Conspiracy theorists can post anything they want online. Uh politicians can say anything they want online. Um the poster gets clicks. We all get angry on both sides and no one's life gets any better. And so it's it's it's uh it's tragic because I think so many of us um go to these platforms because we are searching for connection and instead we fall into this broken business model that leaves us lonelier.
Writers, designers, actors, coders, musicians, thinkers — they're all worried about being replaced by machines. But what if the A.I.s are actually here to help?
I think so many of us um go to these platforms because we are searching for connection and instead we fall into this broken business model that leaves us lonelier. Uh it leaves us more disconnected than when we hopped on the platform in the first place.
So you have an individual controlling a company and essentially he has supranational capabilities. And what we discovered is that when you outsource that capability to an individual, you're at the mercy of their whims.
So it's sort of stunning how successful Elon Musk has been in space. I mean, one stat that just floored me is that in 2025, SpaceX launched about 80% of the things in orbit, 80%. And its next closest competitor was not Jeff Bezos. It was the government of China.
It feels like a time capsule from a completely different era. Um, Mark Zuckerberg has so thoroughly reinvented himself that it felt like I was like, who is who is Jeremy Strong playing?
I don't stay up at night, which might be dumb, right? There's a lot of very smart people who think AI is going to murder us all. There's a bunch of smart people who think it's going to, you know, become a god and save us all. I tend to be really focused on like, oh, there's actually a lot of like humans are flexible.
You can take your roided up macho w you know WWE e you know warrior and give me a 90 lb man or woman in thick glasses with a drone and a hellfire missile and a command module. Let's see who wins. We fight wars now not as much with brawn but with brains and with people who have a certain level of discipline, a certain level of respect for each other.
If it seems to do what we are all watching it do. This is almost like an evolutionary moment in human history. We are moving to a we we have figured out a way to make silicon sand think — that is mind-blowing right and what that could mean
Anthropic marketing. We built a god only we can control and gave it a wet lab. Muse marketing. Hey girl, I know you have dozens of unpaid parking tickets. Let's get that cleaned up.
The people closest to the technology for the first time are saying this is really scary. This can get out of control. And the reason I think is that this is not really another technology. I mean if if it seems to do what we are all watching it do. This is almost like an evolutionary moment in human history. We are moving to a we we have figured out a way to make silicon sand think
Your videos are telling you who you are instead of you interacting with the content and kind of deciding. I think it can it can, as we've seen, really influence how people see themselves, how they see each other, and I ultimately think it can be really damaging to a lot of people.
We know you're addicted to your phone, so here's another product that will actually always be attached to your face where they were going to spin as helping you kind of reconnect with reality.
This revolution is being led by China. That is the key difference. China is at the forefront of this cluster of new technologies that promise to fundamentally reshape the way industry, commerce and actually our daily lives around the world will change and evolve over time.
I think that talking about curing diseases and new medicines we're going to be able to develop, all of that starts to become much more real when you have models that are at this level of assistance and capability. And I do think that there are going to be real changes to to think about in terms of we can have so much more ambition with the kinds of of challenges that we can hope to tackle now.
For the first time in human history, we have a mathematical model of all of human knowledge. It's not perfect, but that's essentially what all of the LLMs are.
today's concentration may be a feature of the current technological paradigm rather than a permanent feature of AI. Transformers reward enormous amounts of data and compute, but future breakthroughs could make smaller, more specialized models far more capable.
It was a time when technology gave us all a deep sense of optimism for the future. I feel like some of that sense has been lost since certainly. But I hope models like Astra can help restore it and push us towards a more hopeful future.
You need to separate the tech from the tech companies because then you're going to start finding interesting things like real experimentation and real people with values. Until you do that, you're just going to be stuck in the hype cycle.
the tech companies want kids to be prepared for the world the tech companies are building. But we're not saying to kids, do you want an AI-driven future? Do you want an AI-first future? Like, we're skipping over all the hard questions.
The best hardware companies look a lot like software companies in the way they think about software and the customer relationship, and the best software companies are starting to look a lot more like hardware companies in the sense that the physical world matters and the intersection of the two is where a lot of the most interesting things are happening.
If you were to put a dollar of gasoline in your car, only around 20 cents of that actually go towards turning the wheels and getting you from A to B. 80% of that is completely wasted as heat and friction and stuff that's actually not serving you or giving you what you need. With electrification, that's basically flipped.
I think there's a third category, and this is the category that I would put Microsoft into. This is the category of companies, big western companies that dared to dream the dream but never managed to realize it.
I think when we outsource our personal lives, and especially things like emotional intimacy and sexual intimacy, to these platforms that are not necessarily looking out for our best interests or treating us as individuals who have dreams and the desire to fall in love, um that can be potentially very unhelpful and frustrating to people.
The most valuable thing in the world is no longer money, you know, or jewels, or artwork. It's data. And all of this data lives in these Fort Knoxes that no one really talked about called data centers.
It's crazy to me that they have that much power and all that going for the company, and they're still not in the lead, let alone being behind as of right now. That's what I think is crazy.
If you were to go back and look at the average productivity of the US worker over the past 90 years, you will not see a single technological innovation. You won't see air conditioning. You won't see cell phones or computers or the internet or Microsoft Office. You don't see it because it takes a long time for productivity to be absorbed into the workplace and used by employers.
I find that in general, people talk a big game about privacy concerns, and then they will give Uber all of their data. Think about Uber. With a hack and a thin layer of AI, you could pretty easily determine if someone just terminated a pregnancy, their HIV status, if they're having affairs, their sexual orientation.
AI tokens are profitable incredibly profitable. When you have something profitable, everybody wants to make more of it. Great demand, great profitability. The conditions are exactly right for the work that we're doing right now.
The economic growth we've had in the last 200 years is this extraordinary exception in human history. And yet, I think we're about to look back on that and think it was just this tiny little warmup. I think we can do the equivalent of that again in a very small number of years.
I think of computers a little like grandparents, actually. You wouldn't use your grandmother, right? But your grandmother can make your life easier if you use her properly.
The most underappreciated thing about AI is that it's deflationary. Every single time in history when something has caused the kind of growth in demand that AI is causing, it has been because it is deflationary — because it lowers the cost of doing something that people want to do.
I think the most important thing that I have come to believe is that intelligence is the underlying commodity of the universe. And if we can have a much more abundant supply of intelligence, both human and artificial, we can solve problems that have stumped humanity for a long time.
Former S.E.C. chair Gary Gensler has had a front-row seat to numerous financial booms and busts. How does he feel about America's massive bet on A.I.? "Something has to give."
The thing that I keep coming back to is that intelligence and energy are the two inputs to wealth creation, and if we can make those cheap and abundant, the world will be able to solve the problems that have plagued us for millennia. And I think that within a not crazy long period of time, we will look back at the current time the way we look back at other transitions in history and think this is when things really changed.
I think most people radically underestimate what's going to be possible. Not just in terms of technology, but if we can actually get these systems to work and we can actually get the abundance they could provide, the degree to which every single person on the planet could have a quality of life better than the wealthiest people today is really hard to get your head around.
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Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
