10 Billion Software Creators, 100 Billion Apps
By 2050, there will be roughly 10 billion humans in the world. And unlike today, every single one of us will have the power to create basically whatever software we need — with our own hands.
The world that we live in today is one where consumers outnumber producers 100 to 1. Everyone buys things, but very few people actually make things for others to buy. The reason for this is twofold.
Creating things that other people find uniquely valuable often requires specific skillsets that most people don’t have
The cost of producing most goods is greater than what the world is willing to pay for it
And if you think about it, the second reason is really just a derivative of the first.
There are a substantial number of things that do not exist not because no one is willing to pay for them, but because the number of people who are willing to pay for them, times the amount they’re willing to pay, times the percent of the addressable market that can feasibly be reached (distribution) is less than the amount that it costs to produce, maintain, and distribute the good.
In other words, the market for most things is simply too small for how expensive it is to produce (and maintain, and sell) them.
We don’t all use the same handful of products because they are theoretically optimal and can’t be improved, but rather, because no one has figured out the economics of creating something better (think Salesforce, Adobe, Windows, etc.).
What we’re seeing happen before our eyes is a fundamental shift in the underlying economics of production — especially as it pertains to bits and bytes.
A software feature that required 80 senior engineer hours (~$16,000) to build in 2022 will require 1 million GPT-4 tokens (~$15) by end of 2024. This assumes we won’t have GPT-5 yet, and that GPT-4 won’t get cheaper (and better/faster).
We’re not talking about a 5%, 20% or even 50% discount on the cost of developing software. We’re talking north of 99%.
It’s easy to imagine the impact this will have on companies whose primary cost is software R&D today. But that’s uninteresting. What is far more significant is the democratizing effect that this will have on the craft of software engineering. All of a sudden, people with ideas who previously lacked skill will be able to bring their imaginations to life. We’re not only going to get cheaper things, we’re going to get better things, a lot more things, and basically every customization option you can imagine.
Today, there are 27 million software engineers in the world. These 27 million people serve as a bottleneck for essentially all progress in bits. They are responsible for creating, updating, and maintaining all of the software that 8 billion people use.
What would happen if everyone in the world could become their own software creator? How many useful tools, sources of entertainment, or means of communication, which don’t exist today, would suddenly come into existence overnight?
I can’t imagine a more exciting time to be alive.