The Ledger, every show

“And now they all have the silver bullet excuse, right? Ah, it's AI. Right, and I know this for a fact, because number one, I talk to them, but number two, I know this for a fact, because AI until, like, literally until, like, December, right, was not actually …”

“DJI is the most widely used drone today by many, many large, you know, American customers, including the United States Department of Defense. Right. The DOD's primary drone supplier is DJI.”

“The fact that political violence is like an all-time low in Western society is something that people really don't talk about.”

“The current models are getting better faster at such a rate that if you are running an NVIDIA, if you're running an NVIDIA inference chip today that's three years old, you're making more money on it today than you did three years ago. Because the pace of impro…”

“The agent hiring the people, which of course is going to happen, right? It's obviously going to happen.”

“How are we going to apply AI in education? The answer is we're not because it's a literal government monopoly. It is never going to change the end, and there is nothing to do. By the way, you can create an entirely new school system. Like that's the one thing …”

“The tech industry is more centralized in Silicon Valley than it has been in its entire existence, and I think it's AI.”

“There are sitting United States politicians in, in serious offices who like literally faked Vietnam War records.”

“Einstein was the exact opposite of a moral exemplar. Einstein was Stalinist. Like, Einstein was, like, a full-on, like, Einstein was pro-Stolic, like, not even just pro-communist, was actually, like, pro-Stalin, and Einstein thought, but, like, American democr…”

“One of the things that we, that was discovered during that process that I didn't know is that in prior union agreements with the dock workers, they already had a one-to-one ratio of people sitting at home doing nothing to every productive dock worker as a cons…”

“I think the result of it was, I think it was a result of 80,000 dollars of ad spend by the Russians in, in the relevant period of the election. It was like a total of like a 140,000, but during the actual run of the election, it was 80,000 dollars, and so the …”

“The AI version of that is, you know, Eliezer Yadkowsky's version of that is we must bomb data centers. Like, if there's a data center that we think might take off, like, if the training run starts to go too well, like, we need to send in the Air Force and be b…”

“For every doc worker in the U S actually works on the doc doc, there's actually somebody sitting, there's a doc worker sitting at home doing nothing, still getting paid.”

“The California high-speed rail project. Which is now ten billion, it's over ten billion in spend with zero ground broken.”

“There were both there were other big banks that wanted to buy SVB, and there were private equity firms that wanted to buy SVB, and basically do a private sector bailout requiring no, no taxpayer involvement, and the FDIC actually blocked those also.”

“It's an empirical observation that the faculty at American universities is now radically polarized on in, in one political direction. Radically, and we could also post a graph on this maybe, which is the numbers are like really radical. There's fields in which…”

“Sitting here today in 2023, the following is true. More people in the world have computers in the form of smartphones specifically and internet access than have electricity or running water in their homes.”

“Einstein, unfortunately, and I know Einstein's, a lot of people consider Einstein to be a hero, not just scientifically, but morally, and the movie paints him as a, both a scientific and a moral hero, which is kind of the received wisdom. A little bit of an is…”

“Tesla has been climbing the ladder on self-driving car functionality capability. They do new software releases, push live to car at night anytime they want. Those new releases are not being tested by any federal, the federal, you know, it's a, whatever it's no…”

“Anthropics thread said they trace the, they trace some black male behavior to literally to the AI doomer literature that they, that, that it was in the training data.”

“The federal government is down. Estimates are as much as 400,000 workers in the federal government since Trump took office the second time.”

“The AI coding thing, you know, really hit critical mass and the world's best programmers, right? Including like Linus Torvalds, you know, for the first time over the holiday break, basically said, yeah, AI is now coding better than we can.”

“If you look at what's happening with, ah, the price of AI is falling much faster than Moore's Law.”

