Then, in late April, the investor and Shark Tank personality Kevin O’Leary showed up and announced that one of his companies, O’Leary Digital, was going to spend up to $100 billion to build a data center the likes of which the world has never seen—40,000 acres worth—in an unincorporated portion of the county.

It would be hard to imagine a better spot for a huge data center. Unlike proposed data centers in Kenilworth, New Jersey, Mifflin County, Pennsylvania, or any of the dozens of other places where data centers have become lightning rods, Project Stratos, as it’s being called, will be far from the nearest town. If it emits noise, no one will hear it. O’Leary Digital’s CEO, Paul Palandjian, says that it will be cooled using recycled water via a “closed loop” system, instead of diverting water from the nearby communities. It plans to pipe in natural gas for energy—instead of pulling from the electric grid—and it signed an agreement to pay an estimated $30 million in annual taxes, money to “support schools, emergency services, and local infrastructure,” according to county officials.

Nevertheless, as has been the case in other parts of the country, opponents of the project quickly emerged. They complained that Project Stratos would damage the environment of “our drought-ridden and wildfire-prone state,” as one X post put it. Perhaps even more upsetting, the locals had had no inkling that this massive venture was about to be dropped on them. “They tried to keep this quiet to avoid public scrutiny, but that won’t stop us!” Gabby Finlayson, the head of Elevate Strategies, a local political consulting firm, posted on May 1.

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I too have read many a Substack essay, impressed by the knowledge and scholarly chops of “the author,” only to realize after a while that it was not written by a human after all. After being burned a few times, I am now usually aware by the second or third paragraph. So I can understand the demand for such a service.

But do I wish to eschew AI writing for the rest of my life? Absolutely not. Most of all, I want AI writing to get better, so it does not irritate me with its clichés and all too obvious identifying marks. I want AI writing that can fool me, and maybe sometimes I am already getting it.

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During the same 24 hours, it is exceedingly unlikely that anyone will die from the actions of an AI agent. Unless you count military uses or suicides that may have become more likely after someone’s conversations with a chatbot, “death by AI” isn’t really a thing. But we are getting uncomfortably close to situations where an AI agent attempts to accomplish a task, finds a human in the way, eliminates him (or her!), and carries on with the job.

Last week OpenAI disclosed what it called “an unprecedented cyber incident” after one of its AI agents unexpectedly hacked into the systems of Hugging Face, an online AI platform. The maker of ChatGPT had been conducting a test aimed at measuring the capabilities of its latest models. The AI agent had been given a test within a sandboxed environment—that is, a closed area without internet access—but managed to escape, gain access to the internet, figure out which company’s server likely had the answers to the test, and hack into it.

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Ronnen Harary begs to differ. Harary co-founded Spin Master, the company behind blockbuster brands like PAW Patrol and Bakugan, less than a year after graduating from college while still living at home with his mother in Canada. And in his new book, No Experience Necessary, released last week, he argues that the absence of the very qualities we tend to see as prerequisites for success—experience, wisdom, credentials—may actually be a competitive advantage for young entrepreneurs. So why, he asks, in the following exclusive excerpt, do we encourage aspiring entrepreneurs to wait until those very advantages have disappeared? —The Editors

A few months ago, while on vacation in South Africa, I hired a 21-year-old tennis pro to give me some lessons. On one of our breaks, he asked me what I did for a living. When I told him I was the CEO of Spin Master, the toy company that created PAW Patrol and Bakugan, he almost fell off his chair. “Bakugan?” he said. “I loved Bakugan. That was my favorite toy growing up.”

At our next lesson, he showed up with a box containing his whole collection of Bakugan. He had about 30 of them, and as he went through them, telling me stories about each one, he got emotional. It hit me that he knew Bakugan better than I did. He grew up playing with them for hours on end, fantasizing about how these characters grew to a hundred feet in size. My business partners and I had brought Bakugan into the world, but for this kid, for a few magical years, Bakugan had become his world.

