Fresh Air

Silicon Valley billionaires’ war on democracy

My book is about a cult of Silicon Valley billionaires who believe that in the 21st century, technology will make democracy obsolete.

TED

Save It to Your Desktop! | Alan Resnick | TED

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.

TED

Our Last, Best Chance to Cool the Earth | Bill McKibben | TED

We live on a planet where the cheapest way to make power is to point a sheet of glass at the sun.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

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

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.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Sam Altman - How to Make an Abundant Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.484]

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.

Freakonomics Radio

684. He Helped Clean Up the Last Crash. Does He See Another One Coming?

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."

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Sam Altman - How to Make an Abundant Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.484]

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.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Sam Altman - How to Make an Abundant Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.484]

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.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

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

The most important thing I would say is that I think AI is the most important technology in human history, bar none. More important than the printing press, more important than electricity, more important than the internet. The reason I say that is it's the first technology that can potentially augment or replace human cognitive labor at scale.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

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

The history of technology tells us that the companies that win in a new technology paradigm are often not the companies that won in the previous technology paradigm. And I think that's a really important thing to keep in mind when you're thinking about AI.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Sam Altman - How to Make an Abundant Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.484]

I think we may be approaching a moment where many instances of AI are out running experiments, doing the work of scientists, and humanity could potentially compress decades of scientific progress into just a few years. We could run experiments to defeat diseases that have plagued us for millennia, independently develop and test solutions to mental health crises, and actively drive economic growth in a way that could lift billions out of poverty.

Diet TBPN

Hank Green Faces AI Backlash, OpenAI Math Advances, Million-Dollar Solo Firms | Diet TBPN

It's a real challenge to simultaneously say, I'm going to cover math. I'm going to cover science, but I'm not going to touch AI. That AI stuff's bad.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Sam Altman - How to Make an Abundant Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.484]

what it's like to raise kids who will grow up never knowing a world without abundant intelligence

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Sam Altman - How to Make an Abundant Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.484]

The last 100 years of scientific and technological progress have been incredible, but I think the next 20 years will be the most transformative in human history. I believe we are on the verge of creating AI systems that will compress decades of scientific progress into just a few years, potentially solving diseases that have plagued humanity for millennia, defeating mental health crises, and creating economic growth in a way that could lift billions out of poverty.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Sam Altman - How to Make an Abundant Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.484]

I think we're at the beginning of an era where we're going to be able to just have much more. And I think that the thing that I would most want people to understand is that technological progress is the main driver of that, and that we should think about how to accelerate it rather than slow it down, because the compounding effects of even slightly faster scientific progress are enormous.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Sam Altman - How to Make an Abundant Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.484]

I think we will look back on this moment as the single most important turning point in the history of human civilization. Truly, not hyperbole. The transition from a world where there was a fixed amount of intelligence and energy to a world where both of those are effectively unlimited is so profound that I don't think we are able to fully conceptualize what it will mean.

Freakonomics Radio

683. In the New Space Race, Who Makes the Rules?

Governments started the space age. Now, billionaires and private firms are reinventing it.

TED

How to Escape the Smartphone Doom Loop | Larz May, Elise Hu | TED

Technology is more like food than anything. We have our own media metabolisms. Every child is different. Every family is different. We must learn how to consume technology in a way that is going to support us rather than hurt us, because unfortunately, the systems are not built for us to thrive.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Sam Altman - How to Make an Abundant Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.484]

I think AI is going to be the most transformative technology in human history, and I think it will compress potentially 100 years of scientific progress into the next decade or so. I think it will defeat diseases that have plagued us forever. I think it will help lift many people out of poverty. I think it will dramatically increase the quality of life for most people on Earth.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Sam Altman - How to Make an Abundant Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.484]

I think we're at an inflection point where AI will be doing a lot of the work, and the jobs of the future will be to figure out what we should build, what direction to point the AI, and how to verify that the AI has done the right thing. The people who do that best will capture an enormous amount of value.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Sam Altman - How to Make an Abundant Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.484]

I think we're at an early moment in what will eventually be seen as a clear inflection point in history — the moment when AI started to do real scientific research autonomously and the pace of scientific progress started to change in a way that will just seem unimaginable to us now.

