WIRED Roundup: OpenAI Announces New Government Partnership

0:01Zoë Schiffer:Hey, this is Zoë. Before we start, I want to share some exciting news with you. We're doing a live show in San Francisco on September 9th in partnership with KQED. Uncanny Valley co-hosts Lauren Good and Michael Colore will sit down with our editor-in-chief Katie Drummond and a special guest for a conversation that you really won't want to miss. You can use the link in the show notes to grab your ticket and invite a friend. We can't wait to see you there.

0:30Zoë Schiffer:Welcome to Wired's Uncanny Valley. I'm Wired's Director of Business and Industry, Zoe Schiffer. Today on the show, we're bringing you five stories that you need to know about this week. And later, we'll dive into our main topic, which is about how OpenAI just announced a massive partnership with the U.S. government to make its models available to federal employees. I'm joined today by Wired's senior writer, Jake Lahut. Jake, welcome to Uncanny Valley. Hey, Zoe. Good to be back.

1:01Zoë Schiffer:Okay, so our first story is actually from your newsletter, Inner Loop, and it's yet another Jeffrey Epstein saga. It just won't quit. So sources have been telling you that the damage done by the Jeffrey Epstein saga is just not going to go away anytime soon. As listeners may know, conspiracy theories around Epstein's death received a lot of fresh fuel in recent weeks when the DOJ released what they called raw footage from the night of his death, but then Wired analyzed the video and found that it had been modified after all. These conspiracy theories have been at the core of the MAGA base for years now, and you wrote really smartly about how sources say there's like simply nothing that can be done to salvage the ongoing catastrophe that is the MAGA base fraying over the ghost of Jeffrey Epstein.

1:51Zoë Schiffer:So tell us more. What is going on? So the weird thing about reporting this one compared to the last time I had been calling around on Epstein with the White House and people around Trump world maybe three weeks or a month ago was that people were much more scared to talk this time. But also like no one really had any updates about what the plan is. And that's where I think this piece became more interesting is that we just really zoomed into the expectations getting set out of whack here. And when you set these great expectations for the base, where one of my sources in this who's in Trump world, they also work in conservative media.

2:32So they had kind of an interesting perspective on this from like an audience capture, you know, kind of the cart leading the horse perspective. And this source basically said that if the base doesn't get not just the list, but like if there's not a smoking gun for Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff, you know, abusing like a baby over a fire like this isn't going to count. And, you know, clearly it didn't help to staff the FBI with Cash Patel and Dan Bongino. But there is an element that kind of goes deeper to it that makes this a very American thing. You know, one thing a lot of people have asked me and something I was asking myself reporting this is like, have a lot of Trump supporters in the base just like not heard of his associations with Jeffrey Epstein before?

3:16Right. And this academic I talked to from the University of Miami, you know, the U, he said, actually, they always have known this. But when you kind of think about it from the QAnon perspective of Trump's rise, you know, this is like an as chosen by God, savior figure. But where the Epstein stuff starts to really pile up and where they think this is kind of at a point of no return is, you know, even if Trump's approval remains high among Republicans, even if this may not be the issue in the midterms, it does mark this kind of before and after and a breaking of trust here. And yeah, people around Trump have really had it.

3:55They're not willing to say it publicly. They're not going to leave the administration or get off the Trump train for it. But they now see this as like being Trump's fault. And I'm curious to see where it goes from here, but definitely the vibes couldn't be lower.

4:10Zoë Schiffer:This is a classic situation of just setting expectations too high. I mean, in journalism, we see this all the time. You get journalists hyping things up on X, formerly Twitter, and saying, like, huge scoop about to drop. And I always cringe when people do this because I'm like, unless you have, like, the Pentagon papers, you're going to look like such a jackass in, like, three minutes when you drop some, like, exciting, but like not that exciting story. Like I just think it's always better to under promise and over deliver. But Kash Patel and Trump himself did quite the opposite by making this a huge deal for years and then being like, no, just kidding.

4:46Zoë Schiffer:There's no there there. And everyone's like, well, we think there is. Yeah, this whole thing works just so much smoother when you're in the opposition. Like when you're Dan Bongino and you have the keys handed to you to be the heir to Rush Limbaugh, that's a pretty great gig. being deputy director of the FBI, actual hard gig. Like you got people reporting to you, you have people to answer to, and you can't run that conservative media playbook of like the drip, drip, drip, wait until this next batch of files comes out and we'll have a week's worth of content. Right, exactly. Yeah, because you're the one with all the files.

