WIRED Roundup: Grokipedia, Real Estate AI Videos, Alpha School

0:00Brian Barrett:Every company says AI will make employees more productive, but most employees are still stuck waiting on IT. Waiting for app access, waiting for password resets, waiting for someone to fix a laptop issue so they can get back to work. That operational drag adds up fast, and IT teams are overwhelmed trying to keep up. Serval was built to automate that work. You describe what you want automated in plain English, and Serval builds it for you. No complicated workflow builders, no consultants, just faster support and fewer tickets slowing everyone down. Serval enables IT teams to build automations using plain English instead of drag-and-drop workflow builders.

0:34Brian Barrett:The platform is designed to eliminate repetitive tickets so IT can focus on strategic work instead of constant firefighting. Serval positions IT as the AI-powered operational backbone of the company, not just a support function. The company guarantees customers can automate 50 % of IT tickets and backs it up with a free 4-week pilot. Learn more or start a free 4-week pilot at serval.com slash uncanny. That's S-E-R-V-A-L dot com slash uncanny. Serval dot com slash uncanny. This show is supported by OutShift, Cisco's incubation engine. Today's AI agents operate in silos, limiting their true potential.

1:16Brian Barrett:We've been focused on building bigger, smarter models, but scaling up is just one approach. To reach superintelligence together, we need to do more. We need to scale out. And we actually have a blueprint from 70 ,000 years ago. Humans didn't just get smarter individually. The cognitive revolution transformed society because we began sharing knowledge, goals, and innovation. Agents are now at that same inflection point. They can connect, but they can't think together. That's why Outshift by Cisco is building the Internet of Cognition, transforming AI from isolated systems into orchestrated superintelligence.

1:54Brian Barrett:By creating an open, interoperable infrastructure, Outshift by Cisco is enabling agents and humans to share intent, context, and reasoning. The cognitive evolution for agents is here. Explore the Internet of Cognition at outshift.com. That's outshift.com.

2:16Welcome to Wired's Uncanny Valley. I'm Wired's Executive Editor, Brian Barrett, filling in today for Zoe Schiffer. Today on the show, we're bringing you five stories that you need to know about this week, including why the promise of a tech-forward school in Texas with software instead of teachers fell apart. I'm joined by our senior politics editor, Leah Figer. Hey, Leah.

2:36Brian Barrett:Hey, Brian. Thanks for having me.

2:41So, Leah, our first story today. Today is a consequential and unfortunate moment. It is the 30th day of the federal government shutdown. Our reporters, Vittoria Elliott and McKenna Kelly, spoke with more than a dozen workers who are struggling to pay the bills, working side gigs. Some of them are even relying on free food programs to get by. As of this recording, around 750 ,000 federal workers have been furloughed with no end in sight. One of the people that Toria McKenna spoke with was a federal worker who was working abroad and a month ago learned that her husband, who's also a federal worker, had an aggressive form of cancer.

3:14Doctors told the couple that they needed to move quickly to remove it, so they did. But now with the government shut down, their health care claims aren't being paid out. They're out tens of thousands of dollars at least, and they're not sure when that's going to change.

3:26Brian Barrett:It's horrible. This was a really devastating story. I mean, there really is no end in sight here. And so to have everyone dealing with medical bills and dealing with mortgages and like day-to-day life, federal workers were not paid very much already. Many are paycheck to paycheck. It's pretty horrifying that we've gotten to this point already. And it makes it even worse that SNAP benefits, food stamps, are slated to end this Saturday on November 1st. A pretty devastating turn of events for already what's been a really hard year for federal workers. Yeah, it's the kind of story that you start out reporting, you know it's going to be bad, and it comes back even worse than you thought somehow.

4:07Yeah. And it could still get worse from here is the other thing, right? Like, back pay for federal workers is supposed to kick in when the government shutdown ends, but who knows when that's going to be? The longest government shutdown on the books happened in 2018, 2019. That lasted 35 days. Looks like we're well on track to beat that record. Your team has been reporting on how federal workers have found their jobs also to be increasingly politicized. Not only is it not coming to an end, their own departments are kind of turning against them. People's out-of-office responders have been forcibly changed to say, this is the Democrats' fault.

4:41Agencies are posting on their websites. This is the Democrats' fault. And agencies are being targeted specifically if they are aligned with so-called Democrat priorities. What is going on here, Leah?

