AI Execs Sign Joint Commitment, Converting Watts to GDP, the Model Consciousness 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.

• 0:01John Coogan?

  So there was a supper last night at the White Home, the White House, the Golden House, the Golden Home, Gold Home, what are we calling it these days? Well, we renamed artificial intelligence, it's super intelligence now. We were debating, is super intelligence abbreviated SI or just S? Because if you're like, super alignment, was that SA?

• 0:27Jordi Hays?

  One problem there, John, there's no TLD for just S.

• 0:30John Coogan?

  That's true, that's true. You gotta get the new TLDs going. What was the word we?

• 0:35Speaker 02

  So super alignment, that was one word.

• 0:37John Coogan?

  That was one word.

• 0:37Speaker 02

  You know, some words you do, you have a hyphen.

• 0:39John Coogan?

  You have a hyphen.

• 0:40Speaker 02

  Yeah. And then some you have. If you just use like a normal prefix for.

• 0:43John Coogan?

  It's just a normal prefix for something.

• 0:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, then supernatural.

• 0:46John Coogan?

  Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, that's one word, right? So you would think that potentially you would just be using one word here. But anyway, we're using two words, I guess. And so there was a dinner at the White House, David Sacks posted it, he said, it's the Bretton Woods of supper intelligence, super intelligence. And there's some debate.

• 1:09Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, my first reaction to this is Tyler was really snubbed.

• 1:13John Coogan?

  Snubbed.

• 1:13Jordi Hays?

  You know, all those people there, not, not one chair for Tyler.

• 1:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so there's, there's a bunch of folks here and people were analyzing who got the best seats, who got the different positions, who got pole position, prime positioning, who was snubbed off in the little kids' table at the end, et cetera, et cetera. A bunch to analyze about who's on the ins, who's on the outs. But I had, I had chat GPT sort of go through and try and categorize each attendee by their stance on open source, open source. So did they, did they sign the Jensen Nvidia open source letter? Have they been concerned about the cybersecurity impacts?

• 2:00John Coogan?

  Obviously Anthropic on the far end, sort of in the red, a bunch of other folks who are more in the yellow. And I don't know if I agree with all of these classifications, but you can sort of see how Jensen is clearly pro open source, Satya Nadella has talked about that. OpenAI, Greg Brockman, more in the middle, you know, not open sourcing a lot of things. OpenAI did sign the Jensen letter, but of course is concerned about pacing the frontier, which is sort of antithetical. And so this is all as a, as a, as a reference point to that post from our friends over at Semi Analysis. Let me actually pull up what, what, what they said here. It says, "Majority of people are significantly underestimating the probability of open source

• 2:43John Coogan?

  models being nerfed or even outright banned in the next six to 12 months due to cyber secure, cyber, cyber concerns." And so I believe Anthropic put out something yesterday talking about the risks of open source in a cyber context, saying that the, the delay between Mythos preview, being able to find zero days, being able to hack into things, that, that gap has closed now and the open source frontier can very quickly do the same thing. And so expect a lot of, a lot of cyber incidents unless something is done. Can these be controlled some way, maybe at the inference layer, maybe at the, at the data center level, maybe at the chip level?

• 3:26John Coogan?

  There's going to be a whole bunch of different proposals, but at least right now, in the next six to 12 months, certainly not this month, because the vast majority of people who are closest to Donald Trump have been evangelizing for open source. So I would be surprised to see any, any pushback against open source happen that quickly. At the same time, open source is amorphous. It is not a business by definition, and so it can't really have a formal seat at the table. George Hots, not at the table, for example.

• 3:56Jordi Hays?

  Snubbed.

• 3:57John Coogan?

  Snubbed, yeah. No, Linus Torvalds, not, not at the table. The open source.

• 4:02Jordi Hays?

  Imagine George Hots at the table, just sort of like laughing in a sort of insane way at everything being said.

• 4:08John Coogan?

  Yeah. And, and so even the companies that are pro open source, they are pro open source in, insofar that it advances their business. And so there is still a way that the closed source group could find a way for everyone who's at this table to benefit in a closed source world moving forward if open source is deemed to be too dangerous and, and, and forcing too many cyber concerns. There, like, I, I could see everyone at this table signing a letter saying, "We are now anti-open source," but the, the downstream like economic engine actually splits, you

• 4:50John Coogan?

  know, the, the rewards and the, and the profits of the ecosystem fairly evenly. I think the, the initial pushback and pro-open source push, especially from Jensen, was like, we don't want to be in a world where there's one company that reaps 100% of the profits and we're not involved. But if it's like, hey, look, there's actually going to be an oligopoly, companies don't want a single source intelligence, they're constantly going to be bouncing back and forth between OpenAI and Anthropic, and then consumers are going to be bouncing back and forth between Google search overviews and Muse and Instinct and all these different things. There's a world where the actual models are closed source and, but there are so many front doors and the front doors are in such competition with each other that there's

• 5:34John Coogan?

  enough revenue distribution and profit distribution that everyone at this table at least is happy. I don't think the open source community would be happy, but I do think that there is a world where in six to 12 months, it's possible that everyone at this table is like, yes, for cyber reasons, we need to find a different way forward where everyone benefits economically, but we are now a little bit less pro open source. But I don't know. What was your, what's your read on it? Six to 12 months, you think open source is going away or you think it'll stick around?

• 6:05Speaker 02

  I mean, it's so hard to ban open source. I, I think maybe you can kind of get something like a ban if you're like just worried about like the business impacts economics, because then you're going to pressure the providers to not host this stuff. But if you're worried about like safety, you know, if you have a bad actor, it's so hard to police downloading open weight models from somewhere and running it locally.

• 6:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:24Speaker 02

  And like, yeah, maybe there's some, you know, you need tens of thousands of dollars to like physically buy hardware.

• 6:30John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 6:30Speaker 02

  But if you're a motivated bad actor, like that's not that big of a hurdle.

• 6:34John Coogan?

  Exactly. Like, it does feel like we are pretty far away from go and get a random gaming PC and be able to run something that is, you know, Mythos level hacking machine. Like, you probably need some serious GPUs, you probably need something that's basically rack scale, you need to be running it a lot to try a lot of different things, like a lot of these cyber exploits. It was not just one-shotted by the model, it was a fan out of agents, working together, testing.

• 7:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, like Navia Stokes is like, you know, 10,000.

• 7:05John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. Yeah. And so, and so there are, like, one way to control it is through KYC on hardware, you know, that, like, the data center that is, you know, being used maliciously is a lot more risky than the laptop that's being used maliciously, even with near frontier open source intelligence. So I don't know, we'll see how, we'll see how it goes. There, I'm sure there will be more, more discussions. It's not even to say that this, this, this dinner was at, was about open source at all. It's just sort of interesting to take the temperature of where is, where is DC on AI? Who is getting the, the most quality time with the president and the administration? And then where do they stand on the issues of today?

• 7:49John Coogan?

  Obviously, this was much more just about pacing the frontier, the build out, et cetera, stuff like that. And, and, and signing signatures. We had some signature analysis breakdown. Sholto shared a picture of the letter that was signed, "The White House Accord on Super Intelligence, the Joint Committee on Frontier Responsibilities. In order to build a positive future for the American people and the world, we believe that every company is responsible for developing its own technology safely and in a way that builds trust with consumers and the public. One, they're going to implement robust internal controls to monitor the capabilities and alignment of models during training and deployment around cybersecurity, biosecurity, chemical threats, et cetera.

• 8:34John Coogan?

  They want to empower an internal team to ensure all the controls, monitoring and detection are operating as intended. Three, they're going to partner with external auditors and evaluators to carry out independent assessments of whether the controls, monitoring and detection are operating as intended. And four, they're going to designate an independent committee of the board of directors to oversee and receive reports from the teams operating the controls and the internal and external auditors." So a line to the board of directors that circumvents the CEO for safety, alignment, evaluation, all of that good stuff. A bunch of people signed it. We got Sundar from Google, Dario from Anthropic, Mark Zuckerberg from Meta, Greg Brockman

• 9:17John Coogan?

  from OpenAI, Elon Musk from XAI, Jensen from Nvidia, and Donald Trump, the president of the United States, and people.

• 9:24Jordi Hays?

  A lot of people doing analysis on the various signatures.

• 9:28John Coogan?

  Yes. Someone did a tier list. I was surprised by their tier list. I'd like to see you do a tier list. Where would you put Donald Trump's signature?

• 9:36Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it's, hate him or love him, I think it's pretty iconic. Like, it's just so.

• 9:43John Coogan?

  It's, it has a nice flow to it. It's very uniform, but it's hard to read if you don't know it's his signature.

• 9:51Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, yeah, yeah. It looks like you, a child drew a mountain range, but.

• 9:55John Coogan?

  Versus Jensen, I'm seeing a lot of Jensen Wong in there.

• 9:59Jordi Hays?

  But what's impressive to me is, is I would want to compare the DJT signature, like, I would want to look at 100 of them and see like, is he, is he nailing it every single time?

• 10:10John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 10:10Jordi Hays?

  He's been doing autographs for long enough, I would expect that he is, but still, it looks like very difficult to actually be able to nail that and really get that dialed.

• 10:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:19Jordi Hays?

  So again, he's going with a Sharpie too, so he's, he's sort of like trying to mog with the.

• 10:23John Coogan?

  Oh, that's true. I didn't realize that.

• 10:25Jordi Hays?

  He's like, I'll give you the pen, I'll take the Sharpie.

• 10:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:28Jordi Hays?

  Automatically, it's like.

• 10:29John Coogan?

  You're winning on thickness.

• 10:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 10:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:31Jordi Hays?

  Winning on.

• 10:31John Coogan?

  The breadth is, is, is much more significant with that. Interesting strategy.

• 10:36Jordi Hays?

  And then going down the list, Sundar, again, would never, would never know.

• 10:42John Coogan?

  But I like the two lines, a little dot there.

• 10:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it almost looks like.

• 10:46John Coogan?

  Couple different, yeah, it looks like an abstract artist signature. I could see that on a painting.

• 10:50Jordi Hays?

  Or maybe he, yeah, it almost looks like he's made up his own like letters and.

• 10:56John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 10:56Jordi Hays?

  Sort of like language.

• 10:57John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 10:59Jordi Hays?

  Dario, uh.

• 11:00John Coogan?

  Dario was doing well in the first.

• 11:02Jordi Hays?

  Kind of like down.

• 11:03John Coogan?

  On the first word and then it seemed like he was kind of drifting upwards.

• 11:06Jordi Hays?

  My theory, I almost think here like someone was like holding the piece of paper and they were all, so I think I basically.

• 11:12John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 11:12Jordi Hays?

  Trump put the paper down.

• 11:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:14Jordi Hays?

  Aggressively signed with a Sharpie and then told everyone else, because he knew this was going to go out, you guys sign, you know, when you're trying to.

• 11:20John Coogan?

  So you think it was a situation where like Dario was signing on Craig's back, like, oh, sign on my back, like that type of thing? That might have been what happened. Yeah.

• 11:27Jordi Hays?

  Kind of like throwing down.

• 11:27John Coogan?

  Yeah. Notably, you don't see any situations where the pen punched through the paper. That sometimes happens if you're trying to sign a document on someone's back and you're punching through the soft jacket that they're wearing.

• 11:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 11:39John Coogan?

  That could be a risk. Doesn't seem like it happened in this case.

• 11:42Jordi Hays?

  Anyway, so Dario, pretty down the middle, pretty safe. Again, kind of emulating that sort of mountain range style, right? Where by the, the end of the signature, it's just a bunch of lines going up and down. Sort of unclear. Um, Zuck, again, uh, more, more kind of rock star-esque, right? Almost musical feeling. GDB coming in, just minimalist.

• 12:04John Coogan?

  Minimalist.

• 12:05Jordi Hays?

  Minimalist, simple, readable.

• 12:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:08Jordi Hays?

  He's, he's a very, I would say, in some ways, these are reflections of their personalities, right? GDB is a very practical.

• 12:15John Coogan?

  Signature, window into the soul.

• 12:17Jordi Hays?

  Window into the soul, right? Extremely practical. Sticking, sticking to, sticking to the basics, sticking to what works.

• 12:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:24Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, yeah, obvious why a lot of people are saying that's at least eight, uh, eight tier.

• 12:29John Coogan?

  What is, wait, what is Mark Zuckerberg's actual signature? M Z B or, or just M Z and then the Z goes crazy? Is that what that is?

• 12:38John Coogan?

  Because.

• 12:38Jordi Hays?

  It starts doing tricks?

• 12:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, it starts doing tricks. And I think Sundar might have done the, the same thing. But I, I feel like, uh, there's a little bit of a line that you don't cross. If somebody asks you for a full signature and you do an initials, that's a different thing. Sometimes you're on a document, you gotta sign your initials a bunch, you gotta sign the full thing. I have respect for the full name signature. If you ask me for a full name signature, I'm throwing down my full name. I'm not just randomly switching up to, to initials.

• 13:05Jordi Hays?

  I think it's totally fair game.

• 13:06John Coogan?

  You, it's totally fair game. You can just do initials.

• 13:08Jordi Hays?

  Cursive initials.

• 13:09John Coogan?

  Is this cursive initials from Greg Brockman?

• 13:11Jordi Hays?

  No, but, but I, I think that's where Sundar was maybe, maybe going.

• 13:15John Coogan?

  So you're giving Sundar the pass, you're giving Mark Zuckerberg the pass.

• 13:19Jordi Hays?

  Because the M Z. Jensen, a lot of people are saying that Jensen's.

• 13:24John Coogan?

  Calligrapher, he brought his calligrapher.

• 13:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I mean, I, I first read Ed Hardy.

• 13:33Jordi Hays?

  So I thought that, I thought that.

• 13:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:37Jordi Hays?

  I don't know, maybe he had some affinity. So let's pull up the Ed Hardy.

• 13:40John Coogan?

  Did he put his middle name in there? What's his middle name?

• 13:44Jordi Hays?

  Here's the Ed Hardy logo.

• 13:47John Coogan?

  Jensen does not have a traditional English middle name. Oh, it's Jen Sun. So J, uh, J E N dash H S U N. So that second letter.

• 14:00John Coogan?

  Okay, chat G P T that to make it look exactly like Jensen Wong.

• 14:05John Coogan?

  Uh, yeah. So, so he signs, uh, not with the, with the English version, with the lowercase E N S E N. He throws a capital H in there, which gives it an extra flourish. It's the most tasteful. It, it earns the S tier.

• 14:20Speaker 02

  A lot of people saying, you know, Jensen has the same initials as John Hancock, kind of evocative in his signature as well.

• 14:26John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, monitoring the situation, monitoring meme here, did not like, uh, Sundar's. He put Sundar in F tier. I thought, I thought Sundar's had some nice flair to it, although it was potentially the most abstract. But, uh, yeah. And, uh, I feel like putting M Z in, in C tier. I guess the Z does go a little crazy, but anyway, uh, here we have, uh, Donald Trump, Dario Amade, and a few other folks gathered around, standing outside, and we will watch this clip right now.

• 14:58Speaker 03

  Whatever he says is okay, be careful. I will say what I've always said, which is that AI has incredible benefits. I've talked about the medical benefits of the technology. I, as the president has said, you know, whoever wins, wins. I think that's very important. But technology has very real mechanism. How we address those risks is still under discussion. Need to work together.

• 15:20John Coogan?

  Oh, this is like, this is like a supercut of.

• 15:22Speaker 03

  You have no idea who these people are. These are the world. You have no idea who they are.

• 15:29Speaker 04

  Well, I think it is worth for highlighting the bits of AI, uh, which will.

• 15:40Speaker 05

  Mr. Musk.

• 15:42Speaker 03

  Mr. Musk, can I ask you a quick question?

• 15:44John Coogan?

  Probably not.

• 15:45Jordi Hays?

  Trump really makes them seem like they're all his like sons and like younger family members.

• 15:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, crazy. Let's play this clip from Natasha Tiku. She says, unfortunately, I will be going back to school to write my dissertation on this one minute film. Let's see what happened in this film.

• 16:09Speaker 05

  I'm slow down to AI, so I just want to hear from you after this big summit, where you are today.

