You're watching TBPN. Today is Monday, September 8th, 2026. We are live from the TBPN Ultradome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital.
You know what time it is, John?
Ramp.com time. Time is money. Save both. Easiest corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.
I need my countdown. There it is. Road to Christmas, 107 days.
December 25th flying by today.
107 days. Time is flying till Christmas. The road to Christmas is going strong.
Start scoping out Christmas trees.
Once we get under 100, hopefully you've already planned.
Open season.
Does math matter? That's the big question. I was debating this with Tyler today. Lots of tension on the timeline over Navier-Stokes, the Millennium Prize math problem. There has been a Millennium Prize math problem that was solved before the Poincaré conjecture in the pre-AI era. These are very, very difficult math problems that all PhD mathematicians, all sorts of elite, the upper echelon of math, has been grappling with for years, and AI is starting to knock these down. Remember, last year was the year of the IMO gold medals from both Google DeepMind and OpenAI. We talked to Scott Woo about this, who's coming on the show later today. Huge race for cognition. And Scott made the prediction on TBPN early in 2025 that he believed that artificial intelligence would be able to achieve gold at the IMO, the International Math Olympiad, in 2025. And he was right. He nailed it.
Progress continued, but debate remained around 'cool calculator bro' is the critique. I mean, people just, they don't feel empowered by a system that's really good at math. It just, people already, a TI-83 can do more complex math than most people can do. And so, when you say, 'Oh, there's another level of math that you don't know about and you don't care about, and computers are good at it,' a lot of people, their eyes glaze over. And so, the bigger question here for me is all about the public perception. What actually matters here? I think they're cool benchmarks. I think they're interesting stories. Obviously, there's a lot of drama over this race. It feels like it was neck and neck. Now, there's a bunch of debates going back and forth with a mathematician who works at Google and a mathematician who's independent who worked alongside an Anthropic researcher who were both working on it. And they were apparently texting back and forth and going back and forth on did they steal the data, did they copy each other's, do they have different approaches? And so lots of different back and forth. And I think someone summed it up well by saying that these math models have discovered the hardest problem of advanced mathematics, which is authorship, contribution. Who actually did the work? Who gets lead left on the paper? But yeah, there was a drama last year, 2025, during the IMO. OpenAI and Google DeepMind and I believe Harmonic, the math AI lab that we had on the show last week, were all working on solving the International Math Olympiad. Remember, there's six questions. Question six, no AI model could solve. It was more complex, but both teams got a 35 out of 42 even though they only got five questions out of six right. That's good enough for gold. It's the bare minimum, but they did it. But there was a bunch of back and forth because OpenAI validated with former IMO gold medalists, while Google's result was graded by the official rubric that year, which is internal to the organization. We called it at the time. It's like they ran the fastest 100-meter sprint in the parking lot while the actual Olympics is going on in the stadium. And so, a lot of these are just, you know, vibe wars, races. Who does what, does it even matter? The interesting thing about Navier-Stokes is, does it matter, Tyler? You think it does? I'll debate you on this a little bit. It seems like it doesn't because the equations themselves are known. They're just not fully proven. Engineers and physicists already solve them numerically all the time for particular situations. So, air flow around a wing, you might have to use some of these equations. Weather models, water through a pipe. These are critical things. They are boring, but you can imagine that there would be cause for optimism. You know, better weather models save lives during hurricane season. Increased air flow across an airplane wing that could lead to more efficiency, longer ranges, cheaper flights, lower carbon emissions. There's a bunch of reasons why you could solve all that and be excited. But that's not actually what...
One of the reasons I'm excited. I believe we agreed last week that if anyone solved Navier-Stokes, Tyler would shave his head.
Oh, that's right. Didn't we do that? We said something.
No, no, that was about the details. We have details down. Get ready to shave your head. But yeah, this is a big moment.
Yeah, I think it was actually, it was if any AI progress happens at all, Tyler shaves his head.
But do you have a steel man for why this matters?
So, I think I agree that like, I don't think the breakthrough, you know, this new stuff that's going on is like practically super useful. I don't think you're going to feel it when you're on an airplane. You're not going to feel like less turbulence now because of this. But I think like, you know, these are like the most important open math problems. I think like these are more close to like, you know, a beautiful painting or something than like some like practical engineering breakthrough. Yeah. Like this is like pure math. This is like the, you know, this is the peak of the mountain of like...
