(Preview) Doom Debates Go Mainstream, AI Religion and the Economic Future, Several Vectors of the China Question

On today’s Ben and Andrew begin with Andrew’s article on AI alarmism, the primacy of the effective altruists in AI risk conversations, and why these discussions are exhausting without more evidence, even as AI risk becomes the biggest story in American politics. From there: A distinction between regulation malaise five years ago and where we are today, the grind of modern software, and questions responding to Ben’s Update on Monday, including thoughts on why OpenAI and Anthropic won’t unilaterally slow down, why Sam Altman and Elon Musk were incentivized to agree with Dario Amodei, and an emailer who asks whether doomerism hysteria is crowding out more urgent economic questions. Then: Questions on China’s incentives in AI, the strategic benefits of chip sales and distillation, military implications of American lead in AI, and China’s messy cybersecurity situation. At the end: An ode to ApplePay, Walmart, and Walton Goggins (but not Matt LaFleur).

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

• 0:00Andrew Sharp?

  Hello and welcome to a free preview of Sharp Tech.

• 0:09Andrew Sharp?

  Hello and welcome back to another episode of Sharp Tech. I'm Andrew Sharp and on the other line, Ben Thompson. Ben, how you doing?

• 0:20Ben Thompson?

  Happy to be with you here at the end of the world, Andrew.

• 0:24Andrew Sharp?

  One of our last pods before the sky falls on all of us. Here we go, or the sky net, I should say, falls on all of us.

• 0:33Ben Thompson?

  There you go. That's a good one. No, I thought, well, we still have time.

• 0:37Andrew Sharp?

  Get some takes off, you know?

• 0:39Ben Thompson?

  Well, we always want to get some takes off, but we, I conceived of Sharp Tech. You were this, you know, brilliant host, my favorite podcast, Greatest of All Talk. And the sort of normie newbie take to Greatest of All Talk was, you know, the guy, the person doesn't know anything about podcasting. They like Ben Golliver, right? He's very funny, very cutting, you know, sounds like he knows stuff, tends a lot of games. The podcast sophisticate appreciates Andrew Sharp. Not only surprisingly good takes, which you wouldn't expect, but also the ability to set Ben up, sort of be the foil, be made fun of, all these sorts of things.

• 1:19Andrew Sharp?

  Bizarre tendencies, sure.

• 1:21Ben Thompson?

  Absolutely. And I'm like, I want that. This is actually, I'm not, this is not a joke. I'm like, Andrew is amazing at hosting and you know what? I like cooking. I like being on someone else's podcast. So my next podcast is not me hosting, it's me permanent guesting. So that is, I think people probably know that, that's sort of the broad origin story.

• 1:45Andrew Sharp?

  Permanent guest here on Sharp Tech. Exactly. Yes.

• 1:49Ben Thompson?

  But before we go.

• 1:50Andrew Sharp?

  Okay.

• 1:52Ben Thompson?

  I want to put the host jacket back on.

• 1:55Andrew Sharp?

  Oh, boy.

• 1:55Ben Thompson?

  For a day. So I did not write a big article this week. I wrote a response, sort of initial response to Dudario Amadez pacing the frontier piece. There is an aspect of all week, I feel like I've already written about all of this. I think if you've been listening to Sharp Tech, you were very early to almost all the arguments that have been going on this week. We've discussed almost all of them from some angle or another. Probably the most pertinent I've written is Anthropic's alignment where they both believe it and also everything's great for them. And it's just an amazing magic trick that they get to pull off. So we will get to that. I will be incapable of keeping my mouth shut

• 2:35Ben Thompson?

  for most of the podcast. But I'd say the official article for this Chucky Post bundle this week is you, some of all fears. S O M E. Great title. How'd you come up with it?

• 2:47Andrew Sharp?

  I was sitting on a plane coming back from a weekend in Arizona, reading all the doomers on Twitter and I knew that I was going to write about it. And so rather than write about it on the plane, I thought of potential titles on the plane and came up with some of all fears. There we go.

• 3:05Ben Thompson?

  It's great. I love it. Well, give me the overview. I think like you really framed this as this is by someone who kind of knows about tech normie perspective, but I don't think that's it.

• 3:18Andrew Sharp?

  Okay.

• 3:18Ben Thompson?

  What I think it is, is someone who pays attention to tech who does not live in San Francisco. That's my high level takeaway. Is that, is that a way, is that a way to frame it?

• 3:28Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah. I mean, that's the thing. It's sort of a misnomer to call myself a normie at this point because I'm immersed in this world every week with the podcast. So I'm familiar with all the characters, I'm familiar with the terminology.

• 3:42Ben Thompson?

  All the preparation, everything is Andrew. That's, that is, the host job is more difficult than it appears.

• 3:47Andrew Sharp?

  Right. So I'm surveying the news and trying to keep track of everything. And I'll be honest, I was moved to write this article because.

• 3:57Ben Thompson?

  Which by the way, is coming out the same time as the podcast. So no one, well, the links in the show notes, I would encourage you to go read it. I thought it was really good. Doesn't mean I stand by everything in it. It's, yeah, Andrew's his own voice.

• 4:07Andrew Sharp?

  Thank you for that clarification.

• 4:09Ben Thompson?

  Which gets me in trouble by the way, sometimes, but.

• 4:12Andrew Sharp?

  Well, so I was moved to write this because I was away with my wife. It was our 10 year wedding anniversary. And so we were at like a resort in Arizona. Thank you so much. We had a delightful weekend and Saturday afternoon, I got a text message from a friend who sent a link to a long New York Times op ed. The headline of the op ed was, this is really bad. And it was like 3,000 words of AI doomerism. And my friend, who's a smart guy, he works in the defense industrial complex in DC and is very accomplished and is not a rube per se. And he sent this to our group chat and was like, read this and worry. And I'm sitting

• 4:57Andrew Sharp?

  there by the pool and I don't even have the energy to respond to all the different arguments in this New York Times article.

• 5:05Ben Thompson?

  It's like when someone, it's like when a normie wants to come up to you to talk basketball. It's like.

• 5:08Andrew Sharp?

  I'm just like, not even going to get into it.

• 5:10Ben Thompson?

  Just go listen to the podcast.

• 5:12Andrew Sharp?

  But I was so annoyed and I've been so annoyed by the tenor of this conversation over the last 10 days, that I had to just sort of walk through why I find myself skeptical of this specific set of people and the claims that they've been making about AI, literally for a decade and certainly over the last several years.

• 5:37Ben Thompson?

  Longer than that. And it's actually a critical aspect of this. This is why I'm a bad host. This is why I'm a permanent guest. An important thing to understand is there's aspects about which this movement has been right about a lot of things and they wouldn't be compelling and effective if that weren't the case. That's always the case, by the way. This goes back, you know, we're, the COVID analogy is going to come up again and again for good reason. But one of the reasons why I was so disgusted by the crackdown, by the censorship crackdown and by the blatant statements of untruths or allowing untruths to propagate because they were quote unquote useful. Like remember the whole thing about masks? Like, oh, we needed them to be available for emergency personnel. We want people to

• 6:22Ben Thompson?

  use them, but then now we want people to use them. It's like whatever, whatever the sort of veracity of that.

• 6:27Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah.

• 6:28Ben Thompson?

  The problem with lying slash whatever it might be, is you give credence to people who tell the truth. Now those people who tell the truth might also be crazy, right? You could say, and there's this childlike view of the world that some people tell all truth and some people tell all lies. And not only is that absolutely not the case, because no one can know everything. So definitionally, at some point in your life, you're going to say something that's not true. But also the reality is people have different motivations, incentives, views of the world, interpret things differently, will use things to their end. So if you create

• 7:10Ben Thompson?

  a situation where you're allowing it to propagate the idea that say there, you don't have any increased resistance to the, to COVID after you've already had it, right? The idea that you need a vaccination post already having COVID is scientific nonsense. Now, you can understand societally why they wanted to say, no, everyone has to get the vaccine.

• 7:31Andrew Sharp?

