The Prof G Pod

China’s AI Dumping Plan Could Trigger a U.S. Recession

If I'm she, I'm going to flood the market with cheap AI and watch Open AI and Enthropic announce a slowdown in growth, which will absolutely freak out the market and probably thrust the US, if not the entire West, into a recession.

TBPN

Muse Wonder, Anjney Sizes Up, Neal Stephenson Joins, Social Reckoning Review, Eli Manning Live

The whole thing feels very out of date in the scaling era. Uh the race towards super intelligence so dominant in the minds of tech people right now. Uh I'm not surprised that this movie is an underperforming because it doesn't answer the questions that people are asking about tech companies right now.

Decoder with Nilay Patel

How Utah locals fought Kevin O'Leary's AI data center

What Josh found throughout the course of his reporting was that the way this data center came together — how it was planned, how it was announced and approved, and how local residents were kept in the dark — ultimately created a political firestorm so severe it stopped Stratos in its tracks. The story is also a larger look at the AI industry's infrastructure boom, the bipartisan backlash to that buildout, and how the tech industry is running into the one obstacle it can't seem to spend its way out of: local democracy.

The a16z Show

The Top 100 Consumer AI Apps: Who’s Actually Paying?

Only a small share of consumers currently pay for AI, but among those who do, spending is heavily concentrated at the top.

Diet TBPN

Cambridge AI Safety Plan, Instinct CEO on Invest Like the Best, Zuck Hires MongoDB CEO | Diet TBPN

You can go the opposite way, the the Mark Zuckerberg way and rip it and just be like, "Yeah, I'm having fun with AI." Which is honestly like it feels like people are like, "Yeah, I kind of want that energy a little bit. Just give me the white pill."

Pivot

Why Scott Galloway Is So Worried about Democrats' Midterm Chances

Nvidia selling guardrails is like an arms dealer selling bulletproof vests. It's a great business model. You get paid on both sides.

Decoder with Nilay Patel

The SaaSpocalypse that wasn't, with Atlassian's CEO

Both Google and Facebook threatened to leave Australia over the proposed law, until Google cut a deal with Australia's biggest news organizations, and Facebook turned off their access to the news feed entirely. After a few days, the law was slightly changed, Facebook also paid the money, and access was restored.

TED

The Energy Mess AI Is Creating — and How to Fix It | Ari Matusiak | TED

The thing to remember about these AI tech companies is that they are in a global race, that they intend to win, and they will pay almost whatever it costs for the power that they need to win that race.

Decoder with Nilay Patel

I have some questions for Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook's motto was once, famously, 'Move fast and break things.' Its new one might be closer to Move fast, break things, move on.

Pivot

Why is Everyone Freaking Out About AI Right Now? | Pivot

We have never in the history of the modern economy had a trillion dollar industry that is totally unregulated

Decoder with Nilay Patel

OpenAI's executive exodus has one big winner

But when Sam Altman got fired by the board, Brockman was so incensed that he quit immediately. He and Altman were going to start their own thing, or were potentially going to lead a department at Microsoft. That's when he was making waves in a new way because he was hellbent on the drama.

China Decode

Why Microsoft Is Quietly Abandoning China | China Decode

I remember Bill Gates famously saying that more than 90% of personal computers in China were running Microsoft software. But what he didn't say was that that was almost all pirated.

Pivot

Kara Swisher on Zuckerberg's New AI Manifesto: "He's in Desperate Need of an Editor" | Pivot

After he goes on about, you know, the need to decentralize power and checks and balances to all that, go look at how they built that data center in Louisiana. It was something like 50 non-disclosure agreements. The arrival of the data center came as a massive shock to that community, right? So when push comes to shove, they're doing what every other company does, which is building data as data centers as secretly as possible and then writing essays about how the future is for everyone.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Gavin Baker - AI Market Jitters - [Invest Like the Best, EP.485]

The street is now generally assuming that hyperscalers are going to spend somewhere between $300-325 billion in capex in 2025. And these are numbers that were literally unimaginable 2 years ago. The question is what is the ROI on that spend and what is the right mental model for thinking about it.

Decoder with Nilay Patel

What Apple’s OpenAI lawsuit is really about

It's just a pattern, maybe not worth diving into at great length, but in the '90s, Apple pushed copyright law to the limit. They sued Microsoft for allegedly infringing on how the Mac looked and felt with Windows. And then in the 2000s and early 2010s, Apple pushed patent law to the limit, suing Samsung for allegedly violating a bunch of patents with Android and Galaxy phones because Apple felt that they had protected the iPhone. But I'll point out that Android still exists, Samsung is doing just fine. Apple may have redefined patent law around 3G and 4G licensing, but fundamentally, it did not actually succeed in stopping its competitors with intellectual property lawsuits.

