YouSaid · the spoken record

Noah Smith

lines on the record: 110
first: 2025-08-04
most recent: 2025-08-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“If we as podcasters encourage one researcher to join Meta, I mean, what's the. How do you put a price on that? Yes. And this has been a phenomenal conversation. No, Ed Torkesh, thank you so much for coming on. It's been great.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, people have been saying, like, look, the messaging could have been better or whatever. I mean, I think it's just much better to have worse messaging or something, but then not sleepwalk towards losing. Also, if you just think about like, okay, if you pay an employee $100 million and they're a great EA researcher and they make your compute, you're training or your inference 1% more efficient. Zuck is spending on the order of like $80 billion a year on compute. That's made 1% more efficient.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Awesome. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that will have to be unlocked before most of the economic value of these models can be unlocked. And so by the point they're generating hundreds of billions of dollars a year or maybe trillions of dollars a year, they will have had to come up with this thing which will be a bigger advantage in my opinion than brand network effects.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are we back at the grock dooming thing? Oh no. Well, what's another example? Xer Xerox this thing. Xerox is just one company that makes a copier Not even the biggest, but everybody knows that a Xeroxane. And so ChatGPT gets massive rents from the fact that everyone just says, I'll use AI. What's an AI? ChatGPT. I'll use it. And so like brand is the most important thing.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure that's a network effect, but brand like OpenAI, ChatGPT, is the Kleenex of AI in the Kleenex is actually called a tissue, but we call it a Kleenex because there was a company called Where are you going with it?”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, it has to do with entry bearers. Basically, it's all about entry bearers. It's the question of if I just decide to plunk down this amount of money. So if the only entry barrier is fixed costs, I'd say we have. Such a good system for just loaning people money That's not going to be that big a deal. But if there's entry barriers that have to do with if you make the best AI, it gets even better. So, you know, why enter? That's the big question. I don't actually know the answer to that question.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've been surprised. So, you would expect over time as the cost of competing at the frontier has increased, you would expect there to be fewer players at the frontier. This is what we've seen in the semiconductor companies, right? I guess more expense up over time. There's now maybe one company that's at the frontier in terms of global semiconductor manufacturing. We've seen the opposite trend in AI where there's more competitors today than there were a year ago, even though it's gotten more expensive. I don't know where the equilibrium here is, because the cost of training these models is still much less than the value they generate. So I think it'll still make sense to 10x the amount of investment, but somebody new to come into this field and 10x the amount of investment. Do you have a take on where the equilibrium is?”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, how could this have turned out differently if the aspects had learned this and then had like told the Incas? I mean, they weren't in contact, but if there was some way for them to communicate, like, here's how you take down a horse. I think what I would like to see happen between the US and China, basically, is like the equivalent of some bread telephone during the Cold War, where you can communicate, look, we notice this, especially when AI becomes more integrated with the economy and government, et cetera. Like we notice this crazy attempt to do some sabotage. Like, be aware that this is a thing they can do, like train against it, et cetera.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. I mean, it was like literally the exact same playbook. The crucial thing that went wrong is that at this point in the 1500s, we actually don't have modern guns. We have archivistes. But the main advantages that the Spanish had was they had horses. And then secondly, they had armor and it was just incredibly, you'd have thousands of warriors if you were fighting on an open plane, the horses with armor will just like trounce all of them. Eventually, the Incas had this rebellion and they learned they can like roll of rocks downhills and the rebellion was moderately successful, even though it's eventually we know what happened.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More so, like the way that the East India Company was able to play different provinces in India off of each other. And ultimately, at some point, you realize, okay, like they control India. And so you could have a scenario like, okay, think about the conquistadors, right? A couple hundred people show up to your border and they take over an empire of 10 million people. And this happened not like once. It happened two to three times. Okay, so why was this possible? Well, it's that the Aztecs, the Incas weren't communicating with each other. They didn't even know what the other empire existed. Whereas Cortez learns from the subjugation of Cuba and then he takes over the Aztecs. Pizarro learns from the subjugation of the Aztecs and takes over the Incas. And so they're able to like just learn about, okay, you take the emperor hostage and then this is the strategy you employ, et cetera.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I genuinely don't know. Yeah, I think it's like possible that there could be some positive, some, like not like a nuclear weapon where both countries can just adopt AI. And there is this dynamic where if you have higher inference capacity, not only can you deploy AIs faster and you have more economic value that's generated, but you can have a single model learn from the experience of all of its copies. And you can have this basically broadly deployed intelligence explosion. So I think it really matters to get to that discontinuity first. I don't have a sense of at what point if ever is it treated like the main geopolitical issue that countries are prioritizing? I also from the misalignment stuff, the main thing I worry about is the AI playing us off each other rather than us playing the AIs off each other. I mean AI.