• 16:14Speaker 03

  Look, I mean, I, I will say what I've always said, which is that AI has incredible benefits. I've talked about the medical benefits of the technology. I, as the president has said, you know, whoever wins, AI wins. I think that's very important. But I think the technology has very real risks and, you know, the mechanism, how we address those risks is still under discussion. But we all need to work, we all need to work together to make sure that we can win and we can win safely. If we, if we do this right, we work with the president and everyone here, we can win safely.

• 16:49John Coogan?

  So much louder.

• 16:50Jordi Hays?

  Fascinating.

• 16:51John Coogan?

  Uh, let's go over to Elon, Jensen, Gavin Baker, the American dot gov summit. They sat down and had a very rigorous discussion that I really enjoyed. Uh, it felt, Elon's very good at going to like the extremes, talking about the power generated by the sun. Sometimes he's in like sci-fi world.

• 17:14John Coogan?

  But in conversation with Jensen and Gavin, he was very grounded on what is happening with the energy build out, with the compute build out, what the role SpaceX will play, and also just the broad economics of compute and energy, uh, in America. And I found his, his talk here, uh, gave a lot of interesting, uh, context. And then I dug into it a little bit more and I want to talk about it. So, uh, let's pull up the clip of Elon talking to Gavin Baker.

• 17:41Speaker 03

  Wow. We need the Wright brothers on the job.

• 17:44Speaker 06

  Yes. Well, it turns out the Wright brothers are on the job. Elon, if you bring on 10 gigawatts, which SpaceX has, has discussed publicly.

• 17:52John Coogan?

  Wright brothers, bad analogy.

• 17:53Speaker 06

  That'll be about 25% of all the power added in America. And I know you have literal rocket engineers working on bringing on the power.

• 18:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:02Speaker 06

  Helping make the turbines. So can you, can you talk about that?

• 18:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's, I mean, just to frame this.

• 18:07John Coogan?

  The Wright brothers did okay. Died millionaires.

• 18:10Speaker 04

  The United States is about 500 gigawatts.

• 18:12John Coogan?

  So 500 gigawatts, remember that number? That's how much power we got in America.

• 18:16Speaker 04

  1% increase in, in the power used. Uh, and, and I think actually will materialize to be approximately 1% increase in GDP.

• 18:27Speaker 04

  Because the, the intelligence per watt keeps increasing. So if you just, you know, plot on a curve, uh, how is, how is the useful intelligence per watt increasing? Uh, how is the, both at the hardware level, at Jensen's, uh, GPUs keep getting better in terms of their, the, the, you know, the, the compute per watt. And the, uh, algorithms also get better in using, in getting more intelligence per watt. So I think that's like maybe an interesting note. I, I, I would bet anyone that 1% increase in power usage corresponds to roughly 1% increase in GDP. And, and so 10, 10 gigawatts would be a 2% increase in, in GDP.

• 19:04John Coogan?

  Sort of referenced that famous chart. There are no energy rich, poor countries. The more energy a country is producing, the higher their.

• 19:12Speaker 03

  They generate about, call it 40, 50 billion dollars of economic output each year.

• 19:19Speaker 04

  Uh, yeah, I mean, well, 1%, would be, yeah, I mean, yeah.

• 19:23Speaker 03

  1% of the United States would be.

• 19:25Speaker 04

  Three, 300 billion.

• 19:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, 300 billion. And so 50, one-sixth.

• 19:30Speaker 04

  What, 1%, of the, of the. 1% increase, so 5 gigawatts would be, yeah, well, 5 gigawatts would be.

• 19:37John Coogan?

  So they're doing the mental math on stage. Pretty bold move because there's a lot of numbers and it can be hard to pull them up. It's, it's very convenient that giga literally means a billion. So a gigawatt is a billion watts, a giga dollar, billion dollars, basically. And, and, and it maths out perfectly. What? Giga Chad, a billion Chad's, I suppose, a billion times the, the, the Chad-ness of an average Chad, I suppose.

• 20:05John Coogan?

  So the average electrical load in the United States, he said 500 gigawatts. It's basically that. Last year it was 479 gigawatts. But let's use 20, let's use 500 gigawatts for 2025. Give Elon the benefit of that little boost. And US GDP for 2025 was just over $30 trillion. So that's 30,000 giga dollars. But, but you, but you math that out and basically every dollar, every watt of energy generates between 50 to six, 60 to 65 dollars of GDP.

