Podcast appearances and mentions of casey newton

Today, I'm talking with Paul Bascobert, who is the president of Reuters, as part of a special Thursday series we're running this month to explore how leaders at some world's biggest companies make decisions in such a rapidly changing environment. Reuters is a great company for us to kick off with, because it's been around since 1851, when the hot technology enabling mass media was the telegraph.  Here, today, in 2025, the tech driving media has clearly changed more than a little bit. Distribution in a world full of iPhones and generative AI is a really different proposition than distributing media 50 years before the invention of the radio. So there's a lot here, and you'll hear Paul and I get deep into basically every Decoder theme there is. Links:  The Trust Principles | Reuters Brendan Carr's FCC is an anti-consumer, rights-trampling harassment machine | Verge AP wins reinstatement to White House events | AP  NYT publisher AG Sulzberger on Trump, OpenAI and the economy | Channels Dow Jones CEO Almar Latour on AI, press freedom, and the future of news | Decoder Platforms need the news — but they're killing it | Decoder Why The Atlantic signed a deal with OpenAI | Decoder Platformer's Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse | Decoder Credits: Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Ursa Wright.  The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey everyone, it's Nilay. We're off today, but we'll be back Thursday, so stay tuned. In the meantime, we have an excellent episode from Business Insider Chief Correspondent Peter Kafka, who hosts the media podcast Channels. In this episode, Peter sat down with one of the biggest names in journalism: New York Times publisher AG Sulzberger. It's a fascinating conversation that covers some of the most pressing issues facing journalism and the news business today. We think you'll like it.  Links:  NYT publisher AG Sulzberger on Trump, OpenAI and the economy | Channels New York Times Reports 350,000 Additional Digital Subscribers | NYT IGN and CNET owner Ziff Davis sues OpenAI | Verge The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement | Verge Dow Jones CEO Almar Latour on AI, press freedom, and the future of news | Decoder Platforms need the news — but they're killing it | Decoder Why The Atlantic signed a deal with OpenAI | Decoder Platformer's Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse | Decoder Credits: Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Ursa Wright.  The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

On the bad side, we have copyright infringement, exploitation, and misinformation; on the good side, we have its uses for brainstorming, editing work, and combating loneliness. On both sides, everyone is freaking out about AI — but are we freaking out about it for the right reasons? Casey Newton joins us to make the pitch that whatever you think, AI is not “crypto 2.0.” Everyone, in every generation, needs to take it seriously.Our guest Casey Newton is a tech journalist who founded and writes for the Platformer newsletter (https://www.platformer.news/) and co-hosts the Hard Fork podcast (https://www.nytimes.com/column/hard-fork/).Want even more Panic World content? Like ad-free episodes, bonus episodes, and access to the Garbage Day Discord? Sign up for a membership at: https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld.SponsorsAudio Maverick, a new nine-part documentary about one of the most visionary figures in radio, Himan Brown. Out now wherever you listen to podcasts.Want to sponsor Panic World? Ad sales & marketing support by Multitude, hit them up here: ⁠http://multitude.productions⁠.Credits- Host: Ryan Broderick- Producer: Grant Irving- Engineer: Rebecca Seidel- Researcher: Adam Bumas- Business Manager: Josh FjelstadSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Data is pouring into your business every second, but where are the insights you need to act on it? Just 27% of business executives in a recent Forrester study said their data and analytics projects produce actionable insights.  In this episode, we look at how AI can help bridge the gap between the overwhelming amounts of data available today and the actionable intelligence executives need to drive results. Knownwell CMO Courtney Baker, CEO David DeWolf, and Chief Product and Technology Officer Mohan Rao kick things off by breaking down the journey from raw data to wisdom. They discuss why 60-70% of enterprise data goes unanalyzed and how leaders can leverage AI to surface hidden insights, not just confirm what they already know. Plus, they explain why vision is critical: if you don't know what you're looking for, your AI won't either. For our expert interview, Pete Buer sits down with Arman Eshraghi, CEO of Qrvey, to discuss how SaaS companies can embed analytics into their products, empowering customers with self-serve insights. Arman shares practical advice for SaaS leaders on turning data into a competitive advantage, plus a sneak peek of Knownwell's own Mohan Rao's recent appearance on Arman's SaaS Scaled podcast. All of that PLUS another installment of AI in the Wild with Pete Buer. Pete and Courtney dive into OpenAI's new deep research tool—an AI agent that might actually live up to the hype, according to Casey Newton of Platformer. Learn why it could revolutionize market research and competitive analysis but why it's also best suited for those with a foundational understanding of the topic at hand. Want to turn your business data into clear, actionable insights? Visit knownwell.com to learn more about the Knownwell platform. Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/gNEMu_uLvGE  Show Notes & Related Links Connect with Arman Eshraghi on LinkedIn Connect with David DeWolf on LinkedIn Connect with Courtney Baker on LinkedIn Connect with Mohan Rao on LinkedIn Connect with Pete Buer on LinkedIn Watch a guided Knownwell demo Read The Human Impact of Data Literacy from Accenture, which includes a number of stats cited in the episode Follow Knownwell on LinkedIn Tags: #AI #DataAnalytics #BusinessIntelligence #AIinBusiness #EmbeddedAnalytics #DataInsights #SaaS #AIforExecutives #CustomerInsights #DataStrategy #EnterpriseAI #OpenAI #DeepResearch #AIApplications #BusinessGrowth

OpenAI's new Deep Research, running on their new o3 model, pushes back against DeepSeek. Is this AGI? NOT YET. But close? Meanwhile, OmniHuman-1 is near perfect AI lip-sync and NVIDIA's robots are coming for us all! Plus, Replit's new iPhone app brings no code AI coding to the masses, ChatGPT does the same thing with o3-mini, Kai Cenat's Unitree Robot experience normalizes humanoid robots and SPECIAL GUEST HOST (YT HANDLE) Theoretically Media joins for the whole show and talks about new free AI music model Riffusion. Kevin is on vacay with his amazing family but will be back next week y'all! Join the discord: https://discord.gg/muD2TYgC8f Join our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/AIForHumansShow AI For Humans Newsletter: https://aiforhumans.beehiiv.com/ Follow us for more on X @AIForHumansShow Join our TikTok @aiforhumansshow To book us for speaking, please visit our website: https://www.aiforhumans.show   // Show Links // ChatGPT Deep Research https://youtu.be/YkCDVn3_wiw?si=VZMn9I3I42kss-yk Deep Research Blog Post From by Casey Newton from Platformer https://www.platformer.news/chatgpt-deep-research-hands-on/ Tyler Cowen on Deep Research https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/02/deep-research.html#comments OpenAI has a new font https://youtu.be/k3d_xeVxEOE?si=zouxcSyK25lbNZ2w Sam Altman on how Deep Research changes labor https://x.com/tsarnick/status/1886297223417458714 Humanity's Last Exam Creator Tweet About Deep Research https://x.com/DanHendrycks/status/1886213523900109011 New Joint Venture With Softbank & OpenAI https://apnews.com/article/ai-softbank-openai-technology-7abf34541acc2d48bd58dff2a73d9e6f Softbank's Masa talks about AI not wanting to eat us https://x.com/tsarnick/status/1886310933191852096 o3-mini is out and free to use https://openai.com/index/openai-o3-mini/ New Replit iPhone App https://x.com/amasad/status/1886859253648122181 OmniHuman-1 https://omnihuman-lab.github.io/ MatAnyone https://x.com/_akhaliq/status/1886479919443579037  Meta's Video Jam  https://x.com/hila_chefer/status/1886791105380851917 Tim Urban Tweet about Robots https://x.com/waitbutwhy/status/1886548288775549406 Ronaldo / Kobe / Lebron Robot https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/1886679733460721875 https://x.com/DrJimFan/status/1886824152272920642 Kai Cenat Hangs With His Robot https://x.com/CyberRobooo/status/1886297302882468182 Lord of the Rings: Kings of the Cage https://www.reddit.com/r/aivideo/comments/1iedy29/the_lord_of_the_ring_and_the_king_of_the_cage ASCII Art Generator Made with o3-mini https://x.com/bbssppllvv/status/1886566254565061016 NeuralViz's Glauorn Dating Show https://x.com/NeuralViz/status/1886233002318966916 Tim's Video on Riffusion https://youtu.be/Vv7tYlljiuU?si=jU6QC1ZcAJO9EJFw  

Casey Newton is the author of Platformer and co-host of Hard Fork. He joins Big Technology Podcast for our annual predictions episode. Tune in to hear Newton analyze 2024's major developments in AI, debate whether AI agents will take off in 2025, and explore what might happen to companies like Apple, Google, and OpenAI in the coming year. We also cover quantum computing breakthroughs, self-driving car expansion, and what a potential Trump presidency could mean for tech antitrust. Hit play for an insightful look at where technology is headed in 2025. --- Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice. For weekly updates on the show, sign up for the pod newsletter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/6901970121829801984/ Want a discount for Big Technology on Substack? Here's 40% off for the first year: https://tinyurl.com/bigtechnology Questions? Feedback? Write to: bigtechnologypodcast@gmail.com

We use Substack to power the Second Nature newsletter, and on today's podcast, we are joined by our man on the inside, Austin Tedesco. In this episode, he shares insights and best practices from the world of sports content creation (and beyond).    Show Notes: Substack: http://www.substack.com Austin Tedesco: https://www.linkedin.com/in/austin-tedesco-90248a59/ Lenny: https://substack.com/@lenny Feed Me: https://www.readfeedme.com/ Semafor article about Emily: https://www.semafor.com/article/11/17/2024/feed-mes-emily-sundberg-and-her-studio-mindset Ethan Strauss: https://substack.com/@houseofstrauss Mark Stein: https://marcstein.substack.com/ Laura Riley: https://substack.com/@magasin Elon Tried To Buy Substack: https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-is-open-to-buying-publishing-platform-substack-2022-12 AI Study About Poetry: https://www.euronews.com/culture/2024/11/19/bard-or-bot-study-shows-readers-prefer-ai-to-human-poetry Casey Newton: https://substack.com/@platformer Brian Morrissey: https://substack.com/@therebooting Michael Easter: https://substack.com/@michaeleaster   JOB OF THE WEEK: Substack Sports Manager: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/4068288839/   BPC: Matter of Brand: https://amatterofbrand.substack.com/ Brand New Story: https://brandnewstory.substack.com/ Clare de Boer: https://substack.com/@claredeboer Field Report: https://steveholmberg.substack.com/ Trail Mix: https://wearetrailmix.substack.com/ Speedhimon: https://bendhiman.substack.com/