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One, yeah, or even in that case, maybe that actually is maybe that's closer to how I think about it, but then you need so many complementary innovations. So internal combustion engines that I think invented in the 1870s, Drake finds the oil well in Pennsylvania in the 1850s. Obviously, it takes like a bunch of complementary innovations before these two things can merge before they're just using the oil for the kerosene to light lamps. But regardless, so if it's this kind of process, it was the case that many countries achieved industrialization before other countries. And like China was dismembered and went through a terrible century because the Qing dynasty wasn't up to date on the industrialization stuff in much smaller countries are able to dominate it. But that is not like we developed the atom bomb first and now we have decisive advantage.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They dominate. I think it's less like the nuclear bomb where there's a self contained technology that is so obviously relevant to specifically this like offensive capability. And you can say, well, like there's nuclear power as well. But neither of those nuclear power is just like this very self-contained thing. Whereas I think intelligence is much more like the industrial revolution where there's not like this one machine that is the industrial revolution. It is just this like broader process of growth and automation and so forth. So that being...”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You mentioned the atomic bomb, and we also mentioned off camera that you don't think the nuke is a good comparison for what happens, how does it play out when a lab figures out AGI? What then happens? Is there a huge advantage if one country has it first? Or if one lab has it?”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And didn't say I'm up of a thing where I think previously he said that AI will take jobs. How do we deal with this? And then didn't he recently say something at a panel where I think President Trump is correct that AI will like create jobs or something? I don't think in the long run you believe this”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, actually, I think in that way, obviously, the Chinese system in the US is no different. Although it has been interesting to see that whenever, I don't know, we've noticed the way that different lab leaders have changed their tweets in the aftermath of the election. I mean, also more both.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. There's another, which is that each province is like just pouring a bunch of money into building their own competitor to BYD in this potentially wasteful way. That distributed competitive process. It seems like the opposite of nationalization to me. Like when people imagine EGI nationalization, I don't think they're saying like Montana will have their AGI and Wyoming will have their AGI and they'll all compete against each other. I think they imagine that all the labs will merge, which is actually the opposite of how China does industrial policy.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, that's kind of the relationship American companies have the U.S. government as well I mean, somewhat. Also, the big difference is what do we mean by nationalization? There's one thing which is like there's a party cadre who is”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think it's politically plausible, especially given this administration. I don't think it's desirable. First, I think it would just drastically slow down AI progress because look, this is not 1945 America and also building an atom bomb is like a way easier project than building AGI.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This goes back to your theory about the phones are destroying us. That is an update towards the idea that AI is not on this trend to be this. Super useful assistant that's helping us already make the short process of training much faster, and this will just be this feedback loop and exponential. I have other independent reasons. I'm like, I don't know, I'm like 20% that like will have some sort of intelligence explosion.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. It was like one of his three big unhobblings. Then onboarding in terms of the workplace. And then I think the final one was computer use. Look, one out of three, and it was a big deal. So I think you got some things where I could get something's wrong, but yeah.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just knowing a reasoning model works, and then you can use it and you see, oh, what is the latency? Like, how fast is the outputing tokens? That will teach you how big is the model? Like, you learn a lot just from publicly using a model and knowing a thing is possible. He has been right in one big way, which is he identified three key things that would be required to get us from GPT-4 to BBAGI kind of thing, which was being able to think, so test time, compute, onboarding, which you talk about.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think this is actually an interesting trend in the history of science where some of the scientists who are the smartest in thinking about the progression of the atom bomb or progression of physics just had these like ideas about the only way we can sustain this is if we have one world government i'm talking about after world war ii there's no other way we can deal with this new technology i do think relative to the technological predictions i think the main way in which he's been wrong is that it didn't take some like breaking the servers in order to learn how 03 or something works it was just public just see you being able to use the model you talked about”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Leopold is just pronouncing a whole bunch of pronouncements from the couch. He released this big situational awareness. How long ago was that a year and a half I would say that already most of the things he predicted have been invalidated or made irrelevant. Last year and a half, and especially in terms of all the stuff about competition with China. It turns out filtration was able to get them a whole lot of things that he never predicted. It turns out that so many of the things other than just the idea that AI would keep getting better, which he predicts and a lot of people predict. But then I feel like a lot of the specific predictions about US capabilities and Chinese capabilities and what would be the bottlenecks and what would be the things that, you know, here's how That has all been proven wrong”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Leads into another thing that I've thought about, which is how poor our track record. Making predictions about the future of AI has been. The first time you and I hung out, I don't know if you remember this, was with Leopold.