Welcome back folks to the WP Tonic Show. This is episode 9998. Got the great pleasure of having a returning guest. We got Matt Mullenweg, the CEO of Automattic as our guest on this episode. We're going to be discussing all things WordPress and AI and the madness around AI. It just seems to get worse and worse. Should be a fantastic discussion. So Matt, would you like to give a quick 10-15 second intro to our audience?
Sure. My name is Matt Mullenweg, talking to you today from Houston, Texas where I was born and raised. I guess 23 years ago now, I connected with Mike Little over the internet on our blogs and we co-founded what we now know as WordPress. That little pebble that turned into a snowball that turned into an avalanche of code and community and plugins and themes and everything. I consider myself very, very lucky to be part of that. My other sort of night job is I do a little bit of investing with RG Capital, and my main gig is the CEO of Automattic, which makes WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Jetpack, Tumblr, Day One, Simple Note. We're a distributed company with about 1,400 people across the world, and yeah, I'm excited to be with you all today.
Thanks for that Matt. And I've got my great co-host Kurt. Would you like to introduce yourself to the new listeners and viewers?
Yeah, sure thing, Jonathan. My name is Kurt von Anan. I own a small agency called Manyana Noms. We also work directly with like great folks at LifterLMS and WP Tonic.
That's fantastic. Like I say, we're going to be discussing all things WordPress AI, the future of WordPress. It should be a great discussion. But before we go into the meat and potatoes, I got a message from one of our major sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks.
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We're coming back folks. Like I say, should be a great discussion, but I also want to point out we've got some great deals from our major sponsors, plus a curated list that's aimed at the WordPress user and small agency owner. You can get these free resources by going over to wptonic.com/deals. wptonic.com/deals and you'll find all the goodies there, my beloved tribe. What more could you ask for? Probably a lot more, but that's all you're going to get on that page. So, let's go straight into it, Matt. So to say that we're living in interesting times would be the understatement of the century, I would say. Matt, so what do you see as some of the biggest opportunities and maybe threats to WordPress over the next 18 months?
Well, in terms of threats, I guess the main thing I would think about is just that it's tied to the opportunity, which is that as we start to apply the coding part of AI, which has gotten quite good if you haven't been following with Claude Code and the new models like Codex, MiniMax, there's a lot of amazing stuff happening. So as that starts to be pointed at not just core but the 60, 70, 80,000 plugins and themes, I think we'll find lots of opportunities to improve. I think we're also going to find a lot of security bugs and things like that. So I would say like many open source projects around the world are being a little bit flooded with this sort of agentic driven input. And so the biggest thing we have to figure out over the next 18 months is how to incorporate this and deal with this both for core and our translations and everything we do in sort of the main WordPress and our official canonical plugins, but also how to provide the tools so that all the tens of thousands of the maintainers of these different open source plugins are able to sort of triage and incorporate all these improvements. Now at the end of this what we'll have is a vastly upgraded from a security, performance, and I think functionality as well, set of open source code and extensions which is very, very, very exciting. So yeah, I think like many things the opportunity and the threat is kind of like two sides of the same coin.
Well we've seen what has been called the SaaS apocalypse recently haven't we? You know, some people in the WordPress community say plugins are finished. You know, in the next 18 months, you're going to see a total semi-collapse of the why build a WordPress plug-in, you know, why buy a commercial WordPress plug-in? How would you respond to that?
Well, it's nuanced, right? So, I do think that we're going to see a lot more people doing what WordPress is designed for, which is customizing it and making it bespoke for their needs. Which is I think beautiful. Now, essentially what you're doing though is you have some proprietary code that is unique to you. So you have to really balance the sort of gradient of whether it's something that's truly unique to your site and should be sort of proprietary code to your site or whether there are some sort of benefits to using shared code that other people are looking at updating, securing, maintaining, etc. So, I know that's a little bit abstract, but you think of it like, well, let's just use e-commerce as an example. I don't think you want to vibe code your e-commerce solution, right? Because you're going to have like compliance and credit cards and anti-fraud and all these sorts of different things. It's probably good to use some code that a bunch of smart humans have looked at and a company's backing and things like that. Now if it's just a different functionality, this is true in technology, the baseline of what people expect or what's possible is going to change. What's a good example? Let's just talk about image editing or all the stuff around managing images or libraries of images. AI is so good now at manipulating images, stuff you used to spend hours in Photoshop doing, you can now do with a single command. It takes like 10 seconds. So any plugins that used to exist around being better image editors or things like that, that's just something that's not as uniquely differentiated before, but it provides an opportunity for them to figure out what is uniquely differentiated. So this is going to happen a little faster than has happened in the past but it's not dissimilar to what is sort of the normal sort of gales of creative destruction as Friedrich Hayek would call it that is prevalent in being in the technology industry in general.
