Why Facebook Gives AI Away

Paul Ford: Hi, I’m Paul Ford.

Rich Ziade: And I’m Rich Ziade.

Paul: And you are listening to Reqless.

Rich: I want to say the song, but let’s just play the song.

Paul: It’s the podcast, Richard, about how AI is changing the entire software industry. Let’s play that theme song.

Rich: R-E-Q-L-E-S-S.

[intro music]

Paul: Okay.

Rich: By Reqless, we mean less requirements, which is just the coolest sounding thing.

Paul: Exactly. Get Reqless by not writing software requirements.

Rich: What’s going on, Ford?

Paul: Well, you know, we’ve got three things to talk about today, and we try to keep this podcast short, so let’s move fast. First of all, panic. Panic, Rich, I’m panicking. The market. AI is over. Everybody says AI is over. The market crashed. It crashed. It’s over. It’s over.

Rich: [overlapping] Whoa whoa whoa. Slow down. It’s August 8th, 2024.

Paul: Yeah! Okay—

Rich: For the people that listen to this ten years from now, they’re wondering why you’re panicking. [laughter] Why are you panicking?

Paul: All right, so a couple—

Rich: Why are you panicking, Paul?

Paul: Couple years ago—or a couple days ago, sorry. Feels like years. [laughter] The market just went, but it went like, [kabloom noise] But it went, [laughing] I can’t even, I can’t even get into this, man. Like, everybody overreacts to everything.

Rich: Okay, by “market”—let’s slow down. By “market,” you mean the stock market?

Paul: The stock market. Like, everybody’s like, “Well, that’s it.” And then the jobs numbers are kind of bad, and everybody’s like, “You know, this AI thing isn’t really working now.”

Rich: Okay, so when you say stock market, so it’s worth noting, Nasdaq is tech-heavy.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Which has a lot of value built into it—

Paul: S&P—

Rich: —as—

Paul: Well, not just Nasdaq, like, I mean, just like the—

Rich: Google and Apple and everybody.

Paul: The biggest companies in the world are driving the American economy and they are technology companies.

Rich: Okay, and what happened?

Paul: It went down a couple percentage points. You know, the whole thing. It was bad. Everybody lost some money in their index fund and everybody’s like, well, that’s it. AI is over. It’s all over. It’s all done.

Rich: Oh. Did they draw a dotted line to AI being all over?

Paul: Yeah, some people did, I think what’s happening, the market is going like, we’re not quite sure we see this huge revolution and everything changing fast enough.

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: Are you going to, is Nvidia really going to sell another billion whatevers, right?

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: So the market crashed and then everybody was panicking on social media, and they’re like, I guess that’s it. And then, of course, it kind of started to rally again the next day.

Rich: Yeah, well, it’s going to be volatile for a bit, is my guess. So it could rally today and fall again tomorrow. It’s going to be a little all over the place.

Paul: Here’s the thing. I actually wanted to sort of act out like a whole form of panic, but I can’t even really bring up enough panic. Like, of course AI is overvalued by the stock market. Of course. Where have you been for the last 30 years if you don’t think that we’re in at least a little bit of a bubble?

Rich: Do you know how I look at markets from a technology perspective?

Paul: Go for it.

Rich: I look at them as, like, R&D investment.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: When an innovation breaks through, like the Internet in 1994.

Paul: Right, right.

Rich: Mass—they were like, “Oh my God. The world’s gonna change. We won’t have to go to bookstores. We won’t have to call anyone to get some food.”

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: “It’s this automated, incredible, like, the World Wide Web is here.” I’m old enough to remember, in 1995, it was so compelling to me that I came out of law school, worked at a law firm for about 20 minutes, and then went to this world.

Paul: I mean, it’s my entire career, right out of college.

Rich: Yeah. And then what happened was this massive wave of investment kicked in.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: Like, and it was a bubble. It was truly a bubble. I stayed at one of the startups that was riding that bubble. They had this incredible office in New York City. Just spectacular. I was like, “Wait a minute, we don’t have any revenue. How do you have this office?” And then it burst.

Paul: That’s why you never could become a VC, because you asked that question.

Rich: [laughing] So it burst.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: In 2001. I mean, 9/11 happened, but also it was going to burst.

Paul: Yes.

