Yuval Noah Harari Sees the Future of Humanity, AI, and Information
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Demis Hassabis On The Future of Work in the Age of AI
WIRED Editor At Large Steven Levy sits down with Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis for a deep dive discussion on the emergence of AI, the path to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), and how Google is positioning itself to compete in the future of the workplace. Director: Justin Wolfson Director of Photography: Christopher Eusteche Editor: Cory Stevens Host: Steven Levy Guest: Demis Hassabis Line Producer: Jamie Rasmussen Associate Producer: Brandon White Production Manager: Peter Brunette Production Coordinator: Rhyan Lark Camera Operator: Lauren Pruitt Gaffer: Vincent Cota Sound Mixer: Lily van Leeuwen Production Assistant: Ryan Coppola Post Production Supervisor: Christian Olguin Post Production Coordinator: Stella Shortino Supervising Editor: Erica DeLeo Assistant Editor: Justin Symonds - It's a very intense time in the field. We obviously want all of the brilliant things these AI systems can do, come up with new cures for diseases, new energy sources, incredible things for humanity. That's the promise of AI. But also, there are worries if the first AI systems are built with the wrong value systems or they're built unsafely, that could be also very bad. - Wired sat down with Demis Hassabis, who's the CEO of Google DeepMind, which is the engine of the company's artificial intelligence. He's a Nobel Prize winner and also a knight. We discussed AGI, the future of work, and how Google plans to compete in the age of AI. This is "The Big Interview." [upbeat music] Well, welcome to "The Big Interview," Demis. - Thank you, thanks for having me. - So let's start talking about AGI a little here. Now, you founded DeepMind with the idea that you would solve intelligence and then use intelligence to solve everything else. And I think it was like a 20-year mission. We're like 15 years into it, and you're on track? - I feel like, yeah, we're pretty much dead on track, actually, is what would be our estimate. - That means five years away from what I guess people will call AGI. - Yeah, I think in the next five to 10 years, that would be maybe 50% chance that we'll have what we are defined as AGI, yes. - Well, some of your peers are saying, "Two years, three years," and others say a little more, but that's really close, that's really soon. How do we know that we're that close? - There's a bit of a debate going on in the moment in the field about definitions of AGI, and then obviously, of course, dependent on that. There's different predictions for when it will happen. We've been pretty consistent from the very beginning. And actually, Shane Legg, one of my co-founders and our chief scientist, you know, he helped define the term AGI back in, I think, early 2001 type of timeframe. And we've always thought about it as system that has the ability to exhibit, sort of all the cognitive capabilities we have as humans. And the reason that's important, the reference to the human mind, is the human mind is the only existence proof we have. Maybe in the universe, the general intelligence is possible. So if you want to claim sort of general intelligence, AGI, then you need to show that it generalizes to all these domains. - Is when everything's filled in, all the check marks are filled in, then we have it- - Yes, so I think there are missing capabilities right now. You know, that all of us who have used the latest sort of LLMs and chatbots, will know very well, like on reasoning, on planning, on memory. I don't think today's systems can invent, you know, do true invention, you know, true creativity, hypothesize new scientific theories. They're extremely useful, they're impressive, but they have holes. And actually, one of the main reasons I don't think we are at AGI yet is because of the consistency of responses. You know, in some domains, we have systems that can do International Math Olympiad, math problems to gold medal standard- - Sure. - With our AlphaFold system. But on the other hand, these systems sometimes still trip up on high school maths or even counting the number of letters in a word. - Yeah. - So that to me is not what you would expect. That level of sort of difference in performance across the board is not consistent enough, and therefore shows that these systems are not fully generalizing yet. - But when we get it, is it then like a phase shift that, you know, then all of a sudden things are different, all the check marks are checked? - Yeah. - You know, and we have a thing that can do everything. - Mm-hmm. - Are we then power in a new world? - I think, you know, that again, that is debated, and it's not clear to me whether it's gonna be more of a kind of incremental transition versus a step function. My guess is, it looks like it's gonna be more of an incremental shift. Even if you had a system like that, the physical world, still operates with the physical laws, you know, factories, robots, these other things. So it'll take a while for the effects of that, you know, this sort of digital intelligence, if you like, to really impact, I think, a lot of the real world things. Maybe another decade plus, but there's other theories on that too, where it could come faster. - Yeah, Eric Schmidt, who I think used to work at Google, has said that, "It's almost like a binary thing." He says, "If China, for instance, gets AGI, then we're cooked." Because if someone gets it like 10 minutes, before the next guy, then you can never catch up. You know, because then it'll maintain bigger, bigger leads there. You don't buy that, I guess. - I think it's an unknown. It's one of the many unknowns, which is that, you know, that's sometimes called the hard takeoff