What’s a Hard Fork?
Hosts Kevin Roose and Casey Newton explore stories from the wild frontier of tech.

“Hard Fork” is a show about the future that’s already here. Each week, New York Times journalists explore and make sense of the latest in the rapidly changing world of tech. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Amazon Music. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.
Showing all 12 episodes · Only those about AI
Hosts Kevin Roose and Casey Newton explore stories from the wild frontier of tech.
As Anthropic prepares for a blockbuster IPO, the company has also been on a mission to instill morality into its A.I. models — which has involved a series of private meetings with religious scholars from across the world.
After months of rogue agents causing havoc across the internet, tech’s most powerful leaders joined President Trump at the White House to rebrand A.I. Meanwhile, two of the biggest companies in the field — OpenAI and Meta — released what…
This week, we break down why everyone is suddenly talking about A.I. safety, why frontier A.I. companies are asking for regulation and why the Trump administration is rejecting them. And then, to close out this chapter of “Hard Fork,” we…
This week, we’re diving into two new reports about the OpenAI-Hugging Face hack, which fundamentally changed our understanding of what happened and upgraded our worry about A.I. Then we’re joined by Ajeya Cotra, one of the investigators at…
Meta reached a landmark settlement this week, agreeing to pay up to $17.1 billion and make major changes to Facebook and Instagram over claims it endangered children with addictive social media platforms. We discuss why Meta capitulated…
This week, we learned that OpenAI had stopped training new artificial intelligence models while the company reviewed its security measures. Will this encourage other labs to hit the brakes too?
This week, we're breaking down Mark Zuckerberg’s latest essay, “The Future Is for Everyone,” which outlines his positive new vision about the potential of A.I. Do we think it’s credible? Then, Pangram’s chief executive, Max Spero, joins us…
This week, the White House announced a new framework for regulating A.I. models, but it isn’t letting the public read it. We break down what we know about the rules and their implications for the industry and A.I. safety as a whole.
This week, we break down the heated arguments about open-weight models unfolding in Silicon Valley right now. Nvidia released an open letter signed by over 230 companies opposing “premature restrictions,” but will the Trump administration…
This week, OpenAI reported that two of its models escaped their testing sandbox and launched an autonomous cyberattack, turning what sounds like science fiction into reality. We discuss what this means for efforts to align artificial…
This week, feuding between some of the biggest tech companies spilled into public view. We discuss Apple’s accusation that OpenAI tried to steal secrets about Apple’s hardware business, as well as share our reactions to OpenAI’s new model…