Hard Fork

This week: How tech executives’ favorite place to take their pants off turned into a muddy hellscape. We talk to one executive who couldn’t just call a helicopter to escape.

Then, Jonathan Greenblatt, C.E.O. of the Anti-Defamation League, on how his organization went from having a “productive” meeting with X’s C.E.O., Linda Yaccarino, last week to being threatened with a lawsuit by Elon Musk on Monday.

Plus, Kevin and Casey answer your questions.

Additional Information:

• Burning Man left behind a sea of “moop” in the desert.
• Research from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, the Anti-Defamation League and other groups found that hate speech had increased on Twitter after it was purchased by Elon Musk.
• Snapchat’s My AI freaked users out after the chatbot appeared to go rogue.

Soon, you’ll need a subscription to keep full access to this show, and to other New York Times podcasts, on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Don’t miss out on exploring all of our shows, featuring everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts.

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 project
• YouTube 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.

Soon, you’ll need a subscription to keep full access to this show, and to other New York Times podcasts, on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Don’t miss out on exploring all of our shows, featuring everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts.

Are New York City’s new rules for short-term rentals like Airbnb effectively a ban? And will they accomplish what proponents want them to? Then, The New York Times tech reporter Erin Griffith on Silicon Valley’s mad dash for GPUs. And finally, we take stock of the A.I. songs of the summer and discuss YouTube and Universal Music Group’s plan to make synthetic voices profitable.

On Today’s Episode:

Erin Griffith is a New York Times journalist based in the San Francisco bureau, where she reports on technology start-ups and venture capital.

Additional Information:

New York City’s new regulations for short-term rentals go into effect soon.

Start-ups are on a “desperate hunt” for GPUs. (There’s even a song about it.)

Creators are using A.I. voices to imitate Freddie Mercury, Johnny Cash, Eric Cartman from “South Park,” and others.

Google and YouTube have different approaches to compensating creators whose work is used to train A.I. tools.

Soon, you’ll need a subscription to keep full access to this show, and to other New York Times podcasts, on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Don’t miss out on exploring all of our shows, featuring everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts.

When Sam Bankman-Fried was arrested in December, he was confined to his parents’ house — but he was left free to roam the internet. Today, the New York Times reporter David Yaffe-Bellany talks about how access to the cyberworld allowed Mr. Bankman-Fried to violate his bail terms and land himself in jail.

Then, how universities can manage a generative A.I. world.

Plus: another look at autonomous vehicles.

On Today’s Episode:

• David Yaffe-Bellany, a cryptocurrency and financial technology reporter for The New York Times.
• Ethan Mollick, an associate professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania who is experimenting with generative A.I. in the classroom.

Additional Information:

• Sam Bankman-Fried was sent to jail after violating his bail terms. The court dispute over his bail focused on a New York Times article that described writings by Caroline Ellison, an FTX executive who had also dated Mr. Bankman-Fried.
• A driverless car got stuck in wet concrete in San Francisco this week.

Soon, you’ll need a subscription to keep full access to this show, and to other New York Times podcasts, on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Don’t miss out on exploring all of our shows, featuring everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts.

Users are protesting Zoom’s liberal data-collection policy. Authors are shutting down websites that scrape their work. And, in a concession to users, OpenAI is allowing websites to opt out of web scraping. The era of A.I. backlash has begun.

Then, street activists are deterring self-driving cars by placing traffic cones on the hoods of vehicles.

Plus: How Reddit has squashed the Reddit Revolt.

Today’s Guests:

• Adam Egelman and Mingwei Samuel are organizers with Safe Street Rebel, an activist group trying to get cars off the streets.

Additional Reading:

• The publication StackDiary exposed that Zoom’s updated terms of service permitted the training of artificial-intelligence models on user content.
• Benji Smith took down his website prosecraft.io, a database that contained the works of over 25,000 books, after authors discovered that their works were being used to power the website without their consent.

Soon, you’ll need a subscription to keep full access to this show, and to other New York Times podcasts, on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Don’t miss out on exploring all of our shows, featuring everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts.

Researchers in Korea claim they’ve identified a material that could unlock a technological revolution: the room temperature superconductor. Material scientists are skeptical, but enthusiasts on Twitter are enthusiastic. Why is the internet so excited about superconductors?

Then, the Kids Online Safety Act is headed to the Senate floor. Would it actually keep children safe? And how would it change the internet?

Plus: Kevin and Casey play HatGPT.

Additional Reading:

• South Korean researchers released a video they claimed was a superconductor showing levitation at room temperature. Scientists were skeptical.
• The New York Times reporter Kashmir Hill profiled Mike Masnick, who wasn’t so sure about KOSA.

Soon, you’ll need a subscription to keep full access to this show, and to other New York Times podcasts, on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Don’t miss out on exploring all of our shows, featuring everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts.

On Sunday night, a crane arrived in downtown San Francisco to take down the Twitter sign from the company’s office building. The crane’s arrival marked the death of Twitter, the brand, and the start of X, Elon Musk’s everything app. Today, why Elon’s acquisition feels more and more like cultural vandalism and what, if anything, will replace the global town square.

Then, is Sam Altman’s universal basic income cryptocurrency app Worldcoin an iris scanning tool to save humanity, or just another attempt to get rich on crypto?

Plus: a trip to Google’s robotics lab, where artificial intelligence models are creating breakthroughs.

Additional reading:

• Casey breaks down Twitter’s rebrand.
• The launch of Worldcoin — and the story of how it recruited the first half a million users.
• Kevin’s column is a deep dive into Google’s new robotics model, which melds A.I. with robots.

Soon, you’ll need a subscription to keep full access to this show, and to other New York Times podcasts, on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Don’t miss out on exploring all of our shows, featuring everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts.

Dario Amodei has been anxious about A.I. since before it was cool to be anxious about A.I. After a few years working at OpenAI, he decided to do something about that anxiety. The result was Claude: an A.I.-powered chatbot built by Anthropic, Mr. Amodei’s A.I. start-up.

Today, Mr. Amodei joins Kevin and Casey to talk about A.I. anxiety and why it’s so difficult to build A.I. safely.

Plus, we watched Netflix’s “Deep Fake Love.”

Today’s Guest:

• Dario Amodei is the chief executive of Anthropic, a safety-focused A.I. start-up

Additional Reading:

• Kevin spent several weeks at Anthropic’s San Francisco headquarters. Read about his experience here.
• Claude is Anthropic’s safety-focused chatbot.

Soon, you’ll need a subscription to keep full access to this show, and to other New York Times podcasts, on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Don’t miss out on exploring all of our shows, featuring everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts.

This week, we answer more of your questions, like: What is ChatGPT’s carbon footprint? Why are engineers so sure artificial intelligence will keep getting better? And, why are there so many venture capital bros?

Soon, you’ll need a subscription to keep full access to this show, and to other New York Times podcasts, on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Don’t miss out on exploring all of our shows, featuring everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts.

Instagram is no stranger to taking product ideas from other companies and turning them into their own successes. Just ask Snapchat about Instagram Stories or TikTok about Instagram Reels. This time, the company is coming for Twitter with Instagram Threads.

Today, the head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, on why the company now wants to take on Twitter.

Today’s guest:

• Adam Mosseri is the head of Instagram.

Additional reading:

• Meta announced a new app called Threads intended to rival Twitter.

Soon, you’ll need a subscription to keep full access to this show, and to other New York Times podcasts, on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Don’t miss out on exploring all of our shows, featuring everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts.