Podcasts · More or Less

Zuck says AI is for everyone, His Rivals Ask Washington To Slow it Down

31 Jul 2026 · 59 min

New studio set up: the squad now records from a parked Tesla in the middle of a rainstorm while Sam is on the beach, and somehow it turned into one of our favorite episodes. We break down Meta's new AI campaign, Zuckerberg's vision for AI, why more than 1,000 frontier AI researchers are asking Washington to slow development, and whether fear has become the easiest narrative in tech. Then we get into China cracking deep ultraviolet lithography, what it means for ASML and the AI race, why AI demand still isn't slowing, Lilian Weng's move from Thinking Machines to OpenAI, and Sam's theory that Silicon Valley has developed an Oppenheimer complex.

Chapters:

0:00 Episode trailer

1:23 Episode start

9:02 Meta's Ad Campaign Rejects The Doomers

11:14 Zuckerberg's Optimism Blitz Actually Lands

13:11 AI's Dark Side Raises Easier Money

15:04 Sam's Bot Read 4GB Of Dad's Journals

17:28 Nobody Wants To Be Anthropic

18:56 Anthropic Runs On Spite For OpenAI

21:10 OpenAI Was The Original Evil Empire

22:57 Meta Is Still A Centralized Ad Company

24:46 Decentralization Loses Without A Jedi

26:01 Apple Won On Politics, Not Technology

27:16 Meta Earnings Miss On Lawsuits And Severance

28:33 China Cracks DUV, ASML Takes The Hit

29:57 Execs Privately Reject The China AI War

32:39 The Compute Debate Gavin Baker Started

39:13 X Is The Tech Town Square Now

46:57 Lilian Weng Quits For Health, Joins OpenAI

53:50 AI Is A Crisis Of Meaning

54:57 Book The Conference Before You're Invited

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The episode on the publisher’s site ↗ (opens in a new tab)