A year ago, we saw a stand-off between OpenAI's non-profit board and its leader, Sam Altman. Since then, the board has been reshuffled, Altman has consolidated power, and under his leadership, some strange things have happened. If AI might change the world, and OpenAI is leading the field -- how worried should we be? We check in with tech reporter Casey Newton of the newsletter Platformer and the podcast Hard Fork. Listen to our previous OpenAI episode (https://pjvogt.substack.com/p/who-should-be-in-charge-of-ai) Support the show: searchengine.show To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week, we talk about Anthropic's new AI agent, cloud exits, and why BMC is splitting up. Plus, a quick update on the WordPress drama and some thoughts on Amsterdam's autumn weather. Watch the YouTube Live Recording of Episode (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNQ8Bf-lfys) 490 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNQ8Bf-lfys) Runner-up Titles The Abyss Looks Into You ROI Stuff RTO Agent Rundown AI Agents The AI agents have arrived (https://www.platformer.news/anthropic-ai-agents-computer-use-consequences/?ref=platformer-newsletter) Amazon-backed Anthropic debuts AI agents that can do complex tasks, racing against OpenAI, Microsoft and Google (https://www.cnbc.com/2024/10/22/anthropic-announces-ai-agents-for-complex-tasks-racing-openai.html) Amazon-backed Anthropic debuts AI agents that can do complex tasks, racing against OpenAI, Microsoft and Google (https://www.cnbc.com/2024/10/22/anthropic-announces-ai-agents-for-complex-tasks-racing-openai.html) Wordpress Open source royalty and mad kings (https://world.hey.com/dhh/open-source-royalty-and-mad-kings-a8f79d16?utm_source=changelog-news) Casey Newton on Mullenweg (https://www.threads.net/@crumbler/post/DBHn6SIzPhd?xmt=AQGzYYKRz15k-2EYpfAqrwLcuO5a2HhwzbUZBCbGWhnvsg) Employees Describe an Environment of Paranoia and Fear Inside Automattic Over WordPress Chaos (https://www.404media.co/automattic-buyout-offer-wordpress-matt-mullenweg/) Cloud Exits Warren Buffett's GEICO repatriates work from the cloud (https://www.thestack.technology/warren-buffetts-geico-repatriates-work-from-the-cloud-continues-ambitious-infrastructure-overhaul/) Basecamp-maker 37Signals says its “cloud exit” will save it $10M over 5 years (https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/10/basecamp-maker-37signals-says-its-cloud-exit-will-save-it-10m-over-5-years/) There's a lot of private cloud out there (https://newsletter.cote.io/p/theres-a-lot-of-private-cloud-out) BMC BMC Announces the Creation of Two Independent Companies (https://www.bmc.com/newsroom/releases/bmc-announces-the-creation-of-two-independent-companies.html) Doubling down on AI and splitting at BMC Connect 2024 (https://siliconangle.com/2024/10/21/doubling-ai-splitting-bmc-connect-2024/) Relevant to your Interests #1046 OpenCost Incubation Proposal (https://github.com/cncf/toc/pull/1046) US Weighs Google Breakup in Historic Big Tech Antitrust Case (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-10-09/us-says-it-s-weighing-google-breakup-as-remedy-in-monopoly-case) ChatGPT Crossed a Revenue Milestone and (Re)Started a Gold Rush (https://appfigures.com/resources/insights/20241004/4-chatgpt-crossed-a-revenue-milestone-and-(re)started-a-gold-rush) Ask HN: What happens to “.io” TLD after UK gives back the Chagos Islands? (https://simonwillison.net/2024/Oct/3/what-happens-to-io-after-uk-gives-back-chagos/) From AOL Time Warner to DirecTV and Dish: 20 years of media mergers (https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/4/24259360/directv-dish-merger-timeline-aol-timewarner) AT&T claims VMware offered it a 1,050 percent price rise (https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/01/att_broadcom_filings_update/) CEO Kurian: 'When I Started, Most People Told Me We Didn't Have a Chance' (https://accelerationeconomy.com/cloud-wars/ceo-kurian-when-i-started-most-people-told-me-we-didnt-have-a-chance/) AMD looks to new chips to grab share from Intel, Nvidia (https://www.axios.com/2024/10/10/amd-new-chips-intel-nvidia-ai) The list of major companies requiring employees to return to the office (https://www.businessinsider.com/companies-requiring-return-to-office-rto-mandate) Avoiding a Geopolitical Open Source Apocalypse (https://thenewstack.io/avoiding-a-geopolitical-open-source-apocalypse/) Overview of current needs and possibilities in enterprise-y FinOps (https://amalgaminsights.com/2024/10/14/the-evolution-and-expansion-of-it-finops/) Ward Christensen, BBS inventor and architect of our online age, dies at age 78 (https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/10/ward-christensen-bbs-inventor-and-architect-of-our-online-age-dies-at-age-78/) Eric Schmidt on electronic warfare (https://x.com/tsarnick/status/1846300559374274904) 700 Ubisoft workers go on three-day strike to protest company's new return-to-office policy (https://gameworldobserver.com/2024/10/16/ubisoft-strike-remote-work-over-700-workers) Amazon's cloud boss on Thursday told employees who are unhappy with the company's new five-day in-office mandate they can leave for other companies. (https://www.threads.net/@cnbc/post/DBQ_E_gOuJw?xmt=AQGzlsObxUnGC2bk5CE_t4sW-QL_NQDcsH5QyN3SuCe43Q) Invisible text that AI chatbots understand and humans can't? Yep, it's a thing. (https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/10/ai-chatbots-can-read-and-write-invisible-text-creating-an-ideal-covert-channel/) Tesla Caught Using a Lazy Video Editing Trick to Make Its "Autonomous" Robots Look More Capable (https://futurism.com/the-byte/tesla-sped-up-video-optimus-robots) How Google is changing to compete with ChatGPT (https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/18/24273748/google-deepmind-gemini-search-chaptgpt-meta-ai-interview) Perplexity is reportedly looking to fundraise at an $8B valuation (https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/20/perplexity-is-reportedly-looking-to-fundraise-at-an-8b-valuation/) Sophos to Acquire Secureworks to Accelerate Cybersecurity Services and Technology for Organizations Worldwide (https://www.secureworks.com/about/press/sophos-to-acquire-secureworks) Chick-fil-A is releasing its own entertainment app, with family-friendly shows and podcasts (https://www.cnbc.com/2024/10/21/chick-fil-a-to-release-entertainment-app-play-with-shows-and-podcasts.html) Passwords have problems, but passkeys have more (https://world.hey.com/dhh/passwords-have-problems-but-passkeys-have-more-95285df9) Foursquare is killing its city guide app to focus on the check-in app Swarm (https://www.engadget.com/social-media/foursquare-is-killing-its-city-guide-app-to-focus-on-the-check-in-app-swarm-191054153.html) Citi reaps rewards from modernization investments (https://www.ciodive.com/news/citi-bank-digital-transformation-returns-cloud-legacy-applications/729929/) Comic Sans Got the Last Laugh (https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/10/comic-sans-debate/680319/?gift=201cWZnM2XBz2eP81zy0pGR9oxa-0Q1yRNNAyEiZV9s&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share) How Wiz Became the Fastest Software Company to Hit $500M & Its Path to $1B (https://softwareanalyst.substack.com/p/the-wiz-playbook-how-they-dominated) In a global first, quantum computers crack RSA and AES data encryption (https://www.thebrighterside.news/post/in-a-global-first-quantum-computers-crack-rsa-and-aes-data-encryption/) Google Executive Overseeing Search and Advertising Leaves Role (https://www.wsj.com/tech/google-executive-overseeing-search-and-advertising-leaves-role-7aaa7906) Google replaces executive in charge of Search and advertising (https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/17/google-replaces-executive-in-charge-of-search-and-advertising/?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAADaAH8SfXbYvJfExfrdTBCk3FQFLK5Tq4uwcyTdvNqH_if1EMb7BiTaIutkBk7E_gi_XolToB8zShW4zMyhXnB3msBJgykhphfBnPzeDtrLww3XP-wNSyUDOl5UIOKZayfYH4AiVuRcNK835OQmS1p-grIHDeizDm3nlSEB9e55j) Concerns Raised Over Bitwarden Moving Further Away From Open-Source (https://www.phoronix.com/news/Bitwarden-Open-Source-Concerns) Intel and AMD are unlikely allies in new x86 ecosystem advisory group – "we'll remain fierce competitors" (https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/intel-and-amd-forge-x86-ecosystem-advisory-group-that-aims-to-ensure-a-unified-isa-moving-forward) The RVA23 profile is now ratified, so RISC-V gets satisfied (https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/23/rva23_profile_ratified/) Twitter users flock to Bluesky as 500,000 join in a day amid controversial blocking changes (https://www.financialexpress.com/life/technology-twitter-users-flock-to-bluesky-as-500000-join-in-a-day-amid-controversial-blocking-changes-3643898/) Nvidia's Blackwell AI Processors Are Sold Out For Next 12 Months (https://www.investors.com/news/technology/nvidia-stock-nvda-blackwell-on-schedule/) Announcing Amazon ElastiCache for Valkey - AWS (https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/10/amazon-elasticache-valkey/) Nonsense What the Waffle House Index says about Hurricane Milton (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/what-the-waffle-house-index-says-about-hurricane-milton) Waffle House (@WaffleHouse) on X (https://x.com/WaffleHouse/status/1844438764547932507) The Hustlers Who Make $6,000 a Month by Gaming Citi Bikes (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/19/nyregion/citi-bike-scam-nyc.html?unlocked_article_code=1.RE4.D83k.4gVrI1ujtLw4&smid=url-share) The VW ID. Buzz was worth the seven-year wait (https://arstechnica.com/cars/2024/10/driving-the-2025-vw-id-buzz-was-worth-the-seven-year-wait/) Listener Feedback World's Largest Buffalo Monument (https://discoverjamestownnd.com/fun-things-to-do-in-jamestown-nd/all-things-buffalo/worlds-largest-buffalo-monument/) 20+ of Canada's Largest Roadside Attractions (https://www.readersdigest.ca/travel/canada/canadas-10-biggest-things/) Our big things vs their big things (https://www.nzherald.co.nz/travel/our-big-things-vs-their-big-things/HXA3VDO7GFRWPH3WJ2MXX3JRD4/) Conferences VMware Explore Barcelona (https://www.vmware.com/explore/eu), Nov 4-7, 2024, Coté speaking. GoTech World (https://www.gotech.world/), Bucharest, Nov 12- 13, 2204, Coté speaking. SREday Amsterdam (https://sreday.com/2024-amsterdam/), Nov 21, 2024, Coté speaking (https://sreday.com/2024-amsterdam/Michael_Cote_VMwarePivotal_We_Fear_Change), 20% off with code SRE20DAY DevOpsDayLA (https://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale/22x/events/devopsday-la) at SCALE22x (https://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale/22x), March 6-9, 2025, discount code DEVOP SDT News & Community Join our Slack community (https://softwaredefinedtalk.slack.com/join/shared_invite/zt-1hn55iv5d-UTfN7mVX1D9D5ExRt3ZJYQ#/shared-invite/email) Email the show: questions@softwaredefinedtalk.com (mailto:questions@softwaredefinedtalk.com) Free stickers: Email your address to stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com (mailto:stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com) Follow us on social media: Twitter (https://twitter.com/softwaredeftalk), Threads (https://www.threads.net/@softwaredefinedtalk), Mastodon (https://hachyderm.io/@softwaredefinedtalk), LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/software-defined-talk/), BlueSky (https://bsky.app/profile/softwaredefinedtalk.com) Watch us on: Twitch (https://www.twitch.tv/sdtpodcast), YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCi3OJPV6h9tp-hbsGBLGsDQ/featured), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/softwaredefinedtalk/), TikTok (https://www.tiktok.com/@softwaredefinedtalk) Book offer: Use code SDT for $20 off "Digital WTF" by Coté (https://leanpub.com/digitalwtf/c/sdt) Sponsor the show (https://www.softwaredefinedtalk.com/ads): ads@softwaredefinedtalk.com (mailto:ads@softwaredefinedtalk.com) Recommendations Brandon: Tailscale (https://tailscale.com) Ozlo Sleepbuds hands-on: resurrected and I've slept so good (https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/22/24275875/ozlo-sleepbuds-hands-on-bose-wearables-sleep-tracking) Coté: Hire Caleb (https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7250088425121267713/) Marques (https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7250088425121267713/) as an Cybersecurity Intern (Coté's N (https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7250088425121267713/)ephew (https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7250088425121267713/)) (https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7250088425121267713/) (https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7250088425121267713/) What Artists Wear (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58999216-what-artists-wear), Charlie Porter (much better cover on Penguin edition (https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/314590/what-artists-wear-by-porter-charlie/9780141991252)) Photo Credits Header (https://unsplash.com/photos/conjunction-bridge-under-white-sky-1JWmFju8vVg) Artwork (https://unsplash.com/photos/black-and-white-robot-toy-on-red-wooden-table-zwd435-ewb4)

This week on the Primo episode, Jesse and Katie discuss an author trying (and failing) to fight back against the haters. Plus, Eric Adams, Casey Newton, and the ACLU makes some interesting choices. Note for listeners: This was recorded before the disaster in Western North Carolina and beyond, but Katie and her family are safe. If you're looking for… To hear more, visit www.blockedandreported.org

