Amjad Masad on Rethinking College for the AI Era

Ultimately, the utility of young people is to question deeply held beliefs, is to be heretics. You need to learn our way so you can get a job and be a perfect citizen, get married, have kids, and get a house and a car and, and live happily ever after.

And in today's college, and actually the opposite, it kind of beats any outside thought out of them.

I just really wanna see a world in which it's okay if you wanna go on a side quest and go do something that's kind of oddball, but also might end up being super amazing if it works out.

The future of companies is gonna change. I'd want to go to a college that is not prescriptive about what I learn. I'm motivated by what skills can it give me in order to achieve what I wanna build.

One of the core tenets of the academy sidesteps this problem entirely. We don't care if you graduate or not. We don't have grades. We don't have tests. The amount of weight to push against should be a lot less.

When you see a 18-year-old that is really inspiring to you, that you're like, "I gotta spend time with this person," what are they doing that is capturing your interest?

The real civilizational missing opportunity is-

What if the most valuable thing young people bring to society is their willingness to question what everyone else takes for granted? Today, I sat down with Replit founder and CEO Amjad Masad and Horowitz and Andreessen Academy co-founder and CEO Gagan Biyani to rethink what education should look like in the AI era. We discuss why students need more freedom to follow their curiosity, learn by building, and take intellectual side quests, and why Amjad thinks some young founders may actually be starting companies too soon. We also get into how AI could change the way companies themselves operate, why trust and judgment matter as much as technical skills, and what Amjad looks for when he needs exceptional young builders.

As we were talking, I remembered this sci-fi story that I read once. It's called "The City and the Stars," and it's about this future city that's governed by AGI. We sort of invented AGI. It now governs all of our lives. It solves all problems, all human problems. There's no wars, there's no disease, everyone lives forever, and people spend their time working on, like, uh, thousand-year art projects and doing all sorts of random things to fill up their time. But they found this problem where they accumulate so much knowledge and memory, it becomes, like, harder to keep it all in their heads. So they invented this technology where they go into some kind of laboratory, and they compress their memory, sort of like context compression that we do with AI today. They go through all the memories, and they compress them, and then they go through a boot camp to retrain them for their life. So they invented a new way to be born, but you're not fundamentally new person. You're still the same person. You're just editing your memory. But there's a glitch that happens in this system, in this machine, and there's a new person that is fundamentally born new, and he immediately starts causing problems. In the boot camp, he starts doing weird things, new things, and everyone was like, "Whoa, that's crazy. You