Karpathy’s AI gap, free Adobe clones, and AI’s effect on persistence

What happens to software businesses when AI makes their products easier to recreate? Reid Hoffman and Aria Finger explore what a developer’s effort to rebuild seven Adobe apps with Claude means for software pricing, competitive moats, and intellectual property. They also unpack Andrej Karpathy’s AI capability gap: why everyday users and researchers inside frontier labs have very different views of what AI can do. Then, they examine a randomized study showing that brief AI assistance caused—not just correlated with—reduced persistence after that help was removed. Reid makes the case for AI as a cognitive exoskeleton—and for designing tools that build grit alongside capability.

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