Rich: It was bursting anyway. And then out of that, a few survived and became some of the biggest companies in the world. And so when I look at ’96 to 2000?

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: What I see is like, that’s like R&D budget, because this innovative moment, this innovative technology landed in our lap and we got to see how, to where value is going to come from. And you know, if you talk to VCs, they like, they’re happy if 5% of their portfolio actually takes off. So I think markets are seeing that, and I do think AI is real.

Paul: Interesting. So you think that Pets.com died so that Chewy.com could live?

Rich: Yeah, I think Webvan.com died so that Doordash could live.

Paul: Right, right.

Rich: Yeah. Ah, all of it, I think, and I think RealVideo died so YouTube could live.

Paul: [overlapping] Aw, yeah. RealPlayer. You’re right.

Rich: RealPlayer. And so what you have is this sort of wild lurching forward of like experimentation and promises and bullshit—don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of BS there. And then a bunch die and then some survive, and the ones that do survive, there is something game-changing. Now I am skeptical of, like, the AI behemoths that declared victory in like the first ten minutes of the game. Like, that is worrisome to me. There’s going to be a retraction there. There’s going to be a reckoning there, I think, just because they haven’t earned the value yet. They have the innovation. When it becomes a real business, it’s actually the same old shit. Google has a sales team, everybody.

Paul: Yeah, they do.

Rich: A lot of the normal stuff—

Paul: Oh, Microsoft has so much consulting.

Rich: [laughing] Yeah, exactly. So I think this is, this strikes me as very normal.

Paul: I think, look, you know, let’s zoom way out for a second. Humans are extremely, like, social, tribal creatures. And I think what happens is these companies and organizations, there’s a lot of money and there’s a lot of promise and there’s a lot of opportunity and people get socially organized around them. Right? Like, it’s sort of like this is the future. I’m part of the future. I’m going to profit. I’m going to—

Rich: Yeah. Look, some people, they have great timing. You know who I think about a lot? Mark Cuban.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: Mark Cuban owned a company. He started a company called Broadcast.com.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: Yahoo was the hottest tech company in the world.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: Yahoo.com. Broadcast.com showed up and is like, “You think you’re cool? I’m going to replace radio.” That’s literally what he said.

Paul: Ooh. Radio.

Rich: Yahoo fully freaks out. He sells to Yahoo at absolute peak value.

Paul: Sure.

Rich: I don’t know exactly how he got paid. All I know is he turned it into cash like almost immediately.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: Because the Yahoo logo was ridiculous from day one.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: And he was like, “Okay, I’m going to turn it into cash, because I don’t know what’s going on.” And then he went and bought a basketball team and a few other things.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Is that guy a tech pioneer, or does he have really great timing?

Paul: I mean, there’s a certain confidence there, and he just kind of like, and he rode the wave. And he had to be smart. He had to figure it out.

Rich: I mean, and he got out.

Paul: Yes.

Rich: Like, he got out. Like he, there are a lot of people, and I know some of these people, who rode the wave got to ridiculous valuations, hung on too long, and then just went like, you know, the peak of the roller coaster and then it just, that picks up speed going downward. So they literally watch, they would log into their portfolio or their cart or whatever, and they think they’re worth hundreds of millions. And then they just kept, they held on too long. Some had to hold on, by the way, some couldn’t sell.

Paul: Yeah, you can’t sell. You get locked in.

Rich: But some, some are like, I believe in this. I’m not going anywhere.

Paul: So, look, you actually, you made an interesting point, which is we’ve got these kind of big players, your OpenAIs and your Anthropics, and they’re like, we’ve solved it. We’re in charge. We’re running AI.

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: Okay? And then you have these other players, and there’s one I want to talk about. Well, there’s two, actually. There’s one to bring up.

Rich: It’s worth saying, there’s hundreds.

Paul: There’s hundreds, but there is, like, there’s one I really want to talk about that we don’t talk about enough.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: It’s Facebook. First of all, have you—

Rich: We do talk about Facebook, just not in this context.

Paul: No, exactly. First of all, have you noticed that Zuckerberg is shown around—he’s, like, shown up with, like, a lot of hair, and he’s wearing jewelry on top of his turtlenecks?

Rich: He looks like an Albanian garment trader.

