Brian Merchant

America first.

You know, I think this Iran thing is also going to cause a big split in the GOP.

So far, it doesn't among, like, people who say they're MAGA voters are still with Trump.

Yeah, I mean, I think you're absolutely right that it's, you know, both of those tendencies are kind of bound up in this same trajectory.

And part of this is necessity, right?

Like, the tech landscape is such that if somebody wants to, you know, release a product that can compete with one of the giants like Meta or Amazon or Google...

then you need just truly an immense amount of capital if you want to compete rather than angle to get bought up or something.

So you need a story that can command the kind of capital that can compete with one of three or four of the tech oligarchs.

That are out there, right?

The tech monopolies that have sort of over the last 20 years sort of concentrated their power.

And so that story then becomes not just, hey, here's a cool product.

That's not going to get you there.

You need a story that is on the magnitude of.

We are creating that software that can automate every meaningful job.

And, you know, that language is right there in OpenAI's charter still to this day.

You can look at that as intrinsic to the pitch to investors.

And so I think there are a number of different factors there.

I think if you look at the last 10 years of the history of sort of this latest AI boom, then you really see it beginning in earnest around at least expressed fears about X-risk and the possibility, you know, as sort of presented by Nick Bostrom and others, that AI could become super intelligent and become this danger.

I think one of Sam Altman's key intuitions was that, you know,

Early on when he was, you know, just sort of heading up, you know, just quote unquote, you know, heading up Y Combinator, he sensed that there was a lot of energy here in this space that he could tap into one way or the other.