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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.
Wild wild weekend, some really great white pilling stuff, some very disappointing news. We'll go through it all. I read a bunch of different, pieces this weekend, tried to sort of tie them together into the newsletter today, but thought we could kind of go all over the place starting with, what we talked about a little bit on Friday was the Artemis two mission. It was scheduled to land at 05:07PM Pacific Time, and it landed exactly at 05:07PM Pacific Time, like within the exact minute. Everyone was joking, like whoever's in charge of this should be in charge of Uber Eats delivery times or something like that or DoorDash delivery times, because it was remarkably accurate.
Speaker 1:I think they predicted it like days or maybe since the beginning of the mission. Like everything was timed out perfectly. Did you have anything?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Mean, you can like predict these things, right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. It is physics. Yeah. But still, I mean
Speaker 2:We know, you know when the next solar eclipse will be for the next ten thousand years.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, ten thousand years. But I don't know. It still feels remarkable that there no that there's no flexibility.
Speaker 3:But was that predicted pre takeoff?
Speaker 1:Yeah, right? I don't know. We should dig
Speaker 3:into Or was that updated after they had exited? Yeah. Because think there'd
Speaker 1:be something about, like, oh, like, this engine fired a little bit too much or a little bit so we had to make a small adjustment. I don't know. We'll have to we'll have to figure it out. Anyway, the the reactions were really, really positive. Elon Musk said, welcome home to the NASA astronauts.
Speaker 1:Welcome home, Reed, Victor, Christina, Jeremy, the Artemis, two astronauts have splashed down at 08:07PM ET, bringing bringing their historic ten day mission around the moon to an end. I watched it live and it was yeah. It was a remarkable moment. I mean, we haven't done in my lifetime. We haven't done this in a in a very long time.
Speaker 1:So, Reed Wiseman says, thank you, Elon Musk. The four of us glimpsed the red hues of Mars far in the distance as the sun slipped behind the moon, and there was zero doubt in our minds that the creative genius of our greatest minds will have us there very soon. Let's go. And so I really like this. This is great.
Speaker 1:No. No. No. It it it is remarkable. And this was inspiring for a few different reasons because I felt like, you know, people were not voicing skepticism publicly beforehand.
Speaker 1:Like, you don't want to jinx it, and also you don't want be negative about anything, and it makes sense.
Speaker 3:But the space people we talked to off air ahead of time were extremely nervous.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Not not even just the space. There were people in every single person had a different take on like, oh, this seems risky. This is aggressive. This has moved very quickly.
Speaker 1:The government hasn't done something like this in a long time. And so can America pull this off? Like America, there's been a lot of worry about the government being able to do things effectively. And like all government like many government projects, there had been delays and cost overruns. The country has been extremely divided.
Speaker 1:Everyone knows this. And this mission in particular required Americans from all different backgrounds and political persuasions to come together to work on a common goal. And we saw some of this. We we can talk about it later. But even even NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman had been through his own back and forth on the way to getting confirmation.
Speaker 1:And so he was, like, sort of new on the job even relative to this mission, which, of course, has been in the works for years. And so there were a lot of different things. There's also the pressure from the private space industry. Can the SLS work in this case? Well, everything did and it was very, very good.
Speaker 1:There were lots of things that could go wrong. Even the Apple executives seemed to be a little bit sort of nervous about this. There's a post in here that
Speaker 3:we would love pull to know how they test that parachute system.
Speaker 1:I think they launch it off of a plane or something. I don't know. How do they
Speaker 3:do Yeah, yeah. I know. I'm sure there's a good answer.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You But have to imagine that it's three parachutes because it can probably survive with just two.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And there's actually two stages of parachutes. So there's one set, and then these break away, and then there's a new set of parachutes once the atmosphere gets thicker, I believe. But look at that. It opens up perfectly and what an inspiring image. Look at that.
Speaker 1:Jaws over at Apple said, welcome home to the Artemis two crew honored that NASA astronauts brought iPhone to space with them. Not the iPhone. Not a couple of iPhones. IPhone. This is in the official Apple brand.
Speaker 1:You don't say the iPhone, you say iPhone. But they brought iPhone to space with them. One small step for iPhone, one giant leap for space. And so NASA posted this on April 4, said this view just hits different. They took a moment to look back at Earth as they continued deep into space toward the moon, and they showed, photos, basically selfies taken with the iPhone or with iPhone, I guess, of the Earth.
Speaker 1:And and then Tim Cook waited until they landed safely. Congratulations to Artemis II on a successful mission. You captured the wonders of space and our planet beautifully, taking iPhone photography to new heights, and we're grateful you shared it with the world. Your work continues to inspire us all to think different. Welcome home.
Speaker 1:And so Aaron pointed out, to the tune of 3,000,000 views, noticed that Apple didn't comment on the iPhone pictures for Artemis II until the crew safely landed. So everyone was like on the edge of their seats hoping for the good outcome, and that's exactly what happened. It was very, very high stakes, but it was also in many ways America at its best. Even the never ending culture war took a back seat to this. There was this interesting, back and forth between Jericho Isaacman and someone who is not a fan of yes, they deleted the post.
Speaker 1:But the Artemis II crew was listening to Pink Pony Club by Chapel Roan. And that didn't align with someone's politics. And so they said, like, this is ridiculous. Why? How they Because possibly list
Speaker 3:like the last five bands that have come up on the show Yeah. Sounds like a made up band.
Speaker 1:Chapel Road? Oh, she's big. Jared Isaacman was like, hey, let's cool it with the political rhetoric. It's not my choice in music, but the astronauts rode a controlled explosion into space on a journey farther away from Earth than any human before with everything around them trying to kill them. That's a crazy way to put it, but it's true.
Speaker 1:They can listen to whatever song they want. And I thought that was a really, really, really important moment when everyone is so divided. And so the job is very much not finished. Artemis three, which aims to land on the moon in 2028, will be a much bigger challenge. And there's some extra context today in The Wall Street Journal, and we can talk about the difference between Artemis two and Artemis three and and sort of where this is going.
Speaker 1:So the the journal writes, Micah Maidenberg says, Artemis two is a blockbuster. Landing on the moon will be a lot harder. And so, flying around the moon may end up being the easy part for NASA's Artemis program. This month's Artemis two flight captivated people around the world as the agency pulled off the deepest human spaceflight ever recorded and the first crewed mission to the moon since nineteen seventies. NASA and its contractors must now get through a series of sprints that would culminate in astronauts landing on the lunar surface in 2028.
Speaker 1:President Trump outlined that expectation in an executive order he signed last year. The path to the lunar surface is open, but the work ahead is greater than the work behind us, said NASA associate administrator, Amit Kastria. Artemis three, planned for next year, will focus on docking the Orion spacecraft with lunar landers in low Earth orbit, a precursor to a planned landing on the moon. Some current and former NASA spaceflight officials are skeptical that a 2028 landing will be possible given the technical and operational milestones the agency and companies involved need to overcome. Among the challenges, showing one or both of the moon landers that SpaceX and Blue Origin have been developing can safely transport astronauts and preparing new spacesuits made by Axiom Space.
Speaker 1:ULA needs to develop upper stages for NASA's SLS rocket. Space missions often
Speaker 3:take years work together. They gotta do, logos all over the space suit.
Speaker 1:Should.
Speaker 3:Private Well companies should be able to help fund the mission by They
Speaker 1:really should. And there's another story in the journal here about that viral video of the jar of Nutella that ended up floating on Artemis two. I I was convinced this was like VFX or AI when we pulled it up. Apparently, it's real. We we can dig into a little bit of like how this actually happened.
Speaker 1:Ben Cohen has the story in the Wall Street Journal. As millions of people all over the world watched Artemis the Artemis two lunar flyby this week, there were minutes from seeing, there were minutes from seeing astronauts travel the furthest distance ever from Earth when they were suddenly captivated by another majestic sight. It floated through the spacecraft, tumbled right past an astronaut's head, and drifted across NASA's livestream, leaving the roughly 252, thousand miles away with the same question. Wait. Was that a jar of Nutella?
Speaker 1:Back on this planet in a precipice, New Jersey conference room, executives at the brand's parent company were taking their seats on Monday for their 2PM operations committee meeting oblivious to the flying object that had appeared far, far away at 01:52PM. Their meeting was quickly interrupted by a message in the Microsoft Teams chat flagging that Nutella was in outer space. As it turns out, the people who spread Nutella to every corner of the Earth were more surprised than anyone to see it near the moon. They only found out about the most famous jar of gooey stuff in the galaxy when they followed a link in the chat to a social media post. Dang, how much did Nutella pay for this product placement?
Speaker 1:And we saw that post and we had the same question. So Nutella says zero. They did not pay for this. This is not product placement, but it is remarkable. They didn't know their chocolate hazelnut concoction was aboard Orion.
Speaker 1:They didn't even know that the astronauts took it with them. And it's still weird to me that astronauts can just bring random stuff with them. But I guess it's just a bus at the end of the day. You can put whatever you want on it. Do you remember
Speaker 3:your first time trying Nutella?
Speaker 1:Not I'm not that big of Nutella guy.
Speaker 3:For me, felt like the first day of the rest my life.
Speaker 1:Really? A big Nutella fan?
Speaker 3:Not really anymore. But as a kid, discovering that, it was that it was like a peanut butter like thing that was just on an entirely different level. It was
Speaker 1:It is a weird It
Speaker 3:was magic.
Speaker 1:Is it a what is it? A condiment, technically? What is it? I don't
Speaker 3:even A spread?
Speaker 1:A spread? Is that a thing? I don't know.
Speaker 3:It can be a lot
Speaker 1:of things. But it's sort of bothered me that it sort of LARPs as chocolate. Like it looks like chocolate, but it's like hazelnut technically, which I think is like sort of a betrayal. I don't know. Sound off in the chat if you have strong opinions about Nutella.
Speaker 1:David says Nutella is like crack for kids. And Geordie is being paid by the Nutella Corporation. No, we are not sponsored by Nutella. I
Speaker 3:wish. We'd have a big So
Speaker 1:jar of it right it's a chocolate hazelnut concoction.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It it has has
Speaker 1:Yeah. Hazelnut in it. It has chocolate in it
Speaker 3:as well.
Speaker 1:So Nutella, the corporation, did not know that Nutella, the hazelnut concoction, was aboard Orion. They still don't know which astronaut brought it. They weren't You just know that
Speaker 3:for the next mission, Red Bull will pay any price to have cans of Red Bull floating around
Speaker 1:the Somehow, I feel like the NASA astronauts' tax records will be deeply inspected to see that they're not selling ad slots out the back.
Speaker 2:We need some iPads floating by with like, B2B SaaS.
Speaker 1:That'd be good. Yeah.
Speaker 2:That'd be sick.
Speaker 1:They still don't know which astronaut brought it. And like us, they weren't even sure the video was real when they watched the jar hurdle across their screens at exactly the right angle for the label to spin into focus. It all looked too perfect. I couldn't have filmed it any better if I tried, said Chad Stubbs, who is their chief marketing officer. What a great name for a CMO Stubbs.
Speaker 1:Of Faroe North America who owns Nutella. But once he reviewed the NASA footage and saw a levitating tub of Nutella, he knew that a marketing opportunity had landed in his lap and that he was no longer sitting in his most boring meeting of the week. It was a lot more interesting than talking about shipping details. And so from the conference room, they started a Teams group to discuss the logistics of their improbable operation. They called it Nutella Mission Control.
Speaker 1:Before, most Americans had never seen the original video. They posted a slow motion clip set to the iconic theme of 2,001: A Space Odyssey. The tagline, Nutella is out of this world. And I wonder I wonder if they could just rip that on Instagram using like the integrated music functionality or if they had to like quickly license that. Because getting like an official theme from a Hollywood film like 2,001: A Space Odyssey, It's definitely within budget for something like this, but it's usually a back and forth with some emails.