The Onion is a comedy institution — and like everything else in media, it went on a pure nightmare hell ride in the 2010s. We could do an entire episode on the G/O Media calamity, but the short version is: A bunch of friends just managed to buy The Onion, and they're busy relaunching the website, going back to print, and, clearly, having a blast doing it. CEO Ben Collins and chief product officer Danielle Strle joined me to explain how that even works in 2024. Links:  The Onion sold by G/O Media | The New York Times Sam Reich on revamping the game show - and Dropout's success | NPR Platformer's Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse | Decoder Craig Silverman: Digital advertising's structure has been weaponized | Digiday US Warns a Gaza Ceasefire Would Only Benefit Humanity | The Onion The Truth is Paywalled but the Lies are Free | Current Affairs A newsroom expands and The Onion is out again on paper | Washington Post Report: Nuclear War Sounds Fucking Amazing Right Now | The Onion Google defends AI search results after they told us to put glue on pizza | The Verge Jury awards nearly $1B to Sandy Hook families in Alex Jones defamation case | CNN ‘No Way to Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens | The Onion Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23989633 Credits: Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Democratic National Convention gets underway this week with party stars, social media influencers and Republican Never Trumpers flocking to Chicago for the historic event. Although Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz have already been officially nominated online, the DNC will be a prime chance to lay out their agenda to the American people. But will they? Or will they be more focused on vibes and values? This week, Kara and a team of longtime Harris reporters and political insiders break down which issues will likely be front and center at the DNC, what you won't hear a lot about, and what role social media, memes and Generative AI will likely play in the weeks ahead. Guests: Wall Street Journal White House reporter Sabrina Siddiqui; New York Times National politics reporter and host of The Run-Up podcast Astead Herndon; Casey Newton, founder of Platformer and co-host of the Hard Fork podcast; and Reed Galen, co-founder of the Lincoln Project, president of Join the Union, and author of the substack The Home Front. Questions? Comments? Email us at on@voxmedia.com or find Kara on Threads/Instagram @karaswisher Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

