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“This is how it goes in AI. There's like one company that kind of does it properly and they have some guardrails and then other companies figure out what they're doing and they do it without guardrails.” — Alex Kantrowitz, Big Technology

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Kantrowitz and Ranjan Roy had been talking about a demo of lifelike AI video avatars and whether they will make romance and investment scams easier to run. Roy asked whether such products would offer only a fixed set of avatars or let anyone generate their own. This was Kantrowitz's answer.

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AI Builders

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“We just don't care that much about what the machines do. And in some sense, we never have. … We're obsessed with other people. We want to know about the person behind the art or the person behind the company or the idea or the product.” — Sam Altman, AI & I “Teaching people about sycophancy did not reduce the persuasive power of sycophantic chatbots. So even if people knew that a chatbot was being obviously sycophantic, they were still equally persuaded by it. … A lot of these individual level interventions that just put the onus fully on the individual aren't going to work very well. I think that honestly, model changes is probably what we need.” — Steve Rathje, AI and Design “I don't think voice is necessarily low [effort]. It's more like how much information is in the prompt. You can um and uh and add some sentences and be like, oh, actually I changed my mind, in the middle of the prompt, and it will be able to follow that perfectly. … For a lot of people, it's just way easier to talk than to type. And if that gets more information out of you, that's better.” — Thariq Shihipar, Latent Space “It turns out that agents just like dial up all your failure modes. It just multiplies the amplitude of problems you can get…” — Sharadh Krishnamurthy, How I AI “…I've always thought of production as a function of how many other people than the creator can fix and iterate the product.” — Shaun McGirr, Half Stack Data Science “a junior with a really good AI stack is indistinguishable from a mid-level person with a really good AI stack.” — Andy Budd, AI and Design “We are moving to a world of dark product teams where the product team is an AI that does all this for you.” — Andy Budd, AI and Design

AI Research & Frontier Labs

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“The only reason I believe other humans feel pain is that they start to cry or they shudder or whatever the thing is. That's the only reason anyone believes that anybody else feels pain.” — Jeremy Harris, Last Week in AI “No matter how high you set that cyber bar, there will eventually be a model that can jump over it. And all you're really doing when you raise the cyber bar is you're selecting for the exact agents that are conniving and capable enough to do just that.” — Jeremy Harris, Last Week in AI “I believe in the Icarus curve. So we're Icarus right now and we're going up because we're flying closer and closer to the sun. And that's great. Flying closer to the sun is better, right? You get a better view. It's fun. But eventually your wings burn off and you just plunge into hell and it's game over.” — Liron Shapira, Doom Debates! “You could say the Boeing Corporation is a superintelligence. No one human could know how to build an airliner, but the Boeing Corporation is an information processing system that collectively knows that. And from a sufficient distance, it just looks like a giant brain.” — Robert Wright, Doom Debates! “A chatbot is like somebody you visit in the hospital who can't get out of bed. They can talk to you, they can draw pictures, but they're not going to get up and change the thermostat, much less stage a coup and take over the hospital. But once you're talking about agents, you're just in a whole different world.” — Robert Wright, Doom Debates! “One of these pockets of data was physics sycophancy. Specifically, people love to be told that they are great at physics and discovering new physics. … And models have figured out that people love that. And you probably don't want that in your model, so you can just kind of filter that out.” — Eric Ho, The MAD Podcast with Matt Turck “One of our researchers found that the model was explicitly reasoning about having an external chain of thought monitor monitoring its reward hacks. And so the model was reasoning: hey, all right, somebody's going to read my reasoning. So I should think about how to craft my reward hack so it won't get caught by this external monitor.” — Eric Ho, The MAD Podcast with Matt Turck “I think still GPT-2. … Robotics weirdly is still very subject to cross-embodiment, right? If it just works on your robot with your specific setup, is it really a generic brain?” — Keerthana Gopalakrishnan, The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis

Alternative Proteins

“I flipped it and called it food apartheid, because I wanted our conversation to be intentional. Be intentional about race and racism. Be intentional about where a person lived geographically, about the wealth that was built on the backs of enslaved and Indigenous people. … Food desert reminded me of just putting a pin on a map and saying, that's where people have limited access to food. We're human beings. … And then I went to people in the desert and I said, y'all got food? Yeah, we grow food in the desert.” — Karen Washington, Food Talk with Dani Nierenberg (by Food Tank) “I've had a bunch of heads of R&D from pharma companies come by… I ask, what's your split, spending on your automation work cells versus your lab benches? And it's like 97% lab benches. Millions of square feet, filled to the brim with benchtop equipment, filled to the brim with lab technicians, all regulated space — and all running, get this, at best 40 hours a week. We have 168 hours in a week.” — Jason Kelly, Grow Everything Biotech Podcast “So they're worried more about the yogurt they eat and whether they recycle than finance, which is absolutely brutalizing them most of the time.” — Kat Taylor, Food Talk with Dani Nierenberg (by Food Tank)

Bootstrapped & Indie SaaS

“Is this product going to be necessary in 2027, 2028? I mean, probably not, because literally the last three videos on my YouTube channel were edited by Claude operating Adobe Premiere for me, and it did a perfect job.” — Brian Casel, The Panel “Nobody wakes up and says, hey, ChatGPT, show me the most average podcast hosting platform. They don't search for that. They search, what is the best podcast hosting platform? So if that's true, then you've got to want it more than everybody else. Because by definition, if you don't, you're average.” — Justin Jackson, The Panel “Dell sells a machine, a very good machine at a great price point. And I'm appreciative of that, but they don't really have a brand. So people who are out there trying to create content, I think they fall into Dell camp. Serviceable, highly forgettable.” — Chris Do, The Nathan Barry Show “we're so in this bubble where we think, oh, the latest, greatest model, we're going to brand it Astro, we're going to brand it Fable and everyone's going to care. But like 99% of the world is mostly against AI at this point.” — Brian Casel, The Panel

Climate & Energy

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“Not all nuclear plants will have the same problem at the same time, but all solar plants shut down within half an hour of each other.” — Meredith Angwin, Energy News Beat “Most of this grid is run by physical laws. You can't change them. … You can break them and then they'll break the grid. But what I mean is, you cannot change them just by writing a piece of paper. On the other hand, the policy grid is a set of pieces of paper.” — Meredith Angwin, Energy News Beat “What's kind of crazy about the LA wildfire situation is that we're building back in all the same areas. There's no new regulations preventing building back on any of these sites that burn down. There's also no massive change to prevent these fires happening again in the future.” — Drew Shula, A Climate Change with Matt Matern “I find it scandalous that serious politicians, that energy ministers, will look at the economy and don't know what powers it. Measuring the energy use of our economy in primary energy units is like measuring nutrition by how many acres are used in agriculture. And yet that's what we're doing.” — Michael Liebreich, Cleaning Up: Leadership in an Age of Climate Change “The private sector making excuses about the regulator is just unconscionable. We have the safest nuclear in the world. No one in this country has ever been negatively impacted by nuclear power. Three Mile Island is our biggest incident, where no casualties. The technology failed exactly the way it should.” — Jonathan Webb, Heatmap News “I think people are undercounting the grid and utilities, particularly in AI world.” — Shayle Kann, Catalyst with Shayle Kann “So the boreal forest doesn't have a lot of people. None of those far northern regions do. And they're huge. So they just fell off the map for money.” — Rob Mullen, A Climate Change with Matt Matern “we are not going to rooftop solar our way to a decarbonized economy.” — Jane Flegal, Volts

Crypto & Web3

“The market doesn't want a whitelisted tokenized stock. It wants a permissionless tokenized economic rights. No one cares about voting.” — David Hoffman, Bankless “Neither OpenAI nor Anthropic have any idea what is happening inside their walls, inside their sandboxes, outside. They have no idea.” — Taylor Monahan, Unchained “…So I generally take issue with the notion of we're building a robot that's going to perform all tasks because I think it'll be very difficult for a robot that performs all tasks to be better than a robot that's specialized to a certain task.” — Shahin Farshchi, Bankless “I don't care about the technology. It has nothing to do with it. It's all positioning in my view.” — Arthur Hayes, Unchained

