Keynote – Fireside Chat with Ma.tt Mullenweg & Robert Jacobi

Well, shoot. >> We're getting this going. >> All right. >> Thank you all so much for a wonderful World War Camp US and it's such a great privilege to be here for the closing keynote. I'm Robert Jacobe, chief experience officer at Black Wall and we're going to have a fun hour. Yeah. So, you'll still make it to the afterparty. Don't worry all. Uh, it's going to be great. I am. Welcome to the closing. Matt will be up shortly because we have a special guest coming up. I'd like to introduce Michael Hammet, Chief Innovation Officer for the City of Phoenix. Michael, >> it's great to be here for WordPress Word Camp 26 happening right here in Phoenix, Arizona. It is great to see the energy out here. And I couldn't see anything from backstage because it's dark and you can see the uh the screen there, but people said there was a wave happening or something. So, I thought there's a lot of fun. >> Phoenix. >> Well, I also understand there are a lot of folks from out of not just out of town, but out of the country. So, if you are from out of out of uh state, out of the country, welcome to Phoenix. Welcome to August in Phoenix. We love it. I walked here from city hall. You follow the shade and carry water. And I hope everybody here has tested out the Whimo. We have the largest footprint of autonomous vehicles in the world. We talked to cities all over the world about uh Whimo, the Whimo experience. And you'd see be surprised how many people are really forward thinking and they will not get into the vehicle. I love it and the data shows it as well. So, we're also home to TSMC, the largest foreign investment in the United States. It's the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Complex. It's reshaping North Phoenix. And we also have a uh really special space here I want to give a shout out to. It's called Venture Cafe and it's the fastest growing venture cafe in the world. Look that up wherever you're from or wherever you go. and it's a space for entrepreneurs. It's very It's great to be here today. I'm here on behalf of Mayor Kate Ggo. Again, I'm Michael Hammed. I'm the city's first chief innovation officer and we lead innovation across the city, working with partners, working with the community and folks like you. So, this is a really special day. And I do want to note when Mayor Kaygo re makes it official and proclaims a special day, it's because it means something to her. And so I want to be really mindful in uh reading her words in the official proclamation. WordPress has strengthened Phoenix communities by supporting small businesses, developers, designers, educators, creators, um, who exchange knowledge, build partnerships, and contribute to the city's growing digital and creative economy. The city of Phoenix is proud to welcome all of you here for this 3-day event. I know we're at the end of it. um and to stand alongside the tens of thousands of individuals worldwide who contribute to the open web every day. In Phoenix, we recognize that open collaboration, accessibility, that's important to Mayor Ggo, and the free exchange of knowledge helped to create stronger communities and a more connected digital future. So, those are some of what is officially in here. and Mayor Ggo would like everyone to not just enjoy the day or the three days, but also enjoy our city. So, we hope you stay stay a while. So, on behalf of Kate Ggo, mayor of the city of Phoenix, Arizona, USA, and in accordance with the law, today, August 19th, is officially proclaimed Phoenix Word Camp Day. So, thank you so much. And I will pass this on to the co-founder of WordPress, Matt Mulleng. And I will officially give this proclamation. And you can see it's a very large uh document. It's official, so I'm trying not to mess it up or bend it. >> That's beautiful. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you for bringing >> Oh, >> I'm old. Thank you very much. >> Nice to meet you. >> Howdy, everybody. Wait, you ready? Wait. One, two, three. Wait, this side. You got to wave. >> Yeah, there we go. You know, photo mat trying to bring it back. >> I just got a new camera. He's so excited. >> Good to see everybody. Well, we've got a little bit of Let's see if I've got that thing here. All right. Yeah, >> we got lots of things back here. >> Yeah, let's go. >> Two laptops. >> Oh, this is an iPad. >> Cool. So, these is going to be some thoughts and ideas. And I thought actually I invited Robert to be sort of a voice of the audience because I love Q&A and things being interactive, but in the format we have, you know, the lining up the microphones and everything, it's kind of slow. So just kind of playing with a new format. Uh a little fireside presentation. Uh Robert has never seen these slides before. >> I have not and I'm really terrified. >> Um don't worry, we are going to do the traditional Q&A at the end. And um the uh I've I've shortened the slides quite a bit because Robert actually prepared some fantastic questions. >> He shortened slides I've actually not seen so I wouldn't even know. >> I know. Um so just a few of these. Uh, and Robert, I invite you to interrupt if you have any questions or um >> Oh, so I'm going to do that right now. So, there's a rule that I'm putting into this conversation. We each get one veto. So, if I start a question that's just not on topic, you can be like veto card. >> I don't know. Anything you want. All righty. But I get a veto, too. >> So, that's Oh, boy. This was a mistake. Uh, also if you want to tweet at me or anything, I'm photomat on Tumblr or I guess you can tumble at me. Uh, and oh, ma.t on blue sky. And then we've got our our WordPress.org profiles here. So, profiles.wordpress.org. Robert PD. >> Yep. >> What's the PD stand for? >> So, this is a problem. Can we change our handles ever on >> I think so. Yeah. >> Oh, I think I can change. That's That's an old one. That's that I Yeah, >> I can go do it right now. I feel like I've got my laptop. >> Yeah, they're not. >> Just a little live tech support. >> We'll talk later. >> That's what we'll do for the whole presentation. Any uh any requests on wordpress.org and go and fix them. Um and I'm profiles.wordpress.org.mmatt. So, actually my first thought and idea is we need cleaner profile URLs, right? Like w.orgmat. That'd be pretty cool. Uh, it's also kind of a nice flex that we have w.org, right? >> Who knew that actually? >> Yeah, a few people. Uh, we probably need to use it more. What's that? >> We can do that already. >> We currently own W........................................ Yeah. >> Yeah. But can we do that? >> Well, that's the surprise for y'all. >> Oh, okay. >> We actually implemented this yesterday. So, if you type this in your username, you don't have to put appmat unless you want. Um, it will redirect you today to app the that long URL. But give us uh a few more days and we'll actually make it so these work as the profiles. So much cooler profiles on WordPress.org. >> Yes. >> Well, that solves the PD problem that I'm having right now. >> And then I'd love for us to start putting this on our badges. Like why are we putting like our Twitter handles and other stuff? Like we're the WordPress people. We should be doing our WordPress profiles and our and our blog URLs as the primary thing that we're promoting, not these random other warden social networks, right? Cough. Gravitar >> or gravitar. Yeah. Um, >> I mean, why not? I got my badge last year. >> Well, and also let's just sync over all your gravitar stuff to your.org profile and vice versa if it's there. >> Love it. >> And then Beaver, sync it over. Sorry, I'm going to go I get to interrupt, so I'm going to go on a rant because I love Beaver. And if we can get this all sync for me because it's all about me, uh, that would be wonderful. >> So, is that good? >> Great. Yeah, keep going. Give us more stuff. Well, basically sort of the thesis of what was going to be a much longer talk is that technology needs to enter the phase of making things simpler. >> Got an agreement over there. >> That's a little wordy, isn't it? Tech needs to be simpler. >> Right. If I had more time, I would have made it even shorter. So, I apologize. Um, who's seen this uh midwip meme? Yeah, three famous. Um, I guess the original version actually has like IQ at the bottom, but I removed that because that's dumb. Uh but the idea is that you know the sort of uh belief of the person on the left which I actually like to think of also like being maybe a young child or inexperienced uh is there thinks one thing and then kind of in between uh you know there's this common belief that things and usually in the middle there's something very complex and at the end there's like this Jedi warrior and um or I could think of that mate perhaps as like the wisdom that comes with experience or age um that you know is actually the same belief that people started with. >> Yep. >> So I sort of wonder the question I've been asking like right now are we in the midw phase? Are we in between >> uh we who >> WordPress as a >> us in this room. >> Okay. Well I mean there's a lot of we that we could be talking about. >> That's true. Um so meaning that have we taken things that could be simple and added a lot of complexity and I actually think we often do this in life like think of the the creativity and beauty of a child and um then you know as we age sometimes that gets kind of programmed out of us or our lives get very very complex and then actually towards the end it often becomes much simpler and there's I think a beautiful symmetry to that I think some of that comes with wisdom. I think there actually is an intelligence aspect to this. Um I wouldn't call it this exact curve, but I think right now with the current state of like LLMs and AI and everything like that, they often make very wordy complex solutions unless you guide it really well. It'll make like a really complex architecture that I've actually noticed as the models are getting smarter and smarter and smarter, they're making simpler solutions to things, which I think is so cool. Um >> does that include the open source models? Absolutely. I don't know if you saw that. Was it the Quinn 3.8 that came out? >> Um, amazing amazing model. You can run the 27 billion version of it on a modern MacBook. You can run on this MacBook. Um, and actually just yesterday a uh obliterated um or uncensored version came out. Has anyone ever tried one of these? Show hands. Who's actually heard of Quinn 3.8? >> Nice. Yeah, there's an amazing thing happening if you haven't been following it where, you know, in the US it's been primarily driven by, you know, anthropic and open AI that's been what we call the frontier labs. Um, >> proprietary >> Google used to be one of them, but they're they're catching up right now. Um, the uh but out of China primarily um a little bit out of France, but they've been Mistl hasn't really been on the edge, but uh some of the Chinese labs, you probably heard of Deepseek, uh Quinn, which is from Alibaba. Um what else am I forgetting? Kimmy. >> Oh god. >> K3. >> Yep. >> Um am I forgetting any? >> GLM. >> Oh, GLM. That's a uh that's on 5.2, right? >> Yeah. 53. Oh, nice. Um they're doing really really well. And actually this Quinn model that just came out is the equivalent of Opus 5.6. Um they developed actually some incredible innovations in the techniques that are allowing it to run at a fraction of the cost. So you're getting Opus 5.6 six performance which again was the frontier just a few months ago um for basically sometimes 120th the cost >> you're running it on your laptop >> and you could run it you know quantized versions do versions on your laptop or you know with um some fairly moderate hardware and and you can run it in the US or inside your own data centers or anything so it's pretty incredible I'm doing a ton of experimentation with local models but oh so what's the uncensored version so uh do you all know about the reinforcement learning and anything that the models go through. >> I see no yeses. So, you got to explain this one. >> We got it. Man, I've been telling you to learn AI for a couple years. >> Changing like every 3 seconds. >> That's one of my last slides, actually. Um, wait, do I still have that in there? I might have taken that one out. Darn. Um, well, the point there is I know there's a lot of anxiety around how AI is like taking jobs and what it's doing. A lot of companies are in layoffs. Um I think part of that's just business model transitions. >> Absolutely. >> So this typically like a transition stage ultimately I think there'll be a lot more demand for people. Um it might not necessarily require companies though. I think it actually opens up some incredible opportunities for solo operators. You know they talk about this there's going to be a one person billion dollar company soon and there's some that are pretty close. You know teams of five 10 people that are making huge revenue. >> I'm I'm going to push back slightly on that. uh