The A.I. Trade Secrets War + Economists Say ‘We Must Act Now’ + HatGPT

Well, Casey, I had a very confusing experience this week because I ordered a new ice cream scoop.

Yeah?

This ice cream scoop is the one I have used for many years, but one of its drawbacks is that if you put it in the dishwasher, it gets totally ruined.

Hmm.

So you put it in the dishwasher—

Which I have to say is a major design flaw for an ice cream scoop—a device that is going to want to be washed at regular intervals.

Yes, you have to hand-wash this thing. So I get a new one, it comes in a box, and there's a little sticker on the ice cream scoop that says, “This product contains AI.”

Oh, no.

And I'm thinking, “What?”

Artificial ice cream.

I'm thinking, “What?” I've been using this same ice cream scoop for 10 years, and all of a sudden it is upgraded to AI. What is the AI? I did not order this. Is it connecting to ChatGPT to tell it what flavor of ice cream I'm doing? What is going on here?

Yeah.

I really am bracing myself because the number of things in my life that used to be very simple and now require something called a firmware update is out of control. If my ice cream scoop needed a firmware update, I'd be very upset.

Yeah.

It also doesn't ship with a charger or anything.

Right.

It doesn't have any ports on it, so I'm thinking, “How the hell does this ice cream scoop have AI?”

Yeah.

I stared at this, bewildered, for 5 minutes, and then I realized it was talking about aluminum. It's using the chemical symbol for aluminum: “This product contains Al.” Then I felt stupid.

I'm Kevin Roose, a tech columnist at The New York Times.

I'm Casey Newton from Platformer.

And this is Hard Fork.

This week, OpenAI has a great new model and a big new legal problem. Then Stanford economist Erik Brynjolfsson is here to discuss a new warning from hundreds of economists and researchers about the growing risk of AI job loss. And finally, some HatGPT starring Lorde. You can run the green light.

Is that a Lorde joke?

Kevin, would you listen to one K-pop song?

1. OpenAI Faces Executive Turmoil

Well, Casey, a lot is happening in AI this week. Specifically, it feels like it's been a very big OpenAI news week.

Yeah, and I feel like it's actually been a minute since we checked in on them, so I was glad there was such a series of events that I felt like, okay, we can actually return to this company now.

Before we do this, of course, we should make our AI disclosures. I work for The New York Times, which is suing OpenAI, along with Microsoft and Perplexity.

And my fiancée works at Anthropic.

Let's get a few things ticked off here. The first thing was a personnel shift: Fiji Simo, the former CEO of Applications, I believe was her title at OpenAI.

That was her initial title. It was later changed to CEO of AGI Deployment.

Okay, so she's leaving the company. She was on extended medical leave because of some health problems she had had. She is now officially stepping back from that role, and her responsibilities will be divided among other executives. Casey, what did you make of this?

I mean, it's a very sad story. Obviously, anytime somebody has to leave a job for reasons other than because they wanted to, it is sad. Simo was there for less than a year, and I think was able to accomplish some of what she wanted. She also played a role in pushing the company to streamline some of its offerings and cut back on some of the projects that, in my view, were distractions, such as Sora, the AI video generator.

But I think she had much bigger ambitions there that she didn't get to realize. In terms of OpenAI going forward, it is yet more executive turmoil at a company that has had a lot of that over the past year.

2. Apple Accuses OpenAI of Theft

And speaking of turmoil, we should also talk about this lawsuit that Apple filed last week against OpenAI, alleging that they stole some trade secrets. Casey, tell us the story of this lawsuit.

This came out on Friday. Apple filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and IO, the Jony Ive-co-founded company that they bought for more than $6 billion. The suit also names 2 current OpenAI employees, Qiang Lu and Tang Tan, who, incidentally, are former Apple employees who now work at OpenAI.

They write in this filing, quote, “At every level, from members of its technical staff to its chief hardware officer”—that's Tang Tan—“and in coordination with business partners, OpenAI has been stealing Apple's trade secrets and confidential information. As a natural result, OpenAI's nascent hardware business now rests on the shakiest of foundations, rotten to its core by its illegal reliance on misappropriated trade secrets.”

That was the kind of quote that you saw in a lot of stories about this particular case, but the details are really pretty wild.

Yeah, let's talk about some of those details. It was a long filing, and there was a lot of juicy stuff in there. The thing that I think got the most attention was this allegation by Apple that Tang Tan, the OpenAI chief hardware officer, had directed job candidates who were applying for jobs at OpenAI to bring physical hardware components, blueprints, and prototypes into job interviews for what the filing calls “show-and-tell” sessions.

You think it's hard enough to get a job in this economy, and then your recruiter says, “Hey, when you come in, make sure to bring 2 forms of ID, your résumé, and also an unreleased Apple product that you sort of secreted out of the lab.” That's such a big ask.

Yeah.

I mean, my goodness.

How are you supposed to do that to get a job in this climate?

I mean, my goodness.

So then there are also these allegations about Qiang Lu, the former senior systems electrical engineer at Apple. Apple says in its filing that he kept a work laptop after leaving the company. He then apparently exploited an unknown security vulnerability to access confidential information and bragged about this to a colleague. I'll just read his apparent quote from the filing.

Please.

“LOL, I found out I can access the network storage.”

You know, I'm glad you read that in full because here's what I want people to know: If you say “LOL” in a message, you should not add “so funny,” because those 2 phrases are doing the same thing.

Yes. Omit needless words.

Yeah.

So there are a lot more allegations in the filing. One of the things it says is that OpenAI allegedly approached one of Apple's manufacturing partners and tricked them into showing them some sort of secret metal-treatment finishing process that Apple uses.

Yeah. If you've ever picked up an iPhone, you know that it has a very beautiful metal finish, and the allegation here is that OpenAI wanted to know how that happened. So they just went to the supplier and said, “Show us what you do for Apple. It's cool. They told us it's cool.”

Yeah, Tim Cook said—

Yeah.

—“We have permission to do this.”

Yeah, Tim Cook said, “I would love for Sam Altman to know how to do this. Just go ahead and show them,” and then they show—these are the allegations.

Yes.

Yeah.

But, Casey, what did you make of this filing as you looked through all of the juicy details?

So I'm of 2 minds here because it is true that Apple, in general, treats everything that has ever happened in the city of Cupertino as an Apple trade secret.

Yes.

They defend their intellectual property extremely vigorously, and so I would not be surprised if, as this case unfolds, a judge or a jury might push back on some of the claims here and say, “You know what? It's actually not illegal for Tang Tan to mention the code name of an unreleased Apple product to a prospective candidate.”

That said, with some of the particular allegations against the “LOL, so funny” person, the allegation that they were coaching job candidates to bring unreleased products into job interviews does just seem transparently wrong to me.

