Pod Insights Hard Fork The Great A.I. Build-Out + H-1B Visa Chaos + TikTok Braces for the Rapture About this episode “You now have the leaders of the biggest technology companies in the world saying, effectively in unison, that they do not care how much it costs to build all the way to A. G. I.”
Transcript 9,906 words · 14 speakers
0:00 Speaker 00 Support for this podcast comes from Dell Technologies. It's time to put AI to work. Is your business ready? The challenge isn't getting started with AI. It's scaling beyond pilots while maintaining control of your data, governance, infrastructure, and costs. Dell AI Factory provides the integrated foundation you need to scale AI securely and efficiently with one trusted partner, Dell, AI on your terms. From idea to impact. Learn more at dell.com/yourwaytoAI. That's dell.com/yourwaytoAI.
0:34 Speaker 01 Let me ask you this. Settle a bet. What do you think is a better name for a golden retriever? Bubbles or Potato?
0:43 Speaker 02 Uh, male or female?
0:45 Speaker 01 Female.
0:46 Speaker 02 Um, Bubbles.
0:49 Speaker 01 That's what I said. So my brother and his family were getting a new dog, and they sent me pictures of this golden retriever. And my nephew said, we're thinking Bubbles or Potato? And I said, well, I think it has to be Bubbles because dogs want a nickname.
1:05 Speaker 02 Yes.
1:06 Speaker 01 And if it's Bubbles, then it's Bubs, it's Bubba.
1:09 Speaker 02 Sir Bubs-a-lot.
1:10 Speaker 01 Sir Bubs-a-lot. You can imagine.
1:13 Speaker 02 We can go on, yes.
1:14 Speaker 01 If it's Potato, it's what? Tate?
1:18 Speaker 02 Tater?
1:18 Speaker 01 Potato? Tater?
1:20 Speaker 02 Popo?
1:21 Speaker 01 Popo? I wouldn't call it that.
1:22 Speaker 02 That one's taken, yeah.
1:23 Speaker 01 I, uh, I lost. And so now the dog is named Potato.
1:28 Speaker 02 No, come on. We gotta change this. It's not too late.
1:32 Speaker 01 It might be too late.
1:36 Speaker 02 The dog doesn't care.
1:37 Speaker 01 That's probably true.
1:38 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:38 Speaker 01 Potato is just a puppy. So my dad saw a picture and he said, it's really more like a French Ray at this point. And I thought that was cute.
1:45 Speaker 02 That is such a good dad joke.
1:47 Speaker 01 Right?
1:53 Speaker 02 I'm Kevin Bruce, a tech columnist at The New York Times.
1:55 Speaker 01 I'm Casey Noon from Platformer. And this is Art Four. This week, an eye-popping deal between OpenAI and Nvidia has us asking, is this AI boom turning into a bubble? Then, the chaos over visas. Immigration expert Jeremy Newfeld joins us to explain how Trump's new $100,000 visa fee could hurt the economy. And finally, the rapture that wasn't. I explained to Kevin how TikTok went wild for the end of days. Have a help us.
2:29 Speaker 02 Well, Casey, it's time to put on our work boots and roll up our sleeves because today we're talking about the great AI build out.
2:36 Speaker 01 Oh, I thought you were going to say we were joining the village people.
2:40 Speaker 02 No, so this week we got some news that I think is thematically related to what I have started calling the great build out. This is our big national infrastructure project to build all of the data centers and acquire all of the compute and make all of the investments that are necessary for the next phase of AI development. So on Monday, Nvidia and OpenAI announced that they had struck a $100 billion deal. This deal will be an investment that Nvidia is making in OpenAI $10 billion at a time until the full $100 billion is reached. Nvidia is giving OpenAI cash and getting equity in return. This is designed to help OpenAI build out massive new data centers that will run on
3:24 Speaker 02 Nvidia's AI chips.
3:26 Speaker 01 Yeah, and just to put that number in perspective, if I walked into a bank right now and said, can I have $100 billion, they would say no.
3:35 Speaker 02 I don't know. I hear the newsletter business is very lucrative. So that was announcement number one is this new Nvidia OpenAI deal. And then on Tuesday, we got announcement number two, which was that OpenAI has announced five new sites for Stargate, their huge infrastructure effort. They said that they were developing two new sites with Oracle in Shackelford County, Texas, and Doña Anna County in New Mexico, along with a third site in an undisclosed location in the Midwest. They're also developing two additional Stargate sites in partnership with SoftBank, and those sites will be located in Lordstown, Ohio, and Mylum County, Texas.
4:17 Speaker 02 Altogether, these new sites will bring Stargate to nearly seven gigawatts of planned capacity and over $400 billion in investment over the next three years. So today we'll talk about some of this new infrastructure news and what it means for the direction that AI is heading. Just the vast unprecedented scale of the investments that are being made in AI right now. And then we'll talk about the kind of strangeness surrounding these various deals. And why we are seeing the biggest companies racing forward, no plans of slowing down. And what it means for the future. And before we do that, I think we should make our AI disclosures.
4:59 Speaker 01 Sure. What's yours?
5:00 Speaker 02 Mine is that the New York Times Company is suing OpenAI and Microsoft over copyright violations.
5:04 Speaker 01 And my boyfriend works at Anthropic.
5:06 Speaker 02 Okay, so Casey, that's a lot of big numbers that I just threw at you and threw at our listeners. So maybe we should, before we talk about what this means, just kind of give some context for the scale that we're talking about here.
5:21 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, so one number that I would throw out is 71.4 billion, which is the amount of money that OpenAI had raised before this week. Right? So in the entire history of the company, they had only made it to 71.4 billion dollars. And now along comes Nvidia and in one fell swoop, promises to eventually invest more than OpenAI has invested to this point. So we've already been at a point where people are saying, I don't know, sure seems like these companies have raised a lot of money and they're not profitable. And everything they do is incredibly expensive. And yet, instead of moderating at all, these companies are stepping on the gas pedal.