As kind of an extension to that answer, Matt, one of the things that I seem to constantly struggle with internally and that is when I think of WordPress and I think about other platforms because I try them. Like I'm like, 'Hey, Skool's super popular. Let's try Skool, right?' And you go in there and the only thing you can do is light mode or dark mode. Like there's no other, you know, and when I build something in an LMS for WordPress, I can customize the whole stinking experience. And I see a disconnect in my clients because they seem fine with like no options in other platforms. And as soon as we mention WordPress, instantly it's I want to change this, change that, this needs to be blue, this needs to be periwinkle. To me, I'm seeing a lot of people post publicly like, oh, AI and WordPress and it's the doom for the agency and people are going to do these things. And I see the opposite. I see more and more people are focused on like I just want to run my business and because I want all this weird stuff in my website, I got to hire an agency or a pro to build it or maintain it for me. And so I'm seeing opportunity. Other people are predicting doom and from an agency perspective, it's a little hard to walk that line and figure out what direction things are really going to go. What are your gut feelings there?
Well, I think you nailed the core thing that although the realm of what is possible is being vastly democratized, which I love. I mean that is literally the mission of WordPress is to democratize publishing. So these things being accessible to more people is possible, but also I mean you know it as you're following it like man it's hard to keep up with all the different AI models and what's launching every day. Sometimes they mess up and it can be very hard to debug sometimes and they can delete things. There's actually still someone described it almost like a slot machine, where sometimes it does something super incredible and you're like wow that would have taken me two months to code manually and it just happened instantly and then sometimes nothing happens or something bad happens. So the beauty of this is that for sort of motivated technical people, I think you get like not even just 10x, maybe 100x in terms of what you're able to do or maintain. And so agencies, I think their ability not just to serve more clients, but maybe even serve their existing clients much, much better than they have in the past, it's going to be increased. Now, if you're one of those clients, let's say you're a small business owner and your day-to-day and your things you want to think about every day might be serving your customers. That's a barber shop, a restaurant, a law firm, a doctor, whatever you might be out there, a teacher. You probably don't want to have to become an expert in using Claude and Codex and all these other things. You might have an expectation that when you call your agency, what used to take him a week now might take him a day. And I think that's completely fine. But there's still a benefit to having a phone you can call, someone you can trust to manage all this complexity, all the change and all the unknowns, sort of guide you through. Again, the AI can do anything, but you have to ask them the right questions. And so that ability to know what the question is and prompt them well I think is still something that for folks who really dedicate a lot of their time to it and make it their craft, profession, thing they love to do, there's going to be value in that.
Nice. Nice. Thanks. If we were to dive deeper into the AI thing, like I saw you just posted on LinkedIn a couple videos of Jamie Marsland in a post and he was talking about some new AI features and it was cool. He put a cat on a mat. Fun things. But when we see things like that, do you feel that obviously you're excited that AI is part of WordPress, like obviously that's an exciting thing, but overall, like long-term looking downstream, do you see that being like a true benefit to the ecosystem that we're working in or do you think it's more like a threat? Because we're making things very easy and putting them into what we're working in when they could just make it in another screen and import it. You know what I mean? It's like are we making things too complicated by putting those tools in WordPress.com or are we making it that much easier for the client?
That's a good question. And I'll say here my thinking here has probably shifted over the past maybe year and a half where I started talking maybe at least two WordCamps ago about remember I mentioned the Perplexity browser which is called Comet and more recently I talked about Atlas which is the OpenAI one. And so this idea that you have a really smart personal AI which is embedded into your operating system or your browser, I think just given the sort of context that's allowed, that is going to know you better and be more powerful. So it's also probably something you're paying for directly versus going into the hosting margin of your hosting plan or something like that which by the way it's not huge already. You're paying like dollars for something which is pretty amazing 24/7 globally available etc. So just to give a simple example, like when you log into WordPress.com, we'll know everything about your sites, and things you chose to connect or share with us, but we don't know all of your calendar. We don't know all of the chats you've had with your personal AI in the past. If you imagine this personal AI has access to all your photos, your emails, your everything, it's a very intimate relationship that you would be rightfully hesitant to ask for something. Honestly, with WordPress.com, I don't want to ask for all that stuff for you. So that personal agent could then essentially be the mediator. It can have access to all that super private stuff, manage it securely and have all that context and then talk to the tool, whether that's WordPress.com or any other website and just give it what that external site needs to have or needs to know. And actually, I'm really excited that in the future, some more of these models might be entirely local, as we get like new chips from Apple and others that can run actually some pretty powerful things just on your device on the edge, which of course from a privacy and security point of view is fantastic. So that personal agent I think will be able to do things on your behalf including using some of our existing interfaces. Like yes we're doing all the MCP and command line interfaces and all that sort of stuff and we actually have decades now of really strong API support everything but I think also these agents will be able to figure out any website even if they haven't built something specifically for AI they'll just start using it like a human will it'll just be slower. So in terms of what that balance will be I think it's probably going to be 80 or 90% it's going to be perhaps your personal agent using the tools. And so what it behooves us as tool makers, whether that's WordPress or others to do is make sure that as we design for human usability, which of course we're going to continue to improve, that we're also thinking about sort of the agentic usability. So how is this accessible to agents to use it and more like AI or agent driven things on behalf of humans using the tools and services.
