Tech Strategy & Big Tech · August 2026
Alex Kantrowitz had just laid out three possible outcomes for AI: it works and it is good, it works and it is bad, or it does not work. Roy pushes back that the data-centre financing story is independent of all three, then breaks off to object to the framing itself. His complaint is not that curing disease is impossible but that it keeps getting offered as a reason to like AI with no concrete route to it attached.
Transcript
That's a good kind of like corollary. Is there a soft landing? Is there no landing? I think that's like a good way to think about it. And what do those different scenarios look like is I think, I mean, I think we're going to be talking a lot about that, especially as it's August 21st and Anthropic is supposedly coming out to the market next month. I think we're going to start seeing a lot more concrete numbers assigned to this whole story.
Yeah. For what it's worth, I just want to state my perspective on this because I have been thinking about it over the past couple of weeks. And then we're going to get to the Anthropic and IPO and revenue numbers and open AI revenue numbers. I'm starting to think there's really only three true outcomes for AI. Like one is AI works and it's good, right? So it leads to economic prosperity and like a rollback of disease. The other is AI works and it's bad. So like we start to see more of like the rogue hacking activity that we've seen and it gets in the hands of bad actors and it leads to like bioweapons and things like that. Or the third possible outcome is that AI doesn't work. And I've really struggled. Like the idea of this soft landing, I struggle to see it. Like if AI doesn't work, there's been so much money tied up into this system that there's going to be some form of crisis. So I really see it as, and I'm going to, I think I'll write about this on big technology when I get the newsletter back up and running, probably like post-Labor Day. But I really see it as three true outcomes here. What do you think about that?
I'm going to be your editor and say that I vehemently disagree with your framing of three possible outcomes. Because everything we have been talking about is completely independent of the three scenarios that you outlined. If it works and it's good or it works and it's bad, actually it can be totally independent of will data centers work over the next few years and be able to actually make bondholders whole on their because it could work over a longer time period. It could work, but then the actual compute requirements because of innovation dramatically decrease and then. Actually, the data center story fails, but AI is either curing diseases or hacking into all of our bank accounts. Like, so I think they're two very, very separate things, the story that we're talking about and those possible outcomes. I think like independent or separate from the whole financing story, I think, yes, those are three outcomes that kind of cover the entirety of anything. And like, but uh, I also, the curing diseases thing, I'm kind of tired of. And I say this only because that feels like such a crutch that Dario and everyone just keeps falling back to just to be like, guys, please like us. We'll cure disease. We haven't outlined any possible way of like any concrete things that actually are going to get us there, but you should like AI because it's going to cure disease. Just drive.
Okay, so first of all, we'll add a fourth potential outcome was that AI works, but it works too slowly and it causes financial collapse. There we go. There we go.
Now I'm good.
But I'm very, I very much disagree with you about this disease thing. I mean, AlphaFold, I know it's been kind of talked about forever, but like some of these personalized healthcare examples that you're getting, you know, maybe it's not cure, it could be managed. They're very, very difficult to argue with. And I'm personally like, I think that it could be very big in a way that, and the amount of focus that's going into it within the labs, to me, I think it's, it's not worth, you know, sort of waving away.