Reinventing the Developer Terminal with Warp Co-Founder and CEO Zach Lloyd

**Elad Gil** (0:05)
Today at No Priors, I'm joined by Zach Lloyd, the co-founder and CEO of Warp, a terminal product and AI tool for developers that allows you to do different sorts of coding applications. Prior to Warp, Zach was at Google, and he also started another company called Selfmade. We talk about AI dev tooling, but we also end up talking about human consciousness and how can you tell if an AI is actually sentient. Zach, welcome to No Priors.

**Zach Lloyd** (0:30)
I'm excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

**Elad Gil** (0:32)
So you have a master's degree in the philosophy of science.

**Zach Lloyd** (0:34)
Yeah.

**Elad Gil** (0:34)
And if you're going to take a very different lens and abstract out of the coding world and all the things that we tend to think about every day. Yeah. How do you think about this societally in terms of big wave of AI that's hitting us right now? And where do you think some of these really big societal impacts will be?

**Zach Lloyd** (0:49)
The way I think about the advances are it's kind of like we are distilling intelligence. And so there are, I think, people who consider what's happening. It's like they're like, are we recreating people in some way? Are we recreating consciousness? But it's not that. It's actually, what's fascinating to me is how much intelligence you can get out of just like next token prediction.

**Elad Gil** (1:14)
Yeah.

**Zach Lloyd** (1:15)
And like, what does that say about the way that our minds work? Something I'm always thinking about is like, is this how our brains are working? Are we doing next token prediction? And I don't think so. Like, I think that there's gonna be some further AI unlock.

**Elad Gil** (1:32)
There's actually a book about this that I think is real interesting called Blind Sight. It's like the sci-fi book where they separate consciousness from intelligence.

**Zach Lloyd** (1:39)
Yeah.

**Elad Gil** (1:39)
And basically, humanity meets a space-faring civilization, or civilization is overstating it, a space-faring intelligent being that's not conscious.

**Zach Lloyd** (1:49)
Yep.

**Elad Gil** (1:50)
And what are the implications of that? And how do you think about that? And how do you communicate with that? Are you basically saying that that's kind of your view of AI right now?

**Zach Lloyd** (1:55)
I think that's what it is at the moment. It's like we've distilled intelligence or something that like, from like an instrumentalist or like functional perspective, is able to do things that we recognize as intelligence, but it's totally mechanistic. I don't think anyone who's looking at this thinks that there's any aspect of consciousness to it. I think that's like a very confusing thing for people.

**Elad Gil** (2:19)
Yeah. Because the classical test for this was known as the Turing test, right? Totally. And so the idea there is, if you can't tell the difference between interacting with a computer and a person, then that computer effectively has met the intelligence bar of a person.

**Zach Lloyd** (2:33)
Yeah.

**Elad Gil** (2:33)
But in our actions with this type of AI, we're having very, in some cases, it feels like very deep conversations. We're asking about relationships. We're asking about all sorts of aspects of our own lives. And it's giving very cogent answers.

**Zach Lloyd** (2:44)
Totally.

**Elad Gil** (2:45)
They make a lot of sense.

**Zach Lloyd** (2:45)
Yeah.

**Elad Gil** (2:46)
And so there's this interesting separation of, again, consciousness and intelligence.

**Zach Lloyd** (2:51)
Right.

**Elad Gil** (2:52)
Is that how you interpret it?

**Zach Lloyd** (2:53)
That is how I interpret it. And the Turing test has passed. What's crazy to me is we just passed it and no one seemed to care.

**Elad Gil** (3:00)
So what do you think is the next test or what is the right test? Like how do we actually test for consciousness? For consciousness?

**Zach Lloyd** (3:09)
I don't have a good... I mean, that's a super deep philosophical question that I don't have a really good answer for.

**Elad Gil** (3:13)
I mean, it should be mechanistic, right? The Turing test was very mechanistic. Yeah. And I mean, there's other tests we had before, but we would consider super intelligence, right? Can it beat us at chess? Then it will be super smart. Yeah. Can it beat us at Go? Can it beat us at different things? Video games, you know, we keep coming up with new tests that these things pass. And then we keep saying, well, it's not conscious.

**Zach Lloyd** (3:32)
What would you want to see from something which is like running a computer program to make you believe that it had consciousness? Are you looking for certain behavioral characteristics?