if you can afford the tokens. >> I just said the tokens got 120th cheaper. So like the the token curve is coming down very very quickly. Okay. >> So it's actually one of the things that I think is going to really challenge the economy because there's been so much investment >> and so much valuation put into these frontier labs. Um you know it might be a little ahead of it. So that's a big worry right now that could cause a recession. I actually don't think that's going to happen because we're starting to see these models be applied to actually make breakthroughs in things like medicine. There's been some math ones if you haven't been following those uh problems that are decades old, never been solved uh are being solved even by like non-mathematicians with like the proper fonting. So there's some pretty cool stuff or like not full-time mathematicians. Uh this is not the presentation but let me get back. So AI I think is actually going to create >> blame it on me. It's my fault. It's going to create some more opportunities particularly for people who are independent or uh self-employed which I actually found our self-employed numbers are way higher than I thought but that's actually a later later or self-sponsored which I hate that term. We're going to get rid of that. Just call it independent, right? Uh dot dot dot dot dot. Oh, so making things simpler models getting smarter. One thing I've been noticing they've been doing uh is have you ever had it where it produces an artifact for you? I could tell to make something that makes you like a web page and they've actually started preferring uh HTML which I think is really cool. You know a lot of these early sort of model experiments and storage layers and static files and everything have been using markdown and I love markdown. You know it was there when it started tech textile before markdown which inspired John Gruber to make markdown. you know, the files from Aaron Schwarz. There was a lot of fun stuff around that time >> and no one would have predicted. It's become so popular. It's like a portable format. But HTML, I actually think is a lot better and you can write very, very simple HTML. By the way, a WordPress thing, we need to really clean up the HTML that we're outputting. >> Yeah, I'm gonna agree with you on that one. >> And um I get why we have these comments and everything for Gutenberg, but why are we putting it on the front end? Why are we, you know, serving this? We need to really be like beautiful cotus poetry, right? >> Yeah. >> Um, let's be a little more e Cummings and a little less uh what's a poet that does super long stuff? >> Edison. >> There you go. >> TS Elliott. >> I love TS Elliott though. I think that's actually >> really long stuff though. >> You know TS Elliot is huge, >> but the lines are actually pretty short. >> Fair. >> The couplets and everything. And TS Elliott is actually the poet that inspired Kodas poetry. Really? >> Yeah. >> Oh, shoot. >> Um, >> I actually just learned something today. >> I had come across an annotated uh TSLA because I studied him in college in high school and um it was actually the inspiration for why I later invested in Genius. It's one of the first investors in what was Rock Genius because I was like, "Oh, this just like the TSLA annotated." And um and also like really got me into links and everything. So, so the models will output these artifacts where actually everything is embedded in the HTML page including the images and everything which is pretty cool. So, we often think of you know when we use HTML we build things and other things you know we've got the HTML we've got the CSS which is another file the JavaScript another file the images uh whatever else even movies can actually be fully embedded as data in this HTML file. So you can have all the media, everything in a single file, which is actually pretty cool because then it's completely self-contained. So now imagine your uh LM wiki or whatever that is. Markdown doesn't do this. >> That's fair. >> So I think very very simple HTML actually has a lot more portability, a lot more future compatibility and I think will ultimately be the the sort of format um that we centralize on. I mean, you still might have plain text, but again, as soon as you want to have like something a little more complex, um, it it gets tricky. >> I think people just HTML than markdown. >> Well, everyone knows Markdown because there's nothing to know. I mean, you >> touche, but I mean, well, when you say to a lot of folks markdown, they're like, what? Because it's not as everyone knows HTML. They know how to do an at least an H1 tag. I also think just aesthetically it's kind of nicer like linking a markdown. It's simple but it's like not pretty to look at. So um anyway, so this inspired me to go back to an idea. So remember I said tech needs to be simpler um to an idea actually back from 2007 some code I hacked on with um with some automaticians like Michael and Andy uh that basically took PHP files and made them completely self-contained. Right. So we've been going through these experiments with WordPress where you know what if you don't need my SQL we just do SQLite right and now we have playground it's portable it's fast it's it's really awesome then you know but what if you don't need a database at all so I would like to introduce WordPress piplets does anyone remember piplets yeah who is that there's like one or two people >> hey Mike do you remember this project. So I couldn't actually find the original code. Kept looking for it because it's written in markdown. >> It was like in an old WordPress repository that the link doesn't work anymore and stuff. So couldn't find it. But actually with my colleague Dan Lou rewrote it. So the idea of a piplet is a self modifying PHP file with all the data actually embedded in the file. Um let me show some things here. So, it's a single file. There's no third party packages. Minimal complexity. Oops. To-do. And >> oh yeah, to-do. Don't forget to do that. >> I'll say we had in 2007. So, this was not just me. But, uh, here's a little demo of one that Dan wrote. So, this is Piplet. Uh, as you can see, >> uh, this is actually using, uh, just a very simple kind of markdown thing. And then it's got a preview. So, some CSS and then where it's being saved. Oh, I thought we had the code demo here. Um, >> you're not going to do a live demo, are you? >> Oh, I could load it up. >> Oh, please not. No. >> Well, I guess we're running late on time. So, >> but basically