Pro-AIPerson

Matt Mullenweg

Co-creator of WordPress, CEO of Automattic

Co-created WordPress — the software behind roughly forty percent of the web — and runs Automattic. He told the community to “learn AI deeply,” ships AI products like Jetpack AI Assistant, and argues open source is the safest foundation for the AI era.

Software Engineer Executive Tech

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In his words

Some of the safest stuff in the world to train on is open source code.

— SXSW London (via Quantum Zeitgeist), 2025

Even early versions, you can say, right here, WordPress plugin, and it just would one-shot it.

— SXSW London (via Quantum Zeitgeist), 2025

Biography

Matt Mullenweg (born 1984 in Houston) co-created WordPress in 2003 and founded Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Jetpack, and Tumblr. WordPress powers on the order of forty percent of all websites, making Mullenweg one of the most consequential stewards of the open web — a role that turned contentious during his 2024–25 legal and rhetorical war with hosting company WP Engine.

“Learn AI deeply”

A decade after his famous “learn JavaScript, deeply” directive reset WordPress developers’ priorities, Mullenweg issued the sequel: learn AI deeply — advice he first gave the community at WordCamp Europe 2022 and reinforced from the State of the Word stage in December 2023, praising what contributors were already building with natural-language tools. Automattic shipped accordingly: Jetpack AI Assistant, an AI writing tool for WordPress, launched in 2023, and a dedicated WordPress AI Team formed in May 2025, delivering an AI roadmap capped by the Abilities API in WordPress 6.9.

At SXSW London in June 2025 he made the open-source case for the AI era: GPL-licensed code — WordPress and its 60,000 plugins and themes — is “some of the safest stuff in the world to train on,” and AI in turn democratizes the platform, one-shotting working plugins from a sentence of description. He has also argued AI code-scanning will make plugin vulnerabilities less of a problem, and told interviewers there is no “putting the genie back in the bottle.”

His optimism is strategic as much as temperamental: WordPress’s bet is that an open, extensible platform absorbs AI rather than being displaced by it — publishing tools that welcome the new interface instead of suing it. Within the broader debate over AI and the open web, that puts Mullenweg on the opposite shore from publishers and platforms fighting AI crawlers, and closer to fellow web-infrastructure builders like Evan You.