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PODCAST

Gabriel Weinberg"s Blog

Gabriel Weinberg

Tech, policy, and business insights from the DuckDuckGo founder and co-author of Traction and Super Thinking. gabrielweinberg.com

technology news commentary

All Episodes

6:17

One approach to a heavily curated information diet

Gabriel Weinberg"s Blog ·

2025/11/22

Disclaimer: This approach works for me. It may not work for you, but also maybe gives you some ideas.I find the signal to noise ratio on social media and news sites/apps too low for me to have a consistently good experience on them. So, I developed an alternative, heavily curated approach to an information diet that I’m laying out here in hope people will give me suggesions over time to improve it. It involves four main inputs:* RSS, skewed towards “most upvoted” feedsI use Reeder because it has a

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4:27

China has a major working-age population advantage...

Gabriel Weinberg"s Blog ·

2025/11/15

In response to “A U.S.-China tech tie is a big win for China because of its population advantage,” I received feedback along the lines of shouldn’t we be looking at China’s working-age population and not their overall population? I was trying to keep it simple in that post, but yes, we should, and when we do, we find, unfortunately, that China’s population advantage still persists. Here’s the data:Currently, China’s working-age population is over 4 times the U.S.According to Our World in Data,

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4:10

Total Factor Productivity needs a rebrand (and if you...

Gabriel Weinberg"s Blog ·

2025/11/01

If you don’t know about Total Factor Productivity (TFP), you probably should. It’s an economic concept that is arguably the most important driver of long-term economic prosperity. An International Monetary Fund (IMF) primer on TFP explains it like this (emphasis added):It’s a measure of an economy’s ability to generate income from inputs—to do more with less…If an economy increases its total income without using more inputs…it is said to enjoy higher TFP [Total Factor Productivity].TFP is an

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5:15

Is consumer AI heading for a duopoly?

Gabriel Weinberg"s Blog ·

2025/10/19

Fifteen years ago Google started using their search monopoly to create a browser monopoly by pushing people to use Chrome through in-product promotions in Google search. It worked. Now they’re repeating that same playbook for consumer AI with Gemini and it’s working again. In the last 30 days, Gemini has been downloaded about the same amount of times as ChatGPT, and nothing else is even close.While ChatGPT had a massive head start, Google is rapidly turning consumer AI into a duopoly. Despite

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4:02

The paradox of progress

Gabriel Weinberg"s Blog ·

2025/10/11

Progress doesn’t have a single agreed-upon definition, but for the sake of anchoring, let’s say progress is rising living standards. While this definition seems unambiguously good, deserving of top billing on policy agendas for both major parties, the paradox is that long-term progress agendas rarely get top billing. Why? Here are three underlying reasons I’ve noticed in thinking about advocating for a lot more basic research funding, which I think needs to be the cornerstone of any credible

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5:59

The overlooked front in the browser wars

Gabriel Weinberg"s Blog ·

2025/10/04

The browser wars are back. Agents are one front; the overlooked front is reducing switching costs in workflows that bridge across search, browse, and AI.Overlapping search, browse, and AI in the browserTraditional web search, browsing, and AI chatting aren’t going away, even as many people will eventually start interacting more with agents that automate tasks. And all three of these core Internet activities increasingly overlap into complex workflows. Many queries you could start either with a web

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5:17

What banning AI surveillance should look like, at a...

Gabriel Weinberg"s Blog ·

2025/09/27

I previously called on Congress to ban AI surveillance because of its heightened potential to easily manipulate people, both for commercial and ideological ends. Essentially, we need an AI privacy law.Yet Congress has stalled on general privacy legislation for decades, even in moments of broad public privacy focus, like after the Snowden revelations and the Cambridge Analytica scandal. So, instead of calling for another general privacy bill that would encompass AI, I believe we should focus on an

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2:33

On reddit, roughly 500 views = 1 click

Gabriel Weinberg"s Blog ·

2025/09/21

A couple weeks ago I wrote a post titled AI survelliance should be banned while there is still time. Someone submitted it to Hacker News where it got over 600 upvotes, so I decided to submit it myself to reddit (on /r/technology) where it got over 1,100 upvotes.Because I submitted it, I was able to get “Post Insights” (pictured above, left) that indicated the post got 175,000 views. Similarly, substack reports “Traffic sources” (pictured above, right) and shows 310 views came from reddit. This

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6:51

A U.S.-China tech tie is a big win for China because...

Gabriel Weinberg"s Blog ·

2025/09/13

China’s population is declining, but UN projections show it will remain at least twice the size of the U.S. for decades.So what?Population size matters because economy size (GDP) matters and GDP = population × output per person. For example:* 100 million people × $50,000 per year = a $5 trillion economy* 1 billion people × $50,000 per year = a $50 trillion economy Then why hasn’t China’s economy already dwarfed America’s? It’s because China’s output per person is still much lower than America’s

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4:26

AI surveillance should be banned while there is still...

