PERSON DIRECTORY
Noah Smith
Noah Smith appears in 4 indexed conversations across The a16z Show, Latent Space, The Cognitive Revolution. This directory brings every appearance, source, TL;DR, digest, and transcript into one searchable feed.
FPV Drones -The Next War Is Already Here — Yaroslav Azhnyuk, The Fourth Law & Noah Smith, Noahpinion
Brandon AndersonNoah SmithYaroslav Azhnyuk
FPV drones now cause 70–80% of frontline casualties, with Ukraine producing about 4 million last year at roughly $500 each versus $4,000 for a 155 mm shell.Autonomy can raise mission success from 20% to 71%, but electronic warfare, counter-drone cost exchange rates, and China’s potential to manufacture billions of systems make allied industrial scale urgent.
Oren Cass & Noah Smith Debate the True Impact of Tariffs
Oren CassNoah SmithErik Torenberg
Oren Cass sets a falsifiable tariff test: domestic capital investment should respond within one to two years, with manufacturing performance visibly different in three to five.Noah Smith cites four consecutive months of factory contraction, five months of shrinking bookings, a sub-50 PMI, weaker employment, and declining real factory construction after “Liberation Day.”Both ultimately argue tariffs require stable rules, industrial policy, infrastructure, vocational training, and allied scale, while disagreeing over a protected U.S. market versus free trade with allies.
Dwarkesh Patel and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy
Erik TorenbergDwarkesh PatelNoah Smith
AGI’s investable threshold is whole-job substitution, requiring continual learning, preference accumulation, and reliable workflow execution beyond current reasoning models.AI-built data centers and robot factories could drive rapid growth, but falling labor income, demand, ownership concentration, and compute scaling remain unresolved constraints.
US-China Relations: History, Culture, and AI Competition, with Noah Smith, from Econ 102
The U.S.–China contest is increasingly about control of trade routes, digital infrastructure, and strategic option value rather than reserve-currency dominance or LLM supremacy.Semiconductor equipment, software, and personnel controls may slow China’s costly 7-nanometer manufacturing and preserve conventional military advantages, but Taiwan incentives and the coming decade’s peak-risk window leave escalation unresolved.