Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke and Social Capital chief Chamath Palihapitiya elaborated on their bullish stance toward artificial intelligence (AI) in a panel at Toronto Tech Week’s Homecoming event—but shared some reservations, too.
Lütke, who recently told his employees to prove AI can’t be used before asking for more resources to complete tasks, said companies falling in love with solutions, not the problems those solutions address, are depriving themselves of agency. To Lütke, AI represents a “completely new set of solutions” that will be better when those companies shift their focus to the problems at hand.
“You have to fall in love with a problem and be flexible on solutions,” Lütke said.
“You have to fall in love with a problem and be flexible on solutions.”
Tobi Lütke
Shopify CEO
Palihapitiya went further regarding AI’s potential, declaring that it represented a “transformational moment” that would help “rebuild society.”
Lütke added that his push for AI use internally is meant to keep Shopify and its toolset up to date. “I don’t want the tree rings to show,” he explained.
Palihapitiya embraced the sentiment, arguing that many companies’ organizational structures are mapped to a “horrible piece of software” they bought, citing Salesforce’s customer relations management suite as an example.
RELATED: Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke tells employees to prove AI can’t do the job before asking for resources
Both leaders were quick to put limits on AI’s current capabilities, however. Palihapitiya downplayed “vibe coding,” or the concept of letting AI take charge of programming. He claimed that it’s “not really a thing that’s valuable yet,” and that developers who heavily rely on it produce “crap.” Lütke saw AI coding as useful mainly for prototyping ideas and deciding if a problem is worth devoting decades (or even a career) to.
Lütke and Palihapitiya also contended that electricity supply and silicon would be critical to realizing AI’s full potential. The venture capitalist said devoting energy resources to compute would be vital in the “next 30 to 40 years,” and that whole chips will one day be devoted to AI-related tasks like inference.
While AI might be impacting hiring globally alongside Canadian tech companies like Shopify and OpenText, Lütke called the notion that STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) degrees were losing their worth in the face of AI a “dangerous narrative.” He instead claimed their value changes based on labour market demand.
BetaKit is the official media partner of Toronto Tech Week. Feature image courtesy Jon Fingas for BetaKit.
BetaKit majority owner Good Future is the family office of two former Shopify leaders, Arati Sharma and Satish Kanwar.