付薪的。所以这根本算不上公平的比较。是啊,当然,但你仍然有比如可组合性,对吧?比如很多人可以在他们构建的东西上继续构建,然后那会让,比如,比如,我不知道。
乔治·霍茨
是啊,是啊,我的意思是,那完全没错,
听众
但谁会赞助它?而且不会有人赞助开源工程师,除非。
联合主持人
而且可组合性并不是开源所固有的。可组合性同样是一件需要投入大量精力、金钱和时间的事情。比如,有很多代码库虽然是开源的,却完全不具备可组合性。理论上的潜力是存在的,但它几乎一直都不是一种实际存在的东西。
乔治·霍茨
不,不会有人自愿加入你的开源项目,进来做有意义的重构以减少代码。他们会写一个功能,然后说,请合并它,这样我就不用维护它了。然后。
埃隆·马斯克
是的,听起来差不多就是这样。
埃隆·马斯克
不过,我有个很快能说完的想法。
乔治·霍茨
埃隆,有没有什么办法,比如
埃隆·马斯克
把吸引更多人使用 Twitter 这件事游戏化?
乔治·霍茨
因为我觉得很多人在新闻里听说了 Twitter,他们
埃隆·马斯克
并不真正明白该怎么使用它,也不知道怎么下载应用并使用它。但或许如果有办法鼓励其他人向人们展示如何使用它,最终可能有助于增加日活跃用户数。
听众
是的,
埃隆·马斯克
嗯,所以日活跃用户数一直增长得相当不错,尤其是如果你统计的是真实用户,而不是机器人和喷子之类的。
埃隆·马斯克
所以,我是说,我发现的其中一件极其疯狂的事,而且我基本上大约10天前才发现,就是 Twitter 在北美以外的短信业务上每年被骗走了6000万美元。于是我就问,你是什么意思?我当时就问,你是什么意思?就像,有价值6000万美元的短信。
乔治·霍茨
是的。
埃隆·马斯克
基本上是 Twitter 在向电信运营商付费。世界其他地方有些电信运营商不太诚实,他们基本上是在钻系统的空子,一遍又一遍地运行双因素认证短信技术,创建无数个机器人账户,目的就是实打实地抬高账单,好让 Twitter 给他们发短信,而 Twitter 甚至问都不问就会付给他们数百万美元。
埃隆·马斯克
而现在这造成了一些问题,因为我说,嗯,我们得阻止这种事。我说,就是,你知道,把欺诈率超过 10% 的所有电信运营商都切断。现在,这确实在世界许多地方引发了一些混乱。然后人们好像把恶意动机归到这件事上,但实际上我只是对团队说,嘿,把任何……欺诈率超过 10% 的电信运营商切断。结果有 390 家电信运营商。我就说,丹,那可真火爆。
埃隆·马斯克
我的天啊。北美以外,你知道,所以我就想,好吧,我都不知道世上有这么多电信运营商,但事实证明还真有一些。你知道,当你接触到俄罗斯比洛的第 4 级电信运营商时,你会觉得,你们这里有些可疑的事情正在发生。
乔治·霍茨
现在有人抱怨他们无法登录 Twitter,因为他们的短信收不到。
埃隆·马斯克
是的。所以我们现在又回头对电信运营商说,听着,如果你们,如果你们不再骗我们,那我们很乐意为短信支付一定金额的钱,但你们不能对无休止的虚假短信视而不见。所以我们正在与电信运营商谈这件事,然后我们可以重新启用它们,并说,听着,你们只要讲点道理,我们可以接受 10% 的欺诈,没问题。但我们不会接受 90% 的欺诈。
埃隆·马斯克
所以,我们不会每年在北美以外的短信上实打实地花费 6000 万美元。所以就是这样。所以那些用户中有一大批根本就是假的,而且实际上就是为了抬高 Twitter 的短信账单。
乔治·霍茨
真的,不骗你。
埃隆·马斯克
这太疯狂了。所以现在,不过说到你提的让 Twitter 更容易使用,我认为显而易见的做法是,如果你下载 Twitter 应用或者访问 Twitter,它应该,它应该把你带到搜索页面,立刻向你展示正在流行的内容。所以这就像,与其说,嘿,你需要下载应用、需要安装应用、需要给我们一个用户名、需要给我们一个该死的电话号码,把开通 Twitter 账户弄得像密室逃脱一样。
埃隆·马斯克
基本上就像是我们要给你一堆数学题,才能开通 Twitter 账户。然后等你进入 Twitter 账户后,你就坐在那里无事可做。这太疯狂了。
埃隆·马斯克
我甚至不确定你究竟是否应该拥有 Twitter 账户。除非你需要进行写入操作。除非你需要写点什么。所以,如果你想点赞、转推、发推或者做类似的事,好吧,到那个时候,是的,你需要一个账户。
乔治·霍茨
那人们为什么又把弹窗加回来了?他们说是你说他们可以这么做的。
埃隆·马斯克
哪个弹窗?
乔治·霍茨
就是我在第 1 周给你发邮件说想移除的那个弹窗。就是你退出登录后在 Twitter 上滚动时出现的那个。
埃隆·马斯克
我没说我们应该加上那个。好吧,这是沟通有误。
乔治·霍茨
哦,太好了,那我们再把它去掉吧。因为我曾经把它彻底移除了。我彻底移除了它。他们又把它加了回来,而且加回去的时候搞砸了,导致它无法关闭,然后他们在 5 天后修复了。但他们并不是有意让它无法关闭,可它当时确实无法关闭,而我很想彻底移除它。对。
埃隆·马斯克
除非有什么我不知道的原因,否则我不明白我们为什么要禁止纯只读式滚动浏览。
乔治·霍茨
不,没有别的原因,只是人们害怕失去 mdao。
乔治·霍茨
对。
埃隆·马斯克
我觉得这种对 MDAO 的优化正在形成一种毫无道理的怪异激励结构。
乔治·霍茨
这在整个组织里都很普遍。他们热爱 mdao。
埃隆·马斯克
对。
埃隆·马斯克
我的意思是,真正重要的是实际用户分钟数,而不是虚假用户分钟数。我们确信这是真实用户。我们确信这名用户确实在应用上花了时间,这是通过手机的屏幕使用时间衡量的,因为手机是主要的用户使用场景,然后,然后再深入一层,我们说要优化的东西是无悔用户分钟数。所以我听很多人说,嘿,我在 TikTok 上花了 2 个小时,但我后悔那 2 个小时。
埃隆·马斯克
我不是说我想贬低 TikTok,因为它对很多人确实很有吸引力,但是。但是我确实经常听说他们。人们后悔自己花在上面、花在上面的时间。所以我认为我们应该优化的是无悔的真实人类用户分钟数。这才是应该优化的东西,而不是 mdao。
埃隆·马斯克
然后,关于广告,就像我之前说的,你希望广告尽可能接近内容,也就是在你需要某种产品或服务的时候,它正好就是你想要的东西,那它实际上就有用了。实际上到那个时候,它会变得与内容无法区分。
埃隆·马斯克
所以,这些才是要追求的东西。我们会摆脱这套 MDOT 狗屁玩意儿,然后我们会获得。
乔治·霍茨
对,我们把所有弹窗都去掉吧。把你点击点赞和引用推文时出现的弹窗也去掉。因为从根本上说,这些东西正在降低网站上的总分钟数。人们看到那个弹窗后,他们就
埃隆·马斯克
点击那个 X。
埃隆·马斯克
对。我的意思是,重要的是要有某种身份验证机制,这样人们就不能看到。你不能直接创建 100,000 个虚拟机实例。直接创建 100,000 台虚拟机,然后直接创建并让它们全都表现得像用户。尽管到了现在,有了 ChatGPT,坦白说你或许直接就能碾压,因为 ChatGPT 会超过。我觉得这个。
乔治·霍茨
哦,这就快变得不可能了。捕获就快变得不可能了。我不知道我们该怎么办。
埃隆·马斯克
对,但我是说,至少我们可以试试。至少我们可以把它弄成像。这样拥有 100,000 个 Bard 账户就不是轻而易举的,而目前就是如此。
乔治·霍茨
最好的办法,最好的办法是采用类似社会认同指标的东西。
乔治·霍茨
Gmail。还记得最初那个采用邀请制的 Gmail 吗?
埃隆·马斯克
对,只要顺着走。你顺着这棵树走。所以如果,比如,如果有一个。以推荐为基础,如果一个放。如果有一个推荐出了岔子,你就查看它,然后切断整棵推荐树。开头就是这样。
听众成员
乔治,我能问 2 个问题,或者说讲 2 个想法吗?
乔治·霍茨
可以,你有什么?
听众成员
我现在人在圣迭戈,用着我的星链,所以这非常棒。
听众成员
我。所以我是 4 个孩子的父亲,你想要有 2 个帮助提升收入的想法。所以我的孩子们无论如何都会接触到广告。我们能不能推出类似 Twitter nest 的功能,让父母可以让孩子拥有账户,而且父母可以控制孩子看到哪些广告商。因为我的孩子们会购买 Robux,或者你懂的,他们无论如何都会买东西,而我想选择他们接触到什么。
乔治·霍茨
先重构。
听众成员
作为一名软件开发者,我同意这一点。然后下一件事是,有些推文是我想推广的,但那是其他人的推文,因为我只是。
乔治·霍茨
无论是某个政党,还是你
听众成员
知道的,某种行动,只是。对。
听众成员
我们能否看到类似资金来源的书面记录?所以回到帕布洛所说的。帕布洛?对,帕布洛之前说过如何看穿噪声。我认为,当我们能看到书面记录、看到正在影响推文的资金时,看穿噪声就容易得多,而我认为,作为一名年长用户,我
乔治·霍茨
曾经对机器人账户感到沮丧,而且我并不介意人们付费让东西
听众成员
得到推广,但我想看到它来自哪里,来源是什么、它来自哪里。就这些。
埃隆·马斯克
好。
埃隆·马斯克
对,同意。
联合主持人
我之前确实看到过一篇关于视频变现的帖子。你愿意多谈谈这件事吗?因为在 Twitch 工作过之后,我有很多想法。
埃隆·马斯克
Twitter 确实需要支持更长的视频。
埃隆·马斯克
我之前不清楚 Twitter 视频时长的限制是什么,但最近有人告诉我,限制是文件大小为 2 GB,至少在当前技术栈中是这样。所以,如果视频都极其短,就很难实现视频商业化。所以。不过,如果你采用比 Twitter 目前所用的更好的编解码器,并使用对手机而言合理的分辨率,那么 2 GB 可以容纳一些相当长的视频。
埃隆·马斯克
所以,作为第一步的粗略判断,我觉得首要的是,你得真正能够发布足够长的视频。如果做不到,那么其他一切都无关紧要。
乔治·霍兹
是的,我觉得大多数人都没有这个权限。所以,我加入 Twitter 之前做那次直播时,必须获得 Media Studio 的权限,而我实际上是这样弄到的。我朋友说,哦对,我认识 Telegram 群里的一个人,然后他通过 PayPal 给了他们 30 美元,就获得了权限。所以,这就是如今在 Twitter 上获得长视频权限所要做的事。
埃隆·马斯克
是的,嗯,又是我的,我得算是对很多事情作出说明。我应该先声明一下,这更像是我认为某个人告诉过我的,而不是说这是千真万确的事实。所以,对于我说的任何话,这都是一个重要的前提。我说的可能不是真的。至少,这是我对自己认为某个人告诉过我的事情的回忆。所以,我说的任何话都要有所保留。不过,无论如何,如果 2 GB 这件事是真的,那么通过改进编解码器,我们实际上就能支持长视频。
埃隆·马斯克
我觉得当前的编解码器相当老旧,然后采用一种手机能够处理的分辨率,不必是超高清,尤其是如果内容类似播客,不需要以高分辨率呈现每个细节,那么接下来就是一些很基本的事情,比如附加一则至少与内容有一定相关性的视频广告。
埃隆·马斯克
所以,如果是一个关于科技的视频,广告就是与科技相关的广告;如果是一个关于园艺的视频,就是与园艺相关的广告。就是那种合乎情理的东西。
埃隆·马斯克
就像我说的,这不是在分裂原子。它非常基础,而这就是这方面需要做的事。
联合主持人
我们看到的主要问题,是获得足够优质的视频广告库存。我们发现,要积累大量广告,以便向分布足够广泛的人群投放,要困难得多。甚至 Twitch 也是过了一段时间,才开始按用户对广告进行分桶。你是否有信心 Twitter 有能力获得视频广告分桶和投放目标?
埃隆·马斯克
不,我认为这是一个确实存在的问题。实际上,如果我看看 YouTube,因为我确实会在没有 YouTube Premium 的情况下观看 YouTube,只是为了看看这里投放的是什么广告之类的,我们经常会看到一些莫名其妙的广告,它们很像骗局,而且与主题无关。所以,如果连 YouTube 都难以获得与主题相关的广告,那么 Twitter 很可能会面临一些重大的挑战。
埃隆·马斯克
但我认为,其中一部分也只是要主动联系在某个特定领域开展业务的公司,并告诉它们,我们有相关的广告库存。为什么不尝试在这个类型的内容中投放广告,看看效果如何?然后,就像我说的,如果你真的能为广告主带来合乎逻辑的投资回报,我认为从整体上看,它们会采取合乎逻辑的行动。可能会有一些不理性的参与者,但在大多数情况下,它们会采取合乎逻辑的行动。
埃隆·马斯克
所以,是的,但我确实认为广告库存是一个重要问题。如果你只有某种特定类型的广告,那么你就很难实现相关性,因为你根本没有相关的广告。
联合主持人
而且在这个范围内,广告组合也必须足够多样,因为从用户角度来说,视频广告重复出现会让人恼火得多。所以,如果你看到同一则视频广告 3 次,它会比看到同一条推荐推文更令人恼火。
乔治·霍兹
我觉得它们在哪儿都这么糟。我觉得自己一直会遇到这种事。比如我观看时,比如我有一个带广告的廉价 Hulu 账户,同一则广告会出现 3 次。然后我就想,这太糟糕了。
联合主持人
Google 是唯一真正把这件事做好的平台。Instagram 在这方面做得更好,因为它们就是它们的广告平台。难以置信。如今,Meta 的表现一直很出色。但要为多样化的视频广告组合解决库存问题,真的很困难。
乔治·霍兹
是的。不需要说话。
听众
为每个用户构建一个模型,而他们会消耗大约 10 千瓦时,比如
乔治·霍兹
每年、每个用户。不,我可能传播过其中一些错误信息。不,你可以阅读 TikTok 的论文。你可以读那篇《Monolith》。就是很普通的内容推荐引擎方面的东西。他们只是把它做得很好,那些论文。
听众
不过,这样做真的很疯狂吗?
乔治·霍兹
不。我们将开始看到这种情况。
乔治·霍兹
比如,我认为那个。听着,最终你会制作出 Infinite Jazz 录像带。最终你会制作出极具吸引力的内容,以至于你会发现人们只是盯着这些东西看上好几个小时
联合主持人
又好几个小时、又好几个小时、又好几个小时。
乔治·霍兹
而且随着机器学习变得越来越好、越来越好、越来越好,你可以,你可以做到这一点。但你知道,是用户无悔分钟数,对吧?
埃隆·马斯克
是的,我认为这是正确的目标。
埃隆·马斯克
比如,我觉得很难反驳说,好吧,我们提高了用户无悔分钟数。这肯定是件好事,而不是坏事。所以,无论如何,各位,我得在这里认输了,但我确实想在结束时说,Twitter 有很多人都在出色地工作,这一点非常令人感激。
埃隆·马斯克
所以,这绝对不是要变成,你知道的,比如让我们没完没了地贬低 Twitter。它的用意是,你知道的,至少从愿望上来说,是进行自我批评,并且说,好吧,我们能、能做些什么来让事情变得更好?
埃隆·马斯克
所以,你知道,我只是确实想确保这不会给人一种对那些实际上正在努力让 Twitter 变得更好的人过分苛责的感觉。
埃隆·马斯克
那么,就这样,大家晚安。
联合主持人
非常感谢。
乔治·霍兹
非常支持。谢谢你,埃隆。看看 Twitter 2.0 会走向何方。
埃隆·马斯克
谢谢你,埃隆。
听众
嘿,乔治,我能问你一个关于工程师人数的问题吗?
乔治·霍茨
可以。
听众
我最初加入时,没想到埃隆会加入。
乔治·霍茨
嗯,我是说,埃隆加入了。所以埃隆加入之后,你知道,他就像,他、他、他、他是唯一获准谈论任何 Twitter 相关事情的人。你知道,我不是说,我不能,我不能。我不会透露 Twitter 的东西是怎么运作的。我签了保密协议。
听众
没错。所以我,我是一名软件工程师。我类似处境的。
乔治·霍茨
在一个人员流动很大、只有骨架般的骨架团队的项目上。
听众
我感觉自己被拉扯在两者之间,就是,我想做软件,但我也必须更好地理解业务。你觉得这是不是一种不好的处境,当你,当你作为一名工程师,必须开始尝试在业务上创新时。
乔治·霍茨
让我们,让我们,让我们把这个 Space 拉回到。我是说,你知道,埃隆一出现,他会把任何对话带向他想要的任何方向。不过是的,让我们回到,你知道,这个 Space 的主题,也就是规模、复杂性和工程师人数。不,还有,你看,埃隆能加入真的很棒。你知道,想到马克·扎克伯格会出现在这个 Space 里,真是太好了。而且,你知道,马克·扎克伯格甚至还不是最差的。
乔治·霍茨
你觉得桑达尔·皮查伊会来随意聊聊 Google 吗?眼前这件事非同寻常。这正是我非常喜欢新 Twitter 的一点。
联合主持人
其实 YouTube 确实会这样做,这真的很酷。必须大力称赞她。
乔治·霍茨
等等,YouTube 会这样做?谁?
联合主持人
对,YouTube 的首席执行官。我,苏珊·沃西基,相信她。
乔治·霍茨
苏珊·沃西基好像。我不知道她的姓怎么念。她好像会开 Twitter Space,在里面随意聊 YouTube,不是 Twitter
联合主持人
Space,但她总是会加入 Twitter 回复区里的对话。而且她会参加那种,真的,就是听众很少的人的播客,那些人以批评 YouTube 平台而闻名,她还经常参加。她出人意料地透明。就是,我对 YouTube 的领导层印象特别深刻。
乔治·霍茨
那我们为什么取消了点踩?
联合主持人
因为那个。它们带来的净影响危害够大,所以他们决定不值得继续保留。这在内部经历了一场旷日持久的争论。她在多次采访中都深入谈过这件事,包括接受 Marques Brownlee 和 Ludwig 的采访。
乔治·霍茨
对此我很感激。你知道,我没看过这些采访。我没去看。我只是抱怨了点踩。所以,你看,我是。就我个人而言,我非常支持以公开透明的方式进行开发。
乔治·霍茨
你知道,就是,能看到这些挺酷的。
听众
嘿,乔治,这场 Space 是受约翰·卡马克离开 Facebook 启发的吗?
乔治·霍茨
我的意思是,这也是其中一件事,对吧?比如,这其实并不全是关于 Twitter。我们可以讨论约翰·卡马克离开 Meta。是啊,我是说,看看他说了什么,对吧?比如,你知道。
听众
对,好像是 5% 的 GPU 使用率。哦。
乔治·霍茨
我觉得我想说什么都完全可以,因为我不在那里工作,也没有签任何保密协议。和那里在一起的地方。是啊。我的意思是,你知道,看看他们在 Horizon Worlds 上花了多少钱。
听众
然后。
乔治·霍茨
你真的用过 Horizon Worlds 吗?Horizon Worlds 是历史上最昂贵的电子游戏。
听众
我从没听说过它。
乔治·霍茨
没错。那是他们的元宇宙项目。
听众
我从来没。
乔治·霍茨
我从来没有真的用过它。我只是看过、看过它的视频。
联合主持人
到这个时候,我确信每家社交媒体公司都需要在巅峰时期,怎么说呢,花太多钱做一款游戏。我在 Twitch 目睹过同样的事情。他们做了一款卡拉 OK 游戏。他们试图欺骗或者与 Harmonix 签约,让他们来做。
乔治·霍茨
他们就像,等等,他们。
联合主持人
不,这里的项目范围荒谬至极。我们不干。然后他们招了整个游戏开发团队,而在事情变成一场灾难之后,我还得教他们 React。美好时光。
乔治·霍茨
是啊,我觉得,你知道,元宇宙本可以非常好,但你需要一个像约翰·卡马克那样的人物来推动它前进。
埃隆·马斯克
对。
乔治·霍茨
因为否则你最终会遭受同样的那种打击。你最终会得到所有这些公司,而且,你知道,情况会很糟糕。
乔治·霍茨
我们有了几位新的发言者。
听众
嘿,乔治。谢谢,兄弟。嘿,我对那个印象很深。
听众
大家处理那个资金跑道问题的方式。那件事。真的很突出。所以我只是有点好奇,想快速记下那些数字。听起来他是在说,他预计每年要烧掉 30 亿现金,而银行账户里大概有 10 亿。我只是想梳理清楚这一切,因为,比如,我不知道有没有人知道,但我猜之前的薪资总额可能大约是 15 亿,削减到了大概 5 亿之类的。
听众
所以我只是想弄清楚。
乔治·霍茨
我这里有丹。我觉得他不该说话。
埃隆·马斯克
我觉得他不想在没有……的情况下,在这里谈 Twitter 的事情。
乔治·霍茨
对,不,我会快速谈一下。我会。我会谈 1 分钟。我的意思是,我确实。我确实非常感谢埃隆回答了这个问题。我。再说一次,我对此一无所知。我对 Twitter 财务状况的全部了解都来自之前的公开披露。而且我不只是嘴上这么说,我实际上对此一无所知。所以,你知道,就是。据我理解,他说的是,Twitter 要烧掉 30 亿,而他们银行账户里有 10 亿。
乔治·霍茨
而那撑不了多久。
埃隆·马斯克
大概是 4 个月左右。
听众
对吧?
乔治·霍茨
是啊。所以,再说一次,这些事全都超出了我的职权范围。我已经不在 Twitter 工作了。
听众
我觉得唯一需要注意、也许还要纳入考虑的一点,就是我认为那次收购给公司增加了 10 亿美元的债务支出。
乔治·霍茨
然后埃隆确实说了,是的,没错。
听众
所以,比如,我在之前的一场 Space 里算是追问过他,而他愿意和我探讨这件事,我其实真的很感激,就像你说的那样。
听众
而且他,你知道,他。我觉得,我觉得如果要概括一下他的回答,我觉得他的感受有点像是,嗯,如果他不买下 Twitter,Twitter 就会被搞垮之类的。我不知道其他人是否都同意这一点,但我觉得他算是暗示了,对于那10亿美元一年的开支来说,他是值得的。但那就像是大概相当于现在整个公司的工资总额之类的,就为了一个人。
听众
所以就是,我只是想搞明白这件事。
乔治·霍茨
听着,是啊,我是说,听着,这个是。我,我真的没法谈那些东西。我知道我的初创公司的资金续航期,而且比,比4个月长得多。
听众
是啊,好吧,我,我很高兴听到这个,也感谢你让我上来,谢谢。
乔治·霍茨
好。是啊,也许我们再继续个大概5、10分钟。
听众
好的。所以,如果你能谈谈 Twitter 的财务状况,那我们改为谈谈 Twitter 的技术吧。我觉得上次埃隆在场时我提问,没有真正把问题表述正确。所以我再试着表述一遍。我觉得,拥有所有这些定制的、非标准的技术、技术栈,其中很多、其中很多就像是由 Twitter 员工、Twitter 开发者在内部发明的,这难道不会显著拖慢新人上手或开发新功能吗?
听众
为什么不用外面有100万人知道怎么处理的 GRPC,却改用 thrift RPC,这东西在全世界可能只有500或1,000个人懂。
乔治·霍茨
Thrift 完全不是。这就是纯粹的工程事实。Thrift 是在 Facebook 发明的。我在 Facebook 工作时用过它。Thrift 不是问题。
乔治·霍茨
而且还有开源的 Twitter,你可以找到 Finatra 和 Finagle。所以 Finagle 是一个 RPC 服务器。Finotra 有点像是建立在它之上的路由引擎。Finagle 既能处理 HTTP,也能处理 Thrift。我知道这些是开放的。
联合主持人
有人正在上面胡乱置顶一些破玩意儿。现在那跟我们正在讨论的事情毫无关系。
乔治·霍茨
哦,我不在乎。直接无视它。我该怎么。
听众
我的意思不是它不是,它是。哦,它不是开源的。我的意思是,外面有多少人,那。那。
乔治·霍茨
是啊,好吧,所以你可以说,是啊,像 Scala 这样的语言存在开发者人才输送问题。再说一次,技术债就是技术债,对吧?我这辈子从没写过一行 Scala,而我可以看看我最近几次直播。
听众
我看了。
乔治·霍茨
用 Scala 做 Advent of Code。听着,我是专家级的学者工程师吗?完全不是。但我能提交像样的拉取请求吗?是的,我觉得现在我能了。
乔治·霍茨
我不认为那是问题。我认为问题在于技术债。就像技术债可能出现在任何语言、任何环境中。而且我觉得最大的,我是说,你知道,我有。我有一个叫 Tiny Grad 的神经网络框架。它有1,000行,而且,嗯,比1,000行多一点。但目标是让它保持在1,000行,因为代码行数是我所知道的、少数几个能够可靠反映技术债的替代指标之一。
乔治·霍茨
当然,你可以钻这个空子,对吧?任何、任何东西。一旦它成为优化目标,就不再是一个衡量指标。这是真的,但与此同时,你也只能钻空子到一定程度。埃隆说有2,000万行 Scala。2,000万行是什么概念?你知道这个网站上到底有什么真的应该需要2,000万行。
埃隆·马斯克
介意我问个问题吗?
乔治·霍茨
当然,可以。
听众
所以我在很多大型科技公司工作过。Amazon、Google。我在 Google 工作了大概10年,待过很多团队,而且
联合主持人
我也在几家初创公司工作过。
听众
所以,比如,我注意到的一件事是,对于 Scala 这样的 JVM 语言,我曾与几个使用 Scala 的团队合作过。就是。或者说任何 JVM 语言,都会存在这种叠加式工程问题。就像他们不断添加代码。尤其是 JVM 语言,似乎不管是谁,而且有时我觉得 JVM 语言几乎是在鼓励,我觉得,代码臃肿和代码行数,而且就像是,没什么大不了的。
观众
有太多高级工具了。这些语言周边有太多工具,而且它们太好用了,能直接大量生成。IDE 可以直接大量生成代码。然后就到了代码不可读的地步。它针对编写做了优化,包括所有重构之类的东西。所以它们没有针对阅读做优化,因为工具太好用了,对吧?所以你最终会有大量代码。然后,当人们想添加功能时,他们不会去阅读已经存在的代码,因为它多得不得了,而是直接,怎么说呢,直接再写一遍。
埃隆·马斯克
就像是。
乔治·霍茨
是的。所以我本来要,我本来要先说,比如,虚拟机为什么会和这有任何关系。对吧。如果我愿意,我可以在 JVM 上运行 Python,去用 Jython 就行。所以我觉得问题不在 J。主要是库。
观众
库。比如,比如有太多库,也有太多工具,所以你最后就会有数量庞大的代码。
乔治·霍茨
我,我觉得它是一直像站在周围。
联合主持人
这些观点我非常赞同,但具体细节却是一派胡言。哦,就像是,我大体上同意你说的。我只是,我不认为这些东西中的任何一个才是问题所在。不是库,也不是 JVM。但确实如此。我们现在已经到了这样一个阶段:你可以更加轻松地写出多得多的代码,因为工具每天都在进步。我认为,我们作为一个类似工程界的群体,需要弄清楚如何应对这一现实:普通工程师没有那么有才华了,因为成为工程师的门槛已经低了这么多,而这是因为工具好用得多了。
观众
但我觉得我之前说的其实没错,就是每家公司都有各种定制的不同工具,还有所有这些复杂的小型入职流程,你知道,这大概要花一个月,才能让某个人在任何……中上手。
乔治·霍茨
Facebook 不是。不是。不是。
联合主持人
是的,Facebook 用他们的想法把它维持住了。
乔治·霍茨
你同意吗?Facebook 做得太成功了。正是我工作得有多好。我在 2011 年是 Facebook 的全职员工。Facebook 的技术有多好?
联合主持人
他们不得不裁员,确实让我感到意外,因为和他们覆盖的产品范围相比,他们一直能够把招聘规模控制得非常精简,这太疯狂了。就像他们。他们构建一切的方式令人难以置信。
乔治·霍茨
这些就是我在 Twitter 内部一直提出的论点。我就说,各位,这是。而人们就说,乔治。乔治根本不知道自己在说什么。我就说,我见过 Facebook。它很美。
观众
这里是一名来自 0508 的 CSH 校友。好久了,老兄。
观众
我想知道你是否同意,按照 AI 发展的方向,我只是觉得,我觉得鉴于有这么多代码是开源的、AI 可以访问的,计算机科学家和软件工程师做的代码苦力活只会继续变得越来越少,而且会开始更多地变成一种。谁能以最好、最有创造力的方式与引擎沟通。
乔治·霍茨
如果你仔细想想,现在已经是这样了,对吧?所以编程不同于,比如说卡车驾驶,它已经是工具完备的了。所以我的意思是,具体说到 JVM 这件事,很可能确实如此。而且你可以把这作为一项对话控制实验来做,比如,像 IntelliJ 这样拥有所有这些自动补全样板代码功能的 IDE 会不会。我觉得其实是 IntelliJ。
埃隆·马斯克
是的,我觉得是。
观众
我觉得你说得对。是 IntelliJ,而且情况会变得更糟。随着 Chat GPT 和所有这些代码生成出现,这有点,我们就像是,情况不会好。
乔治·霍茨
我,我,我是说,是的,我,我甚至不觉得这取决于你的视角。
观众
更糟,对吧?
埃隆·马斯克
或者,或者更好?
乔治·霍茨
不,AI,AI 代码那套东西很荒谬。AI 代码生成很荒谬。荒谬。而且就像,整件事都很可笑。原因如下。
乔治·霍茨
编程是工具完备的。意思是会发生什么,会计也是工具完备的。当你为会计或编程构建更好的工具时,最终会让更少的会计和更少的程序员拥有完成更多工作的能力。对吧。这与沃尔玛收银员或,或卡车司机之类的职业形成对比。对吧。
观众
无论。
乔治·霍茨
卡车可能会变得更好,但你仍然需要司机记录工时。好吧,行。你可以说沃尔玛收银员不是个好例子,因为好吧,现在由 1 个人看管 4 台自助结账机。也许技术也是一样的。所以我们还是以卡车司机为例,它不是工具完备的。但 AI 代码生成本身就像是,为什么需要额外的一步?对吧?你希望 AI 做什么?
观众
嘿,乔治。嘿,乔治。有,有一个问题,就是关于,我觉得你试图讨论的话题:在你看来,最终需要多少员工或工程师,才能算是完成工作,或者算是拥有良好健康的工作与生活平衡,诸如此类的事。
乔治·霍茨
比如就工作、工作、工作而言。我,我觉得,我不喜欢工作与生活平衡。我觉得工作与生活平衡,或者随便你想要什么。
观众
是的。而那里的人想要。
乔治·霍茨
不,我不觉得,我不,我觉得工作与生活的平衡是个愚蠢的概念。我觉得,你知道,工作就是生活。
听众
把问题里的那部分去掉。就是,你知道,有点像
乔治·霍茨
你需要多少,多少名工程师来做什么?
联合主持人
对。
乔治·霍茨
这完全取决于任务是什么。对。
听众
是的,我在试着想清楚,比如说,什么,什么样的统一愿景能把 Twitter 的所有工程师凝聚在一起。比如,我喜欢埃隆谈到的一些功能点,比如显示浏览量,以及这会如何激起很多兴趣。我觉得他有一些挺有意思的想法。但比如说,那种愿景是什么,然后,比如,什么。作为团队,你们需要来自,你知道,不管是你们上面的哪些当权者的什么支持,才能把这个
乔治·霍茨
那是 Twitter 员工的工作。我不在 Twitter 工作。我对 Twitter 一无所知。我今天从 Twitter 辞职,是为了谈论 AI,而出于各种原因,我当然也愿意谈论 AI 和 AI 编程。
听众
好。
埃隆·马斯克
好的。
听众
我误解了。谢谢。
埃隆·马斯克
当然。
乔治·霍茨
如果你不是。如果你现在是发言人但没有在说话,请退出发言席,我们会让一些新人。
埃隆·马斯克
嘿,乔治,对不起,如果我不
听众
应该置顶到顶部,但是。但是我置顶了一些关于安珀警报的内容。如果某个地区触发了安珀警报,而一辆车碰巧从一辆 Tesla 旁边驶过,它没有这样做的概率有多大?摄像头能否扫描它的车牌、建立一个模型,并立即把它传给当局?我觉得这会是 Tesla 的一个非常棒的应用。
乔治·霍茨
谁来写那个?哦,我们得写代码。我们得测试它。问问 ChatGPT,也许 ChatGPT。
听众
不过,我之所以提出那个想法,是因为,当然,我觉得埃隆可能在谋划更大的事情。对吧?他的 5D 国际象棋,也就是说,他让所有这些汽车绘制道路地图,而且。而且记录从他身边驶过的汽车。所以现在他有了 Twitter,有了带地理定位功能、装在其他司机口袋里的手机,本田雅阁司机,他能不能在本田雅阁驶过时,精确定位一辆 Tesla 的确切位置?
乔治·霍茨
你知道,有些功能在你必须动手写出来之前,确实很容易想象,对吧?直到你真的。
联合主持人
想法太廉价了。
乔治·霍茨
想法廉价。直到你必须,比如,让这些东西以某种方式大规模运作起来。所以你会说,比如,这是某个人正在计划的吗?比如,某个人计划什么并不重要。重要的是,比如,实际上会有什么被造出来,而且。是的,你知道,听着。你知道,任何。听着,我现在已经在 Common 工作了6年。你知道,比如,理论上听起来多容易啊,用我们的数据制作地图。哦,我们拥有所有数据。
乔治·霍茨
我们知道所有车道在哪里。我们有如此精确的 GPS。是啊。祝你制作地图好运。
听众
把一个好想法做成产品是最难的部分。
联合主持人
我同意。
听众
但我确实认为,Tesla 特别擅长打造很棒的产品。不像 Twitter 以前那样。
乔治·霍茨
嗯,是的,我觉得你可以通过组织方式做某些事情,但它确实是个不同的产品,对吧?它是个不同的产品。而且存在一些挑战。我的意思是,Twitter并不能做到完全的水平扩展。对。Tesla差不多能做到完美的水平扩展。并非彻底完美,或者,你知道,我会说,逗号,逗号,差不多能做到完美的水平扩展。我们有些东西是所有车辆都会连接服务器,但所有驾驶操作都在车上本地完成。
乔治·霍茨
所以这可以完美扩展。你知道,就像,没有。那里没有需要处理的复杂性。如果你让它在一辆车上运行,那么让它在所有车上运行就很容易,但如果你让它在一个Twitter应用上运行,让它在所有Twitter应用上运行可能会。
埃隆·马斯克
是的,
听众
不过,我觉得埃隆算是提出了一个非常好的解决方案,就是,直接激励人们删除代码。就像。像重构、删除代码和简化这些活儿并不性感。而且没人真的想做,但我的意思是,删代码就多给他们钱。
乔治·霍茨
那就是我想在Twitter做的全部事情。那就是我想做的全部事情。我去那里就是为了重构,让它变得漂亮。我不知道。但你看,重构和把它变漂亮的问题在于,你得去做这些,而不是做功能。
听众
是的,没错。我想,直接给做重构的人更多钱。
乔治·霍茨
不,问题不在于给这些人更多钱。问题是,如果有400个人往池子里倒屎,100个人从池子里铲屎,屎还是会变得。你知道,池子里还是有这么多屎,但到什么时候
联合主持人
你会说,去他妈的,直接把它做出来?
乔治·霍茨
嗯,而且你知道我的意思,这是那种“5年后提醒我”的事情之一。5年后提醒我。然后我们看看。我特别好奇Twitter会发展到什么地步,以及它的基础设施会是什么样子。
听众
我的意思是,这基本上就是最后发生的事情,对吧?时间线混合器被弃用了,新的首页混合器重写版本得到了实施。
乔治·霍茨
它奏效了吗?
乔治·霍茨
嗯,它奏效了吗?你说它奏效了吗是什么意思?现在两个都存在。
听众
是的,它增加了成本。但它对技术深度有帮助吗?
乔治·霍茨
不,你只是在说,你有了更多屎,池子里有更多屎。你没有从池子里清掉任何屎。
乔治·霍茨
我。
联合主持人
这有点像一小段说唱。回到之前一个关于,比如说,效率和,比如说,AI那些东西的话题。我觉得,我们在许多这些大公司里看到的问题,尤其是那些会,比如说,做许多不同功能的公司,是它们如何从,比如说。
联合主持人
我注意到一种规律。我觉得这有一个术语,但它类似于摩尔定律,也就是处理器每2年会变得大约好一倍。每3年,任何一款软件都会变得容易编写2到3倍。而如果你的公司已经存在17年,我们通过改进那些……的工具,已经释放了大量效率。乔治,你和我,作为更年轻的人,我们看到这些服务时,会想,这他妈什么东西?
联合主持人
这本来可以是大约100行代码,而不是10个各有数千行代码的服务。其中很大一部分是整个行业基于我们现在每天使用的所有工具所发生的转变。对我来说,AI是这类东西中的另一个,有些语言和有些架构目前编写起来效率低下,仅仅是因为代码量太大。比如Golang,你写的代码有一半都在复制粘贴,像AI这样的东西,尤其是Copilot,可以让你作为开发者的效率高得多。
联合主持人
我觉得,我们正在实时见证这种2-3倍的时刻之一。但我不觉得我们正在看到开发者消亡。我觉得,我们看到的是,那些愿意从头开始并利用建造池子的新方法的人又多了一项优势。
乔治·霍茨
所以就Golang而言,我的意思是,这是语言设计者非常刻意的选择。就像,你知道,嗯,我们有这么多人,而且说实话,他们还没有聪明到能用C写代码,所以我们就给他们Golang,而这才是,这才是它真正的理由,你知道,而且我认为自己就是那些还没有聪明到能用C写代码的人之一。所以Golang很好。但那种冗长,就像,你知道,那种非常明确、痛苦的错误处理,以及在Go中必须实际检查每一个错误码,其存在是为了鼓励人们正确思考。
乔治·霍茨
所以你可以用chat GPT把这些全都盖过去,但那样你得到的就只是不会正确思考的人,于是整个目的算是毁了。Go是被非常刻意地那样设计出来的。我无法评价Java是如何设计的,因为那全都发生在我的时代之前。但我记得Go推出的时候,我算是亲眼看着这一切发生。
听众
如果这是个Jason话题,那很抱歉。Copilot普及的最大障碍是否只是安装,也就是对安装的畏惧。而考虑到Copilot的价格,客户,他们的价格弹性是否足以让他们,比如说,多付99美元来获得附近某种类似Uber的服务?
乔治·霍茨
我觉得Copilot并没有多好。ChatGPT也一样。
联合主持人
就像,今年我用Copilot在Advent of Code中多次取得全球前100名的排名;一旦你学会如何把它当作工具来配合使用,它有点像vim,你必须学会训练它。比如要知道如何编写,给变量命名,留下评论,并诱导它写出正确的代码。但从这个角度来说,它是一种工具,就像你和它之间存在一种关系。
乔治·霍茨
而如果你是在参加Advent of Code,想尽可能快地完成,那么当然,Copilot可能会帮到你。
联合主持人
我也在 Twitch 工作了5年,还经营一家公司,那里的代码也有一半是我写的。根据我的经验,它在所有这些环境中都运行得非常好。
乔治·霍茨
你真的觉得 Copilot 对你有帮助吗?因为我不觉得。
联合主持人
是的,就是当它与其他我觉得同样有用、甚至更有用的工具发生冲突时。比如当它妨碍 TypeScript、类型定义、自动补全之类的东西时,它会变得很烦人。但我确实经常发现,它提升了我作为开发者的速度和体验。它奏效的时候,确实很奏效。而且如果你知道它在这件事上会怎么做,并且你使用它时很快就会学会,我会让它编写这个算法。我知道它会把这两个东西放错位置。
联合主持人
我要删掉这个,把这个移到别的地方。它让我作为开发者感觉更好,就像我刚开始真正深入使用 vim 时一样。但确实需要一点时间才能真正体会到那种感觉。
乔治·霍茨
所以你总体上喜欢自动补全吗?
联合主持人
是的,在它受到引导,而且你有一个良好的类型安全系统来定义自动补全时。我非常看重全栈类型安全和自动补全。IntelliSense,也就是微软那种引导你找到正确代码行的方式,是我非常看重的东西。
乔治·霍茨
我觉得。我讨厌自动补全。我做任何事情都从不用任何自动补全。我喜欢 IntelliSense 的那些东西。
听众
也许手机打字算。
乔治·霍茨
什么?
