Pretrained

We Are Sleepwalking Into An AI Crisis

Rob Reich is a Stanford political philosopher, associate director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, and former senior advisor at the US AI Safety Institute. He joins Pierce and Richard for a sweeping conversation about AI, policy, modern education, and much more. Rob skewers Silicon Valley's misuse of democratizing AI, unpacks the corporate-form gymnastics behind OpenAI's restructuring and Anthropic's PBC status, indicts Stanford itself as the world's most successful nonprofit, and offers an insider's view of standing up the US AI Safety Institute from a five-person team inside the Department of Commerce.

AI Layoffs Just Went Mainstream

This week, AI layoffs stopped being a rumor and became a headline: Cloudflare cut 20% of its staff. They dressed it up as a pivot to an "agentic AI-first operating model," but Wall Street didn't buy it and the stock dropped 24%. Then we turn to Pennsylvania's attorney general suing Character AI after one of its bots posed as a licensed therapist and dig into why the small players keep getting singled out and what kind of legal precedent that sets for everyone building on top of base models. And finally, Brussels blinks: the EU postpones the AI Act's high-risk obligations after its whole use-case-first framework collided with the reality of general-purpose models.

AI Is Less Popular Than Congress with CatGPT

Catherine Goetze (CatGPT) teaches millions of people about AI on TikTok and Instagram - and just launched a company selling landlines. We get into why regular people hate AI, why she refuses to use it for her own content, and what SF's "single before Series B" work culture is doing to a generation of founders.

China Just Cracked CUDA

ByteDance just wrote a $5.6 billion check for a Chinese AI chip you've never heard of, Huawei's new programming stack copies CUDA so closely an LLM could translate between them, the White House told Anthropic it can't expand access to Mythos because the Pentagon wants first dibs, Samsung warned that memory prices are only getting worse from here, and China killed Zuckerberg's $2 billion bid for Manus because it turns out Singapore-washing your company doesn't fool Beijing. Pierce and Rich break down what all of it means.

DeepSeek Doesn't Need Nvidia Anymore

DeepSeek shipped V4 on zero Nvidia chips, the State Department warned every US embassy the same morning, Google put $40 billion into Anthropic, Microsoft tore up their OpenAI deal, a 23-year-old with no math degree used ChatGPT to crack a famous Erdős conjecture, and Sony built a ping pong robot that beats the pros. We break down what all of it means.