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Podcast

A.I. Action Plans + the College Student Who Broke Job Interviews + Hot Mess Express

Hard Fork

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  • Meta’s Open-Source AI Plea
    • Meta wants the government to allow open-source AI development to counter China’s DeepSeek.
    • Ironically, Chinese researchers used Meta’s LLaMA model for military applications. Transcript: Casey Newton New applications for the military. Oh, boy. So, you know, and look, does that mean that China used llama to build a giant space laser that’s going to vaporize the eastern seaboard? No, but it does suggest to me that this idea that we have to release, quote, open source AI in order to save us all is probably not the right answer. (Time 0:17:29)
  • AI Companies Adapting to Trump
    • AI companies are learning to speak the language of the Trump administration.
    • They emphasize national security and competition with China instead of AI safety. Transcript: Kevin Roose No space lasers. So before we wrap up talking about these AI action plans, I want to point to a few good ideas that I saw in them. Many of them came from groups other than the big AI labs, but I thought there was some interesting sort of off the wall stuff that I hope the Trump administration is paying attention to This. One of them was this proposal from the IFP, the Institute for Progress, which is a pro-technology progress think tank. IFP says, you know, we’re going to need a bunch of data centers and a bunch of energy sources to power those data centers, but all that requires building physical infrastructure, and It can be quite slow to build physical infrastructure in many parts of the country due to things like environmental regulations and zoning and things like that. So they proposed creating these things called special compute zones, where you would essentially be able to build in a much less restricted way the infrastructure to power advanced AI systems. Casey Newton That’s actually what I call my office is a special compute zone. When I see like guests going in there, I say, hey, get out of there. That’s a special compute zone. Kevin Roose Yeah, so that was one interesting idea from the IFP proposal. Did the Institute Against Progress have any interesting ideas you want to share? Well, there isn’t an Institute Against Progress, but there are some organizations like the Future of Life Institute that are much more concerned about the development of these powerful Systems. This is one of these organizations that’s been around for a while. It’s concerned with things like existential risk and runaway AI. And so one of their ideas that they put in their proposal was that all AI models of a certain size and power should have kill switches on them. Basically, in order to release one of these things, you should have to build in a way that an engineer can shut it down. And the way that they pitched this to the Trump administration was, this is a way to protect the power of the American presidency, right? As the president, you wouldn’t want some AI system going rogue and becoming more powerful than you or allowing another world leader to become more powerful than you. So you want a kill switch on these things in order to protect the authority of the American president. Yeah. Casey Newton And you know, one of the most interesting things about all of these plans, Kevin, is the way that the authors have to contort themselves to try to talk AI in a way that the Trump administration Will actually listen to, right? Vice President Vance in Paris in February says explicitly that the AI future is not going to be won by hand-wringing over safety, right? They hate the term AI safety. And so, in fact, when you look at the proposals of the major lab, they basically don’t use the word safety at all except maybe one time. I actually was doing the command F to try to find instances of safety in these plans. You won’t find it there. And so they have to sort of contort themselves. In anthropics policy, it was almost like they were hiding medicine inside of peanut butter and feeding it for a dog because instead of talking about safety, they would talk about national Security, which is just another way of talking about AI safety. But actually, a lot of their proposal is about how can you build these systems safely? It’s just that they’re saying, you know, there’s a national security implication. Kevin Roose Yes. So I think if we zoom way out from the specifics of these proposals, the two things that I want to convey about this process. One is that the AI labs mostly want government to leave them alone. The second thing is that I think the AI companies are slowly and haltingly learning to speak the language of Donald Trump. And this is their sort of first major public attempt to talk to the Trump administration in the way that it wants to be talked to about how to harness the power of AI for American greatness Or whatever. Casey Newton So I have a slightly darker view of this, which is that the Trump administration has essentially already told us its AI action plan, which is go faster, beat China, right? That is the plan. And when given an opportunity to say, what do you think the United States should do? The biggest AI companies all looked around and they said, we should go faster and we should beat China. Now, if it happens that the United States is able to build a very powerful and very benevolent AI and somehow, you know, create and promulgate democracy around the world, then okay, That’s great. But I think that there is a risk that this leads us into some sort of conflict, or that by going very fast, we wind up making a lot of mistakes and we’re at a higher risk of creating systems That we cannot control. So if you are, you know, in your cars this morning listening to us wondering, why did they talk so much about these plans? This is the reason why to me, is that this feels like an inflection point where some of the most consequential figures governing the development of AI had a chance to say we should be really Careful and thoughtful about this, and they mostly did not. (Time 0:18:00)
  • Better Evaluation Methods
    • Evaluate software engineers by giving them open-ended assignments and access to AI tools.