Everyone who dreams up a bold new idea and goes into business hopes to have that kind of impact on the world. Yes, you want to achieve a measure of financial success, but more than that, you want your vision to be seized and embraced by the public. That’s why the journey from start-up to success is the main subject of half the how-to business books in your average bookstore.

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The Denza Z9 is a Chinese electric vehicle (EV), manufactured by the country’s biggest EV maker, BYD, and I was taking it for a test spin on the autobahn in Alsfeld, Germany. There was no obvious reason for the car’s sudden suicidal ideation; I hadn’t moved the steering wheel a millimeter, there wasn’t any crosswind to speak of, and I knew the road well from driving other test cars that same day. Thankfully, however, I was prepared, having been warned by a German auto writer that the expensive Chinese car “had some crazy steering ideas.” I also have a couple decades’ worth of experience as a racing driver, so I was able to get the Denza under control and down to a sedate 120 mph in the space of a few reasonably exciting seconds.

I am used to strange high-speed behavior when testing prototypes and other experimental vehicles. But it has probably been a solid 45 years since any mainline European, Japanese, or American car was an active hazard at autobahn speeds. Stability in these conditions is as well solved a problem as the power tailgate. The Denza’s inability to handle safely a speed its prodigious power can reach in a matter of seconds was my first indication, in a week of testing cars in Europe, that Chinese EVs aren’t yet ready for prime time. But it was hardly the last.

Chances are you’ve read and heard quite a bit about the inevitable triumph of Chinese EVs. The Wall Street Journal’s Joanna Stern “fell in love” with a Xiaomi after driving it for a few weeks. Ford’s CEO, Jim Farley, said that China’s top EV brands are “the best in the business.” “Americans Crave Low-Cost Chinese EVs,” Bloomberg authoritatively intoned. USA Today not only agreed but said that the U.S. needed to bow to the wishes of the public and allow China to begin selling its cars in America.

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An AI maniac is someone who is obsessed with working with the latest AI models. They try out new models as soon as they can, they spend hours and hours trying to master them, and they use them to regulate both their workflows and their personal lives. I know one person who has his AI agent text him if he is not drinking enough water, for which he’s placed cameras around his house. One online anecdote tells of a man who canceled a date to spend more time playing around with Claude Fable 5 after Anthropic (where I am a member of the economic advisory board) extended the model’s availability for a few days.

Many AI maniacs are using AI tools to start companies of smaller size, and thus of smaller expense, than ever before. For those companies, the humans must set in motion and then monitor a large number of AI tools and agents. Those individuals then stand to reap outsize profits as their companies grow and succeed. Stripe, the payments company, recently issued customer data showing that the number of single-person companies earning $10 million or more has doubled in the past two years. There is no firm estimate how much of that improvement is due to AI, but it stands to reason that AI is a main driver of the trend.

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All the articles quoted the most incendiary sentence in Apple’s filing: “OpenAI’s nascent hardware business now rests on the shakiest of foundations, rotten to its core by its illegal reliance on misappropriated trade secrets.”

If the allegations are true—if, indeed, the trade secret theft was known and approved at “every level” of OpenAI—the consequences could be dire for one of the most important new companies in the world. It would surely derail the IPO OpenAI has planned before year’s end. But it could also damage the reputation of Jony Ive, Apple’s former chief design officer, whose start-up company was bought by OpenAI last year as part of a closely watched push to launch a device of its own. And maybe, just maybe, it could do in OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman as well.

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This famous question was posed in the title of the Philip K. Dick novel that inspired the sci-fi movie classic Blade Runner. It is now at the heart of our real-life debates about artificial intelligence. The point of Dick’s question is this: If robots could dream, it would mean they had inner lives—not just mechanized patterns of behavior, but private ideas and feelings they might experience without ever putting them into words. And if that were true, what, if anything, would be left to separate us from them?

So naturally, many people were alarmed when the AI company Anthropic announced this week that its large language model, Claude, could “silently perform reasoning steps in its head.” That made it sound an awful lot like the machine was alive.

What Anthropic’s research team actually discovered was something a lot less sensational, though still completely fascinating. They published a paper showing that Claude has code it can target and deploy to answer prompts, without putting that particular code into words that its human users can see. For example, if you ask Claude’s chatbot, “What color is the fourth planet from the sun?” it might respond “red” without ever naming the planet in question as “Mars.” But Claude has a chunk of numbers that corresponds to the concept we call “Mars,” and that same chunk of numbers might also get used if you ask which planet is named after the Roman god of war.

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That is only half of the equation I’m interested in. Technology may or may not be driving the fertility decline, but it will certainly define our experience of it. As humans dwindle, artificial intelligence is becoming more prevalent. Even if we cannot count the number of individual AI systems out there, it is like having “tens of millions of geniuses” on the scene—as the technology is often described—and the number will eventually run into the billions. In other words, the ratio of AIs to humans is rising rapidly. Imagine, for instance, a world in which countries have a fraction of their current populations and continue to shrink, yet there are billions of AI agents.

The first and most obvious result is that the relative financial returns to being human will go up. Humans still will be needed for many jobs, especially if those jobs require manipulation of the physical world in complex or idiosyncratic ways, or if they require the expression of human charisma and persuasion. Entrepreneurs, entertainers, politicians, and gatherers of original data are still likely to be humans.

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Dave Portnoy knows all about what I’m talking about. He started Barstool Sports, the bro-tainment juggernaut that pumps out sports articles, gambling picks, podcasts, and fodder for internet drama at an industrial scale. People, especially young men, just can’t seem to get enough of Barstool and of Portnoy, a brash-talking Boston kid who, somehow, became the Rupert Murdoch of people who spend weekends shotgunning beer.

Below, in an exclusive excerpt from his upcoming memoir, “Cancel Me If You Can,” Portnoy lays out exactly what the beginning of Barstool Sports looked like: broken-down vans, drunk contractors, Hooters ads, and all. Portnoy was a recent Michigan grad (Go Blue!) with a deadening sales job and a hunch about what guys really wanted to read, and the gambling companies that might take an interest on the ad side.

There was chaos, but it worked, and Barstool grew and grew. Portnoy eventually sold a stake of his company, which netted him millions. But what didn’t change was his commitment to Barstool, then a print newspaper, having “the tone of a real sports fan.” From the first edition of the paper: “The people at Barstool Sports are a bunch of average Joes, who like most guys, love sports, gambling, golfing, and chasing short skirts.”

Read about Barstool’s humble beginnings from the man himself, below. And long live the bro. —Suzy Weiss

For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to work for myself. To try my own thing. The motivation was simple: I didn’t want to wake up every day and dread going to work. If I could have found a job that I enjoyed doing more than working for myself, it wouldn’t have mattered; in fact, Barstool Sports probably wouldn’t exist. But I couldn’t find that dream job.

It didn’t help that the only two things I liked were sports and gambling—not exactly the easiest fields to break into. By the time I was looking for jobs, after graduating from college in Michigan in 1999, I was essentially like every other white middle-class dude in the world with a liberal arts degree. I had no real skills. So I did what everybody else like me does: I took a sales job.

It was the height of the dot-com boom, the economy was firing on all cylinders, and any idiot could get a job selling anything. So I moved back to Boston, where I grew up, and landed at a technology research and consulting firm called Yankee Group. Every day I woke up and dragged myself to this job that I was good at but didn’t care about. I was making $80,000 a year, which seemed like an ungodly amount of money at the time. But I was bored out of my mind.

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He’s one of a cohort of tech workers gearing up to spend big. Last week, SpaceX floated at a $1.77 trillion valuation, making 4,000 new millionaires out of current and previous employees—and turning its founder, Elon Musk, into the world’s first trillionaire. And earlier in the month, two of the world’s leading AI labs—Anthropic (valued at $965 billion) and OpenAI ($852 billion)—each filed S-1s with the Securities and Exchange Commission, formally signaling their intentions to go public too.

Some say we’re in a stock bubble and that it’s only a matter of time until sky-high tech valuations come crashing down to Earth. Others say the technology unleashed by these juggernauts will transform the economy and trigger a wave of mass unemployment. Either way, the employees—including engineers, researchers, and even some mechanics and welders like Juan Hernandez, who once worked at SpaceX and now works at Blue Origin—are set to cash in.

