Thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.
Thanks for having me. Longtime listener, first time, I guess, participating in the podcast. And love being here.
Oh, I appreciate that. Okay, so I know you saw this. I did the survey recently where I asked my readers, what tools do you use most in your day-to-day work as a product builder, as a product manager? And in the category of engineering tools, v0 came in right below Cursor and GitHub for people's most-used AI building tools. So clearly people love what you're doing.
Yeah, we're very happy to see that and for us we're at the very beginning of the journey in some ways because v0 is a relatively new tool. But Vercel, our company has been around for a while. You know, the way that I explain to people is anytime you're using the internet, if there's a website or web application that's really fast, innovative, hopefully it's running on our platform. We're out there, we're running a lot of websites at scale. If you watch the Super Bowl recently, three different companies were promoting digital products that were built and delivered on Vercel. So, not only can you deploy your ideas and build them on Vercel, they can scale to huge volumes of traffic and huge audiences. So, a lot of people know us because of a framework called Next.js. It's an open source framework based on the React technology open source by Meta and it powers some of the most innovative products on the internet. So when you use Claude or Grok or Midjourney you're using Next.js, you're using Vercel's technologies. So with v0, what we're trying to do is, and it's funny because you put us in the rightfully I think in the building or development category in that survey, but what we're trying to do with v0 is help more people participating in building software, increase the sort of the total addressable market of people that are actually shipping things, shipping real products. And at the same time, just like you would with ChatGPT, we want v0 to be just extremely extremely easy and the outputs that it generates make them as refined and realistic as possible. Like the things that you create with v0 hopefully live up to that standard set by, you know, some of the best and largest websites on the internet.
I was going to ask you how v0 came out of Vercel and my theory was it was like you guys are sitting around being like how do we get more people building websites and it's like okay let's just help them do it really easily. Is that it's like TAM expansion for Vercel?
Yeah, in some ways it's what I've been doing for not only 10 years that I've been working on Vercel but maybe my entire life because my strength as a developer is kind of meta. It's been to create developer tools. So I've created a bunch of open source frameworks that are really popular. So Next.js is one but before that in a previous life I created another tool called Socket.io which is a real time communication mechanism that powers for example every time you use Notion, I think you interviewed Ivan, when Notion needs to broadcast messages in real time to other collaborators they use a real-time engine that they built for Socket.io. So the reason that startups and companies have used my products in the past is because I took something that was very difficult to do but very compelling like it was with real time in the past like it's building cutting edge applications on the web with Next.js and I try to make it as easy as possible but you still needed to know development skills, right? For us and the opportunity was if there is maybe 5 million React developers which is the sort of the library engine that we use and there's maybe 20 million JavaScript developers how many product builders or people with aspirations of building products exist? My back of the napkin like minimum calculation is 100 million. And I'll tell you, it's funny where I get that number from. Slack has about 100 million monthly active users. And what you do on Slack is you go in it and you talk to people. And a lot of those people are building digital products, right? And they talk to one another about what they would want to see in the world. They talk to customers through shared channels. I love that feature. We talked to a lot of the Vercel customers like they tell us like I want to build this, I want to see that, I want this feature, I want that thing. And so the opportunity with v0 was it's not that you're going to stop talking to other people, but what if you could yap into the computer and see something happen, build a prototype, build your first version of a product, build a demo, build a full stack product, build it and ship it. And so the inspiration for it was very natural to the mission of Vercel. But concretely the genesis of the story was when ChatGPT came out we noticed that it was very good at writing the code that our tools used. So ChatGPT right out of the bat was good at JavaScript, was good at Tailwind which is a CSS styling technology, was good at Next.js and again the power of open source our tools are already in the training data of the internet and so that long-term bet and vision on open source really paid off and so because the models were so good at writing this kind of code the idea for v0 came naturally from what if we could build a ChatGPT for building web products.
Speaking of that, I didn't actually know so I had Bolt CEO on the podcast and he talked about how Claude kind of unlocked what they're doing and you guys, do you guys sit on ChatGPT and OpenAI?
We started out on OpenAI and we've always used a combination of models. It's funny right now on Twitter there's a million threads with a million views of people trying to reverse engineer the prompt and the models that we use and they're all finding that there's all this kind of different models that are specialists in different tasks and there's a pipeline of models where a model could hand off work to another model and so OpenAI, Gemini, Claude, but we predate Anthropic because I'll give credit to ChatGPT that you know the utility of it was so general purpose. But from the very first release, it was very good. In fact, by the way, if I'm not mistaken, the first prototype of v0 might have even predated ChatGPT or at the very least, I think we were running on GPT-3.5. So, we've always had this vision of unlocking more power for the web through LLMs. And there's a lot of very interesting technical details of why by the way LLMs happen to be so good at the task of web design and web development that we could get into but it was like the perfect timing for us.
That's, I want to come back to that, that's actually a really good question but let me ask a couple other questions here. In terms of v0, what's the scale at this point? We hear all these numbers about all the folks in the space, what can you share about what's happening with v0?
I can share that it's growing exponentially and that over 1.3 million users have interacted with v0 so far. We had our largest day ever yesterday and today again we're the largest, we're one of the largest customers of most of cloud providers at this point. We're hitting the limits of every GPU LLM infrastructure out there in the planet. And what the most exciting thing for me is what I'm seeing people build with v0. So, we launched a feature about a month ago, maybe even less than a month ago, called Digital Community. It already has 20,000 submissions. I'm sure people in your audience have used Figma. One of the things that I love about Figma is Figma files that I can go and grab a starting point for something. Could be a logo, could be a menu, and you can start with something that someone has already contributed. Kind of like that spirit of open source. And so in less than a month, I think we've done over 20,000 community submissions. So we've learned so much about building AI products with this and we continue to sort of open source and share our best practices. But one of the things that I've definitely learned is prompting, it seems like the easiest interface in the world because it's just an input, right? And you put text in it, but there's a little bit of a writer's block sometimes. So, one of my favorite things that I've seen, and I even look at the homepage right now, and you can see like a random assortment of community submissions, and they have 1,200 forks and 1,500 forks and 6,000 forks. And this is every time people saying like, oh, instead of starting from scratch, I'll start from this application that someone else has built and I'm going to prompt it to modify it and make it my own.
So, these the community submissions are people building apps on v0 and sharing what they built. You can look at the code and fork it.
And it's becoming like a compounding investment right like people share something someone else grabs it makes it better maybe you use it at that point. In many ways I see this as the next evolution of GitHub whereas GitHub was so, it was a marvel for software development because it, I don't know if you remember this but like the initial little tagline underneath the GitHub logo was social coding. And it had this democratization effect of building software, but you still needed to know how to code. And so what we're after is social product building in many ways, right? Like everybody should be able to cook and share what they're building.
I love how I hadn't thought of it this way, but I love that it connects so much to your open source roots where people are building on v0 and then sharing what they're building and then people can build off those things. It's kind of like an open-source AI building experience.
It's fascinating, right? Like in many ways if you think about the git commit, the git commit is super interesting. If you watch how an engineer works they look at a problem they spend a lot of time in their code editor and at the end they say I think I got it, I think I've fixed it and then they produce a git commit. They summarize their intent and what they try to do after they've done the work. v0 inverts that. The git commit is you go into the chat and say please change the color of this button and when I click it save this form to a database. And so you're starting with the intent and the output is the code and as a side effect we can also produce a git commit for you. That feature is not online yet but it's coming in the next couple days, spoiler alert for the group. And so I like this idea of we can create this superset of all software building with this platform and that is true to my initial intention with Vercel. Our mission is to enable the world to build and ship the best products and so enabling that for the largest possible group of people is very exciting to me.
So let's go to this question of just kind of the elephant in the room for a lot of people seeing these things happening, product builders that have been doing things a certain way for a long time with apps like this coming around where you can just type a thing in and it builds it for you and it's beautiful. How do you think things are going to change for product managers, for product teams? Where do you think the biggest change is going to happen? How do you think product will be built in the next few years?
