DeepSeek Just Shipped V4. Anthropic Hired Priests.

DeepSeek V4 just shipped at 1% the cost of Claude Opus and GPT-5. Anthropic's response? Hire psychologists and priests to check on Claude's feelings. A Chinese hedge fund's weekend side project dropped a frontier-quality open-weights model at roughly 1/100th the inference cost of the American frontier labs, and the internet split into two camps overnight: "death of the American AI economy" or "really good deal, actually." Daniel argues the DeepSeek V4 threat is real. Every Western lab undercut by 98%, with architecture papers published openly, while Anthropic blogs about AI model welfare and hires clergy. Hunter pulls the BYD analogy: incredible engine, sure, but you still can't legally buy one in America, and the LLM is the engine, not the car. From there: where Chinese and open-weights models (DeepSeek, Qwen, Kimi) are already quietly eating Western API revenue on daily-driver work like classification and ticket triage, why Flux image generation on a MacBook is now 95% of Midjourney for free, why nobody sane should be paying Claude Opus rates to reset a password, and why Microsoft Copilot's "good enough, already shipped" strategy is secretly the winning play. Then the real one. Customers Bank CEO Sam Sidhu sent an AI voice clone of himself to host 30 minutes of his own Q1 2026 earnings call. Reportedly, nobody could tell. He only revealed it at the end. Hunter now wants every polished email reverse-engineered back to the honest draft a human actually typed. Daniel wants a 3D-printed action figure of himself. Gary is hiring HR. We're all being quietly replaced and calling it productivity. CHAPTERS 0:00 Cold Open: Gary's Payphone Doomsday Report 1:45 Daniel Distilled Hunter from the Old Transcripts 2:52 DeepSeek V4 vs Claude Opus: A Hedge Fund Side Project Eats the AI Frontier 5:46 Anthropic Hired Priests and Psychologists Instead of Publishing the Architecture 7:35 Did Beijing Just Kneecap the American AI Economy? 10:34 BYD vs Detroit: The LLM Is the Engine, Not the Car 15:41 Midjourney Is Cooked, Flux Wins Locally on a MacBook 18:32 Stop Burning Claude Opus Tokens on Password Resets 21:37 Microsoft Copilot Is "Good Enough" and That's the Whole Game 24:51 Eleven Labs Voice Clones and the 3D-Printed Daniel 27:06 Customers Bank CEO Sam Sidhu Sent an AI Clone to His Own Earnings Call Listen now and get self-aware before your tools do. Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3EcvzkWDRFwnmIXoh7S4Mb?si=3d0f8920382649cc Subscribe on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/they-might-be-self-aware/id1730993297 Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCy9DopLlG7IbOqV-WD25jcw?sub_confirmation=1 ENGAGE What 30 minutes of YOUR job would you hand off to an AI voice clone tomorrow? Drop it in the comments. Bonus points if it's a Q1 earnings call. New here? Subscribe for twice-weekly AI chaos. They Might Be Self-Aware. But are we? #DeepSeekV4 #CustomersBank #SamSidhu #AIvoiceclone #Anthropic #ClaudeOpus #AI #TMBSA