The AI Slowdown Debate | Diet TBPN

Diet TBPN delivers the best of today’s TBPN episode in 30 minutes. TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with each episode posted to podcast platforms right after. Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” the show has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. TBPN is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Public - https://public.com Cisco - https://www.cisco.com Console - https://www.console.com CrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.com Figma - https://www.figma.com MongoDB - https://www.mongodb.com NYSE - https://www.nyse.com Railway - https://railway.com Shopify - https://www.shopify.com/ Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Jordi Hays?

  We're back. Did anything happen over the weekend in tech? Or was it kind of mellow?

• 0:06John Coogan?

  It was a crazy weekend. There was a lot of news, a lot of back and forth about pacing the AI debate. I was in the hospital because I got RABDO. It's brutal, but I am recovering.

• 0:16Jordi Hays?

  Explain RABDO because it sounds really scary and it is bad.

• 0:20John Coogan?

  It can be very bad. Fortunately, I did. Okay, I got an IV. I got some medicine, broke a fever, got through it and I'm healing up. But it happens and it's the dumbest, dumbest illness you can possibly get. It comes from working out too much and not being hydrated. Very avoidable. Hopefully AI can find a cure. If there's even a 1% chance that AI can find a prevention for RABDO, I think it's worth any amount of risk.

• 0:45Jordi Hays?

  Pushing forward.

• 0:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, we must push forward. No, lots of debate over how fast we should push forward.

• 0:50Jordi Hays?

  We have never missed an episode for being sick.

• 0:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:54Jordi Hays?

  And I realize that because someone's asking me the other day, what do you guys do when you're sick? We just, we keep going.

• 1:00John Coogan?

  I mean, I did talk to the doctor. They said, do you want a doctor's note for work? No, I kind of laughed, but I do think that like this job can be done while sick because you're just sitting in a chair having a conversation. But I might be a little bit slow today, so bear with me if I'm not the sharpest on any of the questions. Before we get into the pacing AI debate, what happened with the US Open? Give me a little tennis update. What happened? It's on the cover of the Wall Street Journal, so you know it's important news. Tennis's US Open climax is in back and forth duel, but there was something interesting.

• 1:36Jordi Hays?

  So Ben Shelton, the American, lost.

• 1:39John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:40Jordi Hays?

  And what was notable was that when he actually hit the winning shot and, and won,

• 1:51Jordi Hays?

  he went back and was getting ready for the next, for the next point. And he starts looking around and everyone is standing, you can see people in the crowd are standing up and cheering and he slowly realizes that he won. Checking, finally looking at the scoreboard. And yeah, it just became very obvious that he was so focused on the next point. He was not, actually not looking at the scoreboard at all. It was just like flow state, just, just playing.

• 2:18John Coogan?

  That's awesome.

• 2:19Jordi Hays?

  And I'm sure a lot of venture capitalists out there were seeing that and they're like, yeah, all that matters is your next investment. You shouldn't even know when one of your companies, your seed companies are going to IPO. You should be so focused on.

• 2:30John Coogan?

  I think a lot of people that don't like VC Victory Labs would appreciate that too. It's like, we get it. There was an acquisition. Let's focus on what you're doing right now. I also liked the cameraman work. I saw a clip of the scoreboard was counting down. There was 007 seconds left. What, who did they cut to? Pierce Brosnan, 007 himself. I thought that was nice camera work. Shows you that there's levels to the game of live production.

• 2:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:56John Coogan?

  You know, you gotta, those little touches, clearly that was just spur of the moment. That's not, that's not something that's scripted. That's just someone being creative in the moment with the tools that they have. The switcher, basically. Anyway, the pacing AI debate. I wanted to start with some history here and then we can go through the timeline of what actually happened since we got off stream Friday. Then all the news breaks, of course. But the pacing the frontier goes back to July 28th of this year. So there was a, there was a pacing the frontier statement, an open letter. It was signed by employees and leaders from OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind, Meta, and a bunch of other places, talking about this idea of pacing the frontier.

• 3:38John Coogan?

  Then the same day, Sam Altman publicly said, we may have to pace the rate of AI development. Two days later, OpenAI tells Axios that OpenAI shaped the petition's language. And Altman had discussed pacing with White House officials. So stuff was happening in DC. This was back in basically the very beginning of August, very end of July. Then August 18th, OpenAI publishes something called pacing of model development in an era of cyber critical capabilities. OpenAI said it actually slowed scaling and paused a major RL run. There was that two week training pause that happened. On August 31st, Anthropic, official Anthropic post explicitly discusses pacing the frontier.

• 4:22John Coogan?

  So the idea is spreading and calls for coordinating pacing mechanisms. And then on September 12th, it was actually Saturday morning that Dario dropped the essay. We must pace the frontier, turn the concept into a much bigger public Anthropic campaign that everyone's talking about today. So the rollout of this was pretty, pretty quick. And there's, there's a few key things from Dario's essay. It hit the timeline at 7:00 AM Pacific. He was up early posting. Perfect time to get a lot of likes on a banger. You gotta feel something. No, everyone else, there's no fundraising news happening. Drop your essay early Saturday morning. Let people digest it with their morning coffee. Elon was clearly engaging. By 8:00 AM, Elon endorses it.

• 5:03John Coogan?

  9:30 AM, Sam endorses it. Saturday, 4:00 PM, Demis generally agrees with Dario's point and argues that it needs some work. Remember, Dario put out something pretty similar, talking about pacing and AI development and the need for oversight generally. Months ago, before transitioning out of his role as CEO of DeepMind and stepping up to, I think, chairman. Then later, David Sacks on Saturday, but at 8:15 has had time to process everything. He asks some questions about Dario's post, goes back and forth. Sunday morning, the Financial Times reports that Donald Trump has rejected calls from tech bosses for an AI slowdown. Later that day, Sunday morning, Gavin Baker rounds up the weekend.

• 5:48John Coogan?

  So we can kind of go through some of this and go through those posts. But what actually happened in Dario's essay, we must pace the frontier. He has the three step plan on how to, how he proposes.

• 5:59Jordi Hays?

  Number three will shock you.

• 6:02John Coogan?

  Number one, give independent third party evaluators access to AI companies so they can verify safety practices. He calls out Meter, which drew a lot of attention because people were debating how independent Meter is. There's some Meter employees who have worked at OpenAI, have worked at Anthropic. There's people that work at Anthropic who worked at Meter. Like it's, it's all very much a revolving door with these AI safety groups. And then the AI labs, you go back and forth depending on what you're interested in. So not as independent as like, oh yeah, we're, we're going with an accounting firm who, you know, doesn't really have an opinion about the, like the AI future. These are all people who are deeply embedded in the discourse,

• 6:46John Coogan?

  which could be a huge benefit because they take the stuff really seriously. Could also lead to some, what people flagged as like conflicts potentially. But still, some optimism from the community around what that would look like. Two is frontier labs in democratic companies should work together with the, with the government's help to establish AI safety standards. And this was the one that people were going back and forth on. Do the labs actually need government approval from this? Dean Ball was talking a little bit about the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. There are very clear rules about companies agreeing to do really anything in concert with each other. This is the number one reason that you don't want monopolies

• 7:29John Coogan?

  and cartels forming is that if all of a sudden, you know, oh, you know, American Airlines and Delta and United all say, yeah, we, you know, for safety reasons, we should have fewer flights. It's like, okay, well, what would that do to the market? Probably drive up their margins because there's less flights, charge more for them. They have fixed costs. So you could very clearly see that collusion in that market would lead to more profits for them and more harm for the consumer. That's where the Sherman Anti-Trust Act came from. We flagged this a week or two ago that like, even, even though it seems like, oh, well, if Demis and Dario and Sam and Elon all agree, like this should just happen. That's not a problem. There are actual legal and federal regulatory rules

• 8:14John Coogan?

