Kevin Ball: I do wonder, coming back to the generative AI thing, if part of the challenge right now - and this is coming in from the chat, but the challenge right now is sort of this assumption pushed by people who have a lot of investment in AI, that AI can actually replace people coding. And they’re pushing – you have all these studies, “Oh, it’s improving your productivity, it’s doing all this”, and so everybody thinks “Oh, I’ve got to do this or I’m falling behind.” And as we were highlighting, for some problems it’s a big help, and for other problems, it’s crap. And it’s not helping you get more done, and at the same time, it’s inhibiting your ability to learn.

So I think some of this is pushed by people like the Sam Altmans of the world, who - they have an agenda. And it’s very clear that they have an agenda, but they’re kind of taking this… It’s like the NFT boom. “This is gonna replace all these things. This is gonna be doing these things.” Well, there’s more value in AI than I think there was in crypto, but there’s also a whole lot of junk.

Amal Hussein: Yeah, exactly. Something-something NFT.

Amal Hussein: Alex is getting a lot of love today. I’m gonna have to message him and tell him that. He’s at Web Directions in Australia… I don’t know why I said it that way, but I did… So – that’s so cool. And that’s amazing that you’re making art. Have you considered making it in an NFT? [laughs]

Adam Stacoviak: They could double that up when it fails, or if it does fail, because it’d be like “NFT. Why?”

Nick Nisi: Sounds like an NFT. [laughter]

Divya: I feel like my experience has been very similar to Kball’s, that like every day I get mentioned – so mine is not like Kball’s. Mine is just NFT threads. I just get added to a bunch of NFT threads constantly.

Ivan Kwiatkowski: So if I wanted to win the contest, I guess I would go with the NFT one, because I know that this is something very divisive, and I think that a lot of the audience that you are reaching is going to be probably – I’m not going to say that they are necessarily going to be on my side, but I think they’re going to be on a side. But I think a much more interesting question that I would be actually interested in having the committee’s opinion about is the one about regulation. I do believe that cyberspace is never going to be regulated, and maybe I need to say a bit more about this one, so that people can figure it out for themselves… My opinion on this is that – we have a number of high-level discussions taking place at the UN about acceptable norms for behavior in the cyberspace, etc. And you have all these discussions between states, where they talk with each other, and they are like, “Okay, what type of offensive operations are legitimate?” Like, for instance, espionage is okay, but destructive attacks are not okay. I mean, I’m not saying this is right, I’m just saying this is probably the kind of discussions that they’re having. And we may have differing opinions on what types of attacks are okay, and what types are not, or even if attacks are okay at all; it doesn’t matter.

The thing is, I do believe that – I don’t think that we will ever reach an agreement there, because, well, states do not have an incentive to regulate cyber offense. I think that they have an interest in having a way, or having some kind of framework that allows them to still conduct operations, because when they conduct operations, they know what they are winning, right? They have intelligence services that gather data, they collect it through cyber means, they take it back, and so they know that they are able to achieve certain results, because they have obtained specific information, and they can quantify that.

On the other hand, when you look at the cost of cyber offense, which means all your companies in your country that have been breached because there are no such norms, it’s something that’s super-hard to quantify. You can never know that you lost some contracts overseas to sell planes, or to sell something else because of cyber means, because it’s very likely that nobody knows that the breach even happened in the first place.

So the thing is, you look at the balance of risk/reward for the decision-makers, and they see “This is what we win with cyber offense”, which is a lot. And what they lose - it’s painless. And also, they have no idea what it is. And so overall, I think that all those discussions that are taking place, that are saying, “Okay, we need to make a safer internet, blah, blah, blah” are actually possibly being conducted in bad faith, because there is no political will to actually stop doing this kind of stuff. This would be my unpopular opinion, especially in the diplomatic circles.

Lars Wikman: So there are cryptographic mechanisms for encrypting the entire file using ID3. There’s also methods for just signing a group of frames, or part of a file to ensure that the ownership, for example, hasn’t been tampered with… And I guess that’s sort of where you get into NFT territory, aside from not being uploaded anywhere.