Speaker 1:But maybe as a as a large marketing team, they had everything, like, wired up already. For as long as humans have been leaving this world, they have been taking products along for the ride. But in this age, when every inch of the planet is sponsored, space has become the most prestigious real estate and marketing because it's the only place where marketing is banned. NASA has a strict policy against promoting or endorsing commercial products, And Tyler's booing. And enforces it so aggressively that not naming brands might as well be part of basic training for astronauts.
Speaker 1:Unlike college athletes, they can't get paid for their name, image, and likeness. As long as they're employed by NASA, they won't be shilling for Nutella.
Speaker 3:So Yeah. I'm not saying the astronauts should be able to do it independently. I'm just saying that NASA should try to try to build out a multibillion dollar average
Speaker 1:You got go straight to the top. You got go straight to the and say, hey, Lockheed's showing up with some stuff. SpaceX is contributing. Axiom Space is doing the space suits. Blue Origin's doing a moon lander.
Speaker 1:Why not Nutella chipping in as well, At least paying for part of it. I don't know.
Speaker 3:It would just be extremely American.
Speaker 1:It would be extremely American to make the Orion capsule look like
Speaker 3:That's what I was saying. A NASA And you've got to have a pay per view.
Speaker 1:Yeah, pay per view for sure.
Speaker 3:Like, you can watch the stream when they're just kind of hanging out traveling. But for anything like a landing, splashdown, takeoff,
Speaker 1:it switches Oh, the switches pay pay per view mode? Yeah. I think they got to sell the windshield. They got to sell the windshield. When you're taking photos of Earth, you
Speaker 2:got to see
Speaker 1:Tide. You gotta see Tide across the across the windshield. It's like, oh, seeing the blue marble from this distance is amazing.
Speaker 3:Reminds me, I have some laundry.
Speaker 1:I have And I kinda have to put the camera in between the I and the d
Speaker 3:Podcast ads over during the stream too.
Speaker 1:Yeah. There is a lot of dead air.
Speaker 3:Letting you guys note in t minus thirty minutes, we'll be coming around the moon.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:And this segment, this moon passing is brought to you by Athletic Green.
Speaker 1:Yep. Great. Okay. So as long as they're employed by NASA, they won't be shilling for Nutella. When one Artemis II crew member let slip in a press conference that he was bringing an iPhone to get mesmerizing photos of Earth, he caught himself.
Speaker 1:He said, I don't think I can actually say that as a government employee, Reed Wiseman said. We have small, highly powerful computing devices that we'll take with us with outstanding cameras. And so, yeah, What is an iPhone if not just a small, highly powerful computing device with outstanding camera? Well, in the cosmos, they also found other purposes for those powerful computing devices. One picture shared by NASA showed Jeremy Hansen with an electric shaver in one hand and his iPhone in the other because he was using it as a mirror, and that wasn't even the most part amazing part of the shot.
Speaker 1:Anyone who looked closely would have spotted another another product in the corner, a container of Jif peanut butter. Now, what's interesting is that the the government does have, at least with peanut butter are you familiar with NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Tech Techniques or Technology or something? NIST? So NIST is like our official weights and measures. Like they keep like the canonical, like what is the one pound?
Speaker 1:What is one gram? They and they have a whole bunch of standards for all sorts of different things. And then different companies can like agree on, Okay, well, we are both saving
Speaker 3:the They're reinventing and defining the gram.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but all sorts of things. And one of the things that NIST like has is peanut butter, reference peanut butter. So if you are doing some sort of lab experiment and you need to say that you are testing this product when it comes into contact with peanut butter, you can go to the government and get the most standard The official peanut peanut butter. The butter. Because otherwise somebody might say, well, did you use Jif or did you use Skippy or did you use something else?
Speaker 1:And this way you can just say one thing. And so there is a world where the government would say, okay, don't bring Jif peanut butter, bring NIST peanut butter, but I don't know. To find out more about space oddities, this journalist at The Wall Street Journal said he called Robert Perlman who obsessively tracks them as the editor of Collect Space. He told me something curious about outer space. The deeply ordinary parts of NASA missions resonate back home as much as the extraordinary.
Speaker 1:We remember the astronauts who flew around the moon and the flying Nutella. It makes us feel closer to the humans who have never been further away. After all, most of us will never see the dark side of the moon. Disagree. And I think we're going to have Peter Diamandis.
Speaker 3:Looks looks like a Coachella set.
Speaker 1:It does look like they're twisted knobs or something. What are they doing there? Just watches. Okay. Oh, they're checking the watches.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:Wrist check?
Speaker 1:Wrist check. One product was already synonymous with the wonder of spaceflight. Do you know what we're talking about? Can you take a guess? What is the main product that was like famously designed for astronauts in space?
Speaker 2:Is it the ice cream?
Speaker 1:No. Oh, no. That that that's close. The freeze dried ice cream is up there. No.
Speaker 1:What? Whipped cream? No. Tang? And no one knows Tang?
Speaker 1:You don't know the story of Tang?
Speaker 3:I think that's before our time, John.
Speaker 1:There's Tang? And then there's also, you know those super bouncy balls? They're I don't know how apocryphal that is, there's always been this story, at least when I was a kid, it was introduced to me that those super bouncy balls were designed as rocket fuel or something like that. And and that the experiment went wrong and like this was all they could come up with.
Speaker 3:Fake news.
Speaker 1:Probably fake news. That sucks. As as an eight year old, like, I was like, this is lore. This is peak. This is peak lore.
Speaker 1:This is this is peak lore. The Artemis three mission next year is supposed to help set up NASA and its contractor to attempt one or more visits to the moon in 2028. So that's Artemis four and five. NASA's inspector general said in a recent report that both SpaceX and Blue Origin have run into delays developing spacecraft for Artemis missions. Each company has been working on in space transfers of super cold propellants to power lunar flights, fueling operations that are still largely unproven.
Speaker 1:So that is a very, very complex and new technology that we are that the entire space community is clearly working on. The in space refueling is sort of critical to actually getting to the moon in a meaningful way. A NASA safety panel separately raised questions about how quickly SpaceX's human lander based on its Starship vehicle would be ready. A landing operation of astronauts with the Starship lander within the next few years appears daunting and to the panel probably not achievable. SpaceX next month plans to launch an upgraded version of its Starship rocket while Blue Origin is working towards launching a cargo lander to the moon with its New Glenn rocket.
Speaker 1:So with all of this has, like, the backdrop of the SpaceX IPO. And you have to imagine, that even if it was incredibly cost intensive, we're in this weird dynamic with SpaceX where the CapEx requirements of something like this and and, you know, sending a rocket to the moon are probably less than Colossus five or some crazy data center. And so you could be in this interesting situation where Elon is incentivized to to move a lot faster, probably not with humans on board, but get even just a basic Optimus robot up there. Get a lunar lander up there. Just continue to deliver payloads because it just shows so many more milestones.
Speaker 1:And as you go public, it's I think it becomes more difficult to stay focused on this thirty year Yeah.
Speaker 3:Part of part of Yeah. Like the value of actually sending humans to space is entirely like kind of marketing and just to prove that it's possible. Yeah. Like you would think that you would hope that a lot of this is Yes and all. Like, it's just very cool.
Speaker 3:Very inspiring. Yeah. I feel like it's important. But at the same time, you would think that NASA should just be optimizing for how how do we get as much mass as possible Yeah. Up to the whether it's space or the moon, and just basically leaning a lot more into drones Yeah.
Speaker 3:And going more for volume versus these sort of like high risk, high cost
Speaker 1:Yeah. Over the weekend in San Francisco, which I'm sure you all saw, there were a variety of attacks. Sam Altman posted a blog post covering a Molotov cocktail that was thrown at his house. Then there was a shooting outside. Morning Friday early hours.
Speaker 1:He said 03:45AM in the morning. He said, thankfully, it bounced off the house and no one got hurt. I saw another article that said that the suspect is in custody. And he says and and Sam goes on to sort of restate what he believes. He says, working towards prosperity for everyone, empowering all people, and advancing science and technology are moral obligations for him.
Speaker 1:AI will be the most powerful tool for expanding human capability and potential that anyone has ever seen. Demand for this tool will be essentially uncapped and people will do incredible things with it. The world deserves huge amounts of AI and we must figure out how to make it happen. And then he also says, It will not all go well. The fear and anxiety about AI is justified.
Speaker 1:We are in the process of witnessing the largest change to society in a long time, perhaps ever, maybe bigger than the Industrial Revolution. And so you would expect the life and the existence of the American populace to change over that period of time. And we have a duty to make it as smooth as possible. And he says, we have to get safety right, which is not just about aligning a model. We urgently need a society wide response to be resilient to new threats.
Speaker 1:This includes new policy to help navigate through a difficult economic transition in order to get a to a much better future. AI has to be democratized. Power cannot be too concentrated. George Hotts actually had an interesting rebuttal to Sam Altman's post sort of re arguing for open source, which is something that a lot of people have not been arguing for lately, but it sort of interesting to see him continue to push
Speaker 3:Was just about open source or was it about sharing research?
Speaker 1:It was he was saying that you don't have an obligation to open source the weights of a model that cost a billion dollars to train. He's not arguing for that. Yeah. But he is saying that you should open source the tricks, the research ideas. Basically publish the research papers again and empower a broader community.
Speaker 1:Of course, there's a of competitive dynamics there, but that is something that could potentially happen via regulation or something or happen just due to just a competitive dynamic. Like there are other labs out there that don't have as much compute and might realize that they have great researchers and maybe they want to open source more. There's there are a lot of different ways that this could play out. So he says, I do not think it's right that a few labs, few AI labs would make the most consequential decisions about the shape of our future. And so there's been a bunch of back and forth about the attacks and what's driving them and how how risky the rhetoric has been.
Speaker 1:I think in general, it's it's a very tough situation because the you don't want to just spark more controversy and more discussion around this stuff. You mostly wanna move towards more security and more more possible. Yeah. Course, the notable,
Speaker 3:you know, it's been shared widely at this point. But the notable one thing that was notable about Friday, the attacker from Friday is just they were sharing all of the Doom if anyone all the AI Yeah. Doom material. They were clearly consume consuming it. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Sort of caught up in it.
Speaker 1:Andre Midhawk, of Andrews and Horowitz out there with a new fund, AMP Public, said time is running out for technology leaders to show they care about public benefit above all else. Slow down your layoffs. Reinvest in reeducation. Mentor the next generation. We are all on team humanity.
Speaker 1:And I think that's a good message. As the AI race continues to heat up in America, geopolitical dynamics have consistently acted as a binding constraint, limiting the viability of proposals set forth by AI lab leaders. And so we've seen this at Davos with various lab leaders saying, Well, we would agree to a slowdown if we could all agree. And then and the Bernie Sanders, data center ban, and all of this feels very intractable in the backdrop of with the backdrop of geopolitical competition. If you don't have buy in from all the different countries, you wind up just falling behind another country and you have the same dynamic again.
Speaker 1:And so that piece of the discussion has sort of fallen by the wayside because it's so difficult to argue if you're running a private corporation in America and you're like, I want to make foreign policy now. That's a really tall order. Fortunately, think people are starting to at least investigate what the path towards some coalition between different countries might look like. And Sebastian Malabai, author of the Infinity Machine and former guest of the show, published an op ed in the New York Times outlining one possible solution to The US China dynamic. He says in in 2022, the Biden administration tried to arrest China's development of artificial intelligence by denying it cutting edge semiconductors.
Speaker 1:This was the CHIPS Act, which at the time I was very in favor of, but of course, the policies have all evolved and there are much more complex situations with the entire semiconductor supply chain and how fast the technology is advancing. So President Trump has relaxed that policy a bit without a clear plan to replace it, but the chip export controls have failed. China's tech sector is too sophisticated to be stopped from building powerful AI. In pursuing an impossible objective, The United States is missing an opportunity to to try for one that sounds fanciful, but which, after a recent reporting trip to China, I believe is more realistic. America should negotiate with China on a global pact on AI safety, which would impose universal limits on a technology that can do much good, but in the wrong hands would do much harm.
Speaker 1:The premise of the export restrictions was that The United States would be able to successfully block China's access to powerful AI chips. The premium chipsets used in AI data centers are the size of skateboards and can't be smuggled in a simple suitcase, and it's hard to put them to use without hands on support from the chipmaker's engineering teams. But Chinese developers circumvented controls by training their AI models and chips located in other countries. This is always a question of, even if you stop the flow of chips into the country, can you set up a holding company that allocates
Speaker 3:the Yeah, this reserves and a question from last year of, wait, how is Singapore placing that many billions of dollars of oil?
Speaker 1:And Malaysia was another and one that was even in The Middle East, there were always questions about, Okay, well, if The Middle East gets chips, are they going to be able to have Chinese companies as clients remotely? And there were discussions of folks basically putting training data on hard drives or model weights on hard drives and just flying them from one country to another. It's very, very hard to actually contain the movement of the critical pieces of the AI value chain. So its model builders also take full advantage of a process known as distillation. Every time a U.
Speaker 1:S. Lab produces a cutting edge model, Chinese rivals quickly reverse engineer its capabilities and build a copycat version. The follower has the advantage, he says. American AI scientists used to say that competitors being able to fast follow would not matter. An intelligent explosion was approaching, the argument went.
Speaker 1:As AI systems would soon become capable enough to write upgrades to their own code, AI would create better AI. Better AI would create even better AI. Recursive self improvement would drive performance skyward. The nation that had just reached this so called singularity first would be the winner of the AI race. Even if the fast follower were just a few months behind the leader, three and a half years after the Biden administration ship controls AI is generating code to upgrade itself, the promised feedback loop has started.
Speaker 1:But the accelerating power of the leading models won't determine who wins the AI race. It's AI deployment that will matter. To transform economies and armies, AI must be embedded into the business processes and weapons systems. The raw power of the cutting edge models must be turned into applications. The upshot is that China and The United States are roughly level in the AI contest.
Speaker 1:Top Chinese models may be a few months behind American ones, and the relative position on military applications is difficult to ascertain as so much is classified. But on industrial applications, China seems to be leading. US sanctioned companies such as Huawei and Hikvision are rolling out AI systems that perform maintenance checks on high speed trains, managing mining operations, scanning water samples to assess pollution, and more. At Huawei's campus near Shenzhen, he recently took a ride in an autonomous car. A device in the passenger seat massaged my back and the steering was immaculate.
Speaker 1:Tyler, do you generally agree with most of these takes here?
Speaker 2:No. Okay. Well, what do think Yeah. To start, I think I think Chinese labs are further behind.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:The only reason
Speaker 2:that they're close behind is because distillation. Distillation. I also think Yeah.
Speaker 3:And he's kind of saying like He's saying that the chip export ban is not working.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Also But I feel
Speaker 3:like the the the them being behind is proof that it is working. And he's also saying, you know, the labs wanna get to recursive self improvement. We're starting to see early signs of that. Mhmm. And so I feel like there's some kind of inconsistencies.
Speaker 2:I mean, also just on the on the chip stuff, like, we're clearly not policing it as hard as we could. Could be policing it way harder. Right? We're I remember it was like super micro. We saw those Yeah.
Speaker 2:Videos where they had smuggled in the boxes and it was like extremely
Speaker 3:Yeah, the hair dryer.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's like if we really want to solve this issue, like we for sure could. Among like the leading labs in The US, you are seeing some kind of like takeoff. But like among them, right, it's like very much a recursive thing.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:The models improve the harness, which improves the next model. Like I think
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:This thing is actually true. Like you're not seeing open source labs kind of keep up, I think,
Speaker 1:generally. Yeah. Mean, it was very, very remarkable watching like deep sea not accelerate in the same way that I think a lot of people expected.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Mean, like like, when is kind of what deep seek what what people thought deep seek would be. And models are good. But Yeah. Again, like, I think most of the reason that they're good is is just because of distillation.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It's chaotic time. Anyway, thank you for watching TBPN today. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Speaker 1:And we will be off tomorrow, but we will be back Wednesday at 11AM Pacific. We'll see you then. Goodbye.
Speaker 3:We love you. Boeing Flashback.
Speaker 1:Goodbye.