Hard Fork

Ezra Klein × Jensen Huang × Kevin Roose × Casey 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.

Kevin Roose × Casey Newton × Katie 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.

Jeremy Neufeld

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.

David Yaffe-Bellany

Social platforms have made borderline outrage a scalable growth mechanism, with X recording more first-time US downloads than on any previous day after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, even as most Americans showed no nationwide surge toward violence.A $2 billion UAE crypto transaction involving World Liberty Financial coincided with a tentative opening for advanced Nvidia-chip exports; the overlapping interests and timing raise conflict risks without proving a quid pro quo.

Tekedra Mawakana

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.

Kevin Roose × Casey Newton × Jordan Schneider

DeepSeek narrowed the perceived US-China model gap through organizational freedom and efficient engineering, but its 1.9 million iOS downloads, bans, and Microsoft-OpenAI distillation investigation also exposed security and data-use risks.Export controls still matter because China needs compute, while Operator frames OpenAI’s $200 price as digital labor; its 90% domain project contrasted with costly unreliability, privacy exposure, and unresolved agent-safety risks.

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.”