5:59 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, the comparison I've been trying to use to illustrate the scale of investment that's happening now. Is with the interstate highway system, which was built over a 36 year period. At a cost of roughly $300 billion adjusted for inflation, that's today's dollars. On a recent earnings call, Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, estimated that this year alone. US companies would spend about $600 billion on AI data centers. So in other words, this year, the AI industry is projecting to spend basically twice as much. As the cost of the entire interstate highway system in one year.
6:42 Speaker 01 It's almost like they're building an information superhighway system.
6:48 Speaker 02 Get out of here.
6:49 Speaker 01 All right.
6:49 Speaker 02 So that's one comparison that, for me at least, helped kind of drive home the scale of this. Are there any comparisons that have been helping you drive home the scale of this?
6:58 Speaker 01 Yeah, so I decided to do a little research. I wanted to try to reach our Gen Z listeners, you know? Because we have a lot of Gen Z listeners. And so I tried to estimate how much would it cost to build one Labubu factory? Okay? Because Labubus are very hot, right? Everybody's trying to get their hands on one of these things. So according to the estimates that I was able to put together, if you were to build a new Labubu factory from scratch, it would cost you between 15 and 20 million dollars. Okay? So that means that, Kevin, for this 100 billion dollars that Nvidia may now invest in OpenAI, they could have built 5,000 Labubu factories.
7:32 Speaker 02 Wow.
7:32 Speaker 01 So I hope that puts that into perspective for folks.
7:34 Speaker 02 Yeah. I can't believe the Trump administration is not making domestic Labubu production an urgent infrastructure priority.
7:41 Speaker 01 It's really my number one issue with the Trump administration.
7:46 Speaker 02 So obviously, the scale of these things is impressive and massive, and we could just go on talking for half an hour about the big numbers here and what they mean. But I think it's also worth pointing out that some of these deals are just extremely weird.
8:01 Speaker 01 Yeah, these are not the standard deals that you get when you like, you know, sign up for Y Combinator with your startup and you give a little piece of equity in exchange for some amount of money.
8:09 Speaker 02 Right. I mean, one thing that makes them especially weird is that many of these companies that are making these huge investments in each other are also buying goods and services from each other. So with OpenAI and Nvidia, like Nvidia is investing billions of dollars in OpenAI. OpenAI is going to turn around and spend many of those billions on Nvidia chips. This is sometimes called round tripping. I've also heard it called left pocket, right pocket, since you're kind of like taking money out of one pocket and putting it into another. Yeah, some people call it vendor financing.
8:43 Speaker 01 What other names do you have for it?
8:47 Speaker 02 Chicanery is what I call it. But this is sort of one of these deals that is raising a lot of people's eyebrows because they're basically saying, wait, you've just kind of created this like Giant circular money machine that's just sort of moving money around in the economy.
9:01 Speaker 01 Yeah, but it's also an incentive for OpenAI to keep Nvidia as its major chip provider, right? We know that Nvidia is the best in the business when it comes to making AI chips, but they do have competition. Google makes its own AI chips, Amazon makes its own AI chips, AMD makes AI chips. Earlier this year, OpenAI struck a deal with Broadcom to make its own custom chips. So one way of looking at this is Nvidia is saying to OpenAI, "Hey, stick with us and we'll sort of give you, you know, most favored company status when it comes to getting state of the art chips."
9:33 Speaker 02 Yeah, so there are some other weird things about some of these deals that have been happening. I'm spending some time looking into kind of the financialization of some of these deals and how they're being financed. Sam Altman this week had a blog post called "Abundant Intelligence" where he sort of hinted that OpenAI was coming up with some creative new financing strategy that they would share more details about soon to sort of pay for all of this. And when I hear phrases like "creative new financing strategy", that's when you know you should start looking for your wallet.
10:10 Speaker 01 Well, one thing they might just do, though, is lease the chips, right? So you can get them at a lower price because you're not buying them outright. There's a public company called CoreWeave. That's their entire business model is just leasing chips to other companies. So that might be one creative thing that they do, but I would agree with you, Kevin. The more creative we get from there, the more trouble we might be in.
10:30 Speaker 02 Yes, so I have to ask, is any of this, the giant announcements, the weirdness around some of the financial aspects of this, is it making you think any differently about whether we're in an AI bubble or not?
10:45 Speaker 01 Well, yes, because the numbers are, one, large in unprecedented ways, and, two, we're not yet connecting this to any reasonable expectation of profits, right? This isn't the traditional Silicon Valley, hey, we lose money for a couple of years, but then we turn on the model. ...spigot and everything just works out. This is, we're spending hundreds of billions of dollars well in advance of any expectation that that is going to be profitable. And the bigger the numbers get, Kevin, the harder it is to make the money back. So I do think it is a moment to pause and reflect on the sheer magnitude of what is being invested.
11:29 Speaker 02 Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, what sticks out to me is just that you now have the leaders of the biggest technology companies in the world saying effectively in unison that they do not care how much it costs to build all the way to AGI or superintelligence or wherever they think the final destination of this technology is going to be. You know, Mark Zuckerberg gave an interview to Alex Heath last week where he said that he, you know, doesn't worry about over investing in AI. If anything, he's worried about under investing in it. Other companies have said similar things. Larry Page, the co-founder of Google, has, you know, been reported to have said something
12:10 Speaker 02 like he would rather go bankrupt than lose the race that they are in. So I think it's really just unusual, not just in the sense of how big the investments are, but in the kind of fierce, single-minded tunnel vision of all of the leaders of these companies who are saying in very clear terms, like they know that they are entering a bubble. They know that they are entering a crazy, unprecedented environment for investment in AI. They just don't care and for the most part, no one can stop them.
12:44 Speaker 01 No, I mean, and I think it's worth saying just how much ego is wrapped up in this, right? No one wants to be the fourth place finisher in the race to build AGI because that is going to dramatically affect how your obituary gets written, if it gets written at all, because of course you might be able to upload your mind to the cloud. So yes, this is about business and yes, this is about creating shareholder value. But a big part of it is I personally want to be the one who builds AGI because that's going to make me feel super cool and that is justifying an enormous amount of spending.
