Inside the company behind Claude, researchers are trying to understand systems that may have already exceeded their grasp. The staff writer Gideon Lewis-Kraus joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss his reporting on Anthropic, the artificial-intelligence company behind the large language model Claude. They talk about Lewis-Kraus's visits to the company's San Francisco headquarters, what drew him to its research on interpretability and model behavior, and how its founding by former OpenAI leaders reflects deeper fissures within the A.I. industry. They also examine what "A.I. safety" looks like in theory and in practice, the range of views among rank-and-file employees about the technology's future, and whether the company's commitment to building safe and ethical systems can endure amid the pressures to scale and compete. Anthropic Doesn't Know, Either," by Gideon Lewis-Kraus " Is There a Remedy for Presidential Profiteering?

Researchers at the company are trying to understand their A.I. system's mind--examining its neurons, running it through psychology experiments, and putting it on the therapy couch. It has become increasingly clear that Claude's selfhood, much like our own, is a matter of both neurons and narratives. A large language model is nothing more than a monumental pile of small numbers. It converts words into numbers, runs those numbers through a numerical pinball game, and turns the resulting numbers back into words. Similar piles are part of the furniture of everyday life. Meteorologists use them to predict the weather. Epidemiologists use them to predict the paths of diseases. Among regular people, they do not usually inspire intense feelings. But when these A.I. systems began to predict the path of a sentence--that is, to talk--the reaction was widespread delirium. As a cognitive scientist wrote recently, "For hurricanes or pandemics, this is as rigorous as science gets; for sequences of words, everyone seems to lose their mind." It's hard to blame them. Language is, or rather was, our special thing. We weren't prepared for the arrival of talking machines. Ellie Pavlick, a computer scientist at Brown, has drawn up a taxonomy of our most common responses. There are the "fanboys," who man the hype wires. They believe that large language models are intelligent, maybe even conscious, and prophesy that, before long, they will become superintelligent. The venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has described A.I. as "our alchemy, our Philosopher's Stone--we are literally making sand think." The fanboys' deflationary counterparts are the "curmudgeons," who claim that there's no there, and that only a blockhead would mistake a parlor trick for the soul of the new machine. In the recent book " The AI Con," the linguist Emily Bender and the sociologist Alex Hanna belittle L.L.M.s as "mathy maths," "stochastic parrots," and "a racist pile of linear algebra." But, Pavlick writes, "there is another way to react." It is O.K., she offers, "to not know." What Pavlick means, on the most basic level, is that large language models are black boxes. We don't really understand how they work. We don't know if it makes sense to call them intelligent, or if it will ever make sense to call them conscious. The existence of talking machines--entities that can do many of the things that only we have ever been able to do--throws a lot of other things into question. We refer to our own minds as if they weren't also black boxes.

How a gift for shooting the shit turned into an online empire--and a political force. Trust in American mass media has plummeted; more than three thousand newspapers have disappeared in the past two decades, and many people get their news from social platforms. In this chaotic media multiverse, Rogan has emerged as a figure of singular influence. For a long time, I stayed up through the night listening to tall-tale tellers, U.F.O. I could not get enough of it. I was a fairly ordinary kid, Jersey-born, but the house I lived in was shadowed by illness. My mother had been diagnosed with a debilitating neurological disease when she was in her early thirties. Every year, she got worse. During the day, I wanted nothing more than to please my mother, do well in school, lighten her load. At night, I wanted only to climb into the shelter of my bed and turn on the radio. I was hungry for elsewhere, for other lives--for what was being said down the street, over the bridge, beyond the horizon. On clear nights, the signal was strong. You could hear the country expressing itself incessantly: everyone was phoning in, suggesting three-way trades, bitching about the mayor, speaking in tongues, raging, joking, climbing out on a ledge and threatening to jump. When I wanted a few hours of sleep before school, I tuned in to a ballgame on the West Coast. The staticky murmur of the crowd in Anaheim or Chavez Ravine was a sure slide to oblivion. Mostly, though, I wanted nothing to do with sleep. Mostly, I was tuned in, midnight to five-thirty, to "The Long John Nebel Show."

Pierre Huyghe's A.I. Art Monster Takes Over a Night Club in Berlin In "Liminals," a terrifying, overwhelming new installation, the artist erases the boundary between humans and the void. At the heart of the new piece is a fifty-five-minute film looped on an enormous screen. My preparation for "Liminals," an art work by Pierre Huyghe showing in Berlin, at Halle am Berghain, involved a small suitcase of books and articles about quantum physics, the science of sound, post-1968 France, relational aesthetics, and the sociology of techno. In the end, none of them proved useful. Among the heady possibilities dangled by the press release was an environment that would feature video, sound, light, and dust; exist outside of space and time; and operate in a state of quantum flux where "every moment is a maybe."

Sign up to receive it in your inbox. Your story in this week's issue, " Predictions and Presentiments," is drawn from your forthcoming book, " Beginning Middle End," which is coming out in July. The audio version will incorporate sounds that you and your team recorded in Sicily, where both the piece and the novel are set. How would you compare the creative processes of writing and recording, and the experiences of reading and listening? Recording sound and listening attentively have been an integral part of my writing process for a long time now.

