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Hard Fork

The New York Times

Hard Fork

The New York Times

“Hard Fork” is a show about the future that’s already here. Each week, journalists Kevin Roose and Casey Newton explore and make sense of the latest in the rapidly changing world of tech. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

2 DAYS AGO

AI Ready

Hard Fork’s 50 Most Iconic Technologies of 2025

Last year we debuted Hard Fork’s 100 Most Iconic Technologies list, in which we ranked the technologies from across all of history that best define life as we know it. To our surprise, it became one of our most popular episodes ever. So now we’re doing it ...

5 DAYS AGO

AI Ready

The Interview: How Wikipedia Is Responding to the Culture Wars

Last month our colleague Lulu Garcia-Navarro had a conversation with Wikipedia’s co-founder Jimmy Wales about the challenges the site is facing — including by right-wing influencers who claim it is biased and by A.I. chatbots that compete with its content....

Nov 21

AI Ready

We Asked Roblox’s C.E.O. About Child Safety. It Got Tense.

Roblox's popularity has exploded among kids since the pandemic. Today Roblox has more than 150 million daily active users, and functions as one of the primary online gathering places for preteens. But precisely because Roblox is so popular with children, i...

Nov 18

AI Ready

Google's Gemini 3 Is Here: A Special Early Look

Google’s much anticipated new large language model Gemini 3 begins rolling out today. We’ll tell you what we learned from an early product briefing and bring you our conversation with Google executives Demis Hassabis and Josh Woodward, just ahead of the la...

Nov 14

Data Centers in Space + A.I. Policy on the Right + A Gemini History Mystery

This week, we talk about Google’s new plan to build data centers in space. Then, we’re joined by Dean Ball, a former adviser at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Ball worked on the Trump administration’s A.I. Action Plan, and he shar...

Nov 07

We Met NEO, the Viral Humanoid Robot + HatGPT

This week, we’re joined by Bernt Bornich, chief executive of 1X. We talked with him about NEO, his company’s new humanoid robot, which has the internet buzzing. Then we meet NEO itself, and compare notes on the experience. Finally, we close the week with a...

Oct 31

Character.AI’s Teen Chatbot Crackdown + Elon Musk Groks Wikipedia + 48 Hours Without A.I.

This week, Character.AI announced that it would soon be taking its A.I. companions away from teens. We explain why this is a major development in the world of chatbots and child safety and how we expect other companies to respond. Then, Elon Musk has built...

Oct 24

Celebrities Fight Sora + Amazon’s Secret Automation Plans + ChatGPT Gets a Browser

Backlash to OpenAI’s video generation app Sora has reached a new tipping point. We discuss two big changes the company is making, after Bryan Cranston and the family of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. complained about deepfakes. Then, New York Times re...

Oct 17

California Regulates A.I. Companions + OpenAI Investigates Its Critics + The Hard Fork Review of Slop

This week, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California signed a big package of A.I. and social media bills into law — including the first state law in the United States to regulate A.I. companions. We talk through what stood out to us in the package and whether these ...

Oct 10

ChatGPT’s Platform Play + a Trillion-Dollar GPU Empire + the Queen of Slop

This week, we discuss the standout moments from our field trip to OpenAI’s third annual DevDay — including a bizarre chat between Jony Ive and Sam Altman, and the announcement that OpenAI is putting apps into ChatGPT. Then, we try to make sense of the mass...

Oct 03

Sora and the Infinite Slop Feeds + ChatGPT Goes to Therapy + Hot Mess Express

This week, we’re talking about the new A.I.-generated video tools and social media feeds from Google, Meta and OpenAI. Is this how A.I. is going to cure cancer? Then, the psychotherapist Gary Greenberg stops by to discuss his recent New Yorker essay about ...

Sep 26

The Great A.I. Build-Out + H-1B Visa Chaos + TikTok Braces for the Rapture

This week, an eye-popping $100 billion deal between OpenAI and Nvidia — along with an announcement about the construction of five new American data centers — has us re-examining our predictions of an A.I. bubble. Then, we try to make sense of the Trump adm...

Sep 19

Charlie Kirk and Online Rage + Inside Trump’s Chip Flip + This Week in A.I.

This week, we discuss the assassination of Charlie Kirk, freedom of speech and the terrifying new reality of extremely online violence. Then The Times’s David Yaffe-Bellany brings us inside the blockbuster New York Times investigation into a $2 billion inv...

Sep 12

Are We Past Peak iPhone? + Eliezer Yudkowsky on A.I. Doom

Apple’s yearly iPhone event took place this week, and it left us asking, Is Apple losing the juice? We break down all the new products the company announced and discuss where it goes from here. Then, Eliezer Yudkowsky, one of the most fascinating people in...

Sep 05

AI Ready

A.I. School Is in Session: Two Takes on the Future of Education

This week, we check in on the state of artificial intelligence in education. We talk with a co-founder of Alpha Schools, MacKenzie Price, about how her private K-12 schools are using A.I. to generate personalized lesson plans and enabling teachers to spend...

Aug 29

Intel’s New Deal + Waymo C.E.O. Tekedra Mawakana on Scaling Driverless Cars + Trumps in Tech

President Trump announced this week that the U.S. government, in a highly unusual deal, had agreed to take a 10 percent stake in the chip maker Intel, and that he was considering similar investments in other companies. We discuss why Trump cares so much ab...

Aug 22

AI Ready

Is This an A.I. Bubble? + Meta’s Missing Morals + TikTok Shock Slop

Note: This episode contains sexually explicit music. This week, the whole tech world seemed to be asking: Are we in an A.I. bubble? We’ll explore the cases for and against, including who we think stands to lose most. Then we’re joined by the journalist Je...

Aug 15

GPT-5 Backlash + Perplexity C.E.O. Aravind Srinivas on the Browser Wars + Hot Mess Express

OpenAI spent the week responding to outcry from users who miss the behavior of the old ChatGPT, before the latest flagship model was released. We discuss the criticism, why it caught the company by surprise and what it indicates about the deepening emotio...

Aug 08

AI Ready

GPT-5 Arrives, and We Try the New Alexa+

This week, OpenAI released its much-anticipated flagship model, GPT-5. We break down what we know about the upgrade, drawing from our initial testing and a special news briefing with Sam Altman. Then, we explain why we were underwhelmed by Amazon’s new Ale...

Aug 01

Age-Gating the Internet + Cloudflare Takes On A.I. Scrapers + HatGPT

This week, we look at the fallout from a sweeping internet age-verification law that went into effect in Britain. We explain why age restrictions are suddenly popping up all over the internet — and how some might create more problems than they solve. Then ...