Derek Thompson

That it started as a hypothetical in terms of arguing for the Department of War's position.

And then as it kept getting repeated, it was like, oh, wait, did this actually happen?

Was this actually like a point of contention or are we talking a little bit in the abstract here?

They kill missiles.

Another defense in the administration.

And I think it's useful to test your position here against some of the more popular defenses.

Ben Thompson, the famous tech columnist, author of Chatechory, I think someone we're both a huge fan of, has said, look...

The AI frontier labs have gone around claiming that their technology is akin to the nuclear weapon of the future, a digital atomic bomb.

You cannot possibly be surprised if you go around saying you're building atomic bomb for the government to want extraordinary amounts of control over your technology.

After all, the Manhattan Project was not some...

project we farmed out to GM and Ford and said, can you please both work on the project to build an atomic weapon?

And once you've refined enough uranium and have blasted this thing in the middle of the desert in America, let us know and then we'll buy the bomb from you.

No, we did not do that.

We had the Manhattan Project.

We created an ultra top secret, highly secured laboratory environment in New Mexico, developed the bomb there.

It was all under the thumb of the US military.

If this is the 21st century version of that, then these labs can't possibly be surprised when extraordinary measures are used to control their dangerous or soon to be dangerous technology.

How do you feel about the Ben Thompson defense of the Department of War here?

I think there's actually huge disagreement on that point.

Like, just a chasm of disagreement.