Same month that AI solved this incredibly difficult math problem, I saw someone use ChatGPT to book a haircut. So equivalent. No, I mean in terms of the actual economy, the actual impact of these things, like practically using these tools for something that people enjoy, that's not just spinning their wheels, that's not just optimizing endless things, that's actually generative and moving things forward, not just defending against cyber attacks, doing...
Winsome says if he gets Millennium Prize, you all have to get bowl cuts.
Bowl cuts are interesting.
That's really, really ridiculous. You do get a million bucks, so you know, there's that. That's not nothing. But in the AGI race where trillions are being deployed, it is very minimal. But it sounds like cause for optimism that Navier-Stokes would improve air flow over a wing, something like that. But that's not really how it will work. Proving these equations is unlikely to actually have any measurable impact, and that's sort of agreed upon. And physicists have sort of chimed in with this take that this won't actually move the discipline of engineering forward at all. But it is a cool demo. Engineers already solve the equations numerically, as I mentioned. So clearly it matters for hype and vibes. Solving our math problems is a good heuristic to show how quickly models are progressing. But...
Yeah, and to me it just comes down to humans are able to use machines that humans built to further humanity's general knowledge.
Yeah. Yeah. It's good. And but I feel like benchmarks, and if you're just trying to measure AI progress, benchmarks and raw inputs and raw metrics of the model sort of do the same thing. Like the number of people who will be convinced that AI is progressing exponentially because they see this result, and then you look at the number of people that would be equally convinced of AI progress just by hearing, oh, there's, you know, 10 gigawatts coming online, or the new model has 10 trillion parameters, or it was trained with a billion dollars of compute, or something like that. Like...
The thing is, the average person is probably more impressed by Sora than by this.
Totally. Totally. It's way more visceral to actually see something. And that's why the weekend was very much Blender and people showing 3D renders and remodeling their houses and building small games and web games. And that feels much more like a, okay, breakthrough. People are having fun. They're vibe coding stuff, but they're also doing 3D modeling, which is like a new skill. We've had image generation, video generation, but there's something much more, I don't know, like grounded in watching a, from just a few images, watching a Blender model come to life. You can walk around inside of it, and it can be something that, you know, the model doesn't exist. I saw a few demos that were like a train, and it was like, 'Oh wow, it modeled this amazing train.' But there are perfectly modeled trains out there that you can just go grab from the internet. That's not that impressive. When you actually see your specific house or your car or something that doesn't already exist out there perfectly modeled, you're like, 'Wow.'
Sorry to interrupt. John Anderson says, 'Why are we only seeing the calendar days for Road to Christmas? Can we please get a weekdays and work days breakdown for Die Hard?' Yeah, we need a full screen graphic. So, let's work on that. Thank you.
Good comment. Good comment. Let's... yeah, so in terms of field, the AGI, computer use definitely one of these. Astra particularly faster at computer use for like really, really mundane things. Also just interesting to just have a very different interface to your computer, like configurations, all the things where you just have to dig through a bunch of settings, maybe set something on the command line, maybe find a control panel. You can just ask Codex or any AI agent to go and do it, and it'll just do it and come back to you.
One of the use cases that I'm excited about is getting, you know, when you get a parking ticket and then you're like, I got this parking ticket, I want to deal with it, and then it's like, well, the ticket is not in the portal yet. Being able to go into chat and say, hey, once this ticket is live in the system, please pay it. Parking. And so you can just forget about it. Yeah, parking ticket super intelligence. It is. It feels like we're close.
So yeah, I think that the Millennium Prizes will get solved or proved or, you know, delivered probably this year, if not like this week. It feels like all of the different labs are like, put a million dollars of inference on this, put a million dollars of inference on this. There's going to be a back and forth, and the labs are going to very quickly solve basically all of these problems. And then there'll be a search for new problems, but the conversation will move back to curing cancer almost certainly because that's the one that's so grounded. That's the one that's, you know, supposed to be tractable. It's been messaged from various labs for so long that people will want that. But there will be a longer flywheel from actually designing a cure for a specific cancer, running tests, seeing that it was effective. It's not, you can't do it with a million dollars of inference over a weekend, I think. But that's, my prediction is like the conversation will go back to biotech after we basically solve math, which is a crazy thing to say, but it feels like we're there. What do you think?