The most profound one that I kind of alluded to is that conversations between product builders and their customers will be mediated by these v0 links, these artifacts. I think when Claude came up with the name artifacts, I found it phenomenal because we're all in this world, especially in this group of people, we're here to build awesome things and share them with the world. Steve Jobs had this awesome speech about it's like our form of giving back to the world is to try and do the best possible job we can and share it with the world. And so the idea that when we talk we would not have the power to make those ideas a reality seems like an L to me. I would love to see people constantly live in the product, be in the design, spend time tuning and trying out new ideas. And that's what the ideal work of the future should look like and less about kind of again that abstraction that being removed from the product or even the sometimes I can feel powerless to not be able to change something. This happens a lot when departments collaborate within an organization. Marketing wants design to do something. Marketing wants engineering to do something. Engineering needs a design. It cuts all ways, right? Like one of the things that people had got excited about that we published on the Vercel blog was about design engineering because a lot of the people that we were noticing were being very successful at Vercel were people that had both the design and engineering skills and that was actually another huge motivator and inspiration for v0 because we realized that people could be more full stack. We shouldn't put limits on ourselves on what we can build and what we can ship and what we can dream about making possible on these web services. And so you could imagine removing all those limitations. A designer that can ship a fully baked product, a product manager that can prototype and ship to production, an engineer. A lot of people that use v0 are backend engineers that never had the ability to, you know, sort of like they could ship an API, they could build a great low-level infrastructure system, but to actually bring their end-to-end vision to life, these are sort of completing that for them.
So, let me follow the thread on engineers. A lot of people are wondering, do we need engineers in the future? What happens to engineers? Should I learn how to code? You're a longtime engineer. Thoughts for folks that are trying to decide the career for themselves.
Yeah, I think knowing how things work is the most important skill in the world. I foresee a lot of people becoming incredibly impactful in building and shipping amazing products and building gigantic companies and everything you could imagine where a single person can do the job of 100 different people in 100 different specializations. Take the example of one skill set that's really important to build a front-end product is you need to know how to use CSS or Tailwind to style it. And once upon a time I would hire people that were truly specialist in this task. The task of there's a Figma design or there is some kind of sketch and translating that into reality because they knew really well how to manipulate layout code, box model code we call it, and borders, paddings, margins, flexbox, all these technologies for styling. And notice I actually use the word translation very intentionally. Because the origin of the LLM goes or the transformer architecture at least goes as far back as the architecture for systems like Google Translate. They were generative LLM techniques basically that's how they crossed that chasm of like remember when translating tools were horrible and then one day the problem was just solved, right? And I look at a lot of the programming jobs to be done that used to be specializations that I think are going away in a way or the tasks to be done. They're translation tasks. We were translating from a screenshot or intent or a design into a React and Tailwind and the CSS implementation. And right now v0 is incredibly good at doing that. It's so good that every time we put a new generation of the model out, I run this test of like converting my own website and try to generate it with v0. Last time I did it, it had taken me like 10 prompts to replicate it. Keep in mind, I'm an expert front-end engineer that's been in the arena since I'm like 10 years old and I'm 35 now. And so I do that test because it's almost like a test of self-imposed humility of like I remember exactly how long it took me to build my website with Next.js, the framework that I created, and ship it. And so with the last model, it took me maybe 10, 15 prompts. With the most recent model, it took me two prompts. And so that translation from the design intent into working implementation. Another anecdote that I like to share with people is the model because v0 tries to embed all of the best practices of the web. The model output more accessible code than when I wrote. It follows the accessibility guidelines that the web standards consortiums put out better than I did. Because it just knows everything. And so those tasks where you can almost model it to a translation task definitely going away. But knowing how things work under the hood, notice all the I'm using specific tokens in this conversation. I'm saying CSS, I'm saying layout, I'm naming styles. Knowing those tokens is going to be very important for you because you're going to be able to influence the model and make it follow your intention a lot better. And so the TL;DR would be knowing how things work, the symbolic systems. And that will mean that you have to probably go into each subject with less depth. I have engineers at Vercel that know every single CSS property by heart. They know when they became available in a certain web browser. They've been tracking this specification. Like it's almost like you're an encyclopedia of knowledge of each CSS property. You probably won't need that in the future. And probably that's good because you'll free up your mind for more ambitious things.
That is fascinating. So what I'm hearing is a skill that will continue to be valuable in the future, no matter how far AI gets, is understanding conceptually how software works. Backend systems, databases, CSS is a thing. So say, I don't know if you have kids, whether you have kids or not, just say they were like trying to decide what should I learn to be, you know, to thrive in this future. How would you summarize it? Like how far should they get into software engineering?
Great question because I have five kids and I've already enrolled them in this school of thought myself in the sense that I'm already guiding them towards the things I think are going to be very useful to them. So understanding how things work needs, I think the ability to understand the fundamental logic behind things incredibly valuable. So I push them really hard on math. If you don't know math really well, you're out of my house. Just kidding. But like it's a fundamental skill that I want them to know. Eloquence. So I joke sometimes, have you heard a meme of word cells versus shape rotators? So a shape rotator is someone that only has a math brain, right? You could argue the kings and queens of Silicon Valley have been the shape rotators because those have been the jobs that have historically commanded the most status, respect, net worth, whatever. And then there's the word cells which is communicating more of the liberal arts. There's also the funny and awesome slide of Apple saying that they are at the intersection of liberal arts and technology. I've always had immense amounts of respect for both sides of the brain so to speak. But I think developing great eloquence and knowing and memorizing those tokens that I talked about, knowing how to refer to things in that global mental map of symbolic systems will be highly valuable. And we have some tools to help people prompt better. But prompt enhancement and embellishment cannot replace thinking and cannot replace your own creativity that you want to infuse into the world. So one of the things that v0 does is it tries and it succeeds I think at creating very nice designs out of the box. We try to infuse what we've learned about what do people think is typically good web design. We've influenced the model in that direction. But still like we also don't want the whole internet to look the same way. So, your ability to steer the model with your words into those references, into those inspirations is going to be very important. I actually have an amazing anecdote. We hosted a design demo night at the Vercel HQ in San Francisco last night and we were showing off how Vercel uses v0 to build v0 and to build Vercel. And one of our designers showed this amazing animation that he built. Actually two amazing animations that he built. And in one of them, it was this amazing triangle that had an animation that I didn't think was possible to make and that it was all built with v0. And he used the word turbulence to describe the effect that he wanted. So, I just want to call out that to people because the difference between knowing that word and not knowing it is getting that style into that beautiful triangle that he created that was interactive and it's probably going to end up in some landing page soon that you're going to visit on vercel.com. And so, developing eloquence and your linguistic ability, I think, is going to be very important. So, I love my kids to know that. And I think that idea of sharing things and putting yourself out there and broadcasting to the world. So another thing that I do is I take my kids to hackathons. We just went to an awesome hackathon at University of San Francisco, USF. It was called the Bloom Hackathon and I took two of my kids and I wanted to watch how people presented their ideas and we had a lot of fun. We also ate waffles and grilled sandwiches which is a bonus. But so presenting and putting yourself out there. I mentioned in the beginning of the podcast when we were chatting I learned so much from you and your guests because you put out all these awesome little posts on X and these videos and these snippets of your interviews. And so the ability to present what you've built and put yourself out there, incredibly important skill in the future, especially in a world where the marginal cost of producing software and new things are going down. You need to build an audience. You need to know how to talk to people. You need to build your own signature brand and style. And so maybe they're a little too young for that one, but I guess taking them into hackathons probably like you know back is influencing their neural networks or pre-training data for the future.
I love it. They're going to tell their friends my dad took me to a hackathon. What's that? So are you actually encouraging to learn to code? Because it's interesting you mentioned math, eloquence, presenting and then okay so also learn.
Yeah, I think again learning how to prompt, learning how to code with v0, we show you the code when we build things. So that if you can build that mapping of like maybe not learning how to code necessarily as an abstraction if you do have a knack for it kind of like you know I'm a big believer also that my five kids have like super diverse personalities and inclinations and I don't want to be pushing for something that they wouldn't want to do or whatever and so learning to code in the abstract might be good for some people, might not be the fun thing to do for other people. And so what I would recommend is try to understand how things work. So if you prompt v0 or any other tool and it generates some code, try to build an understanding of what that does at a high level. It's like actually maybe an extension even of eloquence. One of the bets that I made early on with Vercel that really paid off is we, Vercel maybe as a metaphor is like AWS in easy mode for a lot of people. We have a very large user base of people that would have otherwise not have been able to configure all of the ins and outs of the cloud but do want the scale, flexibility, speed, etc. They want to create very high quality products and services. So, I like to give the Super Bowl example because one of our customers, Ramp, had a 43x increase in traffic when their ad went live. The engineer that worked on that only needed to learn Next.js. Then they pushed their code to Vercel and now they can reach an audience of 100 million people without a blip. 100% uptime. That superpower comes from we made it as easy as possible to get started and the language that we choose is actually very relevant in the story. JavaScript is in my mind has always been almost like the English of programming languages. It's a language that if you learn it, you reach billions of devices. So it's not a coincidence that when you ask ChatGPT or Anthropic or Gemini to build you a web app, it uses these tools. It uses JavaScript, it uses React, it's become the lingua franca of building products on the web. So I would say to my kids, look, if you do want to go deeper into programming, start learning there. You can reach huge numbers of people. If you have a passion, I would say there's going to be a fundamental engineering skill that's going to be useful for decades or centuries to come, which is creating foundational infrastructure. Think about LLMs in terms of they're like oracles that can go and write software for you, but there's a limit to how much software they can write. There's context windows. There is time and computational constraints. So it's very hard for an agent today to go and say I'm going to write a cloud from scratch. I'm going to write all the foundational services. I'm going to write the framework from scratch. I'm going to write the compiler. No, the LLM is orchestrating those tools and infrastructure. It's not writing the compiler from scratch. Otherwise, you get into the Newton thing. In order to create an apple, you have to create the entire underlying universe. No, the elements are interoperating with the universe as it exists. And so the engineers that learn foundational infrastructure are probably going to be extremely empowered still for years to come.
