Jensen vs NYT

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Happy Wednesday.

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The current thing in tech and business is new models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind.

Today’s Lineup

Qualcomm President & CEO Cristiano Amon at 11:40 AM
Bessemer Venture Partners Partner Talia Goldberg at 11:50 AM
Real Sports Co-Founders Louis and John Antonelli at 12:00 PM
Affirm Co-Founder & CEO Max Levchin at 12:25 PM
Numeral Co-Founder & CEO Sam Ross at 12:35 PM

Run of Show

Jensen vs NYT

Jensen Huang Thinks A.I. Alarmism Has Gone Too Far and he debated Ezra Klein on the issue on a NYT podcast. It’s a good listen, they really got into it over the course of nearly two hours, and it definitely scratches the itch that everyone was feeling to get Jensen to flesh out his ideas further in the post-Hugging Face era. Nvidia is incredibly important in the AI ecosystem, “The Central Bank of AI” according to The Economist, providing backstops to everything from application layer companies that need a soft landing to massive data center projects that need investment grade designation for credit lines.

He’s basically p(doom) = 0, which is now oddly contrarian in the modern era when lab employees seem to sit around 10% and most commentators have at least moved up to 1% or willing to engage with the arguments and consider proposals. Jensen makes some good arguments though, specifically anchoring on the recent miscalculation on the impact on the job market. The same crowd that expects us to believe that AI will kill every human on the planet were predicting upwards of 10% unemployment with much higher rates within white collar sectors. Things have played out different though, American white-collar unemployment is about 3% right now, and even in the Philippines, where I saw one AI pessimist predicting 90% unemployment due to call center disruption, the overall employment rate was 4.9% in June 2026 (nevermind that call center work is only ~3.5% of the labor force there).

So there’s a debate raging about what is happening now, and whether we can extrapolate this forward. The future capabilities do need grappling with, and Jensen even eventually buckled and admitted that if models aren’t safe “we have to shut the labs down” (extreme position from a few year ago). Still I wouldn’t expect him to fully flip here, he is running a business in the real world, in the present moment, and today, AI is having an effect akin to the stones, gravel, sand and water allegory highlighted by Stephen Covey in First Things First. It goes like this:

I attended a seminar once where the instructor was lecturing on time. At one point, he said, “Okay, it’s time for a quiz.” He reached under the table and pulled out a wide-mouth gallon jar. He set it on the table next to a platter with some fist-sized rocks on it. “How many of these rocks do you think we can get in the jar?” he asked.After we made our guess, he said, “Okay. Let’s find out.” He set one rock in the jar . . . then another . . . then another. I don’t remember how many he got in, but he got the jar full. Then he asked, “Is that jar full?”Everybody looked at the rocks and said, “Yes.”Then he said, “Ahhh.” He reached under the table and pulled out a bucket of gravel. Then he dumped some gravel in and shook the jar and the gravel went in all the little spaces left by the big rocks. Then he grinned and said once more, “Is the jar full?”By this time we were on to him. “Probably not,” we said.“Good!” he replied. And he reached under the table and brought out a bucket of sand. He started dumping the sand in and it went in all the little spaces left by the rocks and the gravel. Once more he looked at us and said, “Is the jar full?”“No!” we all roared.He said, “Good!” and he grabbed a pitcher of water and began to pour it in. He got something like a quart of water in that jar. Then he said, “Well, what’s the point?”Somebody said, “Well, there are gaps, and if you really work at it, you can always fit more into your life.”“No,” he said, “that’s not the point. The point is this: if you hadn’t put these big rocks in first, would you ever have gotten any of them in?”

This is the effect Jensen is describing, at one point in human history, the only jobs were basically hunting and gathering, we had full employment, then we invented agriculture, we industrialized, and we filled in cracks, and we had full employment, then financialization, information technology, semiconductors, and we filled in more cracks still. AI might intermediate every sub-interaction layers and layers between the basic things we need to do to live and flourish, but we have always found a way forward, and that gives him cause for optimism.

Clip Spotlight: Ben Thompson says consumer AI has a marketing problem because the average consumer doesn't actually want to be more productive.

"Tech companies are like, 'Let us book your flight for you!' I’ve had a personal assistant for 10 years. He does not come within an inch of booking my flights for me. That is crazy talk."

"I understand which ones are gonna be delayed. I know which seat I want to be on. So the fact that this is continually a demo is hilarious to me."

“Number two: people love shopping. They don’t want to be productive. They want to be entertained. One of the biggest forms of entertainment is shopping.”

"Also, there’s so much information on a product page. Companies have spent so much energy focusing on that. You look at apparel as a category. They’re going to tell you what size the model is wearing, and you want to know that, and you want to look at the different styles."

"The idea of having a personal agent that’s going and getting some of the information and bringing it back to you, and then you’re like, 'Well, what about this other thing? Tell me about this thing.'"

"And you have your eager tech company executive say, “Oh, I have an assistant that can do it for you!"

"And it’s like, no. Not only do I want to do it, I want to complain about it. I’m enjoying myself complaining right now, okay? Would you just let me be and live my life?"