Progress in AI is making people update their priors about the origins of the universe.
Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch has speculated that the universe might be made out of code. “The big lesson from AI is that everything is code. A slide deck is code. Design is code. That cool promo video? Code. Excel automation? Code. The universe? Probably made of code too,” he posted on X.
Rauch’s argument starts somewhere much less cosmic than the universe. It begins with the everyday stuff of office life. A slide deck, he wrote, is code. So is design. So is that polished promo video marketing keeps sending around. So is the Excel macro someone in finance built to avoid doing the same task by hand every quarter. Each of these used to feel like its own discipline, built with its own tools, by people with their own specialized training. Rauch’s point is that AI has quietly dissolved the boundaries between them, because underneath every one of those outputs, there was always a layer of instructions a machine could theoretically execute. AI just got good enough to write that layer directly.
It’s a small step from there to the line that got people forwarding the post: the universe is probably made of code too. Rauch didn’t dwell on it, tossing it off almost as a punchline, but it lands at a moment when the idea isn’t as fringe as it sounds. Physicists have floated versions of it for decades under names like digital physics and the computational universe, the notion that reality at its most basic level behaves less like matter and more like information being processed according to a set of rules. What’s changed is who’s saying it out loud. Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis has said he doesn’t buy the classic simulation theory popularized by Nick Bostrom, but he’s also said he thinks physics itself is fundamentally information theory, which is close enough to the same idea wearing a different coat. Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney has made a similar case, arguing that as AI keeps closing the gap on modeling physical laws, the question of whether we’re watching a simulation or living in one gets harder to wave away.
The pattern across all of it is the same. What used to require specialized software, specialized training, and a specialized vocabulary is turning out to be one thing wearing different costumes: instructions, given to a machine, that produce an output. Slides, videos, spreadsheets, interfaces. Rauch’s closing line just extends the logic one layer further than most people are comfortable following it, suggesting that physical reality might be running on the same underlying principle. But the fact that a CEO can toss off a comment like that and have it read as a natural extension of his day job, rather than a stoner tangent, says something about how far the “everything is code” framing has already traveled.
Whether the universe itself turns out to be executable is a question well above any single company’s benchmark suite. What’s clearer is that the distance between “write me a program” and “write me a video” and “write me a spreadsheet” has effectively collapsed, and the people building the tools that collapsed it are the ones now comfortable extending the metaphor as far as it’ll go. “Write me a universe”, suddenly, doesn’t feel all that far fetched.