Like there's a world where you could argue ChatGPT will build the next version of ChatGPT. What I'm hearing from you is that's a long ways away if ever.
Absolutely. This is why you know the running joke is that all of these companies have you go to their careers page it's like engineer, engineer, engineer, right? The counterpoint of that is that at Vercel we had, we have 150 engineers that can write code and 600 total headcount. Now we have 600 engineers. One of the best things that I've seen created with v0 have not come from our team. They've come from the marketing team. They've come from the sales team. They've come from the product management team. The product management team is fascinating, right? Because now they're actually building the product. So last night I saw how we've speced out in v0, think of it as like a live PRD. We've speced out how the new functionality for deploying a v0 to Vercel is going to work. The amount of detail that was contained in that v0. I mean, we're all just saying like, well, just ship it. There's nothing else to discuss, right? Like, it was animated. It was interactive. We demonstrated the error state, the success state, the slow stream state. So, it really empowers product builders not only with technical skills. I think that does a disservice to the tool. It empowers them to explore and augment their thinking with a lot of things that perhaps they wouldn't have considered otherwise. A lot of states of the product they wouldn't have considered otherwise.
The name v0 implies the product is for prototypes, for kind of like the first attempt at stuff and that's definitely where all these tools are finding product market fit. Prototypes, PM showing a thing working versus just design. Do you expect v0 and other tools to get to a place where you can build Salesforce.com and scale it to billions of dollars like you do?
We already have a customer, an enterprise customer of v0 that only works with v0. All of their products, all of their features, all of their client communications are v0 native. Two days ago, I just heard anecdotally on X, someone tells me, my brother just sold his first website to a client completely built in v0. Yesterday at an investor conference, an investor walks up to me and says, two of my friends just got engaged on v0. I was like, okay, okay. v0 is a dating app now. So the engagement website, the proposal, the wedding, like it's all v0 native. So because we've integrated v0 with the Vercel infrastructure, we can do that whole story that I just told you of like I have a website to build and I can get it in front of 100 million people. We can enable that for everybody now. And so the end-to-end full stack v0 native and built on this awesome fluid serverless infrastructure that scales to billions of people all just from prompts or screenshots or just copying and pasting your pods into the tool.
So let's help people be successful with v0 and then let's also do a demo. But before we get there, let me ask you this. So imagine you could magically sit next to someone who's about to use v0 for the first time and whisper a tip in their ear to be successful with v0. What would a couple tips be?
So number one is you can be as ambitious as you want in terms of what you ask the tool. If you can steer the tool towards some kind of inspiration that you have, you're always going to get better results. If you don't have ideas on what to build or what to prompt, I would recommend using the v0 community so that you can find something to fork to get started. I would say in some ways if you have technical skills, this one is interesting, have some suspension of disbelief. Like it humbled me, right? I was saying about like accessibility. So be open-minded about whether the tool actually knows some things that you might not know. And so focus more on the product description, right? Like focus more on like what do you want the end user to experience? What do you want the product to do? And try to be open-minded about how well the tool can implement it. Those would be my main ones. You also have to have a sense of iteration, I guess. Think of it this way. If you were working with a design firm or an agency that you've hired, you will go back and forth and say, try something else. If you were coaching an engineer that's getting stuck in something, you would say, try something else. It's amazing how many times I've gotten unstuck in v0 by just saying like, just try something else.
Just saying that as the prompt, not even.
Just saying that like I'm in a chat. It's like v0, we need to have, it's like you have a one-on-one performance review with a tool. Hey, way to talk. Try something else. What you're doing so far is not working. And it's amazing. Like one fitness function that I'm keeping in my head is I really want to find the thing that I cannot build with v0. So I as part of the v0 community, I have my own profile. We'll share the link with people. You can see six or seven things that I've built and that I consider to be pretty impressive. So, for example, I was flying from Tokyo to San Francisco. The internet was horrible. What I like to do during flights is I like to monitor our own flight while I'm on the flight. So, I open Flightradar or whatever. And I was extremely bored as well. And I noticed that Flightradar, I don't know which one it was. The Flightradar is like I got four or five of them. They were very bloated. They had ads. They were not what I wanted the Flightradar to look like. So I built my own during the flight with the worst internet connection that you could imagine in the world. Integrated into a flight data API called Edge Aviation. So this is what I told v0. You're gonna build, we're gonna build the best Flightradar on the planet. I wasn't prescriptive about how. So, it used a tool called Mapbox and a JavaScript library called Leaflet. I didn't tell them that. And subsequently once we cooked on the design which looks I would say beautiful I then got more ambitious and I said all right let's make it real now and by the way that's actually how I would work so it's how I like to work I like to work experience first and that's also how Vercel was built let's start with the front end let's start with the planes on the screen and by the way there's a lot of subtleties here for example there's so many flights going on at any given time that there's just too many. So I had to work with v0 on improving performance. And once again, I wasn't prescriptive. I just said, we have a lot of flights, chief. Let's.
I actually do say that a lot. And this is I think when I shared it on X it blew a lot of engineers minds because it created a canvas-based, canvas is the sort of underlying rendering surface that very sophisticated products use like Figma and it created this awesome overlay on top of the map that can render tens of thousands of flights at any given time. And then I told it let's make it a full stack application. Okay plug it into the flights API. So that's an example of like we cooked and there was no limit. And so I'm always on the lookout the service that I'm providing to the v0 community is I'm part of the team that is really trying to break this and say like can it not build something or even when it does build it, we're very obsessed with quality and performance like it has to be real. That's our commitment to our users.
And how much of this cost? How much time does this take to make something like this?
So the Flightradar example or v0 example specifically just like, I mean that one probably took less than two hours with the worst internet. Sorry Japan Airlines I love you but like you give me a hard time.
And what did that cost? Like 10 bucks? Like what would you estimate?
I mean I pay for the $20 v0.
20 bucks. Okay. For a month so it's like a month but you use it for two hours, 20 bucks. Yeah. If you had engineers building this, how much do you think that would cost? How long do you think that would take?
I mean, weeks easily. Easily.
And that's like tens of thousands of dollars.
Maybe the most cracked engineer out of Vercel could knock it out in a couple days without using any AI. But then what about the design? What about like me? Because I'm the bottleneck, not the engineer. And this is what's amazing about this collaboration, right? Is like I'm providing the product guidance. I'm saying draw a dashed line between the planes. And by the way, this is v0 just blew my mind so hard. I said draw a dashed line between the two destination airports. And v0 said, well, I have to account for the spherical or what is it? It is a pseudosphere for the curvature of the earth. It's like okay v0 super genius like whatever. And so that's what I mentioned about like how you can kind of go back and forth is it's like a product copilot is like an all knowing being. One of our users yesterday submitted feedback to the tool and it was positive feedback. They were very happy what they were saying like v0 is like a super genius 5-year-old PhD with ADHD. So like you still have to, I'm not gonna oversell this as like you know it knows everything about everything, gets everything perfect of course but it has these sparks of brilliance really truly. I think I've been a big believer that AGI undersells what we're collectively building because we already have all of these sparks of super intelligence. I don't believe that v0 is an AGI if it knows everything about how to draw a dashed line according to the curvature of the Earth on this high performance map of airplanes. Like that's just superhuman. And it's a joy to use.
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As you talk, it's interesting the way I'm thinking about this now. There's almost like three core skills in building apps with AI. There's figuring out what to build. There's making it look good, like design, and then there's getting it unstuck.
And it's interesting how like these are going to.