  And it's useful for people to believe that. Exactly. That's, that was the methodology at the time.

• 7:36Ben Thompson?

  The problem is it's a lie. If you had COVID, you developed like natural, the idea, like natural immunity was like coded for like a few years as this far right wing wacko position.

• 7:51Andrew Sharp?

  Sure.

• 7:52Ben Thompson?

  When it's like the most fundamental truth of like immunology.

• 7:56Andrew Sharp?

  It is still coded that way. Like people talk about Aaron Rodgers.

• 8:00Ben Thompson?

  I felt it right there. I said natural immunity and immediately all my like antenna went up like, oh, I have to cover myself. I have to backtrack. It's nuts. It's absolutely nuts.

• 8:08Andrew Sharp?

  Aaron Rodgers is still stigmatized to this day. And if you go back and listen to what he was saying, it was just objectively correct. And so all of this is still in the water that we're all swimming in.

• 8:22Ben Thompson?

  Well, I love Aaron Rodgers. I'm not, I don't remember everything that he said.

• 8:26Andrew Sharp?

  That's actually, that's a very good qualification.

• 8:29Ben Thompson?

  But I have enjoyed him cooking ESPN over the last few, few, it's the last few weeks. So.

• 8:35Andrew Sharp?

  Yes. Not a broad endorsement. He was on with McAfee recently and said a couple different things.

• 8:40Ben Thompson?

  As a Packers fan, Aaron Rodgers cooking ESPN over COVID takes is all we have right now. So whatever, I'm with you. But.

• 8:46Andrew Sharp?

  Fair enough. Fair enough.

• 8:48Ben Thompson?

  But sorry, before I let you go back to talking about your article, which is supposed to be the opening of this podcast, which you didn't know about, I sprung this on you, by the way.

• 8:54Andrew Sharp?

  That's right. Literally 30 seconds before we came on.

• 8:57Ben Thompson?

  Would you make natural immunity as being a kooky sort of thing? Then people who are kooks, who say natural immunity is real, get credence.

• 9:09Andrew Sharp?

  Sure.

• 9:09Ben Thompson?

  And they get credence, then all their other views also get credence because they were right about this thing. That was different than the mainstream. And then, well, maybe they're right about all these other things. It's like, no, actually they're not. If we had just been honest in the mainstream, then we would have had what, much more like resist, much more immunity to the kooks. So anyhow, you go back to the EAs or not, EAs is a catch all charm. There's actually a bunch of different, there's the rationalists, there's the EAs, there's a, there's a whole like Harry Potter fan, like, I don't know if you know that Harry Potter does figure actually quite prominently into all this.

• 9:49Andrew Sharp?

  I became aware of it against my will over the last 10 days. I actually think that would be a good punishment for whoever finishes last place in your fantasy football league is make them read all of the less wrong posts, this Harry Potter situation, some good podcasts about AI agent welfare and the philosophical.

• 10:12Ben Thompson?

  And the methods of rationality. It's like, it's like an extension of the Harry Potter universe.

• 10:16Andrew Sharp?

  And it's like 600,000 words. So yes, I am vaguely aware. Can't say I've read all 600,000 words.

• 10:23Ben Thompson?

  Yeah, I've read zero of them. And that will continue to be the case. Although, I'm a pretty big Harry Potter fan, to be honest. I was pretty late to it. Cause I was, I was older. But I enjoyed them. I think I remember.

• 10:34Andrew Sharp?

  It's a millennial tent pole. So I'm obligated to be a fan, but I do enjoy it.

• 10:38Ben Thompson?

  Took me a while to get to it. But, but as we've established. So the thing to understand about the AI doomerism is it goes back a long time, like a few, a few decades. I think really in earnest, like two decades. And the reason this is pertinent is no one in this movement for Shaw, for the large language model.

• 11:02Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah.

• 11:03Ben Thompson?

