Reinventing the Developer Terminal with Warp Co-Founder and CEO Zach Lloyd

Today on our priors, I'm joined by Zach Lloyd, the cofounder and CEO of Warp, a terminal product and AI tool for developers that allows you to do different sorts of coding applications. Prior to Warp, Zach was at Google, and he also started another company called Selfmade. We talk about AI dev tooling, but we also end up talking about human consciousness and how can you tell if an AI is actually sentient. Zach, welcome to Enterprise. I'm excited to be here. Thanks for having me. So you have a a master's degree in the philosophy of science. Yeah. And if you're gonna take a very different lens and abstract out of the, you know, coding world and all the things that we tend to think about every day Yeah. How do you think about this societally in terms of big wave of AI that's hitting us right now? And where where do you think some of these really big societal impacts will be? The way I think about, like, the advances are it's kinda like we are distilling intelligence. And so there are, I think, people who consider what's happening, it's like they're like, are we recreating people in some way? Are we recreating consciousness? But it's not that. It's actually what's fascinating to me is how much intelligence you can get out of just, like Mhmm. Next token prediction. Yeah. And, like, what does that say about the way that our minds work? Something I'm always thinking about is, like, is this how our brains are working? Are we are we doing next token prediction? And I don't think so. Like, I think that there's gonna be some further AI unlock. There's actually a book about this that I think is really interesting called Blindsight. Okay. It's like the sci fi book where they separate consciousness from intelligence. Yep. And, basically, humanity meets a space faring civilization, or civilization is overstating it, a space faring intelligent being that's not conscious. Yep. And what are the implications of that, and how do you think about that, and how do you communicate with that? Are you basically saying that that's kind of your view of AI right now? I think that's what it is at the moment. It's like we've distilled intelligence or something that, like, from, like, an instrumentalist or, like, functional perspective is able to do things that we recognize as intelligence, but it's totally mechanistic. I don't think anyone who's looking at this thinks that there's any aspect of consciousness to it. I think that's, like, a a very confusing thing for people. Yeah. Because the classical test for this was known as the Turing test. Right? Totally. And so the the idea there is if you can't tell the difference between interacting with a computer and a person, then that computer effectively has met the intelligence bar of a person. Yeah. But in our in our actions with this type of AI, we're having very …