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 · last 12 months

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

OK, we're already on this.

And so whether or not it's going to take us 20 years this time or maybe only five or something to build AI first business models that realize enormous productivity gains, I can't say.

And whether that's even possible, I can't say.

Like there may be inherent limitations to AI technology once you scale things up from ask one AI some questions to have all these AI agents interact and do business together.

That may not scale up as well as I think it does, as people think it does.

I would guess it does scale up, but maybe it doesn't.

We don't really know yet.

And I think if and when, suppose we do end up finding massive ways to massively increase productivity with AI,

The blind alleys and dead ends that we spent all those tokens on before may have been an integral and important part of that.

And so that productivity may be realized in a bit.

Now, whether in the interim there's a big crash and what that implications are for producers like OpenAI and Anthropic, like upstream producers like NVIDIA, I can't say.

And, you know, like, that's beyond my ability to predict, I think, but it could happen.

When wealth inequality goes from, you know, when the top 1% has like this many trillions of dollars versus that many trillions of dollars, it's not a number humans understand.

You know, regular people, you know, who are just trying to make their credit card payments don't understand that.

You know, you need data by, you know, and then you have, you can have like economists who gather data on this and then argue about how much is really happening because it's hard to measure this top wealth.

And then you have people arguing, but I don't think the sheer number is like, oh my God, look at how much these people have.

I don't think that's the way that wealth inequality becomes a problem in normal people's minds.

I think instead people think about inequality of power and people think about the companies that these people control and are these companies being run in our best interest?

Everyone knows these people are getting rich

Small changes in exactly how much they're getting rich, or even large changes in how much they're getting rich, don't affect the basic idea that people are being squeezed at their jobs, and they're being squeezed on their finances, and they're being squeezed in their consumption.

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