“The EU passed this bill called the AI Act, I don't know, whatever, two years ago, and it basically has killed AI development, and, well, it's actually killed AI development in Europe to a large extent and then it even, it is so draconian that even, Even big Am…”

“One of the things that they've found over the years is if the leader is more than one standard deviation of IQ away from The followers, it's a real problem.”

“So anyway, it, it's gonna do reasonably well because, you know, because it has Leo, but it's still gonna lose like a hundred, hundred and twenty million dollars are, you know, the estimates that I'm hearing, which is, you know, a pretty, pretty big loss you kn…”

“In this last couple weeks with the new version of Sora and a lot of these other new things that are coming out, AI is going to make a whole new kind of filmmaker possible to exist for the first time, which is the filmmaker with no visual skill, right, or acces…”

“The books are coming out now on the 20, 24 campaign and it's becoming clearer and clearer. Like all the Kamala people now greatly regret that they didn't put her on, on more long form podcasts.”

“If you talk to the LPs now, increasingly they are focusing capital either on the scale platforms or they're focusing capital into, you know, this very specific kind of early stage seed angel strategy. And their interest in funding the department of store equiv…”

“As of today, they have only literally dispersed 0.4% of the chip sacks money to any of these companies.”

“There is this very interesting asymptotic kind of thing that's happening right now where, you know, two years ago, there was one, you know, LLM that was like way out ahead of everybody else's, which was opening eyes. And sitting here today, there's like six th…”

“A lot of the people who did this kind of work, the sort of trust and safety or censorship work at the internet companies had just rotated and joined the AI companies.”

“They put out a revised financial statement the summer after they defenestrated Jack Ma, and they announced that the Jack Ma, Jack and his CFO, their voting shares had been reassigned to a set of, I think it was four unnamed other People's Republic of China cit…”

“Xiaomi is one of the big Chinese makers of smartphones. They now have a car. And it's like sort of the equivalent of a Porsche Cayenne SUV. But it's like 20,000 dollars, and it's really good.”

“There's a meme coin with no underlying value that four days ago was worth nothing and is now worth three hundred million dollars, right?”

“Google invented the transformer in 2017 and then put it on a shelf. And then startups came in and sort of picked up that idea and ran with it, OpenAI and now Anthropic and others and many others now. And then as a consequence, Google has now been forced to rea…”

“So it is a threshold of a hundred million dollars.”

“In the peak years up to half of total tax receipts for the state of California come from the top thousand individual taxpayers. Which is basically all tech.”

“Both VR and AR, like, it's crystal clear. The known killer apps right now are games, like, by a very wide margin.”

“They did not approve a new nuclear power plant designed for 40 years.”

“Facebook got just tons of, you know, it's just like this is the most trivial, stupid, useless, you know, thing that doesn't matter, you know, Facebook, there was almost a deal for Facebook to get bought by Yahoo early on, and I remember a certain very prominen…”

“Guess who for those accreditation agencies, guess what they are composed of. They are composed of the incumbents. So the Northeast, you know, college, whatever accreditation council is like, literally it's board of trustees is all of the top Northeastern, you …”

“So what they did was they put in place a legal regime called Dodd-Frank and a bunch of other regulations that had the result, you know, sitting here 15 years later of the too big to fail banks are now much larger than they were before. So the exact opposite. Y…”

“Well, we learned something very valuable over the last few days with a new Google image generator, which is we learned out that the Nazis were actually quite diverse. It turns out there were lots of black and brown Nazis in stormtrooper uniforms in, in the str…”

“There are various attempts by companies to do like AI detectors now. You know, was this text written by AI and schools are actually starting to use that. And I think we can definitively, that will not work. Yeah. So what we can tell, there's already been cases…”

“Depending by field up to 75% of the research in a lot of fields doesn't replicate.”

“Somewhere between like a third to on, on the low end, like you know, a quarter to a third and on the high end, like up to two thirds or three quarters of all published research doesn't replicate.”

“There are multiple large institutions too that have been identified in public, Stanford and Yale, that now have more administrative staff than they have students.”