Gabriel Weinberg"s Blog ·

2025/09/06

All the same privacy harms with online tracking are also present with AI, but worse.While chatbot conversations resemble longer search queries, chatbot privacy harms have the potential to be significantly worse because the inference potential is dramatically greater. Longer input invites more personal information to be provided, and people are starting to bare their souls to chatbots. The conversational format can make it feel like you’re talking to a friend, a professional, or even a therapist

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4:42

Progress isn't automatic

Gabriel Weinberg"s Blog ·

2025/08/30

Everyone living today has lived in a world where science and technology, globally, have progressed at a relatively high rate compared to earlier times in human history. For most of human history, a random individual could expect to use roughly the same technology in one decade that they did the previous decade. That’s obviously not the case today.In fact, most of us alive today have little to no personal experience with such a degree of technological stagnation. That’s a good thing because long-term

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7:16

Musings on evergreen content

Gabriel Weinberg"s Blog ·

2025/08/23

FYI: This post is a bit meta—about writing/blogging itself—so it may not be your cup of tea.I’ve been having some cognitive dissonance about blogging. On the one hand, I don’t believe in doing things primarily for legacy purposes, since in the long arc of history, hardly anything is likely to be remembered or matter that much, and I won’t be here regardless. On the other hand, I also don’t like spending a lot of my writing time on crafting for the ephemeral—like a social media post—because it seems

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4:26

Rule #3: Every decision involves trade-offs

Gabriel Weinberg"s Blog ·

2025/08/10

One of the universal rules of decision-making is that every decision involves trade-offs. By definition, when making a decision, you are trading off one option for another. But other, less obvious trade-offs are also lurking beneath the surface.For example, whatever you choose now will send you down a path that will shape your future decisions, a mental model known as path dependence. That is, your future path is both influenced and limited by your past decisions. If you enroll your child in a

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4:30

9 ways DuckDuckGo's Search Assist Differs from...

Gabriel Weinberg"s Blog ·

2025/07/31

At DuckDuckGo, our approach to AI is to only make AI features that are useful, private, and optional. If you don’t want AI, that’s cool with us. We have settings to turn off all of our AI features, and even a new setting to help you avoid AI-generated images in our search results.At the same time, we know a lot of people do want to use AI if it is actually useful and private (myself included). Our private chat service at duck.ai has the highest satisfaction ratings we’ve seen in a new feature, and

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10:23

The key to increasing standard of living is...

Gabriel Weinberg"s Blog ·

2025/07/26

Standard of living doesn’t have a strictly agreed-upon definition, but for the sake of anchoring on something, let’s use “the level of income, comforts, and services available to an individual, community, or society” (Wikipedia).Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita, that is, the average economic output per person in a country, is often used as a proxy metric to compare the standard of living across countries. Of course, this proxy metric, being solely about money, doesn’t directly capture

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4:56

Most chatbot users miss this key setting, so we moved...

Gabriel Weinberg"s Blog ·

2025/07/20

The magic of chatbots is that they make it seem like you’re chatting with a real person. But the default personality of this “person” isn’t one I particularly enjoy talking to, and in many cases I find downright annoying. Based on feedback from duck.ai users—who rely on our service for private access to popular chatbots—I know I’m not alone. What people want in a chatbot’s personality varies widely: I cringe at extra exclamation points and emojis, while others love them. I also find the default

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5:38

The debate over a potential economic bump from AI...

Gabriel Weinberg"s Blog ·

2025/07/08

The decade surrounding the Internet boom saw a marked increase in U.S. total factor productivity (TFP) growth—the economic efficiency gains beyond just adding more workers or capital—similar to higher levels seen before 1973. However, it then declined again from 2005 onward back to doldrums levels, which brings us to the present. Now, people are starting to debate a similar potential AI productivity bump unfolding over the next decade.However, this debate raises an even bigger question: How do we

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5:26

States should be allowed to regulate AI because...

Gabriel Weinberg"s Blog ·

2025/06/26

A provision in the “Big Beautiful Bill” (the massive federal spending and policy package currently being negotiated) aims to stop all state-level AI regulation for the next ten years. Now, I’m not anti-AI. My company (DuckDuckGo) offers our own private chatbot service at Duck.ai, we now generate millions of anonymous AI-assisted answers daily for our private search engine, and we are working on more AI features in our browser. We’re investing heavily in AI because, to achieve our aim of protecting

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5:06

Rule #2: There are always underlying assumptions.

Gabriel Weinberg"s Blog ·

2025/06/21

Every decision rests on assumptions. At minimum, you’re assuming the options you’re considering are actually all of your options. This set of options is, in turn, based on a set of assumed facts, which is, in turn, based on even more assumptions about how the world works.I’ve seen this pattern repeatedly: teams spend hours debating the details of Option A versus Option B, only to discover they never considered Option C—or that their entire framing of the problem was based on outdated or misaligned

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7:30

Issues with widespread bipartisan agreement that...

Gabriel Weinberg"s Blog ·

2025/06/15

In a country currently known for deep political divisions, some issues still garner supermajority agreement, yet nothing gets done about them. To me, these issues simultaneously represent hope and despair:* Hope—yes, we can agree on some important things.* Despair—uh oh, our widespread agreement isn’t translating into actual change.In other words, the existence of issues with durable, supermajority agreement, which nevertheless never materializes into change, is a strong indicator that we need some

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27 results

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