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Anthropic Goes To War

For today's free ep, we examine the current spat between Anthropic and Trump's Department of War over use of their AI model Claude. Should a next-token prediction model be allowed to make decisions in the heat of battle? Should the snuffing out of a human life be prompted by a computer? Is Mark Zu…

The Far-Flung Future of 2028

When one thinks of impossible futures, they often think of a luxurious, technological wonderland. An unimaginable utopia where humans live in perfect harmony, their every want and need being fulfilled through meteoric advances in artificial intelligence. A prosperous society of abundance and civili…

Down Round Q&A Pt.1

Some have argued that doing Q&A episodes is just a way of farming out the hard bits of doing a podcast to your audience. Not around these parts, buster. If you like the pod, chuck us a review on your podcast player of choice, or go to downround.net to sign up for PREMIUM to get ad-free listening P…

OpenAI vs Anthropic

Gossip episode alert. The OpenAI/Anthropic rivalry is boiling over. We sip on the most piping hot tea around OpenAI and Anthropic's ad spots at the Super Bowl and the growing animosity between the two giants. If you like the pod, chuck us a review on your podcast player of choice, or go to downro…

The SpaceX + xAI Merger

Keen-eared listeners may remember when Elon bought his own company X (formerly Twitter) with his OpenAI spite company xAI. Well, he's done it again, folks. This time SpaceX has bought xAI, meaning that SpaceX now owns xAI and X as part of the largest private company on Earth. We discuss. If you …

Airwallex + Payments

You asked, we answered. We're doing a much-requested episode on "Australian" fintech Airwallex, which has gotten a lot of untoward attention of late — anti-money laundering audits, accusations by American VCs of being a financial backdoor to China. But there's a bigger story here: the proliferation…

Is SaaS Dead?

As somewhat of a follow up to our Claude Code/Coworker episode last week, today we regroup to evaluate what it could mean for YOUR favourite SaaS products. That's right, folks, AI is coming to take away your precious QuickBooks and you're going to watch and clap as it rips and tears it to pieces. W…

Grok Freaks Rejoice

New year, new studio, same red hot takes. This episode covers the typhoon of AI-generated filth created by Grok, Elon Musk's AI venture, currently flooding X. We also touch on the general state of X as a platform. Go to downround.net to sign up for PREMIUM to get ad-free listening PLUS an extra e…

Xmas Spectacular 2025: Has He Got The Juice? (ft. Mark Di Stefano)

We're joined by friend of the pod and Rear Window columnist Mark Di Stefano for a loose chat covering a swathe of topics from capital-J Journalism, the tech oligopoly and AI in politics. This is our final dispatch from our Christmas recording. Go to downround.net to sign up for PREMIUM to get ad-f…