Tech leaders warn of censorship risks and debate China's AI progress

The brief

With David Friedberg away, Travis Kalanick and Gavin Baker join the panel to dissect a shifting geopolitical landscape, starting with a Democratic Socialist sweep in New York City primaries that signals changing economic attitudes among younger voters.

The conversation shifts to digital rights, where Travis Kalanick warns that proposed social media bans for minors are actually a Trojan horse designed to force adult de-anonymization and establish broader online censorship regimes.

In the AI race, China is closing the gap with the US. The release of the GLM model highlights how open-source distillation and composable models are helping international competitors bypass hardware constraints to match Western frontier capabilities.

On the hardware front, Micron's blowout earnings expose a massive bottleneck in High Bandwidth Memory. To escape terrestrial power and regulatory limits, the hosts debate radical alternatives, including the viability of orbital compute in space.

The episode wraps with a look at private market valuations, questioning whether the sky-high expectations for frontier AI giants like OpenAI and Anthropic can be sustained as hardware bottlenecks and distributed compute alter the economics.