The distance between wanting and having

"The distance between wanting something and having it is now a sentence."

https://x.com/r0ck3t23/status/2096287558330437757

Dustin

@r0ck3t23

Larry Ellison built one of the largest software companies on earth. He just said a lot of its code is no longer written by people. Ellison: “A lot of the code that Oracle is writing, Oracle isn’t writing. Our AI models are writing.” Every era of computing shortened the distance between wanting something and having it. Punch cards gave way to assembly, assembly gave way to compilers. Each time, the machine absorbed a layer people used to do by hand. Ellison: “We just tell the model what we want the program to do and then the AI comes up with a step-by-step process to actually do it.” Software has been a translation problem from the start. One person knows what a system should do, another spends months turning that into instructions, and meaning erodes along the way. Ellison: “We don’t write the procedure. We declare our intent, but the model writes the step-by-step procedure that we commonly think of as a computer program.” The translation step is gone. Knowing what’s worth building becomes the entire job, and far fewer people can do that than write code. Every tool in history made the how cheaper. This one produces the how. Ellison: “They diagnose medical images far better than we do. They design drugs that we can’t.” The same shift is running through medicine and chemistry. Name the outcome and the method arrives. Ellison: “There’s a big gotcha on these models and that is the models do not get trained on your private data.” The model learned from nearly everything humanity has published. Hospitals, labs, factory floors hold ground truth it has never seen. Ellison: “For some reason, private people want to keep their private data private. And that’s not going to change.” The models come to the people who hold the data. The intelligence spreads and the data stays put. Humanity has always had more good ideas than hands to build them. That constraint is lifting inside our lifetime. The ideas that used to die between someone’s head and someone’s hands now get built. The distance between wanting something and having it is now a sentence.