Factory CEO on why AGI is already here

Matan, I'm so excited to have you on the show because AI coding, to me, represents everything going on in the AI boom right now. It's the most dynamic, fast-moving part of this. It's also where I think a lot of companies have started to see the earliest ROI on AI is coding. And in the last year, it feels like it's evolved a lot. And I want to get into factory and what you guys do and a lot of other things. But I maybe want to start with, yeah, kind of how you've seen the landscape that you're in evolve over the last year. What was the state of AI coding a year ago to now?

Yeah, I mean, really, I guess it's been crazy to see how it's like things were very, very slow and then sudden. Like we started Factory three years ago. The world was like barely adopting GitHub Copilot. Like people were just starting to do the, you know, IDE autocomplete, like complete the next word or the next line. And it was kind of like that for about a year, two years. We started focused on agents. And like only the SF AI companies were kind of agent pilled, if you will. And then the rest of the enterprise was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, we're adopting Copilot. Like we're moving fast. What are you talking about? And then it was really at the turn of this year. So 25 into 26, honestly spurred a lot by Andre Karpathy tweeting about how he was using coding agents. And then suddenly the whole enterprise kind of completely started to understand and be open to the behavior change. And because of that, we're seeing like when token usage is well over 10Xing year over year, behavior more importantly of every engineer is changing dramatically. Like being an engineer three years ago versus let's say 15 years ago was very, very similar. Being an engineer three years ago versus today is like night and day, like unrecognizable. And I think that's been pretty crazy to see that transition.

You

started Factory, what, in 2023? Is that right? April 17th, 2023.

And you were pitching autonomous agents for coding in 2023. And at the time, I mean, it's hard to remember how long ago this was, but the models were like barely capable of grade school math, right? So what did you see that led to starting a company in this space then?

Yeah, well, I think the following exercise or this game that I played with my co-founder is kind of the kernel of what made us so confident about this. And the game was as follows. So in April of 2023, ChatGPT had come out. And a lot of people were doing this interaction pattern where you have your IDE on one panel and ChatGPT on the other. And you basically go and copy-paste some stuff into ChatGPT, see what it says, paste it back. And the game we played was basically how often could you, just with copy-pasting and guidance, so not writing a single line of code yourself, how often could you get ChatGPT to do exactly whatever it was that you wanted to be done? So not just the line of code, but the full, you know, whether it's building out a feature or writing tests or kind of doing a larger chunk of work, how often could you, the human, just orchestrate ChatGPT to do the full task? And we found that actually, if you gave proper context and properly subdivided the problem,