저자: ChamathPalihapitiya · 외국인
요약 보기
AI는 부(富)의 평준화 도구가 될 수 있으며 자본 장벽이 0에 가까워진다고 주장. 다만 AI는 판단력을 주지 않아 전문성이 여전히 필요하고, 과신 위험이 크다고 경고. 기술 부의 이익은 플랫폼 제작자보다 생태계 참여자에게 더 크게 돌아갈 수 있다고 봄. 부동산 사례로 과거 하락 후 신고점 회복 패턴을 언급. 일자리 대체 우려에는 기술 발전으로 시간 활용 방식이 확장돼 왔다며 낙관적 입장. 특정 종목·자산에 대한 1~3개월 가격 방향 예측은 없음.
다듬은 글
If you don't know who Chamath Palihapitiya is, he helped build Facebook. He's been in venture capital for over a decade and he co-hosts one of the most listened to shows in tech. So, he's on the inside. He's an insider in a lot of these companies, inside this industry, and he's close to the administration.
All three. And what he does in this interview is something I genuinely haven't heard anywhere else. He stops arguing about whether AI is good or bad and just draws the map. Who owns what, where the gaps are, who already lost without knowing it. However you feel about him, this is one of the most valuable interviews you'll watch on AI this year.
I mentioned this last week, but I think it's um it's a bit of the tale of two cities here. Um we've always had this cycle of boom and bust. You know, when I first came, it was right before the first dot-com bust. And so, I, like a lot of people at the time, I was a 20-year-old graduate from engineering and I wanted to be, you know, on Broadway, so to speak.
Um and within months of me getting here, it was the top of the market and we kind of went through the dot-com bust and the rebuild. Went through it again in the mobile wave. We had a little burst of it in crypto, but that really didn't amount to much, really. Um and now this is the third big cycle. So, in one perspective, sort of what's old is new again.
You know, we're going back through the cycle. This really speaks to the cyclical nature of markets. When you're inside the world, you can't see out and all you can think about is how hard it's hitting you right now. But if you can take a calming deep breath and zoom out, you'll see this is survivable.
There have been many market downturns before and there will certainly will be more in the future. Take real estate, our bread and butter. Since the Great Depression, we've had four genuine housing downturns. Four. The Great Depression itself, the savings and loans crisis in the late 1980s, the 2008 financial crisis, and the rate shock we've been living through since 2022.
The 2008 one was the worst since the Great Depression. National home prices fell roughly 27% and in the markets that got hit the hardest like Phoenix and Vegas, it was more like 50 or 60%. At the time that felt like the end of the world and it took until 2017 to climb even back. And today, the national home prices sit somewhere around 75% above that peak in 2006.
Four downturns in nearly 100 years, every single time the new high came in higher than the old high. That's the pattern. The line goes down and then it goes back up past where it was. It's the most important economic leveler of our lifetime. It is the thing that will create the most amount of equality if it's allowed to get to market.
It is the thing that will allow anybody to follow their dreams and to build something, to build a life for themselves, to build a life for their family outside of the conventions of what society says has to happen to make a living. Why is that? We are at a point where, you know, kind of this old adage where like you stand on the shoulders of giants, right?
Where you stand on the shoulders of all these people that have come before you. Think of what had had to happen for AI to happen. This already rings true to us personally. Just look at what we've built since 2024. When these AI tools first went public with ChatGPT and then Claude etc. Several consequential tools that we're running our business on today are based on that.
In a few short months, we replaced a $30,000 investor relations platform. We replaced our investor communication and marketing stock that was costing us five to $600 per month and we keep going tool after tool, agent after agent and we even built our own ARI, which is our AI real estate investing operating system.
It now houses everything from the the acquisition phase through managing the asset all the way to the cycle of selling the property, the entire life cycle in one system we own, we control, we change, we adapt, we update based on our needs. And all of that have been compressed into a very short period of time.
That's what he meant by the leveler. And I can't help but be extremely excited about this. Knowledge is different than expertise and intelligence. Knowledge is being able to go and search for the design of a PN junction. You have no idea what that means. I do not. You can Google it and you'll show it to somebody else.