Paul: [laughing] He does. He does a little bit, actually. That’s a specific thing, but it’s not—

Rich: Jewelry’s hanging out. Hair’s a little big.

Paul: Yeah, yeah.

Rich: He does have a relaxed post—like some, they got some media person, some, like, image person. Like, your shoulders are wrong.

Paul: Yeah. Or some doctor with, like, ketamine.

Rich: [laughing] Something—

Paul: But yes, whatever’s happening in there, good for him. He seems—

Rich: Something’s up.

Paul: He’s in a more, he’s in a more relaxed place than he’s ever been before.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: Facebook, I think, is always this company that when it’s in the news, it tends to be bad. And then when it’s not in the news is when you should actually be watching it. Like—

Rich: Yeah. What are they cooking?

Paul: It’s so big, and it’s so kind of like, consumer. It’s in every house. It’s everywhere. Right?

Rich: It’s everywhere.

Paul: So what are they up to? What are they thinking? And so the other thing, actually, about Facebook is Facebook really was a big part of the ecosystem around AI was bootstrapped on open-source code and things like PyTorch and these sort of, like—

Rich: Sure.

Paul: Low-level things that you would find on GitHub that are like, okay, here’s how to do it.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: They bootstrapped a lot of this world, you know, along kind of like with Nvidia and sort of Nvidia’s libraries and CUDA and sort of all—so I’m just, I’m throwing out some acronyms, but like, if you’re like a GitHub type of person, right?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Facebook and Nvidia are two of the companies that you would pay the most attention to over the last few years.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: So they are a big deal in this world. And they have kind of the most content, I would say, of anybody.

Rich: Mmm.

Paul: So they’re watching…they can see everybody’s everything. They can see all your messages, and they have all the ads, all the everything. So they have the most data.

Rich: Okay, let’s recap for people that maybe don’t know, but Facebook owns Instagram, they own Facebook, they own Messenger, they own WhatsApp—

Paul: Yeah, this is Meta, actually. I keep saying Facebook. Meta, Meta—

Rich: Yeah, it’s Meta. It’s a whole world. I mean, they also have the, you know, the Oculus and all the VR stuff, but who knows where that is?

Paul: It’s this kind of whole quiet ecosystem. Then on the other side you got like Google and Apple, right?

Rich: Yup, yup.

Paul: Like, so Apple’s doing all this stuff and they’re a lot more buttoned up. They’re very private about their goals. Google, of course, this was another subject we want to bring up, is like, going to be going through it with their monopoly. Like, they’re kind of, their, their strategy is probably going to change.

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: I would say, like, we’re gonna, so—

Rich: So Facebook has an AI model that they’ve shared out called Llama.

Paul: That’s right. And that’s kind of what I want to talk about, because there’s two AI stories kind of going on around Facebook at once. One is they allow a lot of AI content to kind of flow through the platform, including an unbelievable amount of slop and garbage, just stuff that people overseas are generating and dumping in to get American clicks for pennies.

Rich: Mmm. Are folded into the model?

Paul: Yeah, this is happening—

Rich: It doesn’t sound like a good thing.

Paul: So that’s a weird one. That’s, if you go to, there’s an article on 404media.co, and it’s, you know, where does Facebook’s AI slop come from? It’s just more like, the Jesus that’s made out of shrimp. A lot of Jesus pictures. People like to look, anything with Jesus.

Rich: Oh interesting.

Paul: Like Jesus has a crab, Jesus, you know, like in the sky, Jesus knocking on the door—

Rich: Because of the content that’s fed the model.

Paul: Well, not, I mean, no, no, this has nothing to do with Llama. Just sort of like, this is what is working on Facebook. So Facebook, people are consuming tons of AI content.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: They’re generating responses—

Rich: I see, I see.

Paul: Responses and so on and so forth.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: So that’s one AI story, uh, that’s the one AI story about Facebook that’s kind of out there. But the other is that Facebook is producing its own model. So what is a model? A model, I think of a model as kind of like a database. Like they’re going out, they’re looking at content, they’re saving it.

Rich: Bucket of knowledge.

Paul: Facebook is very unusual compared to the other participants here because they are increasingly, and they use the term open source, and this gets everybody who’s passionate about what open source really means kind of upset. But they are making the data and the models open. You can download them, you can use them to do all kinds of things.