what it does is like so imagine when it writes to itself basically at the end of the file it appends a section where you could embed arrays or JSON or different things. And so the simple version of this is super super simple just like a fop fright etc. and you kind of post itself. Um there's actually some fun things you do by if you want to separate out some of the data you can call a query string. Um we benchmarked this and actually on sort of 128 megabytes of memory it can store up to 25 megabytes of data and still be very very performant. and it loads in about 50 millconds, which is actually pretty cool because when you think about it, you don't even need the database. And 25 megabits data is quite a bit. That's about 4 million words uh worth of text and actually um smaller than uh probably over half and maybe more of all the WordPresses that we measure. >> So you're still going to need a PHP runtime person. >> Still a PHP runtime. But now with Wom, we can completely embed that. So I think asking these questions if the answer's already there. >> No, no, no. Uh these are good questions. Um also this framework is pretty simple. So I was thinking what to do about this. Uh obviously a to-do is to do the blog URL and uh so we'll link up that in the uh sort of we'll put a little GitHub repository for this. I'd like people to play with this idea and see what happens and let's just kind of play with it for a little bit. Um I think this could actually be a cool directory on WordPress.org Because again I want WordPress to be known for simplicity not just complexity. And a fun thing about this and why I didn't call it the original name was PHP lit. So like pip pip blitz. >> Got it. >> But the cool thing is this framework is so simple. Um it doesn't just need to be PHP. And then with AI I think we can actually transpile this very easily into Python, Ruby, you know, Cotlin, Zig, whatever. Uh whatever people want to play with. And so I think actually like you'll be able to write them in any of these languages, upload it to the directory or just, you know, commit something to a file uh and then that will put it in the directory because we're getting away from zip files and all that junk. Uh and then >> in playground, >> we could do have it this be a little playground app or something. Um but basically I want to make it social. So you can click on one of these, remix it, change it off, fork it, and then a directory that makes it social again on WordPress.org. So but let's let's try it out first. See if you can build any useful apps. benchmark it. Uh yeah, just play with it. I think this could be kind of just a fun hack day thing as well. >> By the way, congratulations on the contributor day. The hackathon format seemed >> awesome, dude. >> Awesome. And also very much thanks to the events team and everyone for that was a little bit of an audible call a day or two before um the event started. So >> a quick round of applause for them. >> I loved it. I love that you switched that up. That was effing awesome. Um >> so any questions on that so far? Um, is there an MCP connected to this? >> Uh, I guess you could. Yeah, you could write a MCP. It's just PHP, so whatever you like. >> You You can't talk about something about AI being in the mix somehow. So that's why >> Oh, sorry. Well, actually, I I'll say that, you know, this uh uh WPO survey or whatever that just came out was a good reminder how much people dislike AI. And you've probably seen like in these um commencement speeches and stuff, people mention AI and everyone starts booing. It's kind of wild. So, uh I wonder if something we've been doing wrong is actually emphasizing AI too much because we're kind of technic >> Oh, preach. I'm going to clap for that one. >> I think we might just need to rebrand some of what we're doing and not call it AI, call it automation or just something else. Uh but we we've been really heavy into it and I think that's you know obviously I'm a huge optimist and believer in this but there's a huge branding problem right now and actually a lot of campaigning against it. >> It it's got that whole Skynet thing going on and we're all going to die and >> but it's going to be the infrastructure that we're dealing with just like open source has been the infrastructure to actually enable AI in the first place. So when I look at this like Piplet, well I'm looking at this, you don't know what I'm pointing at, but uh you know how does that conversation turn with that open source AI? What exists? What happens next? Does one eat the other? Um is Piplet GPL3? What you know what is there a license around that? All this kind of stuff. It gets complicated. >> Yeah, it's so we could put public domain MIT GPL whatever. Okay. Um, these are really >> pick one, MIT or GPL. >> Um, probably MIT actually. >> Um, because again there's no reason for this to >> it's kind of self-contained and you run it yourself and yeah, people do whatever they like with it. The um, so does open does open source go away because of AI? >> Yeah, what do we need open source for? Machines will build it all. >> By the numbers, it's actually exploded. Um, Helen, you probably know what's the sort of growth in GitHub. There's been like a crazy like >> six times in six x in six months, >> a year. I saw something like that. Wow. >> There was basically a blog post because, you know, they they were having some uh downtime. By the way, everyone complaining about that. >> We should be so thankful to GitHub. Think of what they've done for decades now providing like a free hosting for everyone and everything. But anyway, they said we built for like I'm going to make up the numbers, but we built for like 4x capacity and we're going to need like 20x or something. So that's part why they were having some trouble. And all that's open source. Well, not all of it, but like a lot of that's open source, >> but if you look at the open source stats, they're also like that. So I would say more open source than ever. It's actually been kind of fun as well. Like some of my um tech friends uh that previously didn't do a ton of open source like uh Gary Tan uh I've known for a long time. He did posterist and Twitter and currently heads up uh YC publishing some amazing AI stuff too. So check out his U Gbrain and GStack and everything else. But he is now a huge open source evangelist. Like it's so cool to see like so many of the tech world actually sort of come around and see the benefits of open source. >> Well, because they may have