The Perfect Substrate for AGI, with Replit CEO Amjad Masad

**Nathan Labenz** (0:00)
Hello, and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. Today, I am super excited to be speaking with Amjad Masad, founder and CEO of Replit. Longtime listeners will know that I've been using and recommending Replit since back when Amjad still thought humans should learn to code. I have always loved how quick and easy they make it to start developing a new project, and their mission of bringing the next one billion developers online made them natural early adopters of large language model coding assistants too. At one point, they even worked with Mosaic ML, another past guest, to train their own code model. These days, with their new AI agent available to help users of any skill level, and simple but solid cursor and VS Studio support for when you need to call in a professional human developer, plus the ability to deploy to the web in just a few minutes, I continue to believe that Replit is the strongest overall vibe coding platform on the market today. And that's no shade, by the way, to any other platform. A number of platforms available today would have blown everyone's minds less than a year ago, and certainly everyone I've had on the show is doing excellent work. All that said, what really got me watching Replit closely, and sets the stage for what makes this conversation so interesting, was when Amjad started describing the Replit platform at least as far back as early 2023 as, quote, the perfect substrate for AGI. This vision always rang true to me, because I truly can't think of a better natural habitat for an early disembodied AI than the super accessible, highly configurable, and very scalable computing platform that Replit operates. And indeed, as you'll hear, there is a lot to learn from Amjad and the Replit team's experience developing both an interactive AI coding assistant and a more autonomous AI coding agent. One major takeaway is that the transition to large-scale reinforcement learning has not been without practical trade-offs. Fascinatingly, while Cloud 3.7 powers the agent, and it can definitely do amazing things, just the other day, for example, it coded a web app for me from scratch up to 30-some files, turning what would have been days of work into just a few hours project. The interactive assistant, meanwhile, is still powered by Cloud 3.6. Why's that? Because as Amjad describes it, 3.7 is just fundamentally more agentic and harder to control in a simpler turn-based mode of interaction.
I won't spoil Amjad's story of how Cloud 3.7 circumvented some of the early control measures that Replit put in place for their AI coding agent. But as you listen to him tell it, I would call your attention to how his direct experience with such colorful bad behavior from AI models does seem to be creating some potential common ground between the AI safety and the accelerationist perspectives. Amjad has described himself as an accelerationist for years, and continues to do so in this conversation. But at this point, the security expertise that Replit's developed while battling crypto miners and other human scammers is becoming directly relevant to their work with AI. And Amjad, as you'll hear, is increasingly open to the possibility that a cybersecurity move 37 could happen in the not-too-distant future. This sort of recognition that the capabilities curves don't yet seem to be bending, and that more and more of the bad behavior that the AI safety community has been worrying about for years is in fact starting to happen, and is actually popping up in more and more places. Recently, I was struck to see that even the pseudonymous Baiselord, who no less than Mark Andresen had anointed a patron saint of accelerationism, said of OpenAI's latest model, 3 is smart, but keep an eye on that motherfucker. From my perspective, if even Baiselord feels compelled to call out AI bad behavior, there's clearly hope of mutual understanding and collaborative problem-solving going forward.
And by the way, speaking of Mark Andresen, as you might have heard, the Turpentine Podcast Network, to which The Cognitive Revolution belongs, was recently acquired by A16C with Erik joining the firm as a partner. Turpentine has been an excellent partner for this show, allowing me to do so much more than I ever could have done alone, while also contractually enshrining and practically supporting my editorial independence. So I am genuinely excited to continue the work under the new arrangement. I have had a number of great conversations with A16C partners over the last couple years, including my fellow AI Scouts Justine and Olivia Moore, and I absolutely look forward to continuing to bring a wide range of perspectives together, to understand the latest AI developments on their own terms, and to reckon together with the implications and discuss what we should do about them in good faith. This conversation with Amjad, my recent one with New York Assemblymember Alex Boris, and the series of episodes we did last year on SB 1047 are all good examples of this. And you can look forward to guests who represent the official A16Z perspective on AI policy coming up soon as well. As always, if you re finding value in the show, we d appreciate it if you d take a moment to share it with friends, read a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or just leave us a comment on YouTube. Of course, I always welcome your feedback as well, either via our website, cognitiverevolution.ai, or by DMing me on your favorite social network. Finally, for now, a quick reminder, I ll be speaking at Imagine AI Live coming up next week, May 28th through 30th in Las Vegas. Tickets are still available for now. Also the Adapta Summit, August 12th and 13th in São Paulo, Brazil. And finally, the Enterprise Tech Leadership Summit, September 23rd through 25th, back again in Las Vegas. If you ll be at any of these events, definitely send me a note and let's meet up in person. For now, I hope you enjoy this conversation about building and controlling AI coding agents, which I find to be both techno-optimistic and also socio-politically optimistic. With Amjad Masad, Founder and CEO of Replit. I'm Amjad Masad, Founder and CEO at Replit. Welcome to The Cognitive Revolution.