David Hsu on AI skepticism
From Enabling Non-Engineers to Build AI Agents & Apps | Retool CEO · · Product School
“When LLMs first came out, I was experimenting even before GPT-3.5, trying GPT-2 back in the day, and to be honest, I was a little bit skeptical. I wasn't too sure about how smart they were going to get, how useful they were necessarily going to be. You know, they can almost be like a Markov chain, you know, a Markov chain feels smart in some ways, but you know, it's fully probabilistic underneath, and so how far could you go? Obviously, transformers are different, but you know, there was a question in my head, and it was tough because actually, we had a pretty good business, we had a really strong business if you don't look at LLMs at all, you know, so our sort of pre-LLM business was doing very well, and the question was, do we want to, from a focus perspective, do we want to go all in now on LLMs, or do we keep on going and do two things at once?”
On , David Hsu, CEO & Co-Founder at Retool, spoke about AI skepticism during Enabling Non-Engineers to Build AI Agents & Apps | Retool CEO on Product School.
About David Hsu
David Hsu, CEO and co-founder of Retool, appeared in a session on April 1, 2026, discussing the company's focus on enabling non-engineers to build internal applications and AI agents. He stated that Retool connects to data across various sources without storing it, a capability he said has attracted customers including the US Air Force, US Navy, US Army, and Coinbase. Hsu also described a strategic shift, saying the company is considering "a very high conviction bet to totally rearchitect our product" and move toward letting large language models generate code on the platform rather than using drag-and-drop frameworks. Hsu predicted that autonomous agents replacing human work is a "business economic inevitability" by 2028, citing pressure to optimize labor costs. He contrasted this with what he described as unsustainable growth in some AI companies, giving the example of a live coding firm with over $100 million in revenue but gross retention around 55%, suggesting such companies "will be gone in a few years without sustainable use cases." Hsu emphasized the importance of hands-on building, noting that he personally experiments with tools like Boltbox and that product leaders must iterate to avoid being reinvented by competitors.