Bonus: Two roundtables on a tech interview and … a Buddhist sutta

Here’s something a little different. I gave enTalkenator a text containing (a) Ben Thompson’s excellent interview with Mark Zuckerberg (posted this morning), on, among other things, Meta’s AI strategy and (b) the famous Satipatthana Sutta, the discourse on the four foundations of mindfulness. On reading the interview, I kept thinking of the sutta, and I wanted to see what a Critic Roundtable template would do with these highly contrasting texts.

What you have here are two such conversations. The first was enTalkenated using a version of the Critic Roundtable template that I modified to indicate that the provided text contained more than one article and that the participants should not assume the listeners had read the articles. I used Gemini 2.5 Pro (free version). The output is interesting. It proceeds by focusing first on the interview, then on the sutta, then on both.

The second (beginning immediately after the end of the first at 35:45) uses Claude 3.7 Sonnet. After listening to the first, I made one more modification to the “Setting” in the template — instructing that the participants “explore subtle and sometimes not subtle disagreements among one another” to try to spark more interesting back and forth. I found this conversation much more insightful. The conversation focused on the interview and the sutta together from the beginning. The Gemini version might be more helpful in its initial overview of the texts, especially for someone who has not read them.

Both of these models have produced extremely impressive output for me, in the app and in other contexts. So I don’t present these two roundtables as a head-to-head benchmark. If you enTalkenated this same conversation 100 times, you’d get some crazily interesting conversations and some that are perhaps too straightforward, whichever of these two models you used. But I thought it was interesting and worth sharing. Enjoy!