Lenny: Is there another example of you using this what-if approach either on a product you worked on or something you've seen and it working out? Sam Schillace: I'm doing a lot of it right now, honestly. I mean, that's probably the most immediate example. But I could almost point at any product and there's moments like that in there. But right now there's a lot of why-not stories, right, around generative AI. So it's expensive, it hallucinates, you can't necessarily... It's sarcastic, it's random, it doesn't do the same thing twice. Yeah, they're real, they're actual issues to solve, but I look at it and think, "Well, what if? What if we can build software around it? What if we can build more complicated programs than what we've been able to build? What if we actually have a reasoning engine that we can use to do meaningful things? What if this is really the second Industrial Revolution where, in the first one, we had a surplus of physical energy beyond just our bodies and things like water reels, and now we have a surplus of cognitive energy beyond just our brains, right?"
But right now there's a lot of why-not stories, right, around generative AI.