Marc Andreessen says software is the modern philosopher's stone because it turns individual work into lasting capital. A few people, sometimes just one coder, built the most creative software. AI will create super coders with massive productivity, and software assets appreciate over decades while reaching global markets.
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And by the way, let me give a shout out to Brendan Eich. So he wrote JavaScript over a summer and I think it is fair to say now that it's the most widely used language in the world. I'll give you another one, ssl. That was a guy named Kip Hickman who wrote that over a summer. One guy. The transformer at Google was a small handful of people. And then the number of people who did like the core work on GPT, it's not that many people. And so yeah, the pattern in software repeatedly over a very long time has been for the really creative work, I think it's two people, three people. AI ought to make the individual coder obviously far more productive by like a thousand x or something. We ought to have a world now of super coders who are building things as open source with one or two people that were inconceivable five years ago. The level of hyper productivity we're going to get out of our best and brightest I think is going to go way up. The philosopher's stone in alchemy transmutes lead into gold. And Newton spent 20 years trying to find the philosopher's stone. Never got there. Nobody's ever figured it out. Software is our modern philosopher's stone. And in economic terms it transmutes labor into capital, which is a super interesting thing. And by the way, Karl Marx is rolling over in his grave right now because of course that's complete refutation of his entire theory. Transpus, labor and capital, which is, which is as follows, is somebody sits down at a keyboard and types a bunch of stuff in and a capital asset comes out the other side and then somebody buys that capital asset for a billion dollars. Like that's amazing, right? It's literally creating value out of purely human thought, right? There are many things that make software magical and special, but that's the economics. I wonder what Marx would have thought about that. Oh, he would have completely broke his brain. That kind of technology is inconceivable when he was alive. It's all industrial era stuff. And so any kind of machine necessarily involves huge amounts of capital. And then labor was on the receiving end of the abuse. But a software engineer is somebody who basically transmutes his own labor into an actual capital asset, creates permanent value. Minecraft, Mathematica, Facebook, Google. You have the software assets that have been around for 30 years that are gaining in value every year, right? World of Warcraft salesforce.com Every single year they're being polished and polished and polished and polished. They're getting better and better. More powerful. More powerful, More valuable. More valuable. So we've entered this era where you can actually have these things that actually build out over decades. And this is why there is always, you know, sort of a constant investment frenzy around software, is because, you know, look, when you start one of these things, it doesn't always succeed, but when it does, now you might be building an asset that builds value for, you know, four or five, six decades to come. And then the fact that, of course, everybody's online, you know, there's 5 billion people that are a click away from any new piece of software. So the potential market size for any of these things is, you know, nearly infinite.
