Who will explain the machines of loving grace?

TBPN and AI Media

The Dark

Seventy-nine percent of Americans don’t trust AI-generated information. Fifty-seven percent believe the costs of artificial intelligence outweigh the benefits. Nearly half don’t trust either political party to handle it.

If you’re inside of Silicon Valley, there’s never been a better time to learn about AI. People like Karpathy are forgoing decamillion-dollar annual salaries to patiently explain to us the ways for elites to use AI to better their businesses, their lives, and their fortunes.

In the rest of the world, four out of five people use something every day they don’t trust, can’t explain, and believe might kill them. During the atomic age Oppenheimer’s radical enthusiasm inspired people to plant atomic gardens in their schools and excitedly learn about the wonders of this technology as it spread forth from Los Alamos.

The AI age gives vastly more benefits to the average person and is vastly less popular than a technology that announced its arrival into the world with a mass killing of civilians.

The introduction of cars made people nervous. The introduction of electricity made people nervous. Nothing compares to the bitter hatred that the average American, especially on the left, feels towards artificial intelligence systems. Jasmine Sun was writing about this on Substack today; how the world immediately reacted with vitriol to an offhand mention in her Atlantic piece about how she used Claude for editing.

an entire country is living inside a technology that it doesn’t understand, doesn’t trust, and has no credible guide to. The most common way to learn about AI is by using AI, which will never be and can never be a suitable replacement for a beloved public educator.

and the media- the very institution designed to explain to people changes in their world- is not rising to the challenge. there are reasons for that. Reason number one being that the very business that’s building AI (tech) destroyed the media business model abruptly and forever in the early 2000s.

Karen Hao’s Empire of AI — a National Book Critics Circle finalist, the most prominent book about the industry published last year- contains a 1,000x error on water usage by data centres. that error has been repeated in dozens of outlets since and it will continue to be repeated because mainstream AI journalism doesn’t have a correction mechanism, only confirmation mechanisms.

Ask anybody in Silicon Valley if East Coast journalists know what’s going on and they’ll laugh until their sides hurt. The people who are working inside of Silicon Valley alongside their peers, trying to understand this revolution from the perspectives of technology, of anthropology, of civic virtue- they are currently being bought and sold like crypto tokens in a marketplace obsessed with the idea of narrative control.

I am not defending the AI industry. The AI industry is sometimes terrible and often lying, but are simultaneously doing the most meaningful work that one can do on planet Earth in the year of our Lord 2026. the issue is that both the builders of these products and the people who are chronicling this build are locked inside of a self-perpetuating loop of money and information that is not producing public goods. The landscape is not “industry vs. journalists.” The landscape is a public that has been failed by both, while they feed on each other.

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The Roll-Up

This morning, OpenAI announced that it has acquired TBPN — the daily tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays — for what the Financial Times reports is a “low hundreds of millions” of dollars. TBPN is on track to generate over $30 million in revenue this year. It’s the show where Silicon Valley power players sit for three hours and speak candidly to fellow insiders.

The show will now report to Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s chief global affairs officer — a political operative by training. OpenAI says TBPN will maintain “editorial independence.” The show will “run their programming, choose their guests, and make their own editorial decisions.”

But the acquisition is not a surprise event- it’s the logical conclusion to a set of incentives given to Frontier Labs and AI companies- occupy the most important ears in California while they pedal their pelotons and wash their dishes at modest cost.

Andreessen Horowitz (one of OpenAI’s investors) led Substack’s Series A. Substack is the platform where the majority of independent AI writers publish. A16z also acquired the Turpentine podcast network last year — 30 shows, including some of the most popular AI podcasts in the world. They’ve built a New Media operation producing content five days a week across 40+ shows and 500,000+ newsletter subscribers, all of it free. All of it structurally aligned with a16z’s portfolio companies. All of it designed, in a16z’s own words, to help “the next cohort of great founders preferentially attach to our portfolio companies — and to A16Z itself.”

One of A16Z’s New Media partners — Brent Liang — came directly from TBPN before joining the firm.

A16Z invests in OpenAI. A16Z invests in Substack. A16z acquires Turpentine. OpenAI acquires TBPN. A16Z’s people move between these entities. And at the centre of all of it is a $40 billion venture fund that has stated, in writing, that its media operation exists to serve its financial interests.