  that might need to be adjusted or waived for something like this to happen. So that's, I think that's why he's, he's calling for that specifically. He's saying, we need an exception to the rules so that we can actually do this. Because it's great to all write blog posts that we loosely agree on, but to have anything formal, we need government approval. And then third, this is the one that will shock you apparently. The US and other democratic countries should try and coordinate with authoritarian governments. So he wants the US and China to coordinate on AI pacing. Of course, China still wants to catch up and there's some tricks there is like, what will happen in equilibrium if both countries have the exact same capabilities? Is that the best outcome? Or do you always want to be in the lead? If you always want to be in the lead, it's very hard to negotiate with someone and say,

• 9:00John Coogan?

  oh, well, you know, well, why don't you just have half as many nuclear weapons as we have? And like, that'll be great. Like we'll pace you. And so you go back to nuclear non-proliferation and all the difficult debates there. We obviously wound up with a multipolar world with everyone wanting at least some capabilities there. So Elon chimed in agreeing with Dario, then Sam and Demis also agreed. The timeline, on the other hand, had some questions and concerns about Dario's post. Who will, who will these third party evaluators be? Why wait for Washington to regulate the frontier? If Anthropic believes AI is advancing too quickly, why not simply slow down on its own? David Sacks raised some questions on X and we can go to David Sacks's post, which I believe here is in the timeline. He said, Dario has written that we need to,

• 9:44John Coogan?

  quote, pace the frontier and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response. Go ahead. You guys are the frontier by any reasonable metric, market share, revenue growth, model capability. The two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You've also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement. I don't think what you see, I don't see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down. I support your decision to be responsible, but stop pretending you need anyone else's permission. Stop pretending anti-trust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending meter is independent when it is intertwined with anthropics, investors and staff.

• 10:25John Coogan?

  Stop pretending that you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren't even at the frontier. And so, yeah, maybe that's a little bit of an issue, although, yeah, I mean, the regulatory capture angle is always like, if the safety rules become super cumbersome such that you can't start a instinct like product. Right? It's like instinct is a small team. They're not building a frontier model. They're not training their own models, at least not yet, but they're like doing stuff with AI. If all of a sudden they have to spend a year negotiating with a bunch of third-party evaluators, have a bunch of people embedded and then go through some sort of review process. And the government's not getting back to them like you can't have a breakout consumer product.

• 11:10John Coogan?

  And that could be true for the long.

• 11:12Jordi Hays?

  It doesn't feel like there's been any type of effort from anywhere to try to control or regulate like application layer companies. And Greg was on Odd Lots. This episode came out this morning talking about not trying to, doesn't, doesn't believe there should be any sort of limits to.

• 11:30John Coogan?

  Application layer stuff?

• 11:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but basically like if you just want to train a model at home for your own use cases, you know, there shouldn't be limits on that. Yeah, Trump, Trump came out yesterday. He was pretty active over the weekend. He said, "The only control or quote unquote guardrails that AI needs is a strong and smart, high IQ president, and the USA has that in spades." The Trump.

• 11:57Jordi Hays?

  "The Trump administration has stopped AI people from doing bad or potentially bad things like Dario, who is now pretending to be a perfect little angel, and we will continue to do so. We already have tremendous criminal and regulatory power over these companies. There is a sick conspiracy going on against AI and data centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China. Whoever wins AI wins. We are leading China and all others, and will continue to do so. Conspiracy theorists, treasonists, traitors and leakers, beware. Thank you for your attention to this matter." It is funny to accuse, to accuse like the labs of being in a conspiracy against AI.

• 12:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, that really, really doesn't follow. I don't, yeah, it does not make sense.

• 12:41Jordi Hays?

  But he also followed up just 40 minutes ago, said, "Concerning AI, when in the history of business, capital H, capital B, history of business, did anyone see the leaders of an industry call for regulation that if strongly implemented would drive them into oblivion and bankruptcy? AI is taking over the world, destroying humanity and all other things. That is a hoax, no different from Russia, Russia, Russia, Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine, impeachment hoax one, impeachment hoax two, and all the other hoaxes and scams that America was forced to endure." President Xi of China just announced that China will be doing absolutely nothing to stand in the way of AI or its future. "Google has recently stated that they want to build a massive plant in Finland, all because they are finding permitting too difficult in the United States.