Nice. Jonathan, over to you.
Yeah, I just want a quick follow-up question. You know, was you really surprised by what happened around OpenClaw and Peter Steinberger, you know, a fantastic developer. But in some ways you must have been delighted that this quasar open source project. I think it got some of the quickest traction of any open source project in history. I might be wrong about that. But you know somebody with enormous experience of open source, what was your thoughts about what Peter achieved and what's happened with OpenClaw?
Yeah I think it's actually awesome and it's a project that Peter and I have a lot of mutual friends and we've talked a bit through his whole process here. Also I think if you notice WordPress is one of the few accounts that OpenClaw follows. So that's no accident. I think there's a lot of parallels to OpenClaw and WordPress and I also think there's a lot of ways for OpenClaw to drive WordPress and I highly encourage you check out the wp-pinch project from Nick Hamsey. It's on GitHub. Which sort of connects your OpenClaw to your WordPress, allows you to do lots of management, different things. So, it's also got me thinking about, you know, OpenClaw loves working with command line interfaces. And of course, we have a long history of it's an official project. We brought it into the fold, I think eight or nine years ago, WP-CLI, which some of you are familiar with. So, I've definitely been thinking a lot about how to expand our CLI interface to expose some things that we might not currently support through it. That might be a way, this kind of old Unix philosophy of piping together lots of smart command line tools. Actually is a very, very efficient way for AI to interact with applications like WordPress. So, it's exciting to watch. We'll see where it goes. Things happen faster now than ever. Including adoption of things, switching between other things, alternatives. I've been following some of the there's things like NanoClaw or IronClaw or some things inspired by OpenClaw. I'm kind of rooting for OpenClaw. I kind of love the weirdness and quirkiness of the community and everything. And in fact, at Automattic, we're contributing some code to it and some security patches and other things. So, I think it's an interesting project to follow and we're certainly going to try to support it however we can.
Was you surprised that because Peter obviously doesn't need the money. He had a he was highly successful with his last company and I think he took a three-year break and he came back to this and it just came on the radar. But now he's I don't know precisely what his position with OpenAI is. Was you surprised that he's partnered up in some way with OpenAI? Because they I think I'm not being unfair to say that they got a very complex and controversial relationship with open source software, haven't they?
Ah, that's a good question. Well, one, I would say that all the AI Frontier Labs, they're spicy, right? Like, there's definitely a lot going on behind the scenes that we're not aware of, but you can kind of see from the outside when people move between one or the other. They're also in a very unique position. I don't envy them like they're the targets of nation states and geopolitics and countless billions or trillions in funding and value that's being sort of going between them in a hyperly competitive environment. In terms of Peter going to OpenAI or any one of the frontier labs, I don't think it's a they are some of the most interesting companies in the world right now whether that's Anthropic or OpenAI or so and they have an access to resources which is a little bit unparalleled. So if there's something that if he wanted access to like the latest and greatest models and unlimited tokens and everything like that not to mention that there's just good sets of people at these things all my interactions with folks at these companies. They're definitely a magnet for a lot of interesting talent. So we'll see what happens. I agree that these companies sometimes have a mixed relationship with open source, but to be honest, you could say that of any large company. You could say that of Google. You could say that of Facebook. You could say that of Automattic even. We're probably one of the most open source forward companies in the world. Companies I think it's good we sort of anthropomorphize them and speak of them as a single entity but you have to remember these are often made up of thousands of individuals and they make mistakes those individuals make mistakes they change direction and they might do simultaneously things which think of Google and Apple they're like the biggest competitors in the world they also have tens of billions of dollars of partnerships and deals that they do every year in fact Apple now I think choosing the Gemini model to power some of the new AI stuff in their devices. So, I think as adults you have to look at this as like these companies are sometimes going to compete. They're also work together and it's good not to completely write them off or think that they're angels just at any given point in time like it's going to be complex just like humans and evolve.