Yeah. All the conversation... Yeah. People say loudly stop. Yeah. Yeah. So one, the pharmaceutical industry has been curing forms of cancer or making progress against various forms of cancer for a very long time, and like, yeah, zero credit, worst reputation of any category of businesses on the planet. Yeah. And so I don't think that that's like this, like, you know, that I don't think that's the solution to sentiment around the technology industry.
Yeah. I know I saw and setting up this idea, like imagine how underwhelming it will be if any AI lab comes out and makes like 20% progress towards one specific type of cancer, right? That doesn't, that's not going to come across as like, oh wow, they cured cancer. It's like, okay, they sort of advanced understanding and maybe the treatment process and this type of thing is happening all the time. Anybody who's had a family member that's suffered from cancer has heard about, hey, there's this thing in trials, it's showing promising results, trying to get you into it or whatever. So that's happening all the time. Yeah. Right. And it's not going to suddenly change how people feel about the technology industry broadly.
No, it'll diffuse slowly and people will be back in like the what have you done for me lately? I mean, I just saw a reel where we were basically, the thrust was like, what has the pharmaceutical industry done for us lately? And I was like, GLP-1s like sort of cured obesity, like it's sort of a big deal. And for a lot of people, GLP-1s have been like a really, really key intervention in helping them fight diabetes, fight obesity, fight a whole bunch of knock-on effects that come from that. But it's not so much as like the speeding train was coming towards them and the industry pulled them off the tracks at the last second. And it's something where, okay, if you're living at a healthier weight over from your 30s to 60s, you will probably be healthier at 60, but you're not seeing that like it saved a life today. Like a GLP-1 has yet to get that type of credit. So, I don't know. It's going to be back and forth forever.
But anyway, in the meantime, somebody gave Astra a paintbrush, a robot, and a camera, and asked it to paint the Golden Gate Bridge in real life. It figured out how to control the robot and progressively got better throughout its attempts. The time lapse is sick. Here's a one-minute time lapse of, I don't know how to pronounce this, but his account painting the Golden Gate Bridge. How would you rate this, Jordi?
It appears better than I could do.
Better than you could do. How long are you giving yourself?
I'm saying at least by the later attempts.
Okay. The later attempts because it gets better. The first one was not quite there in my opinion.
Yeah. Somebody was talking about potential for a 3D printer boom with all the 3D modeling. The idea that you could design, I saw someone else designed a system where you can from a prompt go from prompt to Lego kit basically in one go. So it takes your prompt, whatever you gave it.
That's pretty solid. I think you could do better with enough time. I don't know how long that took, but it is impressive. It's a fun, fun demo, and again, it lives in the real world. It's not abstract at all. So you can just watch it work, watch it do the thing. And it's very, very interesting. A lot of times what's interesting is that when you're using these models, when they have to do a task like that, they will write a deterministic piece of software to execute it. Like I built a game where it was basically Tony Hawk, but you would play as a pelican on a bike and you'd be able to do tricks and backflips. And the game worked really well. It was fun. And it built it in Godot, the open-source framework for game development. And then I had it go and try and get the high score. And instead of actually using computer use to go and play it, it wrote a script that would play the game flawlessly. And it looked really mechanical because there was no variation in it at all, like watching a normal person play. But it did get a very high score. So I could see it doing the same thing where it generates the image and then maps the X and Y axes and the plan into code and then runs that. And so there's like this process of what the model can do. The model might also write software to do that same thing. So there's this iteration process there. Yeah. And of course people are looking at BachBench, which is the skill in writing a piece of music, and it is the actual meme for my robot. Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot take a blank canvas and turn it into a masterpiece? And I don't know, people are calling this a masterpiece, but they're pretty impressed with...
It was pretty good. I listened to this.
It was good. You're a fan of this lily pond four-part chorale in the style of Bach.
One of the best reactions to Astra's release last week was Josh, who's over at Sentry, his company was acquired by Sentry. He said after Astra's release yesterday, scoring 99% on ARC-AGI-3, I think it's become clear that AGI is no longer some distant hypothetical. About 15 minutes after the benchmarks came out, I booked the first flight I could find to Jackson Hole. And he goes on to say he's also looking into purchasing a horse. At this point, horses remain one of the only major transportation platforms with no API, no OTA updates, and no realistic path to MCP support. So glad to see more people getting into horses.
Getting into the horse game. Bull market in the equestrian lifestyle.
Yeah, it seems like he was joking, but a lot of people were like this unironically. I want to, you know, touch grass, I suppose.
Bojan posted, it's over. Our last line of defense has fallen.
