Interview with Zack Kass: The Next Renaissance

I don't really care if there's a bubble. I don't care. And I'll tell you why I don't care. I don't care because I've studied history long enough to know that bubbles pop. And sometimes it's healthy. Like, sometimes market corrections are actually quite good.

That was Zach Kass, author of the Next Renaissance, AI and the Expansion of Human Potential. I'm Motley fool producer Matt Grier now. Zach Kass is a global AI advisor and the former head of Go to market at OpenAI. He was at OpenAI when the company launched ChatGPT back in 2022. Motley fool contributors Rachel Warren and Rich Lumello recently talked to Cass about the future of AI and about his new book, the Next Renaissance.

You started your career in AI almost 15 years ago. As you say in the book, and OpenAI is head of Go to Market, you helped grow from $1 million to over 2 billion in annual revenue. But you say that nothing really prepared you for November 30, 2022, the day that ChatGPT was released. So I'd love if you would tell us about your background, your journey, what led you to here, and then walk us through that experience, that moment in time when the world was introduced to ChatGPT.

Sure.

Well, I'm not sure that anything would have prepared me for that date. So even as you framed the question, I was thinking, like, what would have prepared me to. I went to Berkeley for college. I studied history and computer science. I graduated and got a job at a machine learning company. And the focus was on at the time building data sets. It was a company called Figure 8, building data sets for the purposes of machine training. Of course, now this has become exceptionally normalized and quite lucrative. Companies like Mercore and Labelbox and Surge, et cetera. And we were principally selling data at the time to companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon, who could afford these large statistical machine learning models. And they were mostly just doing product recommendations. And I stayed there long enough to graduate to a company doing large language models for the purposes of machine translation. That company was called Lilt. And I stayed there long enough to graduate to OpenAI. And so I joked that I just at a time where everyone was making money hand over fist in things like cloud storage or E commerce or sales optimization software, I just stuck around in AI long enough for it to pay off. And at OpenAI for a long time, if you emailed sales or support at, you arrived at my inbox. And that started to change as we started to build API products, it became more popular, of course, GPT3.5. Most people don't remember, but it was state of the art and really impressive in many ways. And then of course, ChatGPT, November 30, 2022. And what was particularly impressive about that is that I had felt like OpenAI should have arrived much sooner. My case to anyone who would listen was that GPT 3.5 was a commercially viable or economically vi reliable model that people should have been adopting much faster and weren't. And it was publicly available in the API since June 2022. So you had the stretch of about five months, four months where people could have built ChatGPT and didn't. And ChatGPT was, as I remind people, not a research breakthrough, it was an application breakthrough. And it serves, for me, this is incredible reminder that the application layer matters so much. You have to build things that people can simply use, otherwise you cannot change consumer or even enterprise behavior in a material way. And that moment is indelible in certainly a lot of technological history, but also my personal history, because a lot of us went home that night not sort of thinking anything of it. I mean, the purpose of it really was to create an experience so that a CEO could come to the website, use the product, and then tell their CTO that they should build something with the API. And then of course, what happened was hundreds of thousands and millions of downloads and then billions of downloads later, and it was amazing. And it sort of thrust OpenAI into into the forefront. It materially changed how people understood AI would work. But it wasn't a scientific breakthrough. It simply put everything in a context that made sense.

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Well, I'll ask you, Rich, where do you think humans are in the human experience? Are you a baseball fan?

Yeah. Third inning.

It's funny, people either pick second inning or eighth inning. I've heard some people do nine. Third is great. I like third a lot. Yeah. Let's say we've been around a couple hundred thousand years and we'll be around for a few million years. Seems reasonable. I ask this, by the way, because I ask it of everyone. Because when someone's like, where are we in AI? I'm like, well, where do you we are in the human experience? Because that sort of answers the question like, I can't convince someone that humans are going to be around for millions of years. And then maybe the next question is, well, is there a bubble? Like, where do we sit in the investment? I don't want to put words in your mouth, but where do we sit in the investment timeline and how much of this needs to shake out? And I have sort of three answers to that, by the way. I don't know if you were going to ask that, but maybe I answer it.

I'd love to hear your take.

Yeah.