Coaching it. Yeah. Or just like here's a, oh, here's the database error. I don't know. It's not figuring it out.
Yeah. On the, I guess does that resonate? I've never thought of that.
Oh, absolutely. In fact, I'll tell you a little bit of a story of something that I, so even going way back in time, Next.js builds on React. React was this UI component library that Facebook created actually with very similar goals. They had so many cracked engineers and they had to help them
Collaborate on an enormous product surface. So they invented or at least pioneered, I would say, the concept of this component as a unit of reusability, as a building block, as a Lego brick of how you build software. It's no coincidence that LLMs love to work with React components, by the way. And one of the things that always has stood out to me about that model is it basically enables people to scale in how they worked together. And one of the key design principles that they embedded into this thing is they called it escape hatch. The API when React doesn't perfectly model your problem with its component system, they give you escape hatch. They say, 'Okay, engineer, you're on your own now. There's no guard rails.' And in fact, one of these escape hatches is called dangerouslySetInnerHTML. They want the developer to know uncharted territory, but they did give people the API. That is a profound systems design engineering principle. And throughout my life, I've always thought about escape hatches. One amazing escape hatch that v0 has is that you're looking at the code that we're generating with Next.js, you can edit it, you can even have other experts look at it. One thing that one of our demos last night came from this awesome company, Luma Labs. They're creating one of the most amazing video models in the world and they use v0 and Vercel extensively to build their application, their websites, etc. And the design engineer was talking about how he was on a v0 that had a hundred or so iterations. So he was knee deep into the latent space. He was in the matrix and at one point he got stuck. But you know what he did? He copied and pasted the code that we generated and he gave it to o1 and o1 thought about the solution. I honestly I'd never even thought about this myself. I was so blown away and it doesn't speak to I love your third point of you need to learn a skill how to get unstuck. It's like a profound life lesson, it's just more generic life advice. You need to get unstuck. Facebook actually had a principle, don't get blocked, seek to get unblocked, seek help from other people. What's fascinating is that you can seek help from other AIs to get unstuck and those escape hatches of actually understanding and seeing the code underneath and even being able to say okay now let's use git, let's turn this into more of a hybrid project, not just prompts, but also traditional software engineering. The fact that that door is open to you is extremely valuable.
Let's actually make this super concrete and show people what this actually looks like in v0. So, pull up, we'll share screen and then we'll do a little live demo. We'll keep it brief. I find people are like, 'Okay, I get it.' But we'll make it fun and brief at the same time. There it is. I see it.
Yeah, of course. We're all about shipping. Okay. So, as I mentioned, you write in English, you yap into the tool. I'll say for a demo, let's create a contact sales form in the style of... By the way, I had a typo. I don't care. Yeah, let's get it. Instead of Supreme, the clothing company for an online store. Now I mentioned that sometimes people get blocked on like there is like a writer paralysis at this step. So we added enhanced prompt. So now like you're tapping into the latent space of the model which has a random component to it. And by the way this is still not a substitute. It doesn't contradict what I said earlier of you knowing the meaningful tokens, knowing what the right style is and what it's called and whatever is still highly valuable. So the first thing you're going to notice is that as the model thinks you can introspect its thinking. So we added this recently and it's been mostly inspired actually by the DeepSeek revolution I would say. So the fact that when you tell it develop a contact sales form like what is it going to do like we talked about escape hatches, okay it's going to use shadcn/ui, it's going to use Tailwind CSS, it's going to use React and this is your opportunity that if v0 is not doing exactly what you wanted this is your opportunity to actually go and sort of correct or influence or give feedback and so on. So you're going to notice it spits out a bunch of files and it gives me the thing that I wanted, right? So I'm going to zoom out a little bit here. So couple things that stand out here that I mean as again as an experienced engineer I can point out the underlying component system that it uses is the same component system that the best tools on the planet are built with. This is called shadcn. If you go to grok.com today, they're using shadcn to build their UI. They're using Next.js, you're getting that caliber of code. The other thing that it did is people on social media talk about this a lot. When you use a global shared component system with the world, you don't want everything to look the same. So, the fact that it was able to apply the style and it kind of knew what Supreme looked like was kind of cool. But now I'm going to say actually because I'm building a financial institution, make it more serious, make it in the style of let's say Charles Schwab. Change typefaces. So this is the iteration process of like I'm going to go and give feedback to the model. I'm going to make it try different things. So once that initial generation was already created, now the model is actually acting more as an editor, it's going and making tweaks to what's already been built. And this actually scales to very large projects. You could have started with something much bigger. So in the meantime, I'm going to show you what Luma Labs created with v0, which is absolutely phenomenal. This last night it already has 2,000 forks. I was telling you about the power of our community. So, by the way, you can just click community here on the v0 sidebar. I'm going to fork it because they generously shared it with the world. Notice all the incredible animations here. By the way, they shipped this to hire and attract talent to their company. I recommend them by the way. Like you should if you be a brand designer, take them into consideration. Notice that it's an interactive, everything is AI generated. They use their own AI image generation tool to create these beautiful frames. These are all AI generated as well.
And it's interactive. So like there's the autoplaying functionality. This is actually a complex layout and animation system that they built entirely in v0. I was telling you that at one point they even got some advice from o1. So shout out to OpenAI. I'm going to say make it sepia style colors. So this is an example of like okay I fork something. I already have a starting point. My bank grade contact form is ready in the meantime. Another fun thing to do is you can start with a screenshot. So I'll use another Next.js user as an example which is fortune.com. Shout out to them. They built a slick website. But let's say that I'm actually wanting to break into the news business. So, I'm just going to paste a screenshot. I could have also attached a Figma file and I'm going to have v0... v0 already knows. v0 can answer questions as well about the engineering design product world. So, like I can ask v0 what is a newsletter, explain with a diagram, use Lenny as an example. So v0 is also a knowledge seeking tool. But we do strongly sort of like quote unquote steer the tool to create things. So if I paste a screenshot, as you can see, it's cooking on creating a hopefully awesome news website. I specifically asked because I think it's funny to explain a newsletter with a diagram. So this v0 can create again like explanations, content, knowledge. The creator is Lenny. You were a former Airbnb product lead. I guess I should have used some examples from Airbnb by the way. But let's look at here at what it created with...
...with Fortune. So notice that the... I'm just noticing now the the cyber should have been on the center. Let's use the... I'm gonna zoom out a little bit. Let's use the refinement tool to center this. I call this, by the way, one of the hardest problems in computer science is actually centering things with CSS.
So, that's right, centering a div.
And in fact, look at it. It was a div. So notice that I did a precise sort of inline prompt in and the difference between v0 and a lot of other tools is that yes you do have the code and code is very important but I call it code last rather than code first, you're living in the product so it centered that. Another website that I love also built with Next.js is Semaphore. So I really like their sepia style. So I'm going to say use this, apply this style instead including...
So you're sharing a screen. So you used a screenshot to design to build the site and I'm using a different screenshot to tell it make it look like this.
And so the idea is that v0 can grok different aspects of what it needs to build. It can be functional aspects. It can be layout aspects. And one of the things that's also very important to know is we influence the model. So a lot of the things that you would have had to prompt you might get for free. One that's important to call out is responsiveness. So as an example, if I notice that if I do this, it's going to like make it work quite well in mobile. It's going to give me that hamburger menu. I can now tell it like apply that style to everything.
In the meantime, I'll show you this is actually to me very very impressive and I don't know why today I'm so fixated on the theme of sepia, but notice that not only did it change the background. I hope people can notice this. It applied it to the checkboxes and it applied a CSS I'm assuming this is a CSS filter. Yeah, it applied a CSS filter. Just for the sake of it, because I'm a nerd, I'm going to look at it, but yes, it applied a CSS filter. Confession time. I actually didn't know that there was a sepia function in the filter property of CSS. There were many ways to accomplish this. You could have also written the images or the videos to a canvas and like apply all kinds of algorithms and whatever.
I like that it did it more elegantly than you would have.
Yeah, exactly. So that's why you can't be too opinionated with the tool. So another cool thing is I do like showing screenshots, but I do want to remind people that the idea is not to clone other people's websites necessarily, right? Like it's just a cool demo. It's a simple way to show off what it can do. Exactly. Like take screenshots of your own things, right? Take screenshot of your art boards. Take screenshots of things that people put post in Slack. And also don't hesitate to add functionality.
Incredible. Thank you for doing the demo. It's I'm just trying to imagine having an engineer I'm working with asking them to do these things and not only just how annoying that would be like make it sepia but just how much time it would take from okay do this thing copy fortune.com it'd be like days, weeks, here it's just check it out here, months if ever.