scenario, where the idea there is that these AGI systems, they're able to self-improve, maybe code themselves future versus themselves, that maybe they're extremely fast at doing that. So what would be a slight lead, let's say, you know, a few days, could suddenly become a chasm if that was true. But there are many other ways it could go too, where it's more incremental. Some of these self-improvement things are not able to kind of accelerate in that way, then being around the same time, would not make much difference. But it's important, I mean, these issues are the geopolitical issues. I think the systems that are being built, they'll have some imprint of the values and the kind of norms of the designers and the culture that they were embedded in. - [Steven] Mm-hmm. - So, you know, I think it is important, these kinds of international questions. - So when you build AI at Google, you know, you have that in mind. Do you feel competitive imperative to, in case that's true, "Oh my God, we better be first?" - It's a very intense time at the moment in the field as everyone knows. There's so many resources going into it, lots of pressures, lots of things that need to be researched. And there's sort of lots of different types of pressures going on. We obviously want all of the brilliant things that these AI systems can do. You know, I think eventually, we'll be able to advance medicine and science with it, like we've done with AlphaFold, come up with new cures for diseases, new energy sources, incredible things for humanity, that's the promise of AI. But also there are worries both in terms of, you know, if the first AI systems are built with the wrong value systems or they're built unsafely, that could be also very bad. And, you know, there are at least two risks that I worry a lot about. One is, bad actors in whether it's individuals or rogue nations repurposing general purpose AI technology for harmful lens. And then the second one is, obviously, the technical risk of AI itself. As it gets more and more powerful, more and more agentic, can we make sure the guardrails are safe around it? They can't be circumvented. And that interacts with this idea of, you know, what are the first systems that are built by humanity gonna be like? There's commercial imperative- - [Steven] Right. - There's national imperative, and there's a safety aspect to worry about who's in the lead and where those projects are. - A few years ago, the companies were saying, "Please, regulate us. We need regulation." - Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. - And now, in the US at least, the current administration seems less interested in putting regulations on AI than accelerating it so we can beat the Chinese. Are you still asking for regulation? Do you think that that's a miss on our part? - I think, you know, and I've been consistent in this, I think there are these other geopolitical sort of overlays that have to be taken into account, and the world's a very different place to how it was five years ago in many dimensions. But there's also, you know, I think the idea of smart regulation that makes sense around these increasingly powerful systems, I think is gonna be important. I continue to believe that. I think though, and I've been certain on this as well, it sort of needs to be international, which looks hard at the moment in the way the world is working, because these systems, you know, they're gonna affect everyone, and they're digital systems. - Yeah. - So, you know, if you sort of restrict it in one area, that doesn't really help in terms of the overall safety of these systems getting built for the world and as a society. - [Steven] Yeah. - So that's the bigger problem, I think, is some kind of international cooperation or collaboration, I think, is what's required. And then smart regulation, nimble regulation that moves as the knowledge about the research becomes better and better. - Would it ever reach a point for you where you would feel, "Man, we're not putting the guardrails in. You know, we're competing, that we really have to stop, or you can't get involved in that?" - I think a lot of the leaders of the main labs, at least the western labs, you know, there's a small number of them and we do all know each other and talk to each other regularly. And a lot of the lead researchers do. The problem is, is that it's not clear we have the right definitions to agree when that point is. Like, today's systems, although they're impressive as we discussed earlier, they're also very flawed. And I don't think today's systems, are posing any sort of existential risk. - Mm-hmm. - So it's still theoretical, but the problem is that a lot of unknowns, we don't know how fast those will come, and we don't know how risky they will be. But in my view, when there are so many unknowns, then I'm optimistic we'll overcome them. At least technically, I think the geopolitical questions could be actually, end up being trickier, given enough time and enough care and thoughtfulness, you know, sort of using the scientific method as we approach this AGI point. - That makes perfect sense. But on the other hand, if that timeframe is there, we just don't have much time, you know? - No, we don't. We don't have much time. I mean, we're increasingly putting resources into security and things like cyber, and also research into controllability and understanding of these systems, sometimes called mechanistic interpretability. You know, there's a lot of different sub-branches of AI. - Yeah, that's right. I wanna get to interpretability. - Yeah, that are being invested in, and I think even more needs to happen. And then at the same time, we need to also have societal debates more about institutional building. How do we want governance to work? How are we gonna get international