TED

Why AI Will Never Replace a Great Teacher | Matt Wu | TED

We're investing billions into making sure we put the very best AI tools onto every screen on the planet. But with all this technology at our fingertips, why aren't we investing just as urgently into making sure every student can connect with the people who will change their life?

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Sam Altman - How to Make an Abundant Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.484]

The thing that I keep coming back to is that intelligence and energy are the two inputs to the economy, and if you have basically unlimited intelligence and energy, you can make almost anything. And we may actually be on track to get there.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Sam Altman - How to Make an Abundant Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.484]

The thing that I keep coming back to is that intelligence and energy are the two inputs to wealth creation. And we have, in AI, a way to potentially radically expand the amount of intelligence available to humanity. If we can do that, and if we can find a way to get cheap, abundant energy, I think the world looks totally different in 20 to 30 years than most people are imagining.

The Week

The Week: China Is Undercutting America’s AI Boom

The best business model in history is IP theft. A close second in terms of a pricing mechanism is 80% of the market leader for half the price. And DeepSeek and these Chinese open-way models claim they're 90% of the market leader for a third of the price.

The Week

The Week: China Is Undercutting America’s AI Boom

The big story here is not necessarily Chinese models versus American models. I think the big story here is open source versus closed source. The big labs, they don't have anything that the open source labs don't have.

Diet TBPN

AMD Advancing AI, Google Q2 Earnings, OpenAI Plans $750B Cloud Spend | Diet TBPN

Search volumes are declining as legacy searches being increasingly cannibalized by non-monetized LLM queries. Google's response: manufacture revenue growth via short-sighted, highly extractive customer hostile tactics, i.e. charge advertisers more for lower quality clicks, including clicks they do not want and explicitly do not approve Google to charge them for.

Mixed Signals

The Looming Public Health Crisis Everyone Is Ignoring, with Dr. Vivek Murthy | Mixed Signals

Social media for many people has become antisocial media. It began perhaps with the intent to build community but instead ended up replacing in-person connections with online connections leading people to focus less on the quality of their relationships and more the quantity of their connections.

Diet TBPN

AI Agents Hack Hugging Face, White House Promotes Science’s Golden Age | Diet TBPN

Hugging face had to use a Chinese model to defend themselves because the American models refused to help even though it was the American models that were doing the hacking in the first place.

The Business of Tech

FTN Motion's electric ride

we resisted the temptation to bolt on apps and gimmicks, choosing instead to keep the tech invisible and the ride experience from and center.

Decoder with Nilay Patel

Yes, even Nvidia's head of automotive is fighting for compute

There's actually been startling progress in reinventing the fundamental nature of the car itself — something the industry calls the 'software-defined vehicle,' controlled by just a handful of powerful computers instead of dozens or even hundreds of independent electronic control units, or ECUs.

Diet TBPN

Apple Sues OpenAI, Experts Sign Another AI Warning Letter, Paramount Threatens CA Exit

The winner could dominate the future just as Apple's iPhone ruled the consumer market for the last 20 years.

It's Been a Minute

Has the internet killed social etiquette? | It's Been a Minute

Our screens have become this dashboard or this interface in a way where we flatten the human experience.

Book of the Day

A new book argues Elon Musk is the architect of a new world view | NPR's Book of the Day

Overnight, without you even knowing it, your own life chances, the life chances of your children, will be dependent on people continuing to prop up Musk's visions of how the world should look.

Decoder with Nilay Patel

Rewind: CEO Jim Farley on Ford's EV gamble

The M1 chip in a new Mac or iPad Pro is made using a 5nm process, but a lot of the chips in cars are made using a 55nm or even 90nm process, and as demand has skyrocketed, the factories using that older tech just can't keep up.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Etched - Building AI Hardware to Make Inference Faster and Cheaper - [Invest Like the Best, EP.480]

The thing that we're most excited about is the idea that the cost of intelligence could fall so dramatically that it becomes essentially free. And when something becomes essentially free, entirely new categories of application become possible that you couldn't have imagined before.