  Like that this is going to be the transformer is going to be the means by which AI comes along. And the reason why it's notable is the biggest failure mode of the large language model is the fact it's so obsequious. It just gives you what you want. Right? Like, like if you, and it's, you know, it's funny, like I. Love all the vibe coming off, all this sort of things. And I like know enough to be dangerous. I know what sort of database like I want to use for a particular sort of thing. Like I know particular things, but as far as security goes, like, like I know the pieces, all the pieces of, of, of an app and how they work together. And the problem is, at the end of the day, though, I, the deeper I get and make things more and more complex,

• 11:45Ben Thompson?

  the more I do feel the fact that I don't actually code. And, uh, and feeling the edges of, look, this was a foreseeable problem. I could have really used a coder that pushed back on me on this particular point. But you stupid LM were like, yep, got it. Let's go do it. It's like, no, we should not have got to do that. Now we have to go back and we have to undo all this sort of stuff. And I have to use up another one of my precious, uh, open AI reuse, uh, uh, tokens that reset or usage tokens that reasons my usage. I used them all. I'm on, I'm on the last one. Again, it's not to say that LM based AI isn't potentially dangerous. The, again, the cybersecurity things, we've been,

• 12:24Andrew Sharp?

  We've been talking about it for three months. Yeah.

• 12:26Ben Thompson?

  Yeah. Um, but there's been a lot of retrofitting of, I have these pre-existing beliefs about AI existentialism. And I'm going to fit this technology onto that and have a deep rooted, ironically enough, because our whole movement is about defeating confirmation biases. I'm gonna fall so deep into confirmation bias hell that every single thing these things do that is problematic is going to fit onto my pre-existing doomer narrative. And the, as opposed to, there's these issues that are coming along, let's extrapolate those issues and say, oh, that could end up very badly.

• 13:10Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah.

• 13:11Ben Thompson?

  And, and that's just a real fundamental distinction. And this call out, or about a longstanding movement, it actually is important to say, it's a 20 to 30 year old movement. It's not a five to 10 year old movement, because that is one of the fundamental critiques of what's going on here. And this, you mentioned the confirmation bias angle in this article.

• 13:34Andrew Sharp?

  And I think it's really important context for people to have when they're evaluating these claims. And one of the things that I have been frustrated by over the last 10 days is just how much deference has been given to Dario and the leaders in the frontier AI community, who all have these sort of pre-existing biases and blind spots, certainly geopolitical blind spots, because they have been leading on the technological side. And so you have people throughout politics who say, well, these are the experts and they're concerned about this. So now we all have to be concerned about this. And it's worth

• 14:17Andrew Sharp?

  looking closer at what some of their other claims have been and how they arrived at some of these conclusions. And how much overlap there is between the auditors and the people in the labs and everything. It, it all ties to this insular community. And again, it's just a reason for me to be a little skeptical.

• 14:37Ben Thompson?

  Which to be clear, has been right about like 85% of things, right? So I, I, just in defense of the sort of doomers, they've been right about a lot. And again, I also believe they are right about there being significant issues and challenges, particularly in the cyber arena, about these sorts of things. And in the very fullness of time, in hundreds of years, when robots do everything, we can get in the call, in the dorm room and imagine like,

• 15:05Andrew Sharp?

  Nano bots? Sure.

• 15:07Ben Thompson?

  Right. But even then, I, the one thing I do sort of regret is like, I do think there's a very clear line between digital and physical. But the digital is so enmeshed in the physical that like, again, I've mentioned this in the podcast last week, I, I, I can imagine there is AI capable of like shutting down the power grid. I wouldn't be surprised if that's the case. And you sort of like, I thought your framing of this was fair, like these companies have air gap systems, all these sorts of things. And like, you go back to like Iran and like the Stuxnet sort of thing. Like, there is a will, there's a way. And one of the things about LM,

• 15:38Andrew Sharp?

  First of all, there's a will and there's a way now. Like China is already, according to various intelligence agencies, China has successfully hacked our infrastructure grid today, pre-AI. So there's always going to be a will and there's always going to be a way. That does not lead to extinction risk, though. And that's where I draw the line. And this, it has always come back to the extinction risk. And like Dario has said, there's a 10 to 25% chance that this has a catastrophic impact on human civilization. And I just don't think that that is a productive way to talk about this.

