Adam D’Angelo (Quora/Poe) and Amjad Masad (Replit) debate the future of AI. They clash on whether LLMs are hitting limits, the timeline to AGI, and the societal impact of automating entry-level jobs while expert roles remain, potentially creating a "missing middle" in the workforce.
Amjad Masad, founder of Replit, joins a16z to discuss the rise of AI agents that can now plan, reason, and code for hours. He explains how reinforcement learning and verification loops unlocked long-horizon reasoning, why AI is advancing fastest in verifiable domains like code, and debates whether "good enough" AI might be a local maximum that blocks the path to AGI.
Amjad Masad, CEO of Replit, outlines a future where AI agents commoditize traditional software, fundamentally reshaping the economy, the nature of work, and how companies are built. He argues that the focus will shift from building applications to solving problems directly, empowering a new class of 'generalist' employees and 'sovereign individuals'.