• 13:24Jordi Hays?

  I'm not happy about this and want them to change their thinking. AI and data centers will be the greatest economic development engine in history, bigger than oil, gold, diamonds, or even the internet." Bigger than.

• 13:36John Coogan?

  Diamond.

• 13:40John Coogan?

  Bigger than diamonds.

• 13:43John Coogan?

  Like of all the technology, the internet, the internet, the transistor.

• 13:51Jordi Hays?

  Oil, the internet.

• 13:53John Coogan?

  The wheel, diamonds, these are equivalent things.

• 13:57Jordi Hays?

  "It will not be stopped by brilliantly run destructive forces during the term of President Donald Trump."

• 14:04John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 14:06Jordi Hays?

  Well, anyways, I, I'm wondering what the, so a bunch of hedge funds are paying, you know, they paid to get access to this. Let's assume like a minute early, something like that. How did they trade this? Because it's very.

• 14:20John Coogan?

  Long to beers.

• 14:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, maybe.

• 14:23John Coogan?

  Long, long diamonds.

• 14:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, maybe diamonds are, are, are underappreciated.

• 14:28John Coogan?

  I think diamonds are actually in a really rough spot. I think people are moving the lab ground stuff really aggressively. So it's, it's actually a tough, tough period of time for the diamonds. And I'm sure the diamond industry is calling for regulation for sure.

• 14:42Jordi Hays?

  We gotta keep going because the president was on a roll this weekend. Let's pull up this video.

• 14:48Speaker 02

  We take in a lot of their cars, car tires.

• 14:51Speaker 03

  This week, again, there's been so much concern about AI. Have you heard directly from any of these AI tech leaders? And you seem to downplay some of the concerns that we've heard.

• 15:00Speaker 02

  But it's, you know, it's going to be more good than bad, but by a lot.

• 15:04Speaker 03

  But have you heard directly from any of them?

• 15:06Speaker 02

  Whoever wins AI, and we're leading by a lot, whoever wins AI wins.

• 15:12Speaker 03

  Have you ever used it yourself or have you been? How do you use AI?

• 15:16Speaker 02

  But I would say, you know, for the most part, you can use AI for a lot of things.

• 15:22Speaker 03

  Speaking of AI.

• 15:24John Coogan?

  The funny thing is that, is that like there's AI generated slop on his social, true social account like constantly. Like the slop videos are obviously AI, like both sides of that debate or that discussion should have known that, I guess. But I guess it's like people on his team are creating like the AI slop videos. Cause like there will be like a new vibe coded, like, like, you know, some sort of simulator that they put up on White House stuff all the time. So, but I guess that's not him. It's probably people on his team that are like, I made this AI video. Yeah, but I don't know. Gavin Baker had a roundup of what happened. Let's go through what's going on. And lots of people just sort of like processing this, going back and forth. People were expecting Elon to be sort of against this, maybe anti Dario.

• 16:07John Coogan?

  He of course came out in favor and has been talking about how like he was working with Nick Bostrom in 2014 on AI safety, has been very concerned about this the whole time. Although at various points in time, Elon has been less of a doomer and more like, we gotta build, we gotta go, we gotta, we, we, we gotta, you know, actually compete here, working both alongside labs, co-founding OpenAI, founding XAI, growing the, the model capabilities there. But he's like firmly in favor of this. So let's see what Gavin Baker had to say. He said, "While 24 hours for AI and lots of different proposals have been made. TLDR, the only tangible new fact is that OpenAI and Anthropic are going to have embedded

• 16:49John Coogan?

