@zck
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I love this piece. It's from a 1930s Vanity Fair series called Impossible Interviews which featured imagined conversations between historical figures
The art-deco illustrations for the full series are incredible. I wish we still had political cartooning like this!
How can you trust somebody whose favorite season isn't fall? Literally nothing better than taking a zoom while walking on a crisp day
Bunch of guys irrelevant to AI: should we be in charge of regulating AI?
Self-driving is one of the only issues where the opposition is so craven and the value so obvious that I struggle to see any reason we should prefer shitty jobs to saving lives
I’ll be on @MTSlive today ~1 eastern (30 min from now)
Importantly, I’ll be joining on this first day of fall vest weather - which in my culture is a very propitious omen
We are live! Here's what we're covering today on MTS:
- Discussing Bernie Sanders' new legislation calling to BAN artificial superintelligence
- Redwood Research's latest analysis of Astra
- OpenAI Daybreak usage in Ukraine conflict
Followed by some amazing interviews:
- @zck talking about data centers as 2028 politics, the historic implications of frontier lab IPOs, and more
- @Noahpinion talking about the U.S.–China AI race at altitude — what winning means, chips/energy/allies, and China’s open-model export
- @boazbaraktcs of @OpenAI talking about AI's impact on mathematics, some recent price improvements for GPT-6 API, and much more
- @jeremiecharris + @harris_edouard of Gladstone AI talking about the coming discussion between Trump and Xi Jinping, as well as general thoughts on the geopolitics of AGI
- @wordgrammer talking about recent articles on AI, the question of whether or not AI will be banned, and more
@gpuemi + Steven Arellano co-founders of Wafer talking about their $40M Series A and what it takes to build AI that builds AI
- @sreeramkannan + @soubhikdeb of Eigen Labs talking about Yukon beating Google’s private quantum circuit in the open, and Gemma ~2x on Apple Silicon
- Rob Lefferts CVP at Microsoft Threat Protection, talking about how AI is changing the pace of cybersecurity
- @sarahehunt01 President & CEO of the Rainey Center, talking about where AI’s electricity comes from and how we can work to find even more of it in the coming years
- Rob Ferguson VP Tech & Strategy at Fireworks, talking about banning Anthropic Fable internally over data-access opt-in and the growing tensions between closed model APIs and proprietary data
- Alex Haro CEO of Hubble Network talking about Hubble's satellite network and their latest Series C
If history is any guide, there will likely be a Ralph Nader of AI who builds pro-consumer tooling and scalps a large legacy company
.@vkhosla thinks consumers will need a personal AI whose only job is to represent their interests against corporate AI.
"An AI that’s loyal to the consumer—not to a particular company, a particular product, a particular point of view—is going to be very, very important.”
Gmar chatima tova!
There’s a story I like (probably apocryphal) that relates to Yom Kippur:
Rabbi Eliezer famously told his students to repent one day before they die. When they reasonably pointed out that no one knows when that will be, he told them to repent today. A clarifying reminder as we go into a meaningful and easy fast
The political implications of the coming AI IPOs are somehow still underappreciated
Historically, each wave of wealth (railroads and steel, oil, finance, early tech, etc) was accompanied by a new class of people for whom politics was a way to compete for status and finance their convictions
AI is likely to follow the same path. If the major labs go public over the next year or so, their founders and early employees will gain access to personal liquidity extraordinary in both its breadth (the number of employees) and depth (the absolute size of the wealth). Beyond simply financing candidates, they will be sustaining institutions and underwriting political projects for decades
There need not be a coherent set of “AI politics” for this to matter (in fact, I doubt there is one!). These people can disagree profoundly and politics will still proactively warp itself in their direction.
Whether you welcome this is a separate question. But the smart players in DC are building these relationships already
Chinese labs when we ask them to pace the frontier
Huawei Chair Eric Xu says Chinese AI researchers need to "increase the speed of development" to "see the dangers" of AI, contrasting with US slowdown calls (@eleanorolcott / Financial Times)
(Visit Techmeme dot com for the link and full context!)
One funny part about how DC works is that government often reaches for off the shelf policy in moments of crisis
So it stands to reason that Washington will likely discover an enormous appetite for biodefense immediately after a potential biological attack
But today, the only available policy solution is restricting AI, which is far easier than deploying biodefenses post hoc
We should probably have more options — and certainly more effective ones — ready before then
Zak Kukoff retweeted
More capable models will introduce increased biological risk. The magnitude is fiercely debated, the direction is not.
We need more resilient biodefense.
It’s probably bad for America - and certainly bad for our tech advantage - that effective altruists and accelerationists have so neatly mapped to Dem/Republican
Absolutely cursed blunt rotation
Axios: Ex-Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and former Trump White House adviser Steve Bannon will join forces at an event on Tuesday to push for human-controlled AI.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Jacob Coxon stated he was invited to the event but did not agree to go.
x.com/hilbertspaess/…
axios.com/2026/09/14/cox…