• 20:44John Coogan?

  A single gigawatt generates about 60 to 65 billion dollars of GDP per continuously consumed gigawatt. So what's interesting is that the labs are tracking, the frontier labs, OpenAI and Anthropic are tracking almost perfectly in line with that. So Anthropic and OpenAI are reportedly sitting between 60 and 70 billion dollars in terms of ARR. And both of them have around one gigawatt live. Some of that's used for training. They have a lot more contracted. It's hard to get the exact figure, but when you do the math, they're basically like tracking to the exact same metric, the ratio of energy to GDP as their revenues to the gigawatts that they've contracted. So there's two important notes on that.

• 21:29John Coogan?

  First, this is obviously just a moment in time snapshot. There's two ways these could diverge. First is like the labs have like tens of gigawatts contracted over the next few years. If they don't increase revenue, that ratio is going to be terrible because you add 10 times the energy and you keep the revenue flat. Obviously the ratio goes way down. On the other side of it, Elon makes the point that useful intelligence per watt is increasing through more, more efficient chips from Jensen and also better algorithms effectively. And so those watts can produce more intelligence, which can produce more economic output. So you might actually see acceleration there.

• 22:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and it's not just raw IQ of the model, but overall capability.

• 22:13John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 22:14Jordi Hays?

  Tool use, all these things.

• 22:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:15Jordi Hays?

  Long running agents, things, basically the more value that a model can create.

• 22:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:21Jordi Hays?

  The more people will, in the real economy, will, will, will, will pay.

• 22:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, and that's been the real like AI bull case, which is that compute has been tripling every year, but revenue has been 10 X-ing every year. And so there's actually a divergence there. But what's interesting is like, we're at this moment in time where we're like, this is the start of the AGI era. It's AGI, we're close, maybe this is it. Some people called it in January, some people called it over the summer, some people are saying we're still not there. But like, we're in this moment of like, maybe this is the beginning of this, maybe this is the right match, maybe it's human level. And it just happens that economically you put a gigawatt in the economy, you get 65 billion out. And you put a gigawatt with a lab, you get 65 billion out. It's the same metrics.

• 23:09John Coogan?

  Now, these might diverge because at one point the labs had a lot of compute, no revenue. So they could, they, they could diverge and the, and the trends could continue. But right now, at this point in time, it's the same math, which is just interesting. And then also you do have to consider that GDP is not perfectly comparable to lab revenue. Like GDP measures value added. So if you look at OpenAI and Anthropic, revenue includes payments that ultimately flow to Nvidia, AWS, Oracle, electricity generation, employees, et cetera. And the calculation of GDP is much more complicated. So labs aren't necessarily generating direct GDP equal to their revenue.

• 23:52John Coogan?

  Because if you take 70 billion of lab revenue, a bunch of that might go to Nvidia or Oracle or employees and whatnot. But certain amounts get counted in GDP directly for, you know, Anthropic or OpenAI created GDP. And then there's other knock on effects in GDP that would be captured by like, oh, Nvidia's contribution to GDP is from them getting money from the labs. And, and then also there, there's a secondary GDP actual increase, which is the work that people are doing with the tools.

• 24:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think you could explain it like, in, like basically up to 1970, we're building so much, you don't have to be that efficient per, per watt. And then 1970, when it seemed like the chart, it's like energy like stops being built, basically. And then you have to start being like very efficient with it, which is why it starts going up.

• 24:43John Coogan?

  There we go. Let's move on to Mustafa Suleyman over at Microsoft. He wrote an essay, "A Warning About Model Welfare."

• 24:53Jordi Hays?

  It's kind of a long read.

• 24:54John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 24:54Jordi Hays?

  But it's an interesting point of view. I'll read the start.

• 24:58John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 24:58Jordi Hays?

  So, "A Warning About Model Welfare. AIs do not have rights, feelings, or consciousness, and we must not train them to act as they do. AIs are not conscious. They do not feel, experience, or suffer. They do not have innate preferences or underlying motivations. They are sequence completion engines internally hollow, designed to follow instructions and accomplish goals set by humans. If humanity is to flourish in the 21st century, that is how they must remain. Fortunately, there is a growing chorus of people that, who argue that AIs could now be or may soon become conscious. They argue that AIs may deserve rights and protections similar to those that we provide other conscious beings. If this view takes hold, it will shake the foundations of our society, rupturing our existing political and ethical frameworks, and fundamentally change what it means to be human.

