Consumer Side of AI Currently Underweighted, Says Mark Pincus

Right. Sure, yes. Like the last day of the dot-com IPO window.

On the one hand, I'm not sure how much the timing matters other than if it changes their access to capital. I don't think they can afford to get significantly behind in the capital and build-out race. But it's not clear that you have to necessarily go public these days. And if you look at the sizes of investments, I think OpenAI is just an amazing generational company. And I think people who count them out and say this is all Anthropic are shortsighted. I think OpenAI has to catch up on the coding side. They think we'll see that happen with Codex. And they have a clear advantage on the consumer side, which I think is currently being underweighted. I think people wrongly think this is all just about coding and enterprise, and that is where the action is right now. That's where the most revenue growth is right now. But there's no question in my mind that the consumer side of AI will be just as big, if not bigger. So Citi put out a report calling it a $6 trillion market. And I thought it was interesting that they capped consumer at $500 billion out of $6 trillion. That doesn't make sense to me. $2 trillion just for the engineering and coding side? No, that doesn't make any sense to me. That's not the way we've seen the internet play out.

It's not a way to communicate online yet, because it's still oddly a single-player experience, right? We're not in the GPT chats together. But if you break your question down, first, how will it impact our jobs and the job market? I think we're very, very quickly transitioning from a knowledge worker economy to something else. We don't have a name for it, but it's going to be a prompt worker. It's going to be about being generative. Whatever our job is, it's going to change very quickly. It's probably changed a lot for you guys, right? The amount of leverage we get—it's moving from a value on knowledge to a value on questions and curiosity. But you also have to have knowledge to ask a smart question, for sure.

You guys both impressively read my book and you have great questions. And I think if you'd relied on AI—and I'll say even writing the book, I had this love-hate relationship with AI. At first it's magical, and you're like, 'Oh my God, it can take this long talk I just gave and condense it,' or our editing is so painful, wordsmithing. And then you start reading it and it starts to get homogenized, it starts to feel soulless, and it's like, where did my voice go? And I even tried a style guide, like, 'I want you to sound like my voice.' And eventually I was like, I don't want to change my words unless you absolutely have to. And then eventually I said, you know what? It's really helpful for some things. It's part of a process to take a long talk and condense it, to make it more organized. But I started to really kind of, like a vinyl record, appreciate the imperfections of how I talk and say, you know what? That's my voice. And that's how you know it is me.

It's such a good question. It's definitely not something I signed up for in my Book of Life. However, intellectual honesty is important to me, and being willing to take an unpopular stand. And I feel like if I can't do that, if I'm so scared because of groupthink and the consequences of taking a very unpopular position in a lot of my communities, then who can? And it was actually my daughter Georgia. I didn't decide until the Sunday before the election that I was going to vote for Trump. I decided I was definitely not going to vote for Kamala. I had lost faith in the Democrats and the mainstream media establishment, that whole process. But I was also being very transparent publicly on Twitter. I wrote a post in The Free Press saying—not that I support Trump—but that Biden at that time, in late July of '24, felt even riskier than Trump. And that alone started a shitstorm. So it's too late to take it back. But Georgia came to me on a Sunday before the election. She said, 'Dad, you know you're going to vote for Trump at this point.' And I said, 'Yeah, I think you're probably right.' She said, 'Then you have to tweet that, because you've been so open and transparent.' And I said, 'Yeah, you're right.' So then I wrote a whole post. I think the most viral post I've ever put up, because it was oddly a touchstone for a lot of people. I was kind of like this big Democratic donor breaking ranks, and it's part of being rank-and-file Silicon Valley founders. And so it was, I think, a little scary to some of the establishment to see this crumbling. I put the post out and my reasons out, and it was on the front page of the New York Post the next day. I didn't think it would be news. And it really was much louder than I anticipated. And I was like, you know what, if I'm going to do it, I'm not going to hide. It's silly that we should have to hide our political views because we're tagged with an identity. And I'll just say this: I'm not on any team. I said that throughout. I'm not on Team Democrats. I'm not on Team MAGA. It sounds cheesy, but I'm Team America. I'm Team my family and community. And in this environment where we just saw three pretty extreme left democratic socialists win in New York, I don't know that any of us can really say we're identified with one party, because who the party is has really shifted. I'm a Chicago liberal. I've always been that. I'm socially liberal—I want people to have their own rights and freedoms—and I'm fiscally and economically conservative. I want to see responsible government. I think I'm stating some obvious things here that 80%, 90% of people agree with. And so for that to then define me as far right—and to hear a journalist say, 'I need to find a far-right founder in San Francisco. Can I interview you?' And I'm like, 'You want me? I'm far right?' I'm still here. Nothing's changed. So yeah, the part about my future self is—even though it was painful and there were some dislocations and I did lose a couple of dear friendships over it—I am happy that Mark 2024 took a stand.

You don't really want to wrap.

And I was not expecting you guys to have read my whole book and have all of these really insightful questions. I hope you guys follow the format of my book. I hope that you take an idea, prosecute it, and as a side hustle you build a huge business, and then this becomes your hobby.

I would love it. Love it.