agreement, at least on some basic principles, around how these systems are used and deployed and also built? - What about the effect on work on the marketplace? - Yeah. - You know, how much do you feel that AI is going to change people's jobs, you know, the way jobs are distributed in the workforce? - I don't think we've seen, my view is if you talk to economists, they feel like there's not much has changed yet. You know, people are finding these tools useful, certainly in certain domains- - [Steven] Yeah. - Like, things like AlphaFold, many, many scientists are using it to accelerate their work. So it seems to be additive at the moment. We'll see what happens over the next five, 10 years. I think there's gonna be a lot of change with the jobs world, but I think as in the past, what generally tends to happen is new jobs are created that are actually better, that utilize these tools or new technologies, what happened with the internet, what happened with mobile? We'll see if it's different this time. - Yeah. - Obviously everyone always thinks this new one, will be different. And it may be, it will be, but I think for the next few years, it's most likely to be, you know, we'll have these incredible tools that supercharge our productivity, make us really useful for creative tools, and actually almost make us a little bit superhuman in some ways in what we're able to produce individually. So I think there's gonna be a kind of golden era, over the next period of what we're able to do. - Well, if AGI can do everything humans can do, then it would seem that they could do the new jobs too. - That's the next question about like, what AGI brings. But, you know, even if you have those capabilities, there's a lot of things I think we won't want to do with a machine. You know, I sometimes give this example of doctors and nurses. You know, maybe a doctor and what the doctor does and the diagnosis, you know, one could imagine that being helped by AI tool or even having an AI kind of doctor. On the other hand, like nursing, you know, I don't think you'd want a robot to do that. I think there's something about the human empathy aspect of that and the care, and so on, that's particularly humanistic. I think there's lots of examples like that but it's gonna be a different world for sure. - If you would talk to a graduate now, what advice would you give to keep working- - Yeah. - Through the course of a lifetime- - Yeah. - You know, in the age of AGI? - My view is, currently, and of course, this is changing all the time with the technology developing. But right now, you know, if you think of the next five, 10 years as being, the most productive people might be 10X more productive if they are native with these tools. So I think kids today, students today, my encouragement would be immerse yourself in these new systems, understand them. So I think it's still important to study STEM and programming and other things, so that you understand how they're built, maybe you can modify them yourself on top of the models that are available. There's lots of great open source models and so on. And then become, you know, incredible at things like fine-tuning, system prompting, you know, system instructions, all of these additional things that anyone can do. And really know how to get the most out of those tools, and do it for your research work, programming, and things that you are doing on your course. And then come out of that being incredible at utilizing those new tools for whatever it is you're going to do. - Let's look a little beyond the five and 10-year range. Tell me what you envision when you look at our future in 20 years, in 30 years, if this comes about, what's the world like when AGI is everywhere? - Well, if everything goes well, then we should be in an era of what I like to call sort of radical abundance. So, you know, AGI solves some of these key, what I sometimes call root node problems in the world facing society. So a good one, examples would be curing diseases, much healthier, longer lifespans, finding new energy sources, you know, whether that's optimal batteries and better room temperature, superconductors, fusion. And then if that all happens, then we know it should be a kind of era of maximum human flourishing where we travel to the stars and colonize the galaxy. You know, I think the beginning of that will happen in the next 20, 30 years if the next period goes well. - I'm a little skeptical of that. I think we have an unbelievable abundance now, but we don't distribute it, you know, fairly. - Yeah. - I think that we kind of know how to fix climate change, right? We don't need a AGI to tell us how to do it, yet we're not doing it. - I agree with that. I think we being as a species, a society not good at collaborating, and I think climate is a good example. But I think we are still operating, humans are still operating in a zero-sum game mentality. Because actually, the earth is quite finite, relative to the amount of people there are now in our cities. And I mean, this is why our natural habitats, are being destroyed, and it's affecting wildlife and the climate and everything. - [Steven] Yeah. - And it's also partly 'cause people are not willing to accept, we do now to figure out climate. But it would require people to make sacrifices. - Yeah. - And people don't want to. But this radical abundance would be different. We would be in a finally, like, it would feel like a non-zero-sum game. - How will we get [indistinct] to that? Like, you talk about diseases- - Well, I gave you an example. - We have vaccines, and now some people think we shouldn't use it. - Let me give you a very simple example. - Sure. - Water access. This is gonna be a huge issue in the next 10, 20 years. It's already an issue. Countries in different, you know, poorer parts of the