He also doesn't know what it means. Yeah, but you're able to get that information. PN junction is the core structural unit on which we build a transistor. Okay. Now though, what you can say is design me a transistor. And you have a spec that you can now mail to somebody and they can actually tape that out for you and you can get back in the mail an actual functional thing.
It's this level of expertise that you can shape. I agree with him to a point. Here's the catch. You still have to bring the level of expertise to shape what AI builds for you. AI can't give you judgment. That's the key point that I need you to circle. There's an academic paper on exactly this. Researchers gave people AI assistance on questions that models tend to get wrong.
Without AI, people got about 27% right and critically 44% of them were willing to say, "I don't know." Now, with AI in hand, the accuracy actually dropped 9% and their willingness to admit they didn't know collapsed under 3%. Meanwhile, their confidence roughly doubled, meaning that they're confidently telling you something while they're being wrong.
Three times less accurate, but yet twice as confident. That's the whole problem in one sentence. AI will sound extremely intelligent while handing you the wrong answer. So, unless you have the skill set to know what the output should look like, what you actually expect to come back, AI becomes the worst possible tool you can pick because you'll walk away with enormous confidence built on completely wrong information.
The expertise isn't optional. It's the thing that makes the tool safe to use. Let me first ask about it something you said which kind of the not even democratization but this leveling I think is the way you referred to it. We're also seeing at the same time though folks who own these companies or at least lead these companies and their larger shareholders venture capitalist or something you do.
There is did did did. There seems to be definitely a capital inequality that gets formed by this. You talk about leveling. Is there also not a concern that just insane amounts of wealth more than we've seen before are going to get concentrated in an even smaller number of people? I think if we do it right the answer to that question will actually be way better than what we want it to be.
Does anybody want to live in a world where there are individually five humans that win and 8.7 billion minus five who are not winning as much? Nobody wants that. Including those five people because their lives become absolutely terrible as well. Okay? What do we all want? We all want to live in a place where two things are true.
I decide to pursue something nobody gets in my way. Nobody tells me I can't do it. That the amount of capital that is required to do it gets smaller and smaller and smaller and approaches zero, right? And then the second is I live in a society where so many other people are doing those things that are that are equivalently uh what that means for me for them.
So that we all appreciate that we're all trying to make something useful for ourselves. What he's saying here is quite profound. When we hear about hundreds of billions trillions of dollars pouring into AI, those of us on the outside might think we can't really participate in this once in a maybe forever wealth creation.
Come on, we're not Sam, we're not Dario, right? That's absolutely not true. Will you and I be the next trillionaire? Um maybe not, right? Well, can we build something extraordinary and be absolutely extraordinary wealthy? Absolutely. That's why I love what Chamath said about wanting the world with zero or near zero friction between you and what you want to create.
Because this is beyond the democratization of wealth. This is about removing the friction that has always sat between people and wealth generation or creation. Regardless of where you start, regardless of your gender, your age, your race, your abilities, what counts instead is the vision and creativity.
Your wealth becomes truly frictionless, determined by your desire and your creativity. The more creative your solution, the more the world is going to reward you. Yes, there will still be inequality, but it's inequality based on choice and talent. We have this meeting with Bill Gates and it was something along the lines of, "Why do you think you're building a platform?" And I go through this whole song and dance and he says something to the effect of, you know, "That's not a platform." He said it a little bit
more colorful. They'll sanitize it for your ears. It's YouTube, you can say what you want to. Oh, yeah. It's like "Are you [ __ ] stupid? That's not a platform. A platform is when the economic value that the participants generate greatly exceeds that of the platform maker. That is not what this is." Telling us basically that at the time our efforts at Facebook platform were mischaracterized.
Forget about Facebook platform for a second cuz it wasn't successful. But if you take that sentence and you, for example, look at the Google ecosystem. As much money as Google makes, it is undeniably true that the ecosystem that works around and on top of Google, all the advertisers, all the companies selling things, that economic value far exceeds what Google makes.
