The Future of Addictive Design + Going Deep at DeepMind + HatGPT
4/3/20261 hr 9 min
Last week, two separate juries held social media companies liable for harming young users. We unpack what these landmark decisions mean — not only for the future of social platforms like Meta and YouTube, but also for A.I. chatbots. Then, Sebastian Mallaby, the author of “The Infinity Machine,” joins us to talk about the three years he spent with Demis Hassabis and those closest to Google DeepMind. And finally, we catch up on some of our favorite tech headlines from the week with a round of HatGPT.
Guest:
- Sebastian Mallaby, author of “The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind and the Quest for Superintelligence.”
Additional Reading:
- Juries Take the Lead in the Push for Child Online Safety
- An A.I. Agent Was Banned From Creating Wikipedia Articles, Then Wrote Angry Blogs About Being Banned
- I Met Olaf — the Frozen Robot who Might be the Future of Disney Parks
- Claude’s Code: Anthropic Leaks Source Code for A.I. Software Engineering Tool
- What’s With All the A.I. Videos of Cheating Fruit?
- This Company Is Secretly Turning Your Zoom Meetings into A.I. Podcasts
- North Korean Hackers Suspected in Axios Software Tool Breach
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First 90 secondsSpeaker 00:00
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Casey Newton· Host0:29
Now, here was a really interesting situation, Kevin. Did you see, uh, this robotaxi outage that left passengers stranded on highways in China?
Kevin Roose· Host0:38
No.
Casey Newton· Host0:38
So this happened in Wuhan, uh, recently, and- I've heard of that place before.
Kevin Roose· Host0:44
Did they do anything else?
Casey Newton· Host0:45
Um, it's not clear to me. [laughs] I'm not really familiar with their game. [laughs] But, uh, apparently there was some sort of technical glitch that caused a number of robotaxis owned by the Chinese tech giant Baidu to freeze- Wow ... trapping some passengers in their vehicles for more than an hour. And I just thought, "My gosh, what a nightmare." Just imagine, you're in your robotaxi on the way to a wet market in Wuhan. [laughs] You, you have an appointment with a pangolin who's gonna cough on you- Yeah [laughs] ... to see if they can transmit anything to you, and then your robotaxi gets stuck.
Kevin Roose· Host1:14
Horrible.
Casey Newton· Host1:14
It's a nightmare.
Kevin Roose· Host1:15
Yeah.
Casey Newton· Host1:15
It's an absolute nightmare. So- Well, I think that robotaxi outage is definitely the worst thing that's ever come out of Wuhan. Yeah. W- when, when it comes to these Baidu robotaxis, my advice? Buy don't.
Kevin Roose· Host1:26
Oh, boy. No, that was the worst thing to come out