5:18Zoë Schiffer:So people are like, just release them. You quite literally are the establishment, yeah. So our next story is about another topic that has consistently been on the Trump administration's radar, which is tariffs. Specifically, this is quite the caper about how some Bitcoin miners raced to beat the sharp tariff increases that were initially put in place back in April around Liberation Day. Our colleague Joel Kalili wrote about the grueling logistics efforts that U.S.-based Luxor Technology embarked on to ship two packages of Bitcoin mining materials, both of them worth millions of dollars. These packages were coming from Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore, and they were all subject to the way, way higher tariffs.

5:58Zoë Schiffer:So this was like a huge problem. And at some point, they were bidding$1.76 million for a charter plane, only to be outbid overnight by another importer that was desperate to get their materials into the U.S. So, I mean, this is another area where I feel like while the Trump administration has been very friendly to this industry, it is still true that I don't think they're in the weeds enough to realize that like the really high tariff hike is going to impact the very industry that they're trying to like promote. Yeah, and this is where this kind of emerging culture of like shut up and take it within the Republican Party is really interesting because their message to the crypto community, both if you're in, you know, your big Coinbase or Andreessen Horowitz, Kraken type space, or if you're just, you know, you're someone who started donating to the Republican Party and, you know, you bought the mean coin.

6:47Maybe you're personally wealthy off Bitcoin, but you're not like an industry player for all those people. Like if you kind of have an ask or you're like, hey, like we gave you a lot of money in the campaign. Could you maybe not do the tariffs or whatever else it is that they find objectionable? They're like, actually, like, why don't you like sit down and shut up? Let us do the decision making here and like good luck getting anything with the Democrats, which I think is a very interesting whole realm for another discussion of like the opening. the Democrats may have here with just like the, as kind of a more of a cultural wedge issue than a policy one with the crypto folks.

7:19But Joel's story is just crazy because of like the, the sense of urgency and the scramble they had. And it's, you know, it's just kind of like, I think the game Hungry Hippo is probably not the best comparison here, but you're just moving this stuff around for you to take this cost on the chin in some form, maybe just a little less depending on the rate coming out of a place like Singapore or wherever. And yeah, it has like last chopper out of Nam vibes. Like, it's a real doozy of a story.

7:44Zoë Schiffer:100%. Yeah, they're, like, at the airport at midnight. But the other thing that is so crazy is that Trump changes his mind about this stuff all the time. So there's, like, this mad scramble. Maybe it'll be worth it. Maybe it really won't. In the meantime, you're kind of losing a lot of money either way. Yeah, you're paying money to lose less money. Right, exactly. So we're recording this on August 7th, and a fresh wave of tariffs have already been imposed on more than 90 countries, which includes the countries that Luxor technology mainly ships from. So we wish them luck. Our next story is short, but it's also pretty juicy.

8:19Zoë Schiffer:Wired contributor Mark Harris reported that this week, the U.S. Coast Guard's Marine Board of Investigation issued a scathing report on the implosion of the Titan submersible in 2023. Oh, my God. Do you remember the Ocean Gate fiasco? I feel like that was one billion years ago. Yeah, if you had told me this had happened pre-pandemic or in like 2018 or something, I would have believed you. But no, it was the summer of 2023. And this unmarked sub was trying to reach the wreck of the Titanic. It imploded and it instantly killed all five crew members. And they also insisted on calling all the crew members like researchers because they technically couldn't be passengers because of like the legal gray area they were in.

8:58And the CEO was among them, right?

9:00Zoë Schiffer:Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, the report really places the blame on the CEO. Like he is the person responsible. He created such a culture of fear and had this looming threat that like people who raised a hand or raised a red flag were going to be instantly fired. But like very few people spoke up, even as there were all of these signs leading up to this specific trip that like the submersible in question just like simply wasn't safe. And apparently he had so much hebras that like he didn't care and was actually on it himself and perished as a result. Yeah, and whether you're in the continental United States or international waters, it does kind of suck that you can't escape responsibility, even in death, from the recklessness of your CEO.

9:45But anyway, in all seriousness, do hope this report can be a warning for these expedition startups where you can find a lot of legal gray area to do whatever you want in the deep, scary ocean.

9:55Zoë Schiffer:Yeah, exactly. Okay, so next, our Wired colleague Del Cameron recently reported that Google is going to use AI to guess someone's age based on their search history. This really made me laugh in kind of fear and terror, but this means that they're going to look at, quote, a variety of signals already associated with a user's account to determine that person's age, regardless of their user-provided birthday. Like, basically, the idea is that we don't trust people to tell us their actual age, but we're going to look at what they look at online and then choose whether they can see certain content.