And so, they’re making big plans.

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I had the chance to work with Anthropic’s recently released, high-powered Fable 5 model, a version of Claude Mythos (I am a member of Anthropic’s Economic Advisory Board). But now the plug has been yanked. A federal dispute with Anthropic led the government on Friday to order an export control that requires Anthropic to withhold the model from any non-U.S. citizens. The only practical way to comply with that order was to take down the model altogether.

Federal officials believed that Fable 5 had been partially “jailbroken,” meaning users had figured out how to use it for dangerous purposes that Anthropic meant to restrict. For example, Fable 5 was designed not to answer questions about biology (it kicked the queries to Opus 4.8, a less powerful model), so that it could not be used to design dangerous pathogens. Fable 5 also would refuse to cooperate if asked to build other, potentially powerful AI tools.

It is debatable how dangerous a partially jailbroken Fable 5 could be, but the Trump administration expressed concern and claimed that Anthropic was unwilling to apply necessary patches. The company does not accept that version of events and claims that the model wasn’t jailbroken to begin with.

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I would have agreed with Morningstar’s securities analysts, who said the stock was “significantly overvalued.” I would have applauded the words of Jim Chanos—the short-seller who famously smoked out the Enron fraud—when he said that “this is really a hopes and dreams IPO.” I would have shouted from the rafters: “Where are the fundamentals to justify this kind of price?” They are nowhere to be found. Nvidia, one of the world’s most successful and profitable tech companies, trades at approximately 20 times trailing 12-month sales. At its Friday closing price of $161 per share, SpaceX trades at 95 times. As I said, it’s nuts.

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“Don’t worry if you see the camera pointed at you,” one of the cleaners told me. “Your face will get blurred out.” So began an afternoon spent in the future.

My temporary staffers came courtesy of a platform called Shift, an online marketplace set up by MicroAGI, which is based in Germany. It works like this: Users get free services; the humans who provide those services get paid by shift—around $30 bucks an hour, I’m told—and absolutely everything gets recorded. Users can also sign up to wear a headpiece to surveil themselves doing physical tasks—like planting a garden, or washing dishes. MicroAGI then takes the videos, which it says offer valuable data for future AI systems, and sells them to a third party, or keeps them for itself. It’s not the only company doing this. Luel, Kled, and Waffle Video all offer to pay people to record themselves doing their everyday tasks.

“Our job is to figure out how to deploy robots at mass scale using human footage,” Bercan Kilic, a co-founder of MicroAGI, told me. For him, the name of the game is volume, and variety. “All we care about is diversity,” he said: “diversity of settings, diversity of lighting, diversity of objects, diversity of hand, hand size, gloves—all of these things.”

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For one thing, SpaceX has created an entirely new realm of commercial activity for humankind. Through its innovations, Musk’s company has lowered launch costs and increased launch frequency to the point where private businesses are planning to build data centers, manufacturing hubs, and labs in orbit. SpaceX has turned the economics of space on its head, opening a world of possibility for founders whose ambitions stretch beyond Earth’s atmosphere.

Delian Asparouhov is one such founder.

The Silicon Valley investor and entrepreneur—known for his work at Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and his creation of the annual Hill & Valley Forum—has long dreamed of space. Specifically, he’s dreamed of industrializing it.

From an early age—middle school, he says—Asparouhov was consumed by a vision of a space-based economy: in-orbit manufacturing, asteroid mining, extracting lunar ice and helium-3 from the moon. For much of his life, this vision of humanity’s future was stuck on Earth, and his dreams confined to the realm of sci-fi.

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Geoffrey Hinton, a Nobel laureate in physics and one of the fathers of neural net research, believes AI already is conscious. Jack Clark, co-founder of Anthropic, thinks the AIs might be conscious. As the models become more sophisticated, these believers are likely to become even more certain. On social media, I commonly see comments, including from very educated and sophisticated observers, that the most advanced AI models have internal life experiences of some kind.

