NASA 'cleanrooms' found crawling with 26 new bacterial species
Maybe not: A new study reports 26 new bacterial species were found growing inside cleanrooms associated with NASA space missions. Specifically, scientists looked in the cleanrooms used to prepare the Phoenix Mars lander for its August 2007 launch.
In the study, scientists analyzed microorganisms growing in the NASA cleanrooms, and discovered many of the new species possessed genes that made them resilient to decontamination and radiation.
"We are unraveling the mysteries of microbes that withstand the extreme conditions of space – organisms with the potential to revolutionize the life sciences, bioengineering, and interplanetary exploration," said Kasthuri Venkateswaran, retired senior research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a lead author of the study, in a statement.
Spacecraft are assembled in cleanrooms, which are highly specialized facilities engineered to maintain exceptionally low levels of dust and microorganisms.
Cleanrooms are key as spacecraft are built and tested: Even tiny particles or contamination can impact delicate instruments and sensitive components.
These controlled environments are extreme in their own right, with tightly regulated airflow, temperature and humidity that inhibit microbial survival. However, some microorganisms – known as "extremophiles" – thrive in such environments.
"Our study aimed to understand the risk of extremophiles being transferred in space missions and to identify which microorganisms might survive the harsh conditions of space," said study team member Alexandre Rosado from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia.
"This effort is pivotal for monitoring the risk of microbial contamination and safeguarding against unintentional colonization of exploring planets," he added.
These previously unknown and newly described species carry genetic traits associated with resilience to extreme environments such as those found in space.
Some of the discovered genes were associated with DNA repair, the detoxification of harmful molecules and improved metabolism, all of which increased the species' survivability.
Scientists said these genes could lead to new biotechnologies that benefit food preservation and medicine. "These findings not only raise important considerations for planetary protection but also open the door for biotechnological innovation," said Junia Schultz, a postdoctoral fellow at KAUST, who was the first author of the study.
"Space travel provides an opportunity to study microorganisms that possess relevant stress-resistance genes," Schultz added. "The genes identified in these newly discovered bacterial species could be engineered for applications in medicine, food preservation, and other industries."
The study was published May 12 in the journal Microbiome.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: NASA 'cleanrooms' found crawling with new species of bacteria
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Crew-10 astronauts to depart ISS: How the Florida launch helped Starliner crew return
In mid-March, four spacefarers arrived at the International Space Station on a mission that at any other time would have been relatively routine and unremarkable. NASA astronauts Nichole Ayers and Anne McClain were joined by Japanese astronaut Takuya Onishi and Russian cosmonaut Kirill Peskov on a mission known as Crew-10 that took on far more significance than most of the regular ventures jointly carried out by NASA and SpaceX. As expected, awaiting the Crew-10 contingent at the orbital outpost were months of scientific experiments tailored to be conducted in microgravity. Crucially, though, the mission also attracted plenty of headlines and fanfare as it cemented its place in spaceflight history for its role in ending the infamous Starliner saga. The Crew-9 team may have arrived in September on a spacecraft with room for the two astronauts who crewed the doomed Boeing Starliner to hitch a ride home. But it was the arrival of the Crew-10 astronauts at the space station that set the stage for Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to make their long-awaited homecoming. Now that the Crew-10 astronaut are soon due to depart the space station more than four months later, here's everything to know about the mission and why it made headlines during the Starliner debacle. Remembering the Boeing Starliner: Look back at mission's biggest moments What was the Crew-10 mission? Astronauts relieve 'stuck' Starliner crew The March 15 arrival of Crew-10 astronauts at the International Space Station made it possible for NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who arrived in June on the doomed Starliner, to finally depart. The mission got off the ground the day prior from NASA's Kennedy Space Center. The U.S. space agency had originally been working toward a February liftoff before announcing in December 2024 that the mission had been pushed to late-March to give SpaceX more time to prepare a new Dragon capsule. The launch date was then moved back up to mid-March – most likely due to pressure from President Donald Trump and SpaceX founder Elon Musk – when NASA decided to instead use a "previously flown" Dragon. The Dragon spacecraft docked at the orbital outpost following a 28-hour journey, allowing the crew to exit the vehicle and enter the space station through its Harmony module. Once aboard, the four Crew-10 spacefarers officially greeted the Expedition 72 crew members, including the astronauts who flew aboard the Starliner. What happened with the Boeing Starliner after launch from Florida? Selected for the inaugural crewed flight of the Boeing Starliner, Wilmore and Williams became fixtures of the news cycle when the vehicle they flew to the space station in June 2024 encountered a series of technical issues. NASA and Boeing ultimately decided that the troubled Starliner capsule wasn't safe enough to crew, and would instead undock and return to Earth with them. On Sept. 28, 2024, NASA launched the SpaceX Crew-9 mission as planned, but with one crucial change: Just two astronauts – Nick Hague of NASA and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov – headed to the space station on a Dragon instead of four to leave two empty seats on their vehicle reserved for Wilmore and Williams. NASA opted to keep Williams and Wilmore at the station a few extra months rather than launch an emergency mission to return them to Earth to avoid having the station be understaffed. Williams and Wilmore eventually departed the space station with the Crew-9 team and safely landed March 17 off the Florida coast following the arrival of the Crew-10 mission. When will SpaceX launch Crew-11 astronauts from Kennedy Space Center? Now, the astronauts of the Crew-10 mission are due to return to Earth themselves following the impending arrival of their own replacements. The Crew-11 mission is due to get off the ground no earlier than 12:09 p.m. ET Thursday, July 31, from near Cape Canaveral, Florida, according to NASA. As the name suggests, Crew-11 is NASA and SpaceX's 11th science expedition to the International Space Station. The missions, most of which last about six months, are contracted under NASA's commercial crew program. The program allows the U.S. space agency to pay SpaceX to launch and transport astronauts and cargo to orbit aboard the company's own vehicles, freeing up NASA to focus on its Artemis lunar program and other spaceflight missions, including future crewed voyages to Mars. Selected for the mission are NASA astronauts Zena Cardman and Mike Fincke, Japanese astronaut Kimiya Yui with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and Russian Oleg Platonov, a Roscosmos cosmonaut. SpaceX uses its Falcon 9 rocket – one of the most active in the world – to launch the crew missions from Launch Complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center. The astronauts themselves ride a Dragon crew capsule – the only U.S. spacecraft capable of carrying astronauts to and from the space station – which separates from the rocket in orbit. Ahead of the planned launch, the Dragon has been stacked atop the Falcon 9 rocket, which was rolled out Sunday, July 27 to the launch pad before being raised to a vertical position, according to NASA. When will the Crew-10 astronauts depart ISS, return to Earth? The arrival of Cardman, Fincke, Yui and Platonov will ultimately pave the way for their predecessors, the Crew-10 contingent, to depart the space station and head back to Earth. But the Crew-10 astronauts won't leave right away. What follows upon the arrival of any astronauts is a brief handover period in which the new crew members are familiarized with the orbital laboratory and station operations. McClain, Ayers, Onishi and Peskov will then depart a few days later on the same Dragon capsule that transported them to the space station. Mission teams will also have to review weather conditions off the coast of California, where the Dragon will eventually make a water landing. Who else is at the International Space Station? Another three spacefarers are also living and working about the International Space Station as members of Expedition 73. That includes NASA astronaut Jonny Kim, who reached the outpost in April 2025 with cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Alexey Zubritsky. Eric Lagatta is the Space Connect reporter for the USA TODAY Network. Reach him at elagatta@ This article originally appeared on Florida Today: SpaceX launched Crew-10 from Florida to relieve 'stuck' astronauts Solve the daily Crossword
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams made news as 'stuck' crew of Starliner. Now, he's retiring
Astronaut Butch Wilmore's venture to space aboard the ill-fated Boeing Starliner spacecraft appears to be his last – at least with NASA. NASA has announced that Wilmore is retiring from the U.S. space agency a little more than a year since he and astronaut Suni Williams set out for the International Space Station for what was meant to be a brief orbital stay. Selected for the Starliner's first crewed test flight, Wilmore and Williams were thrust into the worldwide spotlight after the troubled mission stretched on for months due to issues with the spacecraft. Now, after returning to Earth in March, Wilmore is hanging up the spacesuit, NASA announced in an Aug. 6 press release. Of course, retiring from NASA doesn't always mean the end of an astronaut's space traveling days. Peggy Whitson, 65, has famously returned to space on two ventures with a private company known as Axiom Space after her retirement from NASA in 2018. What's next for Wilmore remains to be seen. In the meantime, here's everything to know about the experienced spacefarer, as well as his part in the Starliner saga. Who is Butch Wilmore? Wilmore, 62, is a Tennessee native first selected as a NASA astronaut in 2000. Prior to joining NASA, Wilmore, a graduate of the U.S. Naval Test Pilot School, served as U.S. Navy captain and test pilot who flew on numerous combat missions. Wilmore flew on three spaceflights during his 25 years at NASA, which included being a passenger on four different spacecraft and accumulating 464 days in space. NASA announces Butch Wilmore's retirement as astronaut In announcing Wilmore's retirement, Steve Koerner, the acting head of NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, said the astronaut's "commitment to NASA's mission and dedication to human space exploration is truly exemplary." 'His lasting legