Can Musk Get Trump Elected? + Steve Ballmer’s Quest for the Facts + This Week in A.I.

This is totally unprecedented for a tech C. E. O.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Your agents can talk to each other. They still can't think together. That's the gap Outshift by Cisco is closing. Outshift is Cisco's incubation engine, building the internet of cognition, shared intent, shared memory, and guardrails that allow agents to work together from anywhere. Open source protocols and code, a system for intelligence that scales. Read the paper and experience the demo at outshift.com. That's O-U-T-S-H-I-F-T.com.

• 0:31Kevin Roose?

  Oh, did you see that Mark Zuckerberg made a statue of his wife?

• 0:35Casey Newton?

  I did. I did see that. I didn't know how to feel about it. Because the thing is, you know, if my husband did that for me, I would think, I would say, thank you, honey. Like, that's very sweet.

• 0:45Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 0:46Casey Newton?

  On the other hand, it feels weird being like, sort of, essentially asked to evaluate the statue of someone else's spouse.

• 0:53Kevin Roose?

  Yes.

• 0:53Casey Newton?

  You know? It's like, I, whatever you hope to get out of this, I hope you got out of it.

• 0:58Kevin Roose?

  Yes.

• 0:58Casey Newton?

  That was my feeling.

• 0:59Kevin Roose?

  Yes. My, my feeling is we should raise people's taxes. I mean, this is... If you're, if you're building statues of your wife, you, you could be funding schools.

• 1:07Casey Newton?

  How much do you think a statue costs? I bet you could do it for under 10K.

• 1:10Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, with like a 3D printer?

• 1:12Casey Newton?

  Now, I assume he spent more than that. Because it was a very like, I thought, I mean, the statue was beautiful. It had like, sort of mixed.

• 1:17Kevin Roose?

  Yes.

• 1:17Casey Newton?

  You know, there was colors.

• 1:18Kevin Roose?

  And he said he was trying to bring back the, the Roman tradition of making statues of your wife.

• 1:22Casey Newton?

  Which we all remember, of course.

• 1:23Kevin Roose?

  Yes.

• 1:24Casey Newton?

  Of course. If you were a Roman and you didn't have a...

• 1:26Kevin Roose?

  The wife guys in ancient Rome were constantly just chiseling into marble.

• 1:31Casey Newton?

  Yeah, today, today, you know, if you're a wife guy, you post about her on a social network.

• 1:36Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 1:36Casey Newton?

  In Roman times, you build a damn statue.

• 1:38Kevin Roose?

  That's true.

• 1:39Casey Newton?

  Something to think about.

• 1:40Kevin Roose?

  If I made a statue of myself and gave it to you, would you put it in your house?

• 1:45Casey Newton?

  No, and for this reason, you are not my wife. I don't care. Just because we've been doing a podcast for two years.

• 1:56Kevin Roose?

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

• 1:58Casey Newton?

  I'm Casey Newton from Platformer. And this is Hard Fork. This week, Elon Musk is using X to try to win the election for Donald Trump. Is it working? Then, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer stops by to discuss his effort to depolarize our politics using government data. And finally, what happened this week in AI?

• 2:22Kevin Roose?

  Well, Casey, the big news in tech this week was the budding bromance between Elon Musk and Donald Trump. The two men appeared together on a ex-spaces conversation on Monday night. This was billed as a sort of friendly conversation between Donald Trump and one of his biggest campaign supporters. Did you listen?

• 2:43Casey Newton?

  I listened to about four and a half minutes.

• 2:46Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I mean, I set up to listen. I cleared my calendar. I canceled my dinner plans. I was all ready. And then there were about 40 minutes where nothing was happening because they couldn't get the damn space to work.

• 2:58Casey Newton?

  Yeah, and of course, this is not the first time this has happened. Something very similar happened when Ron DeSantis came on to announce his presidential campaign. The only difference this time was that this time around Elon blamed the whole thing on a DDoS attack, which as far as we can determine, did not actually happen.

• 3:15Kevin Roose?

  And I guess it's theoretically possible that there was some DDoS attack, but there's no evidence that we know of for that. The Times has not been able to confirm that there was a DDoS attack. And The Verge actually talked to some ex-employees who said this was not a DDoS attack at all, but just sort of a normal tech glitch.

• 3:33Casey Newton?

  I think what they were facing was a distributed denial of competence within the ex-organization.

• 3:39Kevin Roose?

  So, but it did eventually get underway after the delay. And Elon Musk and Donald Trump talked for almost two hours about lots of topics. They started off talking about the assassination attempt and just sort of retelling that story. They talked about climate, foreign policy, federal spending, immigration. Donald Trump praised Elon Musk for cutting the staff of Twitter when he took over the company. He called him "the greatest cutter."

• 4:11Kevin Roose?

  They talked about closing the Department of Education. Elon Musk said that the nuclear bombs that went off during World War II actually, you know, weren't that bad because Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan still exist today.

• 4:23Casey Newton?

  Oh, my.

• 4:24Kevin Roose?

  So overall, I would say a pretty, a pretty rousing campaign appearance.

• 4:28Casey Newton?

  Suffice to say, they've really honed in on the subjects that are most of interest to swing voters.

• 4:33Kevin Roose?

  So today, I want to talk about the alliance between Elon Musk and Donald Trump, less in the context of this one particular sort of glitchy campaign event and more sort of the overall picture of what it means because, you know, we should just keep in mind, this is not normal. It's totally unprecedented for a tech CEO to insert himself into a presidential race in the way that Elon Musk has this year. Like, obviously, we've had tech CEOs who have donated money to candidates or funded super PACs or, you know, endorsed, you know, one party or another. But we've never had a tech CEO who just explicitly makes it his mission to get one specific politician elected and to use the technology product that he controls to do that.

• 5:18Casey Newton?

  Yeah, and there is weirdly very little discussion about this. And I assume that because at this point, it just doesn't seem that surprising, given what we know about Elon Musk. But it is absolutely true that we have just never seen the owner of a major social network before essentially try to turn his entire business into a political project on behalf of one candidate.

• 5:38Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, and I think there were a lot of questions when Elon Musk took over Twitter. Like, how overtly is he going to try to use this platform as a megaphone for his own political views? And I think we got the answer this week, which is extremely overtly, right? He's, he's not just hosting conversations with Republicans on X. He's promoting them. I frankly would not be surprised at this point if, like, you log into X on election day and there is a big banner at the top that just says, "Go vote for Donald Trump."

• 6:07Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 6:08Kevin Roose?

  So you wrote this week that you had a newsletter that had the title, "X is just a political project now." And I totally agree with that. I think it's obvious that Elon Musk no longer really views... Use X as a financial investment or business venture like this is a cultural project for him. He wants to get Donald Trump elected. He wants to undermine the legacy mainstream media. He wants to eradicate the woke mind virus and he wants to use X as his primary means of doing all of that. But instead of just talking about that, because I think that's sort of ground we've covered before, I want to talk about a follow up question, which is if X is a political project, is it working?

• 6:51Kevin Roose?

  Like, is Elon Musk actually accomplishing what he wants by using his social media platform in this way? And if he's not, if he's not able to sort of steer the election the way he wants, does that tell us anything about the limits of tech power more broadly?

• 7:07Casey Newton?

  I love this discussion. Let's get into it.

• 7:10Kevin Roose?

  So first of all, like, what do you think Elon Musk is after? Beyond just sort of electing Donald Trump, like, what do you think his play is here? Because there's lots of theories about out there, you know, he's trying to, I don't know, get more government contracts. He's trying to cozy up to Trump in the hopes of, you know, making SpaceX more profitable and getting more, more defense contracts and things like that. But what do you think his motivation is?

• 7:33Casey Newton?

  I mean, it's very difficult to know what, you know, any individual's motivation is. But, you know, I think there is almost certainly a lot of truth to what you're saying, that in part, yes, this is this person being a titan of industry, whose companies are deeply enmeshed with the federal government, who is always seeking contracts, and who has been in a feud with the Biden administration basically from the beginning, right? Like Musk has felt very slighted by Biden. Biden essentially never mentions Tesla when talking about like electric vehicle production in the United States, like Tesla hasn't been invited to certain events. And so there's a bit of a grudge there. And yet Elon Musk needs the government because it is the government that is going to pay

• 8:17Casey Newton?

  SpaceX to take these payloads into space, right? They're going to give subsidies to Tesla that are going to improve its balance sheet. So there actually are some pretty important reasons of rational self-interest for Elon Musk to want to kind of. Cozy up to the government. What's interesting, though, is that this sort of thing is true for basically every titan of industry. If you're Mark Zuckerberg, you also need to have a good relationship with the government. If you're Sachin Adela, you need to have a good relationship with the government. And so what it is normal for these titans of industry to do is for them to hedge their bets.

• 8:47Kevin Roose?

  Yes.

• 8:48Casey Newton?

  And for them to give money to both parties and to say supportive noises about both candidates and to support whoever winds up being the winner. The fact that Elon Musk has not done that, Kevin, I think suggests that this is not just about the money for him.

• 9:02Kevin Roose?

  So what is it about?

• 9:03Casey Newton?

  So what it is about is his increasing turn toward the hard right. And one of the most fascinating aspects of this is that you can watch Musk's transformation in public on X.com, on the former Twitter. You can go back to the beginning of his account and see his tweets. You can see the moments when he was posting about LGBT rights and bragging about Tesla's record with its LGBT employees, you know.

• 9:30Kevin Roose?

  Talking about climate change and how important it is to move away from fossil fuels, things that would have been considered sort of left-wing positions back when he was making them.

• 9:38Casey Newton?

  Yeah, but bit by bit, he gets a little bit more curious about the right. He decides that the Babylon Bee is hilarious, the sort of right-wing satire site. And he goes through some personal issues. Most prominently, his daughter transitioned. And he took this incredibly hard. And it seemed to have really catalyzed his move toward the hard right. And when he says he wants to eradicate the woke mind virus, what I hear in that is a lot of grief about the fact that he has a trans child.

• 10:13Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. I think he's sort of long ago abandoned kind of rational self-interest. He is clearly emotionally invested in this. It's not just about making money for his companies. It's, in fact, I think there are many ways in which buying Twitter and turning it into X has been, has been bad for his companies. It's polarized the consumer base where, you know, now people who are liberals don't want to own Teslas because that's giving money to Elon Musk and they don't like his views on other subjects.

• 10:42Kevin Roose?

  But I think if you had gone to me a couple of years ago and told me that like a hard right partisan billionaire is going to acquire a major social network and use it to sort of try to influence an American election, I would have said that actually that that has a pretty good chance of working because so much of our political discourse takes place online. The levers that you control as an owner of one of these platforms are vast. And I think I would have said like, that's actually like a decent strategy. And yet, if you look at what has happened since Elon Musk took over X, I think there are ways in which it has made him and his views more prominent. But I also think there

• 11:23Kevin Roose?

  are ways that it has sort of failed to sort of catalyze support for Donald Trump. I mean, you don't see surging poll numbers for Trump after one of these appearances with Elon Musk. It doesn't seem to be, you know, making him the frontrunner in this matchup with Kamala Harris. And so I guess I'm just curious if you think the net effect of Elon Musk acquiring Twitter, turning it into this sort of broadcaster for right wing views, is having the effect he intended?

• 11:51Casey Newton?

  Well, I'm sure he wishes it were going better. But just to play devil's advocate here, let's talk through some of the ways in which if you're Elon Musk, you might think that this is going well. So Twitter was miraculous for a long time because it did feel like one of the few online places where the left and the right were talking to each other in public. And not just any members of the left and right, we're talking about the leaders of the party, the elected officials, and even more miraculously, you have the entire press corps hanging out here all day. And so Twitter represented this incredible opportunity to set the narrative every single day. And so if you're Elon Musk and you decide that

• 12:33Casey Newton?

  you want to lean really hard into politics, it's hard to imagine a better lever that you could pull than something like that, right? Even owning a Fox News wouldn't give you that much leverage because Fox News is already only talking to the converted, right? Twitter represented a chance to do something differently. So we're now almost two years into his reign over what is now called X.com. And in most ways, I think it's gone very terribly, except that a shocking number of the political reporters who were there in the Twitter days are still there on the X days, right? And, you know, even folks like myself, who won't ever post anything on X, still do feel the need to check in with it, you know, most days, just to kind of get a flavor of what

• 13:17Casey Newton?

  the people who are still there are talking about. So as he has moved it ever further to the right, as he has driven away so many users and advertisers, it remains true that it is still a potent megaphone to talk to certain audiences, and those are not just hard right audiences.

• 13:33Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I agree with that. I think you're right that X is not, you know, experiencing this mass exodus. There are still a lot of reporters, political elites, like people still try to get their message out on X. There's really no other sort of centralized gathering place that has gotten the kind of momentum that it has. And I really do think that has had an influence in sort of national political culture, right? I think a lot of the anti-woke backlash that we've seen over the past year or two has really been sort of catalyzed and has taken off on X before it has happened other places. I think, for example, that the sort of recent turn that we've talked about among tech billionaires towards supporting Trump, a lot of that comes from the fact that they now have this app

• 14:17Kevin Roose?

  that they all spend a lot of time on, where they can all sort of see each other, and it kind of creates the permission structure for them to say more incendiary things, to sort of align themselves with Trump in a way that they might not have felt comfortable doing in some previous incarnation of Twitter. So I do think Elon Musk owning X and sort of veering it sharply to the right has had an effect on political discourse. But let's talk about the other side of this, because I think there is a real chance that Elon Musk owning Twitter and turning it into X is actually going to backfire for the right. So maybe let's make that argument.

• 14:54Casey Newton?

  Yeah, so and my basic argument is that he took a site that had been Really mostly nonpartisan and really had tried to host as much speech as it could. And it made it more akin to a Fox News. Fox News has a lot of influence. It does really set the agenda for the conservative movement. But the problem, particularly if you're Elon Musk, is it's really only talking to conservatives. Right? And so the ability to influence outside of that sphere is just dramatically reduced. So I think, you know, the question that you might be worth asking is if you're Elon Musk, you know, would there be a way to have the same influence over the same set of people without spending $44 billion on Twitter? And I think there probably was.

• 15:36Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. I mean, it makes me wonder if if a better strategy for Elon Musk, if he really did want to sort of turn the tide of politics in this country, would have been to just do it in a much more subtle way, right? Instead of instead of like coming out and saying, I endorse Trump. I'm going to host this conversation with him. Like, we're going to make X the anti-woke social media platform. If you just kind of turn the dials a little bit behind the scenes, then maybe a few more right wing views start showing up in people's feeds. The sort of mainstream media gets a little bit less reach over time. But I think he was just so obvious about it that it just made it clear, even to the people who support him, that this was this was a political project and people, I think, discount it because of that.

• 16:17Casey Newton?

  Yeah. And that just makes me want to share a completely unrelated fact, Kevin, which is that ketamine abuse can lead to a loss of impulse control. So I've just been meaning to tell you that. And so I'm glad I was able to get that off my chest.

