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TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
We're back. Did anything happen over the weekend in tech, or was it kinda mellow?
Speaker 2: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 rhabdo. It's brutal, but I am recovering fortunately.
Speaker 1:Explain rhabdo. Because it sounds It's bad. Really scary and it is bad.
Speaker 2:It can be very bad. Fortunately, I I I did okay. I got an IV. I got some medicine, broke a fever, got through it, and I'm I'm healing up. But it it happens and it's the dumbest dumbest illness you can possibly get.
Speaker 2:It comes from working out too much and not being hydrated. Very avoidable. Hopefully, AI can find a cure. If there's even a one percent chance that AI can find a prevention for rhabdo, it's worth any amount of risk.
Speaker 1:Pushing forward. Yeah.
Speaker 2:We we must push forward. No. Lots of debate
Speaker 1:It is about
Speaker 2:we should push forward.
Speaker 1:We have never missed an episode for being sick.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I realized that because someone's asking me the other day, what do you guys do when you're sick? We just we keep going. I mean, I did
Speaker 2:talk to the doctor. Said, do you want a do you want a doctor's note for work? And I was like, 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.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But I might be a little bit slow today. So bear with me if I'm not the sharpest on any other questions. Before we get into the pacing AI debate, what happened with the US Open? Give me a little tennis update.
Speaker 2:What happened? It's on the cover of the Wall Street Journal, you know it's important news. Tennis' US Open climax is in back and forth duel, but there was something interesting.
Speaker 1:So Ben Shelton, the American lost.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:And what was notable was that when he actually hit the winning shot Mhmm. And and won Yeah. He went back and was getting ready for the next for the next point. Yeah. And he starts looking around and everyone is stand you can see people in the crowd are standing up and and and cheering and he slowly realizes that he won.
Speaker 1:Checking the scoreboard. And, yeah, it just became very obvious That's fair that he was so focused on the next point. He was not actually not looking at the scoreboard at all. Yeah. Was just like flow state, just just playing.
Speaker 2:That's awesome.
Speaker 1:And I'm sure a lot of venture capitalists out there were seeing that. They're like, yeah. All that matters is your next investment. You shouldn't even know when one of your companies, your seed companies Yeah. Are gonna IPO.
Speaker 1:You should be so focused on
Speaker 2:I 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 like the cameraman work.
Speaker 2:I saw a clip of the scoreboard was counting down. There was zero zero seven seconds left. What who do they cut to? Pierce Brosnan, double o seven himself. I thought it was nice camera work.
Speaker 2:Shows you that there's levels to the game of live production. Yeah. You know, you gotta those little touches, clearly, 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.
Speaker 2:The switcher, basically. Anyway, the 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, and then all the news breaks, of course. But the pacing the frontier goes back to July twenty eighth of this year. So there was a there was a pacing the frontier statement, an open letter.
Speaker 2: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. 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 position 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.
Speaker 2:Then August 18, OpenAI publishes something called pacing 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 31, Anthropic official Anthropic Post explicitly discusses pacing the frontier, so the idea is spreading, and calls for coordinating pacing mechanisms. And then on September 12, was a set it was actually Saturday morning that that that Dario dropped the essay, we must pace the frontier, turned the concept into a much bigger public anthropic campaign that everyone's talking about today.
Speaker 2:So the rollout of this was pretty, pretty quick. And there's a there's a few key things from Dario's essay. It hit the timeline at 7AM Pacific. He was up early post in. Perfect time to get a lot of likes on a banger.
Speaker 2: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.
Speaker 2:Elon was clearly engaging. By 8AM, Elon endorses it 09:30AM. Sam endorses it Saturday, 4PM. 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.
Speaker 2:Then later, David Sachs on Saturday, but at 08:15, just 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. So we can kinda go through some of this and go through those posts.
Speaker 2: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 to this Number three
Speaker 1:will shock you.
Speaker 2:Basically. 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.
Speaker 2:Like, it's it's all very much a a 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 we're going with an 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, which could be a huge benefit because they take the stuff really seriously.
Speaker 2:It could also lead to some what people flag as like conflicts potentially. But still some 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?
Speaker 2:Dean Ball was talking a little bit about the Sherman Antitrust 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 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, Well, what would that do to the market?
Speaker 2: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 Antitrust 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.
Speaker 2:That's not a problem. There are actual legal and federal regulatory rules that might need to be adjusted or waived 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.
Speaker 2: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 wanna be in the lead? If you always wanna be in the lead, it's very hard to negotiate with someone and say, oh, well, you know, we'll why don't you just have half as many nuclear weapons as we have?
Speaker 2:And, like, that'll be great. Like, we'll pace you. And so you you go back to nuclear nonproliferation and all the difficult debates there. We obviously wound up with a a multipolar world with everyone wanting at least some capabilities there. So Elon chimed in agreeing with Dario, then Sam and Demis also agreed.
Speaker 2: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 Sachs raised some questions on X.
Speaker 2:And we can go to David Sachs' post, which I believe here is in the timeline. He said, Dario has written that we need to, 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.
Speaker 2: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.
Speaker 2:Stop pretending antitrust 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. 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 an issue.
Speaker 2:Although, yeah, I mean, the the the regulatory capture angle is 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.
Speaker 2: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. And that
Speaker 1:there's been any type of effort from anywhere to try to control or regulate, like, application layer companies. And Yeah. And Greg was on Odd Lots. Yep. This episode came out this morning Yeah.
Speaker 1:Talking about not trying to doesn't doesn't believe there should be any sort of limits to
Speaker 2:Application layer stuff?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Basically, like, if you just wanna train a model at home for your own use cases, you know, there there should be limits on that. Yeah. Trump Trump came out yesterday. He was pretty active over the weekend.
Speaker 1:He said, the only controller guardrails that AI needs is a strong and smart high IQ president and The USA has that in spades. Trump.
Speaker 2:That is wild post.
Speaker 1:The Trump administration has stopped AI people from doing bad or potentially bad things like Dario
Speaker 2:What are these topics?
Speaker 1: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.
Speaker 1:Conspiracy theorists, treasonous, traders 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.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That really really doesn't follow. I don't yeah. Does not
Speaker 1:make sense. But he also followed up Okay. Just forty 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 bank 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.
Speaker 1: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. 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.
Speaker 1:Bigger than diamonds.
Speaker 2:Bigger than diamonds. Like, of all the technology, the internet, the transistor, like Oil,
Speaker 1:the internet.
Speaker 2:The wheel, diamonds. These are equivalent things.
Speaker 1:It will not be stopped by brilliantly run destructive forces during the term of president Donald Trump. Okay. Well Anyways, I I'm I'm wondering what the So a bunch of head fund hedge funds are paying, you know, they pay to get access to this. Let's assume like a minute early. Okay.
Speaker 1:Something like that. How did they trade this? How did they trade it? It's very
Speaker 2:Long to beers. Yeah. They They're long long diamonds.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Maybe diamonds are are are under appreciated.
Speaker 2:I think diamonds are actually in a really rough spot. I think people are moving to lab grown stuff really aggressively. So, it's a 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. We
Speaker 1:gotta keep going because the president was on a roll Let's this pull up this video.
Speaker 3:We take in a lot of their cars. Car tariffs are coming.
Speaker 4:President Trump, 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
Speaker 3:we've heard. But it's, you know, it's gonna be more good than bad, but by a lot. But have you heard directly
Speaker 4:from any of them?
Speaker 3:Beginning. Whoever wins AI, and we're leading by a lot. Whoever wins AI, wins.
Speaker 4:Have you ever used it yourself or have you been use AI. I do. How do you use AI?
Speaker 3:I would say, you know, for the most part, you can use AI for a lot of things. But you
Speaker 4:should use it for Right away. Speaking of AI The funny
Speaker 2:thing is that is that, like, there's AI generated slop on his social his 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 slot videos. Because 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.
Speaker 2:So but I guess that's not him. It's probably people on his team that are like, made this AI video. Yeah. But I don't know. Gavin Baker had a roundup of what happened.
