Discover the future of WordPress in the AI era. Learn how artificial intelligence is reshaping CMS platforms and what it means for your website
In this insightful interview with Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic, we explore the future of WordPress in an increasingly AI-driven landscape. Discover how artificial intelligence is reshaping web development, content creation, and user interaction. We delve into innovative tools, trends, and potential challenges that WordPress users may face.
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The Show’s Main Transcript
[00:00:22.000] – Jonathan Denwood
Welcome back, folks, to the WP Tonic Show. This is episode 998. Got the great pleasure of having a returning guest. We got Matt Mareweg, the CEO of Automatic, as our guest on this episode. We’re going to be discussing all things WordPress and AI and the madness around AI. It just seems to get worse and worse. It should be a fantastic discussion. Matt, would you like to give a quick 10-15-second intro to our audience?
[00:00:58.080] – Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic
Sure. My name is Matt Mullenweg, talking to you today from Houston, Texas, where I was born and raised. I guess, 23 years ago now. I connected with Mike Little online through our blogs, and we came out of what we now know as WordPress. That little pebble that turned into a snowball, then an avalanche of code and community and plugins and themes and everything. I consider myself very, very lucky to be part of that. My other night job is I do a little bit of investing with RG Capital. My main gig is the CEO of Automatic, which makes WordPress. Com, Woocommerce, Jetpack, Kumbler. Day one, simple though. We’re a number of… It should be a company with about 1,400 people worldwide. I’m excited to be with you all today.
[00:01:57.000] – Jonathan Denwood
Thanks for that, Matt. I’ve got my great co-host, Kurt. Would you like to introduce yourself to the new listeners and viewers?
[00:02:04.880] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, sure thing, Jonathan. My name is Kurt von Ahnen. I own a small agency called Manana Nomas. We also work directly with the great folks at Lifter LMS and WP Tonic.
[00:02:14.600] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s Fantastic. Like I say, we’re going to be discussing all things WordPress, AI, and the future of WordPress. It should be a great discussion. But before we go into the meat and potatoes, I’ve got a message from one of our major sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks.
[00:02:28.860] – Kurt von Ahnen
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[00:03:02.200] – Jonathan Denwood
We’re coming back, folks. As I say, it should be a great discussion, and I also want to point out we’ve got some great deals from our major sponsors, plus a curated list aimed at the WordPress user and small agency owner. You can get these free resources by visiting wp-tonic. Com/deals, wp-tonic. Com/deals, and you find all the goodies there, my beloved tribe. What more could you ask for? Probably a lot more, but that’s all you’re going to get on that page. So let’s go straight into it, Matt. So, to say that we’re living in interesting times would be the understatement of the century, I would say. So, what do you see as some of the biggest opportunities and maybe threats to WordPress over the next 18 months?
[00:03:59.040] – Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic
I Well, in terms of threats, I guess the main thing I would think about is just that it’s tied to the opportunity, which is that As we start to apply, the coding part of AI has gotten quite good. If you haven’t been following with clogged code and the new models like Opus, Codex, main access, a lot of amazing stuff happening. As that starts to be pointed at not just core, but the 60, 70, 80,000 plugins and themes, I think we’ll find lots of opportunities to improve. I think we’re also going to find a lot of security bugs and things like that. I would say many open source projects around the world are being a little bit flooded with this agentic-driven input. I said the biggest thing we have to figure out over the next 18 months is how to incorporate this and deal with this, both for core and our translations and everything we do in main WordPress and our official economical plugins, but also how to provide the tools so that all the tens of thousands of the maintainers of these different open-source plugins are able to triage and incorporate all these improvements. Now, at the end of this, what we’ll have is a vastly upgraded from a security performance and I think functionality as well, set of open source code and extensions, which is very exciting.
[00:05:38.780] – Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic
I think, like many things, the opportunity of the threat is two sides of the same coin.
[00:05:45.040] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, we’ve seen that it’s been called the sas apoplex recently, haven’t we? Some people in the WordPress community say, Plugins are finished. In the next eight In 20 months, you’re going to see a total semi-collapse of the why build a WordPress plugin? Why buy a commercial WordPress plugin? How would you respond to that?
[00:06:14.620] – Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic
Well, It’s nuanced, right? I do think that we’re going to see a lot more people doing what WordPress is designed for, which is customizing it and making it bespoke for their needs, which is, I think, beautiful. Now, essentially, what you’re doing, though, then is you have some code that is proprietary or unique to you. You have to really balance this gradient of whether it’s something that’s truly unique to your sites and should be proprietary code to your site, or whether there are some benefits to using shared code that other people are looking at updating, securing, maintaining, mining, etc. I know that’s a little bit abstract, but you think of it like, well, let’s just use e-commerce as an example. I don’t think you want to vibe code your e-commerce solution, because you’re going to have compliance and credit cards and anti-fraud and all these sorts of different things. It’s probably good to use some code that a bunch of smart humans have looked at and a company is backing and things like that. Now, if it’s just a different functionality, this is true in technology. The baseline of what people expect or what’s possible is going to change.
[00:07:41.320] – Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic
What’s a good example? Let’s just talk about image editing or all this stuff around managing images or libraries of images. Ai is so good now at manipulating images. You used to spend hours in Photoshop doing it. You can now do it with a single command and it takes 10 seconds. So any plugins that used to exist around being better image editors or things like that, probably now that’s just something that’s not as uniquely differentiated for. But it provides an opportunity for them to figure out what is uniquely differentiated. So this is, I think, going to happen a little faster than it’s happened in the past, but it’s not dissimilar to what is the normal gales of creative destruction, as Frederick Hayek would call it, that is prevalent in the technology industry in general.
[00:08:34.820] – Jonathan Denwood
Over to you, Kurt.
[00:08:38.040] – Kurt von Ahnen
As an extension to that answer, Matt, one of the things that I seem to constantly struggle with internally, and that is when I think of WordPress and I think about other platforms, because I try them. I’m like, Hey, school is super popular. Let’s try school. And you go in there and the only thing you can do is light mode or dark mode. There’s no other. And when I build something in an LMS for WordPress, I can customize the whole stinking experience. I see a disconnect in my clients because they seem fine with no options in other platforms. And as soon as we mention WordPress, instantly it’s, I want to change this? Change that? This needs to be blue. This needs to be periwinkle. To me, I’m seeing a lot of people post publicly like, Oh, AI and WordPress, and it’s the doom for the agency, and people are going to do these things. And I see the opposite. I see more and more people are focused on, I just want to run my business. And because I want all this weird stuff on my website, I got to hire an agency or a pro to build it or maintain it for me.
[00:09:41.640] – Kurt von Ahnen
And so I’m seeing opportunity. Other people are predicting doom. And from an agency perspective, it’s a little hard to walk that line and figure out what direction things are really going to go. What are your gut feelings there?
[00:09:55.900] – Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic
Well, I think you nailed the core thing that although the realm of what is possible is being vastly democratized, which I love. I mean, that is literally the mission of WordPress is to democratize publishing. So these things being accessible to more people is possible. But also, you know it as you’re following Man, it’s hard to keep up with all the different AI models and what’s launching every day. Sometimes they mess up and it’s like, can be very hard to debug sometimes and they can delete things. It’s actually still As someone described it, almost like a slot machine, where sometimes it does something super incredible and you’re like, wow, that would have taken me two months to code manually, and it just happened instantly. Then sometimes nothing happens or something bad What happens? The beauty of this is that for motivated technical people, I think you get not even just 10X, maybe 100X in terms of what you’re able to do or maintain. Agencies, I think their ability not just to serve more clients, but maybe even serve their existing clients much, much better than they have in the past. It’s going to be increased. If you’re one of those clients, let’s say you’re a small business owner and your day to day and your things you want to think about every day, it might be serving your customers.
[00:11:14.960] – Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic
That’s an Arbol Shop at restaurants, a law firm, a doctor, whatever you might be out there, a teacher. You probably don’t want to have to become an expert in using Claude and Codex and all these other things. You might have an expectation that when you call your agency, what used to take them a week, now might take them a day. I think that’s completely fine. But there’s still a benefit to having a phone you can call, someone you can trust to manage all this complexity, all the change, and all the unknowns. It will guide you through… Again, the AIS can do anything, but you have to ask them the right question. And so that ability to know what the question is and prompt them well, I think, is still something that for folks who really dedicate a lot of time to it and make it their craft profession, they love to do. There’s going to be value in that.