Decoder with Nilay Patel

What Apple’s OpenAI lawsuit is really about

Apple may have redefined patent law around 3G and 4G licensing, but fundamentally, it did not actually succeed in stopping its competitors with intellectual property lawsuits. So, you go from copyright to patent and now trade secrets, which is the third big intellectual property, and Apple's doing it again with OpenAI. My big question is whether OpenAI can just pay the money the way that Microsoft and Samsung were able to just pay the money.

Decoder with Nilay Patel

What Apple’s OpenAI lawsuit is really about

It's just a pattern, maybe not worth diving into at great length, but in the '90s, Apple pushed copyright law to the limit. They sued Microsoft for allegedly infringing on how the Mac looked and felt with Windows. I will point out that Windows still exists, Microsoft is fine. And then in the 2000s and early 2010s, Apple pushed patent law to the limit, suing Samsung for allegedly violating a bunch of patents with Android and Galaxy phones because Apple felt that they had protected the iPhone. Samsung eventually paid about $1 billion in damages and those cases just went around in circles forever. But I'll point out that Android still exists, Samsung is doing just fine.

Diet TBPN

U.S. AI Execs Warn as China’s AI Push Grows, Substack Adds AI Detection Tool | Diet TBPN

One probable outcome of an openweight model dominant world is full AI communism, which is precisely what China proposes rather than a market product. AI is a public good, which will ultimately be provided by the state as a kind of digital public infrastructure.

The Business of Tech

Roger Sharp’s bid to build a travel tech powerhouse

Sharp is well aware of the risks of creating 'a two‑class society' where tech workers thrive while hospitality workers are squeezed out of housing. His vision is growth with guardrails: higher‑paid, lower‑footprint jobs that ease pressure on roads, emissions and infrastructure, and give local kids a reason to stay rather than leave for Sydney or London.

Diet TBPN

Stripe’s $53B PayPal Offer, OpenAI’s First Device, TBPN’s New Business Ideas | Diet TBPN

PayPal is a quote sprawling legacy fintech with 25,000 employees. That's a huge company. Decades of technical debt. Neither Stripe nor Apple would want to absorb that.

The Business of Tech

Roger Sharp’s bid to build a travel tech powerhouse

Sharp is well aware of the risks of creating "a two‑class society" where tech workers thrive while hospitality workers are squeezed out of housing. His vision is growth with guardrails: higher‑paid, lower‑footprint jobs that ease pressure on roads, emissions and infrastructure, and give local kids a reason to stay rather than leave for Sydney or London.

TBPN

XBOX RIF, "Manual" Ferrari, SPV Hustle Debate, EV Truck Fraud

Very notable that the first major layoff from a major company just admits that the business is not healthy and doesn't blame it on AI. We have not seen a layoff of this scale that wasn't at least partially credited to like the productivity increases that we're seeing from AI.

Semafor

White House’s export limits on Anthropic linked to concerns about Chinese access

Another way to look at this is that Anthropic has just been very, very successful in making people very, very concerned about advanced AI. Two or three weeks ago, Anthropic actually called for a pause in development of advanced AI models because they were becoming so powerful. So, you know, there's also sort of this this criticism of Anthropic that, "Look, you've been asking for this regulation."

Decoder with Nilay Patel

Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch on AI, the Met Gala & his secret succession plan

You'll hear Sundar say he realized he needed to rethink how Google worked a few years ago in response to ChatGPT, and he made a lot of executive changes and big decisions to get the company in a more aggressive posture.

Diet TBPN

WWDC Reactions, Claude Fable 5 Debuts, McAfee Eyes ESPN Mega Deal | Diet TBPN

So you have like Tim Cook operationalizing the company, making so much money from the app store, building the business, but at the same time, he just happened to be the CEO during the greatest AI winter ever, basically from 2011 to 2022, 2023 when we started getting LLM, started getting chat bots.

Diet TBPN

Social Network Sequel Trailer, Fable 5 Sparks Safety Debate, SpaceX IPO Watch | Diet TBPN

We're twice as big as the biggest country on earth. We're not frightened of Congress. We're post government around here.

Decoder with Nilay Patel

Microsoft AI chief thinks superintelligence is near, but won't take your job

we also talked about Microsoft's relationship with OpenAI, how Mustafa is thinking about all the negative polling and political pushback around AI right now, and whether any of the consumer products are good enough to overcome it.

Decoder with Nilay Patel

Elon Musk is steamrolling Wall Street to become a trillionaire

Its biggest-ever size, of course, at nearly $2 trillion dollars. But also because all kinds of rules that keep our markets fair are being bent, if not outright broken, along the way.

Decoder with Nilay Patel

Elon Musk is steamrolling Wall Street to become a trillionaire

all kinds of rules that keep our markets fair are being bent, if not outright broken, along the way.