7/13: We Must Act Now
Open letter on AI + economics, plus: Richard Sutton neolab, White House ratepayer protections, TSMC revenue up
Happy Monday, monitors. Huge update: Sophia Dew is joining as a full-time host! She’ll be on stream with us every day, and will help run our Instagram as well.
Be sure to catch us on X and YouTube, and join our Discord to chat with our hosts live.
Today’s Experts
Sam Sinai (Dyno Therapeutics)
Christian Cantrell (Reve AI)
Nico Christie (Fundamental Research Labs)
Finn Brown (Aqua Voice)
Making Sense of the World
AI leaders and economists sign an open letter on AI’s economic impacts. The letter, titled “We Must Act Now”, calls for economists, policymakers, and tech leaders to act now to understand and steer the economic impacts of transformative AI. Signatories include multiple Nobel laureates, frontier lab employees, and hundreds of economists.
Richard Sutton founds a neolab, Oak Lab, to build entirely new algorithms for deep learning, with a “holy grail” of creating a trillion-parameter agent that learns and plans in real time with 20 watts of energy, the same as the human brain. Sutton is known as the “father of reinforcement learning”, and wrote the canonical textbook on the subject along with Andrew Barto in 1998.
Xi Jinping will speak at China’s top AI conference in Shanghai this weekend, signaling that top Chinese leadership is paying much closer attention to the technology.
The White House may announce a voluntary ratepayer protection pledge. Utility companies and AI hyperscalers will pledge to cover cost increases from grid updates in order to avoid increasing energy bills for households and businesses. Anthropic, Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle, and xAI have already announced a version of this.
TSMC Q1 2026 revenue is up 36%, showing strong AI spending. Contrary to some people’s expectations of an “AI bubble”, headline revenue metrics for TSMC and Nvidia’s data center segment continue to grow rapidly.
Meta’s Hyperion data center will be 5 GW and cost at least $250 billion. The datacenter, in rural Richland Parish, Louisiana, will be operational at 2 gigawatts (GW) of power by 2030 and reach the full 5 GW by 2032-2036. For reference, the largest operational datacenters today are about ~1 GW, and Meta’s entire 2025 revenue was $201 billion.
Global smartphone shipments have reached the lowest level since 2013 due to increased memory prices. Xiaomi, Oppo, and Vivo, who sell many cheaper phones, declined the most. Apple shipments actually increased 3% on the quarter. The memory shortage is expected to persist through at least 2027 and possibly much longer.
Anthropic releases research on Claude’s values across models and languages. Among the findings: Opus 4.7 is much more cautious than Opus 4.6, and prefers depth to brevity. Claude models are much warmer in Hindi and Arabic, and more rigorous in Russian and English.
The EU plans to further restrict kids’ access to social media. Under a proposed plan, children under 13 would only be able to access social media with adult supervision, and access for teens would be based on regulators’ estimations of platform safety.
Banger Review