This isn’t some kind of dark conspiracy. It’s the result of A16z being full of incredibly smart people that understand the direction of travel of the world today and understand very well the value of audience in the AI era. Its not a kind of tangled conspiracy web- I admire the speed of their execution and the degree to which they’ve been able to accomplish what seems to be a very smart strategy in a very short amount of time.

What’s happening is that the elites of the AI world- the people who build it, fund it, and profit from it- are buying the conversation about themselves. Again, not evil- fiscally sound. $300-or-whatever million for TBPN when you can raise hundreds of billions of dollars in venture capital is so insignificant that it hardly bears mention. the ROI is extraordinary. When you believe your technology will reshape civilization, a few more degrees of narrative control is righteous.

My problem is that 79% of Americans are not in the room. They are not watching TBPN. They are not reading A16Z’s Substack. They are not attending invitation-only summits in Utah. They are using AI tools they don’t trust, reading headlines about water consumption that are wrong by three orders of magnitude, and watching the most consequential technology of their lifetime get explained by the people who profit from it.

Forty-seven percent of Americans don’t trust either party on AI. Twenty-three percent trust the Democrats. Twenty-five percent trust the Republicans. That leaves a majority of the country that trusts no one to handle this for them. Not the companies, not the government, not the press.

That is the actual crisis- not the paperclipping. The absence of anyone credible to explain it before AI runs 40% of GDP and 70% of decisions globally.

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The Sagan Problem

In 1980, a gangly astronomer from Brooklyn hunkered down on the edge of a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean and told 500 million people in 60 countries that they were made of star stuff.

Carl Sagan did not discover the cosmic microwave background radiation, or build the Voyager spacecraft. He did not originate the theory of nuclear winter. What he did was something that the scientific establishment considered beneath it and the public considered essential: he just explained it all without making you feel stupid.

I don’t believe he recorded a lot about his motives but I believe that he did this because he thought that the public had a right to understand what was happening to them, with their money. Perhaps if the space age had been paid for by venture capitalists and not the public purse, this would have been a different story.

I like to believe he thought that democracy could not function if the most consequential science of the era was only comprehensible to the people inside Kennedy Space Center.

he ate a lot of shit for this- Cornell nearly denied him tenure. Ordinary people’s comprehension of this made it feel “unserious” and somehow science that’s broadly understandable lacks the virtues of science that’s dense and expert. They were wrong. Sagan’s work — Cosmos, The Demon-Haunted World, Pale Blue Dot — did more to build scientific literacy in America than any paper published in Nature. what I love about his work is that it serves an audience and it serves an audience faithfully without sneering.

I so badly want to see the emergence of a Carl Sagan for AI. someone who understands this world, who can explain it patiently and carefully to people like my grandmother and people like my arch-conservative uncle or my communist cousin. I fear the AI world will yearn for this figure too late, because they believe that we’re all going to enter a singularity so quickly and abruptly that this explaining is hardly worth the effort. that argument feels credible to me; it’s similar to our stance on regulation. if we just build the machine god, then all these other problems can be kicked down the road.

A credible, independent, accessible voice explaining what is actually happening in the halls of Anthropic and Open AI for the public as a public good, with no portfolio to push or corporate backers or mixed incentives- this is what I dream of. and I fear the consequences of not having this person in place by the time Opus 6 goes live. I’m also quietly terrified that Eliezer is the default if we don’t find someone better.

Sagan understood something that the AI industry’s media buyers and the journalism establishment have both forgotten: the public is not stupid. The public is underserved. Given a guide they can trust, people will do the work of understanding. Given only propagandists and prosecutors, they will do what 79% of Americans have already done — use the technology anyway and trust no one.

The work of creating honest, independent, populist AI education is not a high-ROI opportunity, but rather a national resource. America cannot maintain its position in AI- cannot regulate it wisely, cannot deploy it equitably, cannot compete with nations that are educating their populations about it- if the only people who understand it are the ones getting rich from it.

Someone has to be the person on the cliff, looking out at the Pacific, explaining that we are made of star stuff.