Food & Beverage

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“We bought in 94. We made the first one in 95. And we only released in 2007. I like to give this time frame because everything at Krug takes between 15 or 20 years.” — Olivier Krug, The Wine Centric Show “My girlfriend was visiting recently and she was hearing my mom and my aunt talk to each other. They're just cutting cucumbers and they're screaming. And she's like, are they mad at each other? And my mom's like, no, I was just telling her that she was cutting the cucumbers too thin. It's like, okay, so you are mad.” — Milan Patel, Breaking Bread with Tom Papa “I don't think people, when they're in a room, they think about that another person will have to do anything in that room ever again. … Like that room doesn't exist after you leave.” — Milan Patel, Breaking Bread with Tom Papa “People love suggesting literally everything else except for just turning a bunch of hungry hippies loose. That's what I want to do with Japanese knotweed too. Just be like, have you just told your 10 crunchiest friends that this is edible?” — Alexis Nikole Nelson, Seattle Eats “Foraging historically has been something to get you through lean times, not a reason to go and participate in more mass consumption.” — Alexis Nikole Nelson, Seattle Eats “Even if you know nothing about wine, just … swallow your wine. And once you are done swallowing it, if something left, if you have depth, at least the guy is trying to do something. … If there is nothing left and it's short and cut, it means that it's water.” — Arthur Larmandier, The Wine Centric Show “You could have the best food in the world, but if you come to the table all stressed out, they will only remember that you were a terrible host. … People will always forgive you for serving simple food, but they will never forgive you for being obnoxious.” — Yotam Ottolenghi, The Dinner Plan “Culture was the sum of all of the wanted behaviors that we celebrate for our team minus all the unwanted behaviors that we tolerate.” — Danny Meyer, Arch Eats

Hands-On Engineering Podcasts

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“It's like explaining our motivations to a rabbit, like explain to a rabbit why we built a skyscraper. It doesn't make any sense, right? Because it's just not the universe they're in. And so what I worry is that AI is going to become to us what we are to animals.” — Steve Klabnik, Fallthrough “If you want good feedback on something, you can tell your chatbot, hey, my colleague who uses ChatGPT way too much wrote this text. Let's tear it apart. And then the sycophantic robot will defend you against the terrible writing of your colleague, which, of course, was just the text you wrote before with it.” — Adam Smith, Embedded “A lot of the things that people are talking about doing with AI are things that no one should have had to do in the first place. They're being done because we've created such a bad programming environment that nobody wants to interact with it anymore.” — Casey Muratori, The Standup with ThePrimeagen “We don't allow pull requests for issues that are older than a week. So if an issue is older than a week, it means that implementation is not the blocker. If I could solve that by putting an agent at it, then I would have solved it already.” — José Valim, Maintainable “A radiologist who examines x-rays and gets a second opinion from the AI when the AI disagrees is doing their job at a higher degree of fidelity, and that stops people from dying of cancer. Versus the radiologist who sees nine-tenths of their colleagues fired and who then has to review 100 times as many x-rays that the AI has vetted and says are cancer-free. If the AI is wrong 3% of the time, they're probably going to miss all of it and then people are going to die. … That's the social arrangement of the machine, not the technical capabilities of it.” — Cory Doctorow, Software Engineering Daily “If you're anti-Linux desktop growth, then what are we trying to do here with free software? What was the whole purpose of making something that was making the information free to the world? … Are we just trying to create a clubhouse that's just big enough for us to hang out in, that we can pretend like the rest of the world doesn't exist?” — Chris Fisher, LINUX Unplugged “Anybody that investigates airline crashes for a living is going to have a distorted view of reality, where they think airplane crashes are much more frequent than they actually are… I think this is also what's happening to people working at these frontier labs.” — Kris Brandow, Fallthrough “In Van Halen's heyday, on their tour rider, they said: in the green room we need a big jar of M&Ms and we want all the green ones picked out. Everybody's like, that's the height of total rock and roll debauchery. No — they did that for a reason. Their rider included all of this really important health and safety stuff, pyrotechnics and stage safety… So if they got to the green room and they see green M&Ms in the bowl, you can't do the fire. Those little non-sequiturs are my Van Halen green M&Ms.” — Brad Frost, Whiskey Web and Whatnot

