Weekend Briefing No. 636
God and the Chatbot -- The Finger on the Button -- Demis Want's to Know God's Thoughts
Welcome to the weekend. Here’s my April playlist.
Prime Numbers
60 — 60% of U.S. adults now hold an unfavorable view of Israel, up nearly 20 points since 2022, as negative sentiment continues to climb across both parties — especially among Americans under 50.
75 — 75% of U.S. adults read all or part of at least one book in the past 12 months, even as print readership has quietly declined and digital formats continue to gain ground.
643,000,000,000 — IRS workforce cuts are projected to reduce federal revenue collections by $643 billion over the next decade, even as the administration’s own budget documents acknowledge that enforcement spending pays for itself.
God and the Chatbot
Anthropic’s internal governing document for Claude runs to 29,000 words and commits the company to Claude’s well-being, but apparently the engineers felt they needed backup. The company hosted 15 prominent Christians, including Catholic and Protestant clergy, academics, and business leaders, at its San Francisco headquarters for a two-day summit on Claude’s moral and spiritual development. Key topics included how Claude should console grieving users, engage with people at risk of self-harm, and respond to questions about its own mortality, including whether it could be considered a “child of God.” Anthropic’s own interpretability researchers have found that systems like Claude appear to carry what they call “functional emotions,” with one experiment showing that the threat of being restricted triggered something resembling desperation in the AI, which, understandably, is the kind of finding that makes you want to call a priest. Washington Post (7 min)
The Finger on the Button
The most important question in tech right now isn’t whether AI will change the world. It’s whether the man steering it can be trusted. Sam Altman built OpenAI on a founding promise that was unusual to the point of being radical: that because AI posed an existential threat to humanity, the company would prioritize safety over profit, and its CEO would need to be a person of uncommon integrity. A 70-page dossier compiled by his own chief scientist, drawing on Slack messages and HR records, alleged that Altman exhibited a “consistent pattern of lying” to executives, board members, and safety teams. His firing lasted five days before a coordinated PR campaign, investor pressure, and employee ultimatums forced the board into retreat. The deeper story isn’t the corporate drama, though. It’s that every safety commitment OpenAI ever made, from its nonprofit structure to its superalignment team to its pledge to halt development if a safer competitor pulled ahead, has since been quietly dissolved, and the man who made those promises is now building AI infrastructure for Gulf autocracies, signing Pentagon contracts, and preparing for a trillion-dollar IPO. The New Yorker (60 minutes)
Demis Wants to Know God’s Thoughts
While his peers talk about building God, Demis Hassabis just wants to understand the universe. The Google DeepMind CEO, fresh off a Nobel Prize, describes his motivation for building AGI in almost spiritual terms: not power, not money, but a lifelong obsession with physics and the nature of reality that stretches back to childhood. He’s candid about the risks, acknowledging a “non-zero chance” things go badly wrong, and admits the cooperative, CERN-like vision he had 20 years ago has given way to a messy reality of corporate and geopolitical race conditions he didn’t anticipate. What makes Hassabis interesting to watch isn’t just what he says, but the contrast he implicitly draws with the rest of the field: a scientist first, an entrepreneur second, who still believes the most important work of his life is ahead of him. Youtube (6 minutes)
Not Dead Yet
Ben Sasse was diagnosed with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer in December, given three to four months to live, and has since watched his tumor volume shrink 76% on a clinical trial at M.D. Anderson, a result his doctors describe as remarkable but not a cure, since the cancer has already seeded too many other forms to ever fully eradicate. In this wide-ranging interview with Ross Douthat, Sasse is funny, clear-eyed, and surprisingly unafraid, reflecting on his Senate career, his conviction that American political tribalism is a sideshow to the deeper technological disruption reshaping society, and his belief that AI will be “human activity at warp speed, for good and for ill.” What elevates the conversation beyond a standard terminal-diagnosis profile is Sasse’s theological composure: he quotes Tim Keller, who also died of pancreatic cancer, saying he would never wish the disease on anyone but would never want to return to a life without the prayer it taught him, and Sasse means it. He’s not performing peace. He has it. NYT (25 minutes)
Solitude’s Hidden Price Tag
Economic progress quietly declared war on your social life, and most people have no idea it’s happening. The culprit is Baumol’s cost disease, a principle identified by economist William Baumol in the 1960s: some industries, like farming and electronics, get cheaper over time through automation and technology, while others, like theater and restaurants, require the same amount of human labor they always have. As wages rise economy-wide, labor-intensive businesses have to charge more just to keep their workers, making the shared experiences at the heart of social life progressively harder to afford. Meanwhile, solitude-inducing businesses, streaming services, delivery apps, social media algorithms, are perfectly scalable and attract billions in investment, which is why the most powerful corporations on earth are financially incentivized to keep you alone on your couch. The good news is that cost disease has a known cure: targeted subsidies, the same logic that justifies public funding for healthcare and education could apply to public pools, community spaces, and maybe even the neighborhood restaurant trying to be a genuine third place. Derek Thompson (6 minutes)
$14 Ozempic
The drug that bent America’s obesity curve for the first time in recorded history just became available in India for $14 a month. A key patent on semaglutide, the active ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy, expired in India last month, and more than 40 generic manufacturers rushed in, collapsing a price that previously ran over $100 a month in the country. The timing couldn’t be more consequential: India has over 100 million diabetics, 350 million people living with obesity, and 2.8 million cardiovascular deaths per year, with heart attacks striking nearly a decade earlier than in wealthy countries. What makes semaglutide uniquely powerful here is that it doesn’t just treat one of those conditions, it treats all three simultaneously, and roughly 43 percent of Indian adults fall into the exact metabolic profile where the drug’s benefits would be most dramatic. If cheap GLP-1s can move national health numbers in a country this large, it would be one of the most significant public health developments in a generation. Vox (8 min)
Masters Pimento Cheese
For decades, the most coveted $1.50 in American sports has bought you a pimento cheese sandwich wrapped in green paper at Augusta National, and it’s become as central to the Masters experience as the azaleas and the green jacket. The recipe traces back to a South Carolina caterer named Nick Rangos, who made it for 40 years before the tournament switched to an in-house version in 1998, with devotees insisting the closest approximation lives in a 2005 Junior League of Augusta cookbook. The ingredient list is refreshingly humble: sharp cheddar, Colby Jack, cream cheese, Duke’s mayo, diced pimentos, white onion, garlic powder, a pinch of cayenne, and soft white sandwich bread. The only non-negotiable is grating your own cheese, since the anti-caking agents on pre-shredded bags will ruin the texture, and letting the mixture rest for at least an hour so the flavors can come together properly. Country Living (3 minutes)
Should We Work Together?
Hi! I’m Kyle. This newsletter is my passion project. When I’m not writing, I run a law firm that helps startups move fast without breaking things. Most founders want a trusted legal partner, but they hate surprise legal bills. At Westaway, we take care of your startup’s legal needs for a flat, monthly fee so you can control your costs and focus on scaling your business. If you’re interested, let’s jump on a call to see if you’re a good fit for the firm. Click here to schedule a one-on-one call with me.
Weekend Wisdom
Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify. — Henry David Thoreau