• 16:29Kevin Roose?

  One other thing that I'm curious about is whether you think that the the sort of Elon Musk ownership of X has taken away one of the central claims that Republicans have made over the past few years, which is that social media companies are biased against them. Because I actually think this this was a core part of the sort of. The right wing political message was that we are being suppressed and we are telling people these dangerous and uncomfortable truths that they're not hearing because the liberals in Silicon Valley are artificially suppressing shadow banning. I mean, how many times have we heard that claim from Republican leaders? And I actually think the siege mentality

• 17:13Kevin Roose?

  that came out of that was was useful for them politically. And now with Elon Musk owning X and using it to promote the Trump campaign and make his endorsements, I think that is just a much less potent message.

• 17:25Casey Newton?

  Absolutely. And you know, you really can't overstate the degree to which had Mark Zuckerberg in 2020 had a friendly chat with Joe Biden and sent a push notification to every Facebook user saying, tune in now as Mark interviews Joe, Congress would have had an absolute meltdown.

• 17:44Kevin Roose?

  Yes.

• 17:44Casey Newton?

  Right? They had so many hearings based on these perceived slights of why doesn't my account rank as high in search? Or, you know, why, when I, when I click on the search, do you show me a Democrat when I'm a Republican? I mean, this was the level of discussion that was happening in Congress during the Trump administration. And now, because it's Elon and because Republicans still control the House, it's like, yeah, no, that's, that's just, that's, that's just like, you know, bringing a little bit of balance into the equation, as I suspect what they would say. But you're right, it's absolutely hypocritical and I never want to hear about bias on social networks ever again.

• 18:17Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. John Herman had a good piece in New York Magazine this week about the sort of danger for the American right of becoming too online. Basically, this sort of phenomenon that often happens when people spend too much time on social media where they kind of get trapped in this echo chamber, they start thinking in terms of posts. And his point, which I also felt while I was listening to this Twitter space or this X space between Elon Musk and Donald Trump, was just like, these are people who have lost the ability to communicate outside their network of supporters.

• 18:48Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 18:49Kevin Roose?

  They don't really understand how to persuade people anymore. It's just, it's all kind of this self reinforcing spiral of people agreeing with each other, but not really being able to see how their arguments sound to people. People who are not already bought in.

• 19:03Casey Newton?

  So I agree with that, and yet I would also like challenge the notion that anyone on this online right is trying to persuade me. Like, I read these posts, I read stuff all the time, or I watch media where people are trying to persuade me of something. And it usually starts with trying to meet me where I'm at, trying to find a little bit of common ground, and then trying to move me a little bit away from that common ground toward the speaker's perspective. I never see any of that on the online right, right? With Elon from day one, it was, there is a mind virus that is destroying civilization. And if you don't get on board with me, civilization will end. That is Elon Musk's stated ideology. That is not persuasive, unless you are the hardest core Elon Musk fan in the world, and you decide to accept everything he says at face value.

• 19:44Casey Newton?

  So, yes, the right is online, and I do not see any real efforts at persuasion taking place.

• 19:49Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. I mean, we should also just say, like, Elon Musk is not just hosting X spaces with Donald Trump. He's not just endorsing him on social media and making his platform friendlier to the sort of pro-Trump right. He's also doing some more conventional electioneering. He helped start this thing called the America PAC, which is a pro-Trump super PAC. He's donating to that. He's also getting involved in some of their strategy. And the Wall Street Journal actually had some good reporting this week about his sort of influence and attempts to kind of make that super PAC more efficient. He has apparently blocked out an hour every Friday on his calendar for national politics.

• 20:33Kevin Roose?

  And for his, he's getting sort of in the weeds of how the super PAC works. And we should maybe talk about that, too.

• 20:39Casey Newton?

  Yeah, so he is very involved, Kevin, although, and this was my favorite part of the Journal's reporting, less than three months into this effort, Musk signed off on firing most of the vendors. And then the super PAC decided to rehire one of them. Why is this funny to me? This is exactly what happened after he bought Twitter. He fired most of the employees, then they went out and rehired some of them. So there's just kind of a lot of chaos in here. But anyways, yeah, I mean.

• 21:05Kevin Roose?

  Look, I think all of this is going to hinge on whether or not Donald Trump actually wins the election, we should say, like, it's still a very close race. And I think if, you know, if Elon Musk's, all of his efforts, whether it's the Super PAC, whether it's sort of tilting X to the right, if that results in, you know, a couple hundred thousand swing voters in these, in these, you know, decisive states going for Donald Trump, that could mean the difference between him getting elected or not. But I think if, if Donald Trump is, is not able to win this election, despite sort of Elon Musk putting his thumb on the scale in such an obvious and ham-handed way, I think it should really make us question, like, how much power these platforms really have over our politics, right?

• 21:48Kevin Roose?

  There was this narrative for years after 2016 that, you know, Facebook had been responsible and Twitter had been responsible for the way that those elections went. And I, I think there's some truth to that. Like, those platforms were decisive in getting Donald Trump elected. But I think there is, a lot has changed since 2016. And part of what has changed is just that these platforms may not have the kind of pull in the political economy that they used to. It may not be possible to tip an election based on making some moves on a social platform. What do you make of that?

• 22:24Casey Newton?

  It is a very different landscape than it used to be. The dynamics that made Twitter so important don't exist anymore. It has become more of this conservative echo chamber. And then Meta has just de-emphasized news and general. So you're just much less likely to see a news link on Facebook than you would have been in 2016 or even 2020.

• 22:43Kevin Roose?

  And political news specifically, they, they do not want people to be discussing contentious political topics on their platforms.

• 22:49Casey Newton?

  Well, what they've said is that if you don't follow someone, they're not going to inject that into your feed, right? And so, yeah, for that reason, there's just sort of a lot, lot less politics to go around. And I'm very curious to see what the impact of that will be.

• 23:05Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. I want to sort of caveat the discussion that we've just had by saying, like, I actually do think that X is still an important platform for political conversation in the United States and abroad. I think that Elon Musk's power and influence have grown as a result of owning this platform. I do not think this has been bad for him personally. But on this sort of narrow issue of like, is Donald Trump more likely to be elected because Elon Musk owns X? I'm not sure the answer is yes.

• 23:34Casey Newton?

  Kevin, this is one where I disagree with you strongly. I think just the existence of Twitter has been catastrophic in the life of Elon Musk. And I think that in the alternate reality where Jack Dorsey's harebrained SMS-based status update scheme had not accidentally turned into the global town square, Elon Musk would be a beloved character in American history by most partisans of every stripe.

• 24:06Casey Newton?

  Well, Kevin, that's one way that a tech billionaire could try to influence the election. But coming up after the break, we're going to talk to another one, Steve Ballmer, and he's got a totally different approach.

• 24:30Speaker 00

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• 26:13Casey Newton?

  Well, Kevin, I would say that today we get to talk to a bit of a legend in the world of tech.

• 26:17Kevin Roose?

  Well, you get to talk to a legend every week on this podcast.

• 26:19Casey Newton?

  Boy, well, lucky me because today it's two legends. Because Steve Ballmer is here. Steve spent 34 years at Microsoft. He replaced Bill Gates as CEO in 2000 before passing the baton to Satya Nadella in 2014. Since then, I think he's probably best known as the owner of the LA Clippers, a professional basketball team. But we're talking to him today about something a little lower profile that he's been doing. He started a nonprofit called USA Facts. And the idea is that they are going to take government data and try to make it understandable to everyone and create a kind of fact based foundation for public conversation and debate around issues.