Astra beat all 48 levels of the I'm Not a Robot game.
And this was crazy to watch. I wasn't sure if this was sped up. It seems like it's maybe sped up a little bit.
You have to play tic-tac-toe too. It's pretty good.
What? Yeah. The CAPTCHA defeat is going to be a whole new level of problems. At the same time, it feels like sort of remarkable that CAPTCHA is as effective as it is given how advanced text models are. And so if you, I mean, there's a world where it's, you know, indefensible. Was that Waldo Bench?
It was finding Waldo, not creating.
Finding Waldo. How are we doing on Waldo Bench? That's a good thing to test out for Astra.
Yeah, we got to see because I bet that there's a way to have Astra generate like the proper tiles because the problem when we...
Yeah. You can like iterate on it more.
Exactly. And the problem is that when we try and use an AI image generator to generate a Where's Waldo, it always gets the scale wrong, I feel like, or there's like bigger characters in the foreground.
Yeah, perspective is wrong.
The isometric display is what makes a Waldo. But there's probably ways to solve that with a little sprinkling in of deterministic code generation or Waldo generation. But Waldo Bench might be saturated now. I don't know. So it can't be really saturated. It's not a real benchmark. But lots of back and forth in the benchmark world. It does feel like we're getting to the end of it and the results are either big challenge like a math problem or just a cool demo like this.
Another good demo from somewhere Astra. He says, 'Astra and I are working on making my contact form as difficult as possible. You actually have to fight a battle in order to contact them.' That's amazing. This looks like I might try and contact some Where We After this. This is pretty fun. I like this. Yeah, the defeat of all of the CAPTCHAs is somewhat linked to the Instinct news. Did you see that this weekend, Jordi?
Oh, yeah. The Resi bans.
Yeah. So Instinct is a personal assistant AI focused on consumer. You link it with your email, your text messages, and we've seen a lot of investors sharing posts about how, for what it's worth, I would be surprised if anyone in the audience hasn't already heard of Instinct.
Yeah. And we talked about it before, but thank you for reintroducing it.
But I think it's worth explaining how it works because it does seem like it triggered some bans. There was one report of an individual who got banned from Resi because they were absolutely spamming to get reservations to restaurants. And there was another example of somebody who was at the US Open, was on the fan cam, and then wanted footage. And as the user experience would have been absolutely incredible, right? You're sitting there and you're like, 'Hey, I appeared on the screen for a moment. Can you go and find this?' I've had that idea so many times, like, 'Oh, go find someone on the fan.' But I think what Instinct was doing in the background was being absolutely relentless, and it seems like it was reaching out to hundreds of people aggressively, you know, following up, emailing the media contact, but they did wind up getting the video. Yeah, it worked.
And it was mutually beneficial. And you could imagine if the other side has agent intermediation and filtering and can process things that are spam-like, but there's actually a reasonable action to take that could make it through a filter and not actually annoy anyone on the other side. So that was probably a glimpse into the future and like a cause for optimism. I could see that being popular. But people are doing all sorts of stuff. The classic example is like go save money, get refunds, do that sort of stuff. But people are having fun with that. People are so many demos. This 3D website that pulls apart the male anatomy into 2,234 modeled pieces. I shared this with a friend who I was trying to explain in one video what to get their wheels turning. I think this is a good example. I wonder how much of this was individually modeled versus pulled from an existing model and then just animated, but certainly works well. Yeah, I wonder... Oh, Anish made a game that's fun. Astra's Opus 4.5 for games made Contra but photorealistic this weekend. Link to play below, and it's up on Versell. I wonder if we will get an actual boom in Steam. It feels like Steam will be going through something similar to the Kindle Direct Publishing store where they will be flooded with inbound. Didn't we see this with the app store too, where there were like a disproportionate number of app store submissions for Apple, like 10x'd.
Totally overwhelmed their systems.
But no real breakout apps. Like the top of the app store is still like ChatGPT and like free money or whatever.
Yeah, it's evolved a little bit. The company that I'm confused that's been consistently in the top 10 is this company Vinted.
Pre-loved marketplace. Buy, sell, and buy secondhand clothes. People are buying clothes. It's true. Shopping app. Everyone needs clothes. So big TAM, you make it to the top of the store. But yeah, like you'll be able to vibe code a game. You'll be able to get it on Steam or, you know, in the app store. How do you get the distribution flywheel going? How do you innovate to actually break through? How do you make something that, you know, goes viral, gets traction? Because the long tail is going to get a lot longer. What do you think? I feel like for a lot of these games though, you should just put them on web because it's much more accessible. Not everyone has Steam. You have to actually download like a...