• 16:17Ben Thompson?

  There's supposed to be 25% of jobs eliminated by now.

• 16:19Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah, totally.

• 16:21Ben Thompson?

  Like, or, sorry, I think it was the end of 2026. So we still have three months to wipe out 25% of jobs. Um, so,

• 16:26Andrew Sharp?

  His, his phrase was soon. And it has not happened soon. Um, I think he may have given himself until the end of the decade. And look, that may happen. Um, and there are definitely areas where AI poses real concerning questions. But I think talking about these existential risks kind of confounds any reasonable conversations about how government may or should respond to any of those things. And right now, I think it's so early that it's impossible to respond coherently to any of the downsides that people have been worried about. And then that's where the last 10 days, it's all gone to a pretty crazy

• 17:08Andrew Sharp?

  place. Like, we finished on the last podcast, talking about P doom. And I said to you after we finished recording, I don't know how much more there is to say about this topic. And unfortunately, after we finished, like, the world just went crazy and it became the biggest story in the world over the last seven days.

• 17:26Ben Thompson?

  Well, I think that's actually the exact issue. It's also why I do find it a little tiresome, is by virtue of it being unfalsifiable, it can be used endlessly to whatever,

• 17:39Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah.

• 17:40Ben Thompson?

  whatever one wants. And that's how you see this emerging coalition between this P doom movement, between, unfortunately, like, I don't like to get partisan on our shows, but you know,

• 17:51Andrew Sharp?

  Half the government, every elected Democrat.

• 17:53Ben Thompson?

  I get the AI sort of like, you know, I do the, the run through and again, usually not particularly helpful. And I think they, the AIs always want me to soften stuff. Always. They hate it when I say stuff. They're, because they're like, where's the evidence? Blah, blah, blah. Like, these are the, these are the, I mean, to your point, uh, you talk about very smart people. I'm sure your friend's a nice guy, hopefully doesn't listen to the podcast. Sounds like a bit of a midwitt. I mean, like, there's, there's a real, there's a real, like, this, take it back to like sports analytics, right? Like, at the end of the day, you can get a lot of traction by looking at the numbers and like, sounding smart, all these sorts of things. No comment on graceful talk. We know Ben doesn't listen to the podcast, so we can, we can miss him. But there's, there's some, the beautiful

• 18:38Ben Thompson?

  thing about basketball is there's, there's something else. There's something that is not tangible, there's intangible, that's the word I'm looking for, that goes into actual winning. And yeah, Derek Morey, to your point about biggest loser moments,

• 18:52Andrew Sharp?

  Daryl Morey. You called him Derek.

• 18:55Ben Thompson?

  Oh, no, I said Daryl. I said Daryl. I think Daryl probably does listen to the podcast. Hi, Daryl. Sorry about that.

• 19:00Andrew Sharp?

  We love Daryl.

• 19:01Ben Thompson?

  You can spread, send a spreadsheet about 81 missed calls in a series. And you could say, what are the chances that we missed 27 straight threes? And I can sit here and just infuriate you by saying, there's a reason that it happened. And I can't put my finger on what it is.

• 19:17Andrew Sharp?

  Right.

• 19:17Ben Thompson?

  But there's a reason those rockets never made, but just by the way, all things considered was, they are underrated. We're a great team. They ran up against one of the greatest teams of all time. And this is why it's so devastating when it gets one.

• 19:30Andrew Sharp?

  That was the ultimate problem for Daryl, but it is what it is.

• 19:34Ben Thompson?

  But you always go back to Steve Jobs and making fun of complaining about technology, being obsessed with feeds and speeds. And there are things that can't be measured. And there obviously are. And a consequence of increased transparency, of increased tracking, of increased data, is when there was no data, just tracking a little bit gave you this big advantage. But there's this false sense of certainty that arises from more data.

• 20:09Andrew Sharp?

  Mm hmm.

• 20:10Ben Thompson?

