Welcome back to This Week in Stratechery!

As a reminder, each week, every Friday, we’re sending out this overview of content in the Stratechery bundle; highlighted links are free for everyone. Additionally, you have complete control over what we send to you. If you don’t want to receive This Week in Stratechery emails (there is no podcast), please uncheck the box in your delivery settings.

On that note, here were a few of our favorites this week.

1. Will AI Replace Humans? Dorm room discussions are not generally Stratechery’s domain, but for the terminally online it’s getting harder to escape the insistence in some corners of the AI world that humans will no longer be economically necessary, and that we should make changes now to address what they insist is a foregone conclusion. I disagree: humans may be doomed, but as long we are around, we’ll want other humans — and will build economies that reflect that fact. More generally, as we face this new paradigm, it’s essential to remember that technology is an amoral force: what is good or bad comes down to decisions we make, and trying to preemptively engineer our way around human nature guarantees a bad outcome. — Ben Thompson
   

2. The Future of Power Generation. Through the second half of last year it became clear that one of the defining challenges of the modern era in the U.S. will be related to power: we need more than we can generate right now, electrical bills are skyrocketing, and that tension figures to compound as AI becomes more integral to the economy. If these topics interest you (and they should!), I heartily recommend this week’s Stratechery Interview with Jeremie Eliahou Ontiveros and Ajey Pandey, two SemiAnalysis analysts who provide a rundown on what the biggest AI labs are doing to address these challenges, the important of natural gas, and how the market is responding to the most fundamental AI infrastructure challenge of them all. Reminder on that last point: Bubbles have benefits! — Andrew Sharp
   
   
3. What China Thinks of What Happened in Caracas. On this week’s Sharp China, Bill Bishop and I returned from a holiday that was busier than expected and broke down various aspects of China’s response to the upheaval in Venezuela after the CCP’s “all-weather strategic partnership” with the Nicolás Maduro regime was rendered null and void by the United States. Topics include: A likely unchanged calculus on Taiwan, a propaganda gift, questions about oil imports, and Iran looming as an even bigger wild card for PRC fortunes. Related to all this, on Sharp Text this week I wrote about the logic of the Maduro operation on the American side, and the dizzying nature of decoding U.S. foreign policy in a modern era increasingly defined by cold war objectives but without cold war rhetoric. — AS

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Stratechery Articles and Updates

• AI and the Human Condition — AI might replace all of the jobs; that’s only a problem if you think that humans will care, but if they care, they will create new jobs.
• Nvidia and Groq, A Stinkily Brilliant Deal, Why This Deal Makes Sense — Nvidia is licensing Groq’s technology and hiring most of its employees; it’s the most potent application of tech’s don’t-call-it-an-acquisition deal model yet.
• Nvidia at CES, Vera Rubin and AI-Native Storage Infrastructure, Alpamayo — Nvidia’s CES announcements didn’t have much for consumers, but affects them all the same.
• An Interview with Jeremie Eliahou Ontiveros and Ajey Pandey About Building Power for AI — An Interview with Jeremie Eliahou Ontiveros and Ajey Pandey about how AI labs and hyperscalers are leveraging demand to build out entirely new electrical infrastructure for AI.

Sharp Text by Andrew Sharp

• Notes from Schrödinger’s Cold War — Why the U.S. captured Nicolás Maduro, and the challenge of decoding U.S. foreign policy in an era defined by cold war objectives, but without cold war rhetoric.

Dithering with Ben Thompson and Daring Fireball’s John Gruber

• CES and Humanity
• Tahoe Icons

Asianometry with Jon Yu

• High-Five to the Belgrade Hand
• The Remarkable Computers Built Not to Fail

Sharp China with Andrew Sharp and Sinocism’s Bill Bishop

• China’s Venezuela Calculations; Japan’s Rare Earth Access; A Reported Pause on Nvidia Purchases; The Meta-Manus Deal Under Review

Greatest of All Talk with Andrew Sharp and WaPo’s Ben Golliver

• A New Year’s MVP Ballot, The Jokic Injury and a Jaylen Brown Renaissance, The Pistons and Their Possibilities

Sharp Tech with Andrew Sharp and Ben Thompson

• The Economy in the 22nd Century, Amoral Tech and Silicon Valley Micro-Culture, What Nvidia Is Getting From Groq

This week’s Stratechery video is on Netflix and the Hollywood End Game.