My real question as this case unfolds now, Kevin, is basically how high up the chain this went. Some bloggers have noted that the case goes out of its way not to mention Jony Ive, who's a foundational figure at this company. If there was actually some sort of scheme to do this, it seems extremely unlikely that Jony Ive would be unaware of it, and yet he's not in the filing. Neither is Sam Altman.

Those are some of the questions that I have. But I do think if Apple is successful here, it could have some very tough consequences for OpenAI. What would you make of it?

Yeah, I mean, knowing nothing else about this case other than the filing, I'm sure there will be counterfilings and explanations from OpenAI about why this all wasn't as bad as it looks on paper. But, to me, these guys seem guilty as hell.

That said, it is not clear that OpenAI is actually building anything that makes use of Apple's trade secrets.

We got a report this week from Mark Gurman over at Bloomberg, who is the closest and most plugged-in Apple reporter, about OpenAI's first hardware product—the thing that Jony Ive has been working on with them—being some sort of mobile, screen-free home smart speaker. That doesn't sound to me like anything that Apple has built or maybe is planning on building.

Well, they have the HomePod, right? What Gurman described, as I read it, was basically a next-generation Amazon Echo, which many companies now have their own versions of, including Apple with the HomePod. And so a screen-free speaker that connects to AI—Apple does have one of those, and I would not be surprised if they said that whatever OpenAI is building somehow builds off of their efforts here.

Yeah, I am not particularly bullish on the OpenAI hardware push in general, but I think this made me even more skeptical that they are going to come out with some category-breaking, definitive technology here. I could be wrong, of course, but asking employees and job candidates to bring in prototypes from their secret work at Apple does not seem to me like a company that has a real vision for what it is doing on its own.

You know what I thought was funny about this? A little over a year ago, at the first Hard Fork Live, I asked Sam Altman about their hardware project. And I said, “Is it just Alexa?” And he said, “It’s not just Alexa. We’re thinking we’re going to do something better than Alexa.” And I read the Gurman report this week, and I thought, “Sounds a lot like Alexa.”

So we’ll see. I mean, the AI in it is going to be better, but is it really more?

Yeah, I think this is very much in keeping with Apple’s historical posture for secrecy. You remember when the iPhone—I think it was the iPhone 4—was leaked. There were law enforcement investigations. This company takes its trade secrets very seriously.

At the same time, Apple is also struggling in AI. I think it’s fair to say that. And so this, to me, feels very much like the kind of lawsuit that someone who is not in the lead or close to the lead would file.

Yeah, I think that is reasonable. In addition to the alleged inspection of unreleased devices, over the past couple of years, OpenAI has hired more than 400 people away from Apple. So even at a big company like Apple, that is the kind of recruiting effort that you notice, and I’m sure that has been extremely frustrating to the folks over at Apple as they try to build their own next-generation devices. So I think that there was clearly a wound there, and I think it is fair to read this lawsuit in part as Apple lashing back.

Yeah. I mean, this is a bigger conversation than we have time for today, but I’m always just fascinated by how leaky and porous the boundaries between these AI companies are. One of the hidden factors in this AI race, I think, is the fact that in California you can’t really enforce a noncompete, so people are always moving jobs from OpenAI to Anthropic, from Google DeepMind to OpenAI.

People are just bouncing around all of the time, and they’re taking their secrets with them, right? You can’t take intellectual property. You can’t literally take the code for your model, but all this stuff exists in their head. And so part of the reason that you would hire someone from Apple if you’re OpenAI is that they have this stuff in their head, and it’s just a matter of, well, they can’t literally bring the designs or the prototype or the IP over. That’s illegal. But just knowing how to build something is not a protected class of IP.

Right, and I’m sure that OpenAI will make that argument as this case moves forward. Kevin, what has OpenAI said in the meantime about these allegations?

A spokesperson for OpenAI posted on X, quote, “We have no interest in other companies’ trade secrets. We remain focused on building innovative technology that empowers people everywhere.”

Hmm.

How did that strike you?

That struck me as what we call a non-denial denial. It struck me as: We’re just learning about this, and we need to put out a statement, but we can’t say anything because we don’t know anything. So what is a series of words that journalists would reprint that would buy us a few more days?

Yes.

That’s how that struck me.

There’s an art form to this stuff.

Mm-hmm.

3. Soul Reignites the Model War

Okay, another thing that is happening at OpenAI this week is that people are starting to play around with Soul, this new model, GPT-5.6, that was not available for a period of time at the request of the White House and the federal government, but that people are now using and experimenting with. I have not spent much time with Codex so far, but people I know and trust on this stuff have said it’s really good.

Yeah.

It’s a very capable model.

Yeah, it absolutely is. It is a notable step up from 5.5. I’ve been doing some vibe-coding projects recently. I’ve had GPT-5.6 Soul critique them and suggest changes, and I’ve been really pleased with the feedback. So I think if you are a ChatGPT user and you’re on one of the paid plans, you’re going to be really excited that you have GPT Soul.

Is this a thing you do to get back at your fiancé when you’re having arguments at home? You just casually stroll in, and you’re like, “Hey, been doing some really cool vibe coding with GPT-5.6.”

Yes. I mean, I think he understands that it’s in the nature of my job to always be testing all of the models.

Yeah, you’re not a monogamist when it comes to AI models.

No. I’m extremely poly, and I think he appreciates that.

Yeah, a couple of things have come out of this new model release. One is that it has really changed the plans of Anthropic. As we talked about on the show, they had announced that, starting on some arbitrary day in early July, they were going to revoke access to Fable for people using their Claude subscription plans. This is their most powerful model. Basically, you’d still be able to use it through the API, but you’re going to have to pay for it on a per-token basis. You’re not just going to get some Opus access included in your bundle of a subscription.

And they then extended that deadline by a few days to give people a few more days to play with Fable. Then they extended it again. And my read on this is that this is in direct response to the fact that OpenAI has, by all accounts, a very good model out right now, and they are afraid that if they cut off access to Fable, people are going to switch to using ChatGPT or Codex.

Absolutely. So you think about what their original plan was, which is, “We’ll put out Fable,” and this happened several weeks before 5.6 eventually came out. And I assume that their thinking was, “People will have a few weeks to see how good Opus is, and so then whenever some other company launches a new model, it won’t matter because people are already going to be addicted to Fable.”

Instead, they had a big fight with the U.S. government, and by the time they finally got Fable out the door, there were essentially only a few days between that and 5.6 arriving. And so my belief now is that they are trying to essentially get people hooked on Fable and eventually push them toward paying per token. But 5.6 is out now, and people are going to be able to maybe try that for a lot cheaper.

Right, and the companies, we should say, have been getting a little catty.