• 27:05Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, and I will say like when I heard that Steve Ballmer was involved in this new sort of fact promotion venture, I was a little surprised because I've always known Steve Ballmer as a very passionate and outspoken person. There's this video of him giving a talk at a Microsoft conference years ago that's sort of become famous in tech circles. It's called the developers, developers, developers speech. You know, he's on stage and he's shouting. I think it's fair to say he's shouting.

• 27:33Casey Newton?

  He's whipping the crowd into a frenzy.

• 27:34Kevin Roose?

  Yes, and he's pacing around the stage and he's shouting developers, developers, developers. It's iconic. If you haven't seen it, go look it up. It's it's an amazing speech. But his new venture is very dispassionate, I would say. He is trying to basically just. Give people facts about the government and about the economy and about various other topics and sort of hope that that will educate them and inform them and make them better citizens.

• 27:58Casey Newton?

  Yeah, and so why is that interesting to us? Well, you know, we live in a time where increasingly and partly because of tech, people are allowed to pick their own realities. You know, you pick a sort of partisan social network to hang out on, you pick a partisan cable news channel to get your news from, you pick other partisan media to kind of shape your reality, partisan influencers. And I think this kind of thing really frustrates Ballmer because he's a tech guy. He was a CEO. He spent his entire career in meetings where people were showing him numbers and he used those numbers to decide what is the best path forward. So USA Facts is his effort to bring a little bit of that CEO-inspired decision-making into American politics.

• 28:36Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, so I watched one of the Steve Ballmer videos that is coming out of this project because the project is not new. He's been doing this since 2015, but he did just start putting out a series of YouTube videos in which Steve Ballmer himself sort of appears on screen and basically gives like a little lecture about some part of the government, whether it's immigration or, you know, the state of the federal debt. He's just sort of patiently and calmly walking people through all the various information. And I, you know, I watched one of these last night because I was like, I wonder what Steve Ballmer sounds like in this format. And it's very interesting. It's like a 13 and a half minute video that I watched about the federal budget and the deficit. And it's just, it's sort of like Wikipedia level sort of summaries of where the money

• 29:20Kevin Roose?

  goes in the federal government, how much goes to Medicare, how much goes to social security, how much goes to the military. It is about as dry and neutral a presentation of the facts as possible. And it's just a very interesting contrast to people like Elon Musk, who've decided that the way that they're going to use their billions that they made in tech is by throwing their support behind one candidate or another. Steve Ballmer is basically saying, I'm just going to give you the facts and let you guys sort it out.

• 29:44Casey Newton?

  Yeah, and look, I'll say, I think that this, this project, we might describe it as a bit quixotic, right? Like, I think, you know, even several years into this, this thing hasn't caught fire yet. And I'm just so fascinated by the fact that we have this one very rich, very powerful person who, rather than go the full Elon route, said, I'm going to do something completely different. And it just really made me want to talk to him.

• 30:04Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 30:04Casey Newton?

  So let's go ahead and bring in Steve Ballmer.

• 30:13Casey Newton?

  Steve Ballmer, welcome to Hard Fork.

• 30:15Speaker 05

  Thanks, pleasure to be here.

• 30:17Casey Newton?

  So after being CEO of Microsoft, you could have done just about anything. How did you get interested in the media ecosystem?

• 30:26Speaker 05

  It's interesting that you call it the media ecosystem. I don't think of it that way, but given that we write things and produce videos, I guess you could call it the media ecosystem. Now, when I retired from Microsoft, my wife said, you know, it's time, dude, you got to help with the family philanthropy. You know, I got it when you were out running Microsoft, but I've been plugging away. It's time for you to work. So I said, eh, and she was focusing in kids and families where, let's just say, from the time of birth, the opportunity to move up economically is not that good. So what was my lazy ass response?

• 31:09Speaker 05

  It was, hey, government does that. Government pays for those things. Let's just pay our taxes and be happy about that and call it a day. She said, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh. And guess what? It was, uh, uh. So I went to work with her on that, but I had one of those little spousal, eh, I'm going to see if I can prove I'm right. So I went online and tried to snoop around and figure out really what was going on for wealth transfer, what the government was really doing, how to think about that. And it was a mess. It was a mess to do what I like to do, which is put together things holistically.

• 31:52Speaker 05

  You know, holistically, who pays taxes? Holistically, what is the money being spent on? And that set me out to try to work on that. I thought we had some interesting stuff. So we said, hey, let's publish that. People were kind of interested and we've been doing that now for, I started in 2015 and we're still plugging away.

• 32:17Casey Newton?

  So what I'm hearing is you go out and you get some data and you share it with folks and you know that different people are going to receive it, but the the hope is maybe if we just sort of share some raw data, we can get some agreement, maybe we can have sharper policy debates and that sort of thing. Like you said, you've been at this now for almost a decade. What's happened so far? Like, how do you feel like that's going?

• 32:39Speaker 05

  I would say I am warmed by our progress and I am daunted by the progress I want to make. Look, we have, you know, kind of regularly, you know, we're doing just over a million a month in terms of visits. It's not bad, but if you really want to educate people, we need to get to more people and I want longer interactions. You know, we're over 200,000 newsletter subscribers. Not bad, not bad, not bad. But, you know, when I think about, as I said, millions, and I think about the kind of interaction that lets you be thoughtful,

• 33:21Speaker 05

  which takes a little longer, I am daunted and excited about the potential.

• 33:27Casey Newton?

  So the thing that's new this year is that you're pivoting to video. Is that right? You're putting up videos on YouTube? Are you doing any other platforms? And I guess, is that born out of a feeling that you can just reach a bigger audience through video than you could through text? Or what prompted the shift?

• 33:44Speaker 05

  Pivot sounds like we took a hard left and will only do videos. So I would, I would call it additionally, if you will. And I'll tell you, we're real, this was really born in 1992. I'm looking at you guys and saying, you probably don't remember what I'm about to say, but that's okay.

• 34:04Casey Newton?

  Casey's very old, so he was a teenager, but I was in grade school. I was in sixth grade.

• 34:10Speaker 05

  So, so here's the deal. 1992, Ross Perot, who had started a tech company called EDS, decides he's gonna run for president as an independent. And Ross starts buying TV time, and he does these little poster boards, almost like from science fair. And he's trying to explain government by these poster boards, by the numbers. So, this friend of mine, who'd been kind of around the beginning of USA Facts, I'd known him since college, he and I have always admired the Perot poster boards. So, he comes at me this year and said, "Come on, man. It's an election year. We should take a winger on this. Let's try to do the modern

• 34:52Speaker 05

  day equivalent of the poster boards. Let's buy remnant TV like Ross would have done, and, you know, run 15-minute videos that, you know, really are comprehensible. People can watch on TV. We'll drive them to YouTube. Let's go do..." I'm not running for anything, so I'm not Ross Perot to the max. But we said, you know, "Let's go." And so, I'm heartened. We'll see how we do with the next four videos.

• 35:20Casey Newton?

  And what do you want people to do with the information that they get from these videos? Is it about sort of sharing it with their friends? Is it about talking to their elected officials? Or what do you, what do you hope the, the effect is?

• 35:32Speaker 05

  Yes, yes. And voting. Let me just take immigration as an issue that we've already done. At the end of the day, we're gonna have some immigration. We are. Nobody should, would say not. So, in a way, the question becomes, how many immigrants? Not, "I'm against it. I'm for it." I mean, that's, that's kind of a silly discussion, in my opinion. It's, "Hey, let's step back and think, how much immigration do we want, you know, with people who have what kind of labor skills?" And what really is accepting people who have pain in their home country?

• 36:15Casey Newton?

  Hmm.

• 36:16Speaker 05

  And let's make sure our systems line up with our strategy. I mean, we're, you know, we have, uh, no, let me check the number. We have basically.

• 36:28Casey Newton?

  Facts only, please, Steve.

• 36:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's all. We have about 1.3 million people who were released or paroled into the United States, most of whom are seeking asylum. And I can't remember off the top of my head, but let's say it's 50,000 people who were granted asylum last year. And there's many people who have 10 years before they'll even get their asylum court case. This does not compute. If we want to bring in, you know, a certain number of people, maybe we want to bring in 2 million without a path to citizenship, another, you know, 1.3 million with a path to asylum, whatever it is, it's just numbers. And, you know, I don't, some people may think our, the number of immigrants we should let

• 37:15Speaker 05

  in is very small. Some people would think it's very large. I don't think anybody thinks it's zero. So debate, debate to the facts.

• 37:24Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 37:25Speaker 05

  Debate to the facts, not, you know, just, hey, I don't like it. Hey, I do. Build the wall. Don't build the wall. Tear the wall down. And I'm, I'm, I'm a, you know, sort of a nonpartisan complainer in that.

• 37:38Casey Newton?

  Yeah. The, the idea that you can change minds with data feels very tech inspired to me. But like, I can imagine that as a CEO, you were often shown data that changed your mind about what decision to make. Do, do you feel like this approach is inspired by the way you tried to run Microsoft?

• 37:54Speaker 05

  Yes, and, yeah, look dudes, I, I was a math guy. Actually, in second grade, the math teacher told my parents that I, I was going to struggle in math. And so I, I studied all summers so that in third grade I wouldn't be behind. But it turns out I liked these numbers. I went to a math camp one summer. I went to a science camp one summer. I came. Into college saying, hey, I'm going to major in physics or math and math, math, math. So that I have a long pre CEO heritage of being a numbers lover and math lover. And I also think that's very helpful. I don't know how you be a CEO.

• 38:38Speaker 05

  You don't have to be me, a math camper. But I think it's very hard to be a CEO unless you're going to dig into to some numbers.

• 38:46Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, Steve, I, I, I want to sort of interrogate your theory of change here because I, I think there's this idea that Casey just alluded to that sort of people change their minds based on the quality and the quantity of data that is available to them. And I know that's a very popular idea among sort of business leaders and people with experience running companies. But I don't feel that out in the culture and I, you know, take economic data, for example. That is a domain where we actually do have very good, reliable, high quality government data. You know, we've got the Bureau of Labor Statistics that's constantly putting out reports in the Federal Reserve.

• 39:26Kevin Roose?

  But when you ask people about the state of the economy, they don't cite that data. And in fact, they, they often get the data wrong. There was this survey that was done earlier this year by The Guardian where they basically asked people like, well, do you think the stock market is up or down this year? Are we in a recession or not? And some huge percentage of Americans believe falsely that we are in a recession. And, and also believe that the stock market is going down when it's actually going up. So I guess my question to you is like, what makes you confident that telling people, hey, here are the numbers, look how well the economy is doing, here's the data that proves it, is actually going to change their minds or cause them to behave any differently?

• 40:12Speaker 05

  Remember, I'm not trying to change their minds. We are trying to educate. It's a little different. Do I fundamentally disagree with what you're saying? In a way, no. People will extrapolate from their personal experience. I'm also maybe not as aspirational as you guys would have me be. Let's say we could get five to 10 million people. We know there's about, what, 150 million, 160 million people who vote. If we can get some people to ground that is bigger than a breadbasket, but smaller than a refrigerator, as my mom used to say. If we can do that, I view that as as successful.

• 40:53Casey Newton?

  I, you know, I mean, sometimes journalists try to do these sort of like very like fact heavy stories like, hey, you know, this is like, we think it's like really important. And maybe it's not about a subject that you're super interested, but we just think that you should know that. And we often call that, you know, making readers eat their vegetables, you know. It strikes me, your whole enterprise is about making people eat their vegetables. And my guess is, you're not able to do a lot of clickbait, right? Like, I went to your website. There are no headlines. It's like, you know, this one government statistic will absolutely shock you. But you've sort of given yourself, I feel like, a tough challenge just by the the nature of how sort of rigorously neutral you're trying to be about everything.

• 41:31Speaker 05

  And my wife gives me, she says, look, what do you think we should do? People are interested. To which my response, in this context, has to be, could we do more? One of my my dreams is eventually we'll figure out how to do a point counterpoint. We get people from both sides. We'd kind of referee to anchor the thing in the numbers. So you get a little more pizzazz, a little bit more energy, but it's not our opinion. It's our holding people honest. But a little point counterpoint might give us, you know, it might make us, what shall I say, more of the amuse-bouche. It's not exactly your dessert,

• 42:15Speaker 05

  man, but it whets your whistle. You know, and look, there are places I think people do a pretty good job of this. Take The Economist. The Economist does a pretty good job, actually, on their charts and numbers, and they feature them. And for that reader, I don't think it feels like vegetables, but they, as you know, they have a very particular audience.

• 42:38Kevin Roose?

  I'm curious, Steve, there's been a lot of chatter this year about the sort of tech elite shifting toward Donald Trump and sort of becoming more activated on the right. We've seen a number of influential people in tech come out in support of him. I'm curious, what do you make of all the Trump curious tech CEOs and power players out there?

• 43:02Speaker 05

  One question I'd throw out is, and let's go back pre-Trump. Really, was the tech industry all Democrats? The answer's no. It's just everything wasn't so out there. Things were not so emotionally charged. I would say, on balance, you would hear more from the, you know, sort of more de-partisan folks than the are-partisan folks. But I know at Microsoft, we had people who were happy to welcome Republicans on campus to speak, as well as Democrats to come on campus and speak. So I don't think it's completely different.

• 43:44Speaker 05

  I'm not saying it's not different, but I don't think it's completely different from days past. It's just everything's more sensationalized. That's one thing. The second thing I'd say is, you know, tech CEOs are very business-focused. And that means different things to different people. And both parties try to say things to appeal to various constituencies, for sure. Just take corporate, now I'll just be completely nonpartisan. During the Trump administration, corporate income taxes went down. That's a fact. And not only did you see it in the rates, if you go, I mean, when people talk about

• 44:27Speaker 05

  tax rates, that's a little bit of BS. What you should really look at is total taxes paid. Because that's the reality. The rates are a tool to get there, but the rates don't always drive, and I could talk more about that. But revenue went down. Well, if you're a corporate CEO, you might say, hey, that's a good thing for my shareholders. So I salute that. I support that. Uh, so there are issues, concrete issues in which, you know, I can understand why a CEO would say one thing or another. Is that why the people who are most vocal are really speaking up, whether it's on the D side or the R side? I'm not sure that's why people are really speaking

• 45:11Speaker 05

  up, but you know, we generally, when I was at Microsoft, we avoid, I avoided, uh, doing things that were political, but there were issues that were important to our employees. We had an issue around, uh, gay marriage, I think it was. And there was a local pastor in Bellevue, Redmond, Washington, who was stirring that pot. And we stood for our employees uh, on that issue, but it was an issue. It wasn't a partisan issue per se.

• 45:42Casey Newton?

  So, um, you know, this is a tech podcast, but I, I'm sure we have plenty of sports fans who listen to us as well, Kevin. And Steve, you own the Clippers and you have a new arena opening this week. Like we're talking to you the week that you're opening the Intuit Dome, this massive project in Inglewood. And so I guess I just wanted to know, like, are there cool tech things that you're doing in your new arena?

• 46:05Speaker 05

  I think very much so. Now, but I want to make a point. I said when we started this thing, which was also nine plus years ago, by the way, things take time. I said to the guy, look, you may think I'm a tech guy, so we just have to do tech because we have to do tech. And I said, that will never be the mindset of this project. Because you, you, you see that, oh, I've got to apply my background because my background's mine and I got to strut my stuff. No, I said, we're not going to do that. But as we got into things that we wanted to do, the tech got important. I'll give you two or three examples. First, the

• 46:45Speaker 05

  simplest example of all. We have an acre of scoreboard, the typical NBA scoreboard's 9,000 square feet. We did it all in 4K. We couldn't go 8K. I wanted, uh, I wanted

• 46:58Kevin Roose?

  I want to see the individual pores on the players faces when I'm watching.

• 47:03Speaker 05

  You should come take a look. No, but there's a question, is the, you know, is the display quality good enough for the long run? And so you get to, how does your eye see it from the distance? Remember, we're not as close up as somebody looking at their phone or computer. Okay, then you go to, hey, I really want to reward people who get in their seat early. Well, hmm, how do we know who's in the building? How do we reward them? How do we know if they're sitting down or not? During the game, we want to reward them if they're standing up and making noise. And so we went through all the things we would do from a tech perspective to do that.

• 47:46Speaker 05

  So we have a system built in place that down to the individual seat level, we can tell how noisy you are. We put proximity sensor into the seat. So we can tell, are you there or are you not there? We put power, we wind up running power to every seat so people could charge their devices. But as soon as you have power there, then you say, what else can we do with the power? So we put lighting into every seat that we can control. We put a mini controller, a four button controller in there. So people can interact with the big board sense of community. Once we had some of this stuff, huh? We have a huge screen out in our plaza, different screen. Let's get some digital art done. What does that look like?

• 48:30Speaker 05

  So actually the artist takes statistical data, including for example, data on how our team played. And then creates art using some AI techniques and some not to create the art that goes up digitally on the, on the big board. So did we wind up with some things that people would consider technological? I think the answer to that is yes.

• 48:54Kevin Roose?

  Steve, have you ever considered combining your two passions of, of, of owning the Clippers and government data? And maybe having at the Clippers game instead of like the half court shot at halftime to win a car? Like you have to list three figures from the most recent Congressional Budget Office report and win a car? Like you could really have some synergy here. That's just a free idea.

• 49:15Speaker 05

  I'll consider doing that over 43,000 square feet. Square feet with four buttons.

• 49:24Casey Newton?

  Well, Steve, this has been fascinating. Thank you so much for coming on Hard Fork.

• 49:29Speaker 05

  I really appreciate it. It's been a lot of fun. You guys are great.

• 49:32Kevin Roose?

  All right. Thanks, Steve.

• 49:34Speaker 05

  Thanks very much. Bye bye.

• 49:38Casey Newton?

  When we come back, we'll tell you what happened that made one software engineer say, "The entire night I was hearing the boop, boop, boop."

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• 51:44Kevin Roose?

  Well, Casey, you know what? I'm sort of sick of talking about politics this week.

• 51:47Casey Newton?

  Oh, me too.

• 51:48Kevin Roose?

  I know. It's hard to escape because we are in an election year. But there is also a ton happening in the tech world. And so this week, I thought we should bring back a segment that we haven't done in a while. Let's do This Week in AI. Play the theme music.

• 52:04Kevin Roose?

  That was beautiful.

• 52:05Casey Newton?

  Thank you.

• 52:05Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 52:07Casey Newton?

  Kevin, what's been happening this week in AI?

• 52:09Kevin Roose?

  Well, first up, the AI industry calls for a pause in regulating AI.

• 52:15Casey Newton?

  Oh, yeah. It's about time we stopped all of these onerous regulations that have been passed everywhere. I'm just kidding. There have not been any of those.

• 52:22Kevin Roose?

  Yes, but this week, the biggest story in Silicon Valley that people are talking about that is not the election is this thing called Senate Bill 1047. This is a bill that has been proposed in California, a state bill that is technically called the Safe and Secure Innovation for Frontier Artificial Intelligence Models Act. And Casey, people are really upset about this.

• 52:46Casey Newton?

  Yeah, this is one where rather than the federal government trying to set like one standard for AI across the country, California has come in, as it often does, and tried to offer a template. And while I think sometimes, you know, those approaches have been very successful with things like auto emissions, this is one where basically every single company that works on AI says, this is terrible. Please do not do this.

• 53:09Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, so this bill passed the California State Senate in May. And this week, it's been making its way through the California State Assembly Appropriations Committee. The next step is it's now expected to go to the full assembly for a vote.

• 53:22Casey Newton?

  So what's in this bill?

• 53:23Kevin Roose?

  So it's a long bill. It's got a lot in it. But basically, it says that if you are making what they call a frontier AI model, one of the most advanced AI models out there, you have to conduct safety testing on it. That is the biggest or central piece of this. You have to tell the government that you're doing this. You have to conduct safety testing before you release it to the public. The bill also empowers the state attorney general to take legal action against AI companies if their AI tools cause what they call critical harms, which they define as things like a massive cyber attack that does, you know, a lot of damage or up to and including a mass casualty event. You could then be sued if you are an AI company who makes one of these models. There's a lot more in there, but that's sort of the thing that got everyone in Silicon

• 54:08Kevin Roose?

  Valley's hackles up and made them want to oppose this bill.

• 54:12Casey Newton?

  Yeah, and basically like it's a who's who of AI when it comes to who opposes this bill. So Meta, Google, OpenAI, Microsoft and Anthropic all oppose it or have offered some lengthy proposed amendments. Y Combinator, the big startup accelerator here, released a letter from about 140 startups who oppose this bill. On the other side, some of the godfathers of AI, including Jeff Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, do support it. So Kevin, what do we think of California's effort to regulate AI here?

• 54:39Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I think that there's been a lot of kind of inflated and hyperbolic claims being made on both sides of the debate. But I think this is a really important conversation to have because I think everyone agrees that AI needs to be regulated. But then, you know, as soon as a bill comes along that would regulate AI, it's like, oh, well, not not like that. Like, we didn't mean it like that. I'm a little skeptical that any of this is going to actually reduce the harm risk from AI. I just don't think the regulators can move fast enough to keep up with this technology. And so I think they're always going to be coming from behind a little bit. But what do you make of it?

• 55:15Casey Newton?

  Well, my feeling about this is we had the Biden executive order last year, which attempts to do some of the same things. And so far, it seems like the AI industry has proceeded along without really hurting anyone too badly, except for all the copyright owners, of course. My preference would be let the national government lead here. Like, I do not want a patchwork of 50 different state laws regulating AI. And I don't see any pressing need for California to to pass this bill now because I'm still not sure what specific harm they think that it would address even within the next few years.

• 55:51Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I would love to see more regulation around transparency when it comes to how these models are trained. What data are they using? What is the, you know, the pre-training process, the post-training process look like? How are they, what kinds of decisions are these companies making about what their models can and can't do? Like, that's the kind of thing where I think regulators could actually move the needle in the short term. But I think you're right. I mean, these harms, some of them are still very theoretical. I think that's actually not an argument against this bill. I think we should be trying. To avoid harms before they happen.

• 56:24Casey Newton?

  Sure.

• 56:24Kevin Roose?

  But I think in this country, the way that things usually go when it comes to regulating industries is that something terrible happens and then we pass a bill to prevent it from happening again. I think the risk here that the AI safety folks are worried about is like, they don't think we will have that luxury. They think there will basically be, these harms will arrive in some catastrophic form in the next few years. And we basically get one shot to stop them. And if we're late, then we're doomed.

• 56:51Casey Newton?

  I respect the point of view. This is just not how I want to solve this problem right now.

• 56:56Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. All right. What else is happening in AI this week, Kevin? Okay. Well, the second story from AI this week is that Humane's AI pin is the must not have gadget of the summer. This was a story, an amazing story, The Verge, last week, which reported that Humane, who built this AI pin, that was basically a kind of brooch that you'd wear on your shirt or your jacket that would let you talk to AI and project a little laser screen. The Verge reported that while Humane had brought in $9 million in sales of their AI pin, they had had more than $1 million worth of returns. And that between May and August, according to the internal sales data that The Verge got a hold of,

• 57:40Kevin Roose?

  more AI pins were returned than purchased. Casey, is that good?

• 57:44Casey Newton?

  Well, Kevin, I'm no mathematician, but that does seem very bad. And like a validation of what the critics were saying, unfortunately.

• 57:54Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 57:54Casey Newton?

  I mean, look, I think a lot of people wanted to try this thing out, right? There was kind of something cool and futuristic and sci fi about it. And this is the great thing about early adopters. They will hand you $700 just to sort of maybe have an experience of what the future will be like. It seems like Humane's return policy was maybe a little too generous. Because, you know, there are some things you can't return. You know, it's like, if you buy underwear at the department store, you can't actually return it. I wouldn't be surprised if Humane puts out another device if the return policy isn't much more limited.

• 58:24Kevin Roose?

  Well, and making things worse, apparently, according to The Verge, they can't, Humane can't actually do anything with the returned AI pins. Like they, because There's some kind of limitation on the T-Mobile contracts that are associated with these devices. They can't just refurbish them and resell them to other customers. It's just a whole goat rodeo.

• 58:44Casey Newton?

  I truly feel bad for these people. They were trying to do something new, a different, cool. It's hard to do things that are new, different and cool. And they did talk a very big game. And the effect of talking to very big game is they create a lot of people who are rooting against them. And so now that it does seem like everything is falling apart, like, man, it just has to be rough days over at Humane.

• 59:02Kevin Roose?

  All right, our next story from the week in AI. GPT-4O is dead. Long live GPT-4O.

• 59:09Casey Newton?

  Oh, my goodness. What's happening?

• 59:10Kevin Roose?

  Well, Casey, you will remember that several months ago, OpenAI released the new update to their flagship AI model. This was called GPT-4O. And this week, we got the news that they have quietly updated the model behind ChatGPT, which is now called, and I promise I'm not kidding about this, ChatGPT-4O-latest-2024-08-06.

• 59:38Casey Newton?

  Wow, we're one step away from OpenAI releasing ChatGPT-4O. Final, final, final.

• 59:43Kevin Roose?

  Final, final, final. You used this one?

• 59:45Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 59:48Kevin Roose?

  It's so true. So they have officially taken over the title of the worst naming conventions for AI models, a title previously held by Google. But yeah, this is an update that they have made quietly. They did not draw a bunch of attention to this. And I think this was related to a sense that we've actually heard about from some of our listeners, who have written in to say, hey, does anyone notice that ChatGPT has just gotten really bad recently?

• 1:00:17Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:17Kevin Roose?

  Do you hear this?

• 1:00:18Casey Newton?

  Yes, people have written into us about this. And for me, it's always a hard question to gauge because I don't know what you're inputting. I don't know what output you're getting. Like, I don't know what is making you say that it seems dumber. But the fact that these models are just sort of like getting swapped in and out and still have basically the same names they did before is obviously very confusing. You know, I mean, I feel like such an AI hipster being, you know, like back in my day, these things were called GPT-2 and then GPT-3. And it was really easy for me to keep track of. Nowadays, it's like 4O is gone and it's being replaced by 4O. You lost me.

• 1:00:55Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, and it also feels like, you know, release notes, when they update an app, they'll say like bug fixes and improvements and sometimes they'll have like a little list of things they fix. They never do that for these AI models. People just sort of notice, oh, this thing seems smarter than it was or dumber than it was. It's just kind of this like, we're like trying to understand this this unanswerable thing.

• 1:01:14Casey Newton?

  As always, if you know what's going on at OpenAI, please get in touch. We're trying to figure it out.

• 1:01:18Kevin Roose?

  Have you been following the strawberry discourse?

• 1:01:20Casey Newton?

  Yes, I have. My boyfriend is obsessed with strawberry discourse, so it's become a hot topic for us lately.

• 1:01:25Kevin Roose?

  Okay, I'm gonna try to explain it to our listeners who have not are not as terminally online as as you and your boyfriend and I are. But correct me if I'm getting something wrong here. So, you know, from for, I would say more than a year now, there's been this sort of, I don't know, cottage industry of kind of people proclaiming to have inside information from the big AI companies and specifically with OpenAI. There are these accounts on X that sort of purport to be insiders or people with access to unreleased models who will sort of give these like vague mysterious statements about like something big is coming, like no one's ready for what's about to hit the internet.

• 1:02:05Casey Newton?

  And there's this norm on X where if you're an AI person, you can have an anonymous account. And like some of those anonymous accounts have actually like gotten OpenAI's attention and those people have been hired into the company. And so whereas normally you'd see an anonymous account and you would think this is obviously fake, in this particular case, it actually could be real.

• 1:02:24Kevin Roose?

  Totally. And so what's been happening over the past week or two is Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, recently posted a photo on X of his garden, or a garden, with some strawberries growing in it. And the caption was, I love summer in the garden.

• 1:02:46Casey Newton?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:02:47Kevin Roose?

  Normal post.

• 1:02:47Casey Newton?

  Seems like a pretty normal post.

• 1:02:49Kevin Roose?

  So the sort of AI movement went nuts over this. There was a theory that was being advanced by this anonymous account called I Rule the World, that this was actually a clue that Sam Altman was dropping, that the company's newest next flagship model, which is codename Strawberry, was about to come out, and that this was going to be AGI, and that the world was not ready for this.

• 1:03:14Casey Newton?

  Right, and I ruled the world didn't just do that, right? They had a sort of very long post on X where they talked about it in somewhat like cryptic and, you know, I would say in comprehensible terms about what exactly was going on. But the gist was essentially AGI is very, very close. And I will just say, I have truly no idea what to make of any of this, except to say, Sam Altman did respond to this person on Twitter without really confirming anything, but in a way that I think did stoke a little bit of speculation that, well, maybe this person is on to something.

• 1:03:48Kevin Roose?

  Well, totally, and he's also dropped breadcrumbs before. Like, remember before the demo of the AI voice mode, he posted her

• 1:03:55Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:56Kevin Roose?

  on X, and that was sort of a breadcrumb that they were going to be doing this like voice update. So like, he is sort of fueling some of these theories in a way that I think he, I think he's mostly just having fun.

• 1:04:09Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:09Kevin Roose?

  But it, there is this weird community of like people on Reddit and X and other social platforms who are just like trying to decipher all of the clues and everything that Sam Altman says.

• 1:04:19Casey Newton?