Rich: You can run them on your computer.

Paul: And there are permissive licenses where you could use them, you can extract from them to make your own models. And they keep getting more and more sort of flexible about what they can do and the models keep getting better and better. So right now, if you want to use OpenAI, you go and you use their servers and you run it on their computers.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: The simplest way to understand this is like on a pretty regular basis, Facebook does bigger and bigger indexes of all the content in their world.

Rich: Mmm hmmm.

Paul: That part you don’t know so much about. You know, that’s kind of a little bit of a black box. But you get the database that they make out of all the reality that they see, and then you can do whatever the hell you want with it.

Rich: Mmm hmmm.

Paul: To, you know, with some limits.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And they’re really leaning into this and it’s an interesting strategy for them. They’re not like, Facebook is not like the open source company. Right? Like, it’s not. They’re nothing—

Rich: No, they’ve thrown a lot of projects out into the world like React and GraphQL, but that’s not the core of what they’re about.

Paul: They are actively pressuring the AI space to be more and more of a commodity. Something that runs on your phone, something runs in an app, something they have on servers all over the place, something that is kind of standard, where they set the standard and they give it away for free.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: There’s a tricky part of this for me, which is, I mean, they’re not really doing anything wrong here. They’re doing like, I’m a Facebook paranoid in general.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: But as far as I can tell, unless there is like a secret message inside of this thing and it’s going to slowly take over the world—

Rich: I think it’s good.

Paul: I think what they’re doing is kind of the Linux strategy. Like, you know, IBM adopted Linux at one point and everybody in the open source world was like [confused dog noise].

Rich: Yeah. Yeah.

Paul: Microsoft is big on Linux.

Rich: Sure, sure, sure.

Paul: Runs in the Azure cloud and so on. So they’re doing that. They’re saying like, all right, you know what if it’s headed that way anyway, if it’s a commodity and we’re not going to be able to charge everybody $80 for it 5, 10 years from now, we’re Facebook. We don’t need that money today. Let’s just go ahead and control the commodity exchange.

Rich: Well, I think, I think it’s, I think it might be a little more nuanced than that.

Paul: Okay. Okay. Give it to me.

Rich: I don’t think Facebook will ever charge money to meter your use of its AI models. That’s not their business.

Paul: That’s not their business.

Rich: Right.

Paul: You can go to Meta.AI right now and use their models, by the way.

Rich: But if you can blunt the potential disruptive force of these other AI companies, that’s wise for Facebook.

Paul: That is exact—and they’re not pretending. That’s exactly what they’re doing.

Rich: Yeah. I think that is a smart sort of defensive strategy for them.

Paul: And they have billions in cash on hand. Right? And their CEO just loves this stuff.

Rich: It’s the nerdiest stuff, right? And so they’re doing this, and I mean, I have issues with other aspects of Facebook, but not this. I mean, frankly, I think a bit, I think a lot about how large companies, I don’t think there’s any altruism here. Let me get that out of the way. I don’t think Apple’s altruistic. Apple’s like, we care about your privacy. That’s because you sell me hardware. Like, that’s why you care about my privacy. Because your core business isn’t tied to jeopardizing my privacy.

Paul: Yes.

Rich: Right? Google has done many good things in the world, but then when you go to the aspects of it that are more aligned with their sort of commercial interests, then you start to see where things get murky.

Paul: This always drives me bananas with conversations about capitalism, right? Everybody’s either like, it’s evil or it’s the greatest thing ever.

Rich: No, it’s always—

Paul: These are big businesses.

Rich: Yeah, yeah. He’s the sweetest guy. But after two bourbons, right? [laughter]

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: It’s complicated.

Paul: If you look at what they’re saying, you know, they’re saying that Meta, the Llama model, is being used as an AI companion in Zoom workplace. Like it’s starting to see these applications. So they’re—

Rich: Well, it’s free.

Paul: It’s free.

Rich: That’s a big deal.

Paul: It’s being used to help, Yale School of medicine is using it to see if it can help in, like, low, low doctor access environments, can help with medical stuff.

Rich: Sure.

Paul: So there, I mean, these are press releases I’m giving you. This is their story.

Rich: But still, it’s a tool that people can pick up and try.

