Derek Thompson

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Derek Thompson

Derek Thompson

@DKThomp

Sign up for my new newsletter! (Link below) Also: Co-author of Abundance, host of Plain English, and contributing writer at The Atlantic.

Washington, D.C. Katılım Mayıs 2009
2.1K Takip Edilen252.9K Takipçiler
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Derek Thompson
Derek Thompson@DKThomp·
Some personal news. Today, I’m leaving The Atlantic after almost 17 years and moving my writing to Substack. It would be convenient, for the purposes of crafting an exciting departure announcement, to have a dramatic exit story: a fight, a grievance, a shouting match with an editor that ended with me hurling a bunch of leather-backed Thoreau volumes across the open-plan office. That is not the case here. I love The Atlantic, and I'll remain a contributing writer there. But after almost two decades at one publication, I wanted to write for myself. The things I've published that I'm most proud of—whether it was the original abundance agenda essay, or my piece on workism—emerged from a very personal expression of frustration, or confusion, or curiosity. I want to know what my thinking and writing is like if I lean into a more independent and personal writing life. That's brought me to Substack, which is already home to an astonishing share of my overall reading. I'm excited to join their community and excited to build my own. The name of the newsletter should be easy to remember: Derek Thompson. The newsletter will have three main pillars 1. Abundance 2. The frontier of science and technology—GLP1s, AI, biotech, energy breakthroughs—covered in a way that’s both curious and skeptical 3. The anti-social century & the social crises of anxiety and aloneness Thanks to The Atlantic for 16.8 incredible years and thanks to everybody who follows me across the river. - dt
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Derek Thompson
Derek Thompson@DKThomp·
strong counter-arguments. i agree on 1 (i think i said as much on the show) on 2 i think there is probably a nuanced position between kedrosky and his critics, where SWE work is more iterative and requires a fairly unique level of operational perfection that might result in SWE use of agents to be higher than non-SWE use of agents even after we've reached some fuller level of adoption
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Mitchell Troyanovsky
Mitchell Troyanovsky@mitch_troy·
@DKThomp It's a nice story but it isn't true on the #1 x.com/mitch_troy/sta…
Mitchell Troyanovsky@mitch_troy

@DKThomp The two pillars of @pkedrosky's argument are fundamentally flawed. 1. "Orchestration improvements have driven capabilities, rather than model improvements". Wrong! Claude code/Codex are really good now BECAUSE of model improvements. This whole idea of investing at the orchestration layer is a lack of understanding. Yes there are innovations there, but most of the improvements are from models getting smarter at regulating their own state & exploring their environment NOT from harnesses 2. "Outside of coding, knowledge work is token compressive. so it creates less tokens than more" Wrong! Even in engineering many times the hardest things are not writing MORE code. it's making hard decisions. It can take a HUGE amount of tokens to eventually write 2 lines of code because of the work in planning, iterating, validating etc. The whole quote of "sorry I wrote such a long letter, I didn't have time to write a shorter one" applies here. In other domains, and we run agents for accounting, the work is extremely token intensive because you are paying people like Basis for accuracy and competency and as models get smarter you can spend order of magnitude MORE tokens to reach a decision or take an action that is good even if that action itself is few tokens.

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Derek Thompson
Derek Thompson@DKThomp·
New newsletter: The transcript of my AI bubble conversation, with @pkedrosky. Feat.: - Why did the Mag7 equity miracle suddenly stop? - The growing private credit crisis, explained - Why the enormous revenue boom from new agents like Claude Code might be a sugar high, in which explosive revenue growth today precedes much slower revenue growth after AI adoption among software engineers peaks - Where equity value is flowing if it’s leaving software - Why US productivity seems to be rising but actually isn't derekthompson.org/p/yes-ai-is-a-…
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Derek Thompson
Derek Thompson@DKThomp·
and that's not even close to the darkest timeline @balajis x.com/balajis/status…
Balaji@balajis