world, dryer parts of the world, also obviously compounded by climate change. - [Steven] Yeah. - We have a solution to water access. It's desalination, it's easy. There's plenty of sea water. - Yeah. - Almost all countries have a coastline. But the problem is, it's salty water, but desalination only very rich countries. Some countries do do that, use desalination as a solution to their fresh water problem, but it costs a lot of energy. - Mm-hmm. - But if energy was essentially zero, there was renewable free clean energy, right? Like fusion, suddenly, you solve the water access problem. Water is, who controls a river or what you do with that does not, it becomes much less important than it is today. I think things like water access, you know, if you run forward 20 years, and there isn't a solution like that, could lead to all sorts of conflicts, probably that's the way it's trending- - Mm-hmm, right. - Especially if you include further climate change. - So- - And there's many, many examples like that. You could create rocket fuel easily- - Mm-hmm. - Because you just separate that from seawater, hydrogen and oxygen. It's just energy again. - So you feel that these problems get solved by AGI, by AI, then we're going to, our outlook will change, and we will be- - That's what I hope. Yes, that's what I hope. But that's still a secondary part. So the AGI will give us the radical abundance capability, technically, like the water access. - Yeah. - I then hope, and this is where I think we need some great philosophers or social scientists to be involved. That should hopefully shift our mindset as a society to non-zero-sum. You know, there's still the issue of do you divide even the radical abundance fairly, right? Of course, that's what should happen. But I think there's much more likely, once people start feeling and understanding that there is this almost limitless supply of raw materials and energy and things like that. - Do you think that driving this innovation by profit-making companies is the right way to go? We're most likely to reach that optimistic high point through that? - I think it's the current capitalism or, you know, is the current or the western sort of democratic kind of systems, have so far been proven to be sort of the best drivers of progress. - Mm-hmm. - So I think that's true. My view is that once you get to that sort of stage of radical abundance and post-AGI, I think economics starts changing, even the notion of value and money. And so again, I think we need, I'm not sure why economists are not working harder on this if maybe they don't believe it's that close, right? But if they really did that, like the AGI scientists do, then I think there's a lot of economic new economic theory that's required. - You know, one final thing, I actually agree with you that this is so significant and is gonna have a huge impact. But when I write about it, I always get a lot of response from people who are really angry already about artificial intelligence and what's happening. Have you tasted that? Have you gotten that pushback and anger by a lot of people? It's almost like the industrial revolution people- - Yeah. - Fighting back. - I mean, I think that anytime there's, I haven't personally seen a lot of that, but obviously, I've read and heard a lot about, and it's very understandable. That's all that's happened many times. As you say, industrial revolution, when there's big change, a big revolution. - [Steven] Yeah. - And I think this will be at least as big as the industrial revolution, probably a lot bigger. That's surprising, there's unknowns, it's scary, things will change. But on the other hand, when I talk to people about the passion, the why I'm building AI- - Mm-hmm. - Which is to advance science and medicine- - Right. - And understanding of the world around us. And then I explain to people, you know, and I've demonstrated, it's not just talk. Here's AlphaFold, you know, Nobel Prize winning breakthrough, can help with medicine and drug discovery. Obviously, we're doing this with isomorphic now to extend it into drug discovery, and we can cure terrible diseases that might be afflicting your family. Suddenly, people are like, "Well, of course, we need that." - Right. - It'll be immoral not to have that if that's within our grasp. And the same with climate and energy. - Yeah. - You know, many of the big societal problems, it's not like you know, we know, we've talked about, there's many big challenges facing society today. And I often say I would be very worried about our future if I didn't know something as revolutionary as AI was coming down the line to help with those other challenges. Of course, it's also a challenge itself, right? But at least, it's one of these challenges that can actually help with the others if we get it right. - Well, I hope your optimism holds out and is justified. Thank you so much. - And I'll do my best. Thank you. [upbeat music]
Yahoo
21-05-2025
- Yahoo
Bluesky CEO Jay Graber On Building A Better Social Ecosystem