Ron Evans: No, it ended up you had to pay people for them. They ended up going negative – like negative interest rates, they went to negative values. All of a sudden people are like, “You want to own the NFT? I need some money.” And it was like – ugh, what a mess.

Peer Richelsen: [52:00] And for us, Cal.com is a real, real– I have a statistic on Cal.com/open. The day we rebranded, the signups went ballistic; literally vertical, like a rocket. So it’s undeniable that the brand is important. But what’s more important to me is, first, consumers don’t give a s***t about open source. They rarely even know the difference. If we really want to connect a billion people, I’d say 90% of them don’t know what open source means, or they have never interacted with open source in a way, like they’ve never opened a GitHub repository, but they care about the best product. At the end of the day, best brand, best product and best price - that’s usually the triangle.

And what we’ve seen with open source - I mean, listen, this company has been around for pretty much eight months now, and we are not only on par with Calendly, but already build things that people ask that were nonexistent in Calendly. So the rate of innovation and the rate of deployment or the security - we have about 13 languages, 13 or 14 languages that are all made by the community and peer-reviewed by the community. It’s a major factor for us to be actually a better product. So it’s not only about selling to enterprises and having these highly regulated industries, but also it helps us to really have a short feedback cycle, talk to customers. And also, scheduling is a very integrations heavy market. So Zoom, Google Calendar, Apple Calendar and Google Meets - that’s just a few to name, and then there’s some analytics products…

And for us being open, just as an example, we have a Web3 video integration, which is called huddle.io-. Huddle01.com, sorry. A bit of a mouthful, huddle01.com. And they provide a peer-to-peer Zoom alternative with NFT avatars, and you can connect your MetaMask… Pretty much same niche focus as our Web3 integration. And they told me they’ve been trying to chase down the head of engineering, or the CTO, or like the VP of engineering at Calendly to build the integration. They literally said, “Just give us docs. We will build it for you and we would love to be part of this ecosystem.” And it took them like months and they still haven’t received a reply. And for us, they saw Cal.com, they saw the opportunity, and they opened the pull request, and three days after was merged. That’s just fantastic for any developer who wants to contribute to a project, or any SaaS business, honestly.

If you have the alternative between an open core where anyone can contribute… For example Tandem, which is another Andreessen Horowitz-funded company which is doing like Zoom, but more for remote teams, and really take over control of your computer, and a ton of really cool things. For them, it was the same experience. They looked at Cal and they said, “Hey, this is quite interesting and quite easy to integrate.” And without our permission, they made a pull request, and we looked at it and it was safe to merge, and now they’re live. And that’s something I mentioned a lot of consumers will appreciate. They will never know what the process is behind the scenes, but one day they wake up and be like, “Why does Cal have 20 apps and Calendly only 10, or something, or 100 apps? Or why is this missing? What can I do to add it?” So I think that’s just something where open source really shines.

If you have the developer, you pretty much own the market for most industries. You could be the PayPal and have good GMV, but I would want to have my stock in Stripe, because I think that’s where the innovation is happening, when you really foster the engineer communities.

Abubakar Abid: Yeah, that’s been amazing, and we obviously owe a lot to Hugging Face for that. So for example, we have a Discord server. If we had just launched for Gradio a Discord server, I don’t know how many people would’ve joined. But we’re part of the Hugging Face Discord server, which helps a lot. And our community is honestly amazing. There’s some folks– and this astounds me. There’s some folks that use Gradio every day, and they’re raising new issues. Like, I don’t use Gradio every day. [laughter] So it’s been really nice, people catch issues like that. Any time we break anything, people let us know. But I think one of the very interesting developments that we’re seeing, and we’re trying to understand this piece better, is that people used to just have demos as standalone things, but now people are taking demos and integrating it onto their websites, as part of their portfolios, but even just as standalone websites.

So one of our users, for example, built this NFT search engine using– the backend of it is a Gradio app. He hosted it on Spaces, and just embedded that Space on the homepage of his website. And so his whole website - I mean, it has some surrounding information, but it is basically a Gradio demo, which is very interesting. And this is not the only one. We’ve seen this in a few different examples. And this kind of raises the question… So now it seems like a lot of people are building very data-centric or machine learning-centric applications. That’s the focus of it. If there’s enough use cases like this, maybe we want to focus on building this one-stop shop for how to build a complete data-centric application. So we’re thinking about that as well.

