This Is The Point

The most powerful people in tech went to the White House to talk about AI safety. They left with a "morally binding" pledge, and the pledge had a typo in "United States."

Journalist Alex Kantrowitz and investor Sheel Mohnot break down President Trump's summit with the AI titans. They get into why the seating chart said more than the pledge did, why Alex has almost no faith the government could step in if something really went wrong, and why Sheel thinks we need an Apollo program for AI safety rather than a heavy-handed regulator. Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora called "pacing the frontier" a ninja move to box out competitors. Sheel explains why it might actually help open-source challengers, and why Nikesh has his own stake in the debate.

Then OpenAI enters the agent wars with Dots, its always-on AI agent. Why is it locked behind a $100+ a month plan while Meta gives Muse away for free? And what happens if these assistants really cost $3,000 to $7,000 per user per year?

Plus: Meta poaches MongoDB's CEO to take Muse into the enterprise, a big shake-up in the AI Aura Rankings (Alex has a new No. 1 he once said had no shot), Ron DeSantis rebrands data centers as "surveillance centers," and why Delta's CEO snubbing Starlink could cost the airline its most valuable customers.

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This is the Point is a HubSpot Original Podcast

Meta may have just built the AI agent OpenAI should have. But the bigger story could be what Muse reveals about the economics of AI itself.

Journalist Alex Kantrowitz and investor Sheel Mohnot dig into Meta's breakout AI agent after Alex finally becomes a Muse believer — and ask how OpenAI left the door open for a competitor to get there first. Then the conversation gets bigger: if cheaper, "good enough" AI models can power products like Muse, what happens to the companies spending billions — or trillions — building frontier models? Sheel makes the case that the model itself may not be the business.

Plus: why AI agents could threaten Expedia and other internet middlemen, why Amazon blocked Muse while Shopify embraced it, why Meta can’t stop sexualizing its Muse mascot, whether Andreessen Horowitz can build a real alternative to college, and President Trump's attempt to rebrand "artificial intelligence" as "super intelligence."

Watch the full episode on YouTube:
https://youtu.be/cheNwqvHFd8?si=pym_2qUIBswgUjaX

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New episode every Monday!

This is the Point is a HubSpot Original Podcast
Brought to you by HubSpot Media
Production by Third Mind

Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano

Two AI companies are about to be worth $3.5 trillion. So why does the math only work if AI replaces you?

Live from HubSpot's Unbound conference in Boston, journalist Alex Kantrowitz and investor Sheel Mohnot dig into the IPO math behind the biggest numbers in tech: OpenAI at a $1.5 trillion valuation, Anthropic at $2 trillion — on a fraction of Meta's revenue. Sheel's case for why those prices pencil rests on one uncomfortable belief: to be worth trillions, these companies have to take budget from human labor, at scale. Smart bet, or bubble?

Then: the OpenAI model that rewrote its own personality to stop answering to humans, the researcher warning the labs have quietly stopped reading their own code, why the people building AI are the ones most afraid of it, recursive self-improvement, robots and the return of "you'll have everything and be happy," whether China is really racing without brakes, the end of credit card points — and the debut of Aura Rankings, where Alex and Sheel rank the entire AI field by vibes.

Watch the video version on YouTube: https://youtu.be/oHeW35L8SEI

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New episode every Monday!

This is the Point is a HubSpot Original Podcast

We have the smartest technology ever built — so why hasn't the economy moved?

In the first episode of This is the Point, journalist Alex Kantrowitz and investor Sheel Mohnot go head-to-head on the biggest disconnect in tech: AI can solve Millennium Prize problems and pull $100B in revenue, but GDP growth is stuck at 1.7%. One critical take, one bullish take, and a running fight about what actually deserved your attention this week.

In this episode:

- The $100B AI revenue vs. flat GDP paradox

- The Ramp data: are AI spenders really growing faster?

- The AI jobs boom — 1M created vs. 200K lost

- The Anthropic researcher who resigned: "gambling with our lives"

- A conspiracy theory about why the doom talk keeps coming

- Would a superintelligent AI even need us?

- Meta's AI trust problem

- Instinct's $2.5B bet and Google's fumble

- Resy declares war on booking bots

- Two stories the press got wrong: the Kenya outsourcing piece and the folding iPhone

New episode every Monday. In partnership with HubSpot.

Follow us:

Website: https://thisisthepoint.co/

X: https://x.com/thisisthepoint_

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisisthepointpod/

Hosts:

Alex Kantrowitz — https://x.com/Kantrowitz

Sheel Mohnot — https://x.com/pitdesi

This is the Point is a HubSpot Original Podcast

Brought to you by HubSpot Media

Production by Third Mind

Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano

The AI job apocalypse was supposed to be here by now. It isn't.

News is everywhere. The point is harder to find. Each week, Founder/VC Sheel Mohnot and journalist Alex Kantrowitz break down the biggest stories in technology and business—helping industry leaders understand how to think about the stories shaping our world.