Wired Senior Writer Katie Knibbs interviews Bluesky CEO Jay Graber about the burgeoning social platform and its future. Director: Justin Wolfson Director of Photography: Mark Simon Editor: Richard Trammell; Louis Lalire Host: Kate Knibbs Guest: Jay Graber Line Producer: Jamie Rasmussen Associate Producer: Brandon White Production Manager: Peter Brunette Production Coordinator: Rhyan Lark Camera Operator: Howard Shack Sound Mixer: Jim Sander Production Assistant: Dexter Shack Post Production Supervisor: Christian Olguin Post Production Coordinator: Stella Shortino Supervising Editor: Erica DeLeo Assistant Editor: Fynn Lithgow - Bluesky's for everyone. When we think that over time the broader public conversation needs to be on an open protocol, which is what we're built on. - I'm Wired senior writer Kate Nibs. Today I sat down with Bluesky, CEO Jay Graber. We discuss how influencers are joining the platform, Bluesky's relationship with news media and whether she would welcome President Trump to Bluesky. This is "The Big Interview." [upbeat music] Jay, thank you so much for joining me today. - Thank you. Thanks for having me. - So last time we talked in December, I believe Bluesky had just surpassed 24, 25 million users. Where are you today? - 34.6 million users. - What milestones are you hoping to hit by the end of 2025? - There's a lot of new features that we're launching and we're excited to expand a lot. I think getting in some of the things we've been talking about for a long time. Like communities. - Or what does that look like? - Yeah, communities is a way that people are already using feeds. A lot of people don't realize that Bluesky is a bit like Reddit and Twitter at the same time because you can build feeds that are essentially communities like the science feed is run by scientists, moderated by scientists and has its own rules. And so this is something that you can do, but you have to go outside the app to do it right now. And so we've talked to people who are running these feeds and they would like better tooling for making these into communities in the app. And so that's the big idea, which is essentially just making it easier to create and run a custom feed, which is an interface you can install into the app that's like your own timeline and run that like a community of your own. - When you say you have to go outside of the app, what does that mean? - There's third party services that have built feed builders services like Sky Feeds or Grays. They let you create feeds without knowing how to code and you can say, I want this list of people to contribute to my feed. You can post into it with this hashtag or this emoji and then you run it essentially like it's a service that you're providing other people, other people can install it, subscribe to it, pin it to the homepage of their app. - Any timeline for when this is coming? - Well, you asked about the end of the year, so I think that's the, the most concrete timeline we can give at the moment. - And I know that you recently rolled out video as a feature, which we're very excited about. I think a lot of people already conceptualize Bluesky as sort of a X competitor, but now are you gunning for TikTok too? - We are, as you know, built on an open protocol and so other apps are starting to fill in these open spaces. There is an app called Skylight that has just gotten 150,000 users and this is more of a straight TikTok alternative. It lets you post short form videos, you know, edit them in app, create them. There's these other apps springing up now on the same protocol like Skylight, like flashes for photos that do different things. And the great thing about this being an open protocol means that you can move from Bluesky over to Skylight Social and keep your followers. So they go with you across these applications. - So when you say they go with me, if I'm going to port my followers over or even just join these new apps, how would I do that? Like do I actually go into the app store and download something new or how does it work? - Yeah, you download Skylight from the app store and then you log in with your Bluesky username if you wanna link them together. If you don't want to link them, you can create a new account, but if you link them, you have the same number of followers and the photos or videos that you post to Skylight will also show up in Bluesky or vice versa. And like over time the apps can decide is everything going to, you know, be shared across or is there gonna be some stuff that's separate? But right now it's sort of just a shared data layer where you can have people seeing your videos on Bluesky, even if they're posted on Skylight. - And so does the Bluesky team have anything to do with the development of Skylight or is it totally separate? - It's totally separate. - Do you know know who developed it at all? Like what are your relationships like with the people who are developing different apps on the protocol? - There was recently a conference called the Atmosphere Conference. We call the atmosphere the broader ecosystem of applications around the AT protocol, which is the layer Bluesky is built on. And we met a lot of folks there who are building even apps we didn't know were being built. So there's private messengers being built, new forms of moderation tools. There's a lot of ones out there that are innovating on new forms of social built on this shared layer because they can immediately tap into the Bluesky user base and just add features on rather than having to start from zero. So that's the benefit to developers of building in an open ecosystem. You don't have to start from zero each time you start over and now you have 34.6 million users to tap into. - So I know there's Bluesky the app and then it's built on this app protocol and that's how all of these people are developing these new cool video and photo apps and everything. So the teams are separate. As the CEO of Bluesky, like if one of the video apps were to go mega viral and surpass Bluesky wildly, et cetera, would that help you or would it just sort of be a wash for you? - It would help us because these are shared backends if you recall. So that means that all those videos would be being able to be viewed on Bluesky too. It'd probably change the way that people could interact over on Bluesky because all this content would be coming in from another application, just like all the content created on Bluesky can be borrowed over there. We can borrow from the other apps as well. And then it means that, you know, if they're building on our services over time, one of the pathways to monetization we've