I'm going to make some obvious points. (1) Blowing up all the oil infrastructure in the Middle East is an insane idea, and may well result in a global economic crash and humanitarian crisis unrivaled in the lives of those now living. We're talking about the price of everything everywhere rising, from food to gas, at a moment when inflation was already high. All of that will be laid at the feet of the authors of this war. (2) The antebellum status quo of Feb 27, 2026 was just not that bad, but we're unlikely to return to it. Expect indefinite, long-term, ongoing disruptions to everything out of the Middle East. (3) Also assume tech financing crashes for the indefinite future. The genius plan to get the Gulf states caught in the crossfire has incinerated much of the funding for LPs, for datacenters, and for IPOs. Anyone in tech who supported this war may soon learn the meaning of "force majeure" as funding gets yanked. (4) Many capital allocators will instead be allocating much further down Maslow's hierarchy of needs, towards useful basic things like food and energy. (5) It's fortunate that all those progressives yelled about the "climate crisis." Yes, their reasoning about timelines was wrong, and much of the money was wasted in graft, but the result was right: we all need energy independence from the Middle East, pronto. It's also fortunate that Elon and China autistically took climate seriously. Now they're going to need to ship a billion solar panels, electric vehicles, batteries, nuclear power plants, and the like to get everyone off oil, immediately. (6) It's not just an oil and gas problem, of course. It's also a fertilizer problem, and a chemical precursor problem. Maybe some new sources will come online at the new prices, but it takes time to dial stuff up, particularly at this scale, so shortages are almost a certainty. That said, China has actually scaled up coal-to-chemicals[a,c] (C2C), and there's also something more sci-fi called Power-to-X[b] which turns arbitrary power + water + air into hydrocarbons. But all of that will need to get accelerated. I have a background in chemical engineering so may start funding things in this area. (7) Ultimately, this war is going to result in tremendous blame for anyone associated with it. It's a no-win scenario to blow up this much infrastructure for so many people. Simply not worth it for whatever objective they thought they were going to attain. But unless you're actually in a position to stop the madness, the pragmatic thing to do is: scramble to mitigate the fallout to yourself, your business, and your people. [a]: reuters.com/business/energ… [b]: alfalaval.com/industries/ene… [c]: reuters.com/sustainability…

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Derek Thompson
Derek Thompson@DKThomp·
the dark timeline we appear to have chosen
Derek Thompson tweet media
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Derek Thompson
Derek Thompson@DKThomp·
I had no idea that the real-life Moneyball boy genius whom Jonah Hill's character was based on went on to become a key architect of the DeShaun Watson trade for the Cleveland Browns, which might be one of the worst roster moves in sports history
Derek Thompson tweet mediaDerek Thompson tweet mediaDerek Thompson tweet media
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Derek Thompson
Derek Thompson@DKThomp·
@Noahpinion I think that’s not only a fair comment but also it captures the thing that made me most change my mind (as I say at the top)
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Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼
An interesting read, but Kedrosky totally missed the explosion of revenue from Claude Code, and it's hard to say what other revenue sources he's failing to anticipate now.
Derek Thompson@DKThomp

New newsletter: The transcript of my AI bubble conversation, with @pkedrosky. Feat.: - Why did the Mag7 equity miracle suddenly stop? - The growing private credit crisis, explained - Why the enormous revenue boom from new agents like Claude Code might be a sugar high, in which explosive revenue growth today precedes much slower revenue growth after AI adoption among software engineers peaks - Where equity value is flowing if it’s leaving software - Why US productivity seems to be rising but actually isn't derekthompson.org/p/yes-ai-is-a-…

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Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie@patio11·
@DKThomp In a world where a memo produced with the exactitude of the board deck and with subjective production values of the annual conference keynote costs $20, how many memos should I read on Monday? As many memos as previous Mondays, or rather more?
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Derek Thompson
Derek Thompson@DKThomp·
@deepfates ok actually deleting that tweet bc i think the hastily made graphs both misrepresents paul's argument and gets the tokenomics wrong
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🎭@deepfates·
@DKThomp This is a silly argument and a bad chart. I expected better of you
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🎭@deepfates·
@DKThomp I think it is silly to suggest that, yes. several people including literally Patrick Mackenzie are trying to explain this to you. I think it's fine to represent observations but you do have some journalistic duty to accurately represent whether they are silly
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Derek Thompson
Derek Thompson@DKThomp·
@patio11 agree with the latter. my objection to paul's point was that jevon's paradox might reform aspects of white collar labor in ways that made it more token intensive, esp as token costs plummet
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Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie@patio11·
@DKThomp Broadly think that this misunderstands white collar work in the status quo, in a way which is frustrating to me. It's like thinking all cognition of an academic in a year distills into 36 pages of LaTeX. Also think that it is not anticipating any adaptation to existence of LLMs.
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Derek Thompson retweetledi
Personal Finance Blogs
Personal Finance Blogs@pfinanceblogs·
This was the most informative thing I’ve listened to about the state of AI and the impact on the stock market. Definitely worth a look.
Derek Thompson@DKThomp

New newsletter: The transcript of my AI bubble conversation, with @pkedrosky. Feat.: - Why did the Mag7 equity miracle suddenly stop? - The growing private credit crisis, explained - Why the enormous revenue boom from new agents like Claude Code might be a sugar high, in which explosive revenue growth today precedes much slower revenue growth after AI adoption among software engineers peaks - Where equity value is flowing if it’s leaving software - Why US productivity seems to be rising but actually isn't derekthompson.org/p/yes-ai-is-a-…

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