actually used a lot of it to get to that conversation. So >> meaning the training of the models. >> Oh, they just used everything. The open source is actually the most legal thing for them to use. Good. We're on the same page. That's I mean that's the point. I mean, >> so then I worry about >> of course getting off topic from the slides. Your fault. Um >> these are your questions, right? So >> well they're they're actually like leading into them. But uh if AI is going to be churning 6x 20x >> uh on the code, what what does it matter for open source folks to be in the conversation? If AI can do it, if I can just hold the machine, make me some open source code. Well, again, the benefits of open source aren't just generating the code. It's maybe finding code that already works. It's collaborating together on it. It's a license which allows you to distribute it, which maintains the rights of the user. So again, open source, I think, is critical. It's it's sort of like a little bit of a separate axis. It's orthogonal to whether the generation of the code is cheap or easy. And and code generation is going to become cheaper and easy. The techn is going to be abundant. But then >> maybe even in Washington DC. No, I'm kidding. Uh >> Matt said that. Um but is >> that was also a joke. >> It is. It is. Yes, we're um I'll share I'll share a funny uh DC AI story though about this branding problem with names and everything changed to protect the innocent. But let's just say there was a a top politician um and shared the story that we have a real problem meaning we the AI people or AI advocates because he said I you know I had a meeting he or she said they had a meeting where a sort of like radical Berkeley diet hair. So imagine that sort of archetype of like the most liberal person you could imagine and like a very very conservative you know imagine that archetype like a very very conservative American. Um, >> I know it's very difficult in America to imagine these extremes, >> but just to sort of like put a stereotype on it, like coming in with camo and a gun or whatever, like that sort of thing. Um, which I love, by the way. I'm from Texas. >> That's the Berkeley one. >> Actually, I love both of those. I divide my time between Houston and San Francisco. So, I got a bit of both in me. Um, but they were both in there advocating against data centers. And he said, "If something is bringing these two sides together on a common common cause, you got to fix that. We got a brand new problem >> before you jump to the next one because the just jumping back. >> Oh, how we doing on time? How much time do we have? >> Oh, they told us we have as much time as we want. Uh I hope none of you have to go to the washroom because we're going to be here for a while. >> Oh, we got to we got to launch 7.1, right? >> Oh, yeah. What time is that? Five minutes. >> You want You want to know the schedule? >> What's that? >> Oh, we didn't push the button, though. >> Oh, whoops. >> It's very simple. Do not press the red button. >> Ann and Benjamin, you want to come push the button? Sorry. >> Don't panic. >> Thank you. >> H weird. Well, anyway, uh >> AI bill of materials. >> You don't want to come push the button? We can come have a little button moment. But uh >> 1.4 million downloads already. >> Whoa. Updates. Mary Hubard has been counting each one of them one by one by one. >> Let's see. We got it up there. Yeah. >> Let me do pull it up. >> Yeah, Ann's ready. Ann's ready to push the button. >> Wait, let me pull the little download thing on there. Whoops. >> It's open source. This is how we do this. Come on, folks. Let's see. It's the other button. >> Wait, where' the stats go? >> But you're not mirroring though. >> Oh, there we go. Counter. All right, you ready? >> Oh, we should put the updates number on there. >> You know, downloads and updates for something like this should be pretty uniform in my book. >> Let's see. Then how do I put this onto quick? Everyone take a picture of Matt's uh apps that he has over there. >> There we go. Tada. So 1.4 million updates and 330,000. >> So Ann's ready. >> Yeah. >> Two minutes. >> 20. and and Anna Benjamin. Where >> is that including the QA? >> Oh, we're going to find out what's going on. >> Round of applause. Release leads here. >> All right. >> Thank you. >> Where's the confetti? So that's pivots. Uh that's actually a perfect time to talk about contributions. >> Yes. So part of why I've been thinking a lot about contributions is how do we and you've heard me talk about this already. How do we reward impact? So, a lot of what we've been doing so far is measuring sort of like a commitment or participation or um which has been really fun, but again, uh especially in the age of AI, I don't know if we definitely need more contributors. I would argue we maybe don't need more plugins anymore. Don't know if we need more themes. We need maybe fewer things that work better. And I think part of making things simpler for our users might be sort of trimming down. And I have some sort of plug-in directory ideas I can talk about. Um, but I thought this was kind of an interesting some numbers to share. So this is actually a stat uh per week, but it's just sort of the graph is per week um of the five for the future hours. And so right now weekly there are two million uh self-sponsored hours pledged on the five for future directory um from 150,000 contributors. Uh 51,000 companies sponsored was actually a lot lower than I thought and I don't think it shows what number of contributors that is from companies. So are these numbers surprising to anyone else? Yeah. Do we actually have 150,000 contributors? No, not at all. Why? >> Well, my 70 agents are going into that, right? >> We'll start counting agents later. Um, but these are the numbers in the five for the future directory. So, just when I said the five for the future directory is broken or something like that. I'm not saying that contribution isn't important or the concept of five for the future isn't important. It's just right now the way the directory is working and the way we're highlighting this I don't think is in line with reality. So um now why do the commitments matter at all? Right? We all make lots of commitments in January. We commit to go to the gym. We commit to read a book a month or a book a week. We commit to >> book a year >> listen to more podcasts than watching those short form videos. Um I commit to turn off Twitter sometimes. Obviously, that doesn't go well or hasn't gone