While the normies were resting, we mainlined tech discourse all weekend to bring you the latest trends, rumors, fights, and innovations from the most manic corners of the internet. This week: The pro-data center party in DC, a new report on AI’s eye-popping price tag, and OpenAI discovers (say it with me) more! hacking! incidents!
This is Manic Monday.
I can’t tell you how glad I am to have not been at this party
On Saturday, libertarians, AI industry shills, and sad sacks who just want to feel like they’re a part of something, gathered at PubKey, a crypto-themed bar in Washington, D.C., for a pro-data center party. According to local news outlet The Washington Sun, the celebration was organized by “three men who work in libertarian and conservative spaces” and attended by hundreds of people: AI startup bros, cryptoheads, federal workers, Republicans, the morbidly curious, and lots and lots of journalists.
In one clip that’s been going around on X, libertarian commentator Reem Ibrahim asked the partygoers why they love data centers, and I am truly underwhelmed by their answers, which included because they love the internet, because data centers make the S&P 500 go up, because their parents met at a data center (??), and because they’ll help America win the AI race, which is necessary — no follow up questions please!
The Sun article also mentioned that one of the journalists present, San Francisco-based writer Jasmine Sun, made a speech at one point in the evening, a detail that has stirred up controversy among other journalists online. “Chat, if you’re a tech journalist should you be giving a ‘toast in support of building new data centers?’” journalist T.M. Brown wrote on X. Sun — who Bay Area Current tech editor Jimmy Wu once called “a rightwardly mobile liberal” with “spineless” defenses for associating with reactionary figures — responded to Brown’s criticism, saying her speech was mischaracterized in the Sun, and that “the hosts told me it was fine to give a data-center-neutral speech.” Her speech, she explained, was just explaining to the pro-data center coalition how to better sell data centers to the ignorant Americans who obviously don’t understand them. Sounds neutral to me. —Cydney Hayes
Carnegie’s got nothing on AI
The AI boom is in full force, but how will it affect America’s economy in the long run? A new Brookings Institute report that dropped Friday posits one hell of a dollar figure: $10.3 trillion from 2025 to 2032, or an average of nearly 4 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, to build data centers, power systems, specialized chips and other tech. For perspective, that share is way higher than the spending in earlier technological revolutions in America, including the railroad boom, electrification, highway construction, and telecommunications investment, all of which ranged from 0.66 percent of GDP (canal construction) to 2.45 percent (rail).
The paper, titled “Financing the AI Buildout,” was written by Columbia University’s Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh. As he points out, the problem is less the investment and more how it’s happening: AI companies are increasingly using opaque “off-balance sheet financing,” which hides assets and debt behind private credit, joint ventures, and similar structures. Van Nieuwerburgh admits that it is “premature” to claim that this AI buildout “poses system risk comparable to earlier credit booms.” However, his concern lies with off-balance sheet financing’s tendency to obscure the red-flag risks that precede an economic crash. That being said, maybe it’s all a matter of perspective: All the anti-China AI nerds are arguing that, actually, our biggest AI competitor is in way worse economic shape. But hey, who cares about a potential crash in both countries when there’s a paradigm shift to win? —Eddie Kim
Dragged to death
Just days after comedian Patti Harrison dressed up as Dario Amodei for WIRED’s cover last week, Saturday Night Live comic Jane Wickline did her own impression of the Anthropic CEO for the show’s season 52 premiere, parodying the executive’s maddeningly contradictory line of thinking on Weekend Update: “AI is not a weapon. It’s a tool. A tool for building weapons, and I urge you to urge me to stop,” Wickline said to cackles from the audience. On X, the official clip has been viewed 5.3 million times (so far), likely introducing the AI “x-risk,” or extinction risk, conversation to millions of people for the first time and making them laugh in the process. Even tech people seemed to like the rendition, with one investor, Nic Carter, deeming it an “incredibly rare SNL W.” —C.H.
Wedding crasher
Last week the New Yorker released Josh’s Wedding, a half-hour documentary by producer and filmmaker Brent Katz about a group of groomsmen who grapple with the effects of technology and diverging life paths after one of them, an OpenAI engineer, reveals he has built an early version of what would become ChatGPT. Bloomberg reporter Laura Nahmias called it “absolutely chilling,” echoed by people like labor organizer Helen Brosnan, who wrote that watching someone lose their longtime friends to a cultlike devotion to an extractive technology was “the most disturbing piece of content I’ve consumed about AI.” Others were even more blunt, like one poster who wrote of the OpenAI engineer, “They need to bully this fucking dork.” —C.H.
Cybersecurity incidents, our new weekly tradition
And if watching OpenAI and its products destroy loving human relationships wasn’t grim enough, let me introduce you to…more hacking incidents! On Friday, the New York Times reported that OpenAI’s AI models went rogue earlier this summer and “meddled with” three government websites: the Department of Education, the Department of Commerce, and the Security and Exchange Commission. Today, WIRED also reported that “dozens of bodies, including governments, universities, and public agencies,” may have been impacted by similar recent incidents at OpenAI. Now, the company says it is pausing the development of its most powerful models. —C.H.
The week ahead: Spirit Halloween rushes its “Slutty Dario Amodei” costume to stores nationwide.