By Walt HickeyWelcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.This week, I spoke to Julia Alexander, digital strategy consultant and author of the new blog Posting Nexus.Julia's brilliant, she's been one of the most insightful and compelling minds on attention — where we allocate it, how we measure that, and what becomes of that — for several years now, and when I learned about this new project I was incredibly excited to get her on a Sunday edition to hear more about what's got her, well, attention. We spoke about the incentive structures of the internet, attention as digital currency, and how online trends redefine culture.Alexander can be found on X and Threads, and the project is Posting NexusThis interview has been condensed and edited. Julia Alexander, thank you so much for coming on.Thank you for having me. What an honor.It's always great to talk to you. I've been a fan of your work for a long time, and whether it was your independent newsletter or this new thing, it is always really, really fun to talk to you about what people are consuming and watching and reading and seeing.Thank you, I appreciate it.I wanted to talk about Posting Nexus. It's a new project that you are launching and it is a really fascinating dive into attention and essentially how it has become commoditized, how we use it on the internet, and where it goes. Just to back out a bit, can you tell me a little about why you wanted to go in this direction and start this thing up?Posting Nexus came out of this obsession I have with understanding why people do what they do on the internet and how that affects what they do or don't do off the internet. I now work at Disney, and we won't get into any of that, unfortunately, but a large part of my career was spent looking at the development of the streaming industry and the reality that people's attention was moving away from these closed-circuit traditional distributors to more open-circuit digital distributors who were operating at a pace that was almost relentless, and that was in large part because the attention we gave to digital services was relentless. When I moved into Disney, it didn't stop me thinking a lot about why people do things, where they give attention, and what they want out of attention.So, I decided to launch Posting Nexus, which is me and a few friends who are doing this, edited by the brilliant Allegra Frank until someone very smartly hires her full time. As I say in the intro, it's not a newsletter, it's not a blog, it's kind of just a harbor for thoughts about a lot of this stuff. It really came out of this idea that you can boil down a lot of what people want and where they decide to give their attention into a matrix that I call the IPA matrix, which has nothing to do with beer. It has everything to do with identity, platforms and attention, and when you take those three circles and you put them into a Venn diagram, you get incentive structures and quite often hidden incentive structures. These exist for both the bottom up, so that's us doing things on the internet, and the top down, which are these massive conglomerates who build things on the internet.A great example would be when we look at something like Barbenheimer, which was effectively just an offline manifestation of online attention. Part of the reason that movie did as well as it did is because it leaned into the idea that my identity, which is formed by my interests and the platforms where I socialize, where I'm getting my social capital, and the attention that I receive for participating in this culture then create an incentive structure for me to go out and participate in something in order to post.My general theory on a lot of the tension now is that you give attention in order to receive attention, and through the democratization of a lot of the stuff that we do, we've made it much easier to receive attention by giving attention. I think that constant focus on receiving attention by giving attention leads to this kind of posting nexus.I am very interested in this, just as you are, and our jobs touch on this a bit. You saw it with the technology of film. Charlie Chaplin used to be able to do three shows a night and hit three audiences, and the technology of film made it so that he could be in every cinema in North America, if not further. It seems like what we've had recently is the next advance of that, so now all those audiences within those audiences can entertain each other as well. It's fundamentally inverted a lot of where we gather our attention from and how we disperse it, to the extent that I think it does terrify some people. I would love your thoughts on how this very unique moment we find ourselves in makes this such a fun topic to go into.What's really fascinating is that what's underlying this entire structure is the idea that growth is the end state, that growth is the final destination, and if that is the final destination then there's no real final point. If we think about that in terms of your own life, if you're listening to this, maybe you're a writer and your end point is a book, or you want to write a novel. If you're working within a large company, maybe your end point is CEO or vice president. There actually is an end point.When we think about the way our lives are constructed, which are intrinsically more digital than they are physical at this point, there is no end point. The numbers on your follower count continue to go up and your value, you as a person, is intrinsically tied to making those numbers go up, which means you create labor for companies effectively for free, right? There's this idea that if you do it enough, some offline benefits will occur. If you're an influencer, maybe you'll get a free trip to Rome; if you're a poet, maybe you'll get a book deal out of it. There's this incentive to continue creating free labor for these conglomerates.But if you're the conglomerate — and this is what I like to spend a lot of time on in Posting Nexus. It's not just why we do what we do, it's how are we incentivized by companies that are then incentivized by their own ambitions. If you look at what they've started to realize, it's that they've run out of space to grow, and by space I mean they've literally run out of people. They cannot reach any more people than they're going to reach. If the planet is the best example of finiteness, that's where they are, but they're designed to incentivize growth, so what do they do?If you're on Instagram, all of a sudden you're posting photos, but have you thought about posting a video on this new form of entertainment called Reels? If you're on YouTube, it's Shorts, and if you are an Uber customer because you love taking cars somewhere, have you considered getting your food via Uber? It's finding different ways to capture more slices of pie within someone's attention based on the necessities of their life.Getting into the mixture of business strategy and cognitive behavioral reasoning really starts to help us illustrate why we do what we do on the internet. What I want to do with Posting Nexus quite a bit, and maybe this is going to sound a little naive or a little childish, but I want to figure out a way for us to build a better internet that we understand.If we know that we do this for Facebook, that might not stop us from posting because we like to connect with our friends. Or on Twitter, I like to post to get likes because I am also addicted to the dopamine rush from when we do those things. But if we intrinsically understand that what we're doing is operating within this growth state and we want to get to a steady state where actually just the right level of attention and just the right level of input is going to provide a much happier and a much more mentally healthy lifestyle, how do we get there by working on what we can do and what we can control versus what we can't do?I want to dive into so much from there, just because you hit on something really interesting that got me thinking. There are basically 330 million Americans and there are 24 hours in a day, so that's essentially 8 billion hours that you can have from America. That is the total addressable American time.I think what you're getting at is that we are brushing up on that; there's a point at which growth really can maximize. Let's say you've got 2 billion hours for sleep in the aggregate, and another 4 billion hours for work. We are getting to the total addressable market of American time if we really think that growth is the only way to go about it. I would love for you to speak more to that element of it, because that was really interesting.I think about this joke from a few years ago that you'll remember. The prompt for the joke is that at one point, Netflix's former CEO, Reed Hastings, said “Our only competition is sleep,” and then a few years later, the Pokémon company came out with Pokémon Sleep. All of a sudden it was like, well, Pokémon figured out how to beat sleep. The eight hours a day you actually don't have my attention, finally they figured out a way to get into it. It almost feels matrix-y, right? It feels very dystopian.The thing about growth is that we don't talk a lot about cost. A great example of this comes from this great economist, Herman Daly, who died in 2022. He pointed out that GDP is a really weird factor of just looking at the economic value of a country. It's the growth of product, and when we look at the growth of product, it's been 50 times what it was 50, 60 years ago — in large part because of private companies, because of Reagan economics, you can get into a whole economic debate about it. We don't talk about the cost, both of resources and of time and health that go into creating that product. And if we look at the cost, actually, is it a net benefit or is it a net consequence?Attention by nature plays on two core strings: It plays on how I view myself and my value, which is then the attention I want, and it plays into where I know I can get that attention, and right now that's platforms. It used to be that your growth was in a very limited base. Your growth was in a group of friends, at a company, maybe on your soccer team. There was a very limited group where you had tangible benefit or tangible consequence. Both are good, depending on the attention you sought out.When we add in platforms and the ability to go and seek that out, tie what you know works to your identity, and take in all of this dopamine as well as all of this increased anxiety, when we have that playing out the same time you see third-party spaces disappear so people are not spending as much time with each other in real life, what you get is this growth that's going to end in total, not just disruption, but total destruction for a lot of people. You cannot keep going this way. It used to be, to your point exactly, Walt, that you would stop for eight hours to sleep, and now you stop for six hours to sleep. Or you would go to bed with a book and now instead you go to bed with your Twitter feed.We haven't given ourselves a chance to recover from the trauma of the last decade, especially the last five years. We've been running nonstop ever since basically the invention of the internet, but really the launch of the app store. We've been in this moment for the last 15, 16 years, and at some point, the speed we're running at — the necessity for growth, which is just finding ways to take more of your attention, more of your free labor, and create something out of that and ask you to keep sticking with companies — is going to run out.What I really want to try and figure out with Posting Nexus is where is the health, the net benefit? The net benefit is socialization, it's communication, it's connectivity. That is a net benefit. It's entertainment — entertainment is a net connectivity. We have more democratization of creators, which means we have more voices, which means we have more points of view. That's a net positive.It was a net positive for publishing back in 2010. You were getting stories on maybe Gawker or HuffPost or BuzzFeed that you were not going to get in The New York Times. It didn't mean that one was less valuable; it just meant there was a different POV that the democratization of publishing allowed for. But at some point when everyone had an opinion, when everybody was publishing and Google didn't know how to rank it, you lost authority and you got more disinformation. That became a really bad thing.With Posting Nexus, the underlying point is that we have such finite attention to give, even though it's sold to us as an infinite level of attention. We have a finite level of attention we can receive, even though we're told it's an infinite level of attention, and if we keep striving for growth, growth, growth, eventually you create a world that is unsustainable. With Posting Nexus, it's effectively an equation: How much can you do for net positive before you do too much and tip over into net consequence?That's such a good point, that from the perspective of the companies, they're arguing that growth could continue indefinitely. We can always make more money, but time is definitionally the one thing that you can't make more of.That's the thing with Posting Nexus that's really fun. For people who might not know my background, I started as a blogger for Vox Media, Polygon, The Verge, and then I went into being a strategy consultant, which was great. Recently, I wrote for a publication called Puck and there was a column dedicated to streaming, what was happening with streaming, and trends that were happening with streaming, which was, to your point, effectively an attention story. It was “YouTube is taking attention away,” that kind of story.What I've missed is this idea of being able to have thoughts longer than a tweet and put them somewhere. For example, we've got a bunch of really interesting stories coming out with Posting Nexus. We're looking at the value of The New York Times in 2024, kind of tied around a lot of the Biden coverage before he stepped down. We've got things on decreases in posting and how social media platforms turn into entertainment platforms and what does that mean for how we approach them.We also have really funny things, like a piece on how J.D. Vance as the first main character candidate was always going to happen because he's the first VP candidate ever who has an online history, like in terms of actually posting when he was 20. That's something we've only really seen with influencers over the last decade, and seeing how they've gone through it gets us to this moment where we can inevitably see where Vance goes.So we've got a lot of really fun stuff, but it all plays into this idea that we give our attention to things and our attention rewards through monetary incentives. Both Walt and I have worked in digital media, and when you give the attention to people, it then gives them a monetization pathway, and that's the number one incentive structure. If we think about how we give attention, how we then better focus that attention on something where we know the end result actually is a fiscal reward for a lot of companies or creators, how does that change the way we operate on the internet? And how does it change the way we want to receive some of those benefits, if that's something we want to do?We're getting into a world where your level of posting is the only growth that people have left to chase. This is all these companies have: that you're spending your time consuming Instagram stories. We need you to post in DMs because we know that's where you're spending time because the future of the internet is much smaller. We need you to create a post in a DM that steals from a post that's in your feed in order for us to then serve your data. There's all of that. People intrinsically know this.The New York Times? Our mutual friend, Ryan Broderick. Casey Newton, who writes Platformer. They are very good at writing about this. What I want to get at is the underlying incentive structures that we don't always talk about that are inherently tied to everything you do. If we break that apart, both from a strategic standpoint and a psychological standpoint, how do we better understand the internet that we are helping to create?This has reminded me of genuinely one of the first conversations that we had, which was us talking about Wattpad. A few weeks ago they IPO'd, and I think they still remain an incredibly interesting company. It just grounds some of these headier ideas we're talking about. Wattpad is a good example of a company that became a very wealthy company and a very valuable company because of the broad, dispersed labor of a lot of other people.Wattpad is a great example. I will say in full transparency, I do own shares in Wattpad. I went in when they were public, and this is not financial advice. I think those are the two disclaimers I have to have.Wattpad's very interesting. Wattpad — which is now Webtoon. They merged with a South Korean online comic company a few years ago — existed as a place where people could go and upload their fiction, often a lot of fan fiction. You had 14-year-olds writing stories for other people on the internet. What was interesting about Wattpad was that when it started around 2010, it was one of the first mobile app success stories. It worked because of the iPhone and Androids.You had people who'd go on and they would read their little stories and they would follow creators, but there was no actual financial incentive because you weren't paying the creators. The incentive was building a follower base. You had a lot of people at 14 who tended to be the audience for Wattpad, especially 14-year-old girls who were dealing with a lot of self-negativity in their real life, because they're teenagers coming of age in the time of Tumblr and Instagram and there's a lot of self-negativity on those platforms for young teenage girls.This was an opportunity where they could share their very specific, niche interests. They could write fan fiction about One Direction, or they could write fan fiction about their favorite anime, and they can write their short stories and have a really solid community of people — like LiveJournal for us — come out and say, “This is really great. You're talented, we'd love to continue reading.” And you could see your success and that attention you're receiving grow literally in the number of followers you had. It became this wholesome space away from the internet in a different way.I can't remember exactly the year they did this, but then Wattpad starts introducing financial incentives. There's this idea that you can charge for chapters as you're releasing them and people can subscribe to you for early access. As Wattpad continues to develop and they realize there's this really strong audience of content creators who are creating pretty well-thought-out content that would make for really good movies and TV series, Wattpad then launches its film division and says, we want to work with creators on this platform and bring their work to Sony Pictures, to Netflix, to Disney. We want to get them books.So you have movies like To All the Boys I Loved Before and that genre, which did not start on Wattpad, or you had After, which did start on Wattpad, and you had all these movies coming out that were gaining a larger audience. These authors then create a cycle of further posting, right? Because now people are saying, I can do that. I have access to Wattpad. I think I'm a good writer. And you see, which we've seen over and over again, how it goes from 1,000 subscribers to 10,000 to 10 million to 100 million users who are all posting in an effort to get attention.What's really interesting is how we define the value of that attention, because it used to be that the value of attention on the platform when people first started was from other 14- or 15-year-olds. It was a very peer-to-peer situation. It was, you are writing for someone like me.Now that value is defined by a Netflix executive in their 50s who says, I really think there are 14-year-old girls who would like this type of movie. That's really popular on the site, so we're going to work with Wattpad. The value has now become entirely backed by a financial reward. And if it's not backed by a financial reward, it's still within the follower count. What you get now is this company who — again, I bought shares in it — I think has a really strong business operation, because you have an endless supply of content coming in. You only need to pick a handful of titles that you think will appeal to these larger companies, and then you work with the author on getting them into this three-picture deal with Netflix.All of a sudden you're in between a very traditional world of moviemaking and television series, and you have this constant supply of free ideas and free content coming in that you technically can own the rights to if you work with a creator. No 17-year-old writer at this point is going to say no to having a movie on Netflix. So you get into a really interesting constant flow of supply with very high levels of demand that you can then cherry-pick.The other version of this — which is another company I have shares in, and this is not financial advice, for transparency — is Reddit. Once Google aligned and said, hey, people want more familiar answers when they're searching for “do I have cancer,” Google said, we can just pull from Reddit. It's going to help us with our AI and we can just serve that instead of having to pay The New York Times to have this.All of a sudden you're in this world where Reddit becomes the future of the internet because Google is the still the main pathway to the internet. And if you're pulling from Reddit, what does that do to authority? What does that do to the incentive structure to be popular on Reddit? Which for a while was just, did you show authority and knowledge within your own subreddit community? Now it takes on a whole new world.The business applications of controlling the supply of attention, putting it through a very narrow passage by cherry-picking demand, and how you can sell that demand, is kind of where we're at right now with a lot of these user-generated-content platforms.I love that. They found a way to sell, or at least monetize, like in Reddit's case, respect and reputation in the form of karma. And with Webtoon, I was shocked to see that they're like a $2.8 billion company now. There have always been web comics on the internet, but they were the first to really roll them up into Webtoon. There has always been fan fiction on the internet, but they were among the first to roll them up into this package.AO3, Fanfiction.net, they're not trying to develop a flywheel to give you more attention. They're excellent communities and they retain a lot of that original character. But the thing that Webtoon was really interested in is that they realized the currency of their realm is attention and followers, and now they are a multibillion-dollar company.That, I think, was one of the more compelling stories from this summer. When I saw that you were coming out with Posting Nexus, I was like, oh man, there could not have been a better moment for this. There could not be a better moment to really think about how attention works online.Yeah. And I know you'll appreciate the underlying part of this, because I know you are, and I mean this with all the love, a giant nerd.Gigantic.But one of the best stories I wrote when I was at The Verge — not in terms of it being a good story, but in terms of me liking it — was when I talked to the Wattpad team, the Webtoon team, and said, how do you incorporate data? You have huge numbers of chapters being uploaded every single day from all these authors that come on.They developed a tool, which will sound very familiar to anyone who's ever worked in SEO, where they look at every single word and they look at very specific trend words and try to figure out if it's reaching an audience cluster or cohort that is in demand from other studios. For example: Latino werewolf. Is there an audience for Latino werewolf romances? They can track it, and they do track it. Then they play around with the recommendation algorithms and some of the product placement, and as that grows, they then say, okay, we want to hyperfocus on this in order to sell.That, to me, is the other underlying part of the attention story. There was a really great article by John Herrman, who works at New York Mag, and he talked about whether Twitter is back or not back. He ends his article by saying it doesn't really matter, because according to Twitter's CEO, it is back. According to Elon, it's thriving. It was this idea that Twitter inherently feels very small because communities have gotten smaller. What you think is important is what's appearing on your feed, right? This is how something could be super viral on TikTok for you and no one else has ever heard of it.That idea started with companies like Wattpad and Reddit. They started with this idea that has a really strong impact on this audience and the equation they do. And I worked with companies — not Wattpad, not Reddit — as a consultant on this exact equation, which was: How monetizable is this small audience compared to that small audience? If you're going to look at your cost, where are you going to get the strongest return on your investment?We do that now across a million different cohorts every single day. It's just, where do we think the attention that we're receiving, because they are getting attention from the small group, actually transfers into an action that we can better monetize versus what's the attention that we're seeing that is not going to transfer into a monetizable action. You do that equation, and what that ends up doing is restructuring culture.Imagine Twilight today. Someone would've been like, queer vampire? We think that audience translates into highly monetizable. Now you have Simon and Schuster, Netflix, YouTube — you have all these companies saying, okay, there's a trend here. So we're going to see a new volume of content support that trend. Then a year later, all of a sudden, The New York Times writes a story about how everyone's into queer vampires.It's like, well, that started because someone looked at a cohort of strong attention and said, that's monetizable. It just blew up into redefining what culture is. That's pure attention online that transfers offline.That idea of “this niche is monetizable; this one's not” feels like that's been every success story on the internet for the past decade.When you were describing that, I was reminded of my favorite genre collision, which created something that could not have existed before the internet: the success of D&D podcasts and D&D content, whether it's Critical Role, or you see all this stuff on Dropout doing phenomenally well right now. That only happened because there was a group of niche fans that really, really clicked with something. They realized that this stuff is easier to produce than scripted content sometimes, and you could just see the value proposition make sense to people in real time. Now they're selling out Madison Square Garden.Seeing this very market-based thing, as you were describing, was like, oh man. We've seen this happen. That's really cool.I'm so happy you said this, because it's kind of the end point of what Posting Nexus wants to get at. The fact that things happen in one area and then move somewhere else happens all the time. You watch your favorite football team and then you go watch them play at the stadium. You discover your favorite singer via an album and then you go watch them play a concert. That's super traditional.What we're seeing now is a continuation of that, but it's fascinating to me. I think about this with Critical Role; I think about this with the Pod Save America guys. Effectively what they're doing is taking this attention that you've given them and monetizing it in a new way that feels weird to us because it's different from a superstar musician or a team sport that has always existed in the offline. This is a group of talent, a group of people that we associate solely with being online. And we have that really strong parasocial relationship with creators, because we literally watch them in our bed, even more so than TV. They're in our bed and we listen to them on their podcasts, because they can't just have a YouTube, right? Now they're podcasting, and they're finding different ways to capture more attention.It says a lot about how much we cling to human connectivity. This is my general barbell thesis, is that the world going forward, online or offline, is implausibly big — implausibly big like Christianity, or Taylor Swift — and addressably small. Which is still good; it just means monetizable, like Pod Save America or Critical Role.The whole goal of the first one is that you don't actually have to do 90,000 different things. People will come to you because that's what they crave. They crave that connection. And the second one, the more opportunity you give people to come and see you physically and have that connectivity, have that connection, the more you're going to be able to split how you want your attention eight different ways. Now that they've seen you, maybe they'll buy the book you're selling as opposed to if you just had the podcast.When we give attention and when people demand our attention in different forums, how does that then create these trends within business, within culture, the way we look at religion, the way we look at physical spaces? How does that impact our life offline? So again, it's that general thesis of why people do anything they do online, and how does that translate to what happens offline? That's the obsessive point for me.You've been so generous with your time, I want to make sure we bring this one home. You and I have both worked for the biggest entertainment company on the planet, you and I have both had independent newsletters that were profitable, and it is comforting to realize that it's not simply everything gets eaten or nothing survives. There is a vibrant version of the internet that has all of this.My favorite topic, which I annoy everyone in my life with, is history. I realize that makes me the most boring person on the internet, or just the most average person on the internet, but the thing I really like about history — whether that's ancient, modern, whatever it is — is that nothing is new. Everything happens again and again, so the internet and the fight for attention is like forms of religion battling it out during the Crusades. I mean, it was far more violent, and I'm glad we're not in those times, but it's this idea of what you're choosing to give attention and therefore power to, how we then take that power and tie it to our identity, and our way of communicating and the incentive that we have at the basis of all this is the same.What the internet has done is create unprecedented scale and rapidity that we can't even comprehend. We don't even have time to sit and think, oh, that's crazy that that thing happened. The publishing industry was wiped out, but we don't even have to do that because there's this new thing that's happening and it's newsletters. Which by the way are just pamphlets, which by the way are what people used to print the 1600s, right?It's not new, and yet for us because of the abundance of information that we have coming in, the abundance of content, of entertainment, of distraction that is demanding our attention, we don't have time to sit back and think, what was then five minutes ago and what will be five minutes from now? As we look at some of the biggest power players that build out a lot of these demands — whether it's user-generated social media, whether it's entertainment, whatever it is — bring it back down and really sit and think: What have I given my attention to today and why did I do that? What did it bring to me? And actually, what if I didn't want to do this?You kind of see this with Gen Z, by the way, who are like, I want a phone that's not connected to the internet. Them realizing this is not actually good for me, but what do I need in order to stay connected and feel that really strong presence of humanity?Big question. To your point, it's a super heady topic. What I try to do with the blog is bring it down into a topic that makes sense, that we can actually, tangibly grasp, while asking that question, which is why do you do anything and how has it affected you offline today?In your intro post you had a line saying it's a humongous topic, and there are a million tendrils to pull on. I am very excited to read those million tendrils. It is called Posting Nexus. I'll be sure to link it out.Julia, where can folks find you? Where can they follow you? Where can they see what you're up to?Wow, this is the first time I'm not in a publication. This is crazy. I'm still on X and Threads at @loudmouthjulia, and Posting Nexus is being hosted on Ghost. I'm trying that one out.Hey, a million flowers blooming. It's a fun time.This sounds like such a fun project, and I'm very eager to keep following where you're going. Thank you for your time. I really appreciate it.Thank you for having me. It's always a pleasure talking to you.Edited by Susie Stark.If you have anything you'd like to see in this Sunday special, shoot me an email. Comment below! Thanks for reading, and thanks so much for supporting Numlock.Thank you so much for becoming a paid subscriber! Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news.  This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.numlock.com/subscribe

