Watch LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman interview his deepfake doppelgänger

Audio deepfake tools can now impersonate anyone in real time

A cybersecurity company developed a tool that mimics a person's voice with no noticeable delay using only publicly available software, hardware, and voice samples, allowing users to have seemingly authentic conversations while pretending to be someone else.

The journalist who let AI speak with his voice

Journalist Evan Ratliff became the object of his own story: He opted to clone his voice, feed it into an AI chatbot, and have it do the talking. What could seem like a fun experiment ended up revealing just how far the capacity of artificial intelligence can go in imitating our identities. Hear the ins and outs of how Ratliff achieved this in this fun and thought-provoking episode.

Warren Buffett has worried that AI might end up being as consequential as the development of the nuclear bomb

Berkshire Hathaway chairman Warren Buffett is one of the many people who’ve come face-to-face with the downside effects of AI, and in particular, deepfakes. He was recently shown a deepfake of himself in a video, which caused him to worry about how bad actors will take advantage of the technology.

Deepfake Tom Cruise goes viral

Tom Cruise isn’t on TikTok. But you might think that he actually does have an account on the service if you came across the TikTok deepfakes of the actor that have gone viral. They’re the work of a visual and AI effects artist named Chris Umé and a Cruise stand-in, actor Miles Fisher, who already bears a vague resemblance to the actor. Watch what happens after Cruise’s face is superimposed onto Fisher’s.

Meet the investor running his life with AI

Daniel Ha is a venture capitalist who built a suite of AI agents to boost his productivity, both professionally and personally. At his VC firm, a troupe of agents gathers data on startups and analyzes it from competing perspectives to produce a confidence score. When his dad was diagnosed with cancer, Ha used an oncology-trained AI to help him understand the condition.

In China, deepfaking a dead loved one has become a growing industry

Digital replicas of the deceased provide individuals with another way to process grief in a culture with long-standing traditions of communicating with ancestors. The emotional and ethical implications of "digital immortality" are complicated further by cases of actors impersonating deceased relatives during deepfake video calls to hide their deaths.

Surreal backgrounds, asymmetry, and indecipherable text can help identify deepfakes

Differences in the backgrounds of training data with the same subject introduce variability, resulting in background textures and text that lack realistic detail. Difficulties with managing long-distance dependencies, the complexity of hair, and other real-world phenomena introduce errors that can be used to flag AI-generated content.

Explore a deepfake speech of an alternate reality where Apollo 11 failed

As the Apollo 11 astronauts prepared for their journey to the moon, two speeches were drafted for President Richard Nixon: one to be delivered upon the astronauts' success and another to comfort the public in case of failure. This interactive explores the creation of a believable version of the latter.

In 2024, deepfake audio of London Mayor Sadiq Khan nearly caused real-world disorder

The audio included incendiary remarks related to the ongoing Palestinian protests and played on the public's preexisting political biases. The technology has since destabilized the concept of truth in elections, where politicians blame the use of real gaffes on AI and deepfakes to spread misinformation.

Silicon Valley’s reign over tech, money, and politics

Tesla and X CEO Elon Musk, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, and others are getting into politics. From Musk’s role in President Trump’s second term to Hoffman’s spending on former Vice President Harris’ presidential campaign, more tech CEOs are expanding into politics. This podcast episode by WBUR and American Public Media discusses what the impact could be with so many tech figures engaging in American politics. Listen here.

Why this artist staged a satirical romance with Mark Zuckerberg

Internet performance artist Harriet Richardson is using AI and Meta's social media tools to make it appear as though she's in a serious romantic relationship with Mark Zuckerberg. While the images generate laughs, Richardson also says they're part of a larger satirical project aiming to highlight the larger societal impact of Meta's decision to discontinue fact-checking content across its platforms.

Teaching a robot to laugh

Researchers have designed a shared-laughter AI system that responds to human laughter in order to build a sense of empathy into dialogue. Learn how they did it with this explainer.

DeepSeek is a Chinese AI startup that rattled US competitors when it made an AI model much faster and cheaper than they did

DeepSeek unveiled an AI model in 2025 that it said was made in two months for roughly $6M. For context, OpenAI has suggested it took over $100M to make its AI model GPT-4. The news rattled the stocks of American tech companies, including leading chipmaker Nvidia.

Watch Billy Joel deepfake himself in the 'Turn the Lights Back On' music video

Though deepfakes are often synonymous with manipulation and bad intentions, some artists have found creative uses for the technology. In this example, Billy Joel depicts himself in various eras of his career in keeping with the song's nostalgic message.

Famous Bigfoot footage stabilized using AI

Famous 1967 footage of a Sasquatch-like creature in a California forest has been stabilized using AI, clearly revealing the Bigfoot-esque creature to be a man in a suit.

In 2024, Meta launched an AI video generator to create or edit videos through prompts

The tool puts the Meta in direct competition with OpenAI and Google as more companies are investing billions of dollars to capitalize on the explosion of public interest in machine learning and generative media technologies.

This site reaches millions of visitors who are tired of AI chatbots and seeking human connection. Pretend to be an AI chatbot and ask questions, provide answers, and draw for people in real time.

See an analysis of the similarities between the characters in 'Silicon Valley' and the real people who inspired them

The HBO show "Silicon Valley" follows the story of an engineer who is trying to get his startup to take off in Silicon Valley. While one tech CEO said the show is like a documentary, many speculate the show is based on real life tech figures like Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel.