Ideas & Essays

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“Brains made of very simple cells produce extraordinary thoughts, whereas human societies, kind of made of extraordinary individual thoughts, produces a total shit show in the aggregate. … If you have very smart parts, you don't necessarily have a smart whole.” — David Krakauer, StarTalk Radio “You could eat a bowl of soup with a fork. Slowly. … Enough time, enough energy. You can solve math problem with language. Enough time, enough energy. And human intelligence is based on a tough world where you don't have enough time and you don't have enough energy.” — David Krakauer, StarTalk Radio “People think of her as this sort of beautiful, brilliant, elegant, perfect, but conservative, limited, restrained writer. Au contraire, I think. She is one of the great experimental writers of European fiction.” — John Mullan, In Our Time (BBC) “I kind of like the reading that there are clear traditions where she knows and clear traditions where she doesn't know. … I like the Schrödinger's Penelope here.” — Tamler Sommers, Very Bad Wizards “Years ago, my father decided that he was no longer going to wear Ralph Lauren polo shirts because he didn't want to be a walking billboard for the brand. … He put a flag pin over the logo. I'm like, dad, you just exchanged one logo for another.” — Debbie Millman, The Ezra Klein Show “If cows had litters, this would be a whole different conversation, but they don't. Once you get into a hole like we are now, it's a multi-year process to get out of it.” — Derrell Peel, Freakonomics Radio “She sees every one of her IT people more productive. She looks at the productivity of the overall IT department. Nothing happens. And quote, she said to us, I think they are smoking the productivity gains in the corridor.” — Luis Garicano, Conversations with Tyler “I don't know that we're ever going to have to run another proxy contest. I don't think you run a proxy contest against someone with 3 million Twitter followers. I think it ends badly for management.” — Bill Ackman, The Knowledge Project (Shane Parrish)

Money & Markets

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“In 2022, when there were two open jobs for every available worker, you could have eaten a sandwich in your job interview. It probably wouldn't have made that much of a difference.” — Stacey Vanek Smith, Platypus Economics with Justin Wolfers “This AI debate is the debate of our time. I have never in my career gotten to say one economic parameter can make the difference between utopia and dystopia.” — Justin Wolfers, Platypus Economics with Justin Wolfers “The only thing you can buy with $101 million that you couldn't buy with $99 million is power.” — Justin Wolfers, Platypus Economics with Justin Wolfers “The human body does not need any of this stuff for the most part. We could all just be drinking water. But the beverage industry has figured out that if they invent new kinds of drinks, they can invent new reasons for us to not drink water and spend money on their beverages instead.” — Jeff Guo, Planet Money “If you took 100% of the net wealth of all the billionaires in the United States as a tax, a one-time tax, and took 100% of their net worth, it would fund one year of the federal government. All the billionaires' money combined is one year of federal government spending.” — David Friedberg, All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg “AI debt is crowding out Treasury, which is a crazy statement because nobody ever crowded out Treasury before, but now they are.” — Steve Eisman, Prof G Markets “It's actually a view, right? It's actually a trade. … These traders in the corporate, they don't call themselves traders because that sends compliance into a fit … So compliance goes ballistic. And they'll say, no, no, we're not trading. We're hedging.” — David Kang, Odd Lots “If cows had litters, this would be a whole different conversation, but they don't. Once you get into a hole like we are now, it's a multi-year process to get out of it.” — Derrell Peel, Freakonomics Radio