[00:12:16.200] – Kurt von Ahnen
Nice, nice. Thanks. If we were to dive deeper into the AI thing, I saw you just posted on LinkedIn a couple of videos of Jamie Marzland in a post, and he was talking about some new AI features, and it was cool. He put a cat on a mat. Fun things. But when we see things like that, do you feel that that… Obviously, you’re excited that AI is part of WordPress. Obviously, that’s an exciting thing. But overall, long term, looking downstream, Do you see that being a true benefit to the Ecosphere that we’re working in, or do you think it’s more like a threat? Because we’re making things very easy and putting them into what we’re working in when they could just make it in another another screen and import it. You know what I mean? It’s like, are we making things too complicated by putting those tools in wordpress. Com, or are we making it that much easier for the client?
[00:13:13.660] – Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic
That’s a good question. I’ll say my thinking here has probably shifted over the past maybe year and a half, where I started talking maybe at least two workhams ago about… Remember I mentioned the perplexity browser, which is called Comet. More recently, I talked about Atlas, which is the OpenAI one. This idea that you have a really smart personal AI, which is embedded into your operating system or your browser. I think just given the context that’s allowed, that is going to know you better and be more powerful. It’s also probably something you’re paying for directly versus going into the hosting margin of your hosting plan or something like that, which, by the way, it’s not huge already. Okay, like dollars for something which is pretty amazing, 24/7, globally available, etc. Just to give a simple example, when you log in a WordPress wordpress. Com, we’ll know everything about your sites and things you chose to connect or share with us. But we don’t know all of your calendar. We don’t know all of the chats you’ve had with your personal AI in the past. If Can you imagine this personal AI has access to all your photos, your emails, everything.
[00:14:33.940] – Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic
It’s a very intimate relationship that you would be rightfully hesitant to ask for, for something. Honestly, with wordpress. Com, I don’t want to ask for all that stuff for you. So that personal agent could then essentially be the mediator. It could have access to all that super private stuff, manage it securely, and have all that context, and then talk to the tool, whether it’s wordpress. Com or any other website, and just give it what that site, external site, needs to have or needs to know. Actually, I’m really excited that in the future, some more of these models might be entirely local. As we get new chips from Apple and others that can run actually some pretty powerful things just on your device, on the edge, which, of course, from a privacy security point of view, is fantastic. That personal agent, I think, will be able to do things on your behalf, including using some of our existing interfaces. I guess we’re doing all the MCP and command-line interfaces and all that stuff. We’re very blessed to have decades now of really strong API support everything. But I think also these agents will be able to figure out any website.
[00:15:49.920] – Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic
If they haven’t built something specifically for AI, they’ll just start using a human model. It’ll just be slower. In terms of what that balance will be, I think it’s probably going to be 80 or 90% it’s going to be perhaps your personal agent using the tools. What it behooves us as tool makers, whether it’s WordPress or others to do, is make sure that as we design for human usability, which, of course, we’re going to continue to improve. We’re also thinking about the agent-equisition ability. How is this accessible to agents to use it and more like a AI or agent-driven things on behalf of humans using the tools and services. Nice. Jonathan, over to you.
[00:16:39.800] – Jonathan Denwood
I just want a quick follow for your question. Was you really surprised by what happened around OpenClaw and Peter Steinberger, a fantastic developer? But in some ways, you must have been delighted that this quasar open Open Source project. I think it got some of the quickest traction of any open source project in history. I might be wrong about that. But somebody with enormous experience of open source, what was your thoughts about what Peter achieved and what’s happened with Open Claw?
[00:17:26.020] – Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic
Yeah, I think it’s actually awesome. It’s a project that, in Peter and I have a lot of mutual friends, so we talk a bit through his whole process here. Also, I think if you notice, WordPress is one of the few accounts that OpenClaw follows. So that’s no accident. I think that there’s a lot of parallels to OpenClaw WordPress. And I also think there’s a lot of ways for OpenClaw to drive WordPress. I’d highly encourage you to check out the WP-Pinch project from nick Hamsey. It’s on GitHub, which connects your OpenClaw to your WordPress and allows you to do lots of management, different things. It’s also got me thinking about OpenClaw loves working with command-line interfaces. Of course, we have a long history of it. It’s an official project. We brought it in to fold, I think, 8 or 9 years ago, WP CLI, but some of you are familiar with. I’ve definitely been thinking a lot about how to expand and our CLI interface to expose some things that we might not currently support through it. That that might be a way, this old Unix philosophy of piping together lots of smart command line tools actually is a very, very efficient way.
