Decoder with Nilay Patel

My guest today is Helen Toner, the executive director of CSET. This episode is part two of our series on AI in real life. Helen is a well-known figure in the AI safety and policy community, though she is perhaps best known for having served on the board of OpenAI, where was one of four board members who voted to fire Sam Altman. 

Since then, AI safety has entered the mainstream, as industry leaders have made increasingly dire predictions about what might happen if we don’t proceed more carefully or even slow down. Helen has seen up close what happens when safety commitments run headlong into commercial incentives. As she put it to me, if our hopes for the future depend on any one person being trustworthy, we’re in big trouble. 

Read the full interview transcript on The Verge.

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Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Decoder is produced by Greg Ott, Kate Cox, and Nick Statt. The show is edited by Xander Adams and Ursa Wright. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

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Today, we’re talking about the Jensen Huang scandal at Nvidia, which is developing so quickly that we had to do an emergency update of this intro minutes before publishing this episode — Huang just resigned from his position as CEO of Nvidia as news of his affairs, including with an alleged Chinese spy, threatened to engulf the company. 

We’ll have more on that story as things develop. But just two days ago I talked to Kyle Chan, a foreign policy fellow at the Brookings Institution’s John L. Thornton China Center, about the real heart of the scandal: what China would even seek to accomplish by having a spy so close to Jensen, and what the state of the US-China AI conflict really looks like, particularly from the Chinese point of view.

Read the full interview transcript on The Verge.

Links: 

Subscribe to The Verge to access the ad-free version of Decoder!

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Decoder is produced by Greg Ott, Kate Cox, and Nick Statt. The show is edited by Ursa Wright and Xander Adams. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I was in college when Napster hit, and the RIAA instantly became the big villain because it was suing kids for downloading music. That was when I decided to go be a copyright lawyer, which set the rest of my career in motion — and Mitch Glazier was in the background as a young lawyer at the RIAA, on the other side of those cases.

So part of me was very deeply, very genuinely surprised to discover just how much fun I had talking to Mitch, who's now on the same side as musicians and audiences in the fight against AI. 

Read the full interview transcript on The Verge.

Links: 

Subscribe to The Verge to access the ad-free version of Decoder!

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Decoder’s producers are Greg Ott, Kate Cox, and Nick Statt. Our editors are Xander Adams and Ursa Wright. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I’ve always enjoyed talking to security expert Alex Stamos because he’s so direct — and he doesn't mince words about how the multibillion dollar cybersecurity industry as we’ve known it is all but doomed thanks to the unrelenting, AI-boosted waves of hacks, breaches, and attacks.

That much disruption means a lot of places where bad guys can get in while everyone else is left scrambling. Alex isn’t a doomer in the long run, but he does think we've got a dark age to get through before things get better. 

Read the full interview transcript on The Verge.

Links: 

Subscribe to The Verge to access the ad-free version of Decoder!

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Decoder is produced by Greg Ott, Kate Cox, and Nick Statt. Our editors are Xander Adams and Ursa Wright. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

My guest today is Willy Shih, an economist, a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School, and the author of the upcoming book, Where Does My Stuff Come From? The Powerful Economics Behind Global Supply Chains.

Willy’s new book is all about the economics underlying global trade, which our politicians and regulators seem to insistently ignore. So we got into Trump’s tariffs, why the markets have reacted to supply chain disruptions the way they have, and why China remains a global manufacturing powerhouse even though every other country thinks that’s so risky.

Read the full interview transcript on The Verge.

Links: 

Subscribe to The Verge to access the ad-free version of Decoder!

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Decoder is produced by Greg Ott, Kate Cox, and Nick Statt. This episode was edited by Eileen Felix. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

There’s been a whole lot of organizational and structural change at NBCUniversal since the last time Matt Strauss joined Decoder. First, Comcast spun most of the cable channels off into something called Versant, and Matt became the chairman of the entire NBCU Media Group. Next year, Comcast is splitting off NBCU into an entirely separate company.

That's a lot to have going on all at once — and Matt's the guy who has to make sure broadcast, Peacock, and every other platform keeps making you watch. 

Read the full interview transcript on The Verge.

Links: 

Subscribe to The Verge to access the ad-free version of Decoder!

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Decoder is produced by Greg Ott, Kate Cox, and Nick Statt. The show is editors by Ursa Wright and Xander Adams. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today, I’m joined by Joey Brookhart, an analyst at the chip and AI research firm SemiAnalysis, to help me dig into the story inside the massive Anthropic IPO filing. 

This isn’t just about a single company’s financials, or its lofty ambitions or frankly ludicrous risk factors, which include maybe automating every job or, you know, killing everyone. It’s also the clearest look yet at how the business of frontier AI actually works and who’s really paying for it. 

Read the full interview transcript on The Verge.

Links: 

Subscribe to The Verge to access the ad-free version of Decoder!

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Decoder’s producers are Greg Ott, Kate Cox, and Nick Statt. This episode was edited by Ursa Wright. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

My guest today is Kevin Roose, a journalist and author of the new book The AGI Chronicles. Kevin was a longtime New York Times reporter and host of the popular podcast Hard Fork, but he and friend of the show Casey Newton just left The Times to start the all-new tech podcast Machine Gods, which launched last week. 

Kevin and I talked about launching Machine Gods and what it’s like to go from mainstream media to being an independent creator. Of course, we also talked about his book, which is excellently reported dive into the companies racing to build machine intelligence.

Read the full interview transcript on The Verge.

Links: 

Subscribe to The Verge to access the ad-free version of Decoder!

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Decoder’s producers are Greg Ott, Kate Cox, and Nick Statt. This episode was edited by Kabir Chopra. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

My guest today is Bill Gates, co-founder and former CEO of Microsoft and chairman of the Gates Foundation. You may have noticed Bill in the news more lately — he’s been on something of a tour for the past few months talking about AI risk, and how crucial it is that we start taking this seriously.

So I was excited to sit down with him and really dig into this subject. I came with many questions, about AI policy, the technical aspects of alignment, and what it means for future generations that we’re building something this disruptive and potentially dangerous. 

Read the full interview transcript on The Verge.

Links: 

Subscribe to The Verge to access the ad-free version of Decoder!

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Decoder’s producers are Greg Ott, Kate Cox, and Nick Statt. This episode was edited by Ursa Wright. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker,  has a lot of thoughts about AI, tech, and privacy. Those issues are driving a big and maybe kind of unexpected political realignment — and with the midterms coming up next month, and early voting already underway in a lot of places, the stakes are pretty high right now. And as he notes, some problems are just collective action problems that require a government. We can’t solve everything one at a time, or even one state at a time.

And of course, I had to ask him: Are the Bears gonna stay in Illinois?

Links: 

Subscribe to The Verge to access the ad-free version of Decoder!

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Decoder’s producers are Greg Ott, Kate Cox, and Nick Statt. This episode was edited by [TK EDITOR]. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices