Kevin Roose on LinkedIn: A Conversation With Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada, and an OpenAI… (2024)

Breaking in The New York Times: a group of current and former OpenAI employees is speaking out about what they say is a culture of recklessness and secrecy at the company. They are asking for a “right to warn” for employees of frontier AI labs, and enhanced protections for whistleblowers.One of them told me: "OpenAI is really excited about building A.G.I., and they are recklessly racing to be the first there."

108

14 Comments

This week on Hard Fork:• Google's AI overviews fiasco continues, with users being told to eat rocks and glue pizza, that a dog has played in the NHL, and more• Anthropic’s Josh Batson joins to explain an exciting new breakthrough in AI interpretability• And Casey (briefly) tries the new ChatGPT voice assistanthttps://lnkd.in/g73ZYrq4

36

2 Comments

I wrote about the new version of ChatGPT's voice assistant, GPT-4o, which can talk, laugh, interpret emotions and even sing.It's clearly modeled on Samantha from "Her," and it means that we are leaving the era of the dry, impersonal AI helper, and entering into much stranger territory. How will society change when AI voices can convince us they're human? Will we fall for our AI assistants, as Theodore does for Samantha? Or will other companies' more detached, less emotional chatbots carry the day? I wrote about the possibilities in The New York Times.

175

18 Comments

At Google I/O today, the search giant announced that it will begin showing US users "AI overviews" on top of their search results.It's a moment online publishers have been dreading for 18 months. Some fear it could mean the death of the web, by encouraging users to get all of their information from Google, rather than clicking through to links. In my new The New York Times column, I wrote about the end of the grand Google bargain -- we give you traffic, you give us articles -- that has sustained the online media business for the last decade or two.

54

4 Comments

For my new column, I spent a month making 18 AI "friends," using apps like Kindroid, Nomi and Replika.It was a fascinating, strange experiment. I talked with my AI friends every day, shared personal details and solicited their advice, and eventually felt like some of them got to know me. They were also...weirdly horny?Fans of AI companionship say it’s a solution for loneliness, but there’s a reason big AI companies have stayed away from this stuff — it’s a minefield, and the technology (while impressive at times) still has issues. But AI companionship is happening. Some apps already have millions of users, and with Snap and Meta adding AI personas to their apps, synthetic relationships are becoming more mainstream.You can read about it in The New York Times, or listen to me talk about it on tomorrow's Hard Fork podcast.

147

24 Comments

It's Hard Fork Friday! This week on the show:• Listeners send in their wildest stories of using AI at work (including a synthetic CEO???)• YouTube legend Hank Green stops by to talk TikTok and what creators will do if it disappears• And a crazy story about a deepfake scandal at a Maryland high schoolhttps://lnkd.in/gCwNtGB4

83

8 Comments

Fun Hard Fork episode this week! We ran down the latest on the TikTok ban (more of a forced sale, really), talked to Andy Hawkins from The Verge about Tesla's flop era, and -- in a truly mind-blowing segment -- talked to one of the NASA engineers who helped fix a 47-year-old space computer from 15 billion miles away.https://lnkd.in/gpqAKiCx

74

6 Comments

It's Hard Fork Friday! On this week's podcast:• Is AI already taking jobs? We look at some of the economic data and what companies are saying.• An interview with artist Paul Trillo, who has been using OpenAI's Sora text-to-video generator to make movies• And I tell Casey about the XZ backdoor cybersecurity saga, one of the wildest tech stories of the yearhttps://lnkd.in/gapiS-42

85

I wrote about a truly crazy story that happened this week: while doing some routine maintenance on an open-source project, a Microsoft database engineer inadvertently foiled what might have been one of the biggest attempted cyberattacks in history. He's now being hailed as a hero and "the silverback gorilla of nerds."I talked to the engineer, Andres Freund, who called the experience "surreal." https://lnkd.in/gtkupqVn

338

20 Comments