[00:18:44.080] – Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic
Took an efficient way for AI to interact with applications like WordPress.
[00:18:49.660] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s added to watch.
[00:18:51.360] – Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic
We’ll see where it goes. I think things happen faster now than ever, including adoption of things, switching between other things, alternatives, I’ve been following some of the things like NanoClaw or IronClaw or things inspired by OblaClaw. I’m rude for OblaClaw. I love the weirdness and quirkiness of the community and everything. In fact, at Automatic, we’re contributing some code to it and some security patches and other things. I think it’s an interesting project to follow, and we’re certainly going to try to support it however we can.
[00:19:28.920] – Jonathan Denwood
Would you surprise Because Peter obviously doesn’t need the money. He was highly successful with his last company. And I think he took a three-year break and he came back to this. It just came on the radar. But now he’s… I don’t know precisely what his position with OpenAI is. Was you surprised that he’s partnered up in some way with OpenAI? Because I think I’m not being unfair to say that they got a very complex and controversial relationship with open source software, haven’t they?
[00:20:10.800] – Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic
That’s a good question. Well, one, I would say that all the AI frontier labs, they’re spicy, right? There’s definitely a lot going on behind the scenes that we’re not aware of. But you see from the outside when people move between one or the other. They’re also in a very unique position. I don’t envie them. The targets of nation-states, geopolitics, and countless billions or trillions in funding and value that’s being going between them in a hyperly competitive environment. In terms of Peter going to OpenAI or any one of the frontier labs, I don’t think it’s… They are some of the most interesting companies in the world right now, whether that’s Anthropic or OpenAI. In They haven’t access to resources, which is a little bit unparalleled. If there’s something that… If he wanted access to the latest and greatest models and unlimited tokens and everything like that, not to mention that there’s just good sets of people at these things. All my interactions with folks at these companies are definitely a magnet for a lot of interesting talent. We’ll see what happens. I agree that these companies sometimes have a mixed relationship with open source, but to be honest, you could say that of any large company.
[00:21:33.370] – Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic
You could say that of Google, you could say that of Facebook. You could say that of Automatic even. Probably one of those open source for companies in the world. Companies, I think it’s good. We anthropomorphize them and speak of them as a single entity. But you have to remember, these are often made up of thousands of individuals, and they make mistakes. Those individuals make mistakes, they change directions, and they might do simultaneously things which… Think of Google and Apple. They’re the biggest competitor of the world. They also have tens of billions of dollars of partnerships and deals that they do every year. In fact, Apple now, I think, choosing the Gemini model to power some of the new AI stuff in their devices. I think as adults, you have to look at this as these companies are sometimes running to beats. They also work together. It’s good not to completely break them off or think that they’re angels just at any point in time. It’s going to be complex just like humans and evolve.
[00:22:30.000] – Jonathan Denwood
All right. Over to you, Kurt.
[00:22:33.240] – Kurt von Ahnen
Thinking about that next question that we have, I was driven to think about some of the content that Matt Madera had posted up with WP Minute. He was real fond of Replet for a while, and then he started playing with Lovable for a bit. And then we had people on our show here that were talking about Lovable very fondly. I could build this, I could build that. And then we saw some content where a lot of folks were using these AI-driven site building sources, but also injecting WordPress, headless CMS, and stuff like that into the mix. Just for the record, I’m going to go on the record for myself. I like just building plain WordPress sites. It’s simple. I like just keeping things simple. But what are your thoughts on the whole headless WordPress CMS working in conjunction with these other tools? It’s a mismash of stuff, but it seems to be working for a lot of people.
[00:23:32.560] – Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic
Yeah, and I like to call it decoupled rather than headless, but same idea. Using WordPress as a back-end to talk to it via API is something we’ve supported very strong. It’s been a huge use case. Some of the largest WordPress sites in the world run this way. I think that’s the first version, the V1, and I like to say we are in the command line, DOS era of these AIs in a lot of ways, was a lot of them creating random stuff from scratch. I think the next generation is going to be a lot more saying, how do they build on existing libraries, existing open source projects in the most efficient way so they can use their tokens, use their customization to benefit from large existing communities and plug into existing tools. I would say some of those interesting stuff happening there, as you might have noticed, is we’re starting to publish emails or evaluations and benchmarks for WordPress. Basically, this is way for the Frontier Labs or tools like for replet, Lovable, v0, etc. Say how well they work at creating WordPress blocks, WordPress plugins, WordPress sites, etc. Right now, there could be a lot of basic errors.
[00:24:45.900] – Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic
I saw an example the other day where it created a full plugin, but it messed up something in the read me file, so it actually wasn’t loaded correctly. It was like a one-line change. That was just a very, very simple thing. But it was a bug. It made the hard part of the plugin. It did like thousands of lines of BHP code and everything like that, and it messed up something in the text file. These are basic errors. As we provide ways for AI to test their work and evaluate. They will get better and better. It’s make no mistakes part of building things for WordPress and integrating with WordPress.
[00:25:26.940] – Kurt von Ahnen
I think it’s important to inject For the listeners and viewers now, it would be important to inject. Some people think of WordPress as, like you mentioned earlier, the barbershop, the coffee shop, the lawyer’s office. But there’s giant, huge enterprise projects focused around WordPress that millions upon millions upon millions of items of data that are correlated and all that stuff. I want to make sure people really fully understand if they come in and they’re not in our little circle and understand that it’s used for huge projects. Projects.
[00:26:01.080] – Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic
Yeah, there were sources out there with hundreds of millions of rows, the WP Post table. There were sources with actually hundreds of millions of WP users table. It can scale quite a bit. Do very, very complex things. The final thing I’ll say on that eval is one amazing thing. I’ve been pounding the drum about playgrounds. For those who don’t know, basically, a playground is a way that we spin up a fully containerized virtual machine inside It takes, depending on how fast your computer is, anywhere from 20 to 45 seconds. With a database, web server, everything like that, PHP. It runs WordPress in this low container. It’s completely It’s very atomic, so you can roll back forward. If you make a mistake, you roll back to your previous state in a atomic way and with checkpoints along the way. It’s very hard to break. If you break it, it’s very easy to fix. Also because it’s so cheap and easy to spin these up, it’s free, essentially. You run it in just the memory of a browser. As the AI use things like PlayWriter, other ways to launch virtual browsers, they could actually spin up 20 of these, for example, and use it to verify whether the code they’ve written works.
[00:27:20.120] – Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic
They can take screenshots and see whether it does the thing that’s expecting or show that to the user, say, Is this what you wanted? Right now, we’re doing some stuff with TELX and others, so they’re more WordPress-centric AI things, and I know some others in the community are. But I think once we get the more frontier models and bigger tools to understand and be able to use things like playground as a tool, it will unlock an incredible amount of capability for this going forward and things that would have been unimaginable for it. For example, Let’s just talk about plugin compatibility. There’s like 70,000 plugins out there. Wordpress users have probably experienced where one plugin messes with another plugin. Right? Right Now, finding that out is a somewhat may no process. Someone installs it, something breaks, they report it to their respective developers, they fix it. Now, while we do do some automations a day for the top thousand plugins or whatever and how they interact with each other, obviously, as that number goes larger, the factorial combinations of every possible plugin being installed with every other plugin is very, very difficult to do. You get into tens of millions or hundreds of billions of combinations.
[00:28:44.020] – Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic
However, We could start to do that much more efficiently with a playground-like interface where we’re actually spinning up different things or running an automated test in a much more efficient way than we currently do this with virtual machines or other ways. Also, we could do some sampling, so knowing some of the statistics of which plugins are most frequently used with others to make this a little bit more of a log problem, which is a little more efficient. That, I think, is, again, a possibility. When we think over the next 18, 24 months, some of these things will start to be much better. That’s a lot of fancy words, but basically a way to say that expect your WordPress in the future to not just be more secure, but also just be a lot more stable as you install different plugins and try different things.
[00:29:37.520] – Kurt von Ahnen
In your answer, you brought up a huge curiosity for me, and it’s a little bit of a rabbit trail, so I apologize. But you yourself said 70,000 plugins, and we’ve joked on the show before about how many plugins there are. Is there any roadmap or plan or, I don’t know, qualifier that says this group of plugins is going to get removed because of inactivity, or this group of plugins is going to go to a premium category, and this is going to be a mainstream category, and this is going to be a hobbyist category? Because I know when I get a new client and they’ve tried to look for themselves to shop around. Sometimes I get people because they’re just product overwhelmed. I think the skillset my agency brings is that I can go, these are the top 20 plugins that we use with reliability to help businesses drive revenue. It’s like, Boom. We know what works out of this mess of stuff. We know what works. With AI, there’s going to be ever more submissions for new plugins and new things. So that 70,000 could turn into 100,000 really quickly. Is there a plan to manage that more effectively?
[00:30:49.020] – Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic
I’ve been thinking about this a ton. So I’m glad you brought it up. So first I’ll say, yeah, there are going to be 100,000 plugins. We’re just seeing the submission is go up. We already have a distinction in the plugin directory, which we introduced a few years ago, I believe, where there’s a personal plugin, so essentially solo developer. There’s community plugin, which means it has multiple contributors from a community. And then there’s commercial plugins, which have typically some paid upgrade. It’s typically a single company behind it. I would love to see that second category, the community plugins, grow quite a Right now, it’s a little easier if there’s an existing plugin and you want to do something slightly different for you to fork it or make your own version, versus collaborate on that more shared code base. I’ve been thinking a lot about what are the collaboration tools we can give, just like WordPress itself, encourage people to maybe work together when they have a similar goal and purpose, so that we could have some consolidation, perhaps, of plugins which are not commercial but highly overlapping. Does that make sense?
[00:32:07.240] – Kurt von Ahnen
It’s making sense to me. Yeah, I can picture it. Again, I think of in layman’s terms, someone needs a new laptop. They go to Best Buy, they’re going to buy a new computer, and they start shopping, and it just becomes product overload. They end up leaving without buying a computer because they can’t make up their mind. You know what I mean? There’s just too many options. Sometimes when people are shopping in the repository, maybe an advanced filter or… Maybe I’m dreamcaping here with you, and I know it wasn’t planned, but the plugin directory can be overwhelming to a lot of folks, especially if they’re new to our market. I think WordPress is a fantastic product. I’ve been using it. I got my username in 2004. But when new people come in, there is a sense of overwhelming difficulty. Some people drive to SaaS platforms over that perceived difficulty when it shouldn’t be difficult. It’s relatively easy.
[00:33:08.960] – Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic
You make a good point. The things I’ll put in there that we’re trying to balance is, one, the biggest reason to use WordPress over those other proprietary platforms is that infinite flexibility and customization. The fact that the marketplace is so much bigger. So let’s not forget that. Two, I would say that the thing we’re trying to balance there is helping people find those more canonical or popular plugins, like you said, so we’re not presented with a bajoy options, but also making it possible for new things to come in. That’s the other thing you want to balance. You could easily design a system which points everyone towards the top. Old is the same stuff. However, part of the beauty of an open marketplace is the ability for something for you to come along and gain that traction, gain that user base, become the next jet pack or Yost or one of these things we think about as the huge canonical plugins. I think we definitely want to make sure the marketplace dynamics allow for incumbency, but doesn’t lock it in. But it’s still a discoverability of newer things because we want to keep that open. I’ve been doing a little bit of work here talking to some folks about ways we could actually perhaps use some editorial there to highlight some newer projects, ones that have really excellent code, design, usability, etc.
[00:34:43.800] – Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic
To shine a little bit of a spotlight on some of these new things that people put in the work to make them excellent.
[00:34:51.440] – Kurt von Ahnen
Nice. Thanks for that. Jonathan?
[00:34:53.740] – Jonathan Denwood
I think it’s a great time for us to have our middle break. When we’re coming back, we’re going to be discussing max views on large learning models and AI in general and some other topics. It should be a great second half. We will be back in a few moments, folks.
[00:35:09.090] – Kurt von Ahnen
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[00:35:45.920] – Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic
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[00:36:23.680] – Jonathan Denwood
We’re coming back, folks. We’ve had a great discussion with Matt Mauweg, the joint founder of WordPress and the CEO of Automatic. Before we go into the second half, I’d like to point out, if you’re looking for a hosting partner for your membership, your large learning membership or community-focused website, Why don’t you look at Hosting at WP Tonic? We’re much more than a host. We can be your tech partner in the build-up. You can find more by going over to wp-tonic. Com/partners, wp-tonic. Com/partners. So Matt, well, I’ve been listening through podcast to quite a few people. I’ve been to some degree about AI and large learning models. I’ve been influenced to some degree by Gary Marcus, who is enormously knowledgeable and in this area and has a track record of scholarship and experience. But I listened to his interview by Steve Iceman on He had a very intensive interview with Gary, and then he had another interview with Daniel Gertell recently. I don’t really think people people really understand what large learning models are and the technology behind them. It doesn’t mean, because I listened to Gary, that I don’t think that AI technology is going to have a really fundamental influence about technology in the next few years.
[00:38:23.300] – Jonathan Denwood
But on the other hand, I’m getting very frustrated with people predicting that everybody’s going to lose their job and people are just going to be paid a universal amount of money. I don’t really see that myself. What’s your own views about all this, Matt?
[00:38:52.820] – Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic
I mean, this is a good question and probably actually one good for us to wrap up on.
[00:38:59.640] – Jonathan Denwood
So I’ll do a couple more questions.
[00:39:02.340] – Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic
I might have to run. I dropped something in the chat there. So one thing I’ll say is that even if there were going to be no more iterations with the new generations of chips, data centers coming online, the capabilities of the models today, when you talk about the diffusion of their impact on the economy, is still relatively small compared to what I think could happen. That’s basically another way to say that although these platforms might have 800 million users on ChatGPT or something, the way People that are using them seems not basic, but they’re using it to help with their homework and translate things. They’re doing things that aren’t yet transforming companies or the economy. However, we’re starting to see that adoption by enterprises. And humans adopting this thing is going to take a little bit of time. And it’s a big topic right now as a diffusion of this impact on the at the company. Actually, a good discussion about this is Dario Amadi, the CEO of Anthralik, which does Claude, which is the big coding one. I had a great interview with Advar Kesh, Vitel the other day, which I think I blogged on mba.
[00:40:32.320] – Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic
Tt. If you check out my blog, mba. Tt, I blog about a lot of interesting AI stuff. It’s a good place to stay current with what I think is the bleeding edge of this thinking. I don’t know if I agree as much as a Gary Marcus or Yon LeCun, who think that this technology isn’t going to get us to where we’re hoping there’s a big impact. Perhaps for some definitions of AGI or ASI, Artificial Superintelligence, they might be correct. But I do think that we, gradient descent or whatever, will get us a lot, even better, functionality of what we have today. Some of this is just, again, applying the existing functionality in different ways, like a reasoning model or a model of experts, or having AI check each other, or think for longer, or all these sorts of different techniques you could do to get better results out of even some existing models or weights. In terms of the impact on the economy, is everyone going to lose their jobs, etc. There has been predictions around that for almost every big technological revolution, where that’s electrification or automobiles or all sorts of things, railways. When you think of the big society shaking changes, refrigeration.
[00:41:53.620] – Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic
So yes, some of those jobs go away. Actually, I saw a great YouTube the other day that talked about the whole way that ice used to be distributed. I moved around the world, they had an ice box. There was an ice man who would deliver your ice every day. Ice boxes used to literally be like you have a block of ice on a thing. That was how refrigeration worked. So before we figured out how to deal with electricity and everything else. So yes, the ICE deliverer is probably a less big job now. There still are some. You get the fancy ICE at certain cocktail bars or something. But it’s not like something we’re all getting delivered to our every day, every other day. So that stuff is definitely going to change. However, think of the countless jobs and other things that were created. So I am typically a believer in, yes, there will be technological disruption and certain jobs will change. However, there’s going to be a lot of demand for new things. And second, that also the ability to learn or be retrained or reskilled, it’s the golden era for that. We know historically, the very best way to learn to be educated is this idea of one-on-one tutoring.
[00:43:05.640] – Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic
The infinitely patient with today’s models, you can talk to them and learn anything you want. It is incredible. If you have a CSS bug, if you want to learn about physics, if you want to learn about whatever, I encourage you to using your AI as a tutor, and any of the models are actually really great at this day, is an incredible way to to increase your journal edification and knowledge and be that lifelong learner, which I think is also, we’re going to say, the skill. When I have friends who come to me with kids that are being born or going to college, they’re like, What do we study? What do we do? The thing I always come back to is learning how to learn and filling yourself with curiosity. Also, I think a study of the classics, philosophy, logic, ethics, those things like that. I think that is going to become It’s certainly more important than ever. Certainly, command of the English language and vocabulary, I think it’s going to be more important than ever. But that learning how to learn is the lifelong skill, which I think is never been a good ask to last out and make you well adapted for whatever is going to go.