听众
也许手机打字算,因为想要输入出来太烦人了。那是我唯一使用自动补全的时候。
乔治·霍茨
哦。哦,对。不,这是。不,专门说编程。我喜欢的是,我可以右键点击一个函数。它会带我跳到定义。即便那只有90%的时候是正确的,或者80%的时候是正确的,也仍然比不得不 grep 它好得多。但我不知道。我觉得大多数自动补全都挺。
联合主持人
所以我经营一档播客,会谈论所有这类事情。我请过 React JS 的创建者上节目。我很快会请 GraphQL 的创建者上节目。如果你愿意,乔治,我很想请你上节目,向你展示我的技术栈是如何运作的,尤其是 T3 技术栈的东西是怎么运作的,因为我觉得你会看到,当你实现了从数据库到用户的全栈类型安全后,自动补全就不再是让你烦恼的东西,而会开始引导你第一次就写出正确的代码。
联合主持人
始终如此。当你正确配置好它时,它非常强大。
乔治·霍茨
那就安排吧。我们安排一场直播,我会试试这些东西。你看,这也是那种我确信如果我。我不知道,我有点像。我不太喜欢工具。我喜欢绝对精简的工具。我很长时间都在使用什么都没有的 vim。没有插件,什么都没有。现在我使用 VS Code,基本上精简到了你能做到的最简程度,但是。
听众
所以我有点尴尬。我没有。我当时用的是。我之前说了 Copilot。我本来想说 open pilot。我们刚才正好在谈 Copilot。我在我
听众
当时想问 ox 的是,是否
听众
它是搭配 open pilot 的,是不是,就整个系统的成本而言,而且如果安装让人望而生畏,成为采用它的准入障碍,那么,比如额外增加99美元,提供一种类似 Uber 的安装服务,会不会。
乔治·霍茨
对,对,你知道吗?你用过那个服务。你运营那个服务。我光是想到它就觉得无聊。不,说真的。所以。哦,顺便。顺便说一下,现在既然我有了。我这里有1.4万人。我们正在发布一段不可思议的年度量产车逗号3的视频。听着,我不想经营企业。我对那些事一点也不在乎。我想解决自动驾驶汽车问题,我想击败Tesla,而你赶上了截止期限。
听众
看看这个。
联合主持人
你要把那段视频发到哪里?乔治?
乔治·霍茨
怎么了?
联合主持人
你要把视频发到哪里?
乔治·霍茨
哦,就发在这里,Twitter上。我是说,它是最好的。
联合主持人
你的YouTube策略需要任何帮助吗?我是个。我很喜欢帮忙处理YouTube策略方面的事。我帮助过很多Y Combinator旗下的公司。这算是我很痴迷的东西,我很钻研YouTube算法以及如何让它运转起来。所以如果你想聊聊这个。我最近刚有一段关于AI的视频爆火了。
乔治·霍茨
对,它没有,它没有,它没有那么。它没那么好。我真的不在乎。就像,它更像是一个。就像很多逗号是的东西。
乔治·霍茨
我们有一种想法,就像,我真的不在乎别人怎么看我。观感太没有意义了。
听众
对。
乔治·霍茨
比如,让我们真正解决自动驾驶汽车问题,打造出好上10倍的东西。然后,就像,我不在乎你怎么看我,它就是好上10倍。就像,你必须用它。抱歉。
乔治·霍茨
而且我们会想到很多,比如程序之类的东西。比如openpilot。openpilot。它们的整个openpilot,可以在零接管的情况下把车开到Taco Bell,比Twitter的大多数微服务都小。
听众
嗯,Twitter可能不是一个适合拿来
埃隆·马斯克
比较的好标杆,但是。
听众
对,我明白这个意思。
埃隆·马斯克
这太不可思议了。
乔治·霍茨
对。但归根结底。只不过参与两者的工程师数量是一样的,对吧。
听众
哇。
乔治·霍茨
决定你的东西会有多少行代码的因素,严格来说只是工程师人数的函数,与其他任何因素都无关。而且我认为这算是让这个Space兜了一圈回到了原点。大家差不多都同意这一点吗?你懂的,大体上。
听众
为什么Twitter需要那么多工程师?
联合主持人
我。我基本同意。我认为这。Twitter刚创立时构建东西的方式,和现在构建东西的方式不一样。而我们现在认为显而易见的许多混乱,就像,是事后看来显而易见。
乔治·霍茨
非常同意。对。我觉得我知道,每当我写东西时,我第一次写出来的版本都很糟。第二次写时,就算是还可以。你大概能看出它
听众
会变得不错。
乔治·霍茨
然后我第三次写时,它才真的不错。
联合主持人
现在我算是非常深入产品端了,所以对此有一个质疑。第一个版本往往足以弄清楚你是否实现了产品市场契合。而在我们知道产品有一定市场契合度之前,通常不值得由我付钱让你这个工程师构建第二和第三个版本。如果你有一个系统可以识别这一点,然后在只有一小部分用户使用那个早期V0时,就去构建版本3。
联合主持人
太棒了。就那么做。但我认为问题是,我们正试图尽可能低成本地找到产品市场契合点。而当我们找到它之后,我们会继续在那个糟糕的V0上构建。
乔治·霍茨
我认为没人怀疑Twitter已经实现了产品市场契合。
联合主持人
我认为如果你添加新功能,我们承担得起。我们不知道。我们不知道 Twitter Blue 是否会实现产品市场契合。而且我知道自己现在无法更改我的专业头像,因为我是 Twitter Blue 用户。我设置了一个自动化流程,每当我开始直播时就更改我的头像;而当我改成通过 Blue 获得认证时,它并没有报错。现在我再也无法更改头像了。
联合主持人
我的账户处于这种奇怪的锁定状态。只是成长的烦恼,匆忙推出了功能。不是。不,这不是成长的烦恼。这是为了产品市场契合而进行实验。
听众
对,我已经把那条推文置顶在这里了。如果那样不妥,那很抱歉。但我只是觉得我会。不过,就像,我确实认为这是真的。比如,如果Twitter的核心团队能有更多反馈机制,那会很棒。所以,比如,如果有一个功能就是他妈的非常合理。比如,比如你可以直接从用户那里获得反馈,或者有什么东西坏了。然后把这些信息系统送进核心团队,让他们能够真正围绕那个、那个产品市场契合进行迭代,你懂的,我是说,显然Twitter已经实现了,但,你懂的,
乔治·霍茨
你可以,你可以在 comma 添加任何人,然后可以和他们讨论他们的功能。我不能代表 Twitter 发言,但我可以说,你知道,comma,几乎所有人都在 Twitter 上,而且你知道,你可以,你可以,你可以@他们并提出功能请求。我不知道,比如,我喜欢公开开发。我觉得这么多保密做法蠢得不可思议。我觉得如果埃隆真的扔出一个 3 GB 的 tar 包,那会非常酷。
听众
如果他那么做,那真的会很疯狂。
乔治·霍茨
你想坐在那里试着读它吗?欢迎体验我过去 4 周的生活。
听众
我是说,这只是,这实际上会,就像,就像那会让人震惊,你知道,如果他只是说,对,给你,你把它解决了。
乔治·霍茨
我是说,不,你会想,好吧,我希望他真的别那么做,因为谁知道那个代码库里有多少秘密。我说的秘密不是,比如,比如,比如,比如,比如知识产权秘密。我说的是秘密,比如一个货真价实的 AWS
联合主持人
令牌。
乔治·霍茨
每个人的私营业务里都有那些东西。
乔治·霍茨
好了,Ashok 举手了。
埃隆·马斯克
好的,你好。有没有什么想法和可能性,可以采用独一无二的头像来减少虚假账号或减少滥用?
乔治·霍茨
等等,你最不该问我的就是 Twitter 功能。顺便说一句,我属于 Twitter 应该构建 0 个功能、接下来 6 个月只做重构的那一派。所以,这就是我对任何 Twitter 功能请求的看法。不过听着,我甚至已经不在 Twitter 了。我甚至不在那里工作了。我辞职了。
听众
你是在开玩笑吗?所以你真的在那里工作过?
乔治·霍茨
你当时在做什么?
乔治·霍茨
我试图修好所有这些破玩意儿。
联合主持人
我真的就住在街对面。我怎么去帮忙修复所有那些 React。屁话。
乔治·霍茨
所有那些 React 屁话。听着,我不在那里工作。我不,我对这些一无所知。
听众
我是说,这是。乔治,其实,我有个关于 comma 的问题。
乔治·霍茨
好吧,好吧,那么假设
听众
最好的情况是 comma 变成一家价值 5000 亿美元的公司,对吧?多少?
乔治·霍茨
我不知道那是不是最好的情况。那听起来像是人们想来从我这里拿走。
听众
你这是什么意思?
乔治·霍茨
我根本不在乎钱。钱是假的。各位,你们相信奇点吗?钱不重要。奇点。
听众
对。好吧,先撇开阴谋论,对吧,但怎么,怎么,怎么?
埃隆·马斯克
这是一种社会。
听众
钱是假的。我,我,我知道,我知道。好吧。
乔治·霍茨
把钱拿回来。对。好吧,继续。
听众
comma 会发展到多大规模?因为你没法那样运营它。比如,光是合规你就至少需要一个团队。
乔治·霍茨
遵守什么规定?
听众
我不知道,比如有人遭遇车祸。
乔治·霍茨
要是有人遭遇车祸又怎样?那跟我有什么关系?
听众
因为你是 CEO,你要负责任,但那,那,那不是
乔治·霍茨
comma 系统,而且它是开源的。
观众
嗯,目标是达到第4级,对吧?或者完全。
乔治·霍茨
目标绝对不是达到第4级。我不知道。哦,永远停留在第2级。其实,你知道 comma 的长期目标是什么吗?comma 的长期目标是在商场里开一家店,你走进去,买下你新的 comma 身体,然后把你的 comma 身体带回家,它会打扫你的房子,给你做些吃的,而且你知道,如果你愿意,甚至可以和它做爱。那才是 comma 的目标,对吧?
乔治·霍茨
合规。去我在商场的店里,扔下2万美元,和你的 comma 身体手牵着手、带着头盔遮罩走回家。你还是如此。
观众
埃隆居然进了你的空间,我很惊讶。
埃隆·马斯克
哥们,太搞笑了。
乔治·霍茨
搞什么。埃隆进了我的空间。
观众
对。
联合主持人
我很惊讶
乔治·霍茨
你挺淡定的,伙计。
观众
他也很吸引人。我懂。
乔治·霍茨
他对一开始问的事情并不高兴
联合主持人
关于广告技术。谢谢你替我辩护。对,我很感激。因为那件事,我真的非常敬重你。我完全没料到。
乔治·霍茨
谢谢。谢谢。不,你看,我觉得。我觉得他是在生另一个人的气,而且我觉得他认为其他人都像是。另一个人是实打实地,就只是。只是在惹他烦。但不是,我是说,你看,你对广告技术的说法完全正确。而且任何从事广告工作的人都像是,了解我们。
观众
对。
联合主持人
这就是。对,我很惊讶。
观众
他。
联合主持人
这很糟糕,因为,我真的希望 Twitter 能生存下来,而在这种经济环境下,广告是你赖以生存的方式。而他就是有很多地方没弄明白。
乔治·霍茨
对,你看,知道吗?每当我思考。每当我思考埃隆做出的某个决定时,我都会提醒自己,他是亿万富翁,而我不是。所以无论他做决定的流程是什么,都比我的好。
联合主持人
所以我有个叫作重置理论的东西,也就是说,当你在专业领域方面从一个地方转到另一个地方时,很容易认为你现有的专业能力也能随之迁移,因为你是专家,你很在行。我就犯过这个错误,当时我作为工程师正处于巅峰状态,心想,哦,我可以转去经营一家公司。不,我做不到。没那么容易。真的很难做到。我曾以为自己在 YouTube 上走红时,可以直接把这种成功转移到 TikTok 上。
联合主持人
不,我绝对做不到。真的很难做到。从一种类型的公司转到另一种类型的公司,从客户付钱给你的领域,转到广告商付钱给你、让客户观看他们内容的领域,是一个极其巨大的转变,以至于你很容易看到,比如某些模式,以及比如你所熟悉的那些基本真理、那些一维的解决方案,而在埃隆的情况里,就是人们喜欢你的东西,人们购买你的东西。
联合主持人
东西就会成功。这在这个领域并不成立。而且,你用来定义自己的那些轴线,在这里甚至都不一样。
乔治·霍茨
我是说,我觉得它可以成立。比如,我觉得有件事让我困惑不解。你看看 Twitter 以前的那些东西。这家公司怎么可能花掉55亿美元。
联合主持人
对,这里就像,就像有两个极端,而他们已经远远越过了那个过于庞大的极端。但确实有,而且我同意,Twitter 花的钱太多了。他们规模大得过头。他们既有技术上的债务,也有比如公司自身架构方面的债务,在财务上。而且从财务上说,他们,他们在所有这些维度上都完蛋了。但这并不意味着埃隆关于如何成功创办一家企业的知识,必然能迁移到如何基于某个特定社交媒体产品打造一个成功的广告平台上。
联合主持人
而且,他在成功职业生涯中运用的很多东西,在这个领域里其实尤其有害。比如,那些真理在这里并不存在。
观众
但你说的这个人,曾经卖掉喷火器,还烧过发胶。我觉得不管怎样。他确实知道如何赚钱。而这只是,这几乎就像跳出框框思考,你只需要以不同方式运用它,而且显然要在某些方面限制你的、你的支出。但我觉得这只是,你知道,把他在其他公司积累的专业能力在这里微调一下,并且确实边做边学。
观众
比如,他不是那方面的专家。他并不真正了解这个代码库,也不了解它有多混乱。你知道,像我这样在通用汽车工作过的人,你会有很多遗留东西,他们不断往上堆破烂,然后弄来某种新的集成工具,一切就成了由不同技术构成的一大团,这些技术其实连衔接都衔接不好,但它们就是能用。而一旦能用了,人们就不想钻进去重构它。
观众
所以我觉得更多只是,你知道,让合适的人在背后推动它,他们能把这个世界连接得比现在稍微好一点。
乔治·霍茨
经营以广告为基础的业务、业务,确实有一些道理,但与此同时,这项业务并不是从零开始打造的,对吧?比如 Twitter 是以440亿美元被收购的。你只需要让它实现盈利以维持生存,对吧?平台上有大量用户,所以即使你的广告效率可能不如、不如、不如 Meta,只要你想做的只是维持生存,那或许并不重要。
乔治·霍茨
因为运营 Twitter 这类东西的首要基础成本,这不是一家汽车公司。在汽车公司,你有利润率,而你的利润率有点薄如刀片,对吧?比如你必须从某个地方购买所有这些零部件,对吧?你不生产车轮。你购买车轮;你不生产发动机。你购买发动机。也许 Tesla 生产发动机,但通用汽车不生产发动机。其实,也许他们确实生产发动机,但他们不生产刹车,也不生产方向盘。
乔治·霍茨
所以并没有真正的。运营 Twitter 的实际成本是多少。
听众
我也想这样做。埃隆以前提到过这件事,我觉得这非常重要。就是他将开始在 Twitter 上激励内容创作者。
观众
对。但我是说,我觉得这是一个颠覆性的改变。
乔治·霍茨
谁来打造它们?
听众
所有那些,比如,Substack 上的人,所有的
埃隆·马斯克
那些,比如,YouTube 博主,所有这些人,他们
听众
能赚钱,他们可以在 Twitter 上做到。
乔治·霍茨
我是说。
听众
对。
联合主持人
所以目前,Twitter 没有实现盈利的路径。我。我们在这场 Space 中一直提到了几件事,比如,Twitter 已经实现了产品与市场的契合。它针对某种产品和某个市场实现了产品与市场的契合,但我们不知道它能赚多少钱。而且有2条路径。我们可以尝试提高潜在盈利能力,这样它要么能筹集更多资金,从而获得更长的资金支撑期并做得更大,要么我们可以选择。
联合主持人
我们可以说,好吧,Twitter 已经足够好了。今天我们要把从这里开始、腰部以下的一切都削减掉,这样我们就知道,可以把它控制在目前所能赚取的金额之内。同时做这2件事很难。而当我们选择重构时,我们现在选择的是后者。
听众
另外。
埃隆·马斯克
从功能角度来看,其中1件
听众
你必须意识到的事情是,比如以 Twitch 为例,对吧?
埃隆·马斯克
Twitter Spaces 是原因之一
听众
Twitter Spaces 如此特别,是因为你没有。没有视频。你只是在进行语音交流。你能够专注于那场对话。
乔治·霍茨
而当你加入 Copy Clubhouse,当
听众
你加入视频时,对吧,你就在制造一场军备竞赛。现在这就像 Twitch 一样,对吧?
埃隆·马斯克
比如,你一有视频
听众
现在,只要有人开始使用绿幕,就会开始做画面叠加,开始做动画,并开始做。弄一盏环形灯。这会提高质量门槛。而现在,准入门槛就开始变得。随着时间推移变得更高。它会逐渐提高。
埃隆·马斯克
而这就是 Twitch 身上发生的事。
听众
而现在,比如,如果你要开始在 Twitch 上直播并具备竞争力,
联合主持人
如果你认为事情是这么发生的,比如,你说过一些愚蠢透顶的屁话,但说 Twitch 就是这么变成这样的,真的是,比如,锦上添花。
听众
天啊,对,事情就是这么发生的。而且这也是为什么?
乔治·霍茨
就是,我只是,我不同意。Stretch 上就是这样。我,我以绝对最低的预算在 Twitch 上直播,却有很多观众。
联合主持人
我现在真的正在 Twitch 上向1000名观众直播,而我用的是一个300美元的。
观众成员
但你没法靠这个谋生
联合主持人
我。对,我知道你不行。我可以。尤其是因为我的 YouTube 能获得200万次观看。我在 Twitch 上制作内容。我在 Twitch 工作了5年。我知道这破玩意儿是怎么运作的,伙计。
乔治·霍茨
你,对,你能,你能靠那些东西取得成功。对。这就像,我觉得这和那些认为编程必须用高级键盘的人是同一类人。我觉得这些东西,高端人士会用,但我不认为它们真的和
联合主持人
你的成功有多大关系。
观众成员
它们与成功无关,但这绝对限制了能够取得成功的人群范围。对吧。总会有离群者,总会有那些能找到有创意之事去做的杰出人士。他们确实能。
联合主持人
你可以买一部苹果的600美元手机,你可以买一部苹果的600美元手机,现在就能用它成为顶尖 YouTuber,毫无疑问。就是你从商店买来一台便宜的苹果设备,从第一天起就能获得的录制质量,以及视频和音频质量,简直不可思议。
乔治·霍茨
其实我研究过,我研究过买一台真正高端的摄像机,然后我看了一些东西,接着又用我的,我的 iPhone 13 拍了一些东西,我就觉得,其实没那么大区别。
观众成员
不。但祝你在无法做到以下事情的情况下取得成功
联合主持人
能够用图像编辑方式处理你的缩略图,却没有
观众成员
拥有标题卡,而这些东西有着切实影响。
乔治·霍茨
去看,看我的直播。
联合主持人
你根本不知道怎么做。再说一次,可发现性。
埃隆·马斯克
这对于谋生来说太有趣了。
乔治·霍茨
一切都在于此。接着说题外话,我们要不要用一个关键点来收尾?规模、复杂度、工程师人数。我们都同意,只需要20名工程师。诀窍在于找到合适的20名工程师。
乔治·霍茨
除了火箭,任何东西都可以由20名工程师造出来。火箭可能需要50名。
联合主持人
乔治,对于这件事,我想向你提供一个思考框架。这是我经常试着谈论的事情。我从维度的角度思考问题,而我们作为工程师的目标,不应该是让我们所处的维度尽可能刚性。目标应该是让维度尽可能少。所以,像自动扩缩容这样的东西,就是一个你必须努力维护的维度。像全球分布这样的东西,就是你增加的一个复杂性维度;你可以把它们打造得坚如磐石、牢不可破,让它们保持在良好状态,但只要你不得不做出改变,你就完蛋了。
联合主持人
我的目标几乎总是减少这些维度,让它尽可能简单。而无服务器之类的工具就是如何做到这一点的绝佳例子。我认为,我们将看到的、真正令人兴奋的未来,是这样一个未来:我们能够降低复杂性,不是通过选择更好的语言,也不是让更好的工程师写出更好的代码,而只是他妈的去构建那些从一开始就不存在这些问题的东西。
乔治·霍茨
对,而且我认为这才是 ChatGPT 革命的真正实质。关键不会是你让 ChatGPT 写 Python 还是 Scala。就是,我觉得我们几乎可以把编程语言抽象掉。AI 什么时候才能直接执行计算?
