The episode explores how generative AI has rapidly shifted from vague tech hype to practical, widely used tools that can create new text, images, audio, and soon video, with the hosts sharing real examples from journalism, design, filmmaking, and programming. It opens with a demonstration of AI-cloned podcast voices to underscore both the creative potential and the risks of synthetic media. The conversation then focuses on Stability AI and its open-source model Stable Diffusion, including why its CEO Imad/Ahmad Mostaque believes broad access and community oversight are preferable to tightly controlled systems run by big tech. Alongside the excitement and investment boom, they dig into hard questions about misuse (deepfakes, harassment, violent imagery), responsibility and regulation, and p...

The episode surveys a fast-moving week in AI, including Snapchat’s new MyAI chatbot and Meta’s renewed push into generative AI, with the hosts debating safety, teen mental health, and how AI could flood social platforms with synthetic content that’s harder to moderate and further shifts feeds away from friends and family. They also discuss reports that Elon Musk may launch an “anti-woke” alternative to ChatGPT, using it as a lens on how AI systems’ guardrails and political perspectives could splinter into competing models. New York Times reporter David Yaffe-Bellany then updates the FTX case, detailing added charges, guilty pleas from key insiders, efforts to claw back missing funds, and how regulators’ tougher stance—especially the SEC’s view of most tokens as securities—could reshape or ...