I feel like web games are still like not that fun.
There were some web games I was playing this weekend.
I played under... Did you play more web games this weekend or did you play more Oculus VR, MetaQuest VR when you had the VR headset for an unlimited amount of time, but let's call it a weekend?
Okay. I was probably playing more VR.
I was playing Call of Duty.
You played Call of Duty in VR?
How long? Like a couple hours?
Yeah, probably a few hours. Not bad. But I was playing... Well, when I was making a game too, this weekend on Astra, I spent a lot of time.
So, does that count as playing the game?
Can you drop it in the chat for everyone to play? I think, I mean, I do think that playing a game that's more you designed yourself or for a small group chat, it's the same thing as the images. Like the AI images I generate are not broadly beautiful, they're not going in the MoMA, but like they will often be funny to me and three other people, right?
Yeah, low TAM, but that's the beauty is that with lower cost you can go after lower TAM opportunities. And so I mean this happened, what, a couple months ago, know somebody sent us, I mean Jeremy Gon Simulator is the classic example. Someone sent us Jeremy Gon Simulator version two, which was very low TAM in the sense that it was just in jokes with me and a couple friends. And the long tail of these things will continue to flourish. And then of course people will use them in, you know, real businesses built on IP, built with distribution.
You know what time it is, John?
What time is it? Time for an ad. Console builds AI agents can automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets.
We got two trailers that hit the timeline. Let's start with Nathan Fielder.
And his new film featuring none other than Elizabeth Holmes.
Elizabeth Holmes filmed before she went to prison.
I don't have anything to deceive you on. Of course, I'm not deceiving you. I'm engaging with you as a human being. Why would I deceive you? There's no reason for me to do that.
How long is this being real right now?
The team is stoked. Looks beautiful. Good sound design.
Saw a post somebody saying it feels like I'm living in a simulation because this media product is like perfectly... You would think that a movie like this wouldn't get made by, I don't know, A24 specifically because it feels like the TAM is just like 20,000 people.
But the Theranos story was really big. Yeah, she was on the cover of Time magazine, I believe, and cover of major magazines. It was all over the news when it happened.
No, it's a lot bigger than you would...
The John Carreyrou book is just a fascinating read. It's a real page turner. And so I think a lot of people read the book. The adaptation of the actual play-by-play story, not the documentary, but the, what do they call it? Biopic, I guess. That I think did not break through in the same way. But it certainly continued to elevate her persona, and then the posting has kept her relevant. Like there's a...
Yeah, there was some speculation that maybe it was Nathan that got access to the account.
I completely disagree with that. I do not think that's all. I think that would violate some tenet of what it means to do a documentary. I mean, Nathan blurs lines all the time in terms of how he interacts with his subjects. So it's certainly possible, but I just don't think that's reasonable at all. I think they're her...
How much do we know outside of the trailer though? Like we don't know.
Well, this was leaked something like a year ago from a journalist who got the story, and it was widely denied that it was happening. And he was very upset that he wasn't getting enough credit for being correct here. He ultimately was. But yeah, all we know is that they filmed the documentary in the lead-up to her actually going to prison after sentencing. There was a pretty large gap between before when she had to report to the prison. She gets out in 2030. So coming up three years, four years away. And so I believe even in a week you can get a lot of footage if you're spending the full, you know, every day with someone. And then there were a number of visits to the facility by Nathan that were recorded, probably talking through glass or talking at a table, something like that. So I think some flexibility there. Maybe some phone calls, maybe some correspondence in the aftermath. But we don't know what I'm thinking.
This just becomes like a...
The problem is that he's already in jail. So the question is just what else does Nathan Fielder have in the can because he's obviously thinking years ahead since he filmed that exact scene in, I believe, 2022 or 2023. And so who knows? There's a rumor that he's secretly running a boy band right now. There's this rumor that there's a boy band that's popular on TikTok that's entirely invented by him as a boy. Yeah. Are you familiar with this?
I thought you were going to say Nathan Fielder is SD kit.
Yeah. So yeah, I don't know. I mean, these projects will emerge, and obviously they're taking longer and longer because they're bigger films now. But yeah, after The Rehearsal, it was hard to imagine how he would one-up himself.
