Financial markets went into a panic last week over an obscure Chinese tech start-up called DeepSeek. The company now threatens to upend the world of artificial intelligence and the race for who will dominate it. Kevin Roose, a tech columnist at The Times, discusses how DeepSeek caught us all off guard.
Yesterday
The ‘Ghost Fleets’ Moving Oil Around the World
Since December, the U.S. has been stopping and seizing oil tankers traveling in and out of Venezuela. They are part of what is known as a ghost fleet — tankers that try to secretly move oil around the world, funding states such as Venezuela, Iran and Russia.Christiaan Triebert, a ... Show More
26m 41s
Jan 25
The Sunday Daily: We Underestimated the Neanderthal
Pop culture has not been kind to the Neanderthal. In books, movies and even TV commercials, the species is portrayed as rough and mindless, a brutish type that was rightly supplanted by our Homo sapiens ancestors.But even 40,000 years after the last Neanderthals walked the earth, ... Show More
32m 1s
Feb 2025
Anthropic’s C.E.O. Dario Amodei on Surviving the A.I. Endgame
<p>This week, Anthropic’s C.E.O., Dario Amodei, returns to the show for a candid, wide-ranging interview. We discuss Anthropic’s brand-new Claude 3.7 Sonnet model, the A.I. arms race against China, and his hopes and fears for this technology over the next two years. Then, we gath ... Show More
1h 7m
Jan 2025
Your Guide to the DeepSeek Freakout: an Emergency Pod
<p>A Chinese firm called DeepSeek managed to upend global markets at the start of the week, to drag down chipmaker Nvidia — and to surge to No. 1 in the iPhone app store, all in basically no time at all.</p><p>Today, in this bonus episode, we talk through the news behind the frea ... Show More
24m 4s
Jan 2025
Goodbye TikTok, Ni Hao RedNote? + A.I.'s Environmental Impact + Meta's Masculine Energy
<p>The deadline for TikTok to sell or to face a ban is fast approaching. We discuss how Supreme Court justices — who opted on Friday to uphold the law — reacted to arguments in the case, whether the Chinese government might allow Elon Musk to buy the app, and why self-proclaimed ... Show More
1h 13m
May 2025
Decolonizing the Future: Karen Hao on Resisting the Empire of AI
In his New York Times review of the book, Columbia Law School professor and former White House official Tim Wu calls journalist Karen Hao’s new book, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI, “a corrective to tech journalism that rarely leaves Silicon Valley.” H ... Show More
44m 32s
Jul 2025
Interesting Times: A Mind-Bending Conversation with Peter Thiel
<p>This week, we’re bringing you a recent interview from “Interesting Times with Ross Douthat,” one of The New York Times’s newest podcasts. In this episode, Ross sits down with Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal and Palantir and one of the most contrarian thinkers in tech. To ... Show More
1h 2m