Okay. Well, I have three answers and all three of them are hot. One of them has a negative connotation, one of them has a positive connotation, and one of them is neutral. I'll start with the negative one. People hate this take, by the way. But. But it's true. This is how I feel. I don't really care if there's a bubble. I don't care. And I'll tell you why I don't care. I don't care because I've studied history long enough to know that bubbles pop. And sometimes it's healthy. Like sometimes market corrections are actually quite good. You hate being a part of it. But like a lot of people are beneficiaries on the back end of it. As long as things sort themselves out and short term pain can lead to long term growth and progress. I'M not, by the way, sure that there is a bubble. I just don't spend a lot of time talking about it. And by my calculation, the people who really need to worry about it are like hedge fund managers and individuals who are so uniquely exposed to AI. By the way, I am one of them. Like, let's be clear, it's not like I want my net worth to take a material hit. It's that I know that this takes a long time to play out. Now my other hot take is that even if there is a bubble, what we are building right now, the AI infrastructure is super valuable and in particular the energy infrastructure. I think that the forcing function here around the AI sprint, the broad AI infrastructure, sprint is a net positive for everyone because it will spool up not 40% more energy, but a thousand percent more energy. And 1,000% more energy is only tenable if you have step functional breakthroughs in energy. So you either need for example, geothermal, which of which there's like 100 gigawatts in outside Yuma. You need a solar field the size of Texas, or fusion and small modular reactors. And that forcing function is going to drive us into a new energy paradigm. And what I always say to people is unmetered intelligence is very cool. Do you know what's cooler? Unmetered energy. Like, if nothing else, if AI drives us to a place where we can build desalinization and vertical farms so that everyone, everyone on Earth, thanks to energy advancements, can have clean drinking water and fresh produce, we will have done an enormous amount. There are second order consequences, much like the railroads to this stuff.

You've talked a lot today about unmetered intelligence. The different phases of the integration of AI is kind of this ubiquitous presence in our daily life. And a lot of that goes back to what you talk about a lot in your book, the AI Renaissance, which obviously has implications for consumers, of course, for us as investors. What do you view as being the most kind of vital conditions to usher in the AI renaissance? And what does that look like in practice?

First of all, it's funny, we basically debated naming the book Unmetered Intelligence, which I think would have been better sticky ip, but it is much less approachable. And so like if I wrote another book tomorrow, I'd write Unmetered Intelligence and I would sort of expand on the ideas in the first one. The point of the next renaissance is actually I wrote it for my mom. I wrote the book for everyone on Earth. Right now. The educated layperson who is desperately trying to make sense of this moment and for whom there are very few tools. My mom's a well educated woman who just doesn't know a whole lot about AI. And there are a lot of these people. And sort of what I lay out in it are some complex ideas, one of which is unmetered intelligence. The theory that intelligence is in fact just a resource. And like water and foodstuffs and electricity and the Internet before it, it will go from very scarce to very abundant. It's very hard to compete on a basis of electricity anymore. Right, like owning the utility matters. But like, you can't actually go out and raise money to say, I have access to more electricity unless you are literally building the power plant. And my argument here is sort of the same, which is that intelligence will go the way of these resources and that when we commoditize and utilitize things, good things happen. My net bet is that the world gets a lot better because we are making the cost of this critical resource so cheap. And if you argue, and I do that we measure the human experience on basically human progress on two axes. How free are we to pursue our own version of joy and how inexpensive is it to do so? Right. On one axis, you need governments to protect freedoms and personal liberties, and on the other, you need private market to drive the cost of goods and services down through technological innovation and utilization. And the path that AI is on is basically the best evidence that I can make that we're commoditizing, utilitizing a critical resource. And what happens when we arrive at unmetered intelligence? That's up to us. And I mean us sort of collectively. Cities, states, governments, or countries and communities, and a bunch of upside and a bunch of downside, and we sort of lay all that out in the book.

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You know, AI is really rapidly commoditizing many of our skills and knowledge. And I think one of the questions that comes up a lot, again as consumers and as investors, is what does the AI renaissance mean for the future of work? How does it empower humans rather than replace them? What does that look like in the next five, 10, 15 years, in your view?

