The Future of Addictive Design + Going Deep at DeepMind + HatGPT

Last week, two separate juries held social media companies liable for harming young users. We unpack what these landmark decisions mean — not only for the future of social platforms like Meta and YouTube, but also for A.I. chatbots. Then, Sebastian Mallaby, the author of “The Infinity Machine,” joins us to talk about the three years he spent with Demis Hassabis and those closest to Google DeepMind. And finally, we catch up on some of our favorite tech headlines from the week with a round of HatGPT. Guest: Sebastian Mallaby , author of “The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind and the Quest for Superintelligence.” Additional Reading: Juries Take the Lead in the Push for Child Online Safety An A.I. Agent Was Banned From Creating Wikipedia Articles, Then Wrote Angry Blogs About Being Banned I Met Olaf — the Frozen Robot who Might be the Future of Disney Parks Claude’s Code: Anthropic Leaks Source Code for A.I. Software Engineering Tool What’s With All the A.I. Videos of Cheating Fruit? This Company Is Secretly Turning Your Zoom Meetings into A.I. Podcasts North Korean Hackers Suspected in Axios Software Tool Breach We want to hear from you. Email us at hardfork@nytimes.com. Find “Hard Fork” on YouTube and TikTok .

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The Future of Addictive Design + Going Deep at DeepMind + HatGPT is an episode from Sway by The New York Times.

This episode is 01:09:26 long.

This episode was published on Apr 3, 2026.

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