And that's what you think will happen here, whether that be Open AI or Anthropic. You think You think what's built on top of them will exceed those the values there. It has the potential if we don't [ __ ] it up. This is fundamentally the difference between cost and value. Think about it. Even right now with all the shakeup around Bitcoin, and I'm not a super fan, but hear me out.
If someone offers you to sell you one Bitcoin for $1 today in 2026, you wouldn't say no. You wouldn't say, "Oh my gosh, I can't afford it." You'd be thinking, "How can I buy as many as possible?" Because the economic value so widely exceed the cost that the price stops being the question. That's the principle underneath everything.
Whatever you do, investing, selling, building something online, if it's going to be successful, more widely successful, the value flowing to the person on the other side has to be significantly greater than what you make yourself. The person buying from you, the person receiving your service, the investors trusting you with their money, their gain cumulatively has to far exceed yours.
Because if they don't win, you don't win. This is why I think it's so important for everybody to realize we have the ability to put a genius-level co-founder beside every single human, man, woman, child, independent of age, creed, country, sexual orientation. All this equality stuff that we've been blathering on about for years is actually finally possible.
What's real equality? It's when you are as smart as the smartest human. You are as capable as the richest human. You're as ingenious as the most connected human. That's possible today. This is the most empowering part of this entire interview. In that world, the only difference left between us comes down to two things: preference and expertise.
And this is why there has never been a better time to be alive. Look at the ladder we've been climbing. In an agrarian society, to hold world wealth, you had to own the land. You had to be the king, the queen, the lords. In the age of industry, you had to be a baron. You had to be the owner of the factories.
You had to own the railway, the Standard Oil, the distribution. In the age of technology, you had to know how to program. You had to be the software engineer. But in the age of AI, all you need is creativity and the tools to build it for you. That's the shift. The barrier to entry used to be land, the capital, the specialized skill most people would never acquire.
Now, it's all about creativity and imagination. I know you are not a doomer and and and you criticize doomerism. Is there any part of you, a small part of you that thinks, "I don't think that's what's going to happen, but it might be." There is no scenario. And I look, I think that I am pretty risk adjusted.
I think I think probabilistically, um I think I think through things pretty reasonably. There is no version of this where we're all just standing around doing nothing. There is no version of that. There is a version of it where we all are doing a lot more. We're all thinking about doing our jobs in a totally different way.
And I think that that's very powerful. And then there'll be transitions. We've dealt with these transitions in the past. Let me ask you I guess in a different way, and this is the way I think about it. You've You've got kids, I've got a kid. I I think about my daughter who happens to be 15 and I'm 50, and I think what if if she became really good at whatever it was she wanted to do, what job do I think she could have or what career do I think she could go into that I am certain when she's 50, she could be employed doing?
Again, assuming she's good at it. And I can can't come up with anything for sure. And nor should you. And why are you like defining her value as a human being in such a basic value as a human being, but employment does matter. Sure, but you're not saying that she That's But again, are you saying that you think she's just going to be unemployed and a ward of the state?
No, what I'm saying What I'm saying is I can't I I think of every career, blue collar, white collar, etc. And given where we are with advancements, and not just in terms of AI, but AI and how that's applying to robotics, etc. I I I can't think of a thing necessarily that her or her friends, it's is about her or your kids, will necessarily be able to do that is gainful employment in 35 years.
Why not? Because every job I can currently think of I could make a case potentially that it could absolutely be replaced. Give me an example. Plumber. Okay. Plumber. Look, you've got physical models, robot, an R2-D2 version that is better getting under cabinets than you or I would be. Comes up the steps and can do that job.
Okay. Who owns the plumbing business? A robot? Robotics company. Which one? A robotics company. Which wouldn't necessarily need to have all that many people to run it anymore. You don't need an accounting back office. You don't need HR departments. You don't need all the things. But there are no people in the world that pee and poo?
