AI 2025 → 2026 Live Show | Part 1

**Amar** (0:00)
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**Nathan Labenz** (0:31)
The first ever live show with a year-end retrospective and 2026 look ahead. One of the big reasons I've been interested in doing this is, obviously everything is getting noisier and noisier. I set out for myself this idea of being the AI scout and hopefully having no major blind spots in the AI landscape. That is becoming basically impossible with everything going vertical and AI touching everything. One thought that I've had and a mantra I've tried to encourage others to adopt is, shorten your timelines and do anything you can to make your activities denser in time, more information dense. So the big way I think about today's experiment is obviously there's no timeline shorter than live and instead of doing an hour and a half or whatever with one guest and going comprehensively, sometimes described as a forced march through their world view, we can try to do the 20-minute version, get as much of the alpha as we can in a really short time, and then give people nine of those over a three-hour timeframe.
We'll see how it goes. I'm excited to find out.

**Erik Torenberg** (1:41)
One of the things that we were talking about as we put this together was also that sometimes a longer podcast is often a capstone to a body of work. One of the things that struck me was that a lot of the people that we want to talk to are actually right in the middle of their life's work right now. I wanted to see whether we could get more frequent touches while things were happening. Just capture this moment. This is the end of the Anthropocene, that transition point between two eras, which has been particularly fascinating for me.
I think our first guest is very sensitive to the fact that we are transitioning. Nathan, why don't you introduce Zvi?

**Nathan Labenz** (2:26)
Yeah. Who better to comment on the possible end of the Anthropocene than Zvi Moshowitz, who I think probably needs little introduction in this space because he's a prolific blogger and analyst and really puts out canonical assessments at a really remarkable pace of all the new model launches and the strategic landscape. So Zvi Moshowitz, welcome to our experimental Your End Live show.

**Zvi Moshowitz** (2:52)
I love it. We're live.

**Nathan Labenz** (2:54)
We're live. So to kick us off, and I think you're the perfect person to kick us off, I guess for starters, like we've got a discourse that is increasingly perplexing to me in terms of how fragmented it is. On the one hand, we do have this sort of, I think, increasingly credible idea that maybe we are at the end of the human era or the beginning of the end of it, and then at the same time, we've got these posts still going viral like AGI is impossible because its computation is a physical process or something, still plenty of denialism. For starters, how would you assess the vast gulf between people who, I would say, seem to get it and seem not to, although obviously that characterization would be disputed?

**Zvi Moshowitz** (3:34)
It is very hard to make a man understand something when it's salary-dependent and not understanding it, and misinformation is demand-driven, not supply-driven. Basically, these people, for their own cognitive peace of mind, for their own narratives, for their own business plans, for their own everything, need to believe that AI is normal technology, need to believe often that AI will never do anything else. They just want it to go away. They really, really badly want it to go away. Lots and lots of people want this. Sometimes it's for business reasons, sometimes it's for just ingenuous reasons, sometimes it's just to feel better. So what do they do? They just grasp on to whatever lets them tell that story, and they will repeat it endlessly. They will latch on to every too often. Yeah, someone will generate some study, some paper, some post, some hypothetical, some whatever. You see the same thing in the AI existential risk debates, the same thing in the safety debates, where you'll see the same exact arguments that we were debating back in 2006, often, under completely different architectures. Just try it back up. 101 errors get made over and over again, prominently, like this week, Noah Smith put out, oh, the AI, don't worry about AI, it'll just have utility function which will self-modify to wirenet. And then Tyler Cullen repeats this as if nobody has done any of the normal experiments or thought about humans or philosophy or any of the underlying logic of what's actually going on.