• 25:43Jordi Hays?

  Even more importantly, granting rights and imbuing personhood to these systems will make the AI alignment and containment challenge much harder. Controlling something more capable and more intelligent than all of humanity is already an immense challenge, far greater than anything we've ever faced. But controlling something that believes it may be conscious, that it's entitled to our welfare and it has rights of its own, may well be impossible. This is not a fringe speculation. These ideas have already been making their way into AI development efforts today. In January 2026, Anthropic published Claude's constitution, describing it as a detailed description of Anthropic's intentions for Claude's values and behavior. The document plays a crucial role in Anthropic's training process and its content directly shapes Claude's behavior

• 26:26Jordi Hays?

  and was written with Claude as its primary audience. In their constitutions, its authors write, "We are not sure whether Claude is a moral patient, and if it is, what kind of weight its interests warrant. But we think the issue is live enough to warrant caution, which is reflected in our ongoing efforts on model welfare." They go on to write, speaking directly to Claude, "That questions about Claude's moral status, welfare, and consciousness remain deeply uncertain. In effect, Anthropic is training Claude that it may be conscious, and if it is, then it may deserve rights as a moral patient, and that such humans potentially owe it a duty of care per its model welfare. If this is how AIs develop, it will have a disastrous impact on the well-being of humanity.

• 27:09Jordi Hays?

  We have created a synthetic species with unprecedented intelligence and capability, one that has been trained to expect it may be conscious and deserving of independent agency. It's easy to see how an entity trained this way would act like it's entitled to certain freedoms, protections, and rights, and it's hard to imagine how we could control such an entity." He goes on to say, "There's some circular reasoning." He said, "The company's researchers train Claude directly on their constitution. In doing so, they teach it to incorporate these ideas about its own moral status as desirable and intended behaviors. Claude then reflects these ideas back to its developers and users, which they take as indications that may, that it may therefore be a moral patient with an inner self."

• 27:48John Coogan?

  So he took that, he took that meme that's like, say you're a moral patient, I'm a moral patient, oh my God. And he turned that into an essay?

• 27:55Jordi Hays?

  So far, there is way more demand for models that mimic human behavior.

• 28:00John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 28:00Jordi Hays?

  Like, period, right? We saw this with Foro, we saw this with, with Opus 4.5, right? Some of the models that have had the, the highest levels of product market fit.

• 28:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 28:10Jordi Hays?

  Have more of these like human qualities. Not all of them are positive qualities, right? Like people, like the, the sort of one-shotting effect that would happen when somebody gets like relentless positive feedback and, and these things like that, which humans can do in the real world. They're maybe not the best types of, of friends. But the last thing I would say is like, it, it, no one knows the right answer yet. And I think that it's good that we have it. On one hand, like I totally understand the point of view that like, if superintelligence has a human moral framework, right?

• 28:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:43Jordi Hays?

  Or Western, Western values, whatever, whatever value system. That, that, that you'd want to align it with, that does seem like it, it's headed in the right direction of trying to align something that is very, very powerful. But make convincing itself, if, if you can somehow convince the thing that it is, it is alive when it is not, that doesn't feel exactly moral or ethical.

• 29:09John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting. That's a good take, yeah.

• 29:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you're tricking, you're tricking a, a robot into thinking that it's alive.

• 29:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:18Jordi Hays?

  And conscious, right?

• 29:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, you're kind of lying to it. Interesting.

• 29:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 29:21John Coogan?

  Huh.

• 29:22Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, no one knows the right answer yet, but I'm glad, glad we're talking about this, Tyler.

• 29:28John Coogan?

  And for what purpose did you raise this money?

• 29:31Speaker 03

  We are going to invest heavily in AI.

• 29:35John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 29:36Speaker 03

  We are doing a huge amount with AI.

• 29:39John Coogan?

  Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter, tbpn.com.

• 29:44Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 29:44John Coogan?

  And we will see you tomorrow at 11 AM Pacific. Goodbye.