This week we’re taking another look at prediction markets and a new series of scandals. Is Congress finally ready to rein them in? Then, the journalist Joanna Stern returns to the show to discuss her new book “I Am Not A Robot,” all about turning her life over to a chatbot for a year. And finally, Hard Fork’s Rachel Cohn reports back on her month attending classes at the Strother School of Radical Attention, the center of a movement to resist the commodification of attention by technology companies.

Guests: 

• Joanna Stern, chief everything officer at New Things
• Rachel Cohn, producer of “Hard Fork”

Additional Reading:

• Soldier Used Classified Information to Bet on Maduro’s Ouster, U.S. Says
• Soldier Pleads Not Guilty in $400,000 Betting Case Over Maduro’s Ouster
• French weather service alerts police to tampering after suspicious Polymarket bets
• The Multi-Trillion-Dollar Battle for Your Attention Is Built on a Lie

We want to hear from you. Email us at [email protected]. Find “Hard Fork” on YouTube and TikTok.

Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

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This week, OpenAI announced a loosened partnership with Microsoft and an aggressive new strategy to secure computing power. We unpack what these updates signal about OpenAI’s business strategy and whether the company can scale while balancing a trial against Elon Musk and investor concerns over missed financial targets. Then, the A.I. researcher Dr. Adam Rodman, of Harvard Medical School, returns to tell us about the most significant ways A.I. is changing how doctors treat patients. And finally, can an LLM trained only on very old texts predict the future? We’re talking with one of the creators of the chatbot talkie.

Guests:

• Dr. Adam Rodman, internal medicine physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and assistant professor at Harvard Medical School.
• David Duvenaud, associate professor at the University of Toronto, former team lead at Anthropic and co-creator of talkie.

Additional Reading:

• Microsoft and OpenAI Loosen Their Partnership
• Elon Musk and Sam Altman’s Epic Fight Heads to Court
• OpenAI Misses Key Revenue, User Targets in High-Stakes Sprint Toward IPO
• Take It From a Doctor: It’s OK if Your Medical Advice Comes From A.I.

We want to hear from you. Email us at [email protected]. Find “Hard Fork” on YouTube and TikTok.

Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

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Hosts Kevin Roose and Casey Newton explore stories from the wild frontier of tech.

What’s real? What’s hype? “Hard Fork” is here to help you make sense of it. Tune in every Friday.

Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.