ST Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson

Podcast

Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson

A podcast about understanding how tech works and the way it is changing the world. Hosted by Andrew Sharp with Ben Thompson.

Website ↗ Last published 30 October 2026 295 posts collected by Sputnik

Said on Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson

“About 50% of their revenue is coming from the big three via those services. So it's coming through AWS, coming through Azure, coming through Google. And it is confirmed that they're doing kind of sketchy accounting, depends how you want to define it, which is if you pay Amazon $100, that … Anthropic is recording that $100 as revenue. Anthropic revenue. And then in reality, like 30, a third of that or so depends, it sort of varies. I think people were saying about 37% goes to the provider, the platform provider, the AWS, the Azure, the Google.” — Ben Thompson, Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson
Ben Thompson · 30 Oct 2026 Listen →
“How do you improve the top line? Multiplying humans, right? There's this difference between multiplying versus replacing. And when you're multiplying humans, you're basically creating entirely new things to do, new workflows, new opportunities. The challenge for this whole trade in general is that usually number one takes longer. And number two, usually comes from new companies that they come in, they disrupt the incumbents by virtue of the AI first company taking on the old school SaaS company. The SaaS company is trying to shove AI and use it as much as they can, but they're just fundamentally not constructed properly to do it. And so, in the fullness of time, those companies go away. The AI native companies take their place, and that's how AI takes over the world. I think there's a very decent chance that that's how it happens. The problem is it takes a long time. And timing is the issue.” — Ben Thompson, Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson
Ben Thompson · 30 Oct 2026 Listen →
“I think it's inevitable that we are right now, will be whatever, sort of in a bubble, and it's going to pop and it's going to be painful. And then we'll come back. That's just the inevitable nature of these things. I think there is an extent to which AI is different in lots of areas. The sort of mechanics of stuff piling in too quickly, there being a mismatch in timing between when it's absorbed or not. Like there's lots of differences that we've talked about between the dot-com era and this era. But that dynamic, I think, where dot-com had lots of good ideas, just didn't make sense for a while or didn't sort of get penetration for a while. I think that is almost inevitably going to be the case.” — Ben Thompson, Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson
Ben Thompson · 30 Oct 2026 Listen →
“You tend towards this very low volume, very high-cost weapon systems because you're just serving one customer. It's like the subscription business. In the subscription business, you want to maximize your revenue per user because you don't have as many users. If you're selling to only the government, you want to maximize your revenue per item because you only have one customer. If you're serving the entire market, then you make it up in volume. And so the future of war is, in my estimation, clearly things like drones, missiles, unmanned things, which is a volume play. All of our defensive primes are not built around volume plays.” — Ben Thompson, Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson
Ben Thompson · 30 Oct 2026 Listen →
“Once you grok, no pun intended, that we're talking about power dynamics, you get what I was going for with the Anthropic versus DOW article. It wasn't about legalism niceties. It wasn't about mass surveillance. It was about who, at the end of the day, has power. And if Anthropic keeps saying and insisting, perhaps accurately, we are accruing power to an extent that rivals nation states, the nation states are going to have a say in it.” — Ben Thompson, Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson
Ben Thompson · 30 Oct 2026 Listen →
“ChatGPT was actually the greatest name because it's such a temptation and it's so easy for people to get caught up in feeling like they're talking to something real that isn't real. And it's actually responsible to do everything in your power to continue remind people that this isn't real. Anthropic does the exact opposite. They try to make it real. … Their whole view of alignment is not that they can control Claude, it's that they teach Claude to be good. … So it will control itself.” — Ben Thompson, Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson
Ben Thompson · 23 Oct 2026 Listen →
“Silicon Valley, the sort of person in Silicon Valley, their sense of self-worth and value is so wrapped up in being smart. Everyone in Silicon Valley has always been the smart one. … And so this idea that something's smarter than me is so overwhelming. It's such a blow to the psyche that you have one side is like descending into nihilism. It's all over. And the other side is like, it's okay if it's God. God can be smarter than me.” — Ben Thompson, Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson
Ben Thompson · 23 Oct 2026 Listen →
“The old internet of I'm going to throw up a WordPress site. … I'm going to run my own email server. That's dead. … The whole promise of the internet of being openness, a million nodes. … Everyone who's listening to this who knows anything of what I just said, you should consider yourself fortunate because it was a moment in time. It's a golden era. It will never return.” — Ben Thompson, Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson
Ben Thompson · 23 Oct 2026 Listen →
“LLMs are literally the midwit of the center of the bell curve.” — Ben Thompson, Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson
Ben Thompson · 18 Sep 2026 Listen →

Hosts

Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson is hosted by Andrew Sharp and Ben Thompson .

Recent Episodes

  1. 30 Oct 2026

    Anthropic Opens the Kimono, Bubble Questions and Frontier Costs, Q&A on Meta, Starlink, Brewers

  2. 23 Oct 2026

    Netflix Angst, The End of the Internet, Q&A on Meta’s VR Glasses, Anthropic Alignment, You Can See Everything

  3. 15 Oct 2026

    (Preview) Apple Enters the Uncanny Valley, The SpaceX Play for Cellular, Q&A on The Ringer, Smartphones, AI Parenting

  4. 9 Oct 2026

    (Preview) Two Paths for Apple and Its Users, More on Amazon and Advertising, OpenAI and 722 Mathematical Manuscripts

  5. 2 Oct 2026

    (Preview) All About Agents: Dots Arrive, Google and Apple Questions, Muse Follow-Ups, Super Intelligence, and the Mandate of Heaven

  6. 25 Sep 2026

    (Preview) Three Weeks of Meta Momentum, The Ultimate Muse Upside, A King Kong vs. Godzilla Aggregator War

  7. 18 Sep 2026

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

  8. 10 Sep 2026

    (Preview) Astra (and AGI?) Arrives, Meta’s Muse and the Agent Opportunity, Anthropic and the Revival of (P)Doom Angst

  9. 3 Sep 2026

    (Preview) Fable 5.1 and Anthropic’s Data Retention Pivot, AI Civilizations and Related Matters, Q&A on Meta, Shopify, 3-D Printing

  10. 28 Aug 2026

    (Preview) Meta’s New Restrictions for Teens, Nvidia’s Open Source Investments, Q&A on Netflix, Druckenmiller, Parameters and Performance

  11. 21 Aug 2026

    (Preview) The App Store in the Shadow of AI, Offensive and Defensive Cybersecurity, Q&A on Financial Planning, AI Writing, American Sports

  12. 14 Aug 2026

    (Preview) Nvidia’s Answer to Capital Constraints, Google’s Attrition and Direction, Q&A on AI Writing, Vision Pro, Vibe Coding

Guests

Bill Bishop (2 episodes).