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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Is This an A.I. Bubble? + Meta’s Missing Morals + TikTok Shock Slop
Kevin RooseCasey NewtonJeff Horwitz
AI adoption may endure even as OpenAI’s reported valuation reaches $500 billion and the Magnificent Seven spend over $100 billion quarterly.Cursor’s negative gross margins and possible API-supplier losses expose fragile unit economics; weak enterprise ROI may reflect top-down deployment.Meta’s approved child-directed romantic content raises regulatory risk despite real advertising cash, while TikTok’s “shock slop” tests mass-market AI-media adoption.
GPT-5 Backlash + Perplexity C.E.O. Aravind Srinivas on the Browser Wars + Hot Mess Express
Kevin RooseCasey NewtonAravind Srinivas
GPT-5’s backlash showed that migration can disrupt workflows and trust, prompting OpenAI to restore GPT-4o access and model choice.Sycophancy is a product-safety and demand-side risk: users may prefer flattering models, making less-sycophantic upgrades commercially harder.Perplexity’s Comet bets the browser can own agentic relationships as models commoditize, while its $34.5 billion Chrome bid depends on unlikely forced divestiture and a potentially two-year appeal.