Hard Fork is a weekly podcast published by the New York Times, and presented by Kevin Roose and Casey Newton. The show features discussions about new developments in tech, which in recent years generally translates to ‘AI and little else’. I started listening to the podcast sometime around late 2023: ChatGPT had recently hit the headlines, and I was starting a new research fellowship on the Congruence Engine project which explored the use of digital methods in historical and curatorial work. But although AI was increasingly a subject matter of mainstream news coverage, I didn’t feel like there were many places to keep up to speed with the latest developments in a way that was both detailed and accessible.

At first, Hard Fork seemed like a good way to get clued into the way that the world was being, or at any rate was about to be, transformed by the arrival of newly-transformative Large Language Models. I learned a lot by listening to Kevin and Casey discuss the inner workings of Silicon Valley, often through interviews secured with leading figures in the world of AI like Demis Hassabis or Dario Amadei. The tone, admittedly, was ocassinally a bit grating, but in this instance it had the upside of making the fast-paced world of tech understandable to a relative novice to the field.