10:30Zoë Schiffer:I mean, I feel like this is interesting. I will be genuinely curious to see if it's functional in practice. It seems like there's an opportunity for a lot of hilarious results where someone has such juvenile tastes that they're like an adult, but not able to look at adult content or whatever. Watch out, milk boys. I know it's going to be a tough one. Yeah, exactly. I would love to know how the AI categorizes this, but it's kind of fascinating. I mean, I feel like there's a lot of age verification stuff going on in the United States, a lot of rules and regulations that are getting rolled out and each have their own kind of issue.

11:03Zoë Schiffer:But this is kind of the industry's response to that or an attempt to try something new and see if it works. And we will be curious. Our next story deals with AI technology and it's being put to use in really, really fascinating ways in the real world. So Wired contributor Marta Abba reported this week that the Italian Rescue Corps relied on AI to find the body of a hiker that had been missing for nearly a year. They did it by using two drones that gathered thousands of image frames in the mountain area of Monviso, where a 64-year-old, Nicola Ivaldo, I think is his name, went missing in September of last year, like in the Alps.

11:43Zoë Schiffer:So the rescue corps took the images that the drone had gathered and processed them with AI. So this would have taken humans like many, many, many hours, days, if not weeks. The software identified red pixels that were actually Nicola's helmet. And that's how the rescue corps knew where to go and find him. I think this is like so fascinating because we're talking all the time about like the amazing things AI will do. And like, maybe this isn't curing cancer or whatever we're like hoping is going to happen in the very near future. But it also just seems like such a clear example of like, AI is good at this.

12:14Zoë Schiffer:AI can look at all of these images and really quickly identify ones that are unusual. And then humans can follow up on that. And ultimately we can like find this person. And hopefully in the future we could do this in a way that would like save people before they died. Yeah, because like I feel like where so much of the smart money is going and where so much of the general discussion around AI revolves around like how would replacing a full-time worker's 40-hour work week look versus an AI agent? Instead, I think that these longer time horizons are way more interesting of things that humans feasibly could not have the time to get around to that these could actually start to reveal a whole bunch of areas of life where we might actually be able to come up with solutions that just like, you know, and it sounds very old school Silicon Valley hopium in a lot of ways, but like these are things that like people didn't think they could do before or that, you know, you would just give up way earlier.

13:06Zoë Schiffer:Exactly. And I feel like it's a good example of humans and AI working together. Like in this example, you really do need both. You need the drones to take the images. you need the AI to process them, and then you need humans to figure out what to do with that information. So I think it's an example of like AI augmenting what we can do rather than like necessarily replacing us altogether. Coming up after the break, we dive into our inside scoop on how OpenAI made a deal with the U.S. government to offer their services to federal employees. Stay with us.

13:42the economy never stops shifting markets move global trade gets disrupted and policies shift and all these factors have a tremendous influence on the ways we live and work i'm kimberly adams host of marketplace morning report a daily 10-minute podcast where a team of award-winning reporters helps you make sense of our evolving economy. Listen to Marketplace Morning Report on your favorite podcast app.

14:12Zoë Schiffer:Welcome back to Uncanny Valley. I'm Zoe Schiffer. I'm joined today by Wired's senior writer, Jake Lahut, to discuss OpenAI's latest partnership. The company is partnering with the U.S. government to make its models available to federal employees. In practice, this means that federal agencies can get access to OpenAI's models for$1, very nominal fee, for the next year. This is the culmination of a bunch of stuff that has been happening at OpenAI. So first, Jake, as you probably saw earlier this week, they released two open weight models, which is the first time the company has done so since 2019.

14:48Zoë Schiffer:And then yesterday, it announced the release of the long-awaited new frontier model, GPT-5. And, you know, since even before Trump retook the White House in January, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and other OpenAI executives have been really trying to cozy up to the Trump administration, despite the fact that Sam Altman in the past was kind of vocally against Trump. But, you know, we're in a new era, no surprise. I reported this story alongside my colleague, Will Knight, but I'm curious just to kind of get your impressions. Were you surprised to see OpenAI announce this? Is this kind of where the government is heading?

15:25This seems like a great business move from OpenAI's perspective of like using the federal government in effect as a way to kind of like hedge off progress the competition could make and get the inside track for what could be really valuable contracts. also just getting like a much more immediate sense of some of these ambiguities we've been talking about around like what is woke AI and like, you know, what better way to get an actual iterative understanding of what that is for your business than by working with the federal government directly. And then, you know, the longer term amplifications that I think are interesting from a federal workforce doge perspective of like, to what extent is arming federal employees with these tools kind of like having them dig their own graves, like not for all of them by any means.

16:10But how may this end up turning into a years-long experiment into what type of work at which agencies can be automated more effectively and in which areas are people going to be needed for the longer term?

16:23Zoë Schiffer:Exactly. I mean, I think it's really clear from how Doge, Trump, Elon Musk, and his day were talking about federal employees that it doesn't seem like they have a lot of respect for the people in these roles. And they, you know, this is my conjecture, but would be like happy to automate away a lot of these positions. I have so many questions about how this is actually going to play out in practice, and we're definitely going to keep reporting on it. But one aspect of this, and I'm really curious to get your take on that, is just Sam Altman's place in these negotiations. Because again, like we said at the beginning, he's been a fixture in the tech billionaires lineup of the current administration.

16:59Zoë Schiffer:He's announced the data infrastructure project Stargate alongside Trump earlier this year. And that project actually was started under Biden. but we know from talking to sources close to the project that OpenAI strategically kind of framed the announcement as being kind of a Trump initiative and allowed the president to get up in front of the country and kind of talk about it, announce it officially for the first time as if it was something that he had done, which seems like a classic Sam Altman maneuver. Like he is such a politician and this is something you hear from everyone close to him. But I'm curious if it'll work because unlike Elon Musk, like Sam and Trump just seem like very different people, almost like oil and water in a way.

17:42I was going to say oil and water also. Yeah. I mean, I think Sam Altman is really interesting to compare to someone like Jensen Huang of NVIDIA, where, you know, the NVIDIA CEO seems much more comfortable complimenting Trump, kind of glazing him appropriately and like doing that song and dance in a way that doesn't seem like too forced from him. And, you know, if you're Sam Altman and if you're Jensen Wong, like, you know, you have just these absolute juggernauts in your companies and your comp and you're one of the most powerful people in the world by being CEOs of these companies. So like, to what extent do you need to worry about political messaging and like comm strategy?

18:17Fair point. Maybe not much at all, but I think the learning curve with Sam Altman is not as much, it seems, from the behind the scenes maneuvering and trying to position himself well. It's more of like, you know, you are going to remain the face of this company and now you're going to have these closer and closer ties to the Trump administration, how are you going to talk about it? If you're going to keep going on podcasts and stuff and try to do your chill, laid-back bro routine and, like, someone asks you about masked men disappearing people off the street, are you going to give an answer like, oh, it's actually, like, kind of really complicated?

18:47I'm like, no, you got to do better than that, you know?

18:50Zoë Schiffer:Totally. Yeah, it's been really interesting to watch this play out in real time. One thing I heard from a couple of sources who are quite close to basically all of these tech billionaires is that at the inauguration, they didn't actually know that they were going to be positioned directly behind Trump for that photo op until the photo was being taken. Yeah, that's crazy. And there was a moment of panic where they were like, oh, I don't know. Like, do we want this to be? And then it was like happening. And I think everyone was just like, no, we're going in. Like, we have no choice. And it's history.

19:18Yeah. Well, it just lives forever now.

19:20Zoë Schiffer:But you can just imagine, like, I think there were these opportunities to be like, do we distance ourselves? Do we not? And, you know, I'm sure they feel like they have no choice because they ultimately want their companies to win. But clearly they have made the call that there's almost no concession they aren't willing to make with the Trump administration if it means their firm comes out on top. Yeah, it's just too key of a window for these companies of this next, you know, three to five year span and who is going to be in leading position. And also, they should just be aware. This is a move in Trump's playbook.

19:53If you remember the Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer, when she was in the Oval Office and covered her face with a folder because she didn't know that she was going to be in there with the whole White House press pool. Trump and his people know this move really well. They basically just trap you. They set a trap for you and you can't leave at that point. And then, you know, you have quite literally like a visual reminder of their association with you. And that gives, you know, the Trump administration and Trump himself more leverage over you in the medium and long term.

20:18Zoë Schiffer:Right. I mean, ultimately, it seems like it doesn't really matter for them. Like maybe they'll get critiqued, but like people are probably still going to use their tools. But an even bigger thing that they are getting, a bigger concession they are getting from the Trump administration is that, for example, we heard Trump recently talk about fair use and say, really, really publicly in a press briefing in front of the nation, like, oh, you know, you can't expect these AI firms to pay for every single piece of content that they're training on, basically, like, in real time, trying to redefine the definition of fair use, which is currently being, you know, adjudicated in the courts.

20:54Zoë Schiffer:But we had the president coming out and saying, like, really firmly, I side with the AI companies on this, not necessarily the content creators, which is a huge win. I mean, this is an existential issue for them if the president felt the opposite way. And so I think they're willing to put up with a lot because of that. Totally. Just too much money to be made. And Trump hates books too much. Exactly.