WIRED Roundup: OpenAI Announces New Government Partnership
Uncanny Valley | WIRED
WIRED
4.1 • 571 Ratings
🗓️ 8 August 2025
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In today’s episode, Zoë is joined by WIRED’s Jake Lahut to run through five of the most important stories we published this week — from how bitcoin miners have been racing this year to beat the tariffs, to how AI was used to find a missing hiker in the Italian Alps. Then, Zoë and Jake discuss the details around OpenAI’s latest partnership with the federal government.
Live show tickets at: https://www.kqed.org/event/5459
Articles mentioned in this episode:
- OpenAI Announces Massive US Government Partnership | WIRED
- Trumpworld Knows Epstein Is a Problem. But They Can’t Solve It | WIRED
- Charter Planes and Bidding Wars: How Bitcoin Miners Raced to Beat Trump’s Tariffs | WIRED
- Google Will Use AI to Guess People’s Ages Based on Search History | WIRED
- US Coast Guard Report on Titan Submersible Implosion Singles Out OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush | WIRED
- A Hiker Was Missing for Nearly a Year—Until an AI System Recognized His Helmet | WIRED
Join WIRED’s best and brightest on Uncanny Valley as they dissect the collision of tech, politics, finance, and business, from Alexis Ohanian's newest tech venture to the effects of inaccurate information from artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots on social protests.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, this is Zoe. 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 |
| 0:22.0 | the show notes to grab your ticket and invite a friend. We can't wait to see you there. |
| 0:30.5 | Welcome to Wired's Uncanny Valley. I'm Wired's director of business and industry, Zoe Schiffer. |
| 0:36.8 | Today on the show, we're bringing you five stories that you need to know about this week. |
| 0:41.4 | And later, we'll dive into our main topic, which is about how OpenAI just announced a massive |
| 0:46.5 | partnership with the U.S. government to make its models available to federal employees. |
| 0:51.5 | I'm joined today by Wired's senior writer, Jake LaHutt. |
| 0:55.8 | Jake, welcome to Uncanny Valley. Hey, Zoe. Good to be back. I'm joined today by Wired's senior writer, Jake LaHutt. Jake, welcome to Uncanny Valley. |
| 0:57.1 | Hey, so you're good to be back. |
| 1:14.7 | 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. |
| 1:20.7 | As listeners may know, conspiracy theories around Epstein's death received a lot of fresh fuel |
| 1:25.9 | in recent weeks when the DOJ released what they |
| 1:27.9 | called raw footage from the night of his death, but then wired, analyzed the video and found |
| 1:32.6 | that it had been modified after all. These conspiracy theories have been at the core of the |
| 1:38.0 | Macabase for years now, and you wrote really smartly about how sources say there's like |
| 1:43.6 | simply nothing that can be done to |
| 1:45.4 | salvage the ongoing catastrophe that is the MAGA base fraying over the ghost of Jeffrey Epstein. |
| 1:51.2 | So tell us more, what is going on? |
| 1:54.1 | So the weird thing about reporting this one compared to the last time I had been calling |
| 1:59.3 | around on Epstein with the White House and |
| 2:01.2 | people around Trump World maybe three weeks or a month ago was that people were much more |
| 2:07.6 | scared to talk this time, but also like no one really had any updates about what the plan is. |
... |
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