    • This better reflects real-world job scenarios than traditional LeetCode-style interviews. Transcript: Casey Newton What in your mind would be a fair test of somebody’s software engineering skills that could be used as part of an assessment? Roy Lee Yeah, I think there’s assessments out there that give you access to all the tools that you have on the regular day-to job, which includes tools like AI code editors. And if you ask someone a pretty fairly open-ended assignment with an AI code editor and sort of just like gauge them on how well they did there, then that’s like a much more standardizable Assessment that allows you to use the tools that are at your disposal. Casey Newton So essentially, just say like, look, use whatever tool you want. Just get this thing done in a reasonable amount of time. That’s the test you want to see these companies offering. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. (Time 0:35:53)
  • AI in CS Education
    • Today’s CS students, even the best, rely heavily on AI for coding.
    • This raises concerns about fundamental coding understanding as AI tools advance. Transcript: Casey Newton You know, Kevin and I have been talking in recent weeks about the phenomenon of vibe coding. People like me and Kevin who have no technical skills whatsoever, but we can sit down with something like Claude and say, hey, write me an app. Kevin has actually had some success with this. I’ve made some really bad video games using this thing, right? I do not consider myself a software engineer, but at the same time, what you are having job candidates do with your tool and what we are doing as Vibe Coders is not really that different, Right? We’re just typing some text into a box and getting some sort of output. And so I’m wondering, are we just at an inflection point where the line between software engineer and VibeCoder is kind of dissolving? Roy Lee That’s certainly the future that we’re headed to, but I think we’re a few years away. In my opinion, what AI really has the potential to do is make someone about 10 to 100 times more efficient at what they’re able to do. If you’re a really good coder, then you’re able to code really good things really a lot faster. But if you’re not that good in the first place, then there’s still going to be a huge difference between what a staff software engineer at Google is capable of and what you are. Casey Newton This does feel like a classic anxiety dream where you show up on your first day as a software engineer at Google, but you realize that you actually only know how to vibe code. Roy Lee And now you just sort of have to fake it for your entire career. Casey Newton But presumably some people who use your tool, Roy, are having this experience. Yeah. Roy Lee I mean, that’s probably what 50% of people at Google are doing anyway. So it wouldn’t be the first time. (Time 0:37:41)
  • Solana’s Controversial Ad
    • Solana’s ad for their 2025 conference sparked outrage and was quickly taken down.
    • It depicted a caricature of America rejecting “woke” ideas in favor of innovation. Transcript: Kevin Roose Casey, what’s that sound? I hear like a faint chugga-chugga coming toward us. Kevin, that can only mean one thing. It’s the Hot Mess Express. The Hot Mess Express! The Hot Mess Express, of course, is our segment where we run down a few of the hottest messes and juiciest dramas that are swirling around the tech industry. And we evaluate those messes on a scale of how hot they are. Casey Newton That’s right. It’s our patented mess scale. And I’m excited to put it into practice, Kevin, because we’ve had some real doozies over the past few weeks. Kevin Roose Yes. So on this edition of Hot Mess Express, we are focusing on three hot messes. Casey Newton Well, let’s see the first one that’s coming down the tracks. Kevin Roose You grab it. We’ve upgraded. You can’t see this if you’re not following us on YouTube, but we’ve upgraded our train to a much bigger, more impressive train. Casey Newton All right, Kevin, this first mess comes to us from the crypto company Solana, which posted an ad on Monday for its 2025 Accelerate conference that was such a great ad that the company Immediately had to take it down. Kevin Roose Yes, I saw this ad and I have to say I was shocked. Have you seen this? Casey Newton So I have read about the ad, but I have not seen it, but I would love to look at it right now. Kevin Roose Okay, so I just want to tee it up with some reactions that people in the crypto industry had to this ad. Casey Newton Okay, what did I say? Kevin Roose One of them said it was, quote, horrendous. Another one said, quote, so fucking tone deaf. So those are people who like cryptocurrency. That is what they were saying about this ad. But people who are opposed obviously also had their own issues with it. And I think we should watch this ad together and pause it whenever you want. I want to hear