The A.I. Trade Secrets War + Economists Say ‘We Must Act Now’ + HatGPT

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Introducing The Problem Solvers, a new series from Anthropic about the startup founders who are going further with Claude, like Max Unistrand, co-founder and CEO at Lagora, a collaborative AI workspace for lawyers.

**Max Unistrand** (0:11)
Our system gets better with every new model released, and we certainly saw this when we started embedding more and more of the Anthropic models into Lagora. This exchange of ideas, what's working, what's not working, where do we need to push further, that has been incredible.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:27)
Watch the series at cloud.com/problemsolvers.

**Kevin Roose** (0:32)
Well, Casey, I had a very confusing experience this week because I ordered a new ice cream scoop. This ice cream scoop is the one I have used for many years, but one of the drawbacks about it is if you put it in the dishwasher, it gets totally ruined.
So put it in the dishwasher.

**Casey Newton** (0:49)
Major design flaw for an ice cream scoop, a device that is going to want to be washed at regular intervals.

**Kevin Roose** (0:54)
Yes, you have to hand wash this thing. So I get a new one. It comes in a box, and there's a little sticker on the ice cream scoop that says, this product contains AI.

**Casey Newton** (1:05)
Oh no. Not artificial ice cream.

**Kevin Roose** (1:10)
I'm thinking, what?
I have been using this same ice cream scoop for 10 years, and all of a sudden, it is upgraded to AI. Like, what is the AI.? I did not order this. Like, is it connecting to, you know, to Chachi BT., to like, tell it what flavor ice cream I'm doing? What is going on here?

**Casey Newton** (1:27)
I really am bracing myself, because the number of things in my life that used to be very simple and now require something called a firmware update is out of control. And so if my ice cream scoop needed a firmware update, I'd be very upset.

**Kevin Roose** (1:37)
It also like doesn't ship with a charger or anything. It doesn't have any ports on it. So I'm like, how the hell does this ice cream scoop have AI.? And I stare at this just like bewildered for like five minutes. And then I realize it's talking about aluminum. It's using the chemical symbol for aluminum. This product contains AL. And then I felt stupid.
I'm Kevin Roose, a tech columnist at The New York Times.

**Casey Newton** (2:09)
I'm Casey Newton from Platformer.

**Kevin Roose** (2:10)
And this is Hard Fork.

**Casey Newton** (2:11)
This week, Open AI has a great new model and a big new legal problem. Then Stanford economist Erik Brynjolfsson is here to discuss a new warning from hundreds of economists and researchers about the growing risk of AI job loss. And finally, some Hatch EBT starring Lorde. You can remember the green light.

**Kevin Roose** (2:29)
Is that a Lorde joke?

**Casey Newton** (2:30)
Kevin, would you listen to one gay pop song?

**Kevin Roose** (2:42)
Well, Casey, a lot is happening in AI this week. Specifically, I feel like it's been a very big Open AI news week.

**Casey Newton** (2:48)
Yeah, and I feel like it's actually been a minute since we checked in on them. And so I was glad that there was such a series of events that I felt like, okay, yeah, we can actually return to this company now.

**Kevin Roose** (2:58)
So before we do this, of course we should make our AI disclosures. I work for The New York Times, which is suing Open AI along with Microsoft and Perplexity.

**Casey Newton** (3:04)
And my fiance works in Anthropic.

**Kevin Roose** (3:06)
So let's just get a few things ticked off here. The first thing was a personnel shift. Fiji Simo, the former CEO of Applications, I believe was her title at Open AI.

**Casey Newton** (3:17)
That was her initial title. It was later changed to CEO of AGI Deployment.

**Kevin Roose** (3:22)
Okay. So she is leaving the company. She was on an extended medical leave due to some health problems she had had. She is now officially sort of stepping back from that role, and her roles will be divided up among other executives. Casey, what did you make of this?

**Casey Newton** (3:35)
I mean, very sad story. Obviously, anytime somebody has to leave a job for reasons other than they wanted to, it is sad. Simo was there for less than a year, and I think was able to accomplish some of what she wanted, and did play a role in pushing the company to streamline some of its offerings and cut back on some of the projects that in my view were distractions, such as the Sora AI video generator. But I think she had much bigger ambitions there that she didn't get to realize.