AI Trade Secret War + Economists Say “We Must Act Now” + HatGPT

Disputes between some of the biggest tech companies have gone public this week. We discuss Apple’s accusation that OpenAI tried to steal secrets about Apple’s hardware business, as well as share our reactions to OpenAI’s new model, Sol, and Anthropic’s decision to expand access to its Fable model.

Then we unpack the loudest warning yet about AI and jobs. We talk to Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist at Stanford, about the statement he helped organize, which urges economists and AI researchers to “act now” to steer AI in a direction that complements humans.

And finally we play a round of HatGPT.

Additional reading

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Credits

“Hard Fork” is hosted by Kevin Roose and Casey Newton and produced by Whitney Jones and Rachel Cohn. This episode was edited by Vjeran Pavic. Engineering by Katie McMurran and original music by Dan Powell, Elisheba Ittoop, Rowan Niemisto and Diane Wong. Fact-checking by Caitlin Love.

Special thanks to Paula Szuchman, Pui-Wing Tam, Brooke Minters, and Dahlia Haddad.