  Which I do think just speaks to the fact that like, if you want to get people interested in your company these days, you have to create an alternate reality game where you're sort of putting clues around the internet and there's, there's stuff for the Reddit posters to discuss and analyze and tease apart. So they've been very effective at that, and I guess we'll have to see if any of this is real. In the meantime, though, I do think that this works as psychological warfare against Sam's enemies, because if you're working at Anthropic or Gemini and you're on X and you think, wait a minute, are they about to do? It just sort of puts that little, you know, fear into the back of your head and it messes with you in a way that I think would greatly please Sam Altman.

• 1:04:55Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:56Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:56Kevin Roose?

  We need to start dropping some more like Easter eggs.

• 1:04:58Casey Newton?

  Well, let me just drop an Easter egg right now, Kevin. Watermelon. And I'll say no more. I will say no more. But let me just say, those who know, know.

• 1:05:07Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. If you know, you know.

• 1:05:08Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:10Kevin Roose?

  All right. Before we move on to our next item, here's our standard disclaimer that the lawyers want us to make every time we mention OpenAI, which is that the New York Times company has sued OpenAI for copyright infringement.

• 1:05:23Casey Newton?

  And Platformer has not. And that's the difference between the two publications.

• 1:05:28Kevin Roose?

  Watermelon.

• 1:05:29Casey Newton?

  Watermelon. Period.

• 1:05:32Kevin Roose?

  Okay, next story this week in AI. Donald Trump is accusing Kamala Harris of deep fakery. So this was a story that went around this week. Donald Trump claimed falsely that Kamala Harris has used AI to make the size of the crowds at one of her rallies look larger than it actually was. So this was a photo that was posted online last week of a rally in Michigan where basically there is a plane, Kamala Harris's plane, and there's a massive throng of people celebrating her arrival on the tarmac. And this was posted online and Donald Trump apparently thought that this was a little

• 1:06:17Kevin Roose?

  suspicious and he said on Truth Social, "Has anyone noticed that Kamala cheated at the airport? There was nobody at the plane and she AI'd it and showed a massive crowd of so-called followers, but they didn't exist." Now, this is false. The crowd actually was there. We have well documented evidence that this was not manipulated to make it look bigger than it was. But this is now apparently a thing that you can just accuse your opponent of in a political campaign is using AI to fake the size of their crowd.

• 1:06:46Casey Newton?

  Is this the first instance of a political candidate using AI as a verb?

• 1:06:50Kevin Roose?

  I think so. I think that's the first time I've ever heard anyone use AI as a verb. He AI'd it.

• 1:06:55Casey Newton?

  I mean, look, everybody knows that Trump is obsessed with the size of his crowds and he seems to have been getting more obsessed with it as Harris's crowds have grown. My initial instinct was to dismiss all of this as very silly, but it did kind of captivate the online right this week. And there were a lot of people sharing that and sort of, you know, trying to analyze the photo in Zapruder film-like detail. And at the end of the day, of course, there's nothing to analyze. This rally happened. There was so much evidence out there, people posting all sorts of photos, videos from every angle indicating that, yes, there were many, many people there, but it didn't matter. And I read a really great post on this this week from a guy named Mike Caulfield, who

• 1:07:37Casey Newton?

  studies sort of misinformation and related topics. And he said- This is actually really important, in part because the idea that that Democrats really actually have small crowds is a core belief among the right. And people like Trump promote it because it means that should Harris win, people will have been primed to believe it can't possibly be real. Because all along the way, they've been saying, well, look, no one is even at a crowd. Oh, you thought there was a big crowd there? There wasn't. It was all just AI. So while on the surface, this is an absolutely ridiculous story. We have to remember that these kinds of lies led to the violence of January 6th. And we are unfortunately seeing them again in this election.

• 1:08:20Kevin Roose?

  Yep.

• 1:08:21Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:21Kevin Roose?

  All right. Last story from the week in AI. This one is about the hottest new club in San Francisco is the Waymo parking lot.

• 1:08:30Casey Newton?

  It is popping off in the Waymo parking lot, Kevin.

• 1:08:33Kevin Roose?

  So this is a story that came out earlier this week after people started posting on the internet about a parking lot in San Francisco where a group of Waymo self-driving cars were gathering at night and honking at each other. Did you see this video?

• 1:08:51Casey Newton?

  I did see this video and I love this video.

• 1:08:53Kevin Roose?

  It's so good. It's called "When It's 4:00 AM But The Waymos Are Getting Aggressive In The Parking Lot." And if I can just describe it for our listeners, it's there's a parking lot on the roof of a building. Someone is sort of filming from a nearby apartment building. And it just shows these these Waymo self-driving taxis kind of parked in a line, but then also kind of some of them are backing up and trying to sort of get around each other. And they're just honking and flashing their lights at each other. They're having a meeting.

• 1:09:20Casey Newton?

  They're having a meeting. Well, can we watch this video together?

• 1:09:22Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, let's watch this.

• 1:09:26Kevin Roose?

  So you can see they're just kind of all

• 1:09:30Kevin Roose?

  saying hi to each other.

• 1:09:35Speaker 07

  It's fucking 4:00 AM.

• 1:09:39Speaker 07

  Help.

• 1:09:45Kevin Roose?

  What a great piece of commentary there. So Casey, what did you make of this?

• 1:09:50Casey Newton?

  Look, I always think it's beautiful to see robots getting together and just sort of talking through their differences. And this was no different. So, you know, what did that Waymo say about this, Kevin?

• 1:10:00Kevin Roose?

  They told The Verge that they are aware that in some scenarios, our vehicles may briefly honk while navigating our parking lots. They also said that they've figured out what's causing the behavior and they're working to fix it. I mean, it does answer a question that I had, which is where do all the Waymos go?

• 1:10:15Casey Newton?

  That's one of my favorite children's books.

• 1:10:17Kevin Roose?

  Well, you know, they have to charge, right? Because they're all electric. But then they're not, you know, it's not constant demand throughout the day. So, you know, at 4 a.m., when no one's trying to get home from the club anymore, where do they go? And it turns out they go to this one parking lot. I just, I love that the person who posted this video, Sophia Tong, has actually set up a livestream, complete with lo-fi study beats. So at any time of day, you can just pop over to the livestream and check out what the Waymos are doing.

• 1:10:48Casey Newton?

  Sophia, you're a legend. That's incredible. Amazing, amazing work.

• 1:10:51Kevin Roose?

  It's true.

• 1:10:51Casey Newton?

  I love it. We love it.

• 1:10:53Kevin Roose?

  You know, Casey, we should hang out in the parking lot at 4 a.m.

• 1:10:55Casey Newton?

  We really should.

• 1:10:56Kevin Roose?

  Can we go hang out with the Waymos? I actually would like to do that some night.

• 1:11:00Casey Newton?

  Almost do like a sort of David Attenborough style field recording of like, "At night, while San Francisco sleeps, a group of cars gathers to share their thoughts." And it sounds like this.

• 1:11:12Kevin Roose?

  Oh, yes, I love it. That's this week in AI!

• 1:11:15Casey Newton?

  That's this week in AI. Lot going on.

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• 1:13:21Casey Newton?

  Hard Fork is produced by Whitney Jones and Rachel Cohn. We're edited by Jen Pleirot. We're fact-checked by Caitlin Love. Today's show was engineered by Chris Wood. Original music by Alicia B. Etup, Marian Lozano, Sophia Landman, Rowan Nemisto, and Dan Powell. Our audience editor is Nell Galopoli. Video production by Ryan Manning and Chris Schott. You can watch this full episode on YouTube at youtube.com/hardfork. Special thanks to Paula Schuman, Wee Ying Tam, Dahlia Hadad, and Jeffrey Miranda. You can email us at [email protected].

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