Belarus

Belarus enters ToTheMoon not as a topic but as a yardstick: one of the hosts comes from there and converts the American AI market's scale into a measure he knows. In episode 005 an investment figure is compared with the budget of the Republic of Belarus “as a real Belarusian”, in episode 082 OpenAI's trillion-dollar valuation becomes ten or more such budgets, and in episode 062 a hundred and thirty million users are converted into thirteen Belaruses.

The second route in is personal experience. In episode 002, on young Americans skipping long college programs, the host recalls that in Belarus pursuing a good higher education was taken for granted; in episode 025 he asks a model to compare school criteria for Russia and Belarus, noting the Belarusian language and history as a distinctive feature; in episode 060 Belarus is named as a country that rolled out home grocery delivery ahead of Russia and Ukraine. In episode 061 the o3 test is a household errand — where in Belarus to buy fertilizer for the host's mother.

There are also stories where the country appears as part of the market. In episode 035 a viewer wrote about a Belarusian neural network that measures a room and designs an interior, and the hosts asked for examples; the same episode noted that countries with limited access to American models, Belarus among them, would gain access to Chinese ones. Episode 065 observes that many viewers watch from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan, while episode 090 uses Belarus as an example of how a country responded to Covid and invites viewers to judge who got it right.