‘Something Big Is Happening’ + A.I. Rocks the Romance Novel Industry + One Good Thing
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
It's your day to play.
It's your morning to make the most of.
It's your way to love.
It's your climate to consider.
It's your answer to what should I watch? It's your money to save.
It's your song to analyze line by line.
It's your 10 ways to find a little calm. It's your world to understand.
The New York Times. Find out more at nytimes.com slash your world.
Well, Kevin, did you see this? Elon Musk told employees at XAI that the company needs a factory on the moon to build AI satellites and a massive catapult to launch them into space.
Yes, this is his new pivot from Mars. He's no longer interested in Mars as he was all those years. Now he's going to the moon.
This Looney Tunes ass company, I swear to God. Elon Musk, I have a message for you. If Bugs Bunny ever shows up and tells you to climb into that catapult, do not trust him. Okay? That is a rascally rabbit. And you might find yourself in space, my friend. He's going to launch you from the moon catapult. You know what? That might be the way I want to go out, honestly, is just have a nice long career in journalism and then put me in the moon catapult. I'm ready. I'm ready. I'm Kevin Roos, a tech columnist at the New York Times. I'm Casey Noon from Platformer. And this is Hard Fork. This week, labor pains. Why AI is causing freakouts from the markets to the workforce. Then, the Times' Alexandra Alter on how the romance novel industry is being overtaken by AI authors.
And finally, it's time for our new segment, One Good Thing. It replaces our previous segment, A Lot of Terrible Things. Ha ha ha.
Well, Kevin, welcome back from our nation's capital.
Yes, I was in D.C. very briefly this week, there for some book meetings, and it was very cold. But the bigger observation is that Washington, D.C. is like freaking out about AI. Is that right? Yeah. Yes, so everywhere I went, every meeting I had, people were sort of asking me, is this stuff real? Is it happening? Are we in the takeoff? Is the singularity approaching? And it does feel like the sort of political salience of AI has gotten much, much higher just in the past couple of weeks. Well, why do you think that is? So there are a lot of reasons for that. I think one of them is that I think there's been a lot of people waking up to the new agentic coding capabilities of these models. We've obviously talked about that on the show, cloud code, etc.
I think that is starting to kind of make its way out into the world. There's also the stock market. market stuff that's been going on with a lot of the software stocks that are falling because of the threat of AI. Then I think there's just this ambient cultural vibe shift happening that has led to a lot of people in my life who are not like AI bubble people texting me and saying, hey, is this really something I should be worried about? Is my job at risk here? And so today I think we should talk about this because, among other reasons, there is this viral essay that I've been sent now no fewer than three times just in the past day that is by a man named Matt Schumer called Something Big Is Happening.
And it's basically a distilled version of something you and I have been talking about on this show for a while now, which is like these tools are getting really good. They're changing the way that programmers work. Yeah. So all of this is starting to make me think that there is something big happening here. And I'm not sure it's exactly what Matt thinks is happening, but I do think we are reaching an inflection point in people's feelings and senses about AI and where it's going. And I think we should spend some time today exploring that.
There's a lot to dive into, Kevin. And before we do that, perhaps we should make our disclosures.
Yes, I work for the New York Times, which is doing open AI, Microsoft, and perplexity over alleged copyright violations. And my boyfriend works at Anthropic. Okay, so let's start with this, what they're calling the SaaSpocalypse, the sell-off in some of the tech stocks. SaaS is, of course, software as a service. Not the sort of SaaS you're used to seeing on RuPaul's Drag Race.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–18:12
2
Why did tech stocks experience a recent SaaS sell-off and what does 'SaaSpocalypse' mean?
18:12–28:07
3
How could AI agents and 'vibe coding' change software business models and pricing?
28:07–49:43
4
Is the market panic over AI replacing software companies justified?
49:43–1:02:38
Speakers
6 identifiedMore from Hard Fork
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