Noah Smith

speaker

437 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 24 Jul

Noah Smith’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Prof G Markets · America’s Economy Is Entering a New Era — ft. Noah Smith · 24 Jul 2026 podcast

right?

They used an improper benchmark as their, you know, and then they tore out the dynamos, put back in the boilers and ignored it.

And then about 20 years later, people figured out, oh, if we completely reorganized how the factory worked and ran workstations in parallel instead of in series, we could increase productivity a lot.

And then you got a very rapid increase in productivity by a factor of like,

three to five or something like that.

Just this massive, massive burst of productivity growth with the reorganization of the factory.

And so we got modern looking factories, not these like ancient looking, you know, multi-floor factories that now are part of like old Mickey Mouse cartoons.

And so was the initial use of the, of the, you know, electricity to try to replace steam directly, was that wasted money?

I don't know.

I can't tell you that that was wasted money because there was learning here.

You learned what didn't work.

And that was probably an important input into the, you know, people who redesigned the factory later on and got this huge increase in productivity.

They had to see what didn't work and think about what you could and couldn't use electricity for.

And so...

I'm not sure that token maxing is wasted because all these people are learning what you can and can't use AI for, what it does, what it doesn't do.

And it's forcing a lot of people to think about AI-first production processes.

So now everyone's already talking about building AI-first businesses and AI-first business models.

Maybe a couple people have, you know, my friend Edmund Zagran has this company where he's trying to do this.

We're getting on this much faster than the people did with electricity because information travels much faster, right?

So we know we need to do this faster than they knew that with electricity.

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