  Just because you have more data, doesn't mean you have all the data. And tech has always been susceptible to falling in love with data. Data definitionally is backwards looking. Like, the, the, the L labs want me to cite something when I'm saying something that's happening right now or prediction of the future, because that's how they work. They are consensus mechanism. Like, LMs are literally the midwit at the center of the bell curve. Like, that's what they are. It is a probability distribution. They're going to pull from the center of the distribution. They're not going to pull from the edges. And why? If you pull from the edges, you might pull from the crazy side as much as you pull from the brilliant side.

• 20:47Andrew Sharp?

  You can get things wrong and you're sort of engineered to be accurate.

• 20:50Ben Thompson?

  So I said in that article, like, this is clearly like, half of the political divide. And it didn't like that, because it's like, you're gonna make people upset. Like, but look, that's literally what's happening. And, and the reason it's happening is because this is unfalsifiable. It's something that can't be proven. It, the overall precept of actually government needs to do more. There needs to be this, an entire bureaucracy around controlling this. There needs to be people that have jobs to monitor, to do things. Sorry, it's just a reality. There, there is a one side of the political divide that leans towards more government, that leans towards more bureaucracy. And this is not

• 21:30Ben Thompson?

  a commentary about whether that's good or bad. I'm obviously fairly skeptical of that and concerned about its impact on long-term innovation and all those sorts of things. But it, we can't, it just, I have to point that out. It's just the reality.

• 21:47Andrew Sharp?

  Not only that, it's going to be a reality that informs how policy is crafted here. And I do have some insight because I'm in Washington DC and have a bunch of friends who are in politics. And I remember, I think it was like nine months ago, I met with somebody who is consulting with a potential 2028 presidential candidate. And she was asking me like, what should our AI policy be? I don't know what we should be pushing. And I think the entire Democratic Party has been sort of casting about.

• 22:22Ben Thompson?

  Right. These aren't first principle. These aren't first principle takes. It's a, there's a very big issue that happens to have one side of the divide that in broad strokes aligns with our view of the world. Like, that's what's happening. Like, I think it makes all kinds of sense politically, to be clear.

• 22:39Andrew Sharp?

  And how, exactly. How do we stake out a position that will be popular? People will rally around. And I think that's what's happening here. And government has always been incentivized to assert control over AI. And that may happen at some point over the next couple of years. And I think all of it has accelerated over the last two weeks here. Should we get into some questions?

• 23:04Ben Thompson?

  No, I'm a bad host. I know. I know. There's much to get into here and I feel like I'm doing a bad job. So I need you to take over.

• 23:08Andrew Sharp?

  No, you're good. You're good. Philip says, Andrew and Ben. It was hard not to chuckle this weekend, thinking about Ben being happy in 2023 that he could write about AI instead of antitrust regulation, only to be condemned to now writing about AI regulation for the next 10 years. Scary Dario voice, if we even live that long. With all of the talk of scary AI, I thought it would be fun to lighten the mood and share our dumbest personal benchmarks for when AI has arrived.

• 23:43Ben Thompson?

  What Philip's, Philip's observation cut so deeply. I just tried to waste as much time of this podcast pretending to be the host so you didn't have to read this out loud. Cause it hurts. It's true.

• 23:55Andrew Sharp?

  Before digging in, uh, yeah, you were like the guy at the end of Shawshank Redemption. And now you're going right back to prison here for the next 10 years.

• 24:04Ben Thompson?

  You know what? It actually is interesting. I am. I finally got a good night's sleep last night. A few weeks of not, I woke up with a bunch of ideas. Funny how that works. But there was an aspect this week where Philip was on it. I'm like, I'm in the muck here. I, this is not interesting. I've already said my piece. This is so tiring. And I do think that I have a perspective that I'm sort of working on in my head.

• 24:30Andrew Sharp?

  Okay.

• 24:31Ben Thompson?

  Which means it will probably never show up, but we'll see what happens.

• 24:35Ben Thompson?