mentioned is developer services. So building out infrastructure for new apps to get started. Sort of like a fire base for social, if you will, where you get new apps off the ground and then you know, provide infrastructure to them. - So I've noticed that there has been sort of an influx of big creators onto Bluesky, but right now there's no direct way for creators to monetize their work on Bluesky in the way that there is on say YouTube. Are you working on ways to change that? - Yeah, one things that we've seen is that we're not giving creators money but we're giving them really great traffic and that can convert to money because if you are a YouTube creator or you have a Patreon and you're posting your Patreon link, one big thing is we don't down rank links and so you're getting higher link traffic on Bluesky, even with a smaller follower count. This is true of small creators and even news organizations have been reporting this difference in engagement and click-through numbers. We've heard from large news organizations that Bluesky is giving better click-throughs and subscription rates and so this converts to money once you get people onto your site. So I think this is one of the big benefits we're leaning into right now is just giving people that direct traffic, that direct relationship with their audience and giving them the ability to monetize however they want. Down the road we might introduce other mechanisms, but right now it's just about being the best platform to serve creators needs in terms of giving them attention, giving them engagement and giving them the ability to move with their followers right? So as I mentioned before, if you're a video creator and you do some content on Bluesky to build up a following and then you download Skylight and you start posting different kinds of content over there, you can have that follow graph just go with you and start building on it. So it's cumulative rather than also as a creator starting from scratch each app you move to. - I love that as someone who's jumped from app to app in the past, that sounds very helpful. And when you were talking about traffic for traditional news organizations, I know that traditionally the news media and social media have had sort of an antagonistic relationship. Like it's been obviously a huge driver of traffic for news outlets, but then they're sort of beholden to people like Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk and what they wanna do to the news. Do you have a broader vision for how you want Bluesky to interact with like the information ecosystem or the news media? - Yeah, we want to create a more direct relationship again and be the place where we make those relationships happen. And so rather than being the single feed that all user attention passes through where small algorithm changes can affect how much traffic a news organization is getting, we want to give direct traffic to news orgs and even let them do things like build their own feeds or link their domain directly as their username, clicking that just clicks you directly through to your site. You can also right now create verified news feeds. Some people have been building these in the community and so users can just scroll through all the news articles being posted. This means that you're getting direct traffic because you're not depending on the algorithm, which might be at any given moment showing more or less news to a given user. If the users are interested they can just subscribe to a newsfeed and see all the articles being published on Bluesky in one place. - So recently there's been a pretty noticeable influx of bigger name celebrities on the app, including some of the biggest names in democratic politics like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton just joined for instance. Are you doing anything to court the celebrities or really famous influencers? - We're doing some community outreach. We've had a very community driven growth strategy and so we're seeing a lot of growth in sectors with maybe not as big celebrities, but a lot of traction in areas like you know, sports media. For example, Mina Kimes, a sports reporter came on and she created a starter pack which got a lot of follows very quickly because when you create starter packs, which are essentially lists of accounts that bundle together everyone in a given field, when new people come on through that link, they're following all of them at once. So that's been a way that communities have been onboarding outside of, you know, politics or like even large celebrities, we have game devs, we have sports, we have science. Lots of these different interests are kind of starting with people building custom starter packs and then bringing on folks directly into their community. - Some of these bigger name people who are joining, you know, they do tend to be liberal politicians when they're politicians. I'm wondering, would you welcome President Trump if he was debating joining Bluesky? - Yeah, Bluesky's for everyone, you know, and we think that over time the broader public conversation needs to be on an open protocol, which is what we're built on because that lets people choose their own moderation preferences. It lets people choose their own feed preferences and things can evolve without it being a binary choice, which is like everyone has to adhere to this set of moderation rules or that one you can have customization both within the app and outside of it. Right now, you know, it's people who feel that there's more direct benefits to being on here if you are a creator or somebody who wants to have a direct relationship with your audience. But over time the benefit of this protocol based approach I think will extend to all sorts of social media users. - So right now we're in this moment where free speech is