观众成员
我认为 ChatGPT 的问题在于,你知道,有些东西它无法了解,比如来自工程师的整合或创造力,或者像某些时候,他们让它去做。
乔治·霍茨
完全是胡扯。完全是胡扯。我向你保证,创造力绝对算不了什么。AI 会彻底碾压任何人类的创造力。
观众成员
我不会说是创造力,更多是像让它编写一个 REACT 应用程序。它用的是已弃用的库。所以,要跟上最新进展,或者取决于你实际上想让它整合多少东西,比如那些会有多、多深入。会不会有类似问卷的东西,以便构建一切,或者有点像一个,我想是一个构建。我不知道。
乔治·霍茨
至于跟上最新进展,这些东西读取互联网的速度要快得多。我重新训练模型的速度,能比人类读一本书快得多。
联合主持人
对。
乔治·霍茨
嗯,其实那并不完全正确,但你可以想象,从极限情况来看大致会是这样。我认为现在即将转向的新、新系统,它们目前把所有信息都存储在权重里,但你可以把所有信息存得有点像一个记忆库,然后做检索系统。Facebook 刚刚发表了一篇关于这个的论文。但我想象的不是问卷,而是对话。
观众成员
但我觉得这里确实有一点,就是 AI 其实无法。有不同种类的创造力。AI 能够获取不同的想法,并从不同领域进行综合,远胜于任何人类。对吧。因为它的广度简直惊人。但这种广度是由人类已经知道的一切组成的,并运行在比如,有些类型的创造力,我认为 AI 永远无法真正实现。
观众成员
它更像是一种工具。但显然,有些领域和有些东西是它会创造出来的。
埃隆·马斯克
对。
乔治·霍茨
我向你们保证,这些说法并不是真的。人类没有任何一种创造力是他们独有的。你说 AI 只是对现有想法的综合。人类也不过如此。
联合主持人
对。
乔治·霍茨
绝对没有任何区别。而且你知道吗?每个。每个不相信这一点的人,都会迎来一次悲哀的觉醒。
联合主持人
我觉得我几乎完全同意你。我的一点反驳是,AI 具备这些层次的创造力。它不具备的是理解力。而我认为,那正是人类擅长的地方。他们理解的能力。
乔治·霍茨
什么是理解?
联合主持人
当某样东西在运作时,它为什么能运作?你可以利用 AI 来帮助它为你提供更多见解。但决策,比如总会有某个层次的决策最终要由人类来做,而我们会不断把这一层推得越来越高,并因此不断得以去做更酷的事情。但我们总是在移动层级。我们不一定是在移除人类。
乔治·霍茨
这是。
联合主持人
好吧,所以这是。
乔治·霍茨
这是那个。这是对此更聪明的看法。我仍然认为它是错的,但我觉得它错得没那么明显。
观众成员
我认为它是。我认为 AI 不会创造新的思维范式。你知道,比如 AI 会逐步改进,并综合许多不同的东西,但我们不会得到一个全新的绿色开放领域范式。这样说有道理吗?
乔治·霍茨
你们两个都错了。我们已经越过这个节点了。
观众成员
OpenAI 前一阵子编写了那个 Dota 机器人,它在游戏中发明了新的策略和元玩法,像职业选手,我从来没见过。然后他们试图与这个 OpenAI 机器人对战,以便在这方面变得更强。我们已经到了向 AI 学习的阶段。它是。这就像是人类错了。
埃隆·马斯克
还是不是?
乔治·霍茨
是的,肯定不存在什么范式类型的创造力。这些说法。那些都不是真的。Theo,AI 的能动性倒是一个问题。也许这才是你想表达的。你就像是,好吧,所以 AI 将始终位于人类之下。只不过会变成,比如它是不是正好位于高管之下?对吧。就像你在组织架构图中逐渐向上移动一样。
联合主持人
是的,在一定程度上。比如有这样一个层面:我们接下来应该打造哪款产品。当不同产品得到用户不同的反应时,我们应该加码哪一款?哪些工程师或哪些人未必有必要继续留用。但对于很多这样的事情,AI 可以帮助引导我们作出正确的决定。
乔治·霍茨
但如果你。
乔治·霍茨
好,你说吧。
联合主持人
我担心的是某些事情的代价,比如,让 AI 更容易作出代价高昂的决策,与让 AI 作出代价高昂的决策是不同的。即便真有那么一天,也会是在很久以后,我们才应该让 AI 经常替我们作出代价高昂的决策,而我们本可以改为利用它的见解。而且,如果我们不同意 AI 的决定,作出不同的决定,并因此……,就有一个人可以为此承担责任。
观众成员
而且我认为。
乔治·霍茨
你在 Twitter 上看到那个了吗?1970 年的 IBM 备忘录。计算机永远无法做决定,因为它们无法被追责。
联合主持人
是的,而且我确实认为,这在开发者圈子之外是一个真正的问题。
埃隆·马斯克
我认为,AI 有一样东西
观众成员
永远不会拥有,那就是经验。习得的经验。
埃隆·马斯克
对。
观众成员
关于分娩,我想读多少都可以。我永远无法完全理解那种体验。而且基本上对于每一种人类体验,AI 都会缺少这一点。
联合主持人
而且他那么说之后我不。这样一来,我明白你为什么如此反对我的观点了。
埃隆·马斯克
乔治。
乔治·霍茨
好吧,我们、我们是,那些、那些、那些、那些对 AI 发表的观点实在毫无道理的人。我刚刚记住了发言者。我是说,比如,我看,我、我可以。这些事情的问题在于,当你深究这些人通常所说的内容时,他们最终会说出类似“AI 无法体验感质,而你可以。AI 永远不会知道人类皮肤的触感”之类的话,而这完全毫无意义。根本不存在所谓的意识。
乔治·霍茨
根本不存在所谓的感质。现在,说到工具和智能体之间的区别,那确实存在。那确实是一件有真正科学依据的事。
乔治·霍茨
损失函数看起来不一样,对吧?所以智能体通常会在闭环时出现。具体说到你关于产品的例子,你的意思是,好吧,AI 不会选择产品,对吧?AI 会帮助人类。人类会观察产品表现如何。人类会调整产品,推出新产品,也许会借助 AI。是的,但为什么不干脆把整个环路闭合呢?
乔治·霍茨
如果你的担忧是因为你害怕,好吧,当情况很糟糕时,计算机无法被追责。我是说,也许现在人类和 AI 还处在某种差不多的竞争水平上,人类实际上仍然更好。当然。但最终会有人不把这当成禁忌,而那家公司会碾压你。
观众成员
嘿,乔治,我有一个关于现代安全的问题。
观众成员
你怎么看新的 iPhone 和新的游戏主机?而且与 2017 年有 iPhone3GS 的时候相比,它们要难破解得多,不像 Xbox。
乔治·霍茨
那比 2017 年早了很久。
埃隆·马斯克
我是说,2007 年。
乔治·霍茨
所以,当你说它变得更难破解时,你可以量化这一点。你可以谈谈一个漏洞利用要花多少美元。
观众成员
对。
乔治·霍茨
而且漏洞利用代码的价格已经涨了很多。对,对。
听众
而且你必须接近专家水平。比如,你不能只是个做这种事的青少年,对吧?
乔治·霍茨
对。最厉害的人可能仍然是青少年,或者接近青少年的年龄。他们一向如此。这就是那种会筛选出这类人的事情之一。我向你保证,当今世界上最厉害的漏洞利用者可能也就24岁左右。
乔治·霍茨
你知道,就是这样。我不知道他们是谁。我已经没有持续关注这个圈子了,但我敢说这是真的。因为这就是你的思维运作方式。
乔治·霍茨
不过,对,成本已经涨了很多。但我不知道,那实际上可能并不是因为它变得更难了。这很难说。它实际上更困难了。比如,我不确定自己现在是否真的还能做到。但就像,你知道,然后我看着我之前的那一代人,我看着比如查理·米勒说,哦,现在有ASLR了。很难。而且,你知道,ASLR对我来说从来都不算什么。现在又有这些新来的年轻人,他们会说,对啊,当然。
乔治·霍茨
这需要9个漏洞利用,而且我们必须突破3个沙箱。没什么大不了的,兄弟。
乔治·霍茨
对,对。没有,我只是好奇。
听众
还有一件事是我。我刚刚读到,那个,比如说,Z世代没有千禧一代那么懂技术、技术上那么先进,如果这么说讲得通的话。
乔治·霍茨
年轻人。年轻人啊,兄弟。世界正在崩塌。年轻人都。
听众
你怎么看?
乔治·霍茨
苏格拉底说过这话。你这么认为,没那么技术性地说,希腊人当时也在抱怨年轻人如何堕落、不会做X,而且他们不懂美德。随便吧。不管这是什么。这是件毫无意义的事。
听众
嘿,乔治。
乔治·霍茨
好了,行。
埃隆·马斯克
嘿,乔治,我只有一个问题,你对Twitter有没有什么尚未实现的梦想或想法,或者它们没有得到采纳,或任何你仍然觉得Twitter还悬而未决的事情?
乔治·霍茨
没有,听着,我已经不在Twitter工作了。我不知道。
乔治·霍茨
我认为归根结底,其中一件主要的事情是埃隆想开发功能。而我会做重构,但我的确喜欢埃隆说的那件事。即使不是我,我也希望Twitter的员工能吃到一些优质的好饭菜。
乔治·霍茨
饭菜对我来说非常重要。这对我很重要。得了吧,乔丹,你可能需要
听众
把你的头像改成“我已经不在Twitter工作了。别问我Twitter的问题。”
乔治·霍茨
对,我们会碰到几个人问我Twitter的问题。我会开始想些不错又尖刻的回答。也许我会开始散布假消息。我散布假消息。
乔治·霍茨
好了,行。感谢大家来到我的空间。明天去看看Comma的Twitter。我们有一个超棒的视频要发布。会很不错。
联合主持人
私信我,这样我们就可以安排那期播客。
乔治·霍茨
好的,没问题。我会关注你。
听众
私信我。
乔治·霍茨
对,行。
Co-host
Like diagram.
George Hotz
No, no, no. I mean, like, what do you mean by. Are you crazy?
Co-host
No, no, seriously, come on, buddy.
Audience Member
Come on. Who.
Elon Musk
Who are you?
George Hotz
What do you mean, who am I? I don't know. You gave me the mic.
Audience Member
I got.
George Hotz
No, I didn't give you the mic. I'm doing the mic. And let's. Let's keep it. Let's keep it civil in my space.
Audience Member
I mean.
George Hotz
Yes, like what? No, no, man.
Co-host
You're in charge of the servers and the programming.
George Hotz
Whatever. Like what? Keep things technical in my space. Please. Take me from top to bottom. What does the stack look like right now?
Co-host
What's so crazy about it?
George Hotz
What's so abnormal about this stack versus
Co-host
every other large scale system on the planet?
George Hotz
Buddy, come on, give it to me. All right, so first off, amazing. Wow.
Elon Musk
You're a jackass.
George Hotz
Okay, okay, okay. All right. No, no, no.
Audience Member
I got.
George Hotz
I got no credibility. Everybody, I got no idea. First off, my state.
Audience Member
Sybil, you know, like, you removed him from speakers.
Elon Musk
Good.
George Hotz
Can I go into it?
Audience Member
Yeah.
George Hotz
Okay. One of the biggest problems is that you can't run Twitter locally. So when I was at Facebook, you could run all of Facebook on a laptop. There is no way to run Facebook to run Twitter outside of a very bespoke configuration in a data center. And it makes it nearly impossible to build anything new on it.
Elon Musk
Yeah, I mean, there's 20 million lines of Scala. Think about that. That's insane.
Elon Musk
Did you post that diagram?
George Hotz
No, I didn't post the diagram. But the joke of the diagram isn't that there's that many pieces, it's that when people think of a microservice, they think of 200 lines of code, not 200,000.
George Hotz
Yes, and it's 200,000 for most.
Elon Musk
It should be trivial to do something like add View Count. It should be like literally another sort of line in a database.
Elon Musk
It should be trivial, but it's not trivial because of the insane complexity of the Twitter software stack.
George Hotz
I disagree about view count. I think view count is actually inherently a hard feature. But, for example, right now there's a service that runs a model, and there's a service that calls that like, there's a RPC to run a model. Basically, at comma, it's one line. If you want to put the model inside the process at Twitter, it's two weeks of the best engineer's time.
Audience Member
Right.
George Hotz
That's something that should actually be one line.
George Hotz
I disagree that view counts should be easy, even on the best stack in the world. But there are some things that are the likes feature that I wanted to ship in search. Should have been five lines.
Elon Musk
Yeah, I know. I. Well, so I think if you.
Elon Musk
We do count view counts, we just batch them. So if you reduce the requirement on view count to say like, look, we don't care about the view count being real time, it's okay that it be every hundred seconds instead of every one second. You reduce the load by two orders of magnitude, obviously.
Co-host
Well,
George Hotz
sort of.
George Hotz
You definitely reduce the load two orders of magnitude for tweets that are viewed all the time. Right. But for tweets that are viewed every 200 seconds, it's the same load. It's. If you're basically saying you're going to read every tweet from the table to get the views every hundred seconds, that's a lot of reads.
Elon Musk
Look, the point I'm trying to make here is view count is already counted. Like it's already a thing that is happening. But view count, currently the issue is that it's going to Google Cloud. Instead of the On Prem stuff, the view count is making a call to Google cut in batches at a rate that is towards the magnitude slower than what is needed to render it with the current pipe. That's the actual issue. But if you then say, okay, look, we don't care about it being real time because something like a like is being updated about every second or so.
Elon Musk
But if we said on your tweets.
George Hotz
Yes, on most people's tweets.
Elon Musk
No, no, I'm just saying like the update frequency, it's near real time.
Elon Musk
But the point I'm trying to make is view counts are already counted. They're just being batched and being sent over a slowpipe to an analytics software on Google Cloud. Whereas the likes are using the On Prem database. But you could, that's like an arbitrary decision. It could use the On Prem database as well.
George Hotz
Yes.
Elon Musk
So if it had not been an arbitrary decision to go off prem to Google Cloud, then it would be trivial to add likes.
George Hotz
It would be considerably easier.
Elon Musk
It wouldn't be onerous to add views.
Elon Musk
So if you're not like too precise about exactly how many views there were, if you like, let it be a little, let it float a little bit and you occasionally drop a view count that. So it's because like, we're not like trying to balance a bank book here, then I think views actually would be relatively easy
George Hotz
if views were in the same database as likes. Yes, it would be easy.
Elon Musk
Yeah, that's what I'm saying. And it should be it's absurd that views are on a totally different database in Google Cloud instead of the on PREM
Audience Member
system.
Elon Musk
So anyway, that's sort of an unnecessary complexity. I mean the Twitter stack right now is like basically combining the difficulties of three different worlds, which is running a complex real time on PREM database that's in three data centers in Atlanta,
Audience Member
one
Elon Musk
year in Oregon and one in Sacramento. Sacramento is like possibly the worst place to have a data center because it's hot. And then like the summer it got so hot that the data center failed because the H Vac didn't work. But then in addition to that, you've
George Hotz
got
Elon Musk
also using aws, so using Amazon and using Google Cloud. So all three are required to operate Twitter fleets.
George Hotz
Fleets uses aws. They built all the fleets in aws. Yeah, I read the Google Docs for why too, for why they put fleets in aws. Basically they couldn't get enough provisioning for the internal data center.
Elon Musk
Yeah, I mean like Sam Pilar has been helping out and like I think Sam was saying there was like some pretty nutty amount of data storage is actually analytics for app versions that don't exist anymore. Yeah, like I think it was like 15%, maybe 20% is like, was literally logging data from apps that don't exist.
Elon Musk
This is like, okay, that's. Wow.
Elon Musk
Anyway, there's a lot of crazy stuff going on.
George Hotz
25% of the CPUs are running the ads prediction model. It's the tiniest model those CPUs. Only 30% is actually running the model. 70% is serializing and deserializing the data into four different formats.
Elon Musk
Yeah, and here's the crazy thing. So which is like really kind of mind blowing to think about it, but it took me a few weeks to actually even wrap my head around it. The Google Twitter's advertising is actually for the most part irrelevance optimizing. And so it's like, wait a second, like, what do you mean irrelevance optimizing? Well, when I ask people who have used Twitter for a while, it's like, how many things have you bought on Twitter?
Elon Musk
The answer is usually nothing. But it's like, well, how many things did you buy on Instagram? Oh, I bought a whole bunch of stuff last week. It's like, well, don't you think it's interesting that you wouldn't have accidentally bought something on Twitter after all this time? And the reason you haven't is because the ads are maximizing irrelevance. I feel like I'm stuck in a Douglas Adams novel. It's like the spaceship was powered by maximum improbability.
Elon Musk
And so you're like, wait a second, why on earth would you maximize irrelevance? Well, because the team was told to maximize the impression, the number of advertising impressions. So what happens if you try to maximize advertising impressions? Well, you actually are going to maximize irrelevance because if you. If somebody is spending five minutes on Twitter and two of those five minutes are spent clicking on an ad, you've now lost 40% of your impressions.
Elon Musk
Like head exploding emoji.
George Hotz
Yeah, Dwell time is probably a much better signal for ads than impressions.
George Hotz
I mean, this is what made TikTok. What makes TikTok. What makes TikTok so good? They have dwell time on all the videos. The time you spend on an ad is probably better than whether you saw the ad or not, though I somewhat disagree. In the limit, if you had an ideal ML model trying to maximize impressions, I think you'd end up with someone who just scrolls Twitter and looks at the ads all day.
Elon Musk
Look, I'm just saying that, like, when I was going through this with some of the engineers a few weeks ago, it took me a moment. I just.
Elon Musk
It was so insane that I couldn't comprehend it. It took me a while to actually understand that because I was saying that, like, no, we want people to click on the ads. That's the whole point of having an ad is so that you might buy something. That's the reason for advertising. And so, you know, an ad that is highly relevant is content. An ad that is irrelevant is spam. So we want ads that are as relevant to people's needs as possible.
Elon Musk
And yet I see many ads that, in fact, most ads are not relevant. And when I ask people, what are the concerns about Twitter, it's like, well, Twitter keeps showing me the same ad that I don't care about all the time. I'm like, well, that seems crazy. But then I found the reason, which is that they were being asked to maximize impressions instead of maximizing actual clicks and buying things, which is what they should be doing.
George Hotz
When you run an ad campaign on Twitter, you can choose, I think. I'm not really sure what the back end does. I heard the backend tries to maximize money, but you can choose whether you want to run an impressions campaign or whether you want to run a clicks campaign.
Elon Musk
Yes, things have changed recently. So we have, in the, like, you know, basically since the acquisition, I was like, no, guys, we need to maximize relevance. And there actually has been good work in the direction of relevance optimization.
Co-host
So,
Elon Musk
which, you know, so that, you know, I don't mean to be sort of all negative here, but there's a lot of, you know, there has been good work recently in the direction of actually having ads that are relevant for questions on this.
Co-host
I am super nerdy about ad tech stuff. I'm super curious how Twitter can compete with like Google and Facebook just in terms of their identity network and how well they have like bucketed groups of interest to target. Like, how does Twitter compete?
Elon Musk
Actually, I think Twitter can actually do arguably better for someone that has used Twitter for some period of time. So if you have used Twitter for, let's say, I don't know, a few weeks, and if you have like, you're several hours in and it's, it's the, the signal, the amount of signal that you have is high. You know, what people, what, what, what topics people followed, what, what, what accounts people followed, what they liked, what they, you can say, you know, certainly view count.
Elon Musk
There's. And a bunch of the stuff is actually used at Twitter for recommended tweets, what is called sometimes the home timeline. You know, if you like, there's like a little stars icon in the upper right of the Twitter interface and it'll say like, for your or latest. So for your is recommended tweets. A lot of people actually don't even realize that the upper right stars icon is a way that you can switch between recommended tweets and accounts that you actually follow.
Elon Musk
I bet a lot of people on this call currently do not know that that is what that stars icon is.
George Hotz
So.
Elon Musk
But the recommended tweets are actually pretty good.
George Hotz
Home ML is much better than adsml. Home ML is using much larger models, many more features. The adsml is very rudimentary.
Elon Musk
Yes. But essentially they should be going through the same pipeline.
George Hotz
Yeah.
Elon Musk
If Twitter can accurately recommend tweets to you that you don't explicitly follow, it can by the same token, also show ads that are relevant to you.
Co-host
So the way that a lot of platforms do ad sales and a lot of purchasers expect ads is, isn't necessarily, I'm going to give you these ads and I trust you to serve them to the right people. It's usually almost the opposite where it's, I want to target this group of people in this region who went to a Jiffy Lube in the last 72 days. That level of micro targeting is something a lot of ad buyers now expect. And like, it's a huge part of how CPMs can get so high on platforms.