That's right. Something that I noticed that I loved at the beginning when you were doing the prompting and that prompt improvement feature is it basically is like best practices to make it look good and look better which I think is one of the more interesting levers to working with AI is it just has best practices to help you build things that are beautiful and also feels like there's this opportunity of just helping you figure out if what you're building is at all a good idea like what is the problem you're trying to solve like it feels like there's a PM1 pager step that should exist like how do you know this is a problem? What have users told you? How many people have told you this? Things like that.
Yeah, there's something to be said about the fact that over time we're more and more peeking into the mind of the AI that in itself is becoming a killer feature. So the DeepSeek extreme, the thinking tokens moment was a very big moment for our industry I think because OpenAI did have the technology but they decided that for competitive reasons which you know are it's a reasonable thing to think no pun intended they were going to withhold it and also it wasn't clear that there was going to be product end user and product utility but when DeepSeek hit it was very obvious that people really liked the idea of understanding how the AI thinks and influencing where it should go. We've gotten actually amazing feedback and bug reports where people actually specifically point out, look, this is where the AI went wrong. Please fix it. So the more people we get on this product, the more thumbs up, thumbs down, the more user feedback we get. And by the way, I'll tell you like for people out there building products, my number one guidance or piece of advice I would give to any startup founder was create a lot of opportunities for people to give you feedback inside the product. I drew inspiration from Stripe. And this was amazing for the early days of Vercel. There was a feedback button with a very slick inline form with four emojis that would allow you to decide how you were feeling about the feature, the product at that very moment. And that would go straight into Slack. And we were building day in and day out just like streaming users thoughts right into our consciousness. And maybe we would get I don't know like tens, hundreds a day especially in the early days maybe like a couple a day and whatever when you're building AI products it's a constant stream of user feedback so for people that are thinking about not building AI products you know it's going to be hard to compete with something that has such a tight feedback loop with users. It's the whole idea is to capture users feedback. So the next iteration of the model, the prompt, the fine-tuning, the examples, the RAG is better. And one of the things that Vercel has done as a result of this insight is we've open sourced a lot of what makes v0 work. So let's say that you wanted to create the v0 for doctors as an example. You can go to vercel.com/templates and you can clone a ChatGPT template that basically follows all of the best practices in the world for like really high performance awesome UIs and now you can go out and build your own AI products. We've also open sourced the AI SDK which is a foundational plumbing of v0. It allows you to connect any model and generate UI from its responses. Not just output text, but actually generate UI. So maybe because I love showing stuff, I'll just really quickly show you this. I'm kind of excited about it.
So if you go to chat.vercel.ai super quick, you're going to see this is the open-source chat demo that we've built. It can you can ask questions like old school LLM but also you can ask let's actually finish this let's ask what is the weather in San Francisco we call this generative UI it's responding not with just plain text is creating components as a result last but not least and this is a sort of v0 style opportunity let's ask you to help me write an essay about Silicon Valley it's going to create canvas or artifacts style experience and everything is generative but also users can edit, refine, etc., etc., etc.
This actually reminds me of something I've been thinking about. There's all these startups that are building vertical AI tools. This is like a little bit of a tangent and there's always this like AI stuff for lawyers, AI stuff for doctors, nurses and the pitch there is that these are going to be founders that know a lot about the specific problem in this market and so they'll build like the tools that are very specific to them.
Yeah, I'm absolutely convinced that expert AI tools are the future. There's an amazing product being built on Vercel called chatprd.com. It's the v0 for writing PRDs and it's going to get a v0 integration soon. So you can write your PRD with AI and then you can deploy to create it with AI. That's just an example of like a vertical that you can go after. There's also OpenEvidence. It's like the ChatGPT for doctors. Actually there is an amazing startup building X-ray AI tooling. So the ideas I think are infinite and what I've seen from users of AI at Vercel like for example our legal team loves this tool called getgc.ai. They could in theory go to ChatGPT to ask legal questions but someone out there decided I'm going to build the best legal AI tool in the world. It's going to be up to date. I'm going to obsess about this problem. The CEO herself is a lawyer. So it's going to be hard to compete with that I think.
But here's what I'm thinking. This is like almost the opposite and I'm curious to get your take, but let's not spend too much time on this because it's a complete tangent.
So you showed me this weather widget that you just built. Basically, it's like a little mini app that the AI built as you're talking to it. Is there a world where when AI when AGI is far enough and approaching super intelligence, can it just build you Harvey for example in real time? Here's the best experience for a lawyer. Here we go. We got it for you.
Totally. Totally. I believe that eventually yes. But humans will always want to have some guard rails. The reality is that getgc is taking a double job. One is making the best tools for lawyers possible but also putting their weight behind it, saying like we've actually used this and we believe that this is what the future should look like. There's a sense of direction and opinion about things and I think left to its own devices AI I don't know like this is the double-edged sword of like prompt embellishment like AI doesn't always know exactly what we want or what we need is still very much a co-pilot, a partner and assistant is not really running our lives and I don't know that we even would want that ultimately.
Okay I'm going to go in a whole different direction which is taste. We hear this word taste all the time. It feels like a thing that people are always suggesting. This will continue to be an important skill to know what is good basically to know what people are likely to find valuable and good. And I know clearly you have great taste. You're building incredibly beautiful products. v0 is clearly it's like the most beautiful by default builder out there as we've seen. So in terms of building taste, people are always like, 'How the hell do I do that? I have great taste. I know I do. But I don't need to. How have you built taste? How do you think that is? How do you think you've built taste? And any advice for folks that are trying to improve their taste?
Yes, I think it's extremely important to try lots of products. You need to get yourself out there. I think it's very important to go back to that sort of like get into the world, ship things. Don't be hesitant of self-promotion in a way. So being very honest with yourself like building something getting it out there see how people react go back to the drawing board I think it's about exposure. At Vercel we have one of our sort of internal operating principles is increasing exposure hours try to quantify how much time you expose yourself to watching how people use your products even to watch how people use other products. And you'll develop that muscle. Like taste sometimes I think we think of as like this inaccessible thing that oh that person was born with taste. I see it as a skill that you can develop. And again the AI will help you a lot here because we try and capture some of the universal principles of it. But there's also trends in the world, right? Like I'm not a super like couture guy, but like you can see that like every year like Paris fashion week has like a theme to it and like there is some innovations that happen, some breakthroughs, whatever. And so trying to stay at the frontier or even try and define the frontier as well is certainly very exciting.
I love how doable this is increasing your exposure hours. Basically what I'm hearing is use the best apps.
Yes, there's like a feedback cycle component to it. Just like show, understand the nuances, right? So I actually recently created a I published it to my community profound v0. I created a ChatGPT style interface inspired by Grok and I captured a few things that Grok does that are just so smart. So on mobile web when you press enter on their input they default to creating a new line because they know that the way that people are used to submitting things on mobile is not by hitting enter like we would do on a desktop computer. You can tap the little icon and like your message goes out. On desktop they inverted it. When you press enter you're expected to submit. I think if you got a new line, I think a lot of people would get frustrated that most people don't know that they can press command enter to submit and whatever like it slows everything down. And you can basically prompt for those things, right? But you have to pay attention to the details and you have to decide what you want to see in the world. Sometimes that means like either defining best practices or seeking the best practices and learning from others. Another aspect of exposure hours is that you tend to overrate how well your products work. It's very important to give your product to another person and watch them interact with it. Expose yourself to the pain of reality. And the more you sort of like submerge yourself in the real deal nitty-gritty of what happens when people use your interfaces and whatnot, I think you'll come out stronger, more grounded, hopefully more humbled.
We don't like pain though. And I like that this is a push. Create some more pain in your life. Show people the thing you're building. Is there like a do you have like a heuristic or a number of how many exposure hours per week per month you want your team to have? Or is it just more is always better?
Yeah, more is always better. I mean because the inertia is to get inside your head and the inertia is to think you know everything and assume that everything is going good and you know there are no errors. Of course it's fast. It worked on my machine. I think it's always a push for more. I do sometimes little things like I ask my team to color my calendar. So I say like I have to have certain amount of like one-on-ones with my team represented on my calendar, you know, kind of like meetings so that I can sync with people and see how the company's doing. Then I want to have customer meetings and during those customer meetings I push myself to use the products in fact with our enterprise customers something that I do is like I try to forget how things are built what feature of Next.js or Vercel they use and whatever I just frequently use their products and I want the product to be great that's all and then I try to work backwards into so a form of exposure hours for me is seeing what kind of success our customers are having in the real world and so but again it's just a heuristic like maybe one third of my meetings this week were customer meetings and I tried and watch them do. Another really quick one is we invite people frequently to demo how they use the product live sometimes to the executive team, sometimes to the whole company. And we always inevitably discover something interesting from the customer about maybe there is something that they're in pain about that we didn't know about or maybe something was not as intuitive as we thought. And I find with these sorts of things when you do them when you talk to customers, you have them show how they use the product, you always like, why have I not done this more often? Why am I what am I thinking? This is just so mind-blowing usually.