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think there's like a chance that, oh, continual learning is also like, you know, I had this whole theory about it, it's so hard, and how do you slot it in? And they're like, I fucking trained it to do this. Like, whatever you're talking about here.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right now, we're basically riding the wave of this extra compute. That's why AI is getting better every year mostly in terms of the contribution of new algorithms. It's a smaller fraction of the progress that's explained by that. So if we've just got this rocket, like how high will it take us? And does it get in space or not? If it doesn't, then we just have to rely on the algorithmic progress, which has been a. Yeah.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's for training and yeah, for the labor that will be like the inference will also use the same inference, same bucket of compute. It is the case that for the amount of compute it costs to train a system if you like set up a cluster to train a system, you can usually run 100,000 copies of that model at typical token speeds on that same cluster. That's still obviously not like billions. But if we've got all this compute to be training these huge systems in the future, it would still allow us to set stain a population hundreds of millions, if not billions, of AIs. At that point, maybe obviously we'll still need one more AIs.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And by the way, when I was writing that comparative advantage post and I was thinking about AI specific aggregate constraints, resource constraints, that's what I was thinking of actually. That expansion of compute has to slow down.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, basically, the progress in AI that we've seen over the last decade has been largely driven by stupendous increases in compute. So compute used on training a frontier system has grown four x a year for, I think, like the last decade. And that just over four years is 160 eggs, right? So that's over the course of a decade, that's hundreds of thousands of times more compute, that physically cannot continue if you just like, okay, what would it mean right now we're spending 1.2% of GDP or something on data centers? Not all of that is retraining, of course, but what would it mean to continue this for another decade, for maybe five more years, you could keep increasing the share of energy that we're spending on training data centers or the fraction of TSNC's leading edge nodes wafers that we dedicate to making AI chips or even the fraction of GDP that we can dedicate to AI training. But at some point, you can't keep this 4x trend going a year. And after that point, then it has to just like come.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just this thing of reasoning is relatively easy in comparison to forget about robotics, which is just going to be evolution's spent billions of years trying to get like robotics to work. But there's other things involved with. Like tracking long run state of, you know, a lion can follow up, prey for a month or something, but these models can't do a job for a month. And these kinds of things are actually much more complicated than even reasoning. And where you've netted out is”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But so the thing about the average human is you can get the average human to not do that with the right consequences. And maybe AI, we haven't found the right reinforcement learning function or whatever to get them to not do.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's a good question. Do they hallucinate more than the average person? I think no less They get an hallucinate meaning, like. Getting something wrong, and when they push them on it, they're like, no, whatever. And eventually they'll accede if they're clearly wrong. I think they're actually more reliable than the average human being.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, the reasoning models still go off in these crazy hallucinations that they'll never admit were wrong and we'll just gaslight you infinitely on some crap it made up. Like just knowing truth from falsehood. I've met a couple humans who don't seem to be able to know truth from falsehood. They're weird. But O3 sometimes does this.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, so a lot of things we previously thought were hard have just been incredibly easy. So, whatever additional bottlenecks you are anticipating, whether it's this continual learning on the job training thing, whether it's computer use, this is just going to be the kind of thing we're in advance. It's like, how would we solve this? And then deep learning just works so well that we like, I don't know, try to train it to do that and then it'll work. The long timelines people will say, I don't know, there's a sort of longer argument. I don't know how much to bore you with this. But basically, the things we think of as very difficult and requiring intelligence have been some of the things that machines have gotten first. So just adding numbers together, we got in the 40s and 50s. Reasoning might be another one of those things where we think of it as the apogee of human abilities. But in fact, it's only been recently optimized by evolution over the last few million years, whereas things like just moving about in the world and having common sense and so forth and having this long-term memory, evolution spent hundreds of millions, if not billions of years optimizing those kinds of things. So those might be much harder.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, I'm just wondering what it is. Like when you have a checkout clerk, right? That checkout clerk wouldn't look at an IMO problem and be like, but then you have a checkout clerk and the checkout clerk, you're like, okay, so you put the thing on this shelf and therefore someone has looked for it and didn't find it, so something else must have happened. But I think a reasoning model.