Is Good Taste a Trap? The judgments we use to elevate our lives can also hem them in. In Belle Burden's memoir, " Strangers," she describes the end of her marriage. It happened suddenly: until learning of her husband's infidelity, through a voice mail from a stranger, she had no idea anything was wrong. Burden and her husband shared an apartment in Tribeca and a house on Martha's Vineyard.

Recent memoirs by the retired bookie Art Manteris and the storied gambler Billy Walters provide a glimpse of an industry in its fledgling form--and a preview of the DraftKings era to come. Las Vegas is no longer the seat of the sportsbook gods. In most states, it's now legal, and extremely popular, to place bets using apps or websites such as FanDuel and DraftKings. From your couch, you can wager on everything from the results of snooker championships to the color of the Gatorade poured over the victorious coach after the Super Bowl. The N.F.L., along with the other major-league American sports associations, has officially partnered with sports-betting sites, and their alliance has proved so lucrative that other industries want in on the action; last month, the Golden Globes made a deal with Polymarket, a predictions-market platform, to encourage wagering (or "trading," if you prefer) on the outcomes of its awards race.

A.I. re-creations of the "Magnificent Ambersons" stars Joseph Cotten, Agnes Moorehead, Dolores Costello, and Tim Holt. Edward Saatchi first saw "The Magnificent Ambersons," Orson Welles's mangled masterpiece from 1942, when he was twelve years old, in the private screening room of his family's crenellated mansion, in West Sussex. Saatchi's parents had already shown him and his brother "Citizen Kane." But "Ambersons," Welles's follow-up film, about a wealthy Midwestern clan brought low, came with a bewitching backstory: R.K.O. had ripped the movie from the director's hands, slashed forty-three minutes, tacked on a happy ending, and destroyed the excised footage in order to free up vault space, leaving decades' worth of cinephiles to obsess over what might have been. Part of this outcome was the result of studio treachery, but Welles, owing to some combination of hubris and distraction, had let his film slip from his grasp. Saatchi recalled, "Around the family dinner table, that was always such a big topic: How much was Welles responsible for this? Mum was always quite tough on him." Saatchi's father, Maurice, a baron also known as Lord Saatchi, is one of two Iraqi British brothers who founded the advertising firm Saatchi & Saatchi, in 1970, which led their family to become one of the richest in the U.K. Edward's mother, Josephine Hart, who died in 2011, was an Irish writer best known for her erotic thriller "Damage," which was adapted into a film by Louis Malle. Edward, born in 1985, grew up in London and at the sprawling country estate, surrounded by palatial gardens and classical statuary. He described his parents as "movie mad." The actor and Welles biographer Simon Callow, a Saatchi family friend, recalled, "They had a cinema of their own inside the house, and it was a ritual of theirs every week to watch a film together." Aside from old movies, Edward was obsessed with "Star Trek"--especially the Holodeck, a device that conjured simulated 3-D worlds populated by characters who could interact with the members of the Starship Enterprise. That kind of wizardry didn't exist in the real world, at least not yet. But the young prince of the Saatchi castle had faith that someday it would, and that it could bring the original "Ambersons" back from oblivion. "To me, this is the lost holy grail of cinema," Saatchi told me recently, like Charles Foster Kane murmuring about Rosebud. "It just seemed intuitively that there would be some way to undo what had happened."

Kleber Mendonça Filho wants his films to reclaim lost history. For Kleber Mendonça Filho, filmmaking is an act of both provocation and preservation. Mendonça was born in 1968, in the early years of a ruthless military dictatorship--a time when cinema, like much else, was harshly constrained. His mother, Joselice Jucá, was a historian who studied Brazil's abolitionist movement, and she taught him that filling gaps in the cultural memory was a way to expose concealed truths. His relationship with film is inextricably linked with his home town, Recife--a port city where attractive beaches and high-rise developments coexist with sprawling favelas and rampant crime. In his youth, Mendonça was fascinated by the city's grand cinema palaces. He carried a Super 8 camera to the tops of marquees and shot dizzying images; he spent hours in projection booths, learning the mechanics of how films reached the screen. Over time, Mendonça watched those theatres fall into decline, an experience that he likened to being aboard a ship as it wrecked. But even as Recife lost its allure, he made the city a fixture of his films--a way of vindicating its place in history. His first narrative feature, "Neighboring Sounds," takes place on a street where he lived as a child, a setting that he spent years documenting. Later, he made "Pictures of Ghosts," a documentary about Recife told largely through its cinemas.

He catches nascent changes in the political weather. "During early, he kept telling me, 'Crime--there's something here,' " DeBoo told me. DeBoo studied the latest crime statistics and saw nothing unusual. He brushed off the worry. Then new numbers came out, showing a large pandemic spike in shoplifting and car theft, and concerns about crime exploded into the headlines. Last March, judging the winds, Newsom launched a podcast, "This Is Gavin Newsom."