Do you know what TCP/IP means? (Hint: you’re using it right now.) What about CDMA? Or GPT? While the concepts and the execution of these technologies are clear to most of us who have been on the internet nearly our whole lives, the acronyms we use to define them are often inscrutable. On this week’s episode, we welcome WIRED’s AI reporter Will Knight onto the show. Along with our hosts Michael Calore and Lauren Goode, the trio takes turns quizzing each other on what exactly these acronyms stand for. Michael is asked to unpack various terms from the early internet era, Lauren is tested on acronyms from the mobile era, and Will tells us what all the AI-related abbreviations mean. Everyone does a pretty good job even if nobody earns a perfect score. Play along at home; maybe you can best our hosts with your arcane knowledge of internet minutiae.

Show Notes

Read Steven Levy’s story about the Google research paper that kickstarted the transformer-based AI boom.

Recommendations:

Will recommends the book The Rise and Fall of the EAST by Yasheng Huang. (Watch their conversation at MIT’s Starr Forum.) Lauren recommends the Forest app for the Pomodoro work method. Mike recommends The Jargon File.

Will Knight can be found on social media @WillKnight. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.

Silicon Valley tech types love their edgy new social media startups. The latest is Airchat, an audio-first social app that lets its users express their every thought by posting short snippets of audio. All of these snippets are served in a never-ending feed, a la Twitter. There are replies, there are DMs, but there’s no typing; it’s all spoken audio. The platform is exclusively invitation-only for now, so the current user base is made up mostly of Valley insiders, optimistic venture capitalists, and crypto evangelists, which definitely informs the types of conversations you’ll find on the app. If you're thinking this sounds a lot like Clubhouse, the audio-based social space that flared up during the Covid-19 pandemic, well, you're not too far off.

This week on Gadget Lab, we talk to WIRED’s Director of Special Projects Alan Henry about making mouth sounds on Airchat and whether the buzzy new social startup will appeal to anyone outside the Silicon Valley technosphere.

Show Notes:

Read Lauren’s story about Airchat.

Recommendations:

Alan recommends the Kurzgesagt YouTube channel. Lauren recommends Julian Chokkattu’s review of the Humane Ai Pin and Scoop, a movie about journalism that’s streaming on Netflix. Mike recommends our new sibling podcast, WIRED Politics Lab.

Alan can be found on social media @halophoenix. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.

Election deniers are mobilizing their supporters and rolling out new tech to disrupt the November election. These groups are already organizing on hyperlocal levels, and learning to monitor polling places, target election officials, and challenge voter rolls. And though their work was once fringe, its become mainstreamed in the Republican Party. Today on WIRED Politics Lab, we focus on what these groups are doing, and what this means for voters and the election workers already facing threats and harassment.

Listen to and follow WIRED Politics Lab here.
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