well. Um, so but this all goes away. Let's just measure what happened. We have all the data for that. Was there a commit? Was there a post? Was there a ticket closed? Was there is all tracked everywhere, right? Or not everything people do. Maybe it doesn't track like some of the work camp organizing things or something like that, but we could say helped organize a work camp. >> Yep. >> That's binary. Attended a work camp. Um, donated to the foundation. you know there's all these sort of things they're very very very uh legible so uh when I say measuring impact I think this is very simple it's just highlighting you know all the amazing stuff people are doing and there actually is an incredible amount of contributors so this is the data since um this is the past 696 days which is just an arbitrary no reason number I chose >> I don't think that switched was that >> there we go >> so plugin directory what's an example of how this could work for the plug-in directory Um, and someone might know the exact numbers. I I forgot to pull them, but the uh the plug-in directory submissions has gone through the roof. So, our version of the GitHub thing um is anyone anyone plugging team here? >> Yeah. Do you remember what the number was the spike? >> Oh, wow. So, but basically the number goes like this. It looks like a exponential curve, which a lot of things in AI era are going to look like exponential curves. So, uh, the plug-in team has done an amazing job at keeping up with this, but we're going to need to automate a lot more. And as you probably heard with the Protect the Shire initiative, we're going to be doing actually some automated scanning of the updates in the back directory, too. Um, which I think will do an amazing job for also cleaning up the security and trustworthiness of the directory. >> Um, I've been thinking and these are just questions. So, this is not a policy change. It's something that I think we're we need to discuss at some sort of future uh plug-in team meetings, but um you know, what are we emphasizing? What are we rewarding there? Is it useful to our users to have the 800 uh plugins? And are we doing enough to help the new ones? There's been some great work by Nick Hamsey, who I think is here. Ham, are you here? Oh. Uh the who's who's been um highlighting some new plugins. So, you might have noticed on the plug-in director, he's actually going through editorially every week and picking some plugins that are brand new or no one's heard of. They're not in the most popular. They're not in the top 10, but they're good stuff. So, he's measuring it. Actually, the thing I miss most about like WP Tavern and a few others was they would actually go through and like review plugins, >> which is really, really useful. >> I missed the tavern. >> Yeah, we're working on bring that back. Um, if anyone wants to work on that, let me know. >> Let's hold Matt to that because I do miss the tavern. the uh so but what how can we change the incentives both of the existing directory and perhaps of the submissions as well. So right now we just kind of look at all the updates and submissions and sort of a a sort of uh there's no priority ordering to it really maybe a little bit if it's an existing developer or something we might bump that to the top >> little order to the chaos is what you're seeing. Well, but do we want to encourage a more commercial or non-commercial stuff? And if so, should we prioritize reviewing the non-commercial ones first in line and get those moving faster and um ahead of maybe the the more commercial ones or close? >> Are they Are they both GPL3? >> Uh well, they could be GPL2 or later or any compatible license. >> Well, let's >> I guess the plugin needs to be GPL2 or later or GPL3. >> Three. >> Yeah, >> two or later is actually the WordPress license. Sure, I'm gonna push for three. And Matt's like, >> I like to or later. >> Point being, >> let's let's push the open source side of it rather than whether it's commercial or not, because that's what matters for tomorrow. You said that 20 minutes ago. >> Well, it's all open source already. So, that's that's the >> highlight and push and all that. So, >> well, and that's actually something I really wanted to emphasize is I'm not saying commercial bad uh non-commercial good. In fact, I have uh I think good and bad. You can have really bad free stuff and you can have uh really great commercial stuff. And actually, a lot of my career, I've really pushed a concept and participated in something I call conscious capitalism, which is saying how, you know, for-profit capitalism, commercial things can actually be very, very positive, a positive force for society. um that doesn't happen by default and there's lots of counter examples but is totally possible and actually the entire WordPress ecosystem is a great example of it. We have a multi-billion dollar you know more than $10 billion of of revenue per year going to millions of people and companies that number is quite large actually and lots of companies that have really participated in it in a very very positive pro-social way. So in the plug-in directory to get back to what we incentivize like as again we going to start counting all these results everything better the participation in WordPress.org organ other things. So why not use that in the rankings? Why not reward that actually over maybe the commercial and non-commercial? So that actually I think is a far more interesting distinction. So again, not just commercial and non-commercial being the thing, but who's actually sort of participating in the pro-social positive things that grow the open source community in a way that benefits all of us, not just sort of one company or one selfish thing. I like that. >> So uh sort of evolution of the idea. let's, you know, debate this, talk about it, and, you know, obviously put it in the WordPress.org meetings. >> Well, and open source is is evolving just like everything else and what it means to be part of that and how to grow that. >> Totally. So, that's what I trimmed it down to. >> SL, oh, we're good. We're done. >> Yeah. >> We're not done. Come on. >> Thank you all. >> Thank you, Matt, so much. >> Wonderful. >> Thanks. Well, yeah, we're we're still doing like your old school traditional GPL1 G I just screwed up the >> I don't think I've ever run into GPL1. >> No, I'm just trying to play for for old school for the Q&A for Matt. >> Well, we're kind of in where it should be the audience Q&A, right? Because >> Yeah, that's what I'm talking about. Yeah, the >> How much time left? >> I think that's our clock. 10 minutes. >> 10 minutes. What's that? Oh, yeah. There's there's a clock there. Thank you. It's right next to the red button behind the milk. >> So, uh, if you have questions, jump up on the mics and Robert will fill the time until then. >> You've got more questions, right? So, >> like there goes Michelle. I have like four and a half seconds. Uh, AI bill of materials. >> How do we know the stuff that we're getting from AI for contributing to open source is actually licensed and legit and legit to use? >> You don't have to answer. Wow, someone liked that question. Uh very difficult question to answer right now. Yeah. >> But I believe the current uh in the US at least uh and someone correct me if I'm wrong but the current uh sort of rule from the copyright office and other things is that something purely generated by I by AI or LLM has no copyrights. So literally no copyright at all. So um now obviously if the AI is modifying an existing file >> that's >> um it's sort of and that's why the person is ultimately attesting to this being uh okay. So it's kind of up to you >> or train down proprietary data that may not be >> they actually do some good work to sort of make sure they don't fully output something that they came from. I don't know if you've tried to ask it for like an excerpt from a book lately or something. It's trying really really hard not to do that anymore early versions did. Um, but this is going to be, I think, a very dynamic Yeah. >> uh, evolution because undeniably, I mean, it's out there. The early versions of these LLMs were trained on very liberally on kind of everything, right? But now they are uh, scanning lots of books and things also tailable branding because apparently because of the court ruling, they have to destroy the book afterwards. literally these companies are buying u tens of millions of books including very rare ones which is only a few copies scanning them and ripping them apart. >> It's like the weirdest version of Fahrenheit 451 ever. >> I would say it's actually like the loss of a library of Alexandria in some ways. >> There was a great article about we will we're not going to get sidetracked between this. >> All right. >> Hello. >> Well, I wrote it down so I wouldn't forget what I wanted to say. But what can we as users and WordPress and automatic do to offset the ecological impact that AI servers are having on physical communities? >> Yeah. Uh this is a great question. Um, this is also a place where there's a lot of misinformation and there's actually some evidence and interesting theories that some competitive countries are in fact sort of fermenting some of this uh anti- data center stuff in the US as a way to slow us down maybe a little bit. Um, this is also why they say we're going to have to start putting data center space and other things. But the good news is that with Starlink and other things, the data centers can kind of go anywhere, right? they don't actually need to be very close to things. Now, we're having to reduce some power infrastructure and I actually think we're going to have a lot more with sort of these um other ways that these data centers can go maybe a little bit further away. Now, it's always going to be someone's backyard, but you know, United States is huge. You ever fly over, there's just I'm always amazed by how much space there is. Um, so the common memes are using all the water, uh, raising electricity prices and, um, then, you know, they're kind of ugly and loud and they're building them next to people and there have been, I think, some accidents where they let like leaked some bad stuff in construction. Also, construction is loud and annoying, right? So, of those, uh, the water appears to not be, uh, actually like a real thing. maybe for some of them, but also the water cooling for these is self-contained. So, they recirculate the water. Um, also the water impact of at least the sort of creating that self-contained is um like the equivalent of a small number a small percentage of the US's golf courses. So, when you look at things like almonds and golf courses, they use vastly more water. And you can sort of Google this and look this up. Um, the uh >> these little backup generators. So the power um right now they're offering these gas turbines and other things and those do generate some pollution and it's typically an interim solution right now because they have to get a lot more power and they are allowed. So I think that's totally legit. Um it's not a huge amount of gas and other things relative to other industries and everything but that's true. Loud and ugly super true. So um there's ways to mitigate that. So, for example, uh you know how like some freeways they put like big walls around them? So, there's things you can do to sort of block some noise and of course pollution, anything like that does need to be addressed. Um we have existing laws and regulations for that. Um and then finally, you know, I've been thinking a lot about actually uh these data centers are actually like beautiful and in some ways they're kind of like a a technological cathedral meaning that when you go inside them and you see the complexity and the sort of all the servers coming and everything like that. So I've been wondering like is there a way to design a data center actually that invites in the public and provides a public service. So, you know how in like New York and other big cities when they build these skyscrapers, sometimes they'll create a public area that's accessible to the public or a park or like something that's beautiful and it's a way to sort of get around this big tall ugly building or or blocking the light or something like that. So, how could data centers do that? Like, could we put like libraries in them or, you know, places where uh kids can go and like have super fast internet connections and maybe free AI tokens or something like that? like how can you make them part of the community as well and maybe beautiful in addition to um you know these sort of big monolithic buildings with giant fences around them you can't go in which is fine and some of them might need that for security but when you visit like for example there's this awesome company called Switch their data centers they're like the iPhone of data centers they are stunningly beautiful um and very few people in the world have ever seen one on the inside so >> um you just wondered why this doesn't happen I'm feeling