Hunter Powers and Daniel Bishop break down Ronan Farrow's 912-page New Yorker profile of Sam Altman and argue that lying about the OpenAI roadmap isn't a defect of being a startup CEO — it is the job. Plus: Anthropic flies fifteen pastors to San Francisco to debate whether Claude has a soul, the Pentagon worries Claude's morals could contaminate warfighter supply chains, and OpenAI's rumored next model "Spud" is allegedly too expensive to turn on.

AI Trainers Live In Walmart Parking Lots

They Might Be Self-Aware is a twice-weekly AI podcast about the week's news, tech, and culture, and the question in its name: are the machines becoming self-aware?

Every episode starts with a real story. A new Claude or ChatGPT release, an AI lawsuit, the Pope's verdict on machine souls, Martin Scorsese making films with AI. Then it chases that story somewhere stranger, funnier, and more human than the headline. This is AI as a culture story, not a tech beat: the relief of finally hearing people who are as deep in it as you are.

Hunter Powers and Daniel Bishop host. Two guys who actually build with this stuff, arguing about it fast, funny, and unfiltered, not reading you benchmarks or "10 prompts to save you time." Gary produces, phoning in the cold open from a payphone. He has no last name, and a backstory no one on staff has managed to verify. One of the hosts might not be human. We won't say which.

New episodes Mondays and Thursdays, from The Blur. theblur.ai