Episode 41: The Verification Crisis: Why Trust Is the New Bottleneck in AI

Noah Smith, economist and author of Noahpinion, joins High Signal to look at what AI is already changing… and what it isn’t. The conversation moves beyond the usual productivity hype to ask harder questions: Is agentic coding actually increasing revenue per hour worked? Will software remain a high-margin business if AI makes it easy to clone? And what happens when generating content, code, vendors, applications, and companies becomes much cheaper than verifying them? Noah argues that one of the biggest near-term shifts is not simply automation, but trust. AI is beginning to replace parts of the internet’s knowledge infrastructure — search, Stack Overflow, Reddit, and how-to content — while also flooding markets with new forms of slop. For AI builders and leaders, the central challenge may become less about producing more and more about knowing what is real, valuable, and worth trusting…. In a word, verification. LINKS Noah Smith on X Noahpinion — Noah's newsletter Noah's writing we discuss: You Are What You Consume by Noah Smith How Much More Software Do We Really Need? by Noah Smith What If a Few AI Companies End Up With All the Money and Power? by Noah Smith My Thoughts on AI Safety by Noah Smith Updated Thoughts on AI Risk by Noah Smith Salarymen, Specialists, and Small Businesses by Noah Smith Books, essays, and reports mentioned: Status and Culture by W. David Marx (Viking, 2022) If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares (2025) Machines of Loving Grace by Dario Amodei (2024) All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace by Richard Brautigan (poem, 1967) The Bitter Lesson by Rich Sutton (2019) Forecasting the Economic Effects of AI by the Forecasting Research Institute (2026) The Orthogonality Thesis (Arbital) Herbert Simon on the economics of attention (Attention economy) High Signal podcast Watch the podcast episode on YouTube Delphina's Newsletter