Wordpress powering 40% of all websites, trying to do that in many areas
Automattic has a lot of flexibility in its future
More zealous than Stallman about open source
For our philosophy to need something the world needs, we had
Make a great business while doign all the "right stuff"
These businesses will be the most antifragile when they are built on a strong open community and open core
JJ: Lots Started with self taught devs scratching their own itch, then VCs come
First time founders going from open source governor to CEO. How would you advise founders on that transition?
Matt: Meet your business soulmate
Z Schneider joined as CEO and he totally got it. He was from
first round in 2005 raised very little
The Eric Shmidt era when the adult got brought into the room.
Was very excited to
JJ: AI is a modern Gutenberg. discussion about the closed source models being more transparent than closed.
JJ: Open weights is an open source framework for AI weights. AI is not source code, its different, a big blob of math. Plus a CSV file (according to Elon)
IF we have a license that gives similar permissiveness as MIT/Apache or maybe GPL, we can see open source models really propogate. Even the training set needs some transparency.
Matt: What does the CSV file represent?
Heather advised setting up the wordpress foundation
AI is moving so fast, and the open models are keeping pace. The ecosystem is doing cool stuff with them.
The impact on open source on the leading models, and these agents will get so much more capable in the next year
OSS is great for the grunt work
Ecosystem is where a lot of the magic happens. WP 60,000 plugins/themes. On the long tail, people use a lot of random stuff. All the plugins int the repo are GPL.
Plugins cause problems because they are the bazzar
For example adding SQLite to WP
To power wordpress playgrounds. It boots up php and SQLite, executes all the wordpress codebase and serves it in your browser. To support this it includes SQLite backend. You can even build mobile apps with this. Including permissions and revisions etc, for free.
We must make sure these 60k plugins/themes work. Security, unit tests, etc may change dramatically with AI. As long as you can "cast the spells"
Wordcamp US speaker Simon Wilson is a great prompt engineer. Invented "prompt injection"
JJ: As for laws/regulation of AI models, they are uniquely new laws on computation.
Matt: Like the early days of encryption. The conerns went away eventually
AI moves fast but government moves at the speed of government
JJ: BitTensor, Jensen are focused on nerual net infrencing and unstoppable model deployment
Matt: Sam says these are the worst that these systems will ever be. We have seen the lightning flash but haven't heard the thunder clap yet
Now is the most excited I have been on the open web since the early days. We went through a dark period with mobile and social shutting things down. What would I do differently? Not much. Finding great partners and people to work with, never goes out of style. Connecting on Twitter, I'm in there every day.
Maybe would call WP.com something different. Focused a little to much on business use cases and would focus more on devs
Horacio: focusing on developers. How much weight when you started building the plugin system?
Its critical, "hello dolly" the first wp plugin. I'd encourage people to focus on the business, but mostly focus on building movements rather than building products. Inspire a belief and principle. We have the truth on our side, unlike businesses. Think about that movement: community building, publishing, writing, articulating, and then creating frameworks. We use GPL only for plugins,. Acquied openverse and photoverse for CC0 photos. With 10's of millions of photos one day.
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Audience Question: Open source charter to re-establish trust after _, how to establsih the trust from the beginning. How do you think about OSS alongside a commercial company. How does this balance with competitors?
Matt: we're kind of odd. the foundation is minimal with no employees. We run some events. It's meant to be a check/balance in case of Auttomatic going evil. Not just the code but also the trademark. TM only valuable if the wp brand is doign well by our users. I don't love the non-profit dynamics and I see how some OSS can go wrong when run by committe, etc. Keep things lean, don't be scared to have clear leaders/owners. Acknowledge that its not the perfect structure but
Chief worry about crypto stuff is because the code is written in stone and needs to evolve. For example the legal systems has some flex, like speeding limits. Beauty in the chaotic beauty of nature. Set up checks/balances. I like GPL. We put everything in the main OSS repositories. That creates a really nice alignment for incentives. Challenging for the business? of course! We need to earn the wallet share in a very harsh competitive environment. That will be better for competitors and if others build better businesses
JJ: OpenAI is all over the news w/ the non-profit structure. Linux mark is owned by Linus. Is this OpenAI model viable? Are these checks/balances functional? Will we reach a scale where we need a completely neutral non-capitalist decision maker?
Matt: Its an interesting structure and the singularity has not happened. We would have other problems (after AGI). there is more than one way to do it. all organizational structures are a series of tradeoffs. I don't want to say "everyone should do this". For OpenAI, it may not be a problem with the model, but the board felt a little thin and more members could have prevented the situation.
You want to build the best possible board. Automattic has benefited from ultra-high integrity board that holds us to account. In the best case it doesn't come down to these votes, but the healthy tension is a good structure.
Gabriel: Do you have reccomendations with a remote company making product decisions?
(Meeter is a different thing. Auttomatic with the double T's. )
The highlights for Automattic: came from an open source project. People First. If you hire this way, don't worry about anything else. Switching to async comms was a good agument
Use P2: realtime blog with rich debates/discussions. Embeds, figmas, threads.
An organizational blockchain for our company. We have a robust search to see our decision making. With millions of posts/comments. A valuable asset with AI could make this even better.
Distributed.blog podcast, Sid, Jack Dorsey. Hardest for middle managers.
Finally, post covid recc is meetups. Didn't realize importance until covid. The act of getting togehter is huge even without an agenda. Small companies 6 times a year. Bigger companies fewer times. Bring all these people together is the fuel which makes the other 48 weeks/year super powerful. We spend as much on meetups as our fancy office, and its totally worth it. An investment in team cohesion and our people.
JJ: Thanks for your contributions to the community.