And it feels like he may have done it.
He found a new tall mountain.
We're still, stay with us in the trailer zone. When we come back, we're going to be talking about artificial.
Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Just do it.
Artificial trailer dropped just this morning.
What is the image of the future that you see?
Wait, pause. Was that a Valkyrie?
So, the visuals are already incredible.
They really are. I'm pretty sure that's a Valkyrie. It might be a Vala.
No, because you can see the suspension, that front section.
What is the image of the future that you see?
We've created a machine that will solve the world's problems.
Gate check. Oh, the gate for sure.
We open Pandora's box together. The future's inevitable. Countries will fall. Industries are going to collapse.
The voice is still Eduardo Saverin. But the styling, and the crazy thing is I have that exact backpack.
I think I got it recommended by MKBHD.
To shepherd people into this new world.
Lots of cameos. Not cameos, but I'm so excited to see it.
It'll be interesting. It'll be interesting to see the takeaway. People in the chat are back and forth. Is it too soon? Is it unnecessary? Is it going to be something that, like The Social Network, is divisive but also oddly inspiring to a certain cohort of entrepreneurs? We'll see. We'll see what the reactions are.
Yeah. Do you think that was, do you think Hollywood took away any lesson from The Social Network in that they were trying to frame Mark Zuckerberg as this like generally, you know, troubled person, and then a lot of people came away feeling like, wow, I want to be like Mark Zuckerberg?
Yeah. Sort of a, yeah, yeah, unintended consequence of it. I don't know. I don't know. No, I mean, they're going back for a second scoop of the ice cream with The Social Network, The Social Reckoning. Is there a trailer out or just images? I think we saw that too. So it'll be interesting to see what happens there.
But get your tuxes ready going back to back, artificial, social reckoning, and then capping it off.
Yes. And then also the To Catch a Predator movie. That's going to be a good one too.
Yeah. Outside of tech world.
Yeah, I guess you're right. Yeah.
But still, triple feature.
Yeah. It just feels like it's a year of like niche movies that I expect to be breakouts. I guess like along with like Backrooms and Obsession and these two movies and then the documentaries. There's a lot of things that are like oddly specific, but I would expect they do well, but I don't know. We'll see. The Social Network did very well at the box office. So...
And while we're at it, yeah.
Let's stay in the trailer zone and let's pull up The Social Reckoning. Okay. The official teaser.
Tyler Colbertson is calling it pure cinema.
But I am here to help Facebook, not hurt it. Okay, you send me a message. What would you like to talk about?
The chairman gavels a session to order. You'll read your opening statement, which we'll skip past for now. That's a separate session. Which one is this about?
I don't think this is based on the politics. It's not Cambridge Analytica. It's the Frances Haugen teenage girl whistleblower thing, which honestly looks a lot different in the backdrop of the addiction trials.
I wonder if they were trying to get this out before the trials.
Hang on. I don't understand what you're saying.
Aren't you a tech reporter?
These guys are counting on the next round of congressional testimony to make you likable, Mark. I'm happy to lend a hand, but I think you're doomed.
This company and that guy are playing an unprecedented role in our lives.
The fire hose of bad information you are injecting into the air supply is becoming jet power.
I'm a free speech absolutist. I'm not the one who's lying, and I'm not stopping them from seeing someone who is.
Anxiety, depression of teenage girls got worse as a result of time spent on the platform.
Senior leadership knows and is doing nothing.
I know there are easier enemies to make. The mafia would be an easier enemy to make.
So what would you need to stand up the story? The internal documents.
This is a material violation of my NDA.
We're twice as big as the biggest country on earth. We're not frightened of Congress. We're post-government around here. Please.
Who is that supposed to be?
We have 102 hours to get everything.
She's going to get sued into small pieces.
I don't want to be made an example of by a guy with unlimited resources.
Yeah. So Chad is calling it out, but I don't think that, I think this one's going to flop out of a dorm room anymore because of the lack of, well, lack of supercars. And this is just not top, this story is no longer top of mind.
Yeah. People want to hear about like the talent wars. They don't want to hear about like this kind of stuff.
They do the talent wars. If there's no Alex Wang character, I'm not paying good money. SAS chain says, 'Ooh, technology so scary.'
Yeah. I don't know. Yeah, they, I mean, they should do more tech movies. Maybe, uh, maybe Ces says it will flop because no Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Yeah, this was in the pre...
