The 404 Media Podcast

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We start this week with Jason and Joseph’s article about leaked audio from a private police conference. In that audio, Flock’s CEO made all sorts of wild claims about the backlash to his company not being real, and his wife’s advice to never apologize. After the break, Sam tells us why former Yahoo CEO Marrisa Mayer can’t keep pretending ‘gender doesn’t matter.’ In the subscribers-only section, Joseph tells us about a woman who is facing years in prison because someone else opened a CashApp account in her name.

In Leaked Audio, Flock CEO Tells Cops Backlash to the Company Isn’t Real

Marissa Mayer Can’t Keep Pretending 'Gender Doesn't Matter'

Someone Opened a CashApp In Her Name. She Faces Years in Prison

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This week on the pod we’re joined by Mike Isaac a tech reporter who has been at the New York Times for more than a decade and who just recently announced he’s joining The Atlantic. Isaac also is the author of Super Pumped, a book about Uber that was adapted into a TV show. Isaac and 404 Media cover the same companies and technologies but we come at them from pretty different angles. He has a very deep background in business reporting and he’s also very well sourced in the valley. We spent a lot of time talking about how the AI race looks right now from his perspective, the challenges in covering it, and also the reemergence of Uber’s founder, Travis Kalanick.

Youtube Version: https://youtu.be/1sNBtPRo87s

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We start this week with Jason’s article about how everyone is apparently reverse-engineering everything. After the break, Joseph tells us about a big AI shakeup at consulting giant Accenture. In the subscribers-only section, Sam and Jason discuss the Character[.]ai bankruptcy.

‘Reverse-Engineer Anything’ Is the New Wild West of AI

Accenture Tells Employees They Can Now Spend Only $29 on Claude Per Month

Character[.]ai Bankruptcy Is First AI Bubble Domino to Fall

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Big tech is rushing to build hundreds of data centers across the planet to keep up with the computing demand of artificial intelligence. The tech companies are promising the massive buildings will bring jobs and prosperity when they’re built, but communities across the country aren’t buying it and they’re fighting back. People are concerned about water, noise, pollution, and the rising cost of electricity. Anyone who already lives next to a data center knows those fears are well founded.

To talk through this, Matthew spoke to Paris Marx. He’s a tech critic, the host of Tech Won’t Save Us and the author of the new book Hyperscale: The Ambition and Excess of Big Tech’s Data Empires.

Buy Hyperscale: The Ambition and Excess of Big Tech’s Data Empires

YouTube Version: https://youtu.be/PRf8ZtpSqAg

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Jason Kint, the CEO of Digital Content Next, has kept a close eye on some of the biggest tech antitrust and copyright court cases. Kint has a knack for finding particularly incriminating court records in complex ongoing lawsuits. We talk to Kint about the pressures that human creators are under in an AI world, the New York Times' lawsuit against OpenAI, and why Meta's Cambridge Analytica scandal is relevant again.

YouTube Version: https://youtu.be/knlbTd5Pij4

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