Paul: And I think that if the history, what’s going to be interesting to watch here, right, and they know this, I think everybody knows it. If the history of sort of what we learned from the Internet and open source doesn’t mean that like OpenAI goes away or Anthropic goes away, it does mean that they end up having to specialize as the more commoditized models just become the baseline for all AI.

Rich: That’s appealing to you?

Paul: What happens—I don’t know, appealing or not, what I think happens though is in five years I type a command when I’m a programmer and we’re like, hey, we need to use a model to do this thing. We’re going to make a shoe-finding tool for our website.

Rich: Yep.

Paul: Going to enhance the e-commerce. I’m going to type, install Lama from the command line, and then I’m going to work with it to make the shoe-matching tool.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: That’s going to get deployed through Llama deploy, another command out to my server environment on Azure or Facebook Cloud or whatever.

Rich: Is that bad?

Paul: No, no, none of this is bad. What this means is that it becomes so commoditized and everybody starts using it, that OpenAI and Claude from Anthropic and so on have to start making specific cases for why they exist. Right now, they’re very general.

Rich: Yeah, that’s right.

Paul: So I think if you look, and I would put this on like a three-year path, like in three years, the developers are using, it’s built into their integrated development environments and the AI companies that are thriving have a really specific use case and they’re like, we’re really good for this, for mapping or planning routes or medical or whatever.

Rich: I mean, I think that’s inevitable anyway.

Paul: I think Facebook is just trying to use its giant Galactus-sized hammer to make this happen on its terms.

Rich: Yeah. And I don’t know if that’s a bad thing. I think it’s actually kind of good.

Paul: It’s no worse than Microsoft investing in Linux.

Rich: Right, right.

Paul: So yeah, let’s close it out with Google. What? Okay, so Google went—

Rich: I’m seeing Gemini a lot at the top of my search results.

Paul: Yeah, I wonder how that’s going to keep going. So, you know, I went, there’s an article in the Washington Post about what Google might do post—so first of all, it was found to be a monopoly by the United States government.

Rich: Whoa, so we’re not going to get into Gemini giving smartypants search results?

Paul: I got to tell you, I got a lawyer sitting across. Let’s talk about antitrust for just a couple minutes.

Rich: Yeah, we talked about this in a previous podcast, when the lawsuit came forward.

Paul: So here it is now. Now it has been found to be a monopoly and now a judge needs to look at it and decide what they’re going to do and are they going to restrict it or I guess push it to break up and so on and so forth.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: So, you know, there’s an article in the Washington Post where they sort of polled people about what could happen. Some of it is a little utopian, like, you know, now they’ll be better, lots of little search engines—

Rich: Mmm.

Paul: Including ones that are good for kids. One is like, well, this is going to push Apple to make its own search engine instead of just letting Google pay them $20 billion a year to make it the default. Products that advertise, you know, there’s sort of all the, all the advertising aspects of this. Like Google kind of has a, has, ah, a lock. So does, you know, does advertising cost go down? Do different products have to get pushed instead of just the ones that pay Google? Like, or, and here’s the one, this the one that’s fascinating. Baby Googles.

Rich: You just want to say that.

Paul: Baby Googles!

Rich: I don’t—

Paul: Baby Googles!

Rich: You mean like Baby Bell?

Paul: [losing it] I just—

Rich: Breaking up AT&T into a bunch of little—

Paul: That’s the funniest two words I’ve ever heard together in my life.

Rich: It’s pretty good.

Paul: Baby Googles!

Rich: It’s pretty good.

Paul: I mean, you know, could you, I mean, you know, Chrome becomes its own company.

Rich: I have a couple of thoughts here. First off, I’m not going to sit here and talk to you about the virtues of the appeal process and the law.

Paul: Oh boy. [laughing]

Rich: This is, I guess, determined on a district court level, which is the lowest level of federal courts.

Paul: Yes. We got a while.

Rich: Yeah. I mean, what you have now is, you know, the sort of the five-minute stretching of the appeals lawyers, they’re sort of getting their fingers and their arms limber so they can…. [laughter] And so let’s not pop any champagne just yet.

Paul: Checkbooks are getting out and banks are being created just to sign the checks that are about to be written. Okay, yeah.

