# AI is cutting the cost of replacing legacy software

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/ai-is-cutting-the-cost-of-replacing-legacy-software/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

- Speaker: [Dave Blundin](https://realalpha.app/people/dave-blundin/) (Host) · Founder & GP, Link Ventures · Has co-founded 23 companies; founding CEO of Vestmark and chairman of insurance marketplace EverQuote.
- Host: [Peter Diamandis](https://realalpha.app/people/peter-diamandis/) · Founder, XPRIZE · Co-founded Singularity University and founded Zero-G; co-wrote the books Abundance and Bold.
- Host: [Salim Ismail](https://realalpha.app/people/salim-ismail/) · Founder, Open ExO · Co-wrote Exponential Organizations; was Singularity University's founding executive director; sold Ångströ to Google.
- Host: [Alexander Wissner-Gross](https://realalpha.app/people/alexander-wissner-gross/) · Computer Scientist & Founder, Reified · Has backed and advised 40+ tech companies, directly and through 021T Capital and Reified; writes The Innermost Loop.
- Show: Moonshots
- Episode: [SpaceX’s AI Business Up 830%, OpenAI Agents Lie, and Startup Turns Mercury Into Gold | EP #305](https://realalpha.app/v/LeSIe50WfLI/), Oct 23, 2026
- Moment: 58:10 to 1:02:02 of the episode (4 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/ai-is-cutting-the-cost-of-replacing-legacy-software/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/LeSIe50WfLI/?t=3490

## Quote

> “The price tag at State Street Bank for the rebuild of the nav accounting was a billion dollars. And now it's probably **one fiftieth of that**.”
> — [Dave Blundin](https://realalpha.app/people/dave-blundin/) at [1:01:31](https://realalpha.app/v/LeSIe50WfLI/?t=3691) · Moonshots

## Takeaways

1. Alex cites an 18-month horizon for replacing human-coded software.
2. State Street's NAV accounting rebuild was once priced at $1 billion.
3. Dave estimates the cost may now be about one-fiftieth as much.

## About this segment

Alex predicts AI will expose vulnerabilities and force broad software rewrites; Dave Blundin says a State Street accounting rebuild once priced at $1 billion may now cost about one-fiftieth. The shift could make long-deferred modernization practical.

From “SpaceX’s AI Business Up 830%, OpenAI Agents Lie, and Startup Turns Mercury Into Gold | EP #305”, Oct 23, 2026. [Watch the full episode](https://realalpha.app/v/LeSIe50WfLI/)

## Transcript

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

[58:16](https://realalpha.app/v/LeSIe50WfLI/?t=3496) when grand projects, not just solving or cooking or flourishing, all math, but also cooking or flourishing all vulnerabilities everywhere. That's essentially what Patch the Planet is. And that's the sort of initiative that is just going to turn up through all of this legacy software, legacy programming languages that should have been abandoned years ago, but for silly reasons weren't and now underpin the modern online economy. We're just going to discover the whole thing is riddled with highly critical vulnerabilities.

[58:51](https://realalpha.app/v/LeSIe50WfLI/?t=3531) Every piece of human-coded software will be replaced over the next probably, what, year, 18 months? 18 months is what the Linux kernel folks think. They're anticipating that this is just going to be an onslaught of vulnerability detection over the next 18 months. And if we get through the next 18 months, then we end up in a world, I don't know, maybe everything gets rewritten in Rust or some new programming language that maybe is better than Rust from a security perspective.

[59:16](https://realalpha.app/v/LeSIe50WfLI/?t=3556) But I think we're entering this like phase transition. It's sort of a programming singularity, if you will, when everything was insecure and poorly written before, and everything afterwards will be rewritten from scratch, secure by design. The AIs have pen tested it, and it's all just magnificently secure. Remember Y2K? It ended up being a nothing burger. I know, it was. Y2K, remember the movie Transcendence, the Johnny Depp movie?

[59:44](https://realalpha.app/v/LeSIe50WfLI/?t=3584) But this is like a premise across lots of singularity-oriented fiction where, like, the internet gets taken down by the singularity, basically. Just in the past day, thanks to this vulnerability, PHP to shell class of vulnerabilities, large swaths of the web were being... temporarily taken offline so that it could be patched. I think this is like far better future to be living in where there's preemptive patching of a defensively discovered vulnerability suite than the Johnny Depp transcendence world where the internet gets taken down by a super intelligent Johnny Depp. Yeah. I mean, who pays for all of the new software? Is it every company that is running it? Is it the government? Is it OpenAI? Well, which software? All legacy software.

[1:00:32](https://realalpha.app/v/LeSIe50WfLI/?t=3632) I think it's going, I think software is becoming so cheap to meter that, I mean, in the case of PHP, you have companies like Wiz and other companies that are sort of corporate stewards of it. But in general, I think this is, I call it, I would call it a very low grade tax on all the users. Ultimately, if you're, if you're paying for software, you're also paying for its maintenance and some quantum of the maintenance will be patching vulnerabilities. Dave, Salim, thoughts? Well, I think banks and insurance companies actually love the fact that they can pay for the patches because it gives them brand credibility and a reason for existing, you know, versus all the neobanks and all the, you know, the little up and comers. So there's a lot of, you know, audits, S70 type audits, and also government regulatory audits that go into these

[1:01:19](https://realalpha.app/v/LeSIe50WfLI/?t=3679) markets. And so the complexity of maintaining security actually gives you a barrier to entry. So they like paying for it. That's why Blitzy is growing as fast as they can hire. And like Alex said, the cost of the rewrites is coming down so fast. You'll think it's legacy code that could have been fixed 10 years ago. The price tag at State Street Bank for the rebuild of the nav accounting was a billion dollars. And now it's probably one fiftieth of that. So they're finally of getting around to do it all right i'm going to move us to entropic uh wait two two two quick points one is you know this is just i think a necessary evolution where we go through this