Like I don't understand. Like I I we can go through this and talk at all. I just think that So you don't have So this doesn't It's It's fine. It doesn't worry you. It's an incredible headline. And I think it's great to spark a debate. But if it's then not rooted in some amount of like at least looking at some patterns of the past and trying to critically analyze will there still be people in the world?
Seems like that's not That's growing unabated. Will they continue to live, eat, and breathe? Seems so. Will they continue to need housing? Seems so. Clothing? Seems so. Will they want to do more things with their time? So for example, today let's say that if you went back a thousand years how did a person allocate 24 hours a day?
Probably eight tasks. And if you fast forward a thousand years, that person now has 35 tasks that they can allocate their time across. Some are work, some are leisure, some are with their family, some are vacationing, some are thinking. There's a There's a panoply of options that technology and progress have given the human individual in order to allocate their time.
I suspect if you just trend it that 35 things now goes to 300 things over the next thousand years. There's going to be more ways in which we allocate time. Maybe what we find is all of this stuff that about, you know, a poorly developed prefrontal cortex and all this stuff that we today label ADHD and context switching actually becomes an unlock in the future.
Because what you're able to do is context switch rapidly across many of the things where you can allocate your time. And maybe how we've defined concentration changes. My My point is, there's always to have this argument that aren't as reductive as it's all over, let's just give up. This is one of the best explanation I ever heard of what human life and productivity can look like in a post-AI world.
The time we get back doesn't just disappear. It's not like we're just sitting around doing nothing. It gets reallocated. People forget that there was a point in human history when we could only work during the daylight. And most of our waking hours went to one thing, finding food. That was it. That was the day.
If you go back to your great-grandparents, they weren't running around checking emails. They weren't taking their kids to baseball games, talking to their therapist, checking in on their grandparents, sitting in on Zoom meetings, or going to the gym class. None of those things were even possible back then.
And this example wasn't thousands and thousands of years ago, just maybe a hundred years ago. And yet here we are today afraid of the question, what are we going to do with our time? There's going to be a whole set of things we can pour our time and our leverage into that we haven't even conceived of yet.
We just can't see them from where we are right now. Because we've been so bogged down by all the minutia, by all the tasks, the pure time suck. Some of that fulfilled time will go to things that genuinely fulfill us. Which means less stress, less burnout. And some goes to the bigger, the more existential questions we've never had room to even contemplate instead of, you know, clearing your email before lunch.
And the other piece of doomerism isn't is isn't the labor side, but it is as you talked about kind of the end of humanity, the bioweapons piece, the war piece. Does that worry you or does it not? Yeah. Every single technology that's ever been created is fundamentally deterministic. What does that word mean?
It means anything that is possible will be possible and done. With respect to technology, every single time we've invented something, every single time, we've had the good cases and the bad cases. It's come as a basket. We've never been able to cork innovation in a way All we've been able to do is shape it where it's overwhelmingly good.
Where it's overwhelmingly positive. So, to your point, in the distribution of outcomes, when you create a new tool, like when we figured out how to take atoms and smash them together, the overwhelming majority of those benefits are seen in the lights that are here. It's the energy that's relatively abundant.
It's super clean. But, we also know Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and we know that there are tail risks. It will be the same for AI. There will be nefarious and bad uses of it. I think the question that you're asking me is, could they dominate? And I think that we have to find the right checks and balances.
And again, this is why I think if we had that debate, that's a lot more grounded and rational. It's about technology and terms like KYC that are that are like really boring, I guess. This is a part of the AI debate that suffers the most doomerism and headline grabbing. Think about when we switched from horse and buggy to the car.
I'm sure back then people were thinking, "Oh my god, this is the devil's tool." People would have said, "A man is two-faced. It's unwieldy. You can't control it." And then someone probably said like, "Oh my gosh, it doesn't stop. There's no brakes." So, someone built better brake systems. And then someone probably said, "Hey, it may be a good idea to install seat belts so people don't fly out of the car and they make sure that people actually wear them.
That's why you get tickets now." As a whole, the distribution of positive benefits from technology far outweighs the negative, if only for self-preservation reasons before we even mention anything else.
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