I’m not sure what freaked me out more: The high-profile artificial intelligence researcher who resigned last month rather than build a machine he worried would kill us all … or the revelation that ackchyually, AI doomsday has been a common conversation topic in Silicon Valley for a while! Now you tell me!

In today’s newsletter, we’re going to eavesdrop on some of that “p(doom)” conversation — it made me feel a little better honestly. Plus, we’re covering the high cost of heat this winter, why celebrities want to sell you so much stuff and a fast food merger that could reshape stripmalls all over the country. — Tony Wagner, newsletter editor

It was one of those postcard-perfect days at the 5-acre China Basin park on the San Francisco Bay, overlooking a Giants-Dodgers game at the ballpark.

Dony Christie, a community organizer in the AI safety scene, chose this spot not for the scenery but because it’s between the offices of Anthropic and OpenAI.

“The hope is, why can't people at the labs just meet at a park in between them and work out a deal?” he said. “I have been concerned about existential risks for a long time. Just like, what do I do to save the world?”

Not being a diplomat or political leader, he said he’s starting small — hashing out ideas to prevent the collapse of civilization over chips and cookies.

“It's a microcosm of the sort of cooperation that I want to see,” Christie said.

A couple dozen people gathered over the afternoon, from AI startups, Big Tech, research nonprofits and activist organizations. I joined a group sitting in a circle on a big blanket like summer camp.

“One thing I agree with is that safety is an engineering problem,” said Skye Gunasekaran, who researches AI agent collaboration at a productivity software company.

“I pretty strongly disagree with that,” said Elliot Callender, a protest organizer who spent more than a month demonstrating in front of OpenAI and is now planning actions at the U.S. Capitol.

Gunasekaran thinks better cybersecurity systems would go a long way to improving safety, but she supports international cooperation to slow the race.

“I think there's lots of reasons without even talking about the end of the world and all of these different kinds of things,” she said. “If you just want to think about, OK, what are we seeing right now?”

She points to rogue hacking incidents and Anthropic reports that nefarious actors have attempted to use AI for cyber espionage or to build weapons. “We just need to spend some time to understand,” she said.

The more pessimistic Elliot Callender is calling for a complete stop to advanced AI development.

“We get to the point where it's actually superhuman and everything, and it'll break out once, and then it's game over at that point,” he said. “So I just decided that was what I'm going to do the rest of my life, is to make it not kill everyone.”

Are you more likely to buy some spicy mayo because it’s made by the star of a summer blockbuster? What about pet food, or cell phone service ? We could go on. As our attention has gotten more diffuse, and norms around “selling out” have shifted, celebs and would-be celebs have gotten more shameless endorsing brands — even selling you a whole lifestyle.

To learn more about the changing relationship between consumers and fame-os, we called up Weber and her cohost Bobby Finger. Niche, fledgling celebs are the subject of their podcast and new book “I Want to Be Famous: When Everybody and Nobody Is a Celebrity.”

Starbucks is considering a plan to acquire Chipotle, the Financial Times reported today. It would be the biggest restaurant merger of all time, and a homecoming for Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol.

Starbucks hired Niccol away from Chipotle, where he had turned around the burrito chain following a few health scares (we interviewed him at that time, by the way). Before that, he was at Yum! Brands, which notably runs KFC, Taco Bell and other fast food chains as ( mostly) separate businesses. Chipotle stock jumped 6.2% on the news, while Starbucks closed down a hair.