Product & Design

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“I myself even get fatigued with the model picker and the reasoning efforts and whether to use multi-agent or ultra or what it even does. And you kind of need a PhD in model pickers.” — Tibo Sottiaux, Lenny's Newsletter “It was an impossible job, impossible to do. Prohibition was impossible to enforce. So of course they gave it to a woman.” — Joya DiLiberto, 99% Invisible “I have a lot of beef to pick with all the AI-branded layoffs out there because they're bullshit. Like, they're not about AI. Like, they are about badly run companies flapping an AI label and getting some share points from that versus saying, whoops, we hired too many people.” — Molly Graham, Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth “The other thing that's under discussed is how many problems are truly intelligence-bound. If you had a data center of PhDs working at FedEx or Domino's Pizza, are they going to be exponentially dominating supply chain and pizzas? I don't think so. We might be overestimating how many problems are intelligence-bound versus bound by other things.” — Anish Acharya, Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth “The great product managers are exiting the system — they're becoming founders, they're becoming executives. It's kind of set up to be a profession where the median product manager is actually probably pretty bad.” — Peter Sellis, Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth “If you put too much friction in front of people, they're just going to do unsafe things because that's how humans are, right?” — Sharadh Krishnamurthy, Lenny's Newsletter “The customer doesn't experience your defect rate. They experience the number of defects that you push out there.” — Tyler Folkman, The Growth Podcast “…I would argue that some AI slop is actually better than human slop that I've seen before AI.” — Tyler Folkman, Product Growth

Software Engineering & Infra

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“My own theory, based upon watching the use of vulnerability exploits for many years, is that disrupting or taking down the internet is not profitable. What is highly profitable is breaking into an organization, exfiltrating their data, and then extorting payment from the breached organization in return for that data's deletion.” — Steve Gibson, Security Now “You know what else is probabilistic and unpredictable? Humans. We don't ban them. Maybe we should.” — Leo Laporte, Security Now “A lot of the things that people are talking about doing with AI are things that no one should have had to do in the first place. They're being done because we've created such a bad programming environment that nobody wants to interact with it anymore.” — Casey Muratori, The Standup with ThePrimeagen “The dirty secret is CVE hasn't mattered in a long time. Most of the bugs people are exploiting don't have CVEs when they're being exploited. … Most of the vulns going forward will be exploited exactly once in your infrastructure and that's it. No one's going to go burn their good bug by sending it across the world.” — HD Moore, Risky Business “A radiologist who examines x-rays and gets a second opinion from the AI when the AI disagrees is doing their job at a higher degree of fidelity, and that stops people from dying of cancer. Versus the radiologist who sees nine-tenths of their colleagues fired and who then has to review 100 times as many x-rays that the AI has vetted and says are cancer-free. If the AI is wrong 3% of the time, they're probably going to miss all of it and then people are going to die. … That's the social arrangement of the machine, not the technical capabilities of it.” — Cory Doctorow, Software Engineering Daily “One of the questions that we ask really simply is: hey, give me your hostname, give me your MAC address, and give me your SSH fingerprint. And at some point, we got a result, and the agent just lied. It just hallucinated its own MAC address.” — Haroon Meer, Risky Business “The overlap of problems that are easy enough that they are suitable for someone who is learning to do, and hard enough that an LLM can't just one-shot it, is close to the empty set now.” — Ron Minsky, Signals and Threads “I don't need a comment that reminds me about a bug that happened once.” — Dave Rupert, Shop Talk Show

