Amjad Masad on Rethinking College for the AI Era

Amjad Masad (0:00)

Ultimately, the utility of young people is to question deeply held beliefs. It's to be heretics. You need to learn our way so you can get a job and be a perfect citizen, get married, have kids, and get a house and a car and live happily ever after. And in today's college, and actually the opposite, it kind of beats any outside thought out of them.

Gagan Biyani (0:24)

I just really want to see a world in which it's okay if you want to go on a side quest and go do something that's kind of oddball, but also might end up being super amazing if it works out.

Amjad Masad (0:33)

The future of companies is going to change. I'd want to go to a college that's not prescriptive about what I learn. I'm motivated by what skills can it give me in order to achieve what I want to build.

Gagan Biyani (0:46)

One of the core tenets of the academy sidesteps this problem entirely. We don't care if you graduate or not. We don't have grades, we don't have tests. The amount of weight to push against should be a lot less.

Erik Torenberg (1:01)

When you see an 18-year-old that is really inspiring to you, that you're like, I gotta spend time with this person, what are they doing that is capturing your interest? The real civilizational missing opportunity is, what if the most valuable thing young people bring to society is their willingness to question what everyone else takes for granted? Today, I sat down with Replit founder and CEO Amjad Masad and Horowitz and Andreessen Academy co-founder and CEO Gagan Biyani to rethink what education should look like in the AI era. We discuss why students need more freedom to follow their curiosity, learn by building and take intellectual side quests and why Amjad thinks some young founders may actually be starting companies too soon.

We also get into how AI could change the way companies themselves operate, why trust and judgment matter as much as technical skills and what Amjad looks for when he needs exceptional young builders.

Amjad Masad (1:57)

As we were talking, I remembered this sci-fi story that I read once called The City and the Stars. And it's about this future city that's governed by AGI. We sort of invented AGI. It now governs all of our lives. It solves all problems, all human problems. There's no wars. There's no disease. Everyone lives forever. And people spend their time working on, like, a thousand-year art project and doing all sorts of random things to fill up their time.

But they found this problem where they accumulate so much knowledge and memory, it becomes, like, harder to keep it all in their heads. So they invented this technology where they go into some kind of laboratory and they compress their memory. Sort of like context compression that we do with AI today. They go through all the memories and they compress them. And then they go through a boot camp to retrain them for their life. So they invented a new way to be born. But you're not fundamentally a new person. You're still the same person. You're just editing your memory.

But there's a glitch that happens in this system, in this machine. And there's a new person that is fundamentally born new. And he immediately starts causing problems.

In the boot camp, he starts doing weird things, new things, and everyone was like, whoa, that's crazy. You shouldn't be doing that. That's not how we do things. It becomes very disruptive. And then when they go out into this city, he starts asking questions like, what's out there? What's in the stars? What's outside of city borders? They're like, we don't talk about outside our city borders.

Gagan Biyani (3:38)

Sounds silo a little bit.

Amjad Masad (3:40)

Probably dangerous out there. Yeah. A little bit like silo, a little bit like fallout. Yeah, and I don't want to get into the spoilers too much, but eventually that's what he has so much drive to change things and go discover the stars. That's why it's called the city and the stars. He, in the story unfolds in that way, and he finds all sorts of interesting things out there.

And I'm reminded of this because as we're talking about, what is college and what is it for? And I think a related question is, what is the utility of young people in society?

And I think ultimately, the utility of young people is to question deeply held beliefs, is to be heretics. And in today's college, actually the opposite, it kind of beats any outside thought out of them, right? It tells you you're stupid, we figured everything out, you need to learn our way, and we need to prepare you for the outside world so you can get a job and be a perfect citizen and go get married, have kids, and get a house and a car of happily ever after. But that war doesn't exist anymore. You can do really well in college and you can still be unemployed with a huge debt. But not only that, I think the real civilizational missing opportunity is that person in the city of the stars. It took a glitch to get someone with a clear mind to be able to question deeply held beliefs. And every one of us, we probably have a blind spots in society. We have a lot of blind spots in Silicon Valley. There's a lot of ideas that don't come out of Silicon Valley. Because there's a monoculture here. There's a certain way of thinking. Every culture is somehow a monoculture, even the most radical cultures like Silicon Valley.