So I think the way we describe the next renaissance in the book from a work standpoint, well, first we explain it from a work standpoint. So we say, look, here are some things that are going to happen as it relates to the future of work. And we spell out the jobs that are more likely to automate on a technical basis, and we spell out the jobs that are more likely to augment on a technical basis. And then I call out something that I think is very important for everyone to acknowledge, which is that asking the question, what jobs are going to automate first? Actually requires considering what unions are weakest like. Most jobs are not going to fully automate because most jobs are going to have exceptional political protection. And when you make the argument, oh, will the software engineer automate first? The reason that it' decent argument is not that Claude code is getting super good. It is. But the reason it's a decent argument is because software engineers have no political protection. They never organize, they have no union, and not a single congressperson, except for one or two in Seattle and San Francisco, are going to pass a bill to say, we have to protect these people who make $700,000 a year. And so if you actually play out, wow, why would this group automate? It's because the politicians aren't coming to save them. And we see this all the time. I mean, one of the things I talk about in the book is that the reason that dockworkers are not automated right now is political protection. They went on strike, they said, you cannot automate the ports. And we said, okay, you have four years, we'll keep it the same. And that brings me to the ultimate point that I will make. And then we'll conclude on this, people are making job automation an economic issue. And I think it's totally missing the point. Every time someone says, we're going to automate work and that creates economic pain, we talk about the unemployment rate, et cetera, I think we are actually missing the red herring. And so Much of what I make in the book, which is, and this will sound callous to some people, certainly those who have lost their jobs, but I have to say it anyway, from an academic standpoint, the longshoremen who went on strike declaring that automation harms families and robots don't pay taxes, that's what their picket signs read, were all able to acknowledge when I interviewed them that the world would be cheaper if we automated shipping. And what we all forget, as we have these debates about our job displacement, is that we are all descendants of people whose jobs were automated to our economic benefit, and we never pay them a second thought. We don't think about what they went through in order for us to arrive at this moment. Moreover, we actually wander the earth basically all day asking, when is this good or service going to be better, faster, or cheaper? Without realizing what we're asking is, when is a human going to be extricated from the manufacturing of this good or service? And we don't ask that question because we're jerks. We ask that question because we are rational economic actors conditioned to believe that everything should get better, faster, cheaper, all the time, thanks to technology. And my argument is that automation is actually going to be one of the great boons of, like, a massive wave of job automation is going to be an economic boon that we can't even imagine. And the problem is not going to be that there is not more and better food on the table. The problem is going to be that people can't clearly say, this is who I am. That actually what we're facing is not a job displacement crisis. It's an identity displacement crisis that at least a generation, and maybe two will have to extricate the purpose and identity from work, which has been ingrained in us for thousands of years to such an extent that the two most common last names in the United States are Miller and Smith, because we used to name ourselves after our professions. And I remind people of this not to sound like a jerk when they say, well, whose job is going to automate? Because I don't want to say, well, yours, thankfully. But everyone, it turns out, is wandering around right now wondering when everyone else's job is going to automate, just not theirs, because they know that the world would actually be a whole lot better if taxes were easier to do. So the accountants got automated if we could figure out radiology scans so we didn't have to see a radiologist, so the radiologist could be automated if we could figure out how to stand buildings up in minutes instead of years. So we automate the construction workers. We can all observe that that world is better economically. The problem is the automation boundary. What is the limit of it? And I don't know. But my point in all this is talking about automation like it is. This, like, pejorative is actually the issue, because the issue, hand is purpose. The issue at hand is clearly identity. And I will add one more thing and then I'll go, we can wrap this. When I wrote the book, I wrote it in homage to John Maynard Keynes, who wrote a paper in 1930 that I have read more than any other academic paper in my life. I've read it hundreds of times. I've memorized it verbatim. I could. I could recite it to you now. And he wrote this paper against the backdrop of global despair and suffering. He wrote it at a time when people were literally dying of starvation in the street. And he was traveling Europe giving this lecture series, and he came back to the States and he wrote, and I quote, I must now disembarrass myself to take wings into the future to imagine a world that I will certainly not live to see, one in which humans will have solved the economic problem and be faced with something more profound. The father of modern macroeconomics was arguing that on the horizon was a spiritual battle. And I totally agree. I look around the world and I'm like, the problem is not going to be, are we fed? The problem is not going to be, can I eat something? Can I, Can I do this thing? Can I buy this thing? The problem is going to be, am I spiritually satiated? Am I happy? And we are already seeing the effects of the device addiction on a standard of living that is going up all the time. The developed world is getting less happy. So what I tell people when they say, what's the future of work look like? I'm like, look, one, there's probably plenty of it, and two, if there isn't, good, seriously, like, something profound will happen on the other side and we might discover what it means to be human. But either you believe that everything is going to automate and we're going to have way more food and stuff, or you don't, and we're just going to continue to trudge along in our current sort of state. And I argue that something has to give. I think humans are meant for much more, and I'm not sure exactly what it is, but I do know that everyone is happiest when they are in physical community with friends and family, ideally outside. And I'm like, man. Could technology, this technology in particular, finally give us the opportunity to do that, to actually congregate the way that our hunter gatherer ancestors did in a way that, you know, Harari argues they might have been the happiest humans to ever exist because they had community and purpose sort of throughout their life. What if we are actually about to return to that?

Zach, I think you've given our audience and us as investors so much to think about. I think I speak for Rich and myself that we wish we could speak to you for two or three hours. Such a wealth of knowledge on this topic. But thank you so much for joining us today. To our full audience, check out Zach's upcoming book, the Next Renaissance Expansion of Human thanks so much, Zach.

Thank you as always. People in the program may have interest in the stocks they talk about, and the Motley fool may have formal recommendations for or against. So don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. All personal finance content follows Motley fool editorial standards and is not approved by advertisers. Advertisements are sponsored content and provided for informational purposes only. To see our full advertising disclosure, please check out our show notes. For the Motley fool money team, I'm Matt Greer. Thanks for listening and we will see you tomorrow.