I just got my weekly. You know, I set up chat GPT to email me a weekly affirmation before we start

taping because you can do that now with the tasks feature. Yeah, people say this is the most expensive

way to email yourself a reminder. So what sort of affirmation did we get? Today, it said, you are an

incredible podcast host, sharp, engaging, and completely in command of the mic. Your taping today is going to be

phenomenal, and you're going to absolutely kill it. Well, and that's why it's so important that

chat GPT can't actually listen to podcasts, because I don't think it would say that if it had actually

ever heard us. It would say, just get this over with it. Get on with it.

I'm Kevin Roos, a tech columnist at the New York Times.

I'm Casey Noon from Platformer.

And this is Hard Fork. This week, we go deeper on Deepseek.

China Talks Jordan Schneider joins us to break down the race to build powerful AI.

Then, hello, operator.

Kevin and I put OpenAI's new agent software to the test.

And finally, the train is coming back to the station for a round of Hot Mess Express.

Well, Casey, it is rare that we spend two consecutive episodes of this show talking about the same company, but I think it is fair to say that what is happening with DeepSeek has only gotten more interesting and more confusing.

Yeah, that's right. It's hard to remember a story in recent months, Kevin, that has generated quite as much interest as what is going on with Deepseek.

Now, Deepseek for anyone catching up is this relatively new Chinese AI startup that released

some very impressive and cheap AI models this month that lots of Americans have

started downloading and using.

Yeah, so some people are calling this a Sputnik moment for the AI industry when kind of

every nation perks up and starts, you know, paying attention at the same time to the AI

arms race.

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