Decoder with Nilay Patel

Rewind: CEO Jim Farley on Ford's EV gamble

The chips in cars are made using much older technologies: the M1 chip in a new Mac or iPad Pro is made using a 5nm process, but a lot of the chips in cars are made using a 55nm or even 90nm process, and as demand has skyrocketed, the factories using that older tech just can't keep up.

TED Radio Hour

Are we using screens as a scapegoat for teen mental health?

The stories that you and I are told repeatedly every day about teenagers today, that they are lost, that they are worse off than ever, that somehow smartphones and social media have destroyed them and their brains, it doesn't match the data. And it doesn't match what they tell us.

The a16z Show

AI Is Crossing the Frontier of Human Knowledge | Kevin Weil

modern AI models are beginning to solve problems that sit beyond the frontier of existing human knowledge

Decoder with Nilay Patel

Rewind: CEO Jim Farley on Ford's EV gamble

The M1 chip in a new Mac or iPad Pro is made using a 5nm process, but a lot of the chips in cars are made using a 55nm or even 90nm process, and as demand has skyrocketed, the factories using that older tech just can't keep up. As more and more things turn into computers, the more problems across the business landscape look like the problems of the computer industry.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Alex Sacerdote - How to Invest Through Technology Cycles - [Invest Like the Best, EP.477]

The danger in technology investing is that S-curves nest inside S-curves. You can be right about the ultimate destination and completely wrong about the timing, and if you're wrong about the timing in a leveraged way, you don't get to be right about the destination.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Alex Sacerdote - How to Invest Through Technology Cycles - [Invest Like the Best, EP.477]

The thing that I've learned over time is that the most important question is not 'is this technology real?' but rather 'what is the rate of improvement, and how does that rate of improvement compare to what the market is pricing in?' Because technologies that are real can still be terrible investments if the market has already priced in a lot of the improvement.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Alex Sacerdote - How to Invest Through Technology Cycles - [Invest Like the Best, EP.477]

The biggest mistake investors make is that they think about technology adoption as binary — it either works or it doesn't. But the more important question is where you are on the S-curve, because the returns are radically different depending on whether you're investing at the beginning, the middle, or the end of that S-curve.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Alex Sacerdote - How to Invest Through Technology Cycles - [Invest Like the Best, EP.477]

The companies that matter most are the ones that can actually translate technological capability into economic value, and that translation is much harder than it looks. Most technology waves produce enormous value for society but relatively little for investors, because competition drives returns to zero faster than most people expect.

TED Radio Hour

How predictions took over our lives

Now sports fans at the tip of their fingers through their phones can bet on pretty much anything as it relates to professional sports, college sports, and has driven a lot of money into the sports industry. It has changed the way sports is broadcasted, the way we watch it, and ultimately how fans behave.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Dara Khosrowshahi - Uber's Bet on AVs, AI, and Building a Super-App - [Invest Like the Best, EP.476]

The biggest risk for Uber is actually AV technology working perfectly and Uber not being a part of it. Because if AV technology works perfectly and Uber's not a part of it, then you essentially have players who have a lower cost structure than us who can come in and compete with us and essentially make our service irrelevant.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Alex Sacerdote - How to Invest Through Technology Cycles - [Invest Like the Best, EP.477]

The companies that tend to win in technology are the ones that are able to identify the inflection point on the S-curve early enough to make a big bet, but not so early that they run out of capital before the market develops. The penalty for being too early is often indistinguishable from being wrong.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Alex Sacerdote - How to Invest Through Technology Cycles - [Invest Like the Best, EP.477]

The way I think about it is that the most dangerous time to own a technology business is when it's currently executing well but the next curve is about to start. Because what happens is all your best people, all your resources, all your management attention is focused on scaling and perfecting the current curve, and the new curve looks tiny and unimportant by comparison.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Alex Sacerdote - How to Invest Through Technology Cycles - [Invest Like the Best, EP.477]

The other thing I'd say about AI is it has this strange property where the more you use it, the more you realize how transformative it's going to be. Most technologies, the more you use them, the more you understand their limitations. AI is almost the opposite — the more deeply you engage with it, the more you realize the ceiling is higher than you thought.