A little? I’ve seen episodes of Drag Race that were more polite than what’s been happening on Twitter over the past few days, Kevin.

Yeah, so let’s just talk about that a little bit because I think it’s interesting, but also potentially very important. Anthropic posted a new ad for Claude that is a longer ad. It’s kind of a montage. It’s talking about hard questions. It starts with this very bizarre sequence of images: one is a building on fire, and one is a cemetery, like a row of headstones. It looks to be like a military cemetery.

It’s Arlington National Cemetery, where my grandfather is buried, Kevin. What is it doing in this ad?

And so the voice-over on the ad is talking about who’s going to hit the brakes if we need to slow down this technology. Can AI be trusted? These are the kinds of hard questions. The ad eventually gets to a more hopeful and positive message, but it starts with this very doomy picture of the world on fire, literally as a result of this technology. And Sam Altman did not like this ad. Many other people did not like this ad.

I’ll say, I think this ad is a disaster. I really do. It’s an extremely confusing set of messages, and I think it’s unlikely that the average person would take away a positive message about Anthropic or AI from this ad.

Oh, I don’t know. I want to meekly defend the ad by saying that I think it’s good if AI companies are honest about the fears that they have. I think it would be very bad if they all just turned into sunny, optimistic marketing companies.

Well, sure, but is the right format for that brand marketing? I understand you think this might go really, really badly and you're trying to prepare the world for that. But I think a serious video with your leaders talking about that, or a thoughtful blog post, would be a better avenue than a video posted on X of a burning building.

Yeah, no, I take that point.

Yeah.

I just don't want the message that comes out of this to be, “AI companies should just lie to us, and if they're scared about AI, they should just not tell us that, and they should just put out ads about how great this stuff is.”

Well, here is what I find confusing. I'm not going to call it a lie, but at the end of this ad, which essentially, I believe, has sound clips of average people asking their questions about AI or discussing their wishes for AI, Anthropic shows its tagline, which is “Keep thinking.”

And when Anthropic tells me, “Keep thinking,” I feel like I'm reading one of those blog posts where they tell senior citizens to keep doing crossword puzzles to keep their mind active. You know what I mean? It's like, if you're building superintelligence that is going to do all of the thinking, what exactly do you want me to do the thinking for?

Right.

Do you know what I mean?

Right.

So I just think the entire brand message is getting very, very confused, and it is making people feel bad. I think Anthropic needs to think about that.

Yeah, I think that's right. But let's get back to the OpenAI part of it—

Yeah.

—because that was actually where this started to heat up. Sam Altman posted on Monday. He reposted the ad and said, “I thought this was satire. Kept looking for the handle to be spelled C1audAI,” basically a sort of scam account or something. And then he mocked the “hard questions” tagline of the ad. He said, “Hard questions are great, but only if we deem you worthy enough not to silently downgrade you or even get access at all,” of course referring to Anthropic's on-again, off-again Fable rollout and some decisions they had made about silently downgrading people to a lesser model if it detected they were working on certain types of things.

Yeah. So here is my impression of what is happening: the folks at OpenAI understand that they are now seen as an underdog, and they're thrilled about it. Think about the past year or two that they have had, when they were sort of carrying the banner of American AI, and every misstep that they made was under a microscope.

Now fast-forward to today: Anthropic is seen as being in the lead, and so now all of Anthropic's mistakes are getting magnified. That lets OpenAI come in and throw some blows and look like a scrappy challenger again. It's just much more fun to play the scrappy challenger than the solemn standard-bearer of American AI.

Yeah, I buy that. I don't think they're thrilled about being in second place, at least as the public perceives it. I think there's a lot of paranoia and fear over there that they're losing talented researchers to Anthropic, that they're losing what they call the mandate of heaven to Anthropic by not having the absolute best models on the market.

Wait, what is the mandate of heaven in this context?

Oh my God, you haven't seen this meme?

No.

So this is a thing that insane people on social media post about, where they say, “Oh, you know, the new Gemini is really good. Maybe Google has the mandate of heaven.”

Like God has chosen you to invent AGI?

Yes.

Okay. Wonderful.

It's very dumb. Anyone who says “the mandate of heaven” in sincerity should be checked into a mental hospital. But anyway, I think there's a lot of paranoia. These companies—I don't know if the public understands this—hate each other.

Yeah.

This is more than a Coke-and-Pepsi thing.

Yeah.

What's funny is that I was researching this for my book, and I learned that technically these companies may still have a non-disparagement agreement with each other. When Dario and the Anthropic folks were leaving OpenAI in late 2020, they signed this non-disparagement agreement that says, “We won't badmouth you, and you won't badmouth us, and we'll all keep things placid on the surface.” And that has never been rescinded, to my knowledge.

Yeah.

And so technically they still have a document on the books that says we're not supposed to trash each other in public.

From the outside, reading how they talk about each other, I would assume that they had a disparagement agreement—

Yes.

Which—

An only-disparagement agreement.

Yeah. The minute we leave here, it's on, bro. It's on like Donkey Kong.

Yes. So these companies absolutely hate each other. They're bickering over the terms of these models being accessible to subscribers. I think they're going to start doing some kind of price war with each other. My expectation is that Anthropic will reduce the price of tokens, and then OpenAI will reduce it below that.

I think it will be good for consumers in a very narrow, consumer-interest perspective, because competition among frontier AI labs is good, I would argue.

Yeah, it's definitely good for consumers. I think that there are elements of the AI race itself that are scary, but perhaps that's a different conversation.

4. AI Labs Need Coordination

No, I think that's where I want to go with this, because I think this feud between OpenAI and Anthropic, which does not seem to be subsiding and in fact seems to be getting worse, is very dangerous. I do not like this way that these labs are conducting their relations with each other. I do not like how much the people at OpenAI hate Anthropic and are motivated by wanting to crush them. I do not like how much the people at Anthropic hate OpenAI and want to crush them.

I think we're heading into a period where there may be real and dangerous risks associated with these very powerful systems, and these companies should be open to collaboration—

Yes.

—and solving this problem together. Coordination between labs, I think, is going to become increasingly important, and you can't do that if you're constantly fighting each other.

I completely agree. Demis Hassabis, who runs DeepMind, put out a piece this week where he talked about an idea for a kind of government regulator that would create a process around when a frontier lab could release a new model, maybe solving some of the issues that we've seen in recent months.

One of the things that he talks about is that it would be great if the labs, at some point, could successfully collaborate around a slowdown in the development of AI. And now maybe that's something that the government will just decree. But in the absence of that, you want to see exactly what you're talking about, Kevin, which is the leaders of these companies being able to pick up the phone and call each other and think about what is good for the rest of the world and not just what is going to get a bunch of retweets.

Yeah. I just desperately need Dario, Sam, and Demis to all get together, take a little MDMA, and work it out—

Mm-hmm.