George Hotz
Like YouTube, regardless of whether they're targeted or not. If your goal is C cpms, you should have a very good idea that someone's going to click on an ad before you show it to them. And you can do this with GoodML,
Co-host
but sometimes these advertisers will serve entirely different versions of the same app.
George Hotz
Turn this guy off, please. He's just talking nonsense.
Elon Musk
Thanks.
George Hotz
So
Elon Musk
I've actually talked to the advertisers. I talked to some major advertisers just today, this morning, and they were looking for, as you would expect, return on investment. So that if they spend a certain amount of money, are they going to get a return in excess of the amount of money spent? Quite rational, not arbitrary or random. So, and I won't say who it is, but there are major Advertisers who spent $60 million on Twitter this year.
Elon Musk
And they were like, we calculated the roi. Actually, another company helped them calculate the ROI and Twitter was the lowest. And this is why they're having difficulty spending additional money on Twitter, because they're literally looking at the lowest roi. I'm like, yeah, okay, well, that's quite sensible. And then they were like, well, you know, when this particular product is discussed in replies, wouldn't it make sense to at that point provide an ad that perhaps since you are discussing this product, perhaps you would like to buy it?
Elon Musk
I'm like, yes, that would make total sense. We should of course do that. They were like, yeah, that would be awesome. If you do that, then we will be glad to spend more advertising money. They were very rational and not arbitrary and random.
George Hotz
I'll stand up for Theo, worked at Twitch. He's provided some good stuff on this space so far. While in the limit, I agree with you, it would require retraining advertisers. And I'm not saying you can't do it, but advertisers have come to expect a lot of this micro targeting stuff. Facebook pioneered a lot of it.
Elon Musk
Yeah, look, I think at the end of the day, if you can say like, if you can make a clear equivalence, like, just say like, for. If you spend amount X to generate profit, Y, provided Y is greater than X, you should continue. And provided if you've got good analytics that demonstrate that whoever the advertiser is, you will succeed. And that is not currently the case for Twitter, but it will be.
George Hotz
Do you want to fight every battle or do you want to like, Like. I mean, is this the battle Twitter should be fighting or should we just provide the most standard boring ads interface and just make it good. Like Instagram's.
Elon Musk
Instagram has an excellent advertising interface as, as literally talk to anyone and they probably, if they're using Instagram at all, they probably bought something.
George Hotz
Last week I bought stuff off Instagram ads. Yeah, Facebook has GPUs in the data center too. They're running decent sized models on people.
Elon Musk
Yeah, it's, it's. I don't think we're trying to split the atom here. You know, we're just literally trying to show people ads for something they might actually want to buy.
Elon Musk
You know, this is not the Manhattan Project, even though the database weirdly is called Manhattan.
Audience Member
So,
Elon Musk
so it's just, I'm just, this is common sense stuff. So like, yeah, like sound like this is a monumentally difficult to implement. It will get implemented and it will get done fast.
George Hotz
Elon, would it be possible to offer
Elon Musk
like a more expensive $100 a month version with zero advertisements?
George Hotz
I mean 1% of people might be
Elon Musk
willing to pay that.
Elon Musk
Yeah, absolutely.
Elon Musk
I think it's a no brainer. This is just a question of what complexity do we add when. Okay, so like it's difficult to, frankly it's difficult to overstate the difficulty of adding stuff to the adding features. Features that should be easy to add are not easy to add because the stack complexity is extremely complex.
George Hotz
So can we do refactors? Forgot.
Elon Musk
So we've made some simplifications even in the last few weeks, but this is, it will explode your mind to go through the entire stack. It's like wow.
George Hotz
Well, you have to sort of make a trade off between features and refactoring.
Co-host
Right.
George Hotz
Like if you have X amount of engineering team, you can decide how you want to allocate that.
Elon Musk
Yeah, I mean basically we're going to make you know, a series of I think significant short term product improvements. But then I think we'll need to rewrite in order to have a high velocity of improvement. Unfortunately I think a rewrite is needed.
Elon Musk
Like say like look back at old school Apple, you know, when they had their old operating system and then Jobs came along with osx, you know, it was a new stack. It wasn't like let's like you know, fool around with the old Apple os. It was like he just took the Next OS and adapted that to Apple and said yeah, your old software just doesn't work anymore. Too bad.
George Hotz
But an operating system doesn't run at scale. Like this is doable, but it'd be, I think it'd be pretty hard to do with continuity to roll out this New stack, promising, no downtime on a clean rewrite. Seems very, very hard.
George Hotz
Yeah.
Elon Musk
Nonetheless, I think that's what'll be needed long term.
Audience Member
I actually have a question about the stack.
Elon Musk
Sure.
Audience Member
So you brought up the 20 million lines of Scala before, and you mentioned that the microservices have a lot of the complexity of the Twitter system. So I think microservices to like. I believe microservices for complexity, like a system at that scale won't really microservices land.
George Hotz
Sorry, you're breaking up now.
George Hotz
You think microservice yes or microservices no.
Audience Member
I'm fine with the microservices. My concern is the infrastructure or the tech stack that you guys are using, because instead of using commercial or open source or any standardized products, you guys have inbuilt or in house, your own implementations of everything. Sure, you're using Kafka, but your RPC layer is Thrift, which is developed internally. Your database is Manhattan.
George Hotz
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Thrift is a Facebook product?
Audience Member
Which one?
George Hotz
Thrift is a Facebook product.
Audience Member
My point is that
Elon Musk
we got the TFE, we got the GraphQL, we got the Product Mixer, we got the Ranker, we got the Manhattan database, we got the Strato, we got the Tweety Pie, we got the Gizmo Duck, we got the Twitter memcache, and then wait till
George Hotz
you find out they're all built on top of Finatra and Finagle, which are entirely custom Twitter open source Scala projects.
Audience Member
Yeah, I get. My point is that if you have all of this custom and not like super standardized products, when 80% of your workforce happens to leave now, how much more difficult is it for new people or like even existing people to work with that infrastructure and be able to be able to iterate on it, much less like refactor it?
George Hotz
I mean, I think I could do it, but I think it would take me six months.
Elon Musk
Hilarious.
Audience Member
So, George, you mentioned that at Facebook everything could run locally. I've worked at companies where we had a dedicated team just for developer experience, and their job was literally to Dockerize and containerize everything and just make the app run so people that can code, can code. And it just sounds like Twitter's lacking that.
George Hotz
Yeah, you want to hire those people for Twitter. I think Twitter's definitely lacking that. So, I mean, Elon, how far, how
Audience Member
far are you guys away from having an engineer, like a new engineer on day one? Just, you know, walk in, go through quick orientation, and then get like a single dev instance running and just being able to submit a PR on the same day, or maybe the same.
George Hotz
A dev instance. No, Twitter doesn't believe in that. We have produced and sometimes.
Audience Member
Or local. Any kind of local.
George Hotz
It is local.
Elon Musk
No, I think to your point, it takes a while. There's so much custom stuff that just understanding where everything is and how it all connects, I think is a matter takes at least a few weeks.
Elon Musk
So I think it would be difficult to be productive, you know, without at least a month of intense effort. I mean, that. Yeah. And that would be like, you're really good at software, I'd say, if you can do something useful in a month.
George Hotz
I think I understand most of it, but I think a lot of the problems are not a question of understanding. I think they're of just toolings and workflows.
George Hotz
The fact that I can't stand up Twitter anywhere except for the data center, for example, some services, when you develop them, you have to. They pack. It's a 1.6 gigabyte binary. It has to upload to the data center. That takes 20 minutes and then you unpack it, and then, okay, 30 minutes later, you've tested your one line change and. Oh, you made a typo.
Elon Musk
Yeah, I'm just saying, basically, to George's point, it's a good point, is that.
Elon Musk
There's so much complexity and so much interaction across so many different levels that to make progress is very difficult. Progress is being made, but it is very difficult to make progress. When you touch, like one element of the system, it affects like 17 other elements.
Elon Musk
So, you know, like one argument in favor of, say, a whole bunch of microservices is if they are truly independent, you can add additional microservices without affecting the rest of the system. But that is not the case at Twitter.
Elon Musk
Like I said, we have this challenge of trying to add view count to tweets, which I think is really going to make the site pop, because you'll see just how many people actually view your tweets.
Elon Musk
This is completely normal for video. So if you look at even a video on Twitter, it will actually show you how many views the video has gotten. And that gives you some indication of the popularity of the video, how interested are people in the video. So Twitter has views, poor videos, but does not have views for tweets. So you can tweet something and think, man, did anyone. Was it like a tweet fell in the forest and nobody heard it?
Elon Musk
Did anyone see my tweet? Actually, lots of people saw your tweet, but you don't know, because they didn't want to put themselves out there by. By actually liking it or retweeting or replying. So the site will pop in a big way. Just showing view count of tweets and people realize, holy smoke. A lot of people actually seeing my tweet. That's cool. And then, like I said earlier, we need to add functionality where you can like a tweet without it becoming.
Elon Musk
Without advertising the fact that you liked it to the world or being able to say that maybe you didn't like it in a. I love that that thing happened. Like the earthquake example. You don't love earthquakes, but it's noteworthy, certainly. And it's putting a heart next to an earthquake. That's weird. So you want to have more fidelity in how you. What you think of a tweet, and you want to have the option of making that how you feel about that tweet, public or not public.
Elon Musk
That's like, pretty obvious stuff. But making those changes to the existing Twitter system is very difficult.
George Hotz
Why not refactor and make the changes later? Why do they need to be done now?
Elon Musk
I think we need to make some improvement in the near term. And I think we can make some improvement in the near term.
George Hotz
So I ran Git log this morning and I looked at how many commits are going into the code base and what they actually are. Huge green diffs
Elon Musk
for view count or for something else?
George Hotz
All sorts of things. Maybe 10% of them are view count related.
Elon Musk
Okay.
George Hotz
But all of these other ones are still. They're still green diffs. There are a lot of people writing a lot of code today. Timeline Mixer was deprecated for Home Mixer. Great. It's deprecated for Home Mixer. Was Timeline Mixer deleted? Oh, no. Now we have both Timeline Mixer and Home Mixer.
Elon Musk
They're running simultaneously.
George Hotz
Yes.
Elon Musk
Well, it's not very meaningful to deprecate something if it's still running, obviously.
George Hotz
Yeah, exactly what I'm saying. Right. Nothing gets actually deprecated to Twitter. So Twitter has three APIs, and you can find this on public Twitter if you go to Chrome Inspector. Twitter has a 1.1 API, a 2.0 API, a GraphQL API. It also has 1.1 developer and 2.0 developer. It has five APIs that I could find. And then there's other ones people have talked about too, that I don't know how to find because I don't have Android Emulator on my computer.
George Hotz
This stuff needs to be cleaned up and no one's doing it.
Audience Member
Isn't it, it's pretty common.
George Hotz
Hey guys, do you mind if I ask a.
Audience Member
Sure.
George Hotz
Yeah. So I just wanted to know.
Audience Member
Elon.
George Hotz
So obviously, as you know, I think with the, the Tesla, you know, and
Elon Musk
what you guys do on the autopilot,
George Hotz
you guys are recreating and redoing a lot of the code. And it sounds like with Twitter it sounds like it's kind of a nightmare.
Elon Musk
So how are you prioritizing what you fix, what you're going to implement, like the views, how are you stack ranking everything, especially if things are taking a lot of extra time to get done.
Elon Musk
Well, bear in mind like, you know, the acquisition only closed like whatever, like six weeks ago, 5ish. So this is probably like the biggest amount of change that has happened in an acquisition possibly in history.
Elon Musk
You know, we're at a little over 2,000 people. We were at close to 8,000 people. The site is still running as evidenced by us being on it.
Elon Musk
So, you know, this is reasonably good progress. The most essential thing to be done at Twitter was to cut the burn rate so that Twitter does not just go bankrupt next year. That was like the, you know, task number one. And there's still work to do on that front, but it's mostly done. Then there's also, it's also important to move the revenue base from being essentially entirely advertiser dependent on advertisers, and not just dependent on advertisers, but dependent on fuzzy brand advertising as opposed to advertising that has a clear roi.
Elon Musk
And as we're heading into what appears to be a recession, the first thing that companies will cut is discretionary brand advertising. So it is important for Twitter to therefore have a subscriber base. This is the reason for the Twitter Verified.
Elon Musk
The reason we're able to make progress with Twitter Verified is because it makes use of a product that sort of was pre existing but not very useful, called Twitter Blue.
Elon Musk
So being able to move to a. Have subscriber revenue be a meaningful part of Twitter revenue is going to be essential for the prosperity survival of Twitter.
Elon Musk
So that's why that's actually the number one priority is getting the Twitter Verified to work and then also getting Twitter verification for businesses and organizations to work so that you're starting to see that rollout now where an organization can actually identify who belongs to that organization. So like who is actually, which accounts actually belong to Disney and can speak on behalf of Disney or on behalf of say Stanford or any organization.
Elon Musk
Like if someone says they're affiliated with an organization, how do you know that besides them Saying it in their bio. Well, we're now linking that on the back end so that someone organizations can say, yes, these Twitter handles actually do belong to the company and are authenticated.
Elon Musk
And this is also, you know, obviously an avenue for, you know, business revenue, business to business revenue. So the subscriber revenue and sort of back end business revenue is really important as we see a rapid decline in brand advertising.
George Hotz
But these are all features and they're all at the expense and refactors.
Elon Musk
Yeah, no, they are.
George Hotz
Okay, thank you for acknowledging.
Elon Musk
I think we won't get to the refactor if we don't make these changes.
Audience Member
Why?
Elon Musk
Because we used to be bankrupt.
George Hotz
What's the Runway?
Audience Member
Could I jump in with a quick question to cut the Runway silence there?
George Hotz
Yeah, sure.
Audience Member
Yeah. So I feel like, you know, Elon, you're our philosopher king. Plato would be very proud of you. You know, you're extremely technically competent and, you know, you, I think, really understand how to drive things in a good direction. But, you know, I really love how you're also leaning into the voice of the people and letting them have a say as well. But you can't have a million backseat drivers. So I guess my question to you is, how do you integrate the voice of the people when there are a lot of people that just don't have the right information to make decisions?
Audience Member
And how do you create the right governance systems to really find the signal from all of the noise to get Twitter to become something more like a republic rather than a dictatorship, you know?
Audience Member
Curious what you think.
Elon Musk
Yeah, well, I mean, you know, in the, in the relatively near term, like, these things are all kind of moot if Twitter is already into the ground financially. So I was thinking about the Runway question, like just to sort of, you know, give people some perspective here. Twitter was tracking to spend about $5 billion next year.
George Hotz
We needed the trip to Disneyland.
Elon Musk
Yeah, exactly. Then because of the nature of this transaction, where there's $12.5 billion of debt and the Fed rate has been going crazy, there's on the order of a billion and a half ish of debt servicing that's required. So we're talking about like net cash outflow if you didn't make any changes of on the order of like 6, 6.5 billion next year with revenue probably tracking to 3.
Elon Musk
So that's like a negative cash flow situation of $3 billion a year. Not good since Twitter has 1 billion in cash.
Elon Musk
So that's why I spent the last five weeks cutting costs like crazy.
George Hotz
I think we also got to get the advertisers.
Elon Musk
Yeah, yeah, we do need to get the advertisers. But like I said, I've spoken to a number of the advertisers. They're. Their requests are not fuzzy or irrational or anything. They're like, quite reasonable. They're like, just show us an ROI that makes sense. And I'm like, yes, I agree. If I were in their position, I would also want an ROI that makes sense. Especially when headed into difficult economic times where these questions are asked a lot more than in prosperous times.
Elon Musk
In prosperous times, there is plenty of budget for advertising and you can get away with unclear roi. But when times are tough, then the hard questions of return on investment are asked. And when you do not have a clear answer, then advertisers don't want to advertise because they're being sane. That's the main issue.
Elon Musk
So this is important. So now with the changes that we're making here on massively reducing the burn rate and building subscriber revenue, I now think that Twitter will in fact be okay next year. I think we will be about, hopefully, sort of roughly cash flow break even. That's what I expect for next year.
Elon Musk
But this will be quite. This will be difficult, but I think that's what will happen is roughly cash flow break even, as opposed to minus 3 billion ish on worth 1 billion of cash, which would be therefore dead. So that's the reason for my actions. They may seem sometimes spurious or odd or whatever. It's because this is not. We have an emergency fired roll on our hands. That's the reason. Not because I am like naturally capricious or at least aspirationally, I'm not naturally capricious.
Elon Musk
So. But if you sort of, if you say you're looking at it from my standpoint and you're saying, okay, wow, this company is like, like basically you're in a plane that is headed towards the ground at high speed with the engines on fire and the controls don't work.
George Hotz
I use the same analogy at comma, can we afford good food?
Elon Musk
Yeah, well,
George Hotz
it's really important to me.
Elon Musk
No, I think we can afford good food.
Elon Musk
The madness of, for example, the headquarters food budget was that it was $13 million a year of fixed rate, no matter how many people showed up. So if the normal meal price would have been, if the building was fully occupied, $20 for actually quite a good lunch, the food was good.
Elon Musk
But if you drop to 5% occupancy, you've now multiplied the effective meal cost by 20 and that's where you get a $400 lunch, literally.
George Hotz
Absolutely. The food was great. I loved the chia seed pudding and the smoothies in the morning. But yeah, you got to tell everyone to come into the office. It's crazy to me that people think they can have a job where they don't show up to an office.
Elon Musk
Right. And it seems like a logical thing if, if you have a building where there's literally 5% occupancy that you would seek to renegotiate the food budget and not, you know, have it be 20 times more than it should be. But that was literally the case. So I, you know, the food's a
George Hotz
lot worse now than it was. A lot worse.
Audience Member
Yeah.
Elon Musk
Well, we can definitely improve that.
Elon Musk
That's not like, I think some impossible thing to overcome.
Audience Member
So
Elon Musk
this is not, you know, it's not going to break the bank. The issue is more you can't pay like $13 million a year for a mostly empty building for lunch and not even including dinner.
George Hotz
I could save $13 million by switching ads prediction from TF serving to ONNX runtime alone.
Elon Musk
Yeah, I'm saying we can totally have a good lunch.
Elon Musk
We're not in like lunch purgatory for the rest of time.
Elon Musk
We may have gone too far is what I'm saying. I admit we may have gone too far in cost cutting with respect to the lunch that, that could be the case. And so we'll have to sort of. We may have overcorrected in that regard and we can fix it. This is not an insurmountable problem.
Elon Musk
So.
George Hotz
Yeah, so I'm like, refactors food. How about free speech?
Elon Musk
Well, I mean, free speech, let me tell you that if somebody's got to pay the servers, okay, so the speech has got to cost at least $8 because otherwise how do we pay the friggin server bill? You know, there's like a billion and a half ish, you know, of all in server related costs and you know, we're trying to get that lower, but it's a lot, it's like not trivial and a minimum, you know, like there's like somebody's got to pay the bills.
Elon Musk
So advertising for sure, but there's some degree of subscriptions. And then on the, on the speech front, like my general philosophy on that is that we should hew close to the law in any given country, you know, so
George Hotz
yeah, Elon, that makes me so happy. If that's actually what the policy is. I'm upset when I see Paul Graham get banned for mentioning Mastodon.
Elon Musk
Yeah, that was a mistake.
George Hotz
Okay.
George Hotz
I mean, yeah, I think there's a far cry, you know, look, you can make arguments for Kanye west, you can make arguments for Elon Jack, but you can't make an argument for Paul Gray.
Elon Musk
No, I agree, that was a mistake.
George Hotz
Okay? Can people post Mastodon now?
Elon Musk
Yeah, Fucking post Mastodon all goddamn day long. I don't care.
George Hotz
Yeah, because we're gonna build something way better than Mastodon, right? Like, come on, how hard could it be to beat these guys?
Elon Musk
You know, from an evolutionary standpoint, how'd that work out for the Mastodons?
George Hotz
I don't know what a mastodon was.
Audience Member
I still feel like there's something to be said about like Open source projects though. You know, like you have Linux that you know, out competed windows. Like you like big, big networks of like armies of volunteers can maintain, you know, pretty complex things like yeah, like sure, maybe Linux is run a little bit like a monarchy, like George said earlier in the space. But you know, like I do think that there's something to be said about Open source software in general, you know, and it's, it's like anti fragility.
George Hotz
I mean Linux is absolutely run like a monarchy, but Linux is not Twitter. Linux has a large code base because it needs to support many different device drivers and many different devices. Twitter needs to support basic core functionality and I think open sourcing it. There's no value in the code, right? The operating system has value in the code. The value of Twitter's in the network,
Audience Member
I suppose, but there's still like, you know, composability arguments, right? Like you guys could reuse and other people could build on top of.
