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LS Liron Shapira Liron Shapira Host of Doom Debates, the #1 show for high-stakes debate about AI extinction risk.

“I think the number one takeaway here is that this is the final nail in the coffin of the Ed Zitron camp, right? This idea that, like, look, sure, Anthropic is making tokens, but they're just borrowing from NVIDIA, right? And all these companies are just like in a circle, like throwing money at each other, and there's no value being generated. There were so many data points from the Anthropic S1 that put the nail in the coffin of that kind of speculation. So, number one is just like the cash flow. It was very clear that when Anthropic is serving a model, the margins on serving the model are huge. They were talking like 50, 60, 70, 80%, like depending on how you account for it. But like, yeah, they serve a model. They're printing money. Like, serving the model is printing money.”

Doom Debates! · AI Research & Frontier Labs · October 2026

“I think the number one takeaway here is that this is the final nail in the coffin of the Ed Zitron camp, right? This idea that, like, look, sure, Anthropic is making tokens, but they're just borrowing from NVIDIA, right? And all these companies are just like in a circle, like throwing money at each other, and there's no value being generated. There were so many data points from the Anthropic S1 that put the nail in the coffin of that kind of speculation. So, number one is just like the cash flow. It was very clear that when Anthropic is serving a model, the margins on serving the model are huge. They were talking like 50, 60, 70, 80%, like depending on how you account for it. But like, yeah, they serve a model. They're printing money. Like, serving the model is printing money.” — Liron Shapira, Doom Debates!

Context

Near the end of the episode, Robert Wright mentions the AI-bubble skeptic Ed Zitron, and Liron circles back to an earlier discussion of Anthropic's IPO filing (the S1). He argues the filing's numbers undercut the claim that AI money is just circulating among companies without creating value. The margin figures are his account of what the filing said, with a hedge about how they are calculated.

Listen to the episode → More from Liron Shapira → More AI Research & Frontier Labs quotes →

Transcript

Doom Debates! Around 1:15:21 into the episode
Liron Shapira

…with what I'm seeing day to day. Like I'm seeing my own productivity increase massively day to day. So this idea that this potentially does not net out in a productivity increase, I think is, you know, there's no way. Like there's clearly the only question is how many percent are we talking about?

Robert Wright

I agree. Yeah, I don't know. Edzitron, I'm not sure. There was a very

Liron Shapira

interesting stat, although circling back to the Anthropic IPO discussion, right? The S1, and you mentioned Edzitron. I think the number one takeaway here is that this is the final nail in the coffin of the Edzitron camp, right? This idea that, like, look, sure, Anthropic is making tokens, but they're just borrowing from NVIDIA, right? And all these companies are just like in a circle, like throwing money at each other, and there's no value being generated. There were so many data points from the Anthropic S1 that put the nail in the coffin of that kind of speculation. So, number one is just like the cash flow. It was very clear that when Anthropic is serving a model, the margins on serving the model are huge. They were talking like 50, 60, 70, 80%, like depending on how you account for it. But like, yeah, they serve a model. They're printing money. Like, serving the model is printing money. And then another crazy stat is they're embedded in, I think, half the Fortune 500 companies, something like that, but they're only getting like a 0.1% of these companies' budgets. So they're still getting like a tiny fraction of the company's budgets. I can tell you they're getting a lot more of that of the budget of my company, okay? Like with my thousand dollars a day or whatever. So this is their 0.1%. So I don't think I have to be nostronous here to be like that 0.1% is going to grow. Okay. This is why Anthropic is a good buy at 1.5 trillion or whatever it is.

Robert Wright

Yeah. Now, there could be a crash. I mean, you know, the because for one thing, a lot of people are investing on vibe, and those are the kinds of people who can freak out. And look, the whole financing thing of the infrastructure, it is more and more reliant on debt. Interest rates are going up.…

Liron Shapira

Oh, yeah. Let's see. Yeah, at doomdebates.com.

Robert Wright

Give some love to Pause AI, including Pause AI US. Holly Olmer Singh and/or other pause AIs in other countries.

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

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“As of a year ago, I had this theory when people were saying, where's the productivity growth? … But I had this theory that what was actually happening was that the workers who had figured out how to use AI weren't telling their bosses. They were just spending their day at the beach, right? And so they're still getting as much money as they were to do the same amount of work they were doing. So the productivity growth doesn't show up unless you count beach time.” — Robert Wright, Doom Debates! “It's always been my experience throughout most of my life where I'm like, yeah, this is like the peak of my brain. I'm understanding this with so much nuance. Like computers are so far from being able to do this. And then literally in a period of months, I still remember it was March this year, right? … my entire career entered a completely new phase where now I don't write code at all. I just tell AI to write code. Like I've become a product manager. And of course, the AI is on my heels being its own product manager.” — Liron Shapira, Doom Debates!