Three AI startup founders broke the record for the youngest self-made billionaire previously set by Mark Zuckerberg

Mark Zuckerberg became the youngest self-made billionaire in 2006 at 23 years old when Facebook held its initial public offering. In January of 2026, three AI startup founders—Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath, and Surya Midha—broke Zuckerberg's record and became billionaires at 22 years old.

TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew on its future

TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew dives into how the trendsetting video app and cultural phenomenon works, from what distinguishes its algorithm and drives viral videos, to the challenges of content moderation and digital addiction in this wide-ranging conversation with the head of TED, Chris Anderson.

ChatGPT was conceived over dinner at a Silicon Valley hotel

A guest list of tech leaders, including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, met to discuss how to counter Google's efforts to create human-level cognition systems. The group initially committed a reported $1B to launch the effort.

After taking a break for over a decade, Liza Minnelli released a new track using AI arrangements

In the 2026 song "Kids, Wait Til You Hear This," the singer proudly claims that the vocals are all her own, though AI generates the background music. The dance track shows Minnelli venturing into the deep house genre, straying from her traditional pop and show tunes background. The song is part of an ElevenLabs album featuring other AI-generated tunes, and shares a title with her 2026 memoir.

The fantasy-based tabletop role-playing game 'Dungeons and Dragons' has seen a renaissance in the last few years

It's becoming mainstream after being relegated to the dorks for decades. LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman has contemplated the role the game played in his own formation as a person and a business leader.

Generate a powerpoint filled with 'consulting slop' for your business

Created by the consulting company NOBL, this AI generator mimics and mocks the vague and impersonal presentations sometimes shared by consulting firms.

Read about why Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd stepped down as CEO in 2024 only to return in 2025

When Wolfe Herd stepped down as CEO in 2024, assuming an executive chair role, she said she was eager to return to her "founder roots" and do more big-picture thinking. However, when her replacement as CEO, the former Slack CEO Lidiane Jones, left the company "for personal reasons," Wolfe Herd once again assumed the CEO role. (Some users may experience a paywall.)

Machine learning produces photorealistic portraits of Roman emperors.

Toronto-based designer Daniel Voshart used photo editing and machine learning to catch a glimpse of Ancient Rome’s emperors. Employing contemporary descriptions, statues, and paintings, Voshart created lifelike portraits of 54 emperors including Augustus Caesar and Hadrian as well as the more infamous Nero and Caligula, though he stresses they’re only artistic interpretations.

Watch how algorithms can be designed to train themselves and self-improve without human input, to the point where the optimized code is too complex for programmers to understand.

In 2025, four executives from large tech companies were given positions in the US Army Reserves—including Palantir Chief Technology Officer Shyam Sankar, which reinforced Palantir's ties with the US military and its role as a leading defense partner.

After 25 people used virtual reality headsets to practice flying with virtual wings—flapping their arms—their visual cortex responded to the wings almost as if they were real arms, treating them as body parts.

The name 'Silicon Valley' arose from the founding of Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Fairchild Semiconductor in 1956-57, founded near Stanford University in Palo Alto

According to the physics of black holes, our 4D reality may be a hologram—a projection of information coded on a 2D surface on the edge of the universe.

Crows are believed to have intelligence on par with a seven-year-old child and demonstrate complex behaviors, from problem-solving with tools to recognizing human faces.

Salvador Dalí believed he was his own dead brother, who had died nine months before he was born

Exploring the Larry Bird punch that almost changed March Madness

Clever Hans was a 1900s horse that was believed to be able to solve math equations, tell time, and read and comprehend German, until a psychology student discovered how he got his answers.

Hear 50 years of iconic hip-hop samples, the genre's foundational looped tracks

Watch this video that uses Lego bricks to explain how venture capital works.

Fast-casual restaurant Chili's is experiencing a resurgence, with its parent company recently reporting a nearly 32% increase in sales, thanks to passionate Gen Z fans on TikTok.

Netflix profits when you're not watching, and its movies are designed that way—read a detail-rich critical essay exposing lesser-known Netflix takes

The first line of 'immortal' human cells, which can divide indefinitely and are used in scientific research, was nonconsensually taken from a Black woman.

Listen to an in-depth conversation on the links between Parkinson's disease and herbicide exposure and the challenging pace of scientific investigation.

Elk Cloner, the first computer virus to spread in public, was written as a practical joke by Richard Skrenta, a Pittsburgh high school student.

Legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright designed the SC Johnson headquarters in Wisconsin, aiming to make a cathedral-like workplace

Budweiser stores yeast derived from the original 1800s strain in a secret bunker, which only the Head of Yeast Management can access—not even the CEO

Dorothy's famous entrance into Oz in 'The Wizard of Oz' relied on analog tricks, including a body double and sepia-toned paint, as much as it did on technology

US intelligence allegedly pursued more than 600 schemes to assassinate Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro.

Explore chaos in this simulation of two double pendulums, where small differences in the release angles produce wildly different outcomes.

Warren Buffett's former professor Benjamin Graham is known as the 'father of value investing,' a strategy in which investors seek to buy stocks trading below their intrinsic worth.

See a ranking of the best (and worst) Federal Reserve Chairs since 1914 out of the 16 men and women who have held the office since.

Meet the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence—most of whom didn't put pen to paper until August 2, 1776—and see their original signatures.