Speaker 2:Let's go through what's going on. And lots of people are just sort of like processing this going back and forth. People were expecting Elon to be sort of against this, maybe anti Dario. 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.
Speaker 2:But he's like firmly in favor of this. So let's see what Gavin Baker had to say. He said, wow, twenty four 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 third party evaluators from unknown organizations with Daria floating meter as a possibility. Having third party evaluators is smart as there's no Section two thirty style liability shield for model outputs and showing a duty of care will be important in future litigation.
Speaker 2:Several Internet companies might have gone bankrupt without Section two thirty, 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 a, 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 from the semiconductor supply chain. Like, they they would like to restrict the amount of chips that are created.
Speaker 2: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.
Speaker 2:Can you apply some of that capital, some of that human talent to just getting nuclear power online, getting solar power online, re industrializing the American energy supply chain, battery, relieving grid 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, you know, AGI or ASI because it's too dangerous. At least we have a lot of cheap energy.
Speaker 2: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?
Speaker 5:I mean, at some level, like, yeah, it makes sense because it it is like an input. But it's it's like seems like way too diffuse. Yeah. Also 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.
Speaker 5:But like there's kind of a
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:A narrow use case for chips. Yeah. Where power, you can kinda do whatever.
Speaker 2: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.
Speaker 2:Before there's ever a national regulatory 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 of for AI. Now people are talking about FINRA for AI, which is more nongovernmental 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.
Speaker 2:Yeah. There's a there's a there's a lot of tricks here where people where something if there if 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 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 Yeah. 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, is like, no, if you're pacing the frontier, that's gonna compress margins because everyone else is just gonna catch up and it's gonna become more oligopolistic.
Speaker 2: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 MSI MSL is gonna catch up. DeepMind's gonna catch up. Like, you're gonna have three or four Grok is gonna train to that level. And so you're gonna have four, five, six, seven really capable competitors.
Speaker 2:What was interesting is, like, our Karazian 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 the 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 are we sure we wanna use the million dollar model for checking the weather? Like, let's be a little bit more judicious about this.
Speaker 2: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 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 you sort of alluded to this, that there's just a lot of companies that are like, am comfortable doing business with an OpenAI, an Anthropic, a Google, of course, something that's on AWS, something that's on Azure.
Speaker 2: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, 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 Yeah.
Speaker 2: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, etcetera? So there's there there is a world where you could get to a place where this is bad for the frontier companies business wise.
Speaker 2: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, 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 is not purely aligned to shareholder interests like other companies. PDCs, yeah, public benefit corporations. So they so there so 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 going to slow down revenue growth or tank margins or 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 the PBC.
Speaker 2:But no one's really giving them credit for that. Everyone thinks like, no. This is cynically what gets them to 10,000,000,000,000. This is what gets them to 10,000,000,000,000. And I don't know.
Speaker 2:May maybe maybe it is. But, but it definitely 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 like, the mid curve is, slowing down is actually good for business in the four d chess and, like, do but you don't wanna be the best Yeah. But have a 100% market share.
Speaker 2: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.
Speaker 1:We've some breaking news.
Speaker 2:What's the breaking news?
Speaker 1:The president just phoned Jensen live on stage at the All In Summit. Woah. Mike Isaac says, okay. Wow. Per folks there.
Speaker 1:Trump called Jensen in the middle of his interview. He was on stage and Jensen put the phone on speaker phone. Jensen thanked Trump for his social media post this morning pouring cold water on alarmism.
Speaker 2: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. Mister president, you're you're now talking to the planet.
Speaker 3:See, the great thing about life is that Jensen can develop the most
Speaker 2:complex It's the joke again.
Speaker 3:Put me on speaker. No.
Speaker 2:Odd joke. Okay. Well, anything substantive come out of it? I'm sure we'll know more tomorrow.
Speaker 1:We'll be back.
Speaker 2:We'll be back at 11AM Pacific. Thank you for tuning in. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. I'm off to go get some rest and tomorrow. We love it.
Speaker 2:Newsletter, tbpn.com.