That's true. Make it in the script. Yeah. UFC.
If there's The Social Network 3 and all the scenes where Zach is talking in the middle of...
How is it 2026 and we don't have a Salesforce movie?
Like the comeback, the SaaS apocalypse.
Or at least a documentary on the relationship that he has with the dolphins.
That would be great. That would be great.
And the wildlife generally.
Yeah. I'd like a CrowdStrike movie. I'd like a MongoDB movie. Let's do it. MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers it.
Here's a concept. Dolphin Force. How one man tamed...
It's maybe the best origin story of a tech company ever. I don't know if there's a better one. It's the best. It's just pure bliss, you know, pure positivity. For those that don't know, Benioff famously conceived the vision for Salesforce in 1999 while swimming with a pod of roughly 100 dolphins off the coast of Hawaii during a sabbatical. Feeling one with the pod, he envisioned cloud-delivered enterprise software, leading him to quit Oracle and secure $2 million in seed funding from his mentor, Larry Ellison.
Be great. Be great. Anyway, in other news, lots of craziness in the AI world, lots of new models, but the jobs apocalypse has been officially postponed by The Economist. An AI jobs boom is here. And people have a wide range of takes on this. Is it just postponed? Is it permanently postponed? Kevin Bryan summed it up well. He said, 'I am shocked.' Shocked. So he's being sarcastic, of course. Shocked to find out that a productivity-enhancing, investment-supporting technology is good for workers. Knowing nothing else, this should be your prior because this is how productivity and competitive markets almost always works. A new technology comes out. It supports investment. It enhances productivity. Everyone hires to go after all the different battles. But The Economist breaks it down in a lot more detail with a bunch of charts and a bunch of data. Oh, they say perhaps AI will eventually make many humans unemployable, but there's no sign of it yet. On September 4th, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the American economy added 162,000 jobs in August, far above expectations. The unemployment rate just 4.1%, lower than almost 90% of months over the past 50 years. Young workers, often cast as AI's first victims, are holding up remarkably well. The gap between unemployment among 20 to 24-year-olds and the overall rate is close to a multi-decade low. Some companies and workers are being severely disrupted by AI. Hiring in professional and business services is running 10% below the average from 2015 to 2019. Tech giants like Microsoft and Meta are trimming headcounts as they reorganize their businesses around the technology. Smaller firms such as Block, which is sort of a crazy morgue, smaller firms, but it is smaller than Microsoft and Meta. Block, the owner of Square and Cash App, and Intuit, the maker of TurboTax and QuickBooks, are replacing people with bots. American companies have announced some 16,000 AI-related job cuts a month on average so far this year, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an employment consultancy. What a funny name for a consultancy. But AI-related layoffs get lost in the churning job markets where, so you remember that number. So 16,000 AI-related job cuts a month in a typical month the US workforce just...
churns 1.7 million jobs and then they add 1.8 million jobs. So there's net gains, but you're looking at less than 1% of the layoffs that happen in the economy or job losses or firings. Less than 1% is AI-related, which is what The Economist is pointing out here. And the evidence so far is that AI is already creating a lot of jobs to replace those as it has destroyed.
The vast sums pouring into data centers and power generation have set off a race for construction and infrastructure workers. AI startups are hiring like there's no tomorrow. Incumbents are racing to keep up with new AI roles and making some workers more productive. AI may be increasing the demand for their services. Add it all up and The Economist estimates that AI so far has created around 1 million new jobs in America. That easily exceeds the roughly 200,000 layoffs attributed to AI since mid-2023, and it appears more than enough to offset weaker hiring in many back-office roles. America's AI infrastructure splurge has created many of them. The spending on the kit needed to make AI run, from chips and servers to data centers, cooling systems and power, is roughly $500 billion a year above what it was in 2022 when the world got to know ChatGPT, calculates Goldman Sachs, a bank. Thank you, The Economist.
Data center construction alone is proceeding at an annual rate of more than $75 billion, nearly 60% higher than a year ago, according to Census Bureau data. That building spree requires armies of workers: electricians to wire them, HVAC specialists to stop racks from overheating, grid engineers to hook them up to the power supply, and technicians to install and maintain the machines. The hiring boom is visible in the numbers. The Economist tracked five industries at the heart of the data center buildout, from electrical contracting to equipment manufacturing. Since 2023, employment in them has risen by roughly 320,000, more than broader construction and manufacturing trends would suggest. The BLS expects utilities to be the fastest-growing big sector between now and 2035. Not all those jobs owe their existence to AI. Grid upgrades and other factory building matter too, but lots of them do indeed. A jobs website finds that data center vacancies have more than doubled in two years as job postings overall have fallen. LinkedIn, a social network for strivers... These are so funny.