  third-party evaluators from unknown organizations with Dario floating meter as a possibility. Having third-party evaluators is smart as there's no section 230 style liability shield for model outputs and showing a duty of care will be important in future litigation. Several internet companies might have gone bankrupt without section 230, so limiting liability really matters. I think there are minimal investment implications from this single new fact. But I do think that anyone who wants, quote, "A smoother for a longer cycle than most constraints," are good, wafers, watts, real rates and spreads. I was thinking about how the, a lot of the safety folks are worried about just the capability build out

• 17:32John Coogan?

  from the semiconductor supply chain, like they, they would like to restrict the amount of chips that are created. And I'm wondering if, should we not be pacing electricity generation? Does everyone agree that we should be building more solar, thermal, wind power right now? Is that uncontroversial? Is there anyone who says like, no, we shouldn't be doing that? Because if we wind up in a world where you're pacing frontier AI development, current models are sort of diffusing and there's some economic impact there, but you're not, you know, blitzscaling the data centers and the frontier intelligence. Can you apply some of that capital, some of that human talent to just getting nuclear power online,

• 18:14John Coogan?

  getting solar power online, re-industrializing the American energy supply chain, battery, really even grid prep tension? Because everyone who complains about higher energy prices would be happy with that. I don't think the AI safety folks would be upset about that because you could use it for a lot of things. Worst case, it's like, okay, you wound up with like, okay, we can never build the, you know, AGI or ASI because it's too dangerous. At least we have a lot of cheap energy. Is there any reason why you wouldn't, why you would want to pace the build out of the American electrical grid? I can't see why. What do you think?

• 18:49Jordi Hays?

  I mean, at some level, like, yeah, it makes sense because it is like an input, but it's like, seems like way too diffuse. And so because like, yeah, it's like, if you build a lot of chips, like, sure, you can like, you know, make more data centers that run YouTube or whatever, but like, there's kind of a, a narrow use case for chips.

• 19:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:07Jordi Hays?

  Where power, you can do whatever.

• 19:09John Coogan?

  I wonder if you, yeah, yeah, at what point is there, is there some sort of like AI safety valve that's like? We need to regulate that company in South Korea that makes toilets that also makes films for semiconductors because if we can restrict them, then we can slow down the pace of AI progress, going really, really deep in the supply chain for for safety reasons potentially. To summarize the events, Gavin Baker says Dario made the most maximalist proposal of the weekend, embedded third-party evaluators, national regulatory regime for models beyond a certain capability ingredient threshold, a broad international regulatory pact between democracies, stricter limits on compute distillation for China, and then a different international regulatory regime that encompasses China. Before there's ever a national regulatory

• 19:54John Coogan?

  regime, he wants a Sherman Act waiver so that Anthropic can safely coordinate with OpenAI and other frontier labs without antitrust fears. To be frank, this latest proposal is much less maximalist than some of his prior proposals, like policy on the AI exponential, where he advocated for an FAA for AI. Now, people are talking about FINRA for AI, which is more non-governmental regulation, but industry focused. I believe he is sincere in his beliefs, and despite all the protestations, all of this would also probably be good for his business over the long term. Yeah, there's a there's a lot of tricks here where people where something if there are if there are multiple quadrants of like actions you can take, and it's like it's either good or bad for your business, or it's good or bad for

• 20:38John Coogan?

  safety, you can land in the good for your business and good for safety quadrant, and everyone will accuse you of being cynical and doing it only because it's good for your business. And so it gets really difficult to to say, okay, yes, like the thing that I'm advocating for is good for my business. Now, Rune had another take, which is like, no, if you're pacing the frontier, that's going to compress margins, because everyone else is just going to catch up, and it's going to become more oligopolistic. So if you hold, you know, like, yeah, there's this duopoly right now for the true frontier amongst OpenAI and Anthropic. But if you hold that constant, like Watermelon from MSL is going to catch up, DeepMind is going to catch up, like, you're going to have three or four Grok is going to train to that level. And so you're going to have four, five, six, seven

• 21:22John Coogan?