13:17 Speaker 02 I think that's right. I think there's ego. I think there's FOMO. I also think there's a-
13:20 Speaker 01 Ego and FOMO. Dangerous combination. The dreaded ego FOMO combo.
13:25 Speaker 02 I also think there's a real logic to what they're saying. You know, if this is a winner take all technology, and we've seen several of those in recent decades, then you really do want to be first, even if you only have, you know, a six month lead on your nearest competitor. If you do buy the logic of sort of the intelligence explosion where AI kind of reaches this point at which it starts to be able to recursively improve itself and you have, you know, robots building better robots and building factories to build more robots, then like six months could actually amount to like a, a meaningful difference in your trajectory. And so, look, I don't know that Larry Page and Mark Zuckerberg and, you know, Sundar
14:08 Speaker 02 Pichai and, and all these, and Sam Altman are, are running through, like, I don't know if they have a detailed financial model anywhere, you know, on their computer for like how all of this is going to pay for itself, but I do know that they think that it will at some point pay for itself.
14:22 Speaker 01 Yeah, which is, you know, a fairly common thing for people spending insane amounts of money to say, we have a plan, don't worry about it. My drone business.
14:31 Speaker 02 Right. So Casey, if I'm hearing you correctly, you are worried about a bubble, but not so much that you think like your, your, your alarm bells are not going off quite yet.
14:42 Speaker 01 Well, look, here's the thing, if you can build a software system that can automate vast amounts of labor to the point that big companies no longer have to hire thousands of people, yes, I do think in the end you will make your money back on these investments, even the ones that have nine zeros in them, right? The question is, how many of those companies are there going to be? I do think there will be at least one. I'm not sure there are going to be three. There are probably not going to be seven. So I understand why all of these folks are jockeying for a position here, because while this race may not be winner take all, it probably will be winner take most, and to some extent, that should justify really, really huge investments.
15:25 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, I guess what I would say is like, I am not, I am not convinced yet that we are in a dangerous speculative bubble when it comes to AI. But I am starting to sort of move some of my probability mass on to these fears about, not necessarily a bubble, but just kind of the overall distorting effect that such a large, fast investment has on the rest of the economy. And I'm starting to worry about that maybe a little bit more than I was a couple of weeks ago.
15:58 Speaker 01 That makes sense. And I'm glad we are talking about this because I do think it is inevitable that some of these businesses are going to fail. And when that happens, I want our listeners to know that we're telling you that that is probably going to happen. Right? We talk a lot about AI on the show. We talk a lot about some good things that it can do. We talk a lot about what some bad things that it can do. But when it comes to the business fundamentals, like they're not all sound across the entire industry. And an unprecedented amount of money is being invested. And it would also be unprecedented if everyone making those investments made all their money back. So we are really betting against that. And frankly, it's a pretty easy bet to make.
16:38 Speaker 02 Yeah. And I think if I were to leave our listeners with one thing about this great AI build out, it is this: We are not talking about the future here. These investments are happening now. There are shovels in the ground. There are bulldozers going on to the construction sites. These buildings are going up. Many of them are already operational. We are already starting to see the effects that these data centers are having on things like electricity prices for consumers. This is showing up at the highest levels of our national politics. This build out is now our great American infrastructure project of the 2020s.
17:21 Speaker 02 And it remains to be seen what the effects will be. But I don't want to leave people thinking, oh, this is just Casey and Kevin talking about something that may or may not happen. Like, this is happening now. And while we don't know what the consequences will be yet, we are now one nation under AI capital expenditures. And I just think we need to kind of internalize that because I think it does really make it clear that every person in America has an interest now, whether it's just a financial interest or otherwise, in what is happening in AI.
17:57 Speaker 01 Yeah.
17:59 Speaker 01 Should we go to a data center? We've been invited.
18:02 Speaker 02 Have we?
18:03 Speaker 01 Yeah, OpenAI invited us to one.
18:05 Speaker 02 Should we go?
18:05 Speaker 01 At that dinner.
18:06 Speaker 02 Let's go.
18:07 Speaker 01 Let's go.
18:13 Speaker 02 When we come back, we'll sort through the chaos of Trump's latest policy changes for immigrants in tech.
18:35 Speaker 00 Support for this podcast comes from Dell Technologies. It's time to put AI to work. Is your business ready? The challenge isn't getting started with AI. It's scaling beyond pilots while maintaining control of your data, governance, infrastructure, and costs. Dell AI Factory provides the integrated foundation you need to scale AI securely and efficiently with one trusted partner. Dell, AI on your terms. From idea to impact. Learn more at dell.com/yourwaytoAI. That's dell.com/yourwaytoAI.
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20:16 Speaker 02 Okay, so the other big story of the week in tech is this madness and chaos going on with visas.
20:23 Speaker 01 Yeah, now I use a MasterCard, so I haven't been following this closely, but is this important?
20:28 Speaker 02 Different visa. This was a proclamation that President Trump released on Friday of last week called the restriction on entry of certain non-immigrant workers, which made a bunch of big changes to the H1B visa program. This is the program that allows immigrants from high-scale occupations to come and work in the country. President Trump announced that going forward, there would be a new $100,000 fee for employees who are hired under the H1B visa program. I started hearing about this right away from people who were saying, "Oh, my God, what does this mean?" The tech companies started sending memos and emails to their employees who are on H1Bs saying,
21:13 Speaker 02 "Hey, we're still trying to figure out what's going on here, but if you're outside the country, you need to come back immediately. And if you're inside the US, don't leave because we're not sure if you're going to be allowed back or not." So there was just a lot of confusion about this new program, the new fees, who it would apply to, who it wouldn't apply to. It just seemed to be a big mess.
21:32 Speaker 01 Yeah, it was a weekend full of absolute chaos. My own friends, who are immigrants, and I have been exchanging a lot of messages as we try to figure out what is going on here. And so we thought, "Well, we should try to tell that story on Hard Work this week and tell you what's going on as best as we can."
21:48 Speaker 02 Yeah, so there are still a lot we don't know. As of the time of this recording, the White House has tried to clear up some of the confusion about these changes. They've said this new fee will apply only to new applicants for H1B visas. It will be a one-time fee, not an annual fee, and anyone currently on an H1B visa can come and go as they always have. But Casey, I think it's important to talk about this this week because the technology industry in America is and always has been dependent on immigrants. Immigrants run many of our largest technology companies. In fact, Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, many others have had H1B visas at various points in their careers.
22:31 Speaker 02 AI in particular is a part of the tech industry that relies on a lot of foreign born talent. And the tech industry was the target of these policy changes. And so I think we should examine them, try to figure out what's happening and bring in someone who can really help us unpack what's going on.
22:49 Speaker 01 Yes, so to help us navigate all these changes, we have invited on an immigration policy expert to walk us through what's happening. His name is Jeremy Neufeld. He's the Director of Immigration Policy at the Institute for Progress, which is a nonpartisan think tank for accelerating scientific, technological, and industrial progress. He has written a lot about how these changes will impact not just startups and big tech firms, but also non-immigrant American workers and the wider US economy. He's got a lot to say, let's bring him in.
23:20 Speaker 02 Yes, as the Trump administration is not saying to applicants for H1B visas, let's bring him in.
23:32 Speaker 01 Jeremy Neufeld, welcome to Hard Fork.
23:34 Speaker 05 Thanks so much, thanks for having me.
23:36 Speaker 01 So you focus closely on immigration. Tell me about your weekend. Was this one of those where your phone is ringing off the hook starting on Friday?
23:46 Speaker 05 Yeah, so on Friday, I first heard that there was going to be this proclamation and signing in the White House about something related to immigration policy. This was not on anyone I know's radar before that happened. And then from the time that they made these announcements, up until the time we're talking now, I've just been in nonstop conversations about it, trying to figure out what's going on, how it's going to affect the United States and what it all means.
24:13 Speaker 01 I want to take a step back and understand the history of this visa in particular. We have a lot of different kinds of visas in this country. I have some friends who work in tech who are on what they call O1 visas for immigrants of extraordinary abilities. What is the H1B system? What was it originally designed to do?
24:37 Speaker 05 Yeah, so the H1B visa is our flagship high-skill immigration visa. It's intended for people in specialty occupations. And there's 85,000 of these H1Bs that are available each year for the private sector. And then universities and national laboratories get access to as many H1Bs as they want without being subject to that cap. But I think one way to think about the H1B system is that it's really a couple of different talent pipelines under the same umbrella of the H1B. So on the one hand, it is an incredibly valuable source for top talent, for international scientists, and for top founders of tech companies like Elon Musk. And then at the same time, it's the same visa that's being used for lower-level, lower-skilled
25:22 Speaker 05 talent, like IT consultancy services work. And so I think one of the things that happens with a lot of the debate that happens around this visa is the defenders of the program are pointing to very true things. They're pointing to the amazing contributions that H1B holders have made for the United States, for our scientific and technological leadership. And the critics are also pointing to real cases of certain companies like Infosys and Cognizant, taking a huge number of these visas and bringing in relatively low-skilled workers who might be undercutting Americans. And both of these sides have a point, because the H1B program is not one thing. It's a lot of different kinds of things.
26:03 Speaker 02 Yeah, I think it's worth drilling into that a little bit more, because what I've been hearing from people who are sort of defenders of the H1B program is, you know, all these famous tech people came here on H1B visas at some point. Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, was on an H1B visa. Satya Nadella from Microsoft, Eric Yuan, the founder and CEO of Zoom. I mean, you can go on and on and on. We have so much top tech leadership in this country that was reliant at some point in their careers on this visa program. But then you also have these sort of outsourcing and IT firms that sometimes people in tech will pejoratively refer to as body shops. And what are they doing? And how much of the overall H1B program do they represent?
26:46 Speaker 05 Yeah, the basic reason all of these different pipelines exist is because employers want far more H1Bs than there are H1Bs available each year. So last year, about 400,000
27:00 Speaker 05 Workers got entered into the lottery. There's only 85,000 slots. And so what that means is that there's an incentive for certain kinds of business models who can play into that that basic lottery. These these body shops, they have a business model of spamming the H1B lottery with lots of petitions because they don't really care about which individuals are gonna win the lottery. All that they care about is getting some number of visas so that they can then contract out those workers to third-party companies. So they've ended up increasing in in scale. Right now, H1B-dependent companies, that's companies where a significant share of their workforce are on H1Bs, they represent about a third of all of the visas that could give it out.
27:46 Speaker 05 Outsourcing companies are a subset of those companies. These are companies that that specialize almost entirely in contracting services. They are about 15% of all of the capped H1Bs.
27:58 Speaker 02 Now, where do we think this $100,000 number came from? I saw some speculation on X that someone, I guess, had tweeted this out, you know, a while ago and said, oh, they should fix this program by making everyone pay $100,000 to to get an H1B visa. I don't know whether that was actually in the administration's, you know, feed when they decided on that number. But do you have any better sense of where that came from? And why would charging companies or workers $100,000 to get an H1B visa result in fewer of the kinds of immigrants that the Trump administration doesn't want and would allow others to come in?
28:34 Speaker 01 Oh, I think I can answer that one. Wait, can I guess? I want to see if I got it right to see if I've been following the discussion.
28:38 Speaker 02 Yes.
28:38 Speaker 01 Is it because the outsourcing companies would never pay $100,000 for one of these workers because their wages just aren't that high and wouldn't be worth it to them?
28:45 Speaker 05 That's the basic theory.
28:46 Speaker 02 Yes.
28:47 Speaker 05 Whether that ends up being being true remains to be seen. The first thing I just want to mention is that the proclamation does three different things at once. The first is the fee. The second is a prioritization within the lottery for people who are more experienced and are older. And then the third is it has the Department of Labor try to beef up requirements about what people are required to be paid. And The intention is supposed to be to make it harder for the outsourcers to gobble up so many of these scarce slots. That's what the administration says that they're trying to do. But what these policies would end up doing in effect is cutting out a lot of the high-value talent and potentially leave the outsourcers untouched. And the reason
29:31 Speaker 05 for this is, first of all, the outsourcers have access to another kind of visa called an L visa for intra-company transfers. And the fee has a major loophole, which is that people who are switching from one visa type to an H1B, they don't have to pay the fee as long as they're already in the United States. And so what I think we'll see is that the outsourcers, they can adapt. They can bring people here on Ls, and then they can transfer them over to H1Bs without paying the fee, in a way that a lot of other companies can't adapt because they're not multinationals.
30:06 Speaker 00 Hmm.
30:06 Speaker 05 And then the second way that the outsourcers are helped is, I think entirely unintentional. This is that the Department of Homeland Security was instructed to prioritize higher wage levels in running the lottery. And what they've settled on is something called a wage-level classification constructed by the Department of Labor. But the important thing to recognize is that wage levels are not the same as actual wages. Wage levels are dividing the salaries within an occupation, and so the most experienced, most qualified acupuncturist in the world might be paid $60,000. And so they'd be classified as wage level four, the highest wage level, because they're really highly paid compared to other acupuncturists.
30:51 Speaker 05 A PhD, recently minted PhD coming out of a top university, they're at the start of their career, they're about to go get a job at OpenAI paying $300,000, but because they're right at the beginning of their career, they're going to be classified as wage level one or wage level two because it's entry level. And so the way this wage-level system works is it would favor the acupuncturist to the AI scientist because it looks only within the occupation. And the way that helps the outsourcers is the outsourcers bring a lot of older mid-career staff. So even though they're paying less than other employers, they bring in mid-career people, so they get classified at higher wage levels. And so the end result of all of this is that the outsourcers will come out of this actually ahead.
31:34 Speaker 05 They'll get about 8% more visas under the proposed policies, even though the administration says they're trying to clamp down on the outsourcers.
31:42 Speaker 01 Got it. You mentioned that universities, research institutes, hospitals, they have not been subject to this lottery system that we have. Are they going to have to pay the $100,000 fee? And how do we think it will affect jobs in those categories?
31:59 Speaker 05 Yes, this $100,000 fee is essentially a major tax on universities and national laboratories from recruiting foreign-trained talent. There's no problem in principle with using some mechanism to shift scarce visas to the people who are going to contribute the most. But for universities and other organizations that aren't playing in the same zero-sum game that the lottery creates, this is just a pure cost. And while big tech might be able to afford a $100,000 fee, universities trying to bring in the best associate professor that they can to lead up some new research area, they're not going to be able to do it. And so I'm already seeing top PhDs no longer be that interested in coming to the United States
32:44 Speaker 05 because they know they're not going to be able to build their research career here. I was just talking with someone who was accepted into an MIT PhD program in neuroscience, and now she doesn't want to come anymore because of the legal uncertainty that this causes.
32:57 Speaker 01 Wow. What about the startups that don't have millions of dollars of runway to pay these fees?
33:04 Speaker 05 Yeah, that's such a good point. They don't have the liquid cash to pay $100,000. This will definitely hurt their ability to expand. And that is hugely important for the future of the tech ecosystem. Right now, 60% of the top AI startups in the United States are founded by immigrants. That would not be possible without the H1B program. We're threatening to undermine that huge success story.
33:30 Speaker 01 Wait, that is an insane statistic. I did not know that. 60% of all the AI startups in America are started by immigrants?
33:37 Speaker 05 60% of the top AI startups.
33:39 Speaker 01 That's incredible. Immigrants get the job done. Hamilton said that.
33:45 Speaker 02 Jeremy, what are you hearing from people in the tech industry about how they are planning to deal with this going forward?
33:51 Speaker 05 Yeah, I'm hearing a lot of different answers. I think some people are just hoping that the legal dispute can happen as quickly as possible because there's a lot of questions about whether this fee is legal. I think most of the people I've talked to think that it probably isn't, and so it's a matter of time before it gets struck out. And so people want to ride this out until that happens. Others are coming up with strategies to try to deal with this new fee and try to shift their recruitment toward people who are already here, who they might not have to pay it for. Others are looking at this like it will just fundamentally change whether or not they will be able to participate in this program at all.
34:28 Speaker 01 I can imagine some supporters of this $100,000 fee believe that maybe in some ways this could help to increase the wages of American workers. Is there any evidence that that's true?
34:43 Speaker 05 Yeah, for the private sector. So putting aside the fact that we're going to cut out the universities and make it much harder for people to do basic research, in the private sector, the thinking is only the companies who really value particular people at at least $100,000 and are willing to pay that on top of their salary are going to be willing to go forward with using the H1B system. But the problem with this is, like we mentioned, that the end result of all of this is likely to be that the outsourcers are going to be able to get around it and continue to bring in the kinds of people who have led to the problems of undercutting Americans and top talent who might actually be creating jobs for Americans. They're going to be hit particularly hard.
35:26 Speaker 05 Startups who are going to be creating jobs are going to be hit particularly hard. And the net effect of all of this is that this incredibly huge national asset, which benefits the American worker, is going to take a massive blow, and the people who are undercutting jobs can adapt.
35:43 Speaker 02 Tell us about the exceptions to this policy. I've heard people talking about the gold card, the platinum card, and then maybe some like discretion that the Trump administration can grant to companies and just say like, oh, you, you don't have to pay the $100,000 per employee. So tell us about that.
36:03 Speaker 05 One thing the proclamation does is creates discretionary authority to grant exemptions for the fee at the individual level, at the company level, at the industry level, entirely at the discretion of the administration. One way to think about this is it's analogous to moves that the administration has made on trade policy or other areas where they want to be able to negotiate and they want to bring people to the table to make concessions. The promise of an H1B exemption as a carrot and the stick of $100,000 fee might be a way to get companies to try to apply for these exemptions, make promises, and how all of that plays out, we'll have to, we'll have to see.
36:46 Speaker 01 Well, we'll have to see, but I mean, it seems like if the Trump administration wanted it to be, this could just be another avenue for influence peddling. Oh, you did something we don't really like. Well, yeah, we're not going to grant you any exemptions to this onerous new policy we've created. But hey, if you do what we say, maybe suddenly you don't have to pay that $100,000 fee. So I think we do have to watch that, actually.
37:09 Speaker 02 What is the long-term picture here? We have an immigration system that for whatever problems people have with it, has resulted in a dynamic and very profitable tech industry in America. Many of our largest companies are run by immigrants. What is the long-term threat to American innovation if we start mucking around with this immigration system that has served our tech industry so well?
37:39 Speaker 05 We run the risk of threatening the talent pipeline that has long been our major advantage in technological and scientific competition. One thing I think about is, is the timing on all of this is somewhat ironic because next Wednesday, China is rolling out a new visa program called the K visa for high skilled STEM talent, particularly aimed at, at East Asian talent. Historically, China's not been a big destination for global talent. People haven't wanted to move there, but the Central Committee has said that they want to be competitive with the United States on global talent by 2035. And they're deliberately trying to, to play the best hand that they can.
38:21 Speaker 05 And the United States, by contrast, seems to be walking away from the field, maybe ceding the biggest advantage we have in technological competition. Even if these rules get struck down by the courts, it will likely sow a cloud of uncertainty that will deter people into the future. I think there's huge problems with the H1B program. We've talked about some of them. We've talked about how much the outsourcers are bringing in relatively lower skilled people. And I think the H1B program could be a much better and much more highly skilled immigration program. These particular proposals, though, don't really do that, and they do significantly threaten our ability to continue to benefit from the smartest minds in the world.
39:05 Speaker 01 Well, Kevin, H1B or H1 not to be? That is the question.
39:11 Speaker 02 Jerry, thanks so much for joining us. This is really helpful.
39:14 Speaker 05 Thanks a lot.
39:18 Speaker 02 When we come back, we're going to heaven. Casey tells me about the new rapture trend that's sweeping TikTok.
39:23 Speaker 01 Holy cow.
39:41 Speaker 00 Support for this podcast comes from Dell Technologies. It's time to put AI to work. Is your business ready? The challenge isn't getting started with AI. It's scaling beyond pilots while maintaining control of your data, governance, infrastructure, and costs. Dell AI Factory provides the integrated foundation you need to scale AI securely and efficiently with one trusted partner. Dell, AI on your terms. From idea to impact. Learn more at dell.com/yourwaytoAI. That's dell.com/yourwaytoAI.
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41:22 Speaker 01 Well, Kevin, praise the Lord and pass the smartphone because TikTok is talking about the rapture.
41:28 Speaker 02 Oh, boy. Is this another segment where you just explain something from the internet that will disturb and puzzle me?
41:35 Speaker 01 Uh, don't make it sound like you don't love that.
41:39 Speaker 02 No, it is, it is a time honored hard fork tradition where you dive into the bowels of the internet and bring me back something delightful.
41:45 Speaker 01 Well, I'll, I'll be honest with you. We only try to do this when we only have to dive into the surface of the, you know, we're, we're, we're bringing you what the youth are talking about.
41:54 Speaker 02 Yes.
41:55 Speaker 01 This is not some arcane phenomenon, Kevin. This is what everybody was talking about on Tik Tok. And now that you're a dad and you don't have time to participate in youth culture, I try to reserve some time every week to smarten you up and make it so that you can actually participate in society.
42:09 Speaker 02 That's very nice of you.
42:10 Speaker 01 Thank you. So let's talk about God. Now, have you read the Bible?
42:15 Speaker 02 I have.
42:16 Speaker 01 In fact, you went to Bible college for a year, wrote a book about it.
42:18 Speaker 02 I did, yes. Back in my youth, I spent a semester undercover at a Christian college and spent a lot of that semester reading the Bible.
42:26 Speaker 01 And what did you learn about the rapture in particular?
42:29 Speaker 02 Uh, well, the rapture is a foretold event in the book of Revelation, which is the last book of the Bible. Where, um, at least this is the version I heard, one day, all the people who were saved, who are born again, just kind of disappear. Like they go to heaven and they vanish their clothes and their earthly possessions sort of stay behind and they kind of ascend. And uh, this was uh, written into the plot of a very popular Christian uh, series of novels called Left Behind.
43:01 Speaker 01 Left Behind, of course.
43:02 Speaker 02 One day you're just sitting there in the coffee shop, minding your business and then poof, all the Christians go to heaven.
43:07 Speaker 01 Now, does the Bible actually specify that you don't get to bring your clothes to heaven? Cause that is what you just said on this podcast.
43:12 Speaker 02 No, but that's kind of the plot of the, the Left Behind series of that people are just, you know, their cars just drive off the road and their clothes will get left behind uh, with them.
43:21 Speaker 01 Well, I think we could all agree. This would be a very newsworthy event if it happened.
43:25 Speaker 02 Yes.
43:25 Speaker 01 And perhaps that explains why Kevin, over the past week, Tik Tok has been a buzz as person after person makes a video in anticipation of a rapture that was supposed to happen this Tuesday last.
43:38 Speaker 02 This Tuesday last?
43:39 Speaker 01 Yes. I think that's a very elegant way of saying it, don't you?
43:44 Speaker 01 Now, so Kevin, on Tuesday, according to many folks on TikTok, it was going to be the rapture and we were going to be living in the scenario described by the Left Behind series and also the Bible.
43:57 Speaker 02 Now, what was their theory of why it was going to happen this Tuesday?
44:01 Speaker 01 I'm so glad you asked. It all started when a South African man named Joshua Mleka appeared on a podcast back in June, in which he said he had received a DM from old JC himself, saying that the end of the world would occur on September 23rd or 24th. And I'm going to quote him because I think you'll find this interesting. According to this man, quote, "He," meaning Jesus, "was telling me that by June 2026, the world is gearing up towards the World Cup. But after the rapture of September 2025, the chaos that will be in the world, the destruction and the devastation that will occur with the rapture, there will be no World Cup 2026."
44:46 Speaker 01 I know what you're thinking. I didn't expect there to be a soccer angle with this story. And I didn't expect it either. But that is the nature of the rapture. Now, should we listen to a clip where folks start to discuss this on TikTok?
44:58 Speaker 02 Yes, but why the specific date before we do? Because, you know, he said September there, but he's very specific, September 23rd. So where did that date come from?
45:06 Speaker 01 That date came from Jesus Christ. Any questions? All right. So let's just listen to a clip.
45:14 Speaker 07 Jesus is coming back on the Feast of Trumpets 2025. Here's why.
45:17 Speaker 08 Because when the rapture does happen, when it does happen in the next 24 to 48 hours, September 23rd to the 24th, in a single moment, but it'll happen because it's, um, the world is split into a 24-hour time zone. For most of the world, it'll be on the 23rd. For me, it'll happen on the 24th. But it'll happen in a single moment.
45:39 Speaker 09 I already was convinced, but the Lord just keeps giving little, I don't even want to call them little, these are huge. He keeps giving confirmations every single day. So get ready, guys. We're about to see Jesus face to face.
45:53 Speaker 01 So this starts a trend that becomes so prevalent on the app that it comes to be known as rapture talk, right? You, you open up the search bar on TikTok, all sorts of rapture questions, and people get into the act in big ways. People start alleging that they have sold their cars or given them away. One person posted the lock screen message that she shared. Can we, can we hear the, the lock screen message poster?
46:23 Speaker 10 So I've been doing all this prepping for the people that are left behind, and I want them to not be fooled by what they're going to be told, because we all know that there has to be an explanation for all, you know, billions of people vanishing in the middle of the day or middle of the night, or, you know, depending on your time zone, I guess. So this is what we came up with. We did something, he did it, I didn't do any of it, where he, let me just show you.
46:53 Speaker 01 So now she shows a lock screen message that's basically like, hey, in case you were wondering, we've all been raptured.
46:58 Speaker 10 So the thought is, we put this on our home screen, on our lock screen, and then when someone picks up your phone, they'll see that, and maybe, I don't know, they, it's just more prep, it's just more.
47:15 Speaker 01 Oh yeah, that's how they'll know, not by the fact that billions of people have disappeared. You can see it on the lock screen. Yeah, so this goes nuts on TikTok, and while there are a lot of Christians, who I, you know, think sincerely believe that Tuesday was going to be the big day, they were going to, you know, catch a flight to heaven, there were also people who had a lot of fun with it. Like, for example, there was this person who I think may have hoped that the rapture was going to result in a bonanza of vintage shopping. If we can play a little routiney.
47:46 Speaker 11 Obviously, I believe in the rapture, and the rapture will be occurring tomorrow when all Christians ascend to heaven, and God bless everybody. But more importantly, we're all too worried about the things that we're leaving behind. We're worried about leaving out scriptures for demons that enter our homes and wonder, where did everybody go? We're not worried enough about the demonic clothing collections that we're holding on to. Jesus doesn't have access to eBay. You need to leave demonic clothing outside by midnight. If you want to ascend into heaven, you will not be getting into heaven if you still are in ownership of a fall/winter 1996 Alexander McQueen piece. That is brought over the devil. It is.
48:23 Speaker 01 All right, we can stop that one there.
48:25 Speaker 02 Okay, so I have a question, Casey. I have many questions.
48:28 Speaker 01 Yeah.
48:30 Speaker 02 What is the ratio of people who are sincerely predicting the rapture would happen on September 23rd to the people who are like clowning on those people and making jokes about it?
48:39 Speaker 01 You know, I haven't done a sort of regression analysis on the TikTok results. But I would estimate that more people were sort of laughing about the rapture.
48:54 Speaker 02 I see.
48:54 Speaker 01 Than they were sort of believing that it was really going to happen. But then we get past Tuesday, we get past, you know, well into Wednesday, no rapture has taken place. And so people are, you know, beginning to reckon with the fact that in fact, it's not the end of the world, Kevin, and we have to keep doing this.
49:13 Speaker 02 Yeah.
49:13 Speaker 01 Yeah.
49:14 Speaker 02 So some other questions I have. One are, did this person who originally predicted that the rapture would happen on September 23rd, have they posted since Tuesday?
49:27 Speaker 01 So the person who started all of this, Joshua Malakella, did appear on a live stream in the middle of the week and was sort of asked, hey, it seems like the rapture isn't happening. And he essentially stuck to his guns and said, hey, look, it's still going to happen. So that's basically what we always see in these cases. You know, this is not the first time a false rapture has been predicted. You may remember in 2012, when there was an Aztec prediction that we were about to reach the end of the world. That didn't happen.
50:02 Speaker 02 Yeah.
50:02 Speaker 01 And yeah.
50:03 Speaker 02 I mean, usually what's so interesting about this to me is like, usually when you have these like very specific predictions of the apocalypse or the rapture or what have you, they're kind of like based on some like elaborate numerology, you know, oh, you know. This ancient prophecy foretold that on the fourth day of the 10th month, you know, Moloch would appear and like we've found this buried papyrus script that says this all. This was just literally a guy saying like, Jesus told me the rapture was coming?