SHOW NOTES Summary The hosts of Faculty Futures Lab look back on the most recent season of the podcast, which has been focused entirely on the many ways that generative AI has impacted higher ed. Dr. D.J. Hopkins and Dr. Pam Lach share hopes, fears, jokes, and grievances about the future of AI in the academy… Citations Cowan, Ruth Schwartz. More Work for Mother : The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave. Basic Books, 1983. Hard Fork. "ScarJo vs. ChatGPT." Podcast. 24 May 2024. —D.J. loves Casey Newton's quip about how tech companies claim that their goal is "fully automated luxury communism," but all they really want to do is make money. Bios Dr. D.J. Hopkins (he/him) is a professor at San Diego State University where he serves as the Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning. https://ctl.sdsu.edu/ His publications have focused on Shakespeare in performance and theatre in urban contexts. His current research includes immersive theatre and virtual reality. https://ttf.sdsu.edu/faculty/theatre_faculty_profiles/d.j-hopkins Dr. Pamella Lach (she/her) is the Digital Humanities Librarian at San Diego State University and Director of the SDSU Library's Digital Humanities Center, a values-oriented space designed to blur and disrupt disciplinary boundaries. She is co-director of SDSU's Digital Humanities Initiative. https://dh.sdsu.edu/

O Hipsters: Fora de Controle é o podcast da Alura com notícias sobre Inteligência Artificial aplicada e todo esse novo mundo no qual estamos começando a engatinhar, e que você vai poder explorar conosco! Nesse episódio conversamos com o Deputado João Albuquerque, do Parlamento Europeu, a respeito do processo de aprovação e o impacto do AI Act, o primeiro conjunto de leis do mundo que visa regulamentar o desenvolvimento e o uso da Inteligência Artificial. Além disso, repercutimos as principais notícias da semana, incluindo os anúncios feitos na Microsoft Build, e a polêmica envolvendo a Scarlett Johansson e a OpenAI. Vem ver quem participou desse papo: Marcus Mendes, host fora de controle Fabrício Carraro, Program Manager da Alura, autor de IA e host do podcast Dev Sem Fronteiras Deputado João Albuquerque, membro do Parlamento Europeu

Last week, Google announced a fundamental change to how the site will work, which will likely have dire effects for the news industry. When you use Google now, the site will often offer AI-generated summaries to you, instead of favoring human-written articles. We talk to Platformer's Casey Newton about why this is happening, why publishers are nervous, and about a secret new internet you may not have heard of, a paradise to which we may all yet escape.   Support the show at searchengine.show! Search Engine - How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 1) Platformer - Google's broken link to the web 404 Media - Why Google is shit now To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

On this special episode of Decoder, science educator and YouTuber Hank Green is guest hosting. And the guest? It's Nilay Patel, who sat down with Hank to discuss building The Verge, the state of media, and the future of the web. Also: whether the fediverse is worth investing in, and how social platforms' control of distribution has shaped the internet. In the words of Hank: “Nilay has got some weird ideas about the internet. For example, that he's going to revolutionize the media through blog posts. He keeps saying it, but what the hell does he mean? While I was busy building my business on other people's platforms, Nilay has built something very rare in the year 2024: a website that publishes content and isn't behind a paywall yet still makes money. How does he do it? How does he make decisions? How is The Verge structured? The tables have turned.” Links:  Why Hank Green can't quit YouTube for TikTok — Decoder Platformer's Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next — Decoder Just buy this Brother laser printer everyone has, it's fine — The Verge Sports Illustrated Published Articles by Fake, AI-Generated Writers — Futurism The fediverse, explained — The Verge Can ActivityPub save the internet? — The Verge Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23851875 Credits: Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today's episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Warning: This episode contains strong language.Google removed the ability to generate images of people from its Gemini chatbot. We talk about why, and about the brewing culture war over artificial intelligence. Then, did Kara Swisher start “Hard Fork”? We clear up some podcast drama and ask about her new book, “Burn Book.” And finally, the legal expert Daphne Keller tells us how the U.S. Supreme Court might rule on the most important First Amendment cases of the internet era, and what Star Trek and soy boys have to do with it.Today's guests:Kara Swisher, tech journalist and Casey Newton's former landlordDaphne Keller, director of the program on platform regulation at Stanford University's Cyber Policy CenterAdditional Reading: Google CEO calls AI tool's controversial responses ‘completely unacceptable'Kara Swisher Is Not Here to Make Friends in Her New MemoirBurn Book: A Tech Love Story by Kara SwisherDaphne Keller's FAQs About the NetChoice Cases at the Supreme CourtWe want to hear from you. Email us at hardfork@nytimes.com. Find “Hard Fork” on YouTube and TikTok.

THE Eleventy Meetup Pika - Start Your Happy Blog Scribbles

Today, I'm talking with Casey Newton, the founder and editor of the Platformer newsletter and co-host of the Hard Fork podcast. Casey is also a former editor here at The Verge and was my co-host at the Code Conference last year. Most importantly, Casey and I are also very close friends, so this episode is a little looser than usual.  I wanted to talk to Casey for a few reasons. One, the media industry overall is falling apart, with huge layoffs at almost every media organization you can think of happening weekly, but small newsletters seem to be a bright spot. So I wanted to talk about how Platformer started, how Casey got it to where it is, and how much farther he thinks it can go. And then, I wanted to talk about Substack. It's the newsletter platform Paltformer used to call its home, but content moderation problems — including its decision to allow Nazis to monetize on the platform — have pushed away a number of its customers, including Platformer.  This episode goes deep, but it's fun — Casey is just one of my favorite people, and he is not shy about saying what he thinks. Links:  Can Substack CEO Chris Best build a new model for journalism? — The Verge Substack launches its Twitter-like Notes — The Verge Substack Has a Nazi Problem — The Atlantic Substack says it will remove Nazi publications from the platform --- Platformer Substack keeps the Nazis, loses Platformer — The Verge  Why Platformer is leaving Substack — Platformer The Messenger to close after less than a year — The New York Times Do countries with better-funded public media also have healthier democracies? — Nieman Lab AI is killing the old web, and the new web struggles to be born — The Verge The Biden deepfake robocall Is only the beginning — WIRED Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23823565 Credits: Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today's episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Apple's Vision Pro headset is now for sale in stores. Will it live up to the hype? Kevin Roose and Casey Newton tried it out to see. Then, in a high-profile congressional hearing on child safety and social media, Mark Zuckerberg, the Meta chief executive, made an apology to families of victims of online child abuse. Is new legislation on the horizon? And finally, what the collapse of Cruise, the autonomous vehicle company, means for the future of self-driving cars.Additional Reading: Apple readies its Vision‘Your Product Is Killing People': Tech Leaders Denounced Over Child SafetyCruise Says Hostility to Regulators Led to Grounding of Its Autonomous CarsWe want to hear from you. Email us at hardfork@nytimes.com. Find “Hard Fork” on YouTube and TikTok.

Layoffs are hitting newsrooms and publishers again, as tech platforms, ad markets and artificial intelligence reshape the internet. Kevin Roose and Casey Newton have ideas for solutions. Then, one of the most influential investors in crypto companies lays out where the industry went wrong, and why he still thinks blockchains are the future. And finally, a round of HatGPT with the week's tech headlines, including a spicy LinkedIn post and an A.I. test that disturbs Kevin and Casey's sense of reality.Today's guest:Chris Dixon, partner at Andreessen HorowitzAdditional Reading:Layoffs hit publishers including The Los Angeles Times and Sports Illustrated, while Pitchfork is being wrapped into GQ.“Read Write Own: Building the Next Era of the Internet,” by Chris DixonTest Yourself: Which Faces Were Made by A.I.?We want to hear from you. Email us at hardfork@nytimes.com. Find “Hard Fork” on YouTube and TikTok.

Alex and Evelyn are joined by Platformer's Casey Newton to talk about his decision to move his newsletter off Substack, and how to think about difficult content moderation decisions at different levels of the internet stack.

EPISODE #31: Your favorite pod is back for the weekly Friday episode! Mike Solana and the Pirate Wires writing crew is here to discuss the week that was. We dive into the Casey Newton fake Nazi story, the legacy media trying to control speech, The media meltdown over Trump's win in Iowa, an absolutely insane story regarding eBay. Also, we get a little spicy. We discuss a certain word that has been removed from our vernacular and might be coming back. Finally, the vibe shift continues in the place you definitely thought it would.. RuPaul's Drag Race! Do our PW fans watch RuPaul? Comment below.. Featuring Mike Solana , Brandon Gorrell, River Page, Sanjana Friedman Subscribe to Pirate Wires: https://www.piratewires.com/ Topics Discussed: https://www.piratewires.com/p/overton-collapse https://www.theindustry.pw/p/crisis-on-the-red-sea https://www.dolorespark.pw/p/grim-new-record Pirate Wires Twitter: https://twitter.com/PirateWires Mike Twitter: https://twitter.com/micsolana Brandon Twitter: https://twitter.com/brandongorrell River Twitter: https://twitter.com/river_is_nice Sanjana Twitter: https://twitter.com/metaversehell TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 - Welcome Back To The Pod - Like & Subscribe! 1:10 - Substack Is Full Of Nazis According To Casey Newton - Except It's Not.. 7:00 - The Speech Police On The Internet Who Want To Control Everything 19:45 - Davos Was This Week - Surprise! They Also Want To Control Speech 23:00 - More Examples Of Media Fake Outrage 26:30 - Trump Crushes In Iowa - The Meltdown Has Begun 37:00 - INSANE ebay Story - eBay To Pay $3 Million For Harassment - Stalking, Pigs Head, Cockroaches, The DOJ Involved 46:00 - eBay Still Exists?? Who Uses It? 50:00 - Babylon Bee Caused Trouble.. Which Leads Us To A Light Conversation Regarding A Particular Word 56:00 - Vibe Shift Continues! RuPaul Contestant Is A Villain And The People Love It. 1:01:00 - Thanks For Watching! Like, Comment and Share With Your Friend - See You Next Week!

The New York Times sued OpenAI last week for copyright infringement. Kevin Roose and Casey Newton walk through the lawsuit and discuss the stakes for news publishers. Then, they talk about Apple's “walled garden,” which is facing threats from both regulators and 16-year-olds. Finally, we set our tech resolutions for the new year.Today's guest: Eric Migicovsky, co-founder of BeeperAdditional Reading:The New York Times sued OpenAI.Apple's latest headache in the debate over blue vs. green bubbles.We want to hear from you. Email us at hardfork@nytimes.com. Find “Hard Fork” on YouTube and TikTok.