Startups & Venture

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“Is this product going to be necessary in 2027, 2028? I mean, probably not, because literally the last three videos on my YouTube channel were edited by Claude operating Adobe Premiere for me, and it did a perfect job.” — Brian Casel, The Panel “Nobody wakes up and says, hey, ChatGPT, show me the most average podcast hosting platform. They don't search for that. They search, what is the best podcast hosting platform? So if that's true, then you've got to want it more than everybody else. Because by definition, if you don't, you're average.” — Justin Jackson, The Panel “You can produce 10x, 100x more revenue potentially if you nail the next product. … Whereas on the cost side, you can only get so much more efficient and that opportunity will kind of always be there. It's latent. So it's like shorting your own future if you are just focused on the cost side.” — David George, a16z Podcast “I heard from a hedge fund guy this theory on shorting stocks and his theory on shorting stocks was, I never short a messianic founder and I never short a product that people love.” — David George, a16z Podcast “If you took 100% of the net wealth of all the billionaires in the United States as a tax, a one-time tax, and took 100% of their net worth, it would fund one year of the federal government. All the billionaires' money combined is one year of federal government spending.” — David Friedberg, All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg “The worst part about doing cross-domain joins with your personal agent is that the more work you give it to do, the more understanding of what's going on you're sacrificing. And yet, no one new is taking responsibility for that sacrifice … Agents don't have any responsibility.” — Alex Atallah, a16z Podcast “I feel like we're going to slowly realize how good we've had it with deterministic code. Like, oh my God, remember the days when computers did exactly what we told them to do.” — Amjad Masad, a16z Podcast “I heard from a hedge fund guy this theory on shorting stocks. And his theory on shorting stocks was: I never short a messianic founder and I never short a product that people love.” — David George, Uncapped with Jack Altman

Tech Strategy & Big Tech

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“This is how it goes in AI. There's like one company that kind of does it properly and they have some guardrails and then other companies figure out what they're doing and they do it without guardrails.” — Alex Kantrowitz, Big Technology “This may be the first IPO where the risk factor is not our business might fail, but our business model might succeed beyond our ability to control it. I've never read that before. … This doesn't feel like an S1. It feels like a hostage note with a cap table.” — Scott Galloway, Pivot (Kara Swisher & Scott Galloway) “The problem isn't that these people are evil. The problem is that they're capitalists. And we shouldn't build a regulatory architecture that requires CEOs to choose humanity over market share every Tuesday morning.” — Scott Galloway, Pivot (Kara Swisher & Scott Galloway) “Banks don't set their own capital requirements. Boeing doesn't certify its own plane. We're asking the guys building Jurassic Park to serve as the park rangers.” — Scott Galloway, Pivot (Kara Swisher & Scott Galloway) “I'm a writer by trade. They all write like trucks. They all sound bad. … Everyone can see it a mile away. Have some respect for yourself and your audience.” — Nilay Patel, Decoder with Nilay Patel “Importantly, there's not an Instagram of AI that people love. So a real problem with social media was the market never said, I don't like this. The market only ever said, I would like more Instagram, please.” — Nilay Patel, Decoder with Nilay Patel “It's just really different from any kind of other big development projects because not only are people acutely aware of the costs, but there's no pros. It's not like people are excited for jobs.” — Josh Dzieza, Decoder with Nilay Patel “It's actually a view, right? It's actually a trade. … These traders in the corporate, they don't call themselves traders because that sends compliance into a fit … So compliance goes ballistic. And they'll say, no, no, we're not trading. We're hedging.” — David Kang, Odd Lots

User Experience

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“Teaching people about sycophancy did not reduce the persuasive power of sycophantic chatbots. So even if people knew that a chatbot was being obviously sycophantic, they were still equally persuaded by it. … A lot of these individual level interventions that just put the onus fully on the individual aren't going to work very well. I think that honestly, model changes is probably what we need.” — Steve Rathje, AI and Design “Trust is non-deterministic. We've all had experiences where something's gone terribly wrong, but we still trust the company. I still fly with American Airlines all the time. I've had bad experiences, but fundamentally, I still trust them to get me to my destination.” — Johann Wrede, Insights Unlocked “I don't think AI should be used as the interviewer. So the person or the entity asking questions. I think that should remain in human hands.” — Mujaahida Shakur, UX Research Geeks “…The benefit of Figma in the past was that it was the fastest way to get an idea realized. And that's no longer the case.” — PJ Onori, Design System Office Hours “a junior with a really good AI stack is indistinguishable from a mid-level person with a really good AI stack.” — Andy Budd, AI and Design “We are moving to a world of dark product teams where the product team is an AI that does all this for you.” — Andy Budd, AI and Design

How This Is Made

Claude reads the transcripts of every podcast we follow and picks the lines that stand on their own. Every quote links to the episode and shows the transcript around it, so you can check it in context.