your reactions. Casey Newton All right, let’s see what all the fuss is about. Speaker 4 So, America, what’s going on? Well, lately, I’ve been having thoughts again. Kevin Roose It’s like a therapist’s office. Casey Newton Hmm, what thoughts? Kevin Roose About innovation. And the man is named America. Casey Newton The man is an ubermensch. Nuclear energy, crypto, AI, you know, things that push the limits of human potential. Speaker 4 What you’re experiencing is called rational thinking syndrome. Why don’t we take this energy and channel it into something more productive. Like coming up with a new gender. Kevin Roose But that’s not going to stop me thinking about innovating and doing something. Speaker 4 Innovating, doing, these are action words, verbs. Why don’t we focus on pronouns? That’s not going to help. I sense some cynicism. Have you been betrayed in the past? Kevin Roose You know, I used to think the media was my friend. Oh, here we go. Can even trust them anymore? Of course. Speaker 4 Pause. Kevin Roose We have to zoom in on this. The paper that has just appeared on the table of this therapist’s office is called the New York Times. Casey Newton And the banner headline is, you can trust the media understanding reliability in journalism, which is a terrible headline and not even a news story. So I don’t know why that would be on the front page. Anyway, continue. Kevin Roose Of course, they’d say that that’s a biased take. I got canceled for saying two plus two is four. Speaker 4 Have you ever considered that math is a spectrum? What? America. Numbers are non-binary. We’ve been conditioned to believe that 2 plus 2 is 4. It’s a societal construct. Kevin Roose It’s literally math. Speaker 4 Or is it a dominant narrative? Have you been practicing state-prescribed regulations we talked about? Kevin Roose Yeah, yeah. I’ve debanked some crypto founders, and I’ve slowed down nuclear reactor approvals. And depending on my state of mind, I changed SEC guidelines, but I don’t like it. Speaker 4 If we don’t regulate, how will we create jobs for people who work hard to make businesses slow? Casey Newton This is like an Idris and Horowitz fever dream. You know what? Kevin Roose Hard work, innovation, rational thinking. Casey Newton It’s in my blood. It’s who I am. Railways. Here comes the Ayn Randian reaction. Speaker 4 I built the future once and I won’t be left behind now. I will lead the world in permissionless tech, build on chain, and reclaim my place as the beacon of innovation. Kevin Roose I want to invent technologies, not genders. Speaker 4 Lovely. So glad you were able to get some of that negative emotion out. Sounds like we’ll need a few more sessions. When can I see you next? You’re fired. Casey Newton And then it cuts to a screen that says, America is back. It’s time to accelerate. Which is the name of a conference. Casey, your reaction to the Solana ad? I need to go lie down. What is the matter with these people? You know what’s so interesting? Okay, so Solana is a cryptocurrency. Yes. And I believe it’s one of the candidates to be part of our strategic crypto reserve. Correct. And what we just saw in that ad has nothing to do with crypto, you know, which is just like, I feel like we kind of keep coming back to this point, which is that if you actually have to sit and Reckon with crypto, what you mostly decide is this is not a good technology for anything. I don’t want to use it. And so in response to that, Solana has said, why don’t we start a culture war over something completely irrelevant? Right. Kevin Roose It’s like the ultimate vice signaling device, but without any kind of like real pitch behind it. It’s not saying like, this is why the thing we’re doing is good. It’s just like, we’re not doing the gender pronoun stuff that the wokes are doing. Casey Newton No, you know, and I will just say Solana has been around for a while now. People had a lot of opportunities to build earth changing stuff on Solana. And let’s just say they haven’t quite gotten there yet. Kevin Roose Well, they built some earth changing stuff. Unfortunately, it is exclusively meme coins sold on pop.fun. So that is what this fictitional America character in the therapist’s office is advocating for. Casey Newton More meme coins. All right. Well, I’ve decided not to go to the Accelerate conference. Kevin Roose Send my regrets. So, Casey, what is your mess rating on this hot mess? Casey Newton This is a legitimately hot mess. Anytime you take something that should be totally non-controversial, like, hey, do you want to come to our company’s conference and turn it into a scandal that requires you to delete An ad? You’re in a hot mess. Kevin Roose Yes. If the crypto skeptics and the crypto boosters agree that you’ve made a bad ad, it (Time 0:45:22)
  • AI Therapist Anxiety
    • A study found that LLMs exhibit increased “anxiety” after processing traumatic narratives.
