Jason Warner

Imbue CEO Kanjun Qiu and Poolside CEO Jason Warner presented a clear view. Generative AI will “consume everything in front of us,” in Qiu’s formulation, when it comes to software applications and enterprise computing in general.“Software is going to look radically different.”

Qiu and Warner made a compelling argument that AI would essentially replace software development as we know it, though it might take a little while. Qui gave an example of a simple email sorting program that her tools can’t create on their own quite yet, but will soon. Warner made a bravely specific prediction that the industry would shake out into 5-7 companies making general-purpose LLMs, while everyone else focussed on niches.

Qiu was firm in the view that general-purpose LLMs were not the right choice for everything, and that “we actually need quite a few specialized models that are able to do step-by-step reasoning.” Warner was almost messianic about the potential benefits of AI for humanity and dismissive of short-term obstacles and of VCs on Twitter: “We got to overthinking a lot of stuff and who the fuck cares what they say anyway?”

Qiu was sober about the challenge of making things that businesses actually need: the integrations and UI innovations and safety and security issues are a very long way from being solved. But she was similarly unconcerned about emerging monopolists: no, OpenAI won’t own everything, because enterprises have their own special needs.