50:32 Speaker 01 Yes, but interestingly on TikTok, people did try to apply numerology to the date. So people were saying, well, you know, that date is actually this sort of ancient holiday known as the feast of the trumpet. And this is the year 2025 and the feast of the trumpet takes place exactly 25 days from this. But of course, in the end, it didn't really work out. I'll tell you my sort of hot take about this, Kevin, which is rapture talk is just a platform phenomenon, right? Platforms are always looking to amplify the craziest, wildest stories and rumors. And what could be wilder than the idea that billions of people were about to leave the earth simultaneously, right? And so just through the sheer force of recommendation algorithms, a bunch of people got sent into a tizzy,
51:17 Speaker 01 possibly sold their cars. And once again, we are confronted with the crazy systems that we have built for getting the news.
51:25 Speaker 02 Yes, I mean, I'll throw out an additional hot take on this, which is that I think we are experiencing something of like a religious revival in this country. Obviously I'm joking, like if you look at the, you know, sort of overall trends of like church attendance or whatever, we are still rapidly secularizing as a nation. But I am starting to hear more people than usual, kind of in and around the tech world, sort of talking about God and church and faith. And like Peter Thiel gave a lecture the other night about the Antichrist. And like, it just feels like we are seeing people take some of these ideas more seriously. And I have no idea whether that's connected to rapture talk.
52:09 Speaker 02 But it does feel like there is maybe something, some, some little counterculture that is starting to bubble up where people are, are sort of, you know, getting interested in religion and some of these older religious ideas.
52:20 Speaker 01 Now, Kevin, of course, one explanation for why the rapture didn't happen is that, um, you know, this is essentially just mythology and there is no truth to the idea that one day billions of people are, you know, going to ascend into the sky. But one TikTok user did have an alternate theory that I would like to present in the name of airing all views.
52:40 Speaker 02 Please.
52:40 Speaker 01 So let's just air this one. This one comes to us from TikToker, A Hardcore Angel.
52:46 Speaker 12 Okay, guys, rapture update, September 23rd at 4:53 PM Eastern Time. Jesus did come back, but was very quickly intercepted by ICE.
52:57 Speaker 01 So that would obviously be very unfortunate if true.
53:02 Speaker 01 And that's what's going on on TikTok, Kevin. Jesus H. Christ.
53:07 Speaker 02 I have no notes. Seems like our information economy is working great.
53:13 Speaker 01 Every day we stray further from God's light.
53:14 Speaker 02 It's true.
53:18 Speaker 02 Now, you know, Casey, in the biblical version of the rapture, there are signs. There are things like wars and rumors of wars.
53:29 Speaker 02 We've had some of those. Natural disasters. We had an earthquake in the Bay Area the other day.
53:34 Speaker 01 True.
53:35 Speaker 02 Plagues and pestilence. You were sick last week.
53:38 Speaker 01 Yeah, I had an ear infection.
53:39 Speaker 02 So I'm starting to think maybe I belong on Rapture Talk.
53:43 Speaker 01 I think just with how elegantly you presented that, I think you would crush it on Rapture Talk. Because a lot of these folks, I'll say it, they're not putting together quite that level of rationale to make their cases.
53:55 Speaker 02 All right, well, I'm gonna gather up my vintage clothing and change my lock screen. Get ready to ascend. See you later, loser.
54:05 Speaker 01 By the way, great song about the rapture. Airline to Heaven by Billy Bragg and Wilco, based on a song by Woody Guthrie. So if I was getting raptured, that's what I'd be playing on Spotify.
54:16 Speaker 02 All this is reminding me that like when I was at Christian college many years ago, there was this like viral prank series that would go big on like Christian YouTube, where people would just like trick their friends into thinking that the rapture had happened. So they would like, their friends would like go to the bathroom in a coffee shop. And while they were in the bathroom, like people would just like lay out clothes on the chairs.
54:40 Speaker 02 And leave the coffee shop. And like everyone would be in on it and their friend would come out of the bathroom and just see all these clothes like lying on the thing. And they would just start like melting down. Because like the rapture had happened and they were not in on it.
54:54 Speaker 02 So as bad as Rapture Talk is, I think we may see a revival of even worse kinds of Rapture-related internet content.
55:31 Speaker 00 Support for this podcast comes from Dell Technologies. It's time to put AI to work. Is your business ready? The challenge isn't getting started with AI. It's scaling beyond pilots while maintaining control of your data, governance, infrastructure, and costs. Dell AI Factory provides the integrated foundation you need to scale AI securely and efficiently with one trusted partner, Dell, AI on your terms. From idea to impact. Learn more at dell.com/yourwaytoAI. That's dell.com/yourwaytoAI.
56:05 Speaker 03 AI spend is growing fast, but most businesses still can't see exactly where that money is going. Ramp gives businesses visibility and control across AI providers with realtime guardrails by team and model, helping ensure spend goes to the highest ROI areas. Stop guessing where your AI spend is going. Get started with Ramp. And if you're new to Ramp, you can get $250 off at ramp.com/hardfork. Go to ramp.com/hardfork. Ramp.com/hardfork.
56:37 Speaker 06 Today's AI builders need infrastructure that scales with their ambitions. iRen is a vertically-integrated AI cloud platform, delivering data centers, compute, and software for AI training and inference, underpinned by its expansive portfolio of land and grid-connected power in renewable-rich regions globally. iRen's AI Cloud gives direct access to Nvidia GPUs, scalable from hundreds to thousands. For builders, that means direct access to AI compute, rapid scaling, and predictable pricing. iRen, AI Cloud for the next big thing.
57:12 Speaker 02 Hard Fork is produced by Whitney Jones and Rachel Cohn. We're edited by Jen Poyant. This episode was fact-checked by Will Peichel. Today's show is engineered by Katie McMurran. Original music by Alicia Batyup and Dan Powell. Video production by Sawyer Roque, Pat Gunther, Jake Nickel, and Chris Schott. You can watch this full episode on YouTube at youtube.com/hardfork. Special thanks to Paula Schuman, Qui Wing Tam, Dalia Hadad, and Jeffrey Miranda. You can email us, as always, at [email protected] . Send us your plans for After the Rapture.
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