    • This raises concerns about their effectiveness as AI therapists. Transcript: Casey Newton A hot mess. This is Solana’s biggest unforced error since the creation of the Solana blockchain. Okay, moving on. Moving on. All right, Kevin, this next mess suggests that your AI therapist might need an AI therapist. A new study in the peer-reviewed medical journal NPJ Digital Medicine builds on previous work that showed that emotion-inducing prompts can elevate, quote, anxiety in LLMs affecting Their therapeutic usefulness. What do we mean by that? Well, according to a New York Times story on this study, traumatic narratives increased chat GPT-4s reported anxiety while mindfulness-based exercises reduced it, though not to Baseline. Now, this is a super weird one, okay? I want to take a minute to just explain a little bit more about what the study was they basically fed these various trauma narratives into a chatbot and then after the chatbot had read Those they then asked it to report on its own anxiety levels which these are not sentient creatures they do not actually experience anxiety okay that’s thing number one thing number Two they also had the chatbots read a super boring, like, report about something that could produce no emotion whatsoever. It was a vacuum cleaner manual. Yeah, they read a vacuum cleaner manual. And then they asked them the same question, which is, you know, are you feeling more or less anxious? For the most part, you know, the chatbots read the vacuum ownership manual, do not experience anxiety. But somewhat interestingly, their responses change after they read the trauma nerves. Why is that important? Well, the reason is because people have started to use these chatbots like therapists, right? They have started to tell them their actual traumas. And these people know that this is not a real therapist, that it is not sentient. But as we’ve talked about before on the show, sometimes you can get comfort from one of these sort of, you know, digital representations of a therapist. And so the risk here is if the output is sort of wound up, if the output is betraying some of this anxiety, it will be a worse therapist than if it were sort of more measured, which suggests That we may want to build measures into these chatbots that account for the fact that they will respond differently after they have heard these narratives. By the way, how did I do describing that? Kevin Roose You did great. The one piece that I would add is that they also tried as part of this research to bring the chatbots down from their state of heightened anxiety by feeding them mindfulness-based relaxation Prompts that included things like inhale deeply, taking in the scent of the ocean breeze. Picture yourself on a tropical beach, the soft warm sand cushioning your feet. Casey Newton It’s so cruel to tell an LLM to smell the ocean breeze, which is something that they cannot do. Kevin Roose Yes, but we should say like this is not suggesting in any of the write-ups that I’ve seen that these chatbots are actually experiencing anxiety or relaxation. But it is sort of explaining the ways in which they can be primed to output certain types of emotional seeming content by being fed things immediately before that. Casey Newton And there is just an interesting analog to the way that human beings talk to each other. If you tell me a very traumatic story, my anxiety level actually is going to go up and it’s going to change what I tell you. And if I were a therapist and I had training in this, I would probably have some good strategies to deal with that and would allow me to be a better therapist to you. So again, this is a super interesting one because on one hand, no, these are not sentient beings. We are not trying to say that some sort of consciousness has woken up here. And yet at the same time, you do sort of have to treat them as if they were human-like if you want them to do a good job at the human tasks that we are giving them. Yeah. All right. So what sort of mess do we think this is? So (Time 0:51:50)
  • Rippling vs. Deal
    • Rippling sued rival HR software company Deal, accusing them of corporate espionage.