  really capable competitors. What was interesting is like, R. Karasian was saying that AI spend declined a little bit in August, and that was mostly because of price cutting. It wasn't actually people using less AI. So it's not like people are pulling back on their use of AI. But there's more price competition. So OpenAI is discounting, and people are being we saw like the Fable adoption was a little weak, and a lot of it's like, hey, are we sure we want to use the million dollar model for checking the weather? Like, let's be a little bit more judicious about this. And so if you wind up with a with a world where there's much more price competition, that could compress the frontier's margins, which

• 22:03John Coogan?

  is not good for business. So it doesn't really put you in that top quadrant that you have to be so cynical about. The interesting thing is that he said that he doesn't think that it's open source Chinese models that are actually putting pricing pressure on the frontier. It's more of the duopoly dynamic. And I think that's because I think he sort of alluded to this, that there's just a lot of companies that are like, I am comfortable doing business with an OpenAI, an Anthropic, a Google, of course, something that's on ABS, something that's on Azure. Yes, I could just download the weights for DeepSeek, but I'm not really comfortable with that. I don't really want to deal with that. I don't want to deal with the scaling and uptime of that. And so, yes, there are APIs out there that are reasonable,

• 22:43John Coogan?

  but none of them are as mature as the as the frontier labs, not in terms of the intelligence, but in terms of the actual, if I implement this in my business, will it reliably give me the right results? Is there high quality SLA? Will the service stay up? Will uptime be good, etc.? So there's there is a world where you could get to a place where this is bad for the frontier companies business wise. And Sam has talked about that in an interview with Fortune, saying like, if it's bad for our business, like, we've we have said to our investors at every step for like a decade that like, this is kind of a nonprofit. This is a this is a this is a there are a whole bunch of different ways in which this

• 23:23John Coogan?

  is not purely aligned to shareholder interests like other companies. PBCs, yeah, public benefit corporations. So they so there so so I think both Sam and Dario feel very confident about being able to go to their investors and say, hey, we're doing something that's gonna slow down revenue growth or tank margins, or, you know, just reduce the market cap of the company. But we think it's the right thing to do. So deal with it. And you can't really sue us because you invested in a PBC. But no one's really giving them credit for that. Everyone thinks like, no, this is cynically what gets them to 10 trillion. This is what gets them to 10 trillion. And I don't know, maybe maybe it is. But but it definitely

• 24:05John Coogan?

  seems like like the the if we're if we're on the mid curve, you know, bell curve meme, like the dumb guy thing is like, slowing down is bad for business, right? Like, the mid curve is like slowing down is actually good for business in the 4D chess and like, you don't want to be the best and have 100% market share. You want 20% market share because you let everyone catch up to you. Like, I I'm not I'm not super convinced of that. But, you know, there's plenty of people that are making that case online.

• 24:34Jordi Hays?

  We got some breaking news.

• 24:35John Coogan?

  What's the breaking news?

• 24:36Jordi Hays?

  The president just phoned Jensen live on stage at the All In Summit.

• 24:40John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 24:41Jordi Hays?

  Mike Isaac says, okay, wow, per folks there, Trump called Jensen in the middle of his interview. He was on stage and Jensen put the phone on speakerphone. Jensen thanked Trump for his social media post this morning pouring cold water on alarmism.

• 24:54John Coogan?

  Hmm, yeah, Jensen's been anti doom for this entire cycle. We'll see. We'll see where it all goes. I'm sure there'll be more.

• 25:02Speaker 02

  Mr. President, you're now talking to the planet. The great thing about life is that Jensen can develop the most complex

• 25:11John Coogan?

  It's the joke again.

• 25:13Speaker 02

  ... but he can't figure out how to put me on speaker.

• 25:17John Coogan?

  Odd joke. Okay, well, anything substantive come out of it? I'm sure we'll know more tomorrow.

• 25:25Jordi Hays?

  We'll be back.

• 25:26John Coogan?

  We'll be back at 11 a.m. Pacific. Thank you for tuning in. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. I'm off to go get some rest, and we'll see you tomorrow.

• 25:36Jordi Hays?

  We love you.

• 25:37John Coogan?

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