—and find some compassion—

Yeah.

—and find some common ground.

Yeah.

Put the beef aside.

Yep.

We're all in this together.

What I've found is that sometimes business leaders will forget that we are all individual facets of the same universal consciousness—and that's when they get themselves into trouble.

5. Economists Sound the Jobs Alarm

When we come back, the loudest warning yet on AI and jobs. All right, Kevin, let's turn our attention to the question of AI and jobs. This is something that I have been fascinated by myself over the past few months. I've been speaking to several economists and tech leaders about the short-, medium-, and long-term risk of AI getting so good that all of a sudden employers are going to feel like they don't need people anymore, like they can just spend tokens.

There's frankly still a lot of skepticism on this point. And so that is why I was fascinated to see a new letter come out this week that had been signed initially by a group of nearly 200 economists and researchers, warning about the impact that AI could have on the economy.

Yeah, I saw this too. This was a statement. It was very short, just 3 short points. It was titled “We Must Act Now,” and basically, we can probably just read the whole thing. It's—

Read the whole thing.

—it’s not that long. And it says, “Point 1: AI may become radically more powerful over the next 10 years. Point 2: This could drive an unprecedented transformation of our economy, larger than the Industrial Revolution but unfolding over a vastly shorter timeframe. It could bring risks, including large-scale job displacement, as well as opportunities such as major gains in living standards.”

Point 3, economists, policymakers, and technology leaders must act now to understand the economics of transformative AI and to build the incentives, guardrails, and institutions needed to steer AI in a direction that complements humans and benefits society.

So the statement itself, I think, is pretty anodyne. It's basically like, “We should take AI really seriously because it could do all these things. It could do some good things, it could do some bad things, and we should pay attention to it.” I think what was more interesting was the list of signatories. Former Hard Fork guest Anton Korinek from the University of Virginia and Anthropic was on there, as well as some more skeptical economists who have previously been kind of dismissive of the idea that AI could cause large-scale job transformation.

At least in the short term.

Yes, at least in the short term. It includes several Nobel laureates, including Daron Acemoglu, a well-known skeptic of the short-term AI job-loss hypothesis, David Autor at MIT, and lots of other well-known economists and thinkers who are coming together to make this statement. I thought this was really interesting.

Yeah, and so this week we wanted to talk to a person who helped to put this statement together. That person is Erik Brynjolfsson. He is a Stanford economist who helped organize the statement, and he is somebody who takes these threats really, really seriously.

Yeah. I've known Erik for years. He's a great economist, and he's been writing about the danger that AI poses to jobs and the economy for a very long time—longer than most economists. Longer than ChatGPT has existed, he's been writing about this stuff. He's a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI and the director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab. He's been studying AI's impacts on human workers and firms for a very long time.

So, to meet the demand for the questions that we have for him, we now supply Erik Brynjolfsson.

Erik Brynjolfsson, welcome to Hard Fork.

It's a pleasure to be talking to you again, Kevin.

You have been writing and talking and thinking about the transformative potential of AI on the economy for a very long time, longer than almost any economist I know, and I'm curious what inspired you to organize this letter, this “We Must Act Now” statement from a bunch of your peers and colleagues.

Well, this is something that's been brewing for a long time. You're right, I've been thinking about it for a long time. I taught my first course about artificial intelligence back in 1987, before most of your listeners were probably born. I've just been very convinced about what was happening.

But the nature of exponential curves is they grow slowly at first and then suddenly, and now, especially this year, we're in that suddenly part of the curve. The technology's going so fast, but our economic understanding is nowhere close to keeping up, and so I'm doing what I can to try to change that.

So the letter is titled “We Must Act Now.” I would say it doesn't really specify an action. Tell us about what your goals are with this letter and what you think the policymakers who read it—and all the esteemed signatories—should do.

Well, there are 2 main purposes. First is that there's been a sea change, and we're hoping to catalyze that sea change in attitudes about how seriously we take AI. As recently as 1 or 2 years ago, and certainly before that, most of the economists I talked to really were not very AI-pilled. They thought, “Hey, it's not a big deal.”

I remember 1 Secretary of the Treasury saying to me, “Oh, do you think that maybe there'll be a couple of tenths of a percent of change in productivity over the coming years?” They were imagining a very small technological impact. I personally think it's going to be huge, and I wanted more people to take it seriously and realize that I think this is the most important thing economists should be working on.

Whatever other projects they're working on, they should look at them through a lens of AI. Part of what we're calling for is a better understanding, more economists thinking hard about this question, and more research going into it.

That said, there was the beginning of a direction that Daron Acemoglu, I, and others have been talking about for a while, which is this idea of complementing humans rather than substituting for them. Now, fleshing out exactly how to do that is a bigger question, but at least if we could get a couple hundred economists, a lot of Nobel Prize winners, and other AI researchers around the world to agree on that direction, that's a good start.

Let me hit you with some of the objections that I have heard when I've talked to other tech leaders or economists about the idea that AI might take a lot of jobs. I myself am totally prepared to believe that there could be a real disruption here, but I do hear some skepticism. One thing I hear is that job losses almost never have any 1 cause, and it's basically impossible to pinpoint when you're looking at the data.

Well, it's certainly true that there are lots of things going on in the economy. AI's not the only thing. It's 1 of the most important and increasingly the most important thing.

We wrote this paper, “Canaries in the Coal Mine,” that you may be familiar with. We're going to have a new version of it out in a few days, probably in time for your airing of this podcast, where we look at some of the alternatives as well. We look at what's going on with interest rates, remote work, tech overhiring, and changes in education. All of those are important, and we find that all of them make a difference.

But even when you put them in individually or all at the same time into these regressions to try to parse out what's happening, AI continues to be an important factor. It's not just destroying jobs. AI is also creating jobs, as a lot of people will tell you. It's the job of people like me—of economists—to try to sort that out and see which parts are important as early as possible and as fine-grained as possible. Just because it's not easy doesn't mean we shouldn't try to sort it out.

Yeah, I confess that I have been wrong about the economic expectations I had for what would happen when AI systems got more powerful. I think if you had time-traveled back to 2020 and shown me Claude Fable or GPT-5.6, and then you asked me, “This technology will exist in 2026. What is the headline unemployment rate?” I probably would have said 10% or 20%.

What we see instead is that employment rates today are basically the same as they were a few years ago. Headline unemployment is hovering around 4%. So are you as surprised as I am that this technology becoming so powerful has not created more unemployment?

No, not at all. I've written many papers on this idea of the productivity J-curve and on the way that AI complements change.

I'll retell the story about how, when electricity was first introduced, it took about 20 to 30 years before it fundamentally changed the way work was done in American factories. At first, there was little or no productivity change, and there was little or no employment change because people were just paving the cow paths. They were redoing the same things they used to do, but now with electric motors, and nothing fundamentally changed.