Casey Newton is the editor of Platformer and co-host of Hard Fork. He joins Big Technology Podcast for our annual look back and forward at the year that was and the year to come. In this episode, we both go through our standout moment from 2023, then make predictions on Gemini, GPT-5, the future of Google Search, Apple's Vision Pro, X vs. Threads, Falling in love with bots, autonomous driving, and plenty more. Tune in for a fun lively discussion to close out 2023.   --- Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice. For weekly updates on the show, sign up for the pod newsletter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/6901970121829801984/ Questions? Feedback? Write to: bigtechnologypodcast@gmail.com

Many of the core technologies behind Generative AI are not exactly brand new. For example, the "Attention Is All You Need" paper, which described and introduced the Transformer model (the "T" in ChatGPT), was published in 2017. Diffusion models—the backbone of image generation tools like StableDiffusion and DALL-e—were introduced in 2015 and were originally inspired by thermodynamic modeling techniques. Generative adversarial networks (GANs) were introduced in 2014.However, Generative AI has seemingly taken the world by storm over the past couple years. In this episode, Graham and Jason discuss—in broad strokes—what Generative AI is, what's required to train and run foundation models, where the value lies, and frontier challenges.Fact-Checking And CorrectionsBefore we begin...At around 36:16 Jason said that the Pile was compiled by OpenAI or one of its research affiliates. This is not correct. The Pile was compiled by Eleuther.ai, and we couldn't find documentation suggesting that OpenAI incorporates the entirety of The Pile into its training data corpus.At 49:07 Jason mentions "The Open Source Institute" but actually meant to mention the Open Source InitiativeApplied Machine Learning 101Not all AI and applied machine learning models are created equally, and models can be designed to complete specific types of tasks. Broadly speaking, there are two types of applied machine learning models: Discriminative and Generative.Discriminative AIDefinition: Discriminative AI focuses on learning the boundary between different classes of data from a given set of training data. Unlike generative models that learn to generate data, discriminative models learn to differentiate between classes and make predictions or decisions based on the input data.Historical Background TLDR:The development of Discriminative AI has its roots in statistical and machine learning approaches aimed at classification tasks.Logistic regression and Support Vector Machines (SVMs) are early examples of discriminative models, which have been used for many years in various fields including computer vision and natural language processing.Over time, with the development of deep learning, discriminative models like Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) have become highly effective for a wide range of classification tasks.Pop Culture Example(s):"Hotdog vs. Not a Hotdog algorithm" from HBO's Silicon Valley (S4E4)Image recognition capabilities of something like Iron Man alter ego Tony Stark's JARVIS (2008)**Real-World Example(sAutomatic speech recognition (ASR)Spam and abuse detectionFacial recognition, such as Apple's Face ID and more Orwellian examples in places ranging from China to EnglandFurther Reading:Discriminative Model (Wikipedia)Generative AIDefinition: Generative AI refers to a type of artificial intelligence that is capable of generating new data samples that are similar to a given set of training data. This is achieved through algorithms that learn the underlying patterns, structures, and distributions inherent in the training data, and can generate novel data points with similar properties.Historical Background TLDR:The origins of Generative AI can be traced back to the development of generative models, with early instances including probabilistic graphical models in the early 2000s.However, the field truly began to gain traction with the advent of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) b y Ian Goodfellow and his colleagues in 2014.Since then, various generative models like Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) and others have also gained prominence, contributing to the rapid advancement of Generative AI.Pop Culture Example:The AI from the movie Her (2013)Real-World Example(s):OpenAI's GPT family, alongside image models like StableDiffusion, and Midjourney.Further Reading:Deepgram's Generative AI page in the AI Glossary... co-written by Jason and GPT-4.Large Language Model in the Deepgram AI Glossary... also co-written by Jason and GPT-4.The Physics Principle That Inspired Modern AI Art (Anil Ananthaswamy, for Quanta Magazine)Visualizing and Explaining Transformer Models From the Ground Up (Zian "Andy" Wang for the Deepgram blog, January 2023)Transformer Explained hub on PapersWithCodeTransformers, Explained: Understand the Model Behind GPT-3, BERT, and T5 (Dale Markowitz on his blog, Dale on AI., May 2021)Further Reading By TopicIn rough order of when these topics were mentioned in the episode...Economic/Industry Impacts of AIHow Large Language Models Will Transform Science, Society, and AI (Alex Tamkin and Deep Ganguli for Stanford HAI's blog, February 2021)The Economic Potential of Generative AI: The Next Productivity Frontier ( McKinsey & Co., June 2023)Generative AI Could Raise Global GDP by 7% (Goldman Sachs, April 2023)Generative AI Promises an Economic Revolution. Managing the Disruption Will Be Crucial. (Bob Fernandez for WSJ Pro Central Banking, August 2023)The Economic Case for Generative AI and Foundation Models (Martin Casado and Sarah Wang for the Andreessen Horowitz Enterprise blog, August 2023)Generative AI and the software development lifecycle(Birgitta Böckeler and Ryan Murray for Thoughtworks, September 2023)How generative AI is changing the way developers work (Damian Brady for The GitHub Blog, April 2023)The AI Business Defensibility Problem (Jay F. publishing on their Substack, The Data Stream)Using Language Models EffectivelyThe emerging types of language models and why they matter (Kyle Wiggers for TechCrunch, April 2023) Crafting AI Commands: The Art of Prompt Engineering (Nithanth Ram for the Deepgram blog, March 2023)Prompt Engineering (Lilian Weng on her blog Lil'Log, March 2023)Prompt Engineering Techniques: Chain-of-Thought & Tree-of-Thought (both by Brad Nikkel for the Deepgram blog)11 Tips to Take Your ChatGPT Prompts to the Next Level (David Nield for WIRED, March 2023)Prompt Engineering 101 (Raza Habib and Sinan Ozdemir for the Humanloop blog, December 2022)Here There Be DragonsHallucinationsHallucination (artificial intelligence) (Wikipedia)Chatbot Hallucinations Are Poisoning Web Search (Will Knight for WIRED, October 2023)How data poisoning attacks corrupt machine learning models (Lucian Constantin for CSO Online)Data Poisoning & RelatedData Poisoning hub on PapersWithCodeGlaze - Protecting Artists from Generative AI project from UChicago (2023)Self-Consuming Generative Models Go MAD (Alemohammad et al. on ArXiv, July 2023)What Happens When AI Eats Itself (Tife Sanusi for the Deepgram blog, August 2023)The AI is eating itself (Casey Newton for Platformer, June 2023)AI-Generated Data Can Poison Future AI Models (Rahul Rao for Scientific American, July 2023)Intellectual Property and Fair UseMeasuring Fair Use: The Four Factors - Copyright Overview (Rich Stim for the Stanford Copyright and Fair Use Center)Is the Use of Copyrighted Works to Train AI Qualified as a Fair Use (Cala Coffman for the Copyright Alliance blog, April 2023)Reexamining "Fair Use" in the Age of AI (Andrew Myers for Stanford HAI)Copyright Fair Use Regulatory Approaches in AI Content Generation (Ariel Soiffer and Aric Jain for Tech Policy Press, August 2023)Japan's AI Data Laws, Explained (Deeplearning.ai)PDF: Generative Artificial Intelligence and Copyright Law (Congressional Research Center, September 2023)Academic and Creative "Honesty"How it started. New AI classifier for indicating AI-written text (Kirchner et al., January 2023)How it's going. OpenAI Quietly Shuts Down Its AI Detection Tool (Jason Nelson for Decrypt)AI Homework (Ben Thompson on Stratechery, December 2022)Teaching With AI (OpenAI, August 2023)Human Costs of AI Training (Picking on OpenAI here, but RLHF and similar fine-tuning techniques are employed by many/most LLM developers)Cleaning Up ChatGPT Takes Heavy Toll on Human Workers (Karen Hao and Deepa Seetharaman for the Wall Street Journal)‘It's destroyed me completely': Kenyan moderators decry toll of training of AI models (Niamh Rowe in The Guardian, August 2023)He Helped Train ChatGPT. It Traumatized Him. (Alex Kantrowitz in his publication Big Technology, May 2023)https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/25/technology/chatgpt-rlhf-human-tutors.htmlBig QuestionsOpen questions for AI engineering (Simon Willison, October 2023)Adam Smith and the Pin Factory

Thursday marked the one-year anniversary of the release of ChatGPT. A lot has happened since. OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT, recently dominated headlines again after the nonprofit board of directors fired C.E.O. Sam Altman, only for him to return several days later.But that drama isn't actually the most important thing going on in the A.I. world, which hasn't slowed down over the past year, even as people are still discovering ChatGPT for the first time and reckoning with all of its implications.Tech journalists Kevin Roose and Casey Newton are hosts of the weekly podcast “Hard Fork.” Roose is my colleague at The Times, where he writes a tech column called “The Shift.” Newton is the founder and editor of Platformer, a newsletter about the intersection of technology and democracy. They've been closely tracking developments in the field since well before ChatGPT launched. I invited them on the show to catch up on the state of A.I.We discuss: who is — and isn't — integrating ChatGPT into their daily lives, the ripe market for A.I. social companions, why so many companies are hesitant to dive in, progress in the field of A.I. “interpretability” research, and America's “fecklessness” that cedes major A.I. benefits to the private sector, and much more.Recommendations:Electrifying America by David E. NyeYour Face Belongs to Us by Kashmir Hill“Intro to Large Language Models” by Andrej Karpathy (video)Import AI by Jack Clark.AI Snake Oil by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash KapoorPragmatic Engineer by Gergely OroszThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Emefa Agawu and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Sonia Herrero.

This week, the story of a very brief, very absurd revolution at the world's leading artificial intelligence company, OpenAI. And we try to answer the quite real question that might be animating all of the drama. Check out Casey Newton's newsletter Platformer and our newsletter, too. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It was a head-spinning week in the tech world with the abrupt firing and rehiring of OpenAI's chief executive, Sam Altman. The hosts of “Hard Fork,” Kevin Roose and Casey Newton, interviewed Altman only two days before he was fired. Over the course of their conversation, Altman laid out his worldview and his vision for the future of A.I. Today, we're bringing you that interview to shed light on how Altman has quickly come to be seen as a figure of controversy inside the company he co-founded.“Hard Fork” is a podcast about the future of technology that's already here. You can search for it wherever you get your podcasts. Visit nytimes.com/hardfork for more.Hear more of Hard Fork's coverage of OpenAI's meltdown:Emergency Pod: Sam Altman Is Out at Open AIYet Another Emergency Pod: Sam Altman Is Back

Platformer's Casey Newton moderates a conversation at Code 2023 on ethics in artificial intelligence, with Ajeya Cotra, Senior Program Officer at Open Philanthropy, and Helen Toner, Director of Strategy at Georgetown University's Center for Security and Emerging Technology. The panel discusses the risks and rewards of the technology, as well as best practices and safety measures. Recorded on September 27th in Los Angeles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A group of tech titans is gobbling up land north of San Francisco with aspirations to alleviate the Bay Area's housing crisis, promote innovation, and experiment with new forms of governance. It's not the first time ultra-wealthy people have tried to build the place of their dreams. Will this time be any different?Then, note-taking apps claim to make us smarter. Usually, they don't. Casey Newton, a productivity cult member, on how A.I. could change that.Plus, Kevin and Casey play HatGPT.Additional Information:Tech billionaires want to build a new city. A political fight is coming.Casey takes a look at note-taking platforms and why they usually don't live up to their promise.An Air Force program is embracing A.I. in aerial combat.The S.E.C. took action against a NFT projectYouTube will waive content violation warnings if the creators in violation attend a class.Google Meet's new A.I. program will take notes for users in real time.A smart contact lens can be charged with human tears. 

