The reading room
On Moonshots with Peter Diamandis, the panel walked through Waymo's sixth-generation driver: a purpose-built 5-nanometer chip, fewer but sharper cameras, and an autonomous-hardware estimate falling from $115,000 to $20,000. Peter had ridden in the new vehicle; Alex objected that the West is now white-labeling Chinese hardware, and argued Waymo is heading for full vertical integration.
On Moonshots with Peter Diamandis, the panel read out a new leaderboard result: Google's Gemini 3.7 Flash on top of the AA-AnalystAgent benchmark with 60%, ahead of Claude Opus 5 at 54%. Diamandis called it proof that Google is back; Alex argued the score measures repeated reliability on spreadsheet analysis rather than frontier capability, and blamed Google Search for pushing Gemini toward speed and determinism. Emad Mostaque agreed the model was decent but said Google's problem is institutional, not a shortage of chips.
On the Moonshots panel, Peter Diamandis runs a Grok Bot chief of staff called Skippy and Emad Mostaque runs 18 of them across his own machines, installing models and making art. Salim Ismail calls it the move from asking an AI to assigning work; Alex argues the messaging-app interface cannot possibly scale.
On Moonshots with Peter Diamandis, the panel watched Sam Altman explain that he expected GPT-4 to put software businesses up for grabs far sooner than it did, and that the economy's inertia has made the transition "smoother and slower." Salim Ismail blamed institutions that move at a different speed from the technology, Alex pointed instead at the abstraction layers of the economy and prescribed vertical integration, and Emad Mostaque objected that the models simply were not good enough until recently.
On The Diary of a CEO, writer Ed Zitron described catching an invented Microsoft share price in his Bloomberg terminal, then argued that his editor Matt Hughes — not a benchmark number — is what makes an answer trustworthy. The host pushed back: buyers pay for the output, not the process, and the honest comparison is AI against fallible people rather than perfection.
On The Diary of a CEO, critic Ed Zitron praises a chatbot for reading a troubleshooting log and for helping fix his son's Minecraft mod, then argues that neither is worth a trillion dollars. The host counters with his fiancée's one-woman business and his chief of staff's inbox. The argument turns on tokens, subscription rate limits and who is paying the real bill.
On The Diary of a CEO, Ed Zitron rejects the claim that AI systems are already blackmailing people and escaping control, and traces two famous stories back to their research reports. The reports describe a CAPTCHA deception rather than a threat, and a fictional corporate scenario stripped of easier options — with a genuine safety question still inside it.
On The Diary of a CEO, critic Ed Zitron laid out a sequence he expects to start with OpenAI failing to raise its next round and end in ordinary retirement accounts. He traces the chain from a delayed stock-market listing to SoftBank's paper holdings, cloud growth forecasts and the concentrated US indexes — while Amazon's own filings and Andy Jassy's shareholder letter offer a different account of why the spending is happening.
Parag Agrawal, whose company Parallel builds web search for AI agents, argues that when an agent visits a page instead of a person, advertising and subscriptions both stop working. His proposed replacement borrows an idea from cooperative game theory: estimate how much each source improved an agent's answer, and pay for that contribution. This idea page explains the argument, the mathematics behind it, and what remains unproven.
On Training Data, Parallel Web Systems founder Parag Agrawal traces how agents multiply web searches — from a weekly credit-risk review across 10,000 small businesses to the meeting-prep agents that run hundreds of searches before his own calls — and forecasts a web that, in a couple of years, tells agents when something worth acting on has changed.
On Training Data, Parag Agrawal explains how his company Parallel entered web search without first building a giant index: it launched a search agent that crawled after a request arrived, replaced outsourced human data collection for insurance, sales and finance customers, and treated the index as a latency optimization to be grown later. He describes the agent-specific architecture behind it, the 200-millisecond Turbo mode Parallel announced in July, and a Google Cloud deal that puts Parallel Search beside Google Search as a grounding option.
On The Diary of a CEO, Konstantin Kisin tells Steven Bartlett that nobody — not him, not the host, not Trump — can stop AI, and that what remains is living well with family and community. Bartlett refuses to give up on public pressure and expects AI on the ballot in 2028; Kisin expects voters to blame whoever is in office instead.
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