It took a lot of reinvention of those factories and ultimately the whole economy to unleash a big change, and that reinvention meant eliminating millions of jobs. It meant creating millions of jobs. All of that, in the case of electricity, took 20 to 30 years.

I don't expect it to take 20 to 30 years this time around, but it's not the kind of thing that happens in 20 to 30 months either. It's something that plays out over a period of years. I think we're in the early stages of that transformation. I have no doubt there's going to be a lot of disruption and a lot of jobs destroyed. There's also going to be a lot of jobs created. We're just in the earliest stages of that right now, but it's going to get bigger.

6. Early Career Jobs Are Shrinking

You mentioned the Stanford Canaries dashboard, which I've been following with great interest. It showed that early-career jobs shrank 2.7% year over year, while mid-career jobs grew 1.6% year over year. Is there growing consensus among economists that this is an AI-driven impact, and how should we respond to those numbers?

I can't speak for the economics profession as a whole. I believe the numbers. I've spent a lot of time looking at them. I think over time it'll become more and more obvious.

Maybe 1 of the most convincing things, in addition to what I mentioned—we tested all these other hypotheses, and they didn't knock out the AI result—is that we first published a version of this back in August 2025, and we saw basically the same pattern. People said, “Oh, it's a blip. It's due to interest rates or whatever.” It's just grown over time.

You can go to the Canaries dashboard, AI Economic Indicators, at Stanford, and what you'll see is that these trends have just been continuing to grow over time. It's not something that's just due to COVID or something else.

I want to ask 1 more question, Erik, about this letter, this statement.

Obviously, the coalition that signed the letter was a hugely impressive group of economists, thinkers, and tech executives—a real who’s who of the field. But there were some people who didn’t like this letter and didn’t sign it. Either they thought it was too vague or it didn’t make enough concrete policy recommendations.

I wanted to single out one reaction from Noah Smith, who’s an economics writer and blogger. He wrote that he didn’t sign this statement because, among other reasons, he was skeptical of this line about trying to steer AI in a direction that complements humans and benefits society.

He basically wrote, “This is not possible. We don’t know that we can steer this technology toward being complementary.” He writes, “How the heck are businesspeople and inventors supposed to steer AI toward being complementary to human workers? They obviously couldn’t predict the labor market effects of the last round of AI, at least in the short term, so why should anyone believe that technologists have the ability to purposefully invent different forms of AI with different labor market effects?” What’s your response to that?

Well, I love Noah. He’s super smart, and he’s a friend of mine. We hang out in the Bay Area from time to time. I’m so glad he engaged with the letter, and I’m also glad that not everybody just reflexively agreed with it. I think we had just the right amount of friction there—a few people disagreeing just to make it interesting. It would have been boring if everybody just said, “Yeah, yeah, this is obvious.”

That said, Noah’s wrong about this. We have lots of examples in the history of technology of it being directed in different ways. One of the ideas behind carbon taxes is that you want to do that, and there’s research that shows that, in countries that impose more taxes, engine technology evolved in different ways.

For computers specifically, there have long been 2 strains. Alan Turing talked about the Turing test, imitating and replacing humans. There’s another stream—Doug Engelbart and others—who talked about AI amplifying people.

One of the things I do is spend a lot of time talking to CEOs. Let me tell you a very concrete story. I met with a CFO, and she told me that she wanted to use AI and get a higher ROI from it. I said, “That’s great. That’s what you should be doing.” Then she said, “Therefore, what we’re doing is requiring that every department measure how much headcount reduction they have thanks to AI.”

I said, “Whoa, hold it just a minute there. That’s one way to measure AI: replacing workers. Sometimes that’s a good thing, but there are so many other things you can be doing. You’re a CFO. You’re being paid millions of dollars.” I didn’t actually say that to her, but that was what I was thinking. “You should be more creative. Let’s look at the upside. What kinds of new products and services? What kind of better customer service? What kind of reduced employee turnover?”

There are all these other metrics that a good manager can look at that will increase the upside. If they think that way, if they change their mentality, believe me, they’re going to steer the technology. You’re going to have outcomes that involve people more and complement people more, rather than just replace them.

I’m just a little more cynical about that than maybe you are. I want to believe that you’re right and that these enlightened corporate leaders will say, “We really don’t want the technology to replace humans because humans are so valuable, and there are all these ways that they can be complemented by AI technology.”

Well, let me just say, there are 3 reasons for doing this. One is that I do think it’s the right thing for society, but let’s set that one aside for now. The second reason is that I think it’s in their enlightened self-interest.

I could teach corporate strategy at business schools. The better, more defensible strategy is creating new products and services and barriers to entry, not just cutting costs. The third thing I’ll say is that it’s true: There are a lot of tax and other incentives right now that skew companies disproportionately toward investing in capital versus labor.

For instance, marginal tax rates on capital are lower than marginal tax rates on labor. If you have a strategy that replaces a lot of workers with machines, you end up paying lower taxes. That’s a flaw in the tax system, I think. That’s something we can fix and create better incentives for managers to treat them more evenly.

Last but not least, I do think there are a lot of people who will embrace this because it is the right thing for the world. I think their workforce is going to like working at that company if it’s a company that does right by them.

You told Ben Casselman at The New York Times that economists need more reliable data.

Yes. You know, this is something I’m super focused on right now. Sadly, as we’re going into one of the most turbulent periods in all of economic history, we are destroying our instrument panel. The government is cutting back on data collection and eviscerating some of the statistical agencies. I feel for those people as they’re trying to do it.

This is the time when, if anything, we should be doubling down and investing more in visibility. It’s a really high-ROI activity. It costs just a tiny bit of the budget and will help us make better decisions, not only as policymakers but also as managers.

That said, there’s only so much I can do about the federal budget. What I can do is, at the Digital Economy Lab, create the AI Economic Indicators and partner with private organizations. We’re incredibly lucky that there’s a bunch of real-time data being collected by companies anyway—Ramp, Revelio, and ADP.

We can tap into these data sources and get some visibility. They’re not always collected for the purpose of being representative, so you have to do some work to normalize them and measure them. But by creating an infrastructure to get more visibility, we can do more.

We’re creating a new taxonomy of the kinds of tasks that are being done in the economy. There’s something called O*NET that lists all the tasks that workers do in the American economy, and we’re creating an updated version of that.

I think that, over the coming months and years, we’ll be able to get much more real-time visibility, in a much more fine-grained way, into what’s happening in the economy. That will allow us to sense and respond to what’s happening. You can only do so much about predicting what’s going to happen next, but it’s sometimes easier to at least measure it quickly and then allow people to respond to that.

7. Economists Debate Sharing AI Gains

Eric, I want to get your take on a policy idea that’s been making a lot of waves in recent weeks, which is the idea of some sort of sovereign wealth fund that would be paid for by the AI companies. Every American would get a stake, effectively, in the frontier AI companies, and you would use that to capture some of the value and redistribute it to American citizens.

From an economist’s perspective, do you like that idea, or is there some other way that we should be getting Americans some share of the proceeds from this booming industry?

It’s not my first choice, but I think we need an all-of-the-above solution. I’d like to see us thinking more about how we implement those kinds of ways of sharing the gains.

My concerns with just a payout and a sovereign wealth fund are: Who decides who gets the money and who doesn’t? If you don’t agree with it, what leverage do you have? If you don’t pay a farmer, they’re not going to give you their food. If you don’t pay a factory worker, they’re not going to give you the effort that they put into it.

But if you’re just getting a dole, you don’t really have any leverage to step back. You hope you can work through your representatives, but I think it’s a less stable equilibrium to just have people getting a check that way. That said, as I said at the beginning, we should explore a variety of approaches.

My understanding of how the new dole would work is that if you had some sort of issue with it, you would tweet at David Sachs, and if your tweet got enough retweets, then he would respond to you. So I agree.

That could work.

We could probably come up with a better system. Let me throw a couple of other ideas up on the board that are getting kicked around in this space, Eric. What do you think about wage insurance if you have to take another job because your job goes away and you’re forced to work a lower-paying one?

Yeah. Wage insurance is another thing economists have been talking about for decades. There’s more potential there. It’s kind of a missing market, just like you have housing insurance, fire insurance, and health insurance.

It’s tricky because of moral hazard, as you call it: You still want to have incentives for people to work. But we could have better tools to understand which jobs are being affected and how much of that is due to exogenous forces and how many aren’t. I’m all for exploring that a little bit further. Again, I don’t think it’s going to solve the problem, but it could be one piece of the puzzle.

What about government incentives to hire young workers?

I think some of that actually makes sense as well, and the reason for that is that you don’t get mid-career workers unless they first start as young workers. So there’s a market failure there that needs to be stepped into.

Historically, education and training have been, to some extent, public goods, where there’s value that goes beyond the people who are paying for them. That’s why in almost every country, government and nonprofits have had a role in trying to support them.

I mean, the United States has been, for many centuries, number 1 in the world at making investments in education and training. In the 1800s, we were way ahead of Europe or other places in the world in investing in primary education, secondary education, and college education. It’s not true anymore, but when we did, that was a big reason why the United States not only had the highest productivity, but also one of the biggest middle classes in the world.

Eric, I know we’re almost out of time, but I wanted to ask 1 final question. Your field, economics, has been going through some pretty radical changes, and the 1 that I see the most is that a lot of your colleagues in academia are going to take jobs at AI labs. It seems like—

Yeah, sure.

Every week I read on the internet that some esteemed economist is taking a leave or leaving their tenured position at some university to go work for a frontier AI company. Are you worried that that is going to hollow out the ranks of academic economics departments? And what is your poaching price for any frontier AI lab that is interested in hiring you?

I’ve been resisting so far, but I do see my colleagues in the offices next door, my friends, my students—a lot of them have gone to take jobs at frontier labs. And I’ve got to say, by and large, these frontier jobs, they’re doing great work, and they get access to amazing data, so that’s exciting.

At the same time, I think there’s a role for people that don’t have a boss who is looking to make profits for the frontier labs. Even if the reality is that they’re unbiased, there’s going to be a perception that they’re speaking for that company, and we need people who aren’t as affected by that. I’m not saying academia is completely unaffected either.

So I do hope people will stay. A good lot of smart people will stay in academia and continue to do what I’m doing. I’ve said no very hard. I’ve had offers from frontier labs and I’ve thought about it. For me, the marginal utility of more money isn’t that high, so I just like what I’m doing right now.

Stanford’s been great to me, and I like just being able to have a perch where I can do the research that I’m doing.

What I’m hearing you say, Eric, is that it would take some kind of Meta Superintelligence Labs–style offer, like maybe a billion dollars, to get you out of your chair and go work—

Honestly—

—for a frontier lab.

I don’t know. Maybe there’s something wrong with me, but I feel like, what am I going to do—get a bigger house, more cars? I don’t know. I feel like I have the greatest job. Don’t tell my dean or he’ll cut my salary.

But I feel like I’m basically very happy with what I’m doing. Whatever amount of money I had, I would be doing basically what I’m doing right now. So I’m lucky in that. Not everybody’s lucky enough to have a job like that. Maybe you guys do. You guys look like you’re having fun.

Hopefully, we’ll be entering a world in the future where more and more people can just be doing what they really enjoy doing, like I do, and money won’t be the main reason that they pick 1 job versus the other.

Oh, wouldn’t that be nice? I like it. Well, we really do appreciate the work that you do. It’s great to have strong, independent research and data about this that we can rely on as we do our work. Thank you very much, Eric.

Thanks, Erik.

Thank you. Such fun talking to you guys.

8. HatGPT Takes the Week

When we come back, there’s cheating at Brown University and other stories from this week’s installment of HatGPT. Well, Casey, so much news this week that we can’t talk about it all in depth, but we can do a round of HatGPT.

That’s right, HatGPT, of course, our segment where we toss the week’s news into a hat, pull out items 1 by 1, and discuss them until 1 of us gets bored and says, “Stop generating.”

Okay. Casey, we got a bunch of stuff in the hat this week. You go first.

All right. Let’s see, Kevin. This first story comes to us from The Times and our friend Mike Isaac. OpenAI is showing Kalshi’s World Cup odds in ChatGPT.

As part of a deal between the 2 companies, ChatGPT started displaying the Kalshi odds of victory in response to user queries about various World Cup matches. For example, in the case of France and Spain, there was a graphic showing that the prediction market had assigned the French a 60% chance of winning, which was very important information to have before France would go on to lose 2–0.

So I think this is a perfect story because now there is something in ChatGPT that can help you lose money in a way that does not involve your monthly subscription payment to OpenAI.

It’s beautiful. I am circling a theory that actually has to do with this particular story, which is that the 2 most important forces operating in the world today are, 1, AI capabilities, and 2, gambling addiction.

Yes.

This combines them both into a sort of societal Voltron that is probably going to become unstoppable.

Yeah, and this 1 is a really funny 1 because, of course, prediction markets are so closely associated with the rationalists, who were a driving force in bringing about this current AI moment. So it sort of looks like maybe a feature in ChatGPT that is steeped in the cultural traditions of the place that birthed it.

But on the other hand, it is just gambling, and I, as a paying subscriber to ChatGPT, it does offend me that I have to see gambling advertisements in my responses now.

