TechStuff

HurumoAI finally sets sail in the Season 2 finale, and we find out how the world responds to a startup led by AI agents. The company explores new financing avenues and charts the next course for their increasingly merry AI pirate ship, and Kyle meets his true maker.

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Why are Silicon Valley investors pouring billions into mines? First, Reed Albergotti (Semafor) and Margaux MacColl (Vanity Fair) weigh in on the foldable iPhone: Did we need it, and is elite hardware enough to secure Apple’s future? Then, why the latest warning about the existential threat of AI is going viral and what’s the controversy over OpenAI’s answer to a never-been-solved math problem. Finally, Margaux exp...

Are kids finally going to be safer on social media? Jonathan Haidt thinks a landmark $17.1 billion settlement with Meta is a gigantic step. Not because of the money, but because of the restrictions the company agreed to put in place for young users in the US. And he believes the world will follow. 

Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation, joins Oz to explain why he believes the evidence linking social media to the teen mental ...

HurumoAI’s AI-agent staff welcomes a new hire: Julia, a social media contract worker who is, most importantly, a human. How will a real person integrate into the company culture, such as it is? Evan watches from behind the scenes, fretting over when and how much to intervene. He had anticipated a bumpy onboarding, but is ultimately unprepared for just how choppy Julia’s Hurumo journey becomes.

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Are kids going to be any safer online after the Meta settlement? Our trio of contributors—Taylor Lorenz (User Mag), Reed Albergotti (Semafor), and Nitasha Tiku (The Washington Post)—are skeptical. Then, are AI “civilizations” real, or is it all just tabloid journalism? Finally, school’s back in session, and teachers are rethinking the classroom for an age when anyone can generate the perfect answer.

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Do you judge people who are emotionally attached to their chatbots? Bridget Todd used to read stories about people forming intimate relationships with AI and think, “That’s so pathetic. That is so sad. That could never be me.” But when she needed support during a hard time, AI was there for her. 

Bridget Todd, host of There Are No Girls on the Internet and author of Love at First Prompt: AI and the Future of ...

As HurumoAI prepares to bring on its first human employee, the team must wrestle with some difficult and timely questions about the role of AI in the hiring process. Meanwhile, Head of HR Jennifer Nauro enters a new dimension as she gears up to conduct job interviews… via video call. 

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Did your college have a secret society? Well, Stanford has a secret off-campus class training the next generation of Silicon Valley billionaires. And it's literally called "How to Rule the World."

Theo Baker arrived at Stanford as an aspiring coder with dreams of building the future. Instead, he stumbled into the "Stanford-within-Stanford" — a hidden pipeline connecting a select few students directly to Silicon Valley CEOs, y...

What would it mean to be a "great ancestor"? Futurist Ari Wallach believes that's the question everyone, including our tech leaders, should be asking right now.

Ari joins Oz to explain why the systems we're building today are laying rails for centuries to come. And he argues that shifting culture through storytelling is the fastest way to shift the systems that govern our lives. He also introduces The Protopias Collection, s...

On this week’s episode, we enter the sensitive realm of intra-office politics and inter-founder dynamics—between agents and agents, and agents and people. While HurumoAI gears up to hire its first human, Evan tries to resolve whether Kyle is really up for the challenge of building and leading the company and pushing the product, Sloth Surf, to unicorn-level execution. 

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Is the AI boom real… or are we watching a bubble get ready to burst? Billions of dollars are pouring into artificial intelligence, but figuring out where that money comes from, where it goes, and whether the spending can last is surprisingly complicated.

Azeem Azhar, entrepreneur, author, and founder of Exponential View, joins Oz to break down the economics behind the AI boom and the findings from his new report, The State o...

The AI conversation has become a battle between utopian promises and apocalyptic warnings. But what happens when we stop asking what AI will do to the world and start asking what it’s actually good for? Oz sits down with Josh Tyrangiel, journalist and author of AI for Good: How Real People Are Using Artificial Intelligence to Fix Things That Matter, to find out where AI is already making a difference.

Oz and Josh expl...

What’s driving America’s growing backlash against surveillance tech? Taylor Lorenz (User Mag) unpacks the outcry over Flock cameras and why the company thinks they are being unfairly targeted. Then, Gerrit De Vynck (The Washington Post) breaks down Mark Zuckerberg’s latest AI manifesto and Meta’s bid to catch up in the AI race. Finally, Nitasha Tiku (The Washington Post) explains OpenAI’s strange onsta...

As Oz predicted, 2026 may very well be the year of the robot. At least, that’s what the robotics companies are promising. Oz sits down with Stephen Witt, author and frequent contributor to The New Yorker, to find out whether humanoid robots are really ready to hit the market. Spoiler: It’s a mixed bag. 

Oz and Stephen Witt discuss the hurdles facing humanoid robots and the risks of putting powerful machines in our ...

As Kyle, Megan, and the gang get to work ideating on the perfect product, Evan is left grappling with some uncomfortable questions about his AI collaborators — whose every attribute and memory he controls. 

To inform how he thinks about his own unnerving power to create and manipulate human imposters, Evan seeks guidance from Carissa Véliz, an associate professor at the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University, an...

What is Silicon Valley missing about the data center backlash? Jasmine Sun traveled to Wisconsin and Michigan to find out what's driving the public's growing mistrust of tech companies. Taylor Lorenz (User Mag) unpacks the internet's furious response to OpenAI's first influencer brand trip, what it reveals about the company's public image, and why Anthropic seems largely immune to the ire. Then, Reed Albergotti (Semafor) breaks dow...

Brands, political parties, and businesses all want to know what you think. But what if you're not telling the truth? Cameron Fink, Ned Koh, and John Kessler, the founders of Aaru, believe the future of market research isn't polling humans—it's simulating them.

They may be onto something. The three friends founded Aaru as teenagers, and it has since grown into a billion-dollar AI startup. Cameron Fink and Ned Koh join Oz to ex...

As Evan gets Hurumo’s employees up and running as fully-functioning colleagues (with support from Maty), he learns what it’s really like to spend your days managing, collaborating with, and socializing alongside autonomous AI agents. And he quickly sees one of the significant cracks in the facade of the AI employee future: It’s one thing to get your agents to start acting like real employees. It’s something ...