Yes. I want to talk about limitations of v0 at this point. So what should people know about just like what v0 can't do? Like can you if you have an existing codebase can you plug it in and start doing stuff or is that coming? What else should people know just like okay it's not going to do this yet but...
Yeah you can import code bases through zip files and git is coming very soon. It can do full stack development. Can connect to APIs in the next couple days, maybe even before this podcast is out. We'll have this very tight integrations so that if you need a database or if you need an AI model or if the AI decides it needs that, it'll just seamlessly install it from the Vercel marketplace and the Vercel marketplace has already curated some of the best infrastructure products in the world to store data, to search data etc. So, it's going to make the product even more powerful. I'll say again, I kind of did that exercise and I do that exercise every day of like I have a wild idea and try to see if it can come to life. It's very powerful so far. AIs are still very much a work in progress. They can make mistakes. We have it as a little disclaimer underneath the input. You will find errors. Our fitness function and we've seen such a strong correlation between user love and retention. v0 is actually a very retentive product compared to other AI products that I've built in the past or little demos that we've done or whatever. People subscribe and use it every single day and are very sort of like if they notice a bug they're very jittery about it because they're depending on it day in and day out. But I'll say errors are still possible, right? Like every once in a while you might get a runtime error or whatever but a lot of the technology that we've added is so that v0 is very agentic. It has a lot of agency in how to act. So you're going to see very frequently that if it runs into errors v0 tries to solve them itself. And then last I will say when products get really big, AI today is just not as good at dealing with massive code bases. But going back to that idea of the React component because we break down things into files and components, we tend to do quite well in that dimension. In fact, one thing that Next.js was sort of known for is that in order to start a project, you just create a file and Next.js will route to that page. It was if anyone is familiar with PHP, it's kind of like how PHP worked. And so it's so good that LLMs are good at working with files now because it fits very naturally into our world. And if you can scope down when things get really big, if you can give it a smaller task to work on a specific component or a specific file, you decrease that likelihood of the LLM not being able to reason over very long context windows.
I want to go back to design. We talked about how v0 is really good at just great design by default. To kind of lean into that more if someone wants to improve the design of their product. You know, most people are not designers. They don't really know how to make it look good. They don't know what to ask for. Any just tips and best practices for making their app even better, look even nicer.
Yeah, it was really interesting. The other day I met with a CIO of a large bank who on the side does a lot of coding or like tries out new technologies and whatnot. And I showed him v0 and he immediately became a v0 addict. Like he texts me every day with feedback. He moved two websites of his own from another like sort of website builder type provider to v0 and Vercel. Deployed them, gave them a domain name. They're live in production. And then he said, 'Look, I have this challenge. I have this music festival that I organized with a couple friends and this is what the designer gave us.' And he had this kind of like brochure. It looked very much like a print style design. And so he gave that to v0 and the first result he was kind of like dinging me for it. He's like look this doesn't look good and then because I have experience with the tool I said like why don't I just give it the feedback like literally you know you were asking yesterday like earlier some of the things that I've learned with the product and I was or the best practice what would I recommend if I were sitting next to someone not only you should not hesitate to give the AI feedback it's so interesting dude like sometimes people will press a feedback button to tell us what they wanted v0 to do. And literally all we had to do in many cases is just can you just tell v0 that? And so he sent me this message saying like yeah I just don't like the design and I gave him back a prompt that I would have given. I said like make I don't know what I said it specifically but it's like make it more jazzy. Make it pop. And so trying and again goes back to like try to draw inspiration from variety that the AI already knows about. So, in a couple of prompts, we ended up with something that was in his mind better than the original print design of that brochure, that concert lineup. And at that time, again, I'm even learning about what v0 is capable of and the best ways to use it. But with design, I think unleashing its creativity with and seeing things and playing with it is definitely super helpful.
So, one thing I'm hearing here is just tell it make this look better.
You can totally... but and if you can use tokens that are relevant. So, neo-brutalist, minimalist, newspaper-like, vintage, make it look like a telegram. Like you can sort of like try and reach for things that you maybe would not naturally come to mind. And you will be surprised about how well it can transfer those ideas into reality.
Incredible. Too easy. Maybe to close out our conversation, we'll see where this topic goes. I had this tweet that I loved that I super resonate with. The secret to product quality is blood, sweat, and tears. I completely agree. I think that's why I think my newsletter has been successful. I spend so much time on every newsletter post, more than I think anyone spends on a newsletter post. Like 10, 20, 30 hours. And that's why I think it works. Is there anything more behind that tweet? Anything you've learned and just the importance of working hard, I guess, to create great stuff.
Yeah, I mentioned exposure hours is a good example of like look, it can be painful. It can be painful to see your baby break in front of everyone and noticing all the... the other thing is that a great product is made up of a thousand little details, right? And so you're never really done. There's a humility that comes from the process also of why the best product builders will say nine nos for every yes because when you say yes is like adopting a puppy. A feature is like adopting a puppy. It grows into a beast that you have to take care of and is very demanding and loving but also it's a lot and poops everywhere. So you have to have a creative restraint and while you also have to give, you have to withhold sometimes with the respect of the real world complexity that emerges. A little thing that I, you know, kind of obsess about, I'll give kudos to the Midjourney team. I really love how Midjourney works on mobile web. I don't know if they have an app yet, like a native app, but like their mobile website is phenomenal. And to get it to be that good, by the way, it's possible. That's actually possible to make great things on mobile web but it needs that sense of love and restraint and obsession and testing a lot and using your own products a lot. Dogfooding is a great mechanism obviously. So we use the heck out of Vercel and v0 to make Vercel and v0 and hopefully that helps us do better. But there is a lot of blood, sweat, and tears in the process.
Yeah, you can tell how much you use the product. Like it comes through in everything you say. Let me actually ask about this. You talked about how you have you said you have 600 engineers.
150. So how is AI changing the way they work? Is there anything there? Because I feel like you guys are at the cutting edge of how products are built. What's happening? Like is it just everyone's on Cursor and v0 to build stuff?
Yeah. Yes. But actually it's more profound. I think it's the everybody can ship. It's the we build with AI principles in mind. I actually give a shout out to the Luma Labs engineer who said, well, I'll use AI for everything. I'll use AI also to generate the images for the website, you know. And I'm seeing, for example, our designers that are working on our next conference generate all of the animations with video models. I'm looking at our marketing team are creating demos of how the infrastructure works with v0 that are better than any static diagram or landing page that I've ever seen. One of my most viral zets or X posts is something that one of our designers created which explains how our compute infrastructure works with an interactive demo. And until he created that by the way he designed it and created and we shipped it all in the tool. First of all, it wasn't part of his day-to-day job to do that. AI is making you such a powerful generalist that you can step out of your comfort zone of like well my job was to do only this you can just create. We have a ritual every Friday we had it this morning called demo Fridays and so it's very important to create the space for people to step out of that comfort zone and use AI. So us giving permission to people to build and ship things is part of that cultural backdrop that makes these things possible. We had a demo today as part of demo Friday of our VP of sales engineering also creating an amazing tool that he's going to use to help prospects understand Vercel with v0. So I've heard from devops and infrastructure engineers how much they use tools like Cursor to work on the low levels of the Vercel infrastructure. So I think very quickly we're seeing AI being embedded everywhere. I just heard a product request from a customer was saying, 'Okay, Vercel, you sell domain names. Let me come up with new ideas with AI.' So I just see a future where AI becomes synonymous with software. I do look forward to it because we need to stop talking about AI at some point. I foresee it's probably not going to happen, but it is useful to remind people that AI equals software now and we are a software company. We build software and we use software to build software. So...
And AI is just a part of that.
Yeah, Guillermo, what a beautiful way to end it. Is there anything else you wanted to mention? Anything else that you want to leave listeners with before I let you go?
