Sign up for our daily newsletter to get the best of The New Yorker in your inbox. The microchip maker Nvidia is a Silicon Valley colossus. After years as a runner-up to Intel and Qualcomm, Nvidia has all but cornered the market on the parallel processors essential for artificial-intelligence programs like ChatGPT. "Nvidia was there at the beginning of A.I.," the tech journalist Stephen Witt tells David Remnick. "They really kind of made these systems work for the first time. We think of A.I. as a software revolution, something called neural nets, but A.I. is also a hardware revolution."

Sign up to receive our weekly cultural-recommendations newsletter. Science fiction has historically been considered a niche genre, one in which far-flung scenarios play out on distant planets. Today, though, such plots are at the center of our media landscape. The hosts are joined by Joshua Rothman, an editor and writer at The New Yorker, who makes the case for science fiction as an extension of the realist novel, tracing the way films like "The Matrix" and "Contagion" have shed new light on modern life. The boundaries between science fiction and reality are increasingly blurred: tech founders like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have cited classic sci-fi texts as inspiration, and terms like "red-pilling" have found their way into our political vernacular.