Rich: And related to that, I have to tell you, I do remember when Microsoft aggressively went after Netscape and made Internet Explorer the default browser and whatnot. And then it became a big lawsuit. And I think, I think the FTC got involved. I think it was a federal, like, government situation and there were monopoly questions then and, you know, aggressive behavior and blah, blah, blah. And what it had ended up with, I kid you not, was negotiated settlement where I think money exchanged hands. I don’t remember. But the thing that stuck in my mind was that Microsoft was forced to put the Netscape Navigator icon on every Windows install so you could pick which browser you wanted to use.

Paul: Along with like twelve other icons for garbage products.

Rich: Yeah, other products in, and whatnot. And of course, while all that’s happening, happening. Google built Chrome. [laughing]

Paul: Yes, that’s right.

Rich: So here’s my, my read on this. It’s probably the right, this is, this is the pinnacle of success.

Paul: It’s a search monopoly.

Rich: It’s a search monopoly, which it is. I mean, let’s face it, it’s like 99%. They pummeled Yelp. Yelp used to be this like credible, like, restaurant rating thing, and then they just destroyed them.

Paul: I mean, we’re also in that zone where they’ve kind of pummeled themselves. Like, the product isn’t that good anymore.

Rich: Look, they’ve reached it. They did it. They did it to the, to the maximum.

Paul: Right. Yeah.

Rich: That’s what success is. They’re not evil. Just as AT&T becoming the dominant telephone company is not evil. They’re not evil. They just kept going and then they got there. Then there was nothing left. And next thing you know, they’re like licking the bowl because there’s nothing left.

Paul: Yeah, that’s right.

Rich: There’s just nothing left. Where does that end up? How do you—here’s the problem with breaking up a company. The problem with breaking up a company is this is a company that has deeply ingrained itself into the patterns of how we use computers and the Internet today. And so to say, here comes Baby Goog 3, right? The best search engine for teenagers!

Paul: I just, you know what it’s gonna be?

Rich: Best of luck, everybody.

Paul: You get Chrome, and you get, you know, it’s like you get your choice of Bing. It’s just…

Rich: Choices, humans, when you give them choices, [laughing] they tend to just go back to Olive Garden in Times Square.

Paul: I mean, you know, you’re not seeing like, Google lose 90% of its value on the stock market right now.

Rich: It’s just, oh, no, it’s a very murk—you know what it is, too. It’s a war of attrition. And you could start to whittle it down to becomes this negotiated set of things that they promised to do, and it becomes kind of innocuous.

Paul: The last, last few years have just told me to love our justice system. [laughter] I’m really just feeling good.

Rich: I mean, look, I don’t know how this plays out. It’s just I’ve seen like, behemoths like Microsoft deal with this in a very sort of methodical way where it had minimal damage. Google needs to be other businesses. That’s something they’ve been trying to do for a long time. Google cloud kind of shit the bed twelve times until they, I think they’re doing better now. I don’t know, but they need to do a bunch of other stuff—

Paul: You’re not expecting radical change tomorrow here. It’s going to take a while for this to metabolize.

Rich: I don’t know how you settle it. Like, the settlement requirements around this are super tricky.

Paul: We’ll keep an eye on, we’ll keep an eye.

Rich: I think it’ll be interesting. And also, we don’t know if the appeal will get lost. They’ll lose the appeals.

Paul: All right, so that’ll be fun to watch. Richard.

Rich: Yes, sir.

Paul: This podcast is brought to you by Aboard. What is Aboard?

Rich: Aboard is a software platform. We use AI to deliver exactly the software you need to solve big problems—CRM, ERP, just about anything, usually for bigger companies, but there’s a free version as well. Rather than spending six months writing docs, prototyping, sketching, we get you software really, really fast, and then you refine it, and then we put it in your hands.

Paul: That’s right. We are Reqless. We are patient zero of Reqless-ness.

Rich: Reqless means less requirements. We are not reckless. We’re actually very careful people, Paul.

Paul: We’re good drivers.

Rich: Good drivers. Hit us up at hello@aboard.com. We love to talk.

Paul: We do. And if you have anything you want us to talk about on the podcast, we are, trying to kind of explore the whole world of AI. And there’s lots of stuff, there’s people we should talk to, and there are worlds we’d like to hear about. Just get in touch.

Rich: Have a great week.

Paul: Bye.

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