under threat and free speech on the internet is under threat. I'm wondering how you envision Bluesky's relationship to speech, including political speech and what your obligations are to your users and I guess to the internet at large. - I think building on an open protocol like we've done is the most enduring foundation for speech because what we're doing is creating a digital commons of user data where you really get to control your own identity and your data. And then we're building, you know, infrastructure that I hope stays around for a really long time because Bluesky, the app is just one site where speech can happen and all these other apps are showing that you can have an ecosystem of a lot of different applications. This is like the web itself. Early on we had AOL and accessing the internet happen through AOL and if the AOL web portal wasn't showing you something, it would be a lot harder to find and then more unopinionated browsers came along and these just linked you out to the broader internet and now anyone can put up a blog and host their own views online. And then there's larger websites if you want to, you know, be on Substack or Medium, but you can either self-host or choose one of these, this is the kind of ecosystem we're building, anyone can self-host. And then the question of, you know, freedom of speech not reach is made very tangible because then the sites like the sort of mediums of the world that host a lot of blogs get to choose their moderation rules, but if individuals are unhappy with that, they can start a new site or host their own blog. - For people who might not be familiar with the phrase freedom of speech, not freedom of reach. Could you explain it? - Yeah, this was a principle that old Twitter talked about early on and when we were spinning out of Twitter, I never worked for Twitter, but we opened up this new design space around Bluesky, which was how do we embed that into a protocol layer? So the freedom of speech is embedded in the protocol. Anyone can do the equivalent of standing up a new blog and then the sites like Bluesky, which are the applications, get to decide, you know, how are we going to prioritize reach, you know, we do have a default algorithm but you can choose any other algorithm you want. And so we don't necessarily show everything in the algorithm or the default service, but if you want to find something elsewhere, you can go elsewhere in the ecosystem to find it. That means that you have the pathways that the apps are deciding what is going to be most accessible and then if you want to change the rules you can build another thing and that's guarantee of freedom of speech is being always able to build your own thing or find your own space that serves you the most. - So as you're scaling up, I know that you hired additional moderators to tackle some of the necessary moderation challenges like CSAM. How challenging is it as as you're scaling up to sort of balance offering this level of customization with just the sort of basic things you need to do as a social network for everyone? Like you know, keep pornography off for example? - Yeah, I mean we're running a foundational moderation service, so we get to choose the rules within the Bluesky app and like I said, you can fork off do your own thing, but within the parameters of Bluesky we're setting what the rules are and so we employ moderation team to do this. We face some of the same challenges as centralized social apps because to run a centralized moderation team you're doing a lot of the same kinds of work. And so I would say it's, it's very similar at the base layer and then we have this extra options that we've layered on top for users to choose their own spaces. And in some cases that means that users are able to resolve things more locally. So for example, within the feeds that run a bit like communities, you can moderate things, resolve things locally, but still it's a broader Bluesky application has its own set of rules. - How many countries are you operating in right now or do you have users everywhere? - We have a lot of users in different countries. Some of the biggest are the US of course, Japan, Brazil, and various countries in the EU. - Are there unique challenges in certain locations and if so, what are they? - Each place has their own regulatory guidelines and you know, we try to be in compliance and that's part of being a global company is just learning to operate in different places. I think over the long run there will be applications just like Skylight is targeted towards video, maybe there's applications targeted towards different markets. Early on we saw several Japanese users build Japan focused applications before we had gotten internationalization into the app. So you know, different languages depending on where you're based, people built their own apps to do that. So that's an example of how you can customize things to your own local market. - Speaking of local markets, we're in Seattle, which is where you are based, but is Bluesky currently remote forward workspace? How are you guys set up? - We're a fully remote team and part of the reason for this is we wanted to hire people who care deeply about the mission and are really aligned in what we're doing. Have some of the experience in social, have experience in open protocols and that combination is rare and hard to find. So if we tried to hire all in one city, we wouldn't be getting the best people out there. But as it is, we've hired from several different countries all over the United States because there's people all over that are interested in the vision of what we're building. - And what brought you to Seattle originally? - I moved here during the pandemic. I was previously in San Francisco and it's a really nice city. I mean the nature, the water, the