Yeah. I just think this is going to be sort of everywhere, unless there’s some sort of regulatory response. I expect to open a box of cereal, and it should just give me some Kalshi odds for something in a year or 2. I just think there’s going to be no surface for our attention that does not in some way have a gambling ad attached to it.

All right. Stop generating.

Okay. Next out of the hat: New York enacts nation’s first statewide moratorium on data centers.

Ooh.

Governor Kathy Hochul, former Hard Fork guest, signed an executive order recently pausing the construction of the largest data centers for 1 year while the state assesses their effects on the environment and energy use. This is a temporary pause on hyperscale data centers, which use 50 or more megawatts of power to operate.

President Trump responded to this on Truth Social, calling it a terrible decision and saying, “The radical left dumbocrats must not be allowed to cause us to lose data centers, AI, and all this incredible new technology to China and other countries.”

Casey, what do you make of the statewide moratorium in New York?

I have to say I’m quite sympathetic here. The state legislature had passed a moratorium that would’ve been even more restrictive than this, and so my belief here is that the governor wanted to find a middle path and throw a sop to people who are worried about data centers in their communities without going as far as some of the legislature did.

It was sort of a less-atorium.

Yes, it really was. Very good.

Thank you.

And so, look, I think it is reasonable to say that there are a lot of questions about the impact of these data centers, and we want to investigate it. Now, my hope is that during the next year, they do what they’re saying here and get a handle on what the actual impact is to the average ratepayer. Can we address some of these environmental concerns that are out there meaningfully?

We’ve talked on the show in the past about how maybe some of the water-use claims are overstated here, and I do believe that. But I’m reading other stuff about data centers contributing to an urban heat-island effect, for example, or sort of polluting the water supply. So these are just the sorts of things that I think it’s reasonable to say we want to look into before we have another 10 of these things go up in the state.

What do you think?

I am sympathetic to wanting to have more information. I just hope that the information that makes it to the legislature and the governor's office will be good, high-quality information. I think there's been a lot of shoddy information out there, especially about the environmental effects of data centers and their water use. A lot of that data seems pretty suspect to me, so I hope there is a good, robust inquiry into what the actual effect is on these.

I think the short-term effect is that if you were a tech company planning to build a data center in New York, first of all, you probably weren't planning to build a data center in New York, because I think it's generally known among the big AI companies and the hyperscalers that if you're going to build something, you want to build it in either Texas or some other red state that is likely to look more favorably on your project. But I think that is going to continue to happen, where these data centers will open in largely red states, where there are fewer Democrats to oppose them. I think this is unfortunately becoming quite a polarized issue, and it will remain to be seen whether those states that want the data centers end up getting a bunch of tax revenue from them that makes their citizens' lives better, or whether it is just a blight and they will regret having let these things in.

Yeah, I don't know. I think this issue is maybe a little bit less polarized than some people might think. There was just a massive data center fight in Utah, a very red state. We've seen members of city councils lose their positions over endorsing data centers. So this is not just a pure “Democrats hate data centers and Republicans love them.” Republicans do not love data centers either, and so I think the message to companies that want to build them is: You have to make a really solid pitch, and that includes convincing people that this thing is not going to drive up their electricity prices and that it's not going to be horrible for the environment.

Do you know what they call it when they put a temporary ban on data center construction in Utah?

What's that?

A Mormon-torium.

Stop generating. That joke is for Whitney. Shout-out.

Okay. Casey, you're up.

All right. This is a thick one. Kev, I've been wanting to ask you about this as a Brown University graduate. This one comes to us from Inside Higher Ed. A Brown University economics professor, Roberto Serrano, gave his students a take-home midterm exam in the spring, and students scored a whopping 96% on it, which is way higher than normal. He said the average grade is usually between 65% and 80%. Then it came time to do the final exam, which he gave in person, and the final exam score, Kevin, was 48.6%—an all-time low for the course.

There were many funny things in the data that he released, but my very favorite piece of data was that there was 1 student who scored 55% on the midterm and improved to 59% on the final. This is the most honest person at Brown University, and if you're listening, we salute you.

We salute you.

Yeah.

This was an amazing story that I was very interested in for obvious reasons. I attended Brown University. I actually spent a couple of weeks in Professor Roberto Serrano's economics class before I dropped it because it was too hard. I'm sure that I would've been 1 of these students who cheated on the midterm using ChatGPT or some other AI system—

Yeah.

—and then absolutely bombed the final. It's worth saying that the reason he gave the take-home midterm was particularly generous: They had just had a school shooting on the campus of Brown.

Terrible.

So he says, in the wake of that, “Do your take-home exam, no time limit”—I think a very generous and compassionate—

Yes.

—move by a professor. And how do his students repay him? By cheating en masse? I mean, there is no other explanation for how everyone would score an average of 96% on the midterm and then 48.6% on the in-person final. The score distribution chart that was made to accompany this article was hilarious.

Truly.

It was just like, oh, everyone either had severe brain damage in the time between the midterm and the final, or everyone was cheating using AI.

Yeah. My takeaway here is that cheating is bad and you shouldn't cheat, so.

Well, there's that too.

All right, stop generating.

All right.

All right, next out of the hat. This is a good one: MiniMax CEO vows to forgo salary until achieving AGI. This one comes to us from The Information. Junzi Yan, the founder and CEO of Chinese AI developer MiniMax, told employees in an internal memo that he will forgo his salary until the company achieves artificial general intelligence. The article also notes that MiniMax's share price has not been doing so well. It's down 80% from its peak, and the company's current flagship model has failed to gain traction in the market. But it's a bold move to say, “Until AGI, don't pay me.”

It really is. And you know, Kevin, I believe it was last year that you wrote an article saying that AGI was imminent, which raises the question for me: Are you prepared to forgo your salary until AGI is achieved?

I think AGI has already been achieved for my salary purposes, so I'm not going to let that factor into my negotiations. What about you?

I'm going to continue to be paid for my work. Thank you, sir. All right, stop generating.

All right.

Oh, I enjoyed this one. Lorde has spoken up against what she called effed-up AI glasses, Kevin, and she didn't say “effed,” if you know what I mean. Last week, the great singer Lorde was performing at the Mad Cool Festival in Madrid and had this to say about smart glasses: “Increasingly in our world, it gets harder and harder to know what is real. You don't know if someone is wearing sunglasses or if they're wearing those effed-up—effing—can I just say, for the record, eff the glasses. Don't get the glasses. Not sexy.” She did not mention them by name, but Ray-Ban was a festival sponsor, and a number of outlets have pointed to the Ray-Ban Meta glasses as her likely target. Kevin, what did you think of Lorde's comment about the Meta Ray-Bans?