I'll leave you with my vision of the future, which is we have this billboard in San Francisco, which is everybody can cook. It's also part of the Ratatouille film, one of my favorite movies. I look forward to a future where everybody can get their ideas out there. If you can dream it, you can ship it. And also that when you use products and when you see the creations of other people and the things that they put out into the world that we are collectively making the world better. So, anything you experience hopefully gets faster, higher quality, fewer bugs as we go along. And I think we're all contributing to that. And I look forward to that and look forward to everyone's feedback on how Vercel can play a part in that future.
So to build on that, where can folks find you online? Where can they should they just go to vercel.com? Is it v0.com?
Yeah. And go to v0.dev to get started. I did mention if you want to build your own v0, this is more advanced, but check out our templates on vercel.com. And also, I'm rauchg on X, so you can DM me or tweet at me at any time.
Amazing. Guillermo, thank you so much for being here.
Thank you, Lenny. It was so fun.
Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennispodcast.com. See you in the next episode.
Something that's fascinated me for decades. Ever since I could think about this question, and that's the arrow of time. I can have photographs of the past. I cannot have photographs that are truly representing what happens in the future. The early universe 14 billion years ago near the big bang was in a very special organized state and it's becoming more disorganized and higher entropy as we say ever since then. That's where the arrow of time comes from.
This is StarTalk Cosmic Queries Edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. We got here, of course, Lord Chuck Nice. Hey, what's happening, man?
You're locked and loaded there.
I'm locked and loaded cuz we got queries, man.
And they're not just queries about anything to anyone. No, they're queries on like cosmology to one of our cosmologists about town.
Yes. One of our fave interviews. We've got Sean Carroll on the line. Sean, how you doing, man?
Hey, how's it going, Lord? Chuck, I didn't know you got a promotion.
Yeah, if you try hard like he does, you might get one, too.
Yeah, I mean, no kings, but lords are okay. The occasional lord.
There you go. That's right. No, I'm down with the no kings, but I'm still Lord nice.
And so, let's catch people up on your trajectory through life. You spent a lot of your professional career at Caltech over in Pasadena and now you joined us back on the east coast in Baltimore at Johns Hopkins University.
And I've got you as the Homewood professor of natural philosophy.
That's right. There aren't that many of those. I'm basically the only one. So, it's nice.
Right. This is a very retro title.
It is. I think Newton had a title of natural philosophy before the word physics was a thing.
Yeah. And you're one of my favorite people out there because not only do you bring science to the public, which is something we care deeply about here at StarTalk, but you have for me the best combination of astrophysics fluency, physics fluency, and philosophy fluency, right? You put all that together and there's no boring conversation you will ever have. Ever.
But we're gonna try to change that today.
I'm gonna take this as a challenge. Yeah, I bet I can do it.
So Sean, you had a couple of books recently. I mean, you're always out there, you know, talking physics smack with an interested public. You have two in a row here. Space, Time, and Motion. You know, that's pretty much everything, right?
That's pretty much everything, right? But no, not for Sean Carroll. He's got Quanta and Fields.
Oh, wow. Look at that. Now it is everything.
Well, Space, Time, and Motion and then Quanta and Fields. What's left?
What's left will be volume three, which is Complexity and Emergence. That's what I'm nearly done with writing right now. So, it's a whole three-part series called The Biggest Ideas in the Universe.
Yeah, that's definitely what that is. For sure. For sure. You know, fields is a thing, right? That if I didn't study physics, I'd still think they were kind of imaginary. You go back to Faraday, right, who says there's magnetism there, but there's a field. Well, can I see it? No. But the iron filings can see it, but I can't. Right. Okay. But if you take away the iron filings, is it still there? Yeah. And so just to what did it take to get everybody comfortable with the idea of a field?
That's a great question because it wasn't easy. It took a while. You know, Isaac Newton worried about the fact that he didn't know about the concept of fields. He said that there was a gravitational force between the sun and the earth and it depends on the distance. You know, the inverse square law, the bigger the distance, the less the force. But he didn't know how it got there. How does the earth know where the sun is, how far away it is, how massive it is? And he said, you know, this is over my pay grade. I'm going to leave this for future generations to decide, which is not the kind of thing that Newton said very often. So, it wasn't until the 1800s.
So, he knew something was up.
He knew something was up.
That needed further explanation. Yeah. Wow.
Action at a distance. You know, Einstein famously said spooky action at a distance for quantum mechanics. But even in Newton's time, there was this weird thing. What is it that takes the gravitational force and moves it from the sun to the earth, etc. and vice versa.
Yeah. And in some way there was an answer there from Laplace, Pierre-Simon Laplace, but it wasn't until Faraday, like you said, that he starts moving magnets and watching electrical currents pop up in a wire next to it, like not there, not touching it, right? Through empty space, something happened. And the great thing about Faraday was he was an absolutely genius, intuitive physicist. He was not the math expert that you sometimes need to be. So Maxwell, James Clerk Maxwell came along, was a huge admirer of Faraday and basically made it all mathematically respectable and said, 'Yeah, there's these things called the electric field and the magnetic field and they fill all of space and you can't see them, but we can predict what they're going to do and they're super duper important for explaining everything.' I think Faraday, if memory serves, in none of his published papers does an equation of any kind appear.
That's possible. I didn't know quite that factoid, but it's absolutely in keeping. You know, he was thinking about, in fact, it wasn't even fields that he primarily focused on. He imagined lines of force. So like out of an electron, there's an electric field, we would say now, but he thought they were like literally lines of force filling all of space. And Maxwell's first papers were about trying to make mathematical sense of lines of force. And he eventually said no it's better to think of fields with little vectors. So like little arrows at every point and then the lines are sort of moving in the direction of the arrows.
And that all happened in the 19th century.
19th century. And the great thing was, you know, if you think of the number of different apparent phenomena in the world that we now think of as electricity and magnetism in action, right? Heat, light, radio waves, x-rays, the magnets, all this stuff like very very different things all explained in just two fields talking to each other, electricity and magnetism.
That's amazing. That's completely crazy. And I was just thinking I go through this sort of existential moment maybe once a month. I'm sitting there and I press a button on my smartphone and it changes the channel on my TV, right? And then I press another button, it starts my car, which is three miles away. Yeah. You know, and I'm thinking this is magic.
Yeah. Basically. Yeah. And that's this is why writing books is good because you write a book and you say like you point your remote control at your TV and a radio wave comes out and turns it on and you get many emails saying that's an infrared wave, not a radio wave. You don't know what you're talking about. But they're all different manifestations of electromagnetism and so...
No, no, wait. But my cell phone is not.
Your cell phone is not, but your TV remote control is.
Yeah. Exactly. Like who knows these things? I can't keep track of these things. I'm just a theoretical physicist.
It's funny. While you guys are talking, I'm sitting here with my iPad and I'm taking my finger and moving the screen up and down into this void above your...
Right, and it's exactly the same thing. You're like, isn't that the electromagnetic field on my finger?
Basically everything is the electromagnetic field. Yeah. Other than gravity. It's all electromagnetism all the way down.
Yeah. We live it. We just live it. There's a hugely important philosophy of science lesson here because like Neil said, you can't see the electric field or the magnetic field, but they're clearly everywhere. Like we have equations that describe them exactly and make predictions and fit all the data. Therefore, we accept that they are there. You don't need to see them with your eyes to have evidence that they're part of reality. I do a whole standup bit about that which is...
And I try to beat that into Chuck every time when I say the universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.
Which believe it or not I can't accept. You must make sense to me because I am the center of all things.
And so Sean, what's this latest paper we have you published here co-authored, what Hawking radiation looks like as you fall into a black hole? Was that something that needed to be addressed?
It's something that I have worried about for decades and honestly... really. Yeah. Well, so here's the question there. There's two things that we think are true about a black hole. One is if you're standing very far away and you look at the black hole, Stephen Hawking says black holes give off radiation. Okay, that not that much radiation admittedly, especially for a big black hole, but he again has an equation that predicts exactly how much you should see. The second thing is we have this feeling, no one's ever done it, but we have this belief that if you fall into a black hole, you see nothing special when you cross the boundary, when you cross the event horizon, right? It just looks like ordinary empty space everywhere. But these two statements seem a little bit contradictory because if I'm standing far away and I see radiation coming out and then I just fall in, right? I just stop my rocket ship or whatever and let myself fall in. You know, Neil, that you should see that red shift, that radiation get blue shifted. It should look brighter and brighter and more and more energetic.
So why does it turn off when you hit the event horizon? What actually happens? What is it that you see?
And it turns out this is 100% implicit in all the equations that we have but took a lot of work to actually pull it out. And the answer in a very short slightly oversimplified form is there is high-intensity radiation when you're crossing the event horizon but you're moving so fast that you don't have time to observe it. So it looks to you like there's nothing there.
Wow. Yes. Wow. I mean, in a Heisenberg uncertainty principle way, you don't have time to observe it.
Yeah, exactly. Right. And by the way, before I forget, I got to give huge credit to Chris Tully, my co-author on this.
He was a grad student at Harvard who just graduated, did all the heavy lifting on this and other projects, and he was fantastic. So, he got the right answer after other people got it wrong. Graduate students, they have to have an exception to the slave amendment in the constitution for graduate students, right? Just so you know.
Why are they not, are they only three-fifths of a person?
No. Three-fifths of a scientist. Yeah.
Three-fifths of a scientist. Is that what they are? His graduate student did the heavy lifting. Right. There it is. But see, that's the Sean is in the Bahamas and his graduate student...
And that's the way it should be. Sean already did his work. Okay. That's the whole idea. I would have loved to do the heavy lifting, but for his sake, I needed to let him have that experience. You know how it is.
Of course. Yes. I mean, listen, Leonardo da Vinci, when he painted, he had artisans that worked under him and they do a bunch of the work and then you come in and you sign your name. No, but I will tell you this that in physics and astronomy in our journals, it is not our tradition to put our degrees after our name the way it is in the social sciences.
Well, I made up a reason why that's good, but I don't know if it had different origins. And Sean, you might have some insight here. If you didn't otherwise know the people, you have no idea who is senior, who is junior, because any a brilliant idea can come out of anybody. Even your students. And so there's no reason to segregate who's got title and who doesn't because a brilliant idea is a brilliant idea no matter the package. And a stupid idea is a stupid idea.
True. No matter who comes up with it. Yeah, that's I like that. I like that system.
It's very egalitarian. Yeah, I like that.
Mhm. Ready? Do you harbor questions about the universe? Some long-held bit of cosmic curiosity lingering within you or questions about anything at all. You can become a Patreon supporter of StarTalk. You have access to our exclusive question line on our website. Those are where we draw our questions for our cosmic... some of the most extreme objects in the universe. StarTalk is a work in progress where we every month come up with some new way, some new idea, some new understanding of how to bring the universe down to Earth. And we could not do that without your support. Thank you. And as always, keep looking up.
Sean, one other thing before we get to our Patreon questions. Something that's fascinated me for decades ever since I could think about this question and that's the arrow of time. Some of my earliest books in middle school were all about time and how it passes and why do we know time is going forward rather than backwards and you have some emergent thinking on that?
I absolutely do. You know this is something that was hugely important for me in my career. The arrow of time is just the fact that the past and future are different from each other, right? Like I can have photographs of the past. I cannot have photographs that are truly representing what happens in the future.
Lord Chuck can do it, but I can't do it. So, you know, why is this true? And Aristotle wouldn't even have had the question like there are different things like why is an elephant not an orange? Like what are you even asking? But once Isaac Newton comes along with his theory of physics, suddenly the distinction between the past and future disappears. Like these equations don't treat the past and future differently. So it turns out, long story short, that it's a cosmology question. The early universe 14 billion years ago near the big bang was in a very special organized state and it's becoming more disorganized and higher entropy as we say ever since then. That's where the arrow of time comes from. But okay, why was the early universe like that? And that we don't know. So I wrote a paper about this 20 years ago and I'm revisiting that now to try to improve upon it. We still don't know, but I do think we're making progress in that direction.
Well, I'd hope so after 20 years.
That's not very long in the history of the universe.
I was going to say, excuse me, universe on me. It's a fourth of your life. A fifth of your life.
The universe will wait. We know which direction time moves because certain phenomena we would never see in reverse. Like some famous ones are you drop a blob of ink in water, the ink will disperse. You never see that happen in reverse. In reverse, right? So if you're just eavesdropping on a scene, right, and no one told you which way time was pointing just by phenomena that occur, you should be able to figure it out.
Yeah. Like you never see an orange fall up from the ground back onto a branch, right?
But these are, you know, you're picking good examples, but let's admit you're picking the easy examples. We understand those examples, but I can make a choice about what to do right now. Like I could make a choice right now. This is the most boring podcast ever. I'm going to storm off and not do it.
But I can't make a choice now not to have come on the podcast in the first place. I can't make a choice that affects the past.
And so that's right there at the boundary of physics and philosophy. Both the physicists and the philosophers need to think about this. And again, we have good ideas, but there's still work to be done.
Wow. And now you got me thinking about the multiple timelines and parallel universes and every single like if we are on a call it a trajectory every choice that we make all those other possible trajectories from this point of decision still continue forward just without me. So, what the hell is happening there?
Not sure if I'm quite on board with your explanation there of what's going on.
Well, no. What I'm saying is I'm being way too literal, Sean. What I'm saying is the possibilities of all those trajectories.
Well, the many worlds hypothesis. Is that what that is? I think that that's what you're talking about. Okay. Well, it's pretty close. I mean, many worlds is like really down to earth and equation-based. There's the Schrödinger equation of quantum mechanics tells you what set of things happen in the future and which don't. And it's not because you're making a decision that creates a difference between one world and another. It's because of entanglement in the underlying quantum structure of reality. But we do have reason to believe that there are other copies of the universe where things turned out a little bit different. And you can all if you have an iPhone, you can download an app called Universe Splitter. And I'm a big salesman for this app here. And I don't get any commission or anything, but I think everyone should get it because when you're torn between two decisions, should I take this job or should I just continue living a life of leisure? You can ask the phone and it will, you can plug in these two options and it will send a photon down a beam splitter that has a 50-50 chance of saying you should take the job or you should just stay sitting around and then there'll be if you do it, if you obey the instructions, there will be a world in which you did the other thing.
That brings me to my question.
Well, you got a question before we start with Patreon and specifically did you pay your $5 a month? I'mma owe you.
In another world, he did.
In another world, I paid it.
That's funny. All right, Sean, this is specifically for you. Okay, I this question. All right.
It's my question. First of all, you have to be familiar with this experiment. In the double slit delayed choice quantum eraser experiment. Okay.
I know you've been worrying about that one. Yeah.
No, I really am, Sean. And I'm dead serious.
Wait, wait. So Sean, that's...
I told Neil, this is keeping me up at night.
It's a thing. Yeah, it's a thing, right? It's the double slit delayed choice quantum eraser experiment.
Okay. I've never heard of this. Okay, go.
Okay. And maybe it's all I don't know. Maybe it's I read about it and I'm just like, this is crazy. Maybe it's BS. I don't know.
All right. So, it appears that the photons know they're being measured. Like, they actually know. All right. So, the signal photons and the idler photons show a constructive wave interference pattern when they're not measured by a detector, but there's four detectors and they can't know because of the way the detectors are set up because the photons are split and some go on not to be measured and some go on to be measured. Okay, now here's the deal. There is no wave interference pattern when they are measured. So this makes it look like they know when they're being observed. I can understand the whole explanation of entanglement. I don't know why I should say I can accept it. I don't know why it's easy for me to accept that, but I can just accept it. What I can't know or understand is a particle knowing that it's being watched. So, are there any hypotheses that would explain why this thing would...
No, wait. Wait. So, that's just that your query there sounds like you just need the double slit experiment.
I'm still distracted by the rest of what it's called.
No, this is beyond the double slit experiment because well, maybe I'll let Sean explain it because I can explain it, but I'm probably not going to explain it as eloquently as Sean. The way the experiment is set up, it's a yeah, the double slit experiment is of course a famous thought experiment originally that they wrote down what it should do long before they ever did it to illustrate the magic of quantum mechanics. You have a single electron going through two slits. It's detected somewhere on the other side. And it's just a dot, you know, you can't figure out that much from the dot, but you do that many, many, many times. And what you see is an interference pattern. It's like a wave went through the two slits and waves go up and down depending on how far away they are from the target. And so a wave going through one slit can interfere with the wave going through the other slit and that's what you see in the distribution of dots on the detector screen. So the miracle occurs when you observe which slit the electron goes through, right? Because in the Copenhagen usual way of thinking about quantum mechanics, when you observe the electron, you collapse its wave function. It's no longer going through both slits. You saw it go through one or the other. And magically, the interference pattern goes away because indeed you changed the electron dramatically by observing which one it goes through. So that's all standard stuff. Everyone and their mom learns that in kindergarten when they're learning about quantum mechanics. The delayed choice quantum eraser experiment is a hilariously convoluted elaboration of that which makes people feel bad for no good reason at all.
