SHOW DIRECTORY
Hard Fork
Journalists Kevin Roose and Casey Newton explore and make sense of the latest developments in the rapidly changing world of technology.
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The Ezra Klein Show: Jensen Huang Thinks A.I. Alarmism Has Gone Too Far
Ezra KleinJensen HuangKevin RooseCasey Newton
Jensen Huang calls AI safety a solvable engineering problem: labs should not ship systems they cannot contain, with liability rules and third-party audits still relevant.He argues NVIDIA compute could become a fungible, durable asset class, with one-gigawatt factories and annual rents reaching $50B.Open models have flipped to seventy-thirty, while supply-demand inversion and an uncertain digestion period remain risks.
ChatGPT’s Platform Play + a Trillion-Dollar GPU Empire + the Queen of Slop
Kevin RooseCasey NewtonKatie Notopoulos
ChatGPT is becoming a front door to the web, embedding Expedia, Zillow, Figma, Target, and Spotify for more than 800 million weekly users while seeking transaction-driven platform economics.The opportunity depends on privacy, neutral ranking, and roughly $1 trillion of financing for GPUs and infrastructure, while Sora 2 shows both genuine creative pull and unresolved copyright, safety, and retention risks.
The Great A.I. Build-Out + H-1B Visa Chaos + TikTok Braces for the Rapture
Nvidia’s potential $100 billion investment in OpenAI helps drive a seven-gigawatt, more-than-$400-billion Stargate build-out, but also creates circular-financing risk.The proposed $100,000 H-1B fee could favor outsourcing firms through L-visa and wage-ranking loopholes while deterring AI talent, startups, and researchers needed for the technology race.
Intel’s New Deal + Waymo C.E.O. Tekedra Mawakana on Scaling Driverless Cars + Trumps in Tech
The US exchanged $8.9 billion of conditional CHIPS funding for 10% of Intel, potentially securing domestic chip capacity but risking politicized demand for an execution-challenged incumbent.Waymo targets around a million weekly rides by the end of next year, supported by safety data and expanding markets, while tariffs, regulation, labor opposition and fleet economics remain unresolved.
Your Guide to the DeepSeek Freakout: an Emergency Pod
DeepSeek’s claimed $5.5 million V3 training cost and R1 release challenged frontier AI’s infrastructure moat, helping drive NVIDIA down about 18% and pushing its app to No. 1 in the US App Store.Cheaper inference could compress model pricing and margins, though falling costs may expand usage, existing chips remain useful for inference, and the hosts say DeepSeek’s figures deserve “a grain of salt.”