AI agents drove 1.5 billion deployments in ten months

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 7:24

   So Vercel does play a role in this. You aggregate and you distribute some of that data. But you've also mentioned before that we're in the middle of an exponential or the exponential. So what does that mean? Yeah, for context, Vercel got really popular because of how easy we made it for anybody in the planet to ship an application. So when I started the company over 10 years ago, almost 11 now, if you sat down, even as an experienced software developer, and you wanted to put an app out into the world that really performed, that was secure, that scaled, it was like a PhD that you had to take on cloud computing.

2. 8:09

   And at the time, I realized, hey, if it's hard for me to ship an app, I call it like I've been studying the blade since I, I've been programming day in and day out since I was pretty much 10 years old in Argentina. And if it was so hard for me to ship an app, I couldn't even fathom an enterprise trying to figure out cloud computing and frameworks and tools and shipping pipelines and all of that. And so I started a company with that simple premise, make it easy to ship.

3. 8:45

   It took us about 10 years to get to a billion deployments. Deployment is one of my favorite words. Every time you ship a change to your app, that's a deployment. And then in the next 10 months, the 10 months since then, until now, we've added another 1.5 billion deployments. So what took us 10 years, we've now surpassed in just a few months. And the reason for this is that, well, one, shipping has gotten easier.

4. 9:14

   Not gotten easier in the sense that the code is actually pretty dumb hard, but now we have coding agents writing the code. And I think nobody ever saw that coming. the people building the AI, the people close to the AI, I think what's been the supersonic tsunami is that the machines have taken over. They're better than us at figuring out these algorithms, this code, but they need to ship that stuff somewhere. Like when you write the code, you know, code is kind of a funny thing. Like I remember telling people another one of my sort of internal principles is code is a liability. Code can have vulnerabilities. Code is how, you know, you could delete stuff. You can, you know, leak customer data. So like code is like, you have to treat code with responsibility. But now, you know, these coding agents are super

5. 10:07

   human at writing the most amazing code. And, but again, code doesn't do anything by its own. It needs to live somewhere, needs to be deployed. And Vercel has sort of emerged as the place, this universal field where all of the coding agents are plugging into and pushing their code out so that it can be used by anybody. So you probably are using Vercel every day of your life because when you see things on X go viral, it now makes me quite proud to see this, right?

6. 10:36

   Like, it took us so long to build it, but like almost every other thing I see on X every day is just a Vercel deployment. And sometimes you can tell because by default, we give people a domain name, it's like .vercel.app, or sometimes you see the largest companies in the world deploying on Vercel, including companies like OpenAI and Meta. And so we've been at this sort of juxtaposition of all of this, which to your point, has given us a very unique lens into what's happening.

7. 11:04

   Because not only are we seeing all of the activity coming from the coding agents, we're also distributing the tokens in the internet. So a lot of companies and developers are coming to us to get their AI tokens. And we offer every model under the planet. So you can get open AI, Anthropic, open models, closed models, proprietary models. So we sort of emerge as sort of this index that tells you where AI is going.

8. 11:33

   Are you still coding? Yes. So now we can get into hot take territory.