4:51Brian Barrett:I mean, no, you're 100 percent right. Even with the SNAP benefits in particular, USDA, the department that administers these benefits, their entire homepage is all targeting Democrats and Democrats for the shutdown. What's been really interesting is that the federal workers we've spoken with don't actually seem to blame the Democrats themselves. Instead, they're actually looking at Republicans who aren't passing stopgaps. They're looking at Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House. One really poignant quote from the story was this federal worker whose family now owes tens of thousands of dollars for medical bills that they're still waiting for processing and payment on.

5:31Brian Barrett:And this worker was like, I am a federal worker just like Mike Johnson. We took the same oath. We're both federal employees, but he's getting paid and I'm not. He's getting health care and I'm not. And that's so devastating to hear, so devastating to read. And this really doesn't look like it's going anywhere anytime soon. I mean, you have a couple of Republicans that are signing on, Josh Hawley in particular, to try and extend funding for SNAP benefits and things like that. But it's not getting a lot of pickup in GOP leadership. So I think we're going to be waiting for a while. Well, especially when you've got random billionaires putting$130 million to fund the military.

6:11Why not?

6:12Brian Barrett:Also, again, to be clear, this donation, quote unquote, that you're speaking about from billionaire Timothy Mellon from last week. One, it's just totally unprecedented. Two, that is not very much money when it comes to operating the U.S. government. So the idea that these billionaires are able to kind of buy favor in this way, they're not actually buying that much. Yeah. Speaking of billionaires not buying that much, and how's this for a segue? Anyway, we're going to talk next about Elon Musk and Grokipedia, which may sound familiar. It's my favorite news source now, Brian. Yeah, good. No, rightly so.

6:46You'll find a lot there. Grokipedia, obviously, Grok plus Wikipedia equals Grokipedia. Our colleague Reese Rogers reported this week that after it launched on Monday, that this AI-generated alternative to the crowdsourced encyclopedia, Wikipedia, was supposed to be a massive improvement over Wikipedia. Leah, have you had a chance to poke around? What do you find in there?

7:06Brian Barrett:It is my favorite news source. Massive improvement. I don't even think that goes far enough. I think that this has changed the way that we share information online now. Wow. I mean, seriously, though, this is horrible. This is, like, really, really bad for the internet, I deeply believe. Already, there's so many inaccuracies, really serious bias, obviously denouncing mainstream media, promoting Trump and other conservative viewpoints, and some really horrific stuff about gay people and trans people, too. Like, it's less comparable to Wikipedia and more just like a summary of what Grok replies to random ex-users.

7:43Brian Barrett:I mean, this is, again, to be clear, the AI platform that brought us Mecca Hitler. So my expectations were already quite low, but it's pretty bad. Well, and the thing is, too, when it's not posting things that are echoing Elon Musk's point of view and far-right talking points, it's just ripping off Wikipedia. So it's really like Wikipedia, except for these ideological tentpoles. And some of the examples really are pretty egregious. So the Grokipedia entry about slavery in the U.S., for example, includes a section that outlines numerous, and I am quoting here, ideological justifications made for slavery, with the end of the entry focusing on criticizing the 1619 Project, which Grokipedia says incorrectly framed slavery as the central engine of the nation's political, economic, and cultural development, which of course it was.

8:31Another entry on Grokopedia claims that a proliferation of porn made the HIV AIDS epidemic in the 1980s that much worse. All historical falsehoods, all sort of a Elon Musk fever dream view of the world.

8:44Brian Barrett:I mean, you didn't even get to arguably the one that concerns us most, which is Wired's own entry in Grokopedia. It's really good. I mean, Elon Musk famously loves Wired.com. So it includes Musk's own critique of us in our publication. To quote, it reads, high-profile detractors, including Elon Musk in February 2025, have labeled Wired as devolving into far left-wing propaganda. It almost feels like he just kind of wrote these himself. Yeah, there's clearly no bias here on Grokipedia. But sticking with AI a little longer, because Leah, I know you love AI. I know you can't get enough of it, especially when you're shopping for real estate, when you are looking at apartments and houses.

9:30All you want to see is instead of real pictures, you want to see AI-generated videos and photos of what the houses should look like, which is a trend that Wired contributor Cat10Bars wrote about this week. So many real estate listings now include AI-generated videos. They take a regular picture of a space, so it's just sort of plausible that it would look like that, and then they transform it into this AI slopified version that is every homeowner's dream. Kat talked to the founder of a really popular app that's doing this called AutoReel, who had told her that any real estate agent can create their own video at home in minutes and estimated that between 500 and a thousand new listings like this are being created every day just with his app in the US, in New Zealand, in India, and being used to market thousands of properties.