George Hotz
If Twitter, if Twitter was open source tomorrow, what would you build?
Elon Musk
Honestly, I think we should just post the source somewhere. Frankly.
Audience Member
That would be sick, Elon.
George Hotz
No one would ever get it to run.
Elon Musk
Well, I mean listen, that would just, I think, finally explain.
Audience Member
Do it.
Elon Musk
That is explained with words because you can just look at it.
George Hotz
Dump a tarball Twitter source. It's unbelievable.
Audience Member
So I have two ideas that I would use.
George Hotz
Post it all.
Elon Musk
20 million lines of Scala and you can just watch and read to your heart's content because.
Co-host
Wow.
George Hotz
I think it's actually, I think those are just the used lines.
Elon Musk
Round numbers, round numbers, you know.
George Hotz
Yep, yep.
Elon Musk
We'll take a million.
George Hotz
Oh yeah, well that's just Scala, you know, we have a lot of Python as well.
Elon Musk
Yeah, but actually there's a lot of,
Audience Member
a lot of most open source code quality is like really poor and On Linux, most of the contributors are paid by like intel and other big firms. So it's not really a fair comparison at all. Yeah, sure, but you still have like composability though, right? Like a lot of people can build on top of what they're building and then that makes like, like, I don't know.
George Hotz
Yeah, yeah, I mean that's absolutely true,
Audience Member
but who's gonna sponsor it? And no one's gonna sponsor open source engineers unless.
Co-host
And composability is not inherent to open source. Composability is a thing that takes a lot of effort and money and time as well. Like there's a lot of code bases that are open source that aren't composable at all. The theoretical potential is there, but it's not like a thing almost always.
George Hotz
No, no one is going to volunteer to your open source project to come in and do meaningful refactors that reduce the code. They're going to write a feature, be like, please merge it so I don't have to maintain it. And then.
Elon Musk
Yeah, that sounds about right.
Elon Musk
Still though, I have a quick idea.
George Hotz
Elon, is there any way to like
Elon Musk
gamify getting more people to use Twitter?
George Hotz
Because I think a lot of people hear about Twitter in the news, they
Elon Musk
don't really understand how to use it or get the app and use it. But maybe if there's a way to encourage other people to show people how to use it, it could help get more daily active users eventually.
Audience Member
Yeah,
Elon Musk
well, so daily active users have been growing reasonably well, especially if you count real users and not like bots and trolls.
Elon Musk
So I mean like one of the super crazy things that I discovered, I only discovered this like basically about 10 days ago, was that Twitter was being scammed to the tune of $60 million a year for SMS texts, not counting North America. So I'm like, what do you mean? I was like, what do you mean? Like there's $60 million of SMS text.
George Hotz
Yeah.
Elon Musk
Twitter is paying telcos basically. There are telcos who are not being super honest out there in other parts of the world who were basically gaming the system and running like two factor authentication SMS techs over and over again and just creating a zillion bot accounts to literally run up the tab so that Twitter would SMS text them and Twitter would just pay them millions of dollars without even asking about it.
Elon Musk
And now this created some problems because I said, well, we got to stop that. I said, like, you know, cut off any telco that's got fraud above 10% now that did cause some havoc in many parts of the world. And then people were like imputing like bad motives to it, but it was literally I just said to the team, hey, cut off any telco who's where. The fraud's above 10%. That turned out to be 390 telcos. I'm like, dan, that's hot.
Elon Musk
Oh my gosh. Outside of North America, you know, so I'm like, okay, I didn't know there were that many telcos in existence, but turns out there's some. You know, you get to like the fourth tier telco in Bilo, Russia and you're like, you got some sketchy things going on.
George Hotz
Now you have people complaining that they can't log into Twitter because their SMS doesn't work.
Elon Musk
Yes. And so like now we're going back to the telcos and saying, listen, if you, if you stop scamming us, then we will gladly pay you some amount of money in SMS to texts, but you can't turn a blind eye to relentless bogus SMS texts. So then we're having that conversation with the telcos and then we can turn them back on and say, listen, you just be reasonable, we'll take 10% of fraud, it's fine. But we're not going to take 90% fraud.
Elon Musk
So we're not going to spend $60 million a year on literally SMS texts outside of North America. So that. So a bunch of those users were just fake and like literally for the purpose of running up Twitter's tab on SMS texts.
George Hotz
Kid you not.
Elon Musk
This is insane. So now, but to your point of making Twitter easier to use, like the obvious move I think is like, if you download the Twitter app or you go to Twitter, it should, it should put you into the search page and immediately show you like what's trending. So it's like, as opposed to saying, hey, you need to download the app, you need to install the app, you need to give us a username, you need to give us a friggin phone number and making it like an escape room to open a Twitter account.
Elon Musk
It's like we're going to give you a bunch of math puzzles basically to open a Twitter account. And then once you're in the Twitter account, you're sitting there with nothing to do. This is insane.
Elon Musk
It's not clear to me you should actually have a Twitter account at all. Unless you need to make a write action. Unless you need to write something. So if you want to like or retweet or tweet or something like that, okay, at that point, yes, you need an account.
George Hotz
Then why did people put the pop up back? They said you said they could do it.
Elon Musk
Which pop up?
George Hotz
The pop up that I emailed you the first week that I wanted to remove. The one that when you scroll on Twitter when you're logged out.
Elon Musk
I didn't say we should put the. Okay, that's the miscommunication.
George Hotz
Oh great, let's get rid of it again. Because I got rid of it entirely. I got rid of it entirely. They added it back and they messed up adding it back so it wasn't dismissible and then they fixed that five days later. But like they didn't mean to make it non dismissible and it was non dismissible and I'd love to remove it altogether. Yeah.
Elon Musk
It's not clear to me why unless there's some reason that I'm not aware of, we should not be prohibiting just a read only scroll.
George Hotz
No, there's no reason except that people are scared to lose mdao.
George Hotz
Yeah.
Elon Musk
This optimization of MDAO is like I think creating a bizarre incentive structure that doesn't make sense.
George Hotz
It's endemic in the organization. They love mdao.
Elon Musk
Yeah.
Elon Musk
I mean the thing that actually matters is like true user minutes, not like fake user minutes. But we're confident this is a real user. We're confident this user actually spent time on the app as measured by screen time on the phone, which is since the phone is the primary user use case and then, and then to get like another layer deeper is what we said the thing to optimize is unregretted user minutes. So I've heard like a lot of people say like, hey, I spent two hours on TikTok, but I regret those two hours.
Elon Musk
I'm not saying I want to trash TikTok because it's quite compelling to a lot of people, but. But I do often hear that they. People regret the amount of time they spent spent on it. So I think the thing we'd want to optimize for is unregretted true human user minutes. That's the thing to optimize for, not mdao.
Elon Musk
And then with respect to advertising, as I said earlier, you want advertising that is as close to content as possible where it's something where it's a product or service that you want when you want it, then that's actually useful. It's actually at that point becomes indistinguishable from content.
Elon Musk
So these are the things to aim for. We're going to get rid of this MDOT bullshit and we're going to get.
George Hotz
Yeah, let's get rid of all the pop ups. Let's get rid of when you click likes and quote tweets. Because fundamentally what these things are doing is they're lowering total minutes on the website. People see that pop up and they
Elon Musk
click the X.
Elon Musk
Yeah. I mean the thing to that it is important to sort of have some authentication mechanism so people can't see. You can't just create 100,000 instances of virtual machines. Just create 100,000 virtual machines and just create and have them all behave like users. Although at this point with ChatGPT you could probably just crush frankly, because ChatGPT would exceed. I think the.
George Hotz
Oh, it's about to be impossible. Capture is about to be impossible. I don't know what we're going to do.
Elon Musk
Yeah, but I'm like, at least we can try. At least we can make it like. So it's not trivial to have like 100,000 Bard accounts, which it currently is.
George Hotz
The best things, the best things to do are like social proof kind of metrics.
George Hotz
Gmail. Remember OG Gmail with the invite?
Elon Musk
Yeah, Just follow. You follow the tree. So if like, if one. The referral basis and if one put. If there's one referral that goes sideways, you just look at that and you cut off that entire referral tree. That's how beginning.
Audience Member
George, can I get two questions in or two thoughts?
George Hotz
Yeah, what do you got?
Audience Member
So I'm in San Diego on my Starlink right now, so this is pretty awesome.
Audience Member
I. So I'm a father of four and you want to have two ideas to help boost revenue. So my kids, they're going to be exposed to advertisements no matter what. Could we have like a Twitter nest feature where parents can like let their kids have accounts and the parents can control what advertisers their kids see. Because my kids are going to buy Robux or you know, they're going to be buying stuff no matter what and I'd like to choose what they're exposed to.
George Hotz
Refactors first.
Audience Member
I agree with that as a software developer. Then the next thing is there are tweets that I want to boost that are other people's tweets because I just.
George Hotz
Whether it's a political party or you
Audience Member
know, some move, just. Yeah.
Audience Member
Could we see like a paper trail of where the money comes from? So going back to what Pablo said. Pablo? Yeah, Pablo said earlier how to see through the noise. I think it's a lot easier to see through the noise when we can see the paper trail, the money that it's influencing the tweets and I think that's what as an older user I
George Hotz
was frustrated with the bots and I'm fine with people paying to get things
Audience Member
boosted, but I'd like to see where, what the source is, where it's coming from. That's it.
Elon Musk
Okay.
Elon Musk
Yeah, agreed.
Co-host
I did see a post a while back about video monetization. Is that a thing you're down to talk more on? Because I have a lot of thoughts after my time at Twitch.
Elon Musk
Twitter certainly needs to enable longer videos.
Elon Musk
I wasn't clear on what the limitation on the Twitter video length was, but I was recently told that it was a 2 gigabyte file size limitation, at least in the current stack. So like it's difficult to have video monetization if the videos are like extremely short. So. But if you have a, you know, better codec than is currently used at Twitter and resolution that is reasonable for a phone, you can have some pretty long videos in 2 gigabytes.
Elon Musk
So like the first approximation, I feel like the first order is like you need to actually be able to post a sufficiently long video. If you cannot do that, then nothing else matters.
George Hotz
Yeah, I don't think most people have access to that. So when I did that live stream before I joined Twitter, I had to get Media Studio and I actually got this. My friend was like, oh yeah, I know a guy in a telegram group and he PayPal them 30 bucks and got access to it. So that's what it takes to get access to long video on Twitter today.
Elon Musk
Yeah, well it's my again, I have to like sort of a lot of things I should say. I should preface by this is like what I think someone told me as opposed to like this is the God's honest truth. So that's an important preface for anything I say it. What I say may not be true. At least it's my recollection of what I think someone told me. So take anything I say with a grain of salt. But Anyway, if the 2 gigabyte thing is real, then we can actually have long videos with an improved codec.
Elon Musk
The current codec I think is quite old and then having a resolution that's manageable on a phone, not super high def, especially if it's something like a podcast where you don't need flexi every detail in high res, then it's just like basic stuff like having a video ad attached that is at least reasonably relevant to the material.
Elon Musk
So if it's a video about technology, that the ad is a technology related ad, it's a video about gardening. It's a gardening related ad. It's sort of stuff that would make sense.
Elon Musk
Like I said, not splitting the atom. It's pretty basic and that's what needs to happen on that front.
Co-host
The main problem that we saw was getting good enough ad inventory for video ad. We found it was a lot harder to build up a large pile of ads to serve a distributed enough group of people. And it took a while for Twitch to even have bucketing of ads for users in the first place. Are you confident in the ability for Twitter to acquire video ad buckets and targets?
Elon Musk
No, I think that is a legitimate issue. And actually if I look at YouTube, because I actually watch YouTube without YouTube Premium just to kind of see what kind of ads are being served here and the like, very often we'll see sort of nonsense ads that are like quite scammy and irrelevant to the subject. So if YouTube is even having trouble getting ads that are relevant to the subject, then probably Twitter will have some challenges that are significant.
Elon Musk
But I think part of this is also just like reaching out proactively to companies that do things in a particular arena and say we have inventory that is relevant. Why don't you try advertising with something that's in this genre and see how it goes? And then like I said, if you can actually have a logical return on investment for advertisers, I think en masse they will be logical. You might have some irrational actors, but for the most part they will be logical.
Elon Musk
So yeah, but I do think that the ad inventory thing is an important problem. If you only have ads of a particular type, then you're going to have trouble achieving relevancy because you simply lack an ad that is relevant.
Co-host
It also has to be a diverse enough set within that because video ads are much more frustrating as a user to have as repeats. So if you see the same video ad three times, it's significantly more frustrating than seeing the same suggested tweet.
George Hotz
I feel like they're so bad everywhere. I feel like I get that all the time. Like when I'm watching, like I have a cheap Hulu account with ads, it's the same ad three times. And I'm like, this is terrible.
Co-host
Google's the only platform that's really nailed this. Instagram's doing better here because they're just their ad platforms. Incredible. Nowadays, like meta's been killing it. But the inventory problem for a diverse set of video ads is really tough.
George Hotz
Yeah. Doesn't take talk.
Audience Member
Build a model per user and they spend something like 10 kilowatt hour, like
George Hotz
per year, per user. No, I might have spread some of that misinformation. No, you can read TikTok's paper. You can read it Monolith. It's pretty normal content recommendation engine stuff. They just like do it well, the papers.
Audience Member
Is it actually crazy to do that though?
George Hotz
No. And we're gonna start to see that.
George Hotz
Like, I think that the. Look, eventually you're going to build the Infinite Jazz videotape. Eventually you're going to build content that is so compelling that you'll find people just stare at this stuff for hours
Co-host
and hours and hours and hours.
George Hotz
And you can, you can do that as the ML gets better and better and better. But you know, unregretted user minutes, right?
Elon Musk
Yeah, I think that's the right thing to aim for.
Elon Musk
Like, I think it'd be hard to argue, like, okay, we improved unregretted user minutes. That is definitely a good thing and not a bad thing. So anyway, I gotta throw in the towel here, guys, but I do want to sort of leave off saying that there are a lot of people at Twitter doing great work and it is super appreciated.
Elon Musk
So this is like, you know, definitely not meant to be. Like, let's trash Twitter nonstop. It's like, you know, at least aspirationally meant to be self critical and to say like, okay, what, what can we do to make things better?
Elon Musk
So, you know, I just do want to make sure that this does not come across as being unreasonably critical of those who are actually working hard to make Twitter better.
Elon Musk
So with that, good night guys.
Co-host
Thanks a lot.
George Hotz
Very supportive. Thanks, Elon. See where Twitter 2.0 goes.
Elon Musk
Thanks, Elon.
Audience Member
Hey George, can I ask you a question about engineer numbers?
George Hotz
Yeah.
Audience Member
Originally why I joined, I didn't think Elon was going to join.
George Hotz
Well, I mean, Elon joined. So after Elon joins, you know, he's like, he, he, he, he's the only one who's allowed to say anything about Twitter. You know, I'm not like, I can't, I can't. I'm not going to reveal how like Twitter stuff works. I signed an NDA.
Audience Member
Exactly. So I'm, I'm a software engineer. I similar situation of.
George Hotz
On a project where there's been a lot of turnover and the skeletal skeleton crew.
Audience Member
I feel like I'm being pulled between, like, I want to be doing software, but I also have to understand the business better too. And do you think that's like a bad position to be in when you, when you as an engineer, you got to Start trying to innovate the business.
George Hotz
And let's, let's, let's bring this space back to. I mean, you know, Elon shows up, he'll take any conversation, any direction he wants. But yeah, let's bring this back to, you know, the question of the space, which is scale, complexity and number of engineers. No, and look, it's great to have Elon join. You know, it's so nice to think Mark Zuckerberg would show up in the space. And, you know, Mark Zuckerberg is not even the worst.
George Hotz
You think Sundar Pichai would ever come talk informally about Google? This is something right here. This is something I absolutely love about the new Twitter.
Co-host
Like that YouTube actually does this, which is really cool. Huge shout out to her.
George Hotz
Wait, YouTube does this? Who?
Co-host
Yep, the CEO of YouTube. I, Susan Wojcicki, believes her.
George Hotz
Susan Wojcicki has like. I don't know how to pronounce her last name. She has like Twitter spaces where she just casually talks about YouTube, not Twitter
Co-host
Spaces, but she hops into the conversation on Twitter in the replies all the time. And she shows up on like, really, like small people podcasts on people who are known for pushing back on the YouTube platform, like regularly. She's been surprisingly transparent. Like, I've been super impressed with the leadership at YouTube.
George Hotz
Then why'd we get rid of dislikes?
Co-host
Because of the. The net use of them was harmful enough that they decided it wasn't worth maintaining. It was a long battle internally. Multiple interviews where she talks in depth about this with both Marques Brownlee and with Ludwig.
George Hotz
I appreciate that. You know, I haven't seen these interviews. I haven't looked. I've just complained about dislikes. So, look, I'm. Personally, I'm a huge fan of transparency building in public.
George Hotz
You know, it's just, it's cool to see.
Audience Member
Hey, George, was this space inspired by John Carmack leaving Facebook?
George Hotz
I mean, that's one of the things too, right? Like, this is really not all about Twitter. We can discuss John Carmack leaving Meta. Yeah, I mean, look at what he said, right? Like, you know.
Audience Member
Yeah, something like 5% GPU usage. Oh.
George Hotz
I feel like I can say absolutely anything I want because I don't work there and I have no NDAs in place. Place with there. Yeah. I mean, you know, look how much they spent on Horizon Worlds.
Audience Member
And then.
George Hotz
Have you actually used Horizon Worlds? Horizon Worlds is the most expensive video game in history.
Audience Member
I've never heard of it.
George Hotz
Exactly. It's their metaverse thing.
Audience Member
I've never.
George Hotz
I'VE never actually used it. I've only seen, seen videos of it.
Co-host
This point, I'm convinced every social media company needs to, like, spend too much money to build a game at their peak. I watched the same thing happen at Twitch. They built a karaoke game. They tried to con or contract Harmonix to do it.
George Hotz
They're like, wait, they.
Co-host
Nope, the scope here is absurd. We're not doing that. And they hired a whole game dev team and I had to teach them react after when it was a disaster. Good times.
George Hotz
Yeah, I think, you know, the metaverse could be so good, but you need a John Carmack, like, character driving it forward.
Elon Musk
Right.
George Hotz
Because otherwise you're going to end up with the same sort of blow. You end up with all these companies and, you know, it'll be terrible.
George Hotz
We got some new speakers.
Audience Member
Hey, George. Thanks, man. Hey, I was impressed with the.
Audience Member
With the way everyone handled that Runway question that was. That really stuck out. And so I was curious just to like, kind of download those numbers real quick. So it sounded like he was saying 3 billion a year in cash burn was what he was expecting with like a billion in the bank. I'm just trying to, like, track through all that because, like, I don't know if anybody knows, but I would imagine the payroll number previously was probably like 1.5 billion cut to like 0.5 or something like that.
Audience Member
So I'm just trying to figure out.
George Hotz
I have Dan. I don't think he's supposed to talk.
Elon Musk
I don't think he wants to talk about Twitter stuff on this without.
George Hotz
Yeah, no, I'll talk about that quickly. I will. I will talk about that for a minute. I mean, I did. I did actually really appreciate that Elon answered it. I. Again, I know nothing about this. Everything I know about Twitter's financials comes from public disclosures beforehand. And I'm not just saying that I actually know nothing about it. So, you know, that's. I believe what he said was, Twitter's burn is 3 billion and they have 1 billion in the bank.
George Hotz
And that's not a long run.
Elon Musk
It's like four months or something.
Audience Member
Right?
George Hotz
Yeah. So, again, things all are above my pay grade. I don't work at Twitter anymore.
Audience Member
Just the one thing I think to be aware of and maybe to factor in is just that I believe that the acquisition put a billion dollars of debt expense onto the company.
George Hotz
And Elon did say, yeah, that's correct.
Audience Member
And so, like, I kind of pressed him in a previous space, and I actually really appreciated him engaging with me on it just like you're saying.
Audience Member
And he, you know, he. I think, I think if I were to summarize sort of like his answer, I think he kind of feels like, well, Twitter was going to get run the, the ground if he didn't buy it and stuff. And I don't know if everyone else agrees with that, but I think he kind of sort of insinuated that he was worth it for that billion year of expenses. But that's like the equivalent of like probably like the entire company payroll now or something like that, like for one guy.
Audience Member
So it's just like I'm just trying to like wrap my head around it.
George Hotz
Look, yeah, I mean, look, this is. I, I can't really speak to that stuff. I know the Runway of, I know the Runway of my startup and it's considerably longer than, than four months.
Audience Member
Yeah, well, I'm, I'm glad to hear that and I appreciate you having me on and thanks.