[00:44:14.840] – Jonathan Denwood
I agree with most of what you said there, but aren’t you… Well, the amount of investment that’s gone into some of these companies is so vast that it’s very difficult to say it’s a bubble, because if people are saying it’s a bubble, it probably isn’t a bubble. It’s a bubble. But on the other hand, when you look at the amount of investments, it does seem to have a lot of the taste of the The dot com bubble, the railway bubble, other bubbles that have happened in history where you’ve had… And haven’t a lot of the major players been forced to invest? Because if they don’t invest and they are left behind, they’re finished. So do you think we have seen the actual… We are seeing a bubble when it comes to the investment level?
[00:45:14.280] – Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic
Yes and no. So one, bubbles aren’t always a bad thing. So in fact, if you look at things like railway or broadband, in 2000, it’s a dot-com bubble. We think a lot about the pets. Com and the Internet companies. But actually, a really amazing thing was the amount of fiber that was being laid down that wasn’t utilized right then. But that dark fiber then became the basis for why things like YouTube, Facebook, etc, were able to grow. And that dark fiber will be lit up over the coming decades. So there was an overinvestment at the beginning, but a huge consumer surplus resulted. People like to say that there aren’t very many dead GPUs right now. Basically, demand for this exceeds our ability to produce it. And even old generations are still having a lifetime and being used far longer. I think it was originally predicted using a standard depreciation model for these assets. That points to the demand for this, perhaps being able to fill up the idea of a Jevron’s paradox of the demand, even what seem like it is a lot of supply. Then the final thing I’ll say is that there’s probably some posturing, politics, or fundraising, where, if you look at some of these crazy numbers being thrown around, some of it is announced.
[00:46:41.140] – Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic
There’s a competition to announce that you’re going to invest more, or perhaps you get more kudos from a politician by saying you’re going to make a $500 billion investment or something. I would not be surprised if, along the way for the next few years, we figure out some efficiency improvements and the way we’re running some of these algorithms or inference or other things, that perhaps means that we don’t need to spend a trillion dollars of new things or 100 gigawatts of new power. We’ll figure out ways to achieve similar growth and meet the demands, perhaps more efficiently than current approaches and algorithms. There are some very cool companies around there, not just inference companies like Syborus, but like Liquid AI and others that I think is a really interesting work here.
[00:47:34.860] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, I’m.
[00:47:35.880] – Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic
Thank you so much. It was really good to connect today. It’s always fun to come on. Happy to return, whether that’s a year or a few years.
[00:47:45.720] – Jonathan Denwood
Oh, yeah. Hopefully, it’s a bit sooner than that.
[00:47:48.660] – Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic
We get around to- Will I be in Asia? I’m very much looking forward to WorkCamp Europe, WorkCamp Asia, and the US later in the year. We’ve got some exciting things. WordPress 7 is coming out. It’s going to be a very cool release. Lots of fun AI stuff is going to be in there. I think 2026 is going to be certainly a year that, since I started in technology, is one of the most exciting I’ve been part of. All right.
[00:48:14.920] – Jonathan Denwood
Thank you for coming on the show, mate. We’re going to wrap it up now. So, Kurt, what’s the best way for people to find out more about you and what you’re up to?
[00:48:23.640] – Kurt von Ahnen
Manana Namast for business, or you can always find me on LinkedIn. I’m on there almost every day.
[00:48:28.860] – Jonathan Denwood
Matt, what’s the best way for people to find out? I suppose it’s your blog, isn’t it?
[00:48:33.440] – Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic
Ma. Tt is my blog. Actually, besides the newsletter or RSS, you can also subscribe as a Telegram channel, which is a really cool way to get my updates as I post it. And also, I think I post my photo blog as well. And then on like, tumbler, X, Instagram, everything on Photomath, P-H-O-T-O-M-A-T-T. Actually, a good place to follow me now is also GitHub. There’s a lot more stuff there, including a lot more. And So my username there is the letter M. That’s useful.
[00:49:05.640] – Jonathan Denwood
You won’t forget that, will you? So thanks so much for coming on the show. We’re going to round it up now, folks. We will be back next week with our monthly roundtable show. Should be a hoot. We will see you next week. Bye.
[00:49:21.140] – Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic
Hey, thanks for listening.
[00:49:22.420] – Jonathan Denwood
We really do appreciate it.
[00:49:24.240] – Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic
Why not visit the Mastermind Facebook group?
[00:49:27.300] – Jonathan Denwood
And also to keep up with the latest news, click WP-Tonic.
[00:49:32.670] – Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic
Com/newsletter. We’ll see you next time.
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