Well, I don't like it for this reason: I own a pair of Meta Ray-Bans, and now I am worried that this backlash is going to result in me getting punched in the face as I walk down the street with my Ray-Bans on. I use them predominantly to take photos of my kid.

Mm-hmm.

But I have noticed that in the past several weeks, people have started to notice that I am wearing these things.

Mm-hmm.

And they don't like them. They don't punch me or turn the other way. They're mostly curious, but I think this is starting to become a social scarlet letter a little bit. And I worry about its effect on my life.

Well, look, I don't want anyone to physically harm you because you're wearing these, but I have noticed that some folks online have started to call the Ray-Bans “pervert glasses,” and that does make me laugh. The reason that they're being called that is because it has been possible to disable the light on the glasses that indicates that they are recording and continue to record. You can go into these subreddits for these glasses, and people are exchanging tips on how to do this.

So, look, they did go back recently and change it so that you apparently cannot record if your glasses have been tampered with. But I don't think it is at all unreasonable to want to be able to walk down the street and not worry that strangers are recording you. And so I think that this statement was Lorde's best single in at least 2 albums.

I just think maybe I'm going to have to start wearing a little placard around my neck that just says, “These are for taking photos of my kid. Don't worry, I'm not creeping on you.”

Here's the—

But then again—

Here's the—

—that would be a real “I'm not creeping on you” sign—

Yeah.

—my “not creeping on you” sign is answering a lot of questions already raised by my not-creeping sign.

It really would. This is just a classic case of Meta's own actions coming back to bite it. People do not trust this company, and so now they have a hardware product, and people don't trust that either.

It's very important to me that Apple release smart glasses with a camera in them.

Yeah.

Because I think as soon as that happens, A, they will just take privacy more seriously than Meta does, and also, it's not going to be stigmatized in the same way.

Yeah.

You know? It'll just hit different coming from Apple.

Meta did ship code that had facial-recognition technology in it and then freaked out once people noticed this and wrote about it—

Yeah.

And was like, “How dare you? We would never implement something like this.” Then they had to unship all the code. So again, this is truly just a mess that they made for themselves.

Yeah, and if anyone at OpenAI in the hardware division is looking at Apple’s prototype smart glasses, I would just encourage you to steal those and make that, and not whatever smart speaker you’re making.

Here’s what we know: If you bring it to your job interview at OpenAI, they will look very favorably upon you.

Stop generating.

Okay. New polling from Pew Research about the share of people getting health and wellness information from influencers and podcasters is out, Kevin, and 57% of women ages 18 to 29 say they’ve gotten health and wellness information from social media influencers or podcasts. For men ages 18 to 29, the number was 47%. So, anything to say about this finding?

Yeah, I think people should absolutely be getting their health advice from podcasters. I can’t think of any group more qualified to opine on health care in this country.

And my advice for this week’s health installment is: Don’t eat the bagged lettuce at Taco Bell.

Yeah.

There’s this diarrhea superbug going around.

We wanted to make a statement to all of our listeners who have been affected by the explosive diarrhea parasite: We see you, and we are rooting for you. You are strong, and you’re going to get through this. Hopefully, if you’re on the toilet right now, you’re listening to our show, and we’re helping you take your mind off things.

The good news is it doesn’t seem like the parasite lasts longer than a month. Here’s what I’ll say: I don’t actually watch a lot of this health influencer content, but I think I know—

Clearly.

—roughly what it sounds like, and I would like to do my impression of what I think it sounds like, okay?

Yeah.

Now, this is the content that you hear if you’re a woman, okay? You’re probably not eating enough green beans. They’re calling it green bean theory. And here’s why celebrities are obsessed with it. Okay, so that’s for a bit. And now this is what you get—

Okay.

—if you’re a man, okay? Could you win a fight with a horse? Maybe not today, but by the end of this video, you’ll know 15 techniques to do it. Here’s the workout. That’s my impression of influencer content.

I love it.

Thank you.

Stop generating.

Okay.

Last one.

Last one. Meta removes AI feature on Instagram after days of backlash. A lot of Meta backlash this week. By the way, this comes from Eli Tan at The Times.

Last week, Meta paused a new AI feature on Instagram that allows users to generate images based on people’s public accounts, citing widespread criticism. The feature, which Meta unveiled on Tuesday, automatically opted in any Instagram user with a public account. As a result, countless people’s likenesses were used in AI images without their consent. Users complained about privacy and copyright concerns. Meta walked it back and put out a statement saying, essentially, “We’ve heard the feedback.”

Now, Kevin, why do you think people got so mad about an opt-out feature that let anyone remix their face into anything using AI? Why did people get such a bee in their bonnet about this?

You know, we’re just a bunch of babies in this country. We’re just jumpy and protective, and we don’t like progress. No, this is obviously a bad idea.

Yeah.

If you paid one minute of attention to the launch of Sora, when OpenAI allowed you to put your friends or celebrities in cameos, that also got a bunch of backlash.

Yes.

I assume that Meta knew that and went ahead with this anyway. And here’s what I’ve learned from my years of covering this company.

Yeah.

When they say, “We’ve heard the feedback, and we are pausing this feature”—

Mm-hmm.

—what they mean is, “We are waiting for something else to happen that is a bigger scandal by another company so that the attention on us dies down, and we can ship the feature.”

I think that’s absolutely right. Maybe as a post-AGI job for me, I’d like to start a nonprofit foundation. What it will do is introduce people who work at Meta to people who do not work at Meta, and just help them understand what it’s like to be a person in the world—what are their wants, their desires, their values, what builds trust with it? And I think if we could get those 2 groups in conversation, Kevin, we could change the world.

It’s like an exchange student program.

Yes.

If you’re an engineer at Meta, you have to go work in an auto body shop—

Yes.

—in Kansas for a month, and the auto body mechanic in Kansas comes to Menlo Park and works at Meta.

Absolutely. This is a good idea.

Yeah.

This has legs.

Unlike the Metaverse avatars.

Very good.

Once the AI IPOs happen and you’ve got a lot of money to throw around, you want to start a nonprofit, get in touch.

Love it.

Okay.

Close the hat.

And that was HatGPT.

That's all the news.

All the news. Hard Fork is produced by Whitney Jones and Rachel Cohn. We're edited by Viren Pavich. We're fact-checked by Caitlin Love. Today's show was engineered by Elisa Moxley. Original music by Alicia Boc Etub, Diane Wong, Rowan Nemesoe, and Dan Pell. Video production by Sawyer Roquet, Jake Nickell, and Chris Schott. You can watch this whole episode on YouTube at youtube.com/hardfork. Special thanks to Paula Schumann, Wee Weng Tam, Brooke Minters, and Dalia Hadad. You can email us at hardfork@nytimes.com with your favorite Lorde single.