10:15Leah, how do you feel about the AI slopification of real estate? I've got my bets.

10:22Brian Barrett:So I'm about to say something incredibly controversial, which is we're talking about a lot of really serious stories today. And this is like maybe the one that upset me the most from a very personal place. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm a millennial. I'm in my 30s. My favorite app is Zillow. I can't even scroll Zillow anymore for fun. This was really upsetting for me. Thank goodness that Kat blogged about this and did more. I mean, like, she really pulled together a real temperature check on, like, where the entire industry is going in terms of, like, using AI for staging, for entirely recreating outsides of homes.

10:57Brian Barrett:The story that I want is really just an interview of me and my friends going, oh, my God, wait, this place looks incredible. It is in Bay Ridge. Should we move there anyway? Oh, no, this is all fake. Everything here is not real. It was so upsetting. Yeah. It was so upsetting. I do think some sort of series that just has prospective buyers showing up at the house that they thought was one thing. And it's like the opposite of the home improvement show where they do the big reveal. I think that's sellable. The fact is real estate agents are doing this. They think it's worth it. And I think the reason for that, a source told Kat, is that, look, you could go to a virtual stager and have someone do it over the course of a few days, spend a few hundred dollars on it, like do it with Photoshop, get a photographer.

11:39for it's a lot of work, a lot of time, a lot of money, when instead they can just do it from their phone now. On the flip side of that, though, Kat also spoke with an agent who acknowledged, look, like, this is a huge investment for people. It's probably the biggest purchase that most people are going to make in their whole lives. And the idea that you start off that purchase by breaking their trust, right, by showing them a lie is a really bad foot to get off on. So it will be interesting to see if there's enough backlash to kind of stop this from happening.

12:06Brian Barrett:I hate it. I hate it so much. The Leah backlash alone is going to make people knock it off. One more story before we go to break. There's no AI in this one. There is, however, a genetically engineered pig kidney. Surgeons at Massachusetts General Hospital removed a genetically engineered pig kidney from a 67-year-old man after he spent a record time with the implant compared to previous pig organ transplants. He went nearly nine months. That may not sound like a lot, but the doctors who performed the operation found it hopeful that actually it lasted that long because previous attempts, two to three months max.

12:41So this is still a relatively emerging field, and every little bit of progress is important, especially because the availability of human kidneys is not where it should be. So sure, if we can get a pig kidney to work for as long as we can, so much the better.

12:56Brian Barrett:I think this is amazing. Parts of the story were really hard to read. And, you know, obviously the previous examples, it was organ failure and two months at a time. But to have nine months is pretty incredible and an amazing look at how far this science has come. And like you said, Brian, there's 90 ,000 people waiting to receive a kidney in the U.S. alone. And with this shortage of organs, the U.S. only performed 28 ,000 kidney transplants in 2024. So if this is the way that we actually get people off dialysis back into their homes and being able to live again, it was amazing. I thought this is a really incredible moment in gene editing and bridging these gaps to actually make these transplants work.

13:39And watch this space. The hospital plans to carry out another genetically edited pig kidney transplant before the end of the year. And who knows how far that one will go. Okay, we're going to take a quick break. And when we're back, we're going to dive into why a tech-centered private school in Texas unfolded into something that parents didn't bargain for.

14:22Brian Barrett:15 minutes shortwave follows a question wherever it leads and brings you along for the ride. It's science, but not the kind you remember from school. It's surprising, playful, and full of wonder. Science isn't just for PhDs of the world. It's for everyone, including those of us who didn't realize we love science. At Wired, we love a good rabbit hole. We recommend listening to their recent episode, Where Did the Moon Come From? Earth didn't always have a moon. In the beginning of the solar system, when the planets were still forming, something happened that would change Earth's night sky forever.

14:58Brian Barrett:Co-host Regina G. Barber takes you on that journey. Follow NPR's shortwave podcasts and exercise your right to wonder. This show is supported by Notion. Agents are getting smarter every day, but even the smartest agents get stuck without the right context and the right tools. That's where Notion comes in. With the recent launch of custom agents, Notion became the collaborative AI workspace where teams and agents work side by side. And now their new developer platform is turning that workspace into infrastructure developers can build on. Notion's developer platform gives developers and coding agents the primitives to extend what's possible on Notion and take it beyond.