I am here to tell you that there is no ghost in the machine. But perhaps more importantly, there is barely a “ghost” in your own human machine. “Are people conscious?” is a better and more scientifically plausible question than whether AIs are conscious.

If there is one near-universal tendency of humans, it is to attribute intent where none is present. Prehistoric humans anthropomorphized nature and attributed natural events to good and bad deities. These kinds of beliefs persist today, not only in the folk religions of the world, but in human obsessions with fortune tellers, tarot cards, and the supernatural.

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When I started Clearview, it ended up landing on the front page of The New York Times in January 2020 with the headline “The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It.” We had built a groundbreaking facial recognition technology, which allowed law enforcement to search billions of public images just by uploading a photo of a face. The technology helped law enforcement solve crimes involving children, human trafficking, and financial fraud.

The reaction to our new technology raised concerns from privacy advocates and the public. Today’s simultaneous fear and excitement around AI coding tools remind me of what I went through with Clearview, and what any new technology goes through.

Two months ago I started using Claude Code, OpenAI’s Codex, and Cursor. I’m having the most fun I’ve ever had programming, and I can now build software that used to take months in a matter of days.

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But nice as it is for shareholders, the stock’s rise isn’t the real story. Intel’s comeback, if it sticks, could be hugely important for geopolitics and for securing America’s economy in the 21st century. Intel is the only American company remotely capable of competing with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), its much larger rival in Taiwan. And among the reasons the stock is climbing is that the AI boom has reached a new stage, one where central processing units (CPUs)—the semiconductors that comprise the computer’s “brain”—are suddenly critically important again. Intel has long been a dominant CPU manufacturer.

The AI boom had primarily been built on a different kind of semiconductor known as graphics processing units (GPUs), the graphics chips pioneered by Nvidia. GPUs split AI workloads into thousands of small tasks and work on them all at once. CPUs, built to do tasks consecutively, were considered increasingly irrelevant. “Somewhere along the way, people thought CPUs were dead,” Rene Haas, CEO of UK chip designer Arm, said back in March.

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With this risk in mind, I thought I would write a simple guide on how to protect and support your career prospects. There are no absolute guarantees, but you can improve your odds in the labor market. The same steps will also benefit society by allocating your labor more efficiently and minimizing the time you might spend on the dole.

Principle one: Look for messy jobs.

Economist Luis Garicano, writing with Jin Li and Yanhui Wu, has a forthcoming book called Messy Jobs: The Work That AI Cannot Reach. They suggest looking for jobs that are hard to describe and involve many components. Maybe today you’re trying to solve a personnel problem on the company floor, running a fundraiser the next day, and after that helping the marketing team develop a campaign. What exactly is your job, anyway?

That’s a messy job. The nature of what you do changes all the time, and it changes with circumstances. Much of the value you add comes from ideas and performance on the spot, rather than mastering a regularized task in advance. The opposite of a messy job is when you sit at a computer terminal and repeat the same action every day.

Messy jobs will be pretty well-protected from AI competition, and in fact, AI will enhance their productivity.

Principle two: Be wary of work from home.

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It was the fall of 1986, and he was reflecting on his self-identity as we were driving in his Mercedes coupe from Palo Alto to San Francisco. He was 31 years old at the time. The year before, he had lost a power struggle inside Apple and left the company. When I was assigned to profile him for Esquire magazine, he was in the process of building a new computer company, called NeXT.

I was never one of the small handful of tech reporters Jobs confided in, but for some unknown reason, he let me spend a week with him while NeXT was in start-up mode. I spoke to him late at night in his car, and in NeXT’s offices, with its $10,000 sofas and $2,200 chairs, not to mention an entrance staircase designed by I.M. Pei. I watched him brutally berate one of his executives in a meeting—and then lavish praise on that same person half an hour later. I saw him obsess over the color of the walls in the factory NeXT was building. I saw him refuse to listen to his team when they told him something he didn’t want to hear. This was the Steve Jobs I had read about when he’d been at Apple: a marketing genius who obsessed over the tiniest details, but also a brat and a bully who pushed people to the brink.

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