Trump and his allies in the House’s flurry of anti-trans legislation and executive orders will soon run into both the law and the reality that our institutions like the military really rely on trans people.
Guests:
Major Alivia Stehlik, Director of Holistic Health and Fitness for the 101st Airborne Division.
Want more What Next? Join Slate Plus to unlock full, ad-free access to What Next and all your other favorite Slate podcasts. You can subscribe directly from the What Next show page on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Or, visit slate.com/whatnextplus to get access wherever you listen.
Podcast production by Elena Schwartz, Paige Osburn, Anna Phillips, Madeline Ducharme and Rob Gunther.
Dylan Patel is the founder of SemiAnalysis, a research & analysis company specializing in semiconductors, GPUs, CPUs, and AI hardware. Nathan Lambert is a research scientist at the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) and the author of a blog on AI called Interconnects.
Thank you for listening ❤ Check out our sponsors: https://lexfridman.com/sponsors/ep459-sc
See below for timestamps, transcript, and to give feedback, submit questions, contact Lex, etc.
OUTLINE:
(00:00) – Introduction
(13:28) – DeepSeek-R1 and DeepSeek-V3
(35:02) – Low cost of training
(1:01:19) – DeepSeek compute cluster
(1:08:52) – Export controls on GPUs to China
(1:19:10) – AGI timeline
(1:28:35) – China’s manufacturing capacity
(1:36:30) – Cold war with China
(1:41:00) – TSMC and Taiwan
(2:04:38) – Best GPUs for AI
(2:19:30) – Why DeepSeek is so cheap
(2:32:49) – Espionage
(2:41:52) – Censorship
(2:54:46) – Andrej Karpathy and magic of RL
(3:05:17) – OpenAI o3-mini vs DeepSeek r1
(3:24:25) – NVIDIA
(3:28:53) – GPU smuggling
(3:35:30) – DeepSeek training on OpenAI data
(3:45:59) – AI megaclusters
(4:21:21) – Who wins the race to AGI?
(4:31:34) – AI agents
(4:40:16) – Programming and AI
(4:47:43) – Open source
(4:56:55) – Stargate
(5:04:24) – Future of AI
A year after first being declared a billionaire, Taylor Swift’s rarely been out of the headlines or the charts. The pop superstar’s Eras tour finally came to an end, and she’s been continuing to break records. Good Bad Billionaire will be back with a new season in March, but until then, here’s a quick update on what Taylor’s been up to and another chance to hear a classic episode from the archives. Zing Tsjeng and Simon Jack uncover the huge public feuds and private legal battles that made the most famous woman in the world. She can change the economy, but is Taylor Swift good, bad, or just another billionaire?
Picture day is an annual tradition for American families — and, for the companies that take the photos, a lucrative one. Zachary Crockett smiles for the camera.
Ed and Jathan are together in the San Francisco Bay Area huddled over a single mic like a fire keeping us warm as we record an episode about DeepSeek before running off to our book launch event at City Lights (thanks all the wonderful TMK fans who made it a packed house!). DeepSeek, the disruptive new LLM from a Chinese startup / hedge fund, is being hailed as Silicon Valley’s “Sputnik moment.” We dig into how DeepSeek challenges the fundamental economics of the AI industry, while casting a skeptical eye on claims that DeepSeek solves any of the real problems of AI—financial, social, or political.
••• Deep Impact | Ed Zitron https://www.wheresyoured.at/deep-impact/
••• DeepSeek sends a shockwave through markets https://www.economist.com/business/2025/01/27/deepseek-sends-a-shockwave-through-markets
••• The real meaning of the DeepSeek drama https://www.economist.com/leaders/2025/01/29/the-real-meaning-of-the-deepseek-drama
••• OpenAI targets $300bn valuation in SoftBank-led funding round https://www.ft.com/content/2c697ff8-dfe9-4c42-a328-d21216293aa3
Standing Plugs:
••• Order Jathan’s new book: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520398078/the-mechanic-and-the-luddite
••• Subscribe to Ed’s substack: https://substack.com/@thetechbubble
••• Subscribe to TMK on patreon for premium episodes: https://www.patreon.com/thismachinekills
Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (bsky.app/profile/jathansadowski.com) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (www.x.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (bsky.app/profile/jebr.bsky.social)
Most presidents want as much power as they can get. And it's not unusual to see them claim authority that they don't, in the end, actually have.
We saw it just last term, when former President Biden tried to unilaterally forgive hundreds of billions of dollars in federal student loans.
Or when he announced, days before leaving office that the 28th Amendment, on gender equality, was now the law of the land.
So are the opening moves of Trump's presidency just a spicier version of the standard playbook or an imminent threat to constitutional government as we know it?
For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org
Most presidents want as much power as they can get. And it's not unusual to see them claim authority that they don't, in the end, actually have.
We saw it just last term, when former President Biden tried to unilaterally forgive hundreds of billions of dollars in federal student loans.
Or when he announced, days before leaving office that the 28th Amendment, on gender equality, was now the law of the land.
So are the opening moves of Trump's presidency just a spicier version of the standard playbook or an imminent threat to constitutional government as we know it?
For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org
Most presidents want as much power as they can get. And it's not unusual to see them claim authority that they don't, in the end, actually have.
We saw it just last term, when former President Biden tried to unilaterally forgive hundreds of billions of dollars in federal student loans.
Or when he announced, days before leaving office that the 28th Amendment, on gender equality, was now the law of the land.
So are the opening moves of Trump's presidency just a spicier version of the standard playbook or an imminent threat to constitutional government as we know it?
For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org