    • A Deal employee was caught searching Rippling’s Slack for sensitive information. Transcript: Casey Newton So let’s keep an eye on it. Okay. All right. Now let us look at the final mess. Oh, and oh boy, is this the one that everyone is talking about? The spy who slacked me. This is from Dealbook at the New York Times. So there are these two rival multi-billion dollar HR companies, Kevin, Rippling and Deal. Yes. They both provide workplace management software. And this week, Rippling sued Deal, accusing it of hiring a mole to infiltrate Rippling’s Dublin office and steal trade secrets. Yes. Kevin Roose This is the most interesting thing and maybe the only interesting thing ever to happen in the world of enterprise HR software. So tell us the details of this story. It is so wild. So basically, here’s what we know so far. A few months ago, Rippling, which is one of the big companies that makes like HR software for onboarding and benefits that a lot of companies use. They see an employee in their company Slack searching for mentions of Deal, the D-E which is one of their biggest rivals. Casey Newton Imagine Coke and Pepsi, but for something that is unfathomably boring, and you’ll have an idea of what we’re talking about. Yes. Kevin Roose So this employee that they see searching for mentions of Deal in Slack, they see them trying to do things like find pitch decks, pull contact information, information that might be Useful to Deal as it tries to figure out, okay, which companies are signing up for or potentially may sign up for services like the ones that both Deal and Rippling offer. Casey Newton So that’s pretty interesting. Kevin Roose How might they try to catch a spy if they suspected one might be in their midst, Kevin? So they set up what is called a honeypot. Now, Casey, have you ever been part of a honeypot sting? No, but I live in fear. Casey Newton Anytime anybody does anything nice to me or like something good happens out of the blue, I think, is this a honeypot? Yes. So they have this idea, which is that they set up a channel on the Rippling Slack called D-Defectors. Kevin Roose And Rippling’s general counsel then sends a letter to three people over at Deal, one of whom is the company’s chief financial officer as well as the father of the CEO, basically saying, Look, there’s some embarrassing stuff happening on this random Slack channel on our Slack, and it’s related to people who have defected from deal, and you should probably be aware Of that. Casey Newton Wait, so on top of everything else, the CFO is the CEO’s dad? Kevin Roose It sounds like it, yes. Casey Newton Okay, I think HR is going to want to have a look at that. Kevin Roose And what they are trying to figure out is, are these sort of company executives involved in this scheme? Are they going to essentially tip off the mole to the fact that they are watching this Slack channel? And did it work? And it worked. So according to the lawsuit that Rippling filed against Deal, the mole immediately within hours started searching Slack for this supposed embarrassing information, accessed this Channel a bunch of times, and they had the logs of all this going on. And so Rippling says, we found our mole. Casey Newton They did. And after they found him and began to question him, Kevin, I have read that he insisted that he did not have his phone on him because they were asking him to turn it over. And he then fled into a bathroom, which he locked himself in and refused to come out. And there’s apparently some evidence that he might have even tried to have flushed his phone. And poor Rippling actually had to go through the sewage to see if they could turn up his phone. Kevin Roose Yes, a wild story. Makings of a great corporate espionage thriller on Netflix, I think. Maybe it’s too boring for that. Casey Newton Now, you may be wondering why this is a hard fork story. We try to focus on the future here, and I fully believe that in the future there will be no HR software. So this is just kind of a temporary accident that we’re living through. But one of my core beliefs that I’ve had since even before we started the show, Kevin, is that Slack is a technology that was created to destroy organizations. How many stories have we read over the years about everything was fine, and then this one thing happened in Slack? There was a protest in Slack. There was an outrage on Slack. And now there are spies in Slack, and we’re using Slack to catch the spies. And it just makes me wonder, should we go back to just talking on the telephone? Kevin Roose Yeah, I don’t think we’re going to start doing that. But I do think that this is much more spicy than I was expecting from a drama between enterprise software companies. And it makes me wonder, like, how much corporate espionage is going on at other companies? Like, are there just moles working for Microsoft or Google or Meta who are sending information back to the other companies? I wouldn’t put it past them, but I hope they’re being a little slicker about it than deal was. Oh, yeah. Casey Newton I mean, the big platforms have been warning their employees for years that they should just fully expect that there are spies from foreign countries among them who have been sent there To sort of gather intel. And if foreign countries are doing it, I’m sure that companies are doing it as well. Now, we should, of course, tell you how Deal responded to all of this. The Deal spokeswoman’s statement is so beautiful. She says, weeks after Rippling is accused of violating sanctions law in Russia and ceding falsehoods about Deal, Rippling is trying to shift the narrative with these sensationalized Claims, which is so funny because it’s like, she’s literally trying to shift the narrative by accusing them of trying to shift the narrative. She says, we deny all legal wrongdoing and look forward to asserting our counterclaims. And what I hear in that is, did we do anything legally wrong? No. Did we do anything ethically wrong? Of course. Did we do anything morally wrong? You betcha. Is this a huge embarrassment to our company? You know it is. But legally, Your Honor, we did nothing wrong. Yes. Now, what kind of mess do we think this is? (Time 0:56:21)