Ben Thompson Writes Stratechery, a subscription newsletter analyzing the business strategy behind tech and media companies, and has built a reputation for framing how platfo...

“LLMs are literally the midwit of the center of the bell curve.”

Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · September 2026

Context

Thompson is talking about tech's habit of mistaking more data for certainty. He calls LLMs consensus mechanisms that sample from the middle of a probability distribution, and says they avoid the edges because the edge that holds brilliance also holds the crazy.

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Transcript

Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson Around 20:23 into the episode

Ben Thompson

But there's a reason those rockets never ran up. By the way, all things considered, they are underrated. We're a great team. They ran up against one of the greatest teams of all time. And this is why it was so devastating. That's a round one. That was the

Andrew Sharp

ultimate problem for Daryl, but it is what it is.

Ben Thompson

…that arises from more data. Just because you have more data doesn't mean you have all the data. And tech has always been susceptible to falling in love with data. Data definitionally is backwards looking. Like the LLMs want me to cite something when I'm saying something that's happening right now or prediction about the future because that's how they work. They are consensus mechanisms. Like LLMs are literally the midwit of the center of the bell curve. Like that's what they are. It is a probability distribution. They're going to pull from the center of the distribution. They're not going to pull from the edges. And why? If you pull from the edges, you might pull from the crazy side as much as you pull from the brilliant side.

Andrew Sharp

You can get things wrong and you're sort of engineered to be accurate.

Ben Thompson

So I said in that article, like this is clearly like half of the political divide. And it didn't like that because it's like, you're going to make people upset. Like, but look, that's literally what's happening. And the reason it's happening is because this is unfalsifiable. It's something that…

Andrew Sharp

Not only that, it's going to be a reality that informs how policy is crafted here. And I do have some insight because I'm in Washington, D.C. and have a bunch of friends who are in politics. And I remember, I think it was like nine months ago, I met with somebody who is consulting with a potential…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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