15:41Brian Barrett:connect to external systems, bring context in, take permissioned actions across your tool stack, and expose custom agents' capabilities to any system that needs them. It includes new primitives that allow teams to sync any data source into Notion, build any tool for your Notion agents, and orchestrate any agent in Notion. Learn more about Notion's developer platform today at notion.com.prx. That's all lowercase letters, notion.com.prx. to try Notion's developer platform today. And when you use our link, you're supporting our show. On Masters of Scale, iconic leaders reveal how they've beaten the odds.

16:21Brian Barrett:Asking really strong questions is a superpower. You want to show up with something radically different and how they've grown companies to incredible heights. The greatest rewards always come from the greatest risks. That's hit the gas. Airbnb, Zillow, Microsoft, Liquid Death, and more. Hear from the founders who've changed the game. It's anything but business as usual. Find Masters of Scale on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever else you get podcasts.

16:57Welcome back to Uncanny Valley. I am Brian Barrett, and I am joined today by senior politics editor Leah Figer. Let's dive into our main story this week. That's out of a school in Brownsville, Texas called Alpha School. Alpha School is actually a chain of private micro schools. Chain might not be the right word, but there's a lot of them. The focus is on using software as the main teacher for kids. It's built itself to parents as providing a superior future-looking approach to education, very into kids being self-starters, learning from the computer more than they're learning from humans. Wired contributor Todd Feathers spoke with some of the parents and staffers previously affiliated with the Brownsville, Texas location of Alpha School.

17:35And he found a different reality there. One story from this feature that Todd found is that of Christine Barrios, who told Todd that her nine-year-old daughter got stuck on a lesson in IXL. IXL is personalized learning software that a lot of schools use, actually. But it was, in this case, acting as Christine's daughter's math teacher. The software kept telling her to repeat the exercise tens of times without making a mistake. When she asked her guide, and that's what they call teachers, they call them guides because, again, the computer is the teacher, whether she could move on from it. she was told, nope, you got to keep going.

18:07Over the next weekend, according to Barrios, she and her husband sat with her daughter for hours each day until she finished the multiplication lesson, even as she broke down and sobbed that she'd rather die than keep going. Ultimately, Barrios said that she double-checked all the answers on a calculator before her nine-year-old entered them. But when the girl returned to school with the lesson completed, her mom says, she came back reporting crushing news. In the time she spent stuck, she had fallen even further behind on her targeted goals. So within a couple of weeks, again, according to Varios, the school reported to her and her husband that their daughter wasn't eating lunches.

18:41According to Varios, Alpha said that it was because she would rather stay in and work. That's a quote. The girl later explained to her parents that she was spending lunchtimes catching up on IXL. Her parents would send her to school with snacks. When Varios saw that the snacks were coming back in her backpack uneaten, the daughter told her mom that staff at the school said she didn't earn her snacks and wouldn't get them until she met her learning metrics. And understandably, Christine Barrios pulled both her kids out of Alpha School that November. Now, that's just one example of many examples that Wired gathered from parents, students, former educators in this program.

19:17And Leah, I'm just curious for your reaction to that.

19:21Brian Barrett:Not everything is a tech startup. Yeah. This is just like the constant drum I feel like we've been beating at Wired all year long, which is you can have these incredible technologies. I'm not going to sit here and say that AI is not a world-changing technology, but I'm just not sure then why every single application has to imitate an office at Google in 2012. You know, there are so many details in this piece, the large TVs on walls that are displaying charts, updating with completion rates and comparing students about how there's like dozens of kids in a room with their headphones on. It's like this eerie quiet plugged into their laptops.

20:03Brian Barrett:Even the idea of special rooms with snacks and rewards or alternative ways to sit, like you can lie down while working. Like how incredible. There are a lot of schools that do this and also don't, you know, run their kids as if they're like about to do code breaking for the next big thing in the valley. It was pretty wild to read this. Like it sounds like they're experimenting on children. Yeah, and that's actually what a former employee described it as. It is, as a model, I think you really nailed it. It is sort of applying the idea of these all-night coding sessions and all the sort of bootstrapping entrepreneurial whatever that Silicon Valley is obsessed with and saying, hey, nine-year-olds, maybe that's the best way to learn math or somehow English, history.