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can't get to goal either, but I don't think I can reason as well as Mac Olympia, at least in the relevant domain. I agree that reasoning is not just about mathematics. This is true of any word you come up with. Like the zebrow, what about the thing that is a mixture of a zebra and a giraffe, and they have a baby? Is that a zebra still? I agree there's edge cases to everything, but there's a general conceptual category of zebra, and I think there's like a general conceptual category of reasoning.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The solution this way. Algorithmically, I have an okay idea of what a reasoning model does that the non reasoning models don't. But in terms of how does that map to a thing that we call reasoning, what is the definition of what it means to reason that these people are using, the operational definition here? Because I don't understand that myself.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just wasn't trained that much on Mathencoin problems. So, like, it didn't have whatever meta circuits there exist for how do you backtrack? How do you be like, wait, but I'm on the wrong track? I got to go back. I got to pursue the solution this way.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One, I think it's GBT3 can technically do a lot of things GPT 4 can, but GBT4 just does it way more reliably. And I think this is even more true of reasoning models relative to GPT-4.0, where 4.0 can solve math problems and, in fact, like modern day 4.0 has been probably trained a lot on math end code, but the original GPT-4.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The website? Oh no. This podcast got silly. But anyway, I guess the point is that. The idea of a humanity that just keeps increasing in numbers and spreading out to the galaxy, I don't see a lot of evidence that is in our future and that we have to go to great lengths to make sure that future is compatible with AGI because I don't think it's happening in any case. AGI or none.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm saying, like, as long as you can get your why did humans perpetuate the human species, it was not because they wanted to see the human species perpetuated. It was because it's like, oop, I had sex and there came a baby. And that's done. We've severed that. That is the end. We did not evolve to want our species to continue”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No. I also don't think TikTok is unique in destroying human race. I think that interacting online instead of interacting in person, that's a great money. That's a great silver. How do you make your money go ahead? I agree. We're all making money destroying our species. You don't think we get isolated to dating?”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do things so far there's been a lot of negative effects from widespread TikTok use or whatever that we're still like learning about. Somewhat optimistic that. The long run, there's some optimistic vision here that could work. Because Right now Impossible for Steven Spielberg to make every single TikTok. Directed in a sort of really compelling way that's like genuine content and not just Video games at the bottom and some music video at the top. Genuinely be possible to give every single person their own dedicated Steven Spielberg Incredibly compelling, belong narrative arcs that include other people they know, etc. Oh, yeah. Long run, I'm like, maybe TikTok is like the best possible medium.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, no, it's a phone. I mean, we'll know the pill and other things, like women's education, whatever, like lowered fertility quite a bit, but some countries were still at replacement level, some were still around replacement level, but the crash we've seen since everybody got phones is epic and is just unbounded. The human race... Does not have a desire, a collective desire to perpetuate itself. Yes, we're going to get lonely, but we'll have company through AI and through the internet, social media until there's just a few of us and we dwindle and dwindle. But yeah, I mean, like technology has already destroyed the human race and basically UBI is just like keeping us around on life support for a little while while that plays out”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of course, I mean, this discussion may be academic because I believe that you said that we got phones in the world look the same. I mean, no, it doesn't. Phones have destroyed the human race. Like the fertility crash that's happening all around the world, nobody has replacement level. Fertility is going far below replacement everywhere because of technology. Is that the focus?”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The reason I favor UBI is like this thing where in a future world with explosive growth, we're going to see so many new kinds of goods and services that will be possible that are not available today. And so distributing just like a basket of goods is just inferior to saying, oh, if we solve aging, here are some fraction of GDP. Go spend your tens of millions partly on buying this aging cure, whatever this new thing that AI enables, rather than here's a food stamps equivalent of the AGI world that you can have access to.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Had the bear case for UBI was something around like COVID as an example. You gave people a bunch of money, and what do they go do ride to the streets? I'm teasing. But are people going to use that money in an effective way? I mean, that was literally what happened.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do think it's important to point out in advance basically it would be better if we just bit the bullet about AGI so that instead of doing redistribution by expanding Medicaid and then Medicaid can't procure all the amazing services that AI will create, it would be better if we just said, look, this is coming and I'm not saying we should do a UBI today, but like if all human wages go below subsistence, then the only way to deal with that is through some kind of UBI rather than if you happen to see OpenAI, you get a trillion dollar settlement, otherwise you're screwed.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Argument okay, sure, but that's true of a lot of jobs that exist now. A lot of jobs that exist now. I'm not sure what university professors, there's a lot of those jobs, or like credit rating agencies, or there's a lot of things where probably we could ring out some significant TFP growth more or less by eliminating those things, but we don't because our politics is a clue geocracy. I think this is one of Tyler's points.”
2025-08-04 · a16z Podcast · Dwarkesh and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source