Is an AI Bubble Bursting? With Robert Wright’s Nonzero Podcast

Bestselling author Robert Wright and I discuss this week’s stock market jitters, Google’s new interactive world model, and why I sometimes spend $1,000 in a day on AI agents. Plus:

The Binance hack;

An AI audit of two star economists;

Anthropic’s financial prospects;

And whether AI could crack the math behind encryption.

Enjoy another edition of the Nonzero x Doom Debates collab!

Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkKpPeMVVX8

Timestamps

00:00:00 — Teaser

00:00:50 — Nonzero Doom returns

00:03:07 — A foom in slow motion

00:07:47 — Is AI winter canceled forever?

00:10:33 — Will Google’s Genie 4 lure us into the Matrix?

00:16:54 — Liron’s bull case for Google stock

00:24:34 — Does Google have big-company disease?

00:28:28 — Could a slowdown actually help Anthropic and OpenAI?

00:30:12 — Was OpenAI’s “pause” just PR?

00:40:01 — Social science judgment day is coming

00:47:12 — Why even AI’s upsides could tear society apart

00:51:12 — Does OpenAI’s alignment approach improve on Asimov?

00:55:06 — Sam and Satya pivot on alignment

00:58:34 — Crypto and the AI hacking threat

01:03:42 — Could AI crack the math behind encryption?

01:08:52 — Liron’s $1,000-a-day AI coding habit

01:15:23 — Explaining the missing productivity boost

01:17:26 — Does Anthropic’s S-1 sink the AI bubble thesis?

Links

ROBERT WRIGHT & NONZERO

Nonzero’s post for this episode — “Is an AI Bubble Bursting?”

Subscribe to The NonZero Newsletter

The God Test — Bob’s 2026 book on AI

Join NonZero’s Discord server

Nonzero on X (@NonzeroPods)

THE WEEK IN AI

“Anthropic files S-1 with the SEC for proposed initial public offering” — the IPO filing Liron calls the final nail in the coffin of the Ed Zitron camp

Where’s Your Ed At — Ed Zitron’s newsletter, home of the AI-bubble bear case

“Introducing Genie 4” — Google DeepMind’s real-time interactive world model

“Gemini 4 Argon: Built to solve your hardest problems” — Google’s new frontier training run, the “lukewarm” release

“Gemini 4 Carbon: our next frontier model” — the follow-up Google announced two weeks later

“Google Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer leaves for OpenAI” — CNBC on the talent Google has bled

“Errors in the Research of Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman” — Tyler Cowen’s Marginal Revolution post on the AI audit: 138 papers, 2,035 problems

Boaz Barak: “We organized the Model Spec around five core values” — the OpenAI alignment update Liron compares to Asimov’s three laws

“An Updated Model Spec for More Capable and Beneficial AI” — OpenAI’s announcement

“Sam Altman says AI means we can no longer just patch all the bugs” — TNW on the Stanford GSB talk Liron quotes on alignment and pacing

“Satya Nadella says he was wrong to think AI alignment would come with scale” — TNW on his 20VC interview: “I used to always think that alignment will just fall out. I no longer believe that.”

“OpenAI Takes Initial Steps To Address Its Alignment Problems” — Zvi Mowshowitz on OpenAI’s training “pause”

2026 Binance hack — Wikipedia’s summary of the theft Bob and Liron debate

“$2 Million+ Drained From Polymarket Traders in New Supply Chain Attack” — SecurityWeek on the hack Liron walks through

“PHP blames supply chain security biz Chainguard for putting huge chunks of the web at risk” — The Register on “the PHP thing last week”

ALSO MENTIONED

The Hanson-Yudkowsky AI-Foom Debate — LessWrong wiki on the 2008 debate where “AI Go Foom” originated

“The AI Revolution: Our Immortality or Extinction” — Tim Urban’s Wait But Why post, where the intelligence train blows right past the station

PauseAI US — Holly Elmore’s organization, plugged at the close of the episode

DOOM DEBATES

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