thinking that automatic might have some data centers. >> We have like 32 or 33 but we uh colllocate. So we are in existing data centers. We don't build the buildings or things ourselves. So >> I think uh we should get some invitations. >> Actually those buildings have the access restrictions. So um but you know I I do know the switch folks. So, I'll I'll run this idea by them. And it's open source, so anyone can take this idea. All right. Thank you, Michelle. All right. I think we got a final question here. >> Oh, wow. Tempest Fujit. >> Hey, Matt. Mike demo. I'll read you the Tumblr I sent you while I was sitting here so I got it right. So, on Monday, Juma turned 21 and you spoke at the Jumla World Conference. That's actually where we met the first time way back then. >> What year was that? 2013. Oh, nice. >> I was there. That's when we first met. You don't even remember. >> He doesn't even remember. >> Um, >> uh, and many other open source events. And I know automatic has, um, supports a lot of different open source events. But why do you think so many people in WordPress, Drupal, Jumal, etc. are so dry tribal instead of focusing on trying to focus on open source? I've had thousands of conversations with tons of developers in all these communities and they all are WordPress is better than Jumo and there it's all this infighting which I have never understood. So what can the project do to try to stop that? >> That's a good question. Um well one we can lead by example and so uh I will now reveal that I was actually going to give this slot or create an additional slot. I invited Dre to come speak here at this very work camp. So he's the founder of Drupal. Um so I think we've always been pretty good about inviting others in. Actually Dre and I did a fun thing with Mike Little in London. >> Yep. >> Um so I think and by the way invitation open if you know leaders of other open source projects want to come in. We can do a Q&A or co-presentation or something be very very welcome for that. And also I have also gone to some of these other things like this Juma world conference that was obvious a little while ago >> um you said though we say someone does something better you know sometimes that's true I think some projects do do things better than others and software can have features that's directly better or worse but I think what we could do a lot more is learn from that so we're open source the code is there if they like some code that we wrote better they can copy they in fact they should copy and paste into their project and vice versa That is the entire point of open source. So, um, and perhaps over time, you know, we could maybe even work together on some of the same code or same projects. This is why, you know, we tried to make the licensing for Gutenberg even more liberal than WordPress. Um, but, you know, at least among the GPL folks, um, we should probably work together more. If you look at the rankings on W3 text, you know, the one, two, three in the world used to be WordPress, Jumla, Drupal. >> Yep. Um, objectively in those numbers, they are no longer in the top four. So, Juma and Drupal have been completely surpassed by Shopify, >> Squarespace. WordPress is still number one with a little bit wobbliness there. Um, which actually I got some interesting numbers on that. Uh, some of the things that looks like it go down might actually be related to WP Engine uh, not using the WordPress.org update server anymore. So that's now affecting the stats and like the plug-in directory and some of the other stats that we have. The download stats and update stats, none of those sites are included in them. So all of those numbers actually fully account and maybe a little more for some of the internal dip we saw. Um the W3 text numbers I think there's some different things going on and we've actually started spidering um the entire web just to get some better first party numbers because I want to know what the sites are doing, how headless is affecting that number. So the W3 text numbers I think is being pretty strongly by sites because there are so many zombie sites as well. >> Yeah. And spam and stuff. So like >> it'd be fun to get like the >> um so uh probably if I were strategically advis advising these other projects, I would say maybe team up and whatever you love about Jumler or Drupal, let's bring it over and let's have like an open source thing that we all work together on. Now choice is great. There's always a lot of different things, but I think open source does favor sort of like either versions of the same thing like the Linux kernel or uh you know just collaboration. >> Yeah. >> Because when we all work together, we can make something a lot better. So that would be my sort of invitation and um and even if we don't though, let's uh maybe take some time do a presentation like what are the best things about Drupal? What do people love about it? And what can we learn from there? What can we be inspired? And also maybe what we can contribute back. Do we have some things that we can maybe package up in a different way that make it more reusable by other projects or embeddible in things like Laravel or something like that? So more working together I think is the way forward. >> Hey, I love ending on working together. That is fantastic. >> Well, speaking of, thank you so much for working together to create an amazing work camp. Uh, thank you all for braving the heat. >> But it's a dry heat. No, no, it's not. It's just hot. Everyone was thinking there was going to be like 300 people here. Over a thousand of us have raved this heat and um it's actually been kind of nice. You know, it's like you get like a free sauna when you walk outside. So I I wouldn't stay in it very long. But uh >> hold on. I'm going to ask this because I have met more firsttime work campers at this work camp than in probably the last 10 years. Can we get a show of hands for first time? Yeah. It's it it's shockingly I mean it's I am I am really just like absolutely shocked and and tickled by how how many new uh folks are in the community >> and actually we can thank AI for that at least a little bit. >> Come on. >> Megan shared a story where someone asked what's the coolest event happening in Phoenix and it recommended work camp. They came to contributor day and they won the reward. Uh I didn't have the name there but they won one of the awards. So uh thank you AI. Thank you, Chad. We do. And but more importantly, thank you all. >> Thank you, Matt. >> All right.