GDP is fake, electricity is real | George Hotz

**Amanda Cassatt** (0:00)
I'm Amanda Cassatt, and you're watching Endgame. They believe that a stock will go down, and the market thinks it'll go up, and so you short that stock. And it's a finite game that you're playing there. It's a zero-sum game, but you're not manipulating anyone by doing that.

**George Hotz** (0:17)
It's not a fair game. Let's look at things like DraftKings and FanDuel. It's the same basic idea. DraftKings and FanDuel are not sportsbooks. It's a lot of polymarket. Polymarket is market and they take a vink. It's the old market on bookie takes a vink. This is not what I have a problem with. What I have a problem with is when the whole marketplace is structurally set up such that the players lose. And when you look at FanDuel and DraftKings, again, it's not a sportsbook. Nobody can take the other side. They're using powerful algorithms to price that bet perfectly to manipulate you.
They're using technology. They're using predictive models to target you psychologically to extract value from you. All I'm saying is that if you are using technology to manipulate other people, you should be ashamed of yourself.

**Amanda Cassatt** (1:10)
What AI tools are you using? Are they actually making you more productive or addicting you to a dopamine move that stimulates productivity?

**George Hotz** (1:19)
Same ones everyone else is using and probably. I mean, the problem with giving specific tool names is people are going to go download those tools and, oh, look, I'm using the same tool George is. I'm using the same ones everyone else is. I think that there's not much of a difference between most of them. And yeah, I think it's more important than ever to guard against fake productivity in the same way that you can watch these YouTube videos that teach you something, but they don't really teach you something. They simulate the feeling of teaching.
So maybe AI is simulating the feeling of programming.

**Amanda Cassatt** (1:52)
I think a lot of people are getting quote-unquote agent psychosis and spending a lot of time with these tools, but we haven't seen, and correct me if I'm wrong, any extraordinary outputs. It's not like suddenly we have a piece of software that fixes an age-old problem that we didn't have before because people have been so productive. I struggle to even name one new app I use now that agentic coding is available. What of that?

**George Hotz** (2:19)
Yeah, I definitely don't think that these things are some massive intrusion to productivity. They're not 5X, they're not 10X. They are marginally between minus 30 percent and plus 50 percent. So you wouldn't expect to see things radically change. I think that what you see with AI is, sure, I think the tools were unusable two years ago. I think that now I've started to use them for some of my workflow, and I think that I will use them increasingly for more and more.

**Amanda Cassatt** (2:49)
Are you done coding by hand?

**SPEAKER_3** (2:52)
I'm not sure what that means.

**George Hotz** (2:53)
You're done with writing by hand when you have a typewriter?

**Amanda Cassatt** (2:55)
Are you a manager of agents as opposed to a direct coder at this point?

**George Hotz** (3:01)
I'm not sure what the difference is. Or when you say a direct coder, are you coding in machine code? No, you're coding in some high-level language, you then pass to a piece of software. It is just to be called a compiler. It's the same thing. So no, no one's a direct coder. Maybe when you were putting the machine code on punch cards, that was the closest you got. No one's been a direct coder for four years.

**Amanda Cassatt** (3:23)
I think the difference in what's happening now is that people that used to write in code are now writing in more English language, and they're having the machines generate a lot of the code. I think that's what the average person would mean. That very recently, they changed their behavior when they're coding due to the presence of AI agents. Have you not changed your behavior recently?

**George Hotz** (3:49)
Again, I don't really see the distinction, right? You had auto-complete and editors for a long time. You've had... What about using something like templates?

**Amanda Cassatt** (3:59)
Sure, but I think there's been something radical that's happened in the last few months. That does not feel like a continuous line from templates or auto-complete. We see people spending huge amounts of time with these agents. We see people managing armies of these agents. I think it feels kind of in the moment to characterize what happened as some kind of gradual evolution, rather than something fairly radical that happened just before Christmas that's captured a lot of people's attention and arguably permanently changed how people code.