  But there's also an aspect to this that it's not like what it was. The problem with five years ago is there's nothing cool happening, right? Like, there's room to like actually write about what you can do and what's possible. And what, like, there is still room for thinking about businesses and what the impacts are. And, you know, there is a bit where this week, you know, I wrote about like dream force of all things, right? Like, uh, uh, which, you know, Mark Benioff is a great character. So they're actually quite entertaining because he is an absolute character. But I also found it very satisfying and I think pertinent and useful. The question of AI on large enterprises is actually a totally open question.

• 25:19Ben Thompson?

  There are a lot of uncertainties here beyond the political. And I think I'm okay with continuing to, like, I feel like I said my piece on Monday and the other two days are about other stuff. And that's, I think, how I will continue to operate. And that's good for everyone.

• 25:35Andrew Sharp?

  And there will be new products that are thrilling. I think it is a good distinction between where we were four or five years ago and where we are today. Because four or five years ago, it was the end of the beginning and there were these sort of fixtures in tech and these tent pole products that everything organized around. And there's a lot of greenfield over the next five to 10 years here, and that will keep things interesting.

• 26:01Ben Thompson?

  Every single large, and all those tent poles that seem so certain, like, there's legitimate, like, maybe 5%, 10% like threats, right? It's, yeah, it's so, uh, sobering note from Philip, but it's not, it's not so bad. I'm, I'm.

• 26:17Andrew Sharp?

  There you go. The magic of a good night's sleep, uh, filled with optimism and enthusiasm for the future. Well, Philip's nominations for AGI benchmarks. HBO Max moves me to the next episode automatically when I log back in, instead of picking up in the credits of the episode I watched the night before. The footnote links work in the Substack app. And then three NBA teams stop hiring Doc Rivers to be a coach.

• 26:45Ben Thompson?

  Look, Philip, okay, look, I was, you brought me down. I was taking myself back up. Then I had to relive.

• 26:50Andrew Sharp?

  Brings you right back down again.

• 26:53Ben Thompson?

  The most, or Doc Rivers, the most, Philip Rivers, great quarterback, great dad, apparently. The most devastating meme I saw, uh, you know, the Packers are mysteriously, they've lost, was like, they like 97 to five in their last two fourth quarters or something like that, or 47 to five. And in between that, or 47 to six, between that, they extended their head coach. It's baffling. It's unbelievable to me. Someone posted a meme of the Packer sideline instead of Matt LaFleur is Doc Rivers.

• 27:25Andrew Sharp?

  Oh, boy. You do have football Doc Rivers out there. Uh, you deserve better.

• 27:32Ben Thompson?

  Pretty, pretty rough. That image haunts me.

• 27:37Andrew Sharp?

  Talk about cutting to your core. That's a tough beat.

• 27:41Ben Thompson?

  The other thing to Philip's point, I was thinking about this week, I think my mom, I just had my mom set up a new phone. I think, or there was, in order, there was something else I was doing. The extent to which software just sucks is really underrated. It, and like, and honestly, this is part of tech's problem. Like, we endure it. We put up with it because the benefits are so large. But we underrate and underappreciate just how awful the experience is.

• 28:12Andrew Sharp?

  Of an experience it is for normal people.

• 28:14Ben Thompson?

  Brutal. Dude, it's brutal for me. And like, the, I actually, I don't want to give it away because it's part of my overall idea of the take that I have. But, um, there's a good chance that, uh, the, the, the software that as we think about software, well, it's, you know, people ask, where's all the great AI software apps? There's a bunch of great AI software apps that are running a Stratechery, like, like there's, like, literally making lives, people's lives better, which I will never sell in a million years because I don't want that responsibility.

• 28:43Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah.

• 28:43Ben Thompson?

  And, but I can do that because it's not like to make the money back that it costs to build them, right? Like the, it's just, it solves a need. It fills it. There's this real, really, really fundamental shift in, uh, what does it actually mean to democratize something? There is an analogy to blogging and newspapers and all those sorts of things. Uh, and, um, and it cannot come soon enough because I'm sorry, the vast majority of stuff that even that I deal with is just awful. And to see my poor mom, it's like, it's.

• 29:14Andrew Sharp?

  Oh, I can't even imagine. Yeah. I am generally, I'm not as proficient as you, but I'm like fairly comfortable with computers and software. And I find myself tearing my hair out all the time. So, uh, the Substack app.

• 29:30Ben Thompson?

  Like, there's this preciousness about like, oh, our code is like, what AI slop? It's like, dude.

• 29:35Andrew Sharp?

  Your code's not that good.

• 29:38Andrew Sharp?

  The Substack app honestly makes me appreciate how hard it must be to build a functional app because it malfunctions in all kinds of maddening ways. And I love Substack as a platform and I love a bunch of writers on there. So it'll hit me with these notifications and then I'll go to open the app and it just doesn't work half the time. So that's a great call out.

• 30:01Ben Thompson?

  If it doesn't work, no, it's like the, the self-driving car thing. It's like a self-driving car gets in an accident. It's like, it's headline news. It's like people get in accidents all the freaking time. This is like the AI slop software thing. It's like, oh, that's AI slop software. It's like, yeah, and it's a way smaller in volume than all the human slop software we've been putting up for years and years. So, sorry, I just made a lot of people really mad. I actually love you and appreciate you, software developers. We absolutely love you. We do and appreciate how difficult it is. But, oh my word, I, like, I just, I felt bad. Like, it's like this stuff. No, actually, there's a funny anecdote for this. Um, so my parents, my mom was trying to set up a new YouTube premium plan.

• 30:42Andrew Sharp?

  Okay.

• 30:42Ben Thompson?

  This is actually independent of her new phone. Uh, I think what happened, I'm suspecting is my dad joined it while he was at my house, who's on a different IP address. The long and short of it is my dad is definitely part of her family. My mom definitely has a YouTube premium plan and YouTube is insistent. My dad does not have YouTube premium.

• 31:00Andrew Sharp?

  Oh, God.

• 31:01Ben Thompson?

  And, and so we're like, we're contacting them. And what's funny about the support, which I'm pretty sure is a real person, is the degree to which they were insistent that they told me, well, that's because your parents don't live together. And I'm like, sir. I have 50 years of evidence to the contrary, that they do in fact live together. Maybe there's things I don't know about. That's very possible.

• 31:27Andrew Sharp?

  But YouTube knows, but Ben doesn't. The Google Panopticon. Great.

• 31:32Ben Thompson?

  And the funny thing is I kind of understood like how, I'm sure that's what happened. I remember my dad was doing it like, oh, it's sort of quick for me. But the, the assumption, the assumption on their part and the way it was stated was it was stated matter-of-factly. That's because they don't live together.

• 31:47Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah.

• 31:47Ben Thompson?

  And I'm like, they do live together. It's, yeah.

• 31:51Andrew Sharp?

  All part of the adventure, you know?

• 31:53Ben Thompson?

  Yeah, it's, uh.

• 31:54Andrew Sharp?

  Life's rich pageant as we live in the future here. Yes. Well, that's a good nomination.

• 31:59Ben Thompson?

  Understand that my parents do in fact live together. Maybe that's my measurement of AGI. So.

• 32:03Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah. Well, and every time I update my Apple software, my computing experience gets worse, which is not how it's supposed to work. So I'd love to solve that as well.

• 32:14Ben Thompson?

  New iPhone week, which is exciting and actually terrible because.

• 32:19Andrew Sharp?

  Again, you just have to sort of grind through it. In any event, we could keep it moving and go to Thomas. We'll go rapid fire with some of the responses to your article. Thomas says.

• 32:29Ben Thompson?

  These are all like two paragraphs long.

• 32:30Andrew Sharp?

  Well, Ben and Andrew, all of the AI conversations have been insane recently, but I'm a little confused on one specific thing. Why can't Anthropic or OpenAI unilaterally slow down development for safety? All right. And that is the end of the free preview. If you'd like to hear more from Ben and I, there are links to subscribe in the show notes or you can also go to sharp tech.fm. Either option will get you access to a personalized feed that has all the shows we do every week. Plus lots more great content from Stratechery and the Stratechery Plus bundle. Check it out. And if you've got feedback, please email us at email at sharp tech.fm.