Queue all the Grammy content
We hope you made it through the winter storms in one piece—because between confirmation hearings, tariff-palooza, and yet another AI-driven news cycle, it’s been a chaotic week. If you're already over the AI discourse and just want the machines to take over, buckle up—we think you’re in for a long year.
In other news, two of us lost a bag YOLO-ing on NVIDIA, one of us survived layoffs, and all of us are just glad dry January is finally over.
AI doomer-ism (or is it optimism this week? we can’t keep up) is dominating every headline. The confirmation hearings have continued to be a venue for clickbait showmanship - except for when they haven’t. Rubio sailed through with a unanimous vote and offered us a rare bipartisan bright spot courtesy of his back-and-forth with Tammy Duckworth. But the fireworks aren’t over yet folks. Tulsi is still trying to convince the Dems she’s not a Russian asset and RFK will definitely need another pack of ZYN before this is all over (so will we.)
Take a spin through our weekly round-up below and stay safe out there.
Top of Mind
Behind The Screens
David Pinsof’s critique of AI doomerism dismantles the movement’s core assumptions, arguing that fears of an AI apocalypse rely on a pseudoscientific understanding of intelligence and human agency. As AI advances, Pinsof challenges us to ground debates in evolutionary biology and economics, not fearmongering.
By 2030, AI infrastructure could demand data centers consuming up to 5 gigawatts of power—matching New York City’s peak electricity use—but massive hurdles in power, land, funding, and regulations make that vision uncertain. Current estimates suggest only 1–3 of these ultra-scale facilities might materialize in the U.S., making AI’s future dependent not just on innovation, but on the infrastructure needed to power it.
From Washington
With the contentious confirmation of our new Secretary of HHS, healthcare reform seems looming. Sebastian Caliri’s Healthcare Excellence Agenda for the New Administration outlines a pathway to fiscal sustainability and better patient outcomes, focusing on market-driven innovation over government expansion. He highlights an urgent reality: the U.S. spends more than $1.5 trillion annually on healthcare (double what it spends on defense) yet public health metrics continue to deteriorate. Modernizing U.S. healthcare is long overdue - we’ll see if current administration has the political capital to get it done.
OpenAI announces partnership with the U.S. National Laboratories in response to AI advancement national security concerns. Sama continues to receive public and private aid in developing a monopoly. Scared. Also crying wolf this week was bullshit after their CTO would not disclose the source of Sora’s training data.
Ctrl+Alt+Culture
Christ Hayes argues that attention is the new labor. Just as industrial capitalism transformed work into a commodity, modern digital capitalism has monetized our focus — with consent or not. Just like early industrial workers who were suddenly told they had to sell their labor, we now sell our attention — often without realizing it. In the same way that labor laws were created to safeguard workers from exploitation, we might need "attention laws" — limits on how much of our focus can be extracted and sold (especially for children).
Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, is making the case for even stricter U.S. export controls on advanced AI chips to China, arguing that recent breakthroughs by Chinese AI firm DeepSeek validate—not undermine—the need for these restrictions. Amodei’s argues that controlling AI chip exports now may determine whether the future of AI remains under democratic oversight or shifts towards authoritarian dominance.
ICYMI: Happy Hour Edition
Painting New York’s Underbelly (Drake’s)
Chartbook 349 Scholasticides (Adam Tooze)
Improve Your Focus (LindyMan)
More than two decades after the last commercial supersonic flight, US start-up’s trial aircraft breaches Mach 1 in California (Financial Times)
Logitech’s peel-and-stick radar sensors could let companies invisibly monitor their offices (The Verge)
A Young Man Used AI to Build A Nuclear Fusor and Now I Must Weep (Core Memory)
Nobody Cares (The Founders Tribune)
It’s time to come to grips with AI (Nate Silver)
America needs better defense aqcuisition (Joe Lonsdale)
More than two decades after the last commercial supersonic flight, US start-up’s trial aircraft breaches Mach 1 in California (Financial Times)