Natalie Pistunovich: I probably saw some interesting examples, but yeah… Maybe not. I’m trying to think what other interesting recommendations we can give to listeners who are just getting – or you know what? Let’s take one step back and let’s speak to those who are maybe a little bit cynical about including AI in their flow, and look at that as an NFT or whatnot; a new buzzword. So why is it actually a good idea to include AI in your flow? Why should I not just stick to my good, old Vim, or IDE like VS Code, with no any other add-ons?

Adam Stacoviak: It’s definitely the beginning, the early innings of what will become of this way to create and share the value of what is created out there… And I think what’s more – what’s happening now, like any gold rush, or any rush of sorts, there’s gonna be bad actors, and there’s gonna be people that are just in it to create scarcity, and get that value. I actually saw a TikTok recently where it was like “Do you wanna get rich? Go to Canva, and whatever-this. And then go to this marketplace and find somebody to create you 1,000 pieces of artwork, and then put those out there as NFTs”, and this and that. It’s like, okay, you’re not really bringing anything of value, really. You’re just selling – at that point it’s just JPEGs. But maybe that’s the code smell, so to speak, is if you’re just buying a JPEG, you’re doing it wrong. Because if we ever got into the NFT space, it wouldn’t be to sell a JPEG. That might be the thing you can look at, and say “I own this thing” and –

Nader Dabit: Some of the DAOs allow you to just join for free, some of them ask you to mint some type of token… But either way, you have to have, for the most part, some type of token to get in. And the reason that that’s the case is to kind of give ownership to everyone that’s there, and also provide them a way to liquidate that ownership.

So for a token, you can basically sell that, either on some digital exchange, or maybe like an NFT would be like OpenSea, or some type of NFT marketplace… But yeah, most of the time you can get a token or buy a few ERC20 tokens, or work for those tokens by participating in the Discord, and then you can participate in that way.

For the Developer DAO, which is the DAO that I have created for developers, the token is completely free. All you have to do is just go to the website and mint the token. And you do have to pay the Ethereum transaction costs. When you pay that cost, you get that token sent to your wallet.

And really, the reason that there is any type of cost at all is to kind of have some type of way to prevent civil resistance… Because if this token is gonna be worth money at some point, what’s to stop someone from minting all 8,000 of those for themselves? Like, how do we equally distribute ownership between a large number of people? Well, there is some type of way that we can do that with needing someone to mint.

But what I’ve been doing is actually setting aside a few thousand of my own dollars, and just minting those and sending them to people around the world that can’t afford even the $20 minting cost. But that way I know that that person is real, and that they’re kind of in it to be part of the community, and they’re not just in there to kind of speculate.

Bill Kennedy: Having that physical connection with the person that produced it, for me, means ownership. So if I get a book from someone and they signed it, I know, they touched that book, I know they interacted with that physical book; it’s something special about that book beyond me just buying it on Amazon. And so that’s what I’m looking for. If there was a way of, with the NFT, having ownership of the code and knowing this is the code they used, I think it would be the same thing with a photographer. I want to know that you physically touched it and maybe you signed it. And maybe there’s a way of doing a digital signature. See, that would be interesting, now that we’re talking about it… Is there a way to stamp a digital signature that only that artist could have put on that image? Now it gets interesting to me, because anybody can download it and reproduce it, but not anybody can have that digital signature, unless it came from the artist. So now maybe that thing is worth $20,000 for me. I’m not saying the art isn’t worth $20,000. I mean, there’s some amazing creations that are happening. Like, that’s not the problem. The problem for me is how do I get that physical connection? How do I know that the artist was literally involved in giving me that electronic asset? That’s what I need. So I just don’t think the NFT is enough. That’s my unpopular opinion.

Paul Bakaus: Yeah, I would be lying if I said I’m an expert here. I’ve been following the NFT craze, but that’s about it.