Watch on X: https://x.com/OpenAgents/status/2046426222758973467

Worse is Better article: https://dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html

The people have spoken! They want HONEST propaganda with no big lab puppet strings, no “new media” astroturfing, no fatcat VCs talking their book.

OAPN #7 is our first episode recorded in the new OpenAgents headquarters in downtown Austin.

We first discuss the two competing design philosophies of software: the New Jersey school vs the MIT/Stanford school and how they map to the landscape of AI labs today.

Software of the New Jersey school, pioneered by Bell Labs, has conquered the world. C and Unix started simply and became ubiquitous-- a path we now follow with OpenAgents.

"We really draw lessons from this 'Worse is Better' article. How can you build a thing that catches on? In the case of OpenAgents, what are we not doing? We're not spending 12 months raising money and hiring people and putting them in a room where you never hear from for a year because they're building some secret superintelligence behind closed doors that at some point will be released on the world. Every other lab is doing some version of that, or did versions of that like OpenAI way back in the day.

"We're not doing that. We're starting with: what is the thing that's going to grow? How do we start optimizing for virality? I know! Car, you've got some compute there. Can I pay you bitcoin for it?"

"Sure."

"How much do you want?"

"I don't know."

"Exactly. You don't know because no one else is buying it. We’re the only buyer. So that graph of the 20 gigawatts of consumer compute relative to the 2 gigawatts of OpenAI’s compute... there’s no buyers for that 20 gigawatts. The price of it is zero. We are putting a price on it. So we have this essentially limitless pool of compute accessible to us if we can sustainably purchase it from you.

"Now, us giving you bitcoin for a thing... of course you’re happy to sell it to us. The big question, and what we’ve spent a lot of our time in is: can we produce something that’s economically valuable that is better than the cost of essentially nothing? Can we do anything at all that’s valuable?

"Because if we do, we’ve got a flywheel that’s going to begin. And it’s not going to be perfect. It’s not going to have all the tens of billions of dollars of budget of the big products. But if we’ve got a simple basic interface that you’re happy to click around and earn some bitcoin and then be productive with, we’ve got the makings of something truly great."