George Hotz
Cool. Yeah, maybe we'll keep this going for another like five, ten minutes.
Audience Member
Okay. So if you can talk about Twitter's financials, let's talk about the Twitter's technology instead. I feel like I didn't really get to phrase my question correctly when I asked it last time when Elon was up. So I'll try to phrase it again. I think having all of this custom, non standards, tech, tech stack, a lot of it, a lot of which is like invented in house by Twitter employees, Twitter developers, doesn't that like slow down onboarding or working on new features significantly?
Audience Member
Why not use GRPC that a million people out there know how to deal with and instead using thrift RPC, which is something that maybe 500 or 1,000 people in this world know.
George Hotz
Thrift is not at all. This is straight up engineering fact. Thrift was invented at Facebook. I used it while I was at Facebook. Thrift is not the problem.
George Hotz
And so also open source Twitter, you can find Finatra and Finagle. So Finagle is a RPC server. Finotra is like a routing engine on top of it. Finagle can do both HTTP and Thrift. I know these are open.
Co-host
People are pinning random shit in the on top. Now that has nothing to do with what we're talking about.
George Hotz
Oh, I don't care. Just ignore it. How do I.
Audience Member
My point was not that it's not, it's. Oh, it's not open source. My point is that how many people out there the. The.
George Hotz
Yeah, okay, so you can say yeah, there's a developer pipeline problem for a language Like Scala. Again, technical debt is technical debt, right? I've never coded a line of Scala in my life and I can watch my last few streams.
Audience Member
I did.
George Hotz
Advent of code and Scala. Look, am I an expert scholar engineer? Not at all. But can I make decent pull requests? Yeah, I think now I can.
George Hotz
I don't think that's the problem. I think the problem is technical debt. It's just like technical debt can appear in any language, in any environment. And I think the largest, I mean, you know, I have. I have a neural network framework called Tiny Grad. It's a thousand lines and, well, it's a little more than a thousand lines. But the goal is to keep it at a thousand lines because lines are one of the only reliable proxies I know for technical debt.
George Hotz
Now, of course, you can game this, right? Any, anything. Once it becomes an optimization target, it ceases to be a metric. This is true, but at the same time, you can only game it. So far, Elon was saying 20 million lines of Scala. What's 20 million lines? You know what on this website really should take 20 million lines.
Elon Musk
Mind if I ask a question?
George Hotz
Sure, yeah.
Audience Member
So I've worked on a lot of big tech companies. Amazon, Google. I worked at Google for like 10 years and a lot of teams and
Co-host
I also worked at a few startups.
Audience Member
So, like, one thing I noticed is with the JVM languages like Scala, I've worked with a few teams that have used Scala. Is that. Or just any JVM language is that there's this additive engineering problem. Like they keep adding code. It seems like the JVM languages in particular, whoever, and sometimes I think the JVM languages, they almost encourage, I feel like code bloat and lines of code and it's like, no big deal.
Audience Member
There's so many advanced tooling. There's so many tooling around these languages is so good that they can just pump out. The IDEs can just pump out code. And then it gets to the point where it's not readable. It's optimized for writing, all the refactoring and stuff. So they're not optimized for reading because the tooling is so good, right? And so you end up with like tons of code. And then when people want to add features, they instead of reading the code that's already there, which is enormous, they just, like, they just write it again.
Elon Musk
It was like.
George Hotz
Yeah. So I was gonna, I was gonna first say, like, why would the VM have anything to do with. Right. I can run Python on the JVM if I wanted go get Jython. So I don't think it's the J. It's mostly the libraries.
Audience Member
The libraries. Like, like there's so many libraries and there's so much tooling that you end just with like enormous amount of code.
George Hotz
I, I think it is keep like standing around.
Co-host
Points I really agree with, but then the details are nonsense. Oh, it's like I largely agree with you here. I just, I don't think any one of these things is the problem. It's not libraries, it's not the jvm. But like absolutely. We're at a point now where things like you can write much more code much more easily because the tools are getting better every day. I think we as like an engineering like community need to figure out how to deal with that reality where the average engineer isn't as talented because the bar for engineering has gotten so much lower because the tools are so much better.
Audience Member
But I think what I was saying earlier is kind of right though is that like every company just has all these bespoke different tools and all this like complex little like onboarding thing that takes, you know, like it probably takes a month for someone to ramp up into any.
George Hotz
Not Facebook. Not. Not.
Co-host
Yeah, Facebook held it with their thoughts.
George Hotz
Would you agree? Facebook killed it. Exactly how good I worked. I was full time at Facebook in 2011. How good was Facebook's tech?
Co-host
I was genuinely surprised they had to do layoffs because they've been able to hire so lean compared to the amount of like product surface area they cover, it's nuts. Like they. The way they architect everything is incredible.
George Hotz
These are the arguments I kept making inside Twitter. I'm like, guys, it's. And people are like, George. George has no idea what he's talking about. I'm like, I've seen Facebook. It's beautiful.
Audience Member
CSH alum here from 0508. Long time man.
Audience Member
I was wondering if you would agree that with the direction AI is going, I just feel like, I feel like with how much code exists open source and accessible to AI, I feel like code monkeying work of computer scientists and software engineers is going to just continue to get less and less and it's going to start to become more of a. Who can communicate with the engine the best and the most creatively.
George Hotz
It already is if you think about it, right? So programming, unlike say truck driving, is already tool complete. So I mean to specifically talk about the JVM thing, it may very well be. And you can like do this as a Conversation controlled experiment that like do ides like intellij which have all this autocomplete boilerplate functionality. I think it's actually IntelliJ.
Elon Musk
Yeah, I think it is.
Audience Member
I think you're right. It's IntelliJ and it's going to get worse. With Chat GPT and all this code generation, it's kind of, we're like it's not going to be good.
George Hotz
I, I, I mean, yeah, I, I don't even think it depends on your perspective.
Audience Member
Worse, right?
Elon Musk
Or, or better?
George Hotz
No, the AI, the AI code stuff is ridiculous. AI code generation is ridiculous. Ridiculous. And like it's just the whole thing is laughable. And here's why.
George Hotz
Programming is tool complete. Meaning what happens Accounting is also tool complete. When you build better tools for accounting or programming, you end up with less accountants and less programmers having leverage to do more work. Right. This is in contrast to something like Walmart cashiers or, or truck drivers. Right.
Audience Member
No matter.
George Hotz
The truck might get better but you still need the driver to log the hours. All right, fine. You can say Walmart cashiers is a bad example because okay, now you have one person overseeing the four self checkouts. Maybe that is the same thing with technology. So we'll stick with truck drivers, which is not tool complete. But the AI code generation in of itself is like why do you need the extra step? Right? What do you want the AI to do?
Audience Member
Hey George. Hey George. One, one question right on, on the topic I think that you are trying to address is where are you at on, in terms of how many employees or engineers are ultimately needed just to sort of get the job done or kind of have like a good healthy work life balance, like that sort of thing.
George Hotz
Like in terms of work, work, work. I, I think, I don't like work life balance. I think work life balance or whatever it is you want.
Audience Member
Yeah. And the people there want.
George Hotz
No, I don't think, I don't, I think work life balance is stupid to concept. I think that you know, work is life.
Audience Member
Take that part out of the question. Just you know, kind of like
George Hotz
how many, how many engineers do you need to do what?
Co-host
Right.
George Hotz
It all depends on what the task is. Right.
Audience Member
Yeah, I'm trying to think through like sort of what's, what's kind of the unifying vision that that's going to bring all the engineers at Twitter together. Like I like some of the feature points Elon made about like showing the views and how that would raised a lot of interest. I thought he had some like interesting ideas. But like what's the sort of vision and then like, what. What support do you need from, you know, whatever the powers that be are above you as teams to get the
George Hotz
job for the folks at Twitter. I don't work at Twitter. I don't know anything about Twitter. I resigned from Twitter today to talk about AI and for various reasons, I'm certainly down to talk about AI and AI coding.
Audience Member
Cool.
Elon Musk
Okay.
Audience Member
I misunderstood. Thank you.
Elon Musk
Sure.
George Hotz
If you're not. If you're a speaker right now and you're not speaking, please step down and we'll let some new people.
Elon Musk
Hey, George, I'm sorry if I wasn't
Audience Member
supposed to pin up top, but. But I pinned a little bit about the Amber Alerts. If an Amber Alert goes off in an area and a car happens to drive by a Tesla, what are the odds it doesn't? Can the camera scan its license plate, make a model, and beam that instantly to authorities? And I figure this would be a really great application of Tesla.
George Hotz
Who's writing that? Oh, we got to write code. We got to test it. Ask ChatGPT maybe ChatGPT.
Audience Member
The reason why I even float that idea, though, is because, of course, I think there's something bigger here that Elon might be playing at. Right? His 5D chess, which is he has all these cars mapping the roadways and. And noting the cars that are driving by him. So now that he has Twitter with phones, with geolocation and other drivers pockets, Honda Accord drivers, is he gonna be able to pinpoint when the Honda Accord passes by, the exact location of a Tesla?
George Hotz
You know, what features are really easy to imagine until you have to write them, right? Until you actually.
Co-host
Ideas are so cheap.
George Hotz
Ideas cheap. Until you have to, like, make these things sort of work at scale. So you say, like, is this what someone's planning? Like, it doesn't matter what someone's planning. It matters, like, what's actually going to get built and. Yeah, you know, look. You know, any. Look, I've been working at Common now for six years. You know, like easy it sounds in theory, to make maps from our data. Oh, we have all the data.
George Hotz
We know where all the lanes are. We have such an accurate gps. Yeah. Good luck making maps.
Audience Member
Productizing a good idea is the hardest part.
Co-host
I agree.
Audience Member
But I do think that Tesla is particularly good at making awesome product. Unlike Twitter was.
George Hotz
Well, yeah, I think that you can do certain things with organization, but it really is a different product, right? It is a different product. And there are some challenges. I mean, Twitter is not perfectly horizontal scale. Right. Tesla is Pretty much perfect horizontal scale. Not entirely perfect or, you know, I'll say, comma, comma, is pretty much perfect horizontal scale. We have some things where all the cars connect to the server, but all the driving is done locally on the car.
George Hotz
So that scales perfectly. You know, like, there's no. There's no complexity to deal with there. If you make it work on one car, it's easy to make it work on all the cars, but if you make it work on one Twitter app, making it work on all the Twitter apps might be.
Elon Musk
Yeah,
Audience Member
I think Elon kind of brought up a really good solution, though, which is like, just incentivize people to delete code. Like. Like refactoring and deleting code and simplifying isn't sexy work. And no one really wants to do it, but, I mean, pay them more for deleting code.
George Hotz
That is all I wanted to do with Twitter. That's all I wanted to do. I was there to refactor and make it beautiful. I don't know. But you see the problem with refactoring and making beautiful is you got to do that instead of features.
Audience Member
Yeah, exactly. I guess just pay the people more who are refactoring.
George Hotz
No, it's not a question of paying the people more. It's a question of if you have 400 people dumping shit into a pool and a hundred people shoveling shit out of the pool, the shit still becomes. You know, there's still so much shit in the pool, but at what point
Co-host
do you say, fuck it and just build it?
George Hotz
Well, and you know what I mean, this is one of those remind me in five years kind of things. Remind me in five years. And let's see. I'm so curious to see where Twitter will be and what their infrastructure will look like.
Audience Member
I mean, that's essentially what ended up happening, right? The timeline mixer was deprecated and the new rewrite of the home mixer was implemented.
George Hotz
Did it work?
George Hotz
Well, did it work? What do you mean, did it work? There's now both of them.
Audience Member
Yeah, it increased the cost. But did it help the technique depth?
George Hotz
No, you're just saying, you have more shit, there's more shit in the pool. You didn't take any shit out of the pool.
George Hotz
I.
Co-host
This is like a slight rap. Back to a topic earlier around, like, efficiency and, like, the AI stuff. I think that the problem we see in a lot of these larger companies, especially the ones that, like, do lots of different features, is how they transition from, like.
Co-host
I noticed a pattern. I think there's A term for this, but the similar to the Moore's Law where every two years processors get like twice as good. Every three years, any given piece of software becomes two to three times easier to write. And if your company's been around for 17 years, a lot of efficiency has been unlocked by us improving the tooling that. George, you and I, as younger guys, we look at these services, we're like, what the fuck?
Co-host
This could be like 100 lines of code instead of 10 services that are thousands of lines of code. A lot of that is a shift in the industry based on all the tools that we use now every day. For me, AI is another one of those where certain languages and certain architectures that right now are inefficient to write because of just raw amount of code. For something like Golang, for example, where you're copy pasting half the code you write, something like AI, specifically like Copilot can make you much more efficient as a developer.
Co-host
I think what we're seeing is one of those 2-3x moments in real time. But I don't think we're seeing developers die. I think we're seeing yet another advantage to the people who are willing to start from scratch and take advantage of the new way to build a pool.
George Hotz
So with respect to Golang, I mean that's a very deliberate choice on the language designers. It's like, you know, well, we have all these people and like, let's be honest, they're not smart enough to code C, so we'll give them Golang and like that's the real, that's the real justification for it, you know, and I consider myself one of those people not smart enough to code C. And that's why Golang is nice. But that verbosity, like, you know, the very explicit painful error handling and Go having to actually check each error code, it's there to encourage people to think right.
George Hotz
So you can go and pave over that with chat GPT, but then you just get people who don't think right and then the whole point is kind of ruined. Like Go was very deliberately designed that way. I can't speak to how Java was designed because that was all before my time. But I remember when Go came out, I like watched all this happen.
Audience Member
Sorry if this is a Jason topic. Is Copilot's biggest barrier to adoption just installation, the, the intimidation of installation. And with the price of Copilot, would customers, would they be price elastic enough to like pay an extra 99 bucks to have like an Uber like service nearby?
George Hotz
Copilot I didn't find it great. The same thing with ChatGPT.
Co-host
Like I got multiple top 100 in the world placements this year in Advent of Code Using Copilot once you learn how to work with it as a tool, it's kind of like vim, where you have to learn to train it. Like know how to write, name a variable, leave a comment and trick it to writing the right code. But it's a tool in that way, like you have a relationship with it.
George Hotz
And if you're trying to play Advent of Code where you're trying to do it as fast as possible, sure, Copilot might help you.
Co-host
I also worked at Twitch for half a decade and run a company and wrote half the code for that too. It works really well in all these environments. From my experience.
George Hotz
You really you find Copilot helps you because I don't.
Co-host
Yes, it's when it conflicts with other tools that I find as if not more helpful. Like when it gets in the way of typescript, type definition, autocomplete and stuff like that, it can get annoying. But I do often find it improves my velocity and experience as a developer. When it hits, it hits. And if you know how it's going in this and you'll learn quick when you use it, I'm going to have it write this algorithm. I know it's going to put these two things in the wrong place.
Co-host
I'm going to delete this one and move this one somewhere else. It makes me feel better as a developer the same way I did when I first got really into vim. But it takes a bit to really like feel that.
George Hotz
So do you like Autocomplete in general?
Co-host
Yes, when it's guided and you have a good type safe system that is defining the autocomplete. I'm really big on full stack type safety and autocomplete. Intellisense, like the Microsoft way where it guides you to the right line of code, is something I'm really big on.
George Hotz
I find. I hate autocomplete. I never use any autocomplete for anything. The things that I like with IntelliSense.
Audience Member
Maybe mobile texting.
George Hotz
What?
Audience Member
Maybe mobile texting because it's so annoying to try to get. That's the only time I use autocomplete.
George Hotz
Oh. Oh yeah. No, this is. No, specifically for programming. I like that I can right click on a function. It takes me to the definition. Even if that's only correct 90% of the time or 80% of the time, it's still a lot better than having to grep for it. But I don't know. I find most autocomplete to like.
Co-host
So I run a podcast where I talk about all of this type of stuff. I've had the creator of React JS on. I'm going to have the creator of GraphQL on soon. If you're down George, I'd love to have you on to show you how my stack works and how the T3 stack stuff goes specifically because I think you'll see when you have full stack type safety implemented from your database to your user, autocomplete stops being a thing that annoys you and starts being a thing that guides you to writing the right code the first time.
Co-host
Always. It's so powerful when you have it set up right.
George Hotz
Let's set it up. Let's set up a live stream and I will give this stuff a try. Look, it's the kind of thing also where I'm sure if I. I don't know, I have like. I don't really like tooling. I like absolutely minimal tooling. I used vim for a long time with nothing. No plugins, no nothing. And now I use VS code pretty much the most bare bones you can make it but.
Audience Member
So I'm a little embarrassed. I did not. I was using the. I said copilot earlier. I meant to say open pilot. We were just talking about copilot. I used the wrong word when I
Elon Musk
was trying to ask ox is if
Audience Member
it was with open pilot was the like with the cost of the system in general and if installation is intimidating for it is like a barrier to entry for adoption then like would increment of 99 extra dollars for like an uber like installation service.
George Hotz
Yeah, yeah, you know what? You were on that service. You run that service. I'm bored thinking about it. No, really. So. Oh by the. By the way, by the way we are dropping now that I got. I got 14k people here. We are dropping an incredible video of the year production car comma 3 Look, I don't want to run a business. I don't give a about any of that. I want to solve self driving cars, I want to beat Tesla and you hit a deadline.
Audience Member
Look at this.
Co-host
Where are you posting that video? George?
George Hotz
What's up?
Co-host
Where are you posting the video?
George Hotz
Oh, right here on Twitter. I mean it's the best.
Co-host
Do you want any help with the YouTube strategy? I'm a. I'm a big fan of helping with YouTube strategy stuff. I help with bunch of like Y combinator companies. It's Something that's like, I'm nerdy about the YouTube algorithm and how to make it tick. So if you want to chat about that. I just had a video go viral about AI recently.
George Hotz
Yeah, it's not, it's not, it's not that. It's not that good. I don't really care. Like, it's more of a. Like a lot of things that comma are.
George Hotz
We have a thing where it's like, I don't really care what people think of me. Perception is so meaningless.
Audience Member
Right.
George Hotz
Like, let's actually just solve self driving cars and let's build something that's 10x better. And then like, I don't care what you think of me, it's just 10x better. Like, you have to use it. I'm sorry.
George Hotz
And we think of a lot of, like, the program and stuff like that. Like open pilot. Open pilot. Their entire open pilot, which can drive a car with zero disengagements to Taco Bell, is smaller than most of Twitter's microservices.
Audience Member
Well, Twitter might be a bad bar
Elon Musk
to compare with, but.
Audience Member
Yeah, I get the point.
Elon Musk
That's incredible.
George Hotz
Yeah. But it comes down to it. It's just the same number of engineers work on both, Right.
Audience Member
Wow.
George Hotz
It's just the thing that will determine how many lines of code your thing will have is strictly a function of your number of engineers and a function of nothing else. And I think that kind of brings the space full circle. Does everyone kind of pretty much agree with that? You know, give or take.
Audience Member
Why did Twitter need that many engineers?
Co-host
I. I largely agree. I think that it. The way things were built when Twitter started and the way things are built now are different. And a lot of the chaos that we now see as obvious is like, obvious in hindsight.
George Hotz
Very much agree. Yeah. I think that I know that whenever I'm writing something, the first time I write it, it's terrible. The second time I write it, it's like kind of okay. You can sort of see that it's
Audience Member
going to be good.
George Hotz
And then the third time I write it, it's actually good.
Co-host
I have one challenge for this now that I'm like really deep on the product side. The first version's often enough to figure out if you have product market fit. And it's often not worth me paying you as an engineer to build the second and third version until we know that the product has some market fit. If you have a system where you can identify that and then Go build version 3 when like a very small subset of users are on that early V0.
Co-host
Awesome. Do that. But I think the problem is we're trying to find product market fit as cheap as possible. And when we find it, we keep building on that awful V0.
George Hotz
I think nobody has doubt that Twitter has product market fit.
Co-host
I think we can afford if you add new features. We don't know. We don't know if Twitter Blue is going to have product market fit. And I know I can't change my pro profile picture right now because I'm a Twitter Blue user. I had an automation set up to change my profile picture whenever I went live and it didn't error out when I had changed when I became verified through Blue. And now I can't change my picture anymore.
Co-host
My account's in this weird locked state. Just Growing Pains Rush the feature. It's not. No, it's not Growing Pains. It's experimenting in favor of product market fit.