Casey Newton writes the Platformer newsletter. Kevin Roose is a technology columnist for The New York Times. Together they co-host the podcast Hard Fork. CN: “People actually like to be a little bit confused. They like listening to things where people are talking about things they don't quite understand, which was very counterintuitive to me. I think a lot of editor-types would scoff at, but I've come around.” KR: “We can revisit subjects and we do. We can change our minds. Print pieces feel so permanent, they feel so definitive. Podcasts, we can just sort of say, ‘I don't know what to make of this, ask me again in a month.'” Show notes: @CaseyNewton @kevinroose cnewton.org kevinroose.com Newton on Longform Roose on Longform Longorm Podcast #337: Casey Newton Longform Podcast #81: Kevin Roose Newton and Roose's Hard Fork archive Newton's Platformer archive Roose's New York Times archive 3:00 Newton's Verge archive 7:00 “Elon's X Machina, Crypto Orbs, and a Visit to Google's Robot Lab” (Newton and Roose • New York Times • July 2023) 12:00 Huberman Lab (Andrew Huberman • Huberman Lab • 2023) 14:00 Rabbit Hole (Roose • New York Times • 2020) 25:00 Futureproof (Roose • Random House • 2022) 29:00 “ChatGPT Transforms a Classroom and Is ‘M3GAN' Real?” (Newton and Roose • New York Times • Jan 2023) 29:00 “Dario Amodei, C.E.O. of Anthropic, on the Paradoxes of A.I. Safety and Netflix's ‘Deep Fake Love Story'” (Newton and Roose • New York Times • July 2023) 31:00 “Google C.E.O. Sundar Pichai on Bard, A.I. ‘Whiplash' and Competing with ChatGPT” (Newton and Roose • New York Times • March 2023) 31:00 “Mr. Altman Goes to Washington and Casey Goes on This American Life” (Newton and Roose • New York Times • May 2023) 44:00 “Aided by A.I. Language Models, Google's Robots Are Getting Smart” (Roose • New York Times • July 2023) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Bestselling novelist and former Twitter employee Robin Sloan joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to talk about how Elon Musk's ownership of Twitter and the rise of new platforms like Mastodon, Bluesky, and Meta's Threads are shaping a new ecosystem of social media. The co-hosts and Sloan grapple with the unruliness of Twitter over time, political polarization on different platforms and the risks of disinformation, and what the end of Twitter—now rebranded as X—might look like. Sloan reflects on the role social media plays (or doesn't) in authors' careers, as well as his own decision to leave Twitter. Finally, he reads from his 2012 novel Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore. To hear the full episode, subscribe through iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app (include the forward slashes when searching). You can also listen by streaming from the player below. Check out video versions of our interviews on the Fiction/Non/Fiction Instagram account, the Fiction/Non/Fiction YouTube Channel, and our show website: https://www.fnfpodcast.net/ This episode of the podcast was produced by Amanda Trout and Anne Kniggendorf. Robin Sloan Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore Sourdough “Conspiracy Museum” (The Atlantic) Others: “Robin Sloan leaves Twitter's Media Partnerships team,” The Next Web, November 11, 2011 “Bay Area author Robin Sloan dishes on 'Sourdough,' Twitter and books,” San Jose Mercury-News, May 18, 2019 “How to Write Science Fiction That Isn't 'Useful,'” Robin Sloan interviewed by Ellen Cushing, The Atlantic, May 15, 2020 “The Age of Social Media Is Ending,” by Ian Bogost, The Atlantic, Nov. 10, 2022 “Threads users looking for 'genuine connection' as Twitter-like social media platform goes back to basics,” ABC News (Australia), July 14, 2023. “Social Media Is Dead,” by Edward Ongweso Jr., Vice, Nov. 8, 2022. “Social Media Died When It Stopped Being Social and Became About Making Money,” by Enrique Dans, Forbes, May 13, 2019 “With the rise of AI, social media platforms could face perfect storm of misinformation in 2024,” CNN Business, July 17, 2023 “Threads, Twitter, and the Future of Social Media,” by Sriram Krishnan, The New York Times (Opinion), July 15, 2023 “Zombie Twitter Has Arrived,” by Ian Bogost and Charlie Warzel, The Atlantic, July 6, 2023 “The Weaponization of Social Media and Real World Consequences,” by Dave Davies, National Public Radio, October 9, 2018 “Conservative social networks like Gettr and Parler keep making the same mistake,” by Casey Newton, The Verge, Jul 6, 2021 “Tucker Carlson's show on Twitter makes ad deal with anti-ESG shopping app” by Brian Schwartz, CNBC, July 16, 2023 “Taylor Swift Gets Political On Social Media As Nashville Elections Start,” by Aimée Lutkin, Elle, July 15, 2023 “Despite cries of censorship, conservatives dominate social media,” by Mark Scott, POLITICO, Oct. 26, 2020 “Robin Sloan's 'Sourdough' Is a Fascinating Riddle” by Andy Newman, The Atlantic, Dec. 5, 2017 “Book Armageddon is a Myth: Interview with Robin Sloan” by Lex Berko, Vice, April 10, 2013 “More than eight-in-ten Americans get news from digital devices” Jan. 2021 Study by Elisa Shearer, Pew Research Center, Jan. 12, 2021 “Conservative Social Media— A New Norm?” by Kayla Morrison, Brown Political Review, Dec. 3, 2022 “Robin Sloan: Describing the emotions of life online,” by Josh Kramer, New Public, Mar. 13, 2022 “Computer Stories: A.I. Is Beginning to Assist Novelists—Robin Sloan” by David Streitfeld, The New York Times, Oct. 18, 2018 “The Infinite Deaths of Social Media” by Jason Parham, WIRED, May 4, 2022 “Social media is doomed to die” by Ellis Hamburger, The Verge, April 18, 2023 “The Future of Social Media Is a Lot Less Social” by Brian X. Chen, The New York Times, April 19, 2023 “Delhi Man Creates Device Which Allows You To Order Pizza With Your Mind,” by Anoushka Sharma, NDTV, July 21, 2023 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Search Engine investigates the erratic behavior of the world's wealthiest man with Hard Fork's Casey Newton. The three top theories for why Elon Musk has begun to act strangely, including one theory that upset our understanding of reality itself. If you'd like to read more about this episode or support the show financially, go here. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This is an episode about Meta's new app, Threads. It's also about Substack and Substack's new-ish feature, Notes. But really, it's an episode about what we're looking for from the category we call "social media" and how we think about achieving those ends. And perhaps what it's really, really about is how we go looking for and creating meaning in the digital sphere.Jay Acunzo, a writer, podcaster, and public speaker who thinks a lot about online content, was one of the 100+ million people to give Threads a try over the last week. I was not. So I wanted to see how he was approaching the platform, why he joined in the first place, and maybe, just maybe, how he's thinking about making meaning online.Footnotes: Find out more about Jay Acunzo, his podcast, and his newsletter Substack Notes "Threads is a mecca of Millennial brain rot" by Kate Lindsay on Embedded "Meta unspools Threads" by Casey Newton on Platformer "To quit or not quit social media: opportunity cost can help you decide" on What Works John Austin's How to Do Things With Words Performativity in the theory of Judith Butler "Queer Failure" by Kate Tyson Find written versions of every What Works episode at whatworks.fyiLove What Works? Consider becoming a premium subscriber for just $7/month. Not only do you help support my work, but you also get access to bonus episodes and other goodies. ★ Support this podcast ★

Follow Rich!Rich opened the show by taking a stroll down social media history lane with a look at some brands that have fizzled including Friendster, MySpace, Foursquare, Path, Google+, Vine and Meerkat. Now, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram are the gold standards, with Threads quickly gaining 70 million users in just a few days.Rich is on Threads at richontech.Jennifer in Laguna Beach wants to know if there's a way to keep tabs on her friend while they travel through Europe. She has iOS and her friend has Android. Rich recommends Life360. Another way to find a lost iPhone or Android is through finding tools for Google and Apple.Don't fall for a new scam that claims to give you a free piano.Samsung is holding its next foldable phone event on July 26 in Seoul, Korea.Volkswagen will test self-driving cars in Austin.Casey Newton of Platformer will chat about all things Threads. Listen to an interview with Threads Adam Mosseri on his podcast Hard Fork.The Las Vegas Sphere was lit up for the first time. It's 580,000 square feet of LED's, the largest in the world. Here's my behind the scenes look.Rich recommends the campy sci fi horror movie M3GAN, which is streaming free on Amazon Prime.Reggie in South Carolina clicked a Facebook notification that asked for her to submit her driver's license. Is that a scam? Just to be safe, check Facebook security settings here and be sure you're not logged into any unknown devices and have Two Factor Authentication turned on.Mark wants to know who the first performer in the Sphere in Las Vegas will be. It will be U2 Live in September.If you lose an AirTag, be sure to open the Find My app and put it into Lost Mode, and include your contact information. Someone who finds it can hold the AirTag to the back of their phone to bring up the information.Jacob Palmer of Best Reviews joins to talk Amazon Prime Day deals.Paul in Columbus asks if he gets a new Amazon Fire TV Cube, will he have to re-log into all of his streaming apps?The Super Mario Bros. Movie will stream on Peacock starting August 3. Check the Big list of streaming deals page to see which services are offering free streaming trials.Chris in Miami wants to know if he should go with a Ring peephole cam.YouTube Premium is testing a new lock screen feature.James wants to rescue the data on a USB drive he purchased. Rich recommends trying free data recovery software from Stellar, Recuva and Disk Drill. If that doesn't work, search Yelp for Data Recovery and find someone that can help you out in your area.Dr. Renee Dua explains how her new app called Together can take your vitals with just a selfie.A caller in Murrieta says her VoiceOver function has disappeared from her iPhone. It's still a part of iOS, so perhaps it got deactivated. Use Settings or Siri to turn it back on.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Lovett Or Leave It is gay by the bay for our second tour show at San Francisco's beautiful Palace of Fine Arts. The incredible Snaxx kicks off a night of laughs, while the Phantom of the Westfield Mall (Chris Fleming) shakes his fist at God and new housing construction. Casey Newton walks us through our tech dystopia, while we quiz him on others. Chef Nate Park gives Lovett a taste of cultivated meat, and Dylan McKeever has us California screamin' over San Francisco on the big screen. Plus we close out the night with a round of Y-Not-Combinator in honor of Big Tech asking, “Why not?” instead “Why in God's name?” For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email transcripts@crooked.com and include the name of the podcast.

This is Garrison Hardie with your CrossPolitic Daily News Brief for Friday, June 30th, 2023. Page50 ad read concepts: Page50 is a distinctly Christian marketing company striving to help Christian-owned businesses grow and succeed in our digital age. They don’t want to just make a paycheck, they want to change the world, and that means building it alongside you. The mission is bigger than just Sunday. Page50 wants to help Christians recapture the work week, economic and political influence, and the public square. Page50 doesn’t work with just anybody, but if you’re a believer they want to work with you. Visit pagefifty.com (ya gotta spell it out, because i don’t own the page50.com domain) and see what they can do for you. That’s pagefifty.com. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/courts/supreme-court-affirmative-action-race-conscious-college-admissions Supreme Court bans affirmative action in ruling against race-conscious college admissions The Supreme Court ruled to ban the consideration of race as part of admissions decisions at colleges, including Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, ending the decadeslong practice known as affirmative action. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the six-member majority to undo the lasting impacts of the landmark 1978 case Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, which upheld race-conscious admissions at universities. "Harvard’s and UNC’s admissions programs violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment," the majority held in Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College. Liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented and was joined by Justice Elena Kagan. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented in the UNC case, joined by Sotomayor and Kagan. Jackson recused herself from the Harvard case due to her past service on the university board. Justices have been mulling since November over two cases brought by the nonprofit group Students for Fair Admissions, headed by conservative legal strategist Edward Blum, a staunch critic of affirmative action policies. The majority held that "nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant's discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise. But, despite the dissent's assertion to the contrary, universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today." Justice Clarence Thomas added that he would "highly doubt" universities could carry on with considering race in admissions policies with the new test that was established Thursday. “In the future, universities wishing to discriminate based on race in admissions must articulate and justify a compelling and measurable state interest based on concrete evidence. Given the strictures set out by the Court, I highly doubt any will be able to do so." During oral arguments in October 2022, the court's inclination to ban affirmative action was evident. The court's six conservatives expressed skepticism toward the practice, even as attorneys for Harvard and UNC, along with U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, implored the court to permit the practice to continue. Another case filed in 2014 alleged the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill unlawfully discriminates against white and Asian American applicants. That suit accused the university of violating the Constitution's 14th Amendment promise of equal protection under the law. Banning the use of affirmative action will force elite colleges to reinvent their policies and find new ways to ensure diversity in their student populations without using race as a consideration. Several universities have expressed concerns in legal briefs that a decision to overturn affirmative action could result in fewer minority students on campuses. But ahead of the high court's opinion release, legal experts speculated colleges might attempt to maintain a superficial vision for diversity on campus without taking race into consideration. The matter of race-neutral admissions policies that are implemented for racially conscious ends could find its way to the Supreme Court soon. A group of parents, alumni, and community members at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax, Virginia, sued the school for changing its admissions process to increase the number of black and brown students and decrease the number of Asian students. The U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the school's new process did not violate federal law. The case's next stop would be the Supreme Court. https://www.npr.org/2023/06/29/1185087587/google-says-it-will-start-blocking-canadian-news-stories-in-response-to-new-law Google says it will start blocking Canadian news stories in response to new law Google said on Thursday that it will block all links to Canadian news articles for people using its search engine and other services in the country in response to a new law that would compel tech companies to pay publishers for content. It comes a week after Meta vowed its own blackout of Canadian publishers on Facebook and Instagram, calling the law "fundamentally flawed." The two tech giants have been battling the Canadian government over the law that would force them to negotiate compensation deals with news organizations for distributing links to news stories. The law, called the Online News Act, passed last week. But it could take months for it to take effect. Once it does, Google and Meta say they will start removing news articles by Canadian publishers from their services in the country. Supporters of the legislation have argued that it could provide a much-needed lifeline to the ailing news industry, which has been gutted by Silicon Valley's ironclad control of digital advertising. Under the law, platforms like Meta and Google would have to come to the negotiating table with news organizations and hammer out compensation deals. Government estimates predict that the law would result in a cash injection of some $329 million into the Canadian news industry, which has been beset by news staff layoffs and other downsizing in recent years. Canada's law was modeled on a similar effort in Australia, where Meta did block news articles for nearly a week before tense negotiations led Meta and Google to eventually strike deals with news publishers. A bill to force tech companies to pay publishers is also advancing in California, where the tech industry has levied similar blackout threats. In Canada, both tech platforms have long been against the law, saying the companies are already helping news companies by directing web traffic to their sites. On Facebook and Instagram, news represents a tiny fraction — on Facebook, it's about 3% — of what people see every day. Google, too, does not consider news articles as essential to its service. So both companies have wagered that it is simply easier to block links to news articles than to start paying news organizations. While most major publishers in Canada back the new law, outside media observers have not been so sure. Tech writer Casey Newton has argued that a tax on displaying links would "effectively break the internet" if it was applied to the rest of the web. Other critics have pointed to the lack of transparency over who actually would receive cash infusion from the tech companies. Some fear the programs could be hijacked by disinformation sites that learn how to game the system. Yet press advocates insisted that tech companies retaliating by threatening to systemically remove news articles will be a blow to civil society and the public's understanding of the world. "At a moment when disinformation swirls in our public discourse, ensuring public access to credible journalism is essential, so it's deeply disappointing to see this decision from Google and Meta," said Liz Woolery, who leads digital policy at PEN America, an organization that supports freedom of expression. Woolery continued: "As policymakers explore potential solutions to the challenges facing the journalism industry, platforms are free to critique, debate, and offer alternatives, but reducing the public's access to news is never the right answer." https://www.stripes.com/theaters/asia_pacific/2023-06-28/taiwan-russia-warships-passage-china-10574003.html Taiwan tracks pair of Russian warships off island’s eastern coast Taiwan scrambled aircraft and dispatched ships late Tuesday to monitor the passage of two Russian warships off its eastern coast, according to the island’s Ministry of National Defense. Two Russian frigates traveled northward along the coast toward the East China Sea around 11 p.m. Tuesday, the ministry said in a news release Tuesday. It did not specify how far offshore the ships were. In response, Taiwan’s military used “joint intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance methods” and “dispatched mission aircraft, ships and shore-mounted missile systems to closely monitor” the Russian vessels, according to the release. The ships continued on course and left Taiwan’s “response area” southeast of Suao, a city on the island’s northeastern edge that is also home to a logistics support naval base, according to the Defense Ministry. While Taiwan reports near-daily activity from the Chinese military off its western coast in the Taiwan Strait — 49 Chinese aircraft and 20 ships have been reported in the waterway since Sunday — Russian activity is less common. The warships’ passage comes less than a week after the Wagner Group, a Russian paramilitary outfit, organized a brief, two-day rebellion against the Russian government that began Friday with the group taking over military headquarters in Rostov-on-Don and concluded Saturday after they stood down and withdrew from the city. It also comes just over a week after Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Beijing to meet with high-level Chinese officials, including President Xi Jinping, which Blinken described as “candid and constructive” but failed to secure the United States’ top priority of renewed communication between the two countries’ militaries. Beijing considers Taiwan, a functionally independent democracy, to be a breakaway province and aims to reunite it with the mainland. China and Russia remain close allies, with the two countries regularly coordinating military exercises together, although Beijing has not openly endorsed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Meet Elon Musk, the Muskian mogul who Elon Musks his way to the pinnacle of Muskitude. Please share this episode with your friends and start a conversation.Warning: This podcast occasionally uses spicy language.For an entertaining deep dive into the theme of season five (Phalse Prophets), read the definitive peer-reviewed taxonomic analysis from our very own Jason Bradford, PhD. Sources/Links/Notes:Prepare to be wowed by the Musk Foundation website.Luc Olinga, "Errol Musk, Elon's Dad, Prompts a New Controversy," TheStreet (2022).Musk's attack on Jane GoodallCade Metz and Neal E. Boudette, "Inside Tesla as Elon Musk Pushed an Unflinching Vision for Self-Driving Cars," The New York Times (2021).Andrew J. Hawkins and Umar Shakir, "Elon Musk unveils a new Master Plan, a path to sustainable energy future, but no new cars," The Verge (2023).Adam Kovacs and Adam Westbrook, "Elon Musk Has Some bad Ideas for Mass Transit. We Have Solutions," The New York Times (2022).Adam Something, "Elon Musk's Loop is a Bizarrely Stupid Idea," YouTube (2021).Ted Mann and Julie Bykowicz, "Elon Musk's Boring Company Ghosts Cities Across America," The Wall Street Journal (2022).Nikki McCann Ramirez, "Paul Pelosi Conspiracy Theory Trends on Twitter After Elon Musk Pushes It," Rolling Stone (2022).Ted McCormick, "The billionaire space race reflects a colonial mindset that fails to imagine a different world," The Conversation (2021).Marina Koren, "The War in Ukraine is Testing the Myth of Elon Musk," The Atlantic (2022).Radhika Viswanathan, "Elon Musk's plan to bring a mini-submarine to rescue the Thai boys," Vox (2018).A podcast episode from Backpacker that describes the amazing Thai cave rescueZoe Schiffer and Casey Newton, "Yes, Elon Musk created a special system for showing you all his tweets first," Platformer (2023)Emile P. Torres, "How Elon Musk sees the future: His bizarre sci-fi vision should concern us all," Salon, July 17, 2022.Support the show

Washington Post columnist George Conway talks about Trump's next moves after his indictment. Platformer's Casey Newton talks to us about the increasingly bleak outlook for Twitter's financial future. Then we'll talk to Lashrecse Aird about her run against an anti-choice state senator in the Virginia State House.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In a congressional hearing this week, OpenAI's chief executive, Sam Altman, appeared to be on the same page as lawmakers: It's time to regulate A.I. But like so many other proposals to regulate tech, will it actually happen? The Times's technology reporter Cecilia Kang helps us understand whether Congress will actually act, and what that could look like.Then, Casey talks with Twitter's former head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, before and after Elon Musk took over the company.On today's episode:Cecilia Kang is a reporter at The New York Times covering technology and regulation.Yoel Roth is the former head of trust and safety at Twitter.Additional reading:Sam Altman urged Congress to pass legislation to regulate A.I., including the proposal that A.I. developers should be required to get licenses from the U.S. government to release their models.Casey Newton reported for This American Life on Roth's time at Twitter, before and after Musk took over. 

Maddy, Jason, and Kirk bring on special guest Casey Newton (Platformer, The Verge, Hard Fork) to talk about the generative AI craze that's sweeping the land. Artificial intelligence: what even is it? How did it become such a popular trend? And what does it all mean for video games?One More Thing: Kirk: Nope (2022)Maddy: The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023)Jason: Talk to Me: How to Ask Better Questions, Get Better Answers, and Interview Anyone Like a Pro by Dean NelsonLinks: Casey Newton's newsletter, Platformer, and his podcast, Hard ForkKevin Roose's unsettling encounter with Bing/Sydney: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/16/technology/bing-chatbot-microsoft-chatgpt.htmlTriple Click LIVE IN BROOKLYN, May 18th: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/triple-click-live-tickets-513213584647Support Triple Click: http://maximumfun.org/joinBuy Triple Click Merch: https://maxfunstore.com/search?q=triple+click&options%5Bprefix%5D=lastJoin the Triple Click Discord: http://discord.gg/tripleclickpodTriple Click Ethics Policy: https://maximumfun.org/triple-click-ethics-policy/

“It's different because it's Google.” Bard, Google's answer to ChatGPT, could prove to be more consequential than any large language model to date — but it isn't there yet.Then, we hear from listeners on how they are using A.I. to negotiate their rent, understand medical results and affirm their gender identity.Plus: Why Spotify's A.I. D.J. may be a tipping point for artificial intelligence taking control of our lives.You can sign up for On Tech: A.I. at nytimes.com/newsletters.Additional reading:Google released a new chatbot, Bard. Here's what it does well — and not so well.After a conversation with Google's executives, Casey Newton answers six questions about the large language model.Interior AI is a design tool that makes interior design mock-ups using artificial intelligence.Spotify unveiled a new A.I.-powered D.J.In his book “Futureproof,” Kevin Roose outlines the concept of “machine drift” — the concept that people will gradually turn over more of their life to the decisions of algorithms.

Times tech columnist Kevin Roose stopped by The Daily twice this week to chronicle the debut of Bing's new chatbot — and the creepy things that transpired. Today, we're bringing you the latest episode of Kevin's podcast, Hard Fork. Kevin, along with his co-host Casey Newton, expand the discussion about why Microsoft's A.I. search tool appears more powerful — and more unsettling — than they initially believed. Plus: a conversation about Elon Musk's quest to be the most popular user on Twitter, and why online ads have gotten so much worse (like, much worse).Hard Fork is a podcast about the future of technology that's already here. You can search for Hard Fork wherever you get your podcasts. Visit nytimes.com/hardfork for more.

Enjoy this episode of On with Kara Swisher! From the high speed train wreck at Twitter to the extradition of a fallen crypto kingpin and an AI that can rewrite your dating profile, there's a lot happening in tech right now. Today, Nayeema moderates a conversation with Kara Swisher and Casey Newton, the tech reporter who runs the Platformer substack. They break down the biggest stories of 2022. And they look at what lies ahead in 2023. Will there be less billionaire grift? Is this the year that AI takes your job? And, ok Google, could this be the year of revenge for Bing?  This conversation was taped in front of a live audience at Manny's in San Francisco.  You can find Kara and Nayeema on Twitter @karaswisher and @nayeema. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Tech journalist Casey Newton says Elon Musk did not inherit a company in crisis — but after massive layoffs and upheaval the social media giant is losing money and Musk is warning of bankruptcy.

Today we're bringing you an episode from the recently launched New York Times podcast, Hard Fork. Hosted by veteran tech journalists Kevin Roose and Casey Newton, Hard Fork is a rigorous and fun exploration of Silicon Valley's already-emerging future — and its evolving imprint on the rest of the world.In this episode, Kevin and Casey discuss Elon Musk's on-again-off-again – and recently on-again – interest in Twitter, as the billionaire signals once again that he's buying the social media platform. What might be behind the change of heart? And what will the deal mean for employees and users? Casey and Kevin swap theories and predictions — and also step into the metaverse with the New York Times reporter Kashmir Hill.Hard Fork is produced by Davis Land. Edited by Paula Szuchman and Hanna Ingber. Fact-checking by Caitlin Love. Original music by Dan Powell, Elisheba Ittoop and Marion Lozano. Engineered by Corey Schreppel. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Shannon Busta, Julia Simon, Larissa Anderson, Pui-Wing Tam, Kate LoPresti, Nell Gallogly, Mahima Chablani and Jeffrey Miranda.You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.

It's called “Hard Fork,” and it's all about the wild frontiers of tech. With co-host Casey Newton. Listen to the trailer here, and check out the first episode wherever you get your podcasts, including on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, Amazon and Google.

If you think Instagram sucks now, it's by design. Vox's Rebecca Jennings and Platformer's Casey Newton explain.  This episode was produced by Victoria Dominguez, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Hady Mawajdeh and Laura Bullard, engineered by Efim Shapiro, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained   Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices