Channels with Peter Kafka

Sam Altman has spent years presenting himself as the face of AI: The guy warning that the technology could change everything, and the guy insisting that he should be the one to build it. Now we are facing some overdue questions: Can we trust Sam Altman with the massive power AI may generate? And should we trust anyone with that power?

Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz join me to talk about their New Yorker profile of the OpenAI CEO, the internal fights around OpenAI’s mission, and why so many people who’ve worked with Altman keep coming back to the same concerns about trust.

We talk about Altman’s talent for telling different audiences different things; why Silicon Valley’s usual tolerance for founder myth-making looks different when the product is AI; and how OpenAI went from warning about dangerous race dynamics to helping kick one off with ChatGPT.

Then we broaden out: if the real problem is structural, not just personal, what kind of oversight should exist for the people building a technology they say could reshape all of our lives?

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Jonathan Glatzer has written for shows like Succession and Better Call Saul. Now he’s got his own: The Audacity, a new AMC drama set in Silicon Valley.So why make a Silicon Valley show right now — and what, exactly, is he trying to say about tech?

Glatzer tells me he wasn’t interested in making a wall-to-wall “tech show,” or in doing spot-the-billionaire satire. Instead, he says, he wanted to focus on the people living inside that world: the strivers, service providers, almost-rich neighbors, therapists, and families orbiting vast amounts of money and power.

We talk about why privacy and data collection still worry him more than AI hype; why he thinks tech has failed to deliver on many of its biggest promises; and why he’s more interested in the human consequences of Silicon Valley than in explaining how the industry works.

Plus: what it means to make a prestige-style TV drama in a post-Peak TV market, why AMC was willing to take a swing on this one, and how you fake Silicon Valley by shooting in Vancouver.
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Elon Musk has spent the last year being quieter than usual — by Elon Musk standards.That may be about to change in a very big way, as his SpaceX moves toward what could be one of the biggest IPOs in history. So what, exactly, is Musk selling? A rocket company? A satellite internet giant? An AI play? Or just the latest, biggest version of Elon himself?Bloomberg’s Max Chafkin, who has been tracking Musk for a couple of decades, joins me to walk through what Musk has actually been up to lately. We talk about what SpaceX is now that it includes multiple businesses under one roof; why Musk might want to take it public after years of insisting he didn’t; and how much of the pitch is grounded in real operating businesses — rockets! Satellite internet! — versus the familiar promise of something much vaguer and hard to assess.Then we broaden out: Tesla’s drift from car company to AI-and-robotics story, whether X is still a business or simply a political and cultural weapon, and what changed after Musk’s break with Trump. The bigger question underneath all of it: has Musk built a coherent empire — or just a very effective machine for turning hype, power, and celebrity into capital?
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Prediction markets are suddenly everywhere: in sports, in politics, in the media business — and, depending on who you ask, they’re either a useful forecasting tool or just gambling with better branding. So what changed? And why is the federal government sounding more like a booster than a regulator?

WIRED’s Kate Knibbs joins me to explain why she made prediction markets her beat, how Kalshi and Polymarket went mainstream, why Trump-world is so friendly to them, why some states are trying to stop them, and what happens when more and more of public life gets turned into a bet. We also talk about media companies cutting deals with prediction-market firms, the blurry rules around insider trading, and why this story is really about the casino-fication of everything.
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Lots of publishers are freaked out about “Google Zero” — the notion that one day, Google will stop sending them any traffic at all.

That’s more or less already happened at People Inc., says CEO Neil Vogel. Vogel says Google used to account for 70% of his properties’ traffic, but dropped off quickly in the last couple years. Now Google represents about 25% of his mix.

That decline is supposed to be an existential problem for people like Vogel, who built a series of sites designed to harvest search traffic. Instead, he’s growing at a double-digit clip.

One reason People Inc. is doing well is that Vogel, backed by Barry Diller’s IAC, bought People, along with all the other titles owned by magazine publisher Meredith back in 2021. Turns out many of those brands still mean something to lots of people.

Meanwhile, Vogel has been happy to sign deals with AI companies like OpenAI. Isn’t there a chance those companies will end up being unreliable partners, just like platforms of the past? Sure, Vogel says. But he’s willing to take the chance — and the money those AI companies are providing — and figure it out as he goes.

“There is a chance we are a hundred percent wrong on all of this,” he tells me. “There's a chance that we're a hundred percent right. The truth is probably somewhere in between.”
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