Goldman Sachs, a bank. LinkedIn, a jobs website, a social network for strivers, estimates that nearly half a million data center jobs were created between 2023 and 2025 in America. The scramble for workers is showing up in paychecks, too. Who indeed finds that installation and maintenance jobs at data centers advertise wages about 40% higher than comparable work elsewhere. Official wage data tell a similar story. In the year to June, average hourly earnings rose more than 13% in electrical equipment manufacturing and nearly 8% among electrical contractors. Even with the pay gains, workers are still not easy to find. On a recent visit to a transformer factory, Donald Livvens of the National Electric Manufacturers Association asked the company's chief executive what help she needed most. "Can you come in here and help run one of our lines for me?" she replied. "It's not just hard hats that are proliferating. AI is also creating a new class of white-collar jobs. Engineers build the models. Data annotators..."
Tyler's clapping for the white-collar job creation. Data annotators label their inputs and judges judge their answers. Forward-deployed engineers adapt them for customers, and newly minted heads of AI decide what companies should do with the technology. And there's some interesting reporting in the journal about Google and Accenture teaming up to do more forward-deployed engineering. They're deploying some, I think there's a thousand people on this one team. That's just an example of like new roles for AI diffusion. Some of these roles barely existed until recently, says The Economist. Many are quickly growing in number. Postings for heads of AI, AI engineers, and directors of AI have roughly doubled since 2023-2024. The numbers are starting to add up.
Preliminary research by economist Gad Levvenon at the Burning Glass Institute uses the research outfit's career history database to identify jobs that would not exist without AI, whether at AI-native firms or because they are AI-specific roles at other companies. He reckons roughly 1% of professional jobs are now AI jobs, on the order of 1 million positions in America in computer occupations and life sciences, including researchers using AI to discover new drugs. The share is four to 5%. LinkedIn's own analysis points to roughly 640,000 new AI-specific jobs between 2023 and 2024. So Jevons paradox. The Economist tracked employment in professional occupations closest to the AI boom: engineers, software developers, mathematicians, and data scientists, and compared their growth since 2022 with professional employment overall. These roles have added roughly 730,000 jobs above the trend in recent years. AI will not have created every single one of them, but it almost certainly created quite a few.
Third source of jobs comes from productivity gains. AI allows lawyers to draft contracts faster and analysts to comb through financial filings in minutes. If higher productivity lowers the cost of professional services, it is possible that demand for them can rise enough to create more work overall. Nikia Beer was talking about this this weekend. He used Astro to create three different potential deck remodels, redesigns, building expansions to his home. And it was interesting because it's a lot of work that you could say is like, oh, that's going to displace an architect. I don't think the models are at a place where you would trust a deck that's built in Blender from even the best model. I was finding in my Blender modeling tests a lot of, you know, misaligned beams and things that weren't quite right. But in terms of visualization, in terms of getting excited about a project and getting to that next stage of saying, "Hey, okay, I have a really solid vision here, I can imagine what I want to do. Let me actually go and do that." There's this odd diffusion that happens in the economy. I was talking to Sager and Jetty about this, the credit card effect, where credit cards had a big effect on the economy in a very, very boring way. They just slightly lubricated the machinery of the...
global commerce basically.
So you're just like, okay, if I send a wire, I'm not going to be able to get the money back, but if I put down my credit card and it doesn't show up, I can probably get a chargeback. And so that instilled just a little bit more confidence that what you're buying is accurate, and it enabled more commerce, right? And so the same thing is starting to be true here, where people can say, "Okay, I'm ordering shoes. Let me find the shoes that fit me perfectly, that are the right price, that will come on time, that are from a reliable manufacturer, aren't going to fall apart." And if you get a very solid report back that gives you confidence, you make that purchase just a little bit sooner. And if everyone is doing that, it winds up speeding up the machinery of global commerce, which is incredibly boring, but incredibly valuable.
Yeah. One of my favorite examples is you were looking at a number of different houses, all of which were not necessarily in the condition where you're like, great, I want to move in here.
And you just dropped the Zillow links into Codex and it made you an entire website that you could walk through with before.