Audience Member
Yeah, I've got the tweet pinned up here on top. Sorry if that's, if that's not okay. But I just thought I would. But like, I think that it's true though. Like, it would be awesome to have more feedback mechanisms into the core teams at Twitter. So like, if, like there's a feature that just makes a lot of fucking sense. Like, like you could just have that feedback directly from the users or something is broken. And then getting those information systems into the core team so that they can really iterate on that, on that product market fit, you know, I mean, obviously Twitter already has it, but, you know,
George Hotz
you can, you can add anybody at comma and you can discuss their features with them. I can't speak to Twitter, but I could say, you know, comma, everyone's pretty much on Twitter and you know, you can, you can, you can at them and ask for features. I don't know, like, I love building in public. I think that so much secrecy is incredibly stupid. I think it would be so cool if Elon actually dropped a 3 gigabyte tarball.
Audience Member
If he did that, that would actually be insane.
George Hotz
You want to sit there and try to read it? Welcome to my last four weeks.
Audience Member
I mean, it was just, it would actually like, like that would be mind blowing, you know, if he just was like, yeah, here, you solved it.
George Hotz
I mean, no, you're like, okay, I hope he actually doesn't do that, because who knows how many secrets are in that code base. I don't mean secrets like, like, like, like, like IP secrets. I mean secrets, like a literal like AWS
Co-host
token.
George Hotz
Everyone's got those in Their private business.
George Hotz
All right, Ashok's got his hand up.
Elon Musk
Yes, hi. Is there any ideas and possibilities on having unique profile pictures to reduce fake profiles or reduce abuse?
George Hotz
Wait, the last thing that you can possibly ask me about is Twitter features. By the way, I'm in the Twitter should build zero features camp and should just do refactors for the next six months. So that's my take on any asks for Twitter features. But look, I'm not even at Twitter anymore. I don't even work there. I resigned.
Audience Member
Were you joking? So you actually worked there?
George Hotz
What were you doing?
George Hotz
I tried to fix all this shit.
Co-host
I literally live across the street. How do I go to help fix all the react. Bullshit.
George Hotz
All the react bullshit. Look, I don't work there. I don't, I don't know about any of this.
Audience Member
I mean, this is. George, I got a question about comma, actually.
George Hotz
All right, all right, so let's say
Audience Member
the best case scenario is comma turns into like a 500 billion dollar company, right? How many?
George Hotz
I don't know if that's the best case scenario. That sounds like people want to come take the from me.
Audience Member
What do you mean by that?
George Hotz
I don't give a about the money. The money's fake. Guys, do you believe in the singularity? The money does not matter. The singularity.
Audience Member
Yeah. Okay, conspiracy aside, right, but how, how, how?
Elon Musk
It's a social.
Audience Member
The money fake. I, I, I know, I know. All right.
George Hotz
Get the money's back. Yeah. All right, go on.
Audience Member
How, how big would comma grow? Because you can't operate that. Like, you would need at least a team for compliance alone.
George Hotz
Compliance with what?
Audience Member
I don't know, like people getting car crashes.
George Hotz
What if people get in car crashes? What does that have to do with me?
Audience Member
Because you're the CEO and you'd be responsible, but that, that's, that's not
George Hotz
comma system and it's open source.
Audience Member
Well, the goal is to be level four, right? Or full.
George Hotz
The goal is definitely not to be level four. I have no idea. Oh, level two forever. Actually, you know what the long term goal of comma is? The long term goal of comma is to have a shop in the mall where you go in and you buy your new comma body and you bring your comma body home with you and it cleans your house and it cooks you some food and you know, you can even have sex with it if you want. Now that is the goal of comma, right?
George Hotz
Compliance. Go to my store at the mall, drop 20 grand, walk home with your comma body hand in hand with helmet shade. You're still so.
Audience Member
I'm surprised Elon came into your space.
Elon Musk
Dude, it's so funny.
George Hotz
What the. Elon came into my space.
Audience Member
Yeah.
Co-host
I'm surprised
George Hotz
you're chill, man.
Audience Member
He's a draw too. I get it.
George Hotz
He was not happy with the asking
Co-host
about ad tech initially. Thank you for defending me. Yeah, I appreciate. I got mad respect for you for that. I did not expect that at all.
George Hotz
Thank you. Thank you. No, look, I think. I think he was pissed at the other guy and I think he thought everyone else was like. That the other guy was literal, like, just. Just annoying him. But no, I mean, look, what you said about ad tech was like, absolutely right. And anyone who works on ads, like, knows us.
Audience Member
Yeah.
Co-host
Which is. Yeah, I was surprised.
Audience Member
He.
Co-host
It sucks because, like, I really want Twitter to survive and ads are how you survive in this economy. And he just doesn't get a lot of it.
George Hotz
Yeah, look, you know what? Whenever I think about. Whenever I think about a decision that Elon's making, I remind myself that he's a billionaire and I'm not. So whatever his process is for making decisions, it's better than mine.
Co-host
So I have a thing I call reset theory, where it's very easy when you go from one place to another in terms of, like, areas of expertise, to think that your current expertise carries over because you're an expert, you're on top of your shit. And I made this mistake when I was on top of my game as an engineer thinking, oh, I can move over to running a company. No, I can't. It's not that easy. It's really hard to do. I thought when I was popular on YouTube, I could just move that over to TikTok.
Co-host
No, I absolutely can't. It's really hard to do. Going from one type of company to another, from a space where customers are paying you money to a space where advertisers are paying you money to have customers watch their stuff is such a huge shift that it's easy to see, like, certain patterns and, like, the fundamental truths, the one dimensional solutions that you're familiar with, which in Elon's case are people like your thing, people buy your thing.
Co-host
Thing will be successful. That's not true in this space. And like, the axes you've defined yourself on aren't even, like, the same here.
George Hotz
I mean, I think it can be true. Like, I think that one of the things is baffling to me. You look at Twitter's old things. How is this company possibly spending $5.5 billion.
Co-host
Yeah, there's like, like there's two extremes here and they're way past the like, too big extreme. But there are and like, I agree, Twitter spending way too much money. They're way too big. They had a lot of debt from both technically and like the architecture of like the company itself, financially. And financially they're, they were fucked on all of these dimensions. But that doesn't mean Elon's knowledge of how to start a business successfully necessarily carries over to how to make a successful advertising platform on a given social media product.
Co-host
And a lot of the things he's used for his successful career are specifically like harmful in this space. Like those truths don't exist here.
Audience Member
But you're talking about somebody who sold flamethrowers out and burnt hairspray. I think like out of anything. He does know how to generate money. And this is just, it's almost like thinking outside of the box where you just have to apply it in different ways and obviously limit your, your spending in some ways. But I think it's just, you know, fine tuning his expertise in other companies here and really learning as he goes.
Audience Member
Like, he's not an expert there. He didn't really understand the code base or how chaotic it is. You know, somebody who, like I worked at GM and you have a lot of legacy where they keep stacking shit and they get some new integration tool and everything's just this big ball of different technologies that don't really even connect well, but they just work. And once they work, people just don't want to dive in there and refactor it.
Audience Member
So I think it's just more so of, you know, getting the right guys behind it that can connect the world a little bit better than it already is.
George Hotz
There definitely are some truths to running an advertising based business business, but at the same time, this business is not being built from scratch, right? Like Twitter was bought for $44 billion. You only need to make this thing profitable to stay alive, right? There are a huge number of users on the platform that even though you might not be doing ads as efficiently as, as, as meta, it may not matter if all you're trying to do is stay alive.
George Hotz
Because the first fundamental cost to run something like Twitter, this isn't a car company. At a car company you have margins and your margins are kind of razor thin, right? Like you got to buy all these parts from somewhere, right? You don't make the wheels. You buy the wheels, you don't make the engine. You buy the engine. Maybe Tesla makes the engine, but GM don't make the engine. Actually, maybe they do make the engine, but they don't make the brakes, they don't make the steering wheel.
George Hotz
So there's no real. What's the actual cost to running Twitter.
Audience Member
I also want to do that. Elon's mentioned this before, and I think this is like, huge. Is that he's going to start incentivizing content creators like on Twitter.
Audience Member
Yeah. But I mean, I think this is a game changers.
George Hotz
Who's gonna build them?
Audience Member
All the, like, substack people, all of
Elon Musk
the, like, YouTubers, all these people that
Audience Member
can make money, they can do it on Twitter.
George Hotz
I mean.
Audience Member
Yeah.
Co-host
So right now, Twitter doesn't have a path to profitability. I. We've said a couple things throughout the space, like, Twitter has product market fit. It has product market fit for a product and a market, but we don't know how much money it can make. And there's two paths. We can try and raise the potential for money to be made so that it can either raise more money so it can get more Runway and be bigger, or we can pick.
Co-host
We can say, okay, Twitter is good enough. Today we're going to trim everything from here, from the waist down so that we know we can fit it under the amount of money it can make at this moment. It is hard to do both at the same time. And when we choose to refactor, now we are choosing to do the latter.
Audience Member
Also.
Elon Musk
One of the things from a feature
Audience Member
standpoint that you got to realize is like with Twitch, for example, right?
Elon Musk
Twitter Spaces is one of the reasons
Audience Member
why Twitter Spaces is so special is because you're not. There is no video. You are just doing voice. You're able to focus on that conversation.
George Hotz
And when you add Copy Clubhouse, when
Audience Member
you add in video, right, you're creating an arms race. Now it's like with Twitch, right?
Elon Musk
Like, as soon as you have video
Audience Member
now as soon as somebody starts getting like a green screen, it starts doing picture overlays, it starts doing animations and starts doing. Getting a ring light. It levels up the quality bar. And now there's like the barrier to entry starts to get. Get larger over time. It creeps up.
Elon Musk
And this is what happened with Twitch.
Audience Member
And now, like, if you were to start streaming on Twitch and be competitive,
Co-host
if you think that's what happened, like, you've said some stupid shit, but saying that's what happened to Twitch, really, like, icing on the cake.
Audience Member
God, yeah, that's exactly what happened. And it's also why?
George Hotz
Like, I just, I disagree. That's happened with Stretch. I, I stream on Twitch with the absolute lowest budget and I get a lot of viewers.
Co-host
I'm literally streaming on Twitch right now to a thousand viewers and I'm using a $300.
Audience Member
But you can't make a living off
Co-host
I. Yeah, I know you can't. I can. Especially since my YouTube gets 2 million views. I produce on Twitch. I worked at Twitch for half a decade. I know how the shit works, man.
George Hotz
You, yeah, you can, you can be successful those things. Yeah. This is like, I think this is the same people who think you need a fancy keyboard in order to program. I think these things, the high end people get them but I don't think they really have much to do with
Co-host
your success at all.
Audience Member
They don't have to do success, but it absolutely limits the pool of people who can find success. Right. There's always going to be the outliers, there's always going to be the exceptional people who find something creative to do. They do.
Co-host
You can buy a $600 phone from Apple, you can buy a $600 phone from Apple and be a top YouTuber with it right now, no questions asked. Like the quality you can get of like recording and quality both video and audio on a cheap Apple device from the store day one is insane.
George Hotz
I was actually looking into, I was looking into buying like a real high end video camera and then I like was watching some stuff and then I was shooting some stuff with my, my iPhone 13 and I'm like, it's not really that different.
Audience Member
No. But good luck being successful without being
Co-host
able to graphic edit your thumbnails without
Audience Member
being having title cards and these things matter tangibly.
George Hotz
To watch, watch my stream.
Co-host
You have no idea how. Again, discoverability.
Elon Musk
This is so fun for making a living.
George Hotz
It's all about that. Following off topic, do we want to end it with one key thing? The scale complexity, number of engineers. We all agreed that we only need 20 engineers. The trick is finding the right 20 engineers.
George Hotz
Everything can be built with 20 engineers except rockets. They might need 50.
Co-host
The framing I want to offer you for this, George. This is the thing I try to talk a lot about. I think about problems in dimensions and it should be our goal as engineers not to make the dimension we're working within as rigid as possible. It should be to have as few dimensions as possible. So things like auto scaling, that's a dimension you have to work to maintain. Things like global distribution, that's a dimension you've added of complexity you can make those rock hard, rock solid and hard, keep them in good places, but you're fucked as soon as you have to make changes.
Co-host
My goal is almost always to reduce those dimensions and make it as simple as possible. And tools like serverless are a great example of how to do that. I think that that's the future we're going to see that's really exciting is a future where we're able to reduce complexity not by picking better languages or writing better code with better engineers, but simply fucking like building things that don't have those problems in the first place.
George Hotz
Yeah, and I think that's the real truth of the ChatGPT revolution. It's not going to be whether you ask your ChatGPT to write Python or Scala. Like, I think we can almost abstract away the programming language. When can the AI just directly do the compute?
Audience Member
I think the issue with ChatGPT is that, you know, there are certain things that it won't be able to know, like the integration or the creativity that comes from the engineers, or like certain times where they asked it to.
George Hotz
Total bullshit. Total bullshit. I promise you that creativity is, is absolutely Nothing. And the AIs will blow out of the water any human creativity.
Audience Member
I won't say creativity, but more so of like asking it to write a REACT application. It's using deprecated libraries. So staying up to speed or depending on how many things you actually want integrated with it, like how, how in depth will those. Will there be like a questionnaire to be able to build everything or kind of like a, I guess a build. I don't know.
George Hotz
As far as staying up to date goes, those things can read the Internet so much faster. I can retrain the model so much faster than a human could read a book.
Co-host
Right.
George Hotz
Well, actually that's not exactly true, but like you could imagine this kind of being true in a limit. The new, the new systems that I think are going to move to right now, they store all the information in the weights, but you could store all the information like kind of like a memory bank and you can do retrieval systems. Facebook just came out with a paper on this. But I don't imagine it being a questionnaire, I imagine it being a conversation.
Audience Member
But I think that there's something to this though, that AI can't really. There are different kinds of creativity. AI can take different ideas and synthesize from different domains way better than any human could. Right. Because it just has such an insane breadth. But that breadth is composed of all stuff that humans already know running on top of like there's some types of creativity that AI I think will never really achieve.
Audience Member
It's more a tool. But there are some domains and some things that it will create, obviously.
Elon Musk
Right.
George Hotz
I promise you guys that this stuff is not true. There is no type of creativity that the humans have that is unique to them. You say the AI is just a synthesis of already existing ideas. That is all humans are.
Co-host
Right.
George Hotz
There is absolutely no difference. And you know what? Everyone who. Everyone who doesn't believe this is going to be in for a sad awakening.
Co-host
I think I'm almost entirely with you. My one piece of pushback is that AI has these levels of creativity. The thing it doesn't have is understanding. And I think that is where humans excel. What their ability to under.
George Hotz
What is understanding?
Co-host
When something's working, why is it working? That's something you can use AI to help it give you additional insight on. But the decision, like there will always be a level of decision making that comes down to a human and we will keep moving that higher and higher up and keep getting like to do cooler things as a result. But we're always moving layers. We're not necessarily removing humans.
George Hotz
This is.
Co-host
Okay, so this is.
George Hotz
This is the. This is a smarter take on it. I still think it's wrong, but I think it's less obvious that it's wrong.
Audience Member
I think that it's. That AI I don't think will create new paradigms of thought. You know, like AI will incrementally improve and synthesize a bunch of different things, but we're not going to get a whole new paradigm of green open field. Does that make sense?
George Hotz
Both of you are wrong. We've already passed this point.
Audience Member
OpenAI wrote that Dota bot a while back and it was inventing new strategies and metas in the game that like pro players, I've never seen. And then they were trying to play against the open AI bot to get better at it. We're like at the point where we're learning from AI. It's. It's like the humans wrong.
Elon Musk
Or does it not?
George Hotz
Yeah, there's definitely no paradigm type of creativity. Any of this. None of that's true. There is a question of the agency of AI Theo. Maybe that's what you were getting at. You're like, well, so the AI is always going to sit below humans. It's just going to be like, does it sit right below executives? Right. Like as you kind of move up in an org chart.
Co-host
Yes, to an extent. There's a level of like, which product should we Build next. And when different products have different responses from users, which should we double down on? Which engineers or which people don't necessarily make sense to keep. But AI can help guide us to the right decisions for a lot of these things.
George Hotz
But if you.
George Hotz
Okay, go ahead.
Co-host
My concern is the cost of certain, like AI making expensive decisions easier to make is different from AI making expensive decisions. And it will be a long time, if ever, where we should let AI regularly make the expensive decisions for us when we could instead use its insight. And if we disagree with the AI's decisions and make different ones and up as a result, there is a person who can hold accountable for that.
Audience Member
And I think that.
George Hotz
Did you see that on Twitter? The IBM memo from 1970. Computers can never make decisions because they can't be held accountable.
Co-host
Yes, and I do think that's a real problem outside of the dev world.
Elon Musk
I think one of the things AI
Audience Member
will never have is experience. Learned experience.
Elon Musk
Right.
Audience Member
I can read all I want about childbirth. I'm never going to fully understand that experience. And AI will lack that for basically every human experience.
Co-host
And I don't after he said that. That way I understand why you were so against my take.
Elon Musk
George.
George Hotz
Okay, we're, we're the, the, the, the people with takes on AI that really make no sense. I've just remember speakers. I mean like I look, I, I can. The problem with these things is you get at the bottom of what these people are generally saying and they eventually get to something like AI can't experience qualia and you can. The AI will never know the touch of human skin and this is just completely meaningless. There is no such thing as consciousness.
George Hotz
There's no such thing as qualia. Now to talk about the difference between tools and agents, that is a real thing. That is a real thing that has a real science.
George Hotz
The loss functions look different, right? So agents usually come when the loop is closed. And to come to your exact example about products, you're like, well, the AI is not going to choose the product, right? The AI is going to help the humans. The humans are going to look at how the product's performing. The humans are going to tweak the product, put the new one out, maybe with the help of the AI. Yeah, but why not just close the loop entirely?
George Hotz
And if your worry is because you're afraid, well, the computers can't be held accountable when it's terrible. I mean, maybe today where humans and AIs are on kind of similar ish playing fields, humans are actually still better. Sure. But someone's eventually not going to have that taboo and that company is going to crush you.
Audience Member
Hey, George, I have a question about modern security.
Audience Member
What do you think about the new iPhones and the new consoles? And they're much more difficult to hack compared to back in 2017 when there was the iPhone3GS, unlike the Xbox.
George Hotz
That was a long time before 2017.
Elon Musk
I mean, 2007.
George Hotz
So when you say it gotten harder to hack, you can quantify this. You can talk about how many dollars an exploit costs.
Audience Member
Right.
George Hotz
And the price of exploits has gone up a lot. Yeah, yeah.
Audience Member
And you have to be a near expert. Like, you can't be a teenager doing this, right?
George Hotz
Yeah. The best people are probably still teenagers or close to teenagers. They always are. It's just one of those things that selects for. I promise you, the best exploiter in the world today is probably like 24.
George Hotz
You know, it's just. I don't know who they are. I haven't kept up with the scene, but I bet you that's true. Because it's just like the way your mind works.
George Hotz
But, yeah, the cost has gone up a lot. But I don't know, that actually might not be because it's harder. It's harder to say. It's actually more difficult. Like, I'm not sure I could really do it anymore. But it's like, you know, then I watched the generation before me, I watched, like, Charlie Miller be like, oh, there's ASLR now. It's hard. And, you know, ASLR was never a thing for me. And now you have these, like, new kids who are like, yeah, of course.
George Hotz
It takes nine exploits and we have to break out of three sandboxes. No big deal, bro.
George Hotz
Yeah, yeah. No, I was just curious.
Audience Member
The other thing too is I. I was just reading that the, like, Gen Z is less technical, technically advanced than, like, millennials, if that makes sense.
George Hotz
The youth. The youth, man. The world is falling. The youth are.
Audience Member
What do you think?
George Hotz
Socrates said that. You think so less technically, the Greeks were complaining about how the youth were corrupt and couldn't do X and they didn't know the virtue. Whatever. Whatever this is. This is a meaningless thing.
Audience Member
Hey, George.
George Hotz
All right, cool.
Elon Musk
Hey, George, I just have a question that you have any unfinished dream ideas for Twitter or weren't they listened or anything that you still feel that is pending with Twitter?
George Hotz
No, look, I don't work at Twitter anymore. I don't know.
George Hotz
I think one of the main things it comes down to is Elon wants to build features. And I would do refactors But I did like that Elon said that. Even if it's not me, I do hope the Twitter employees get some good, quality food.
George Hotz
The food matters a lot to me. It's important to me. Come on, Jordan, you might need to
Audience Member
change your profile picture to I do not work at Twitter anymore. Don't ask me Twitter questions.
George Hotz
Yeah, we're gonna get a few people who ask me Twitter questions. I'll start coming up with good, snippy responses. Maybe I'll start spreading misinformation. I spreading misinformation.
George Hotz
All right, cool. Thank you, everyone, for being in my space. Check out Comma's Twitter tomorrow. We got a fire video dropping. It's going to be good.
Co-host
DM me so we can schedule that podcast.
George Hotz
All right, sounds good. I'll follow you.
Audience Member
DM me.
George Hotz
Yeah, Cool.