Figma co-founder and CEO Dylan Field said Thursday that artificial intelligence doesn’t pose a serious threat to the future of the design software company, which is on the verge of debuting on the public markets.
“We’re in this moment where you might, if you’re singularity-pilled, go, ‘Hey, superintelligence is coming and it’ll be able to do things that no human can do,” Field told CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” “I have a harder time believing that we’re going to approach that really quickly right now, but that doesn’t mean it’s out of the picture.”
Figma is slated to begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “FIG” on Thursday. Last week, the company estimated that it would price shares in the range of $25 to $28, and on Wednesday it priced above that range at $33 a share.
The offering values Figma, which ranked No. 45 on this year’s CNBC Disruptor 50 list, at $19.3 billion.
The company was supposed to be acquired by Adobe for $20 billion, but the deal was scrapped in December 2023 after regulators objected.
So-called “superintelligence,” a type of artificial intelligence that would be more powerful than the human brain, has recently become a growing focus among technology companies.
Field told CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin that the company’s “complex” graphics engine and other aspects of its technology make it difficult to be replaced by superintelligence.
“I think that’s not stuff that you can learn from looking at code and sort of various places on the internet,” Field said. “It’s not part of the pre-training data mix. I believe that doing that at scale — it’s quite difficult.”
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been especially vocal about the potential for superintelligence, declaring in a Wednesday memo that the technology will serve as a tool for “individual empowerment” over automation and efficiency.
Meta recently created a lab to pursue superintelligence, and Zuckerberg has poured billions of dollars into building a roster of top AI talent.
— CNBC’s Jordan Novet contributed reporting to this story.