mountains, it's a place where nature is really accessible and I really like that. - And I understand that you have a background in crypto. I know that the largest investor in Bluesky is a venture capital firm that sort of specializes in crypto investing. Does Bluesky have more in common with a crypto startup than one might like originally suspect? - Well the term Web3 got very associated with cryptocurrency, so it's not a good word to use for what we're doing anymore because there isn't a blockchain or a cryptocurrency involved. But if you wanna think about Web3 as evolving the social Web2 version forward, that kind of is what we're doing. We're evolving forward social media that was based in centralized companies into something that is open and distributed and that was some of the goals underlying the Web3 movement that had a lot of blockchains involved. We just didn't build on that technical foundation of a blockchain because we didn't need it. You can achieve a lot of the same things using open web principles and more Web 1.0 kinds of technology, which is, for example, our identity system let's you use a domain name as your username so you can be like as your username. That's just a web 1.0 technology brought into a social media sphere. And so I think our investors really saw that vision and they're also excited about building out the broader dev ecosystem, which is something we really wanted alignment on. We want investors who care about seeing this entire world of social media come to life, not just one application Bluesky succeeding. - Yeah. What would building out the dev ecosystem look like? - It's starting to happen. So the Atmosphere Conference, which I mentioned was started and run by the community. We heard about it partway through and sponsored it, but they found other sponsors as well. And it's something that's taking off sort of as a movement of people to reclaim social and Bluesky and the Open Protocol is a great place to do a lot of this building. People are getting in and starting to build different applications, starting to propose new ways the protocol could be evolved. Private data for example, is not something that we have in Bluesky at the moment as part of the protocol, but people are proposing new ways to do private data for their applications that they're building. And so moving forward the app protocol, I don't think all the development will just be within the Bluesky company. It'll be other people building their own applications and then modifying the protocol and suggesting changes that meet the needs of what they're trying to do. - And when you say the Bluesky company, like would you be the CEO of all of this or just the platform? - I am just the CEO of Bluesky Social. So we have built out the app protocol and we maintain the Bluesky application. So we'll always maintain the Bluesky app, but the app protocol is going to take on a life of its own. Pieces of it are going to be standardized, pieces of it are going to be stewarded by the community and it's going to evolve in different directions as the new people who are getting involved shape it. - Right now you do have some investor money. Is your stance on advertising still the same? Where are you with subscriptions? Basically this is me asking you how are you planning to make money? - Yeah, subscriptions are actually coming soon as well. So that got delayed for a few months last year doing our growth spurt, but we're re-approaching how we're gonna do them and I think the next steps down the road are also to look into what kind of marketplaces can we build that span some of these different applications. There's other apps in the ecosystem that are experimenting with say, you know, placing sponsored posts in feeds and things like that. I've mentioned before, I think ads eventually in some form work their way into an attention economy, but we're not gonna do ads the way traditional social apps did because we don't have a single feed and the traditional ad model is usually getting everyone to spend as much time engaged on a single feed as possible and then putting ads in there. Since we have lots of different feeds. Even if we did that, you could switch away and use a different feed because this one has too many ads. And so it kind of constrains the open model of what we've done, constraints what we can do. We'll just let people experiment and see what comes out of it. - Some people watching this video might not be super familiar with Bluesky. What do you want people to know about this platform? - I'd want them to know this is a choose your own adventure game so you can get in there and customize the experience as much as you want. And if you're not finding what you want within the Bluesky app, there might be another app out there that is still part of the Bluesky at protocol ecosystem that will give you what you want. Like if it's you know, videos or images or maybe a different kind of feed experience, like let's say the Discover Feed isn't giving you what you want, you can install a different one and find the stuff you want and if you can't find it, you can build it. And so the options are really endless. I think it takes some time to get in there and really set things up the way that you like it, but then once you do, it's a great place to be because you don't get this level of control anywhere else. - I mean you've kind of sold me on becoming an app developer for this protocol. I might be making a career pivot soon, so thank you. - Yeah, I think there's lots of technical folks who watch, you know, Wired interviews as well and I would just love for them to know that this is an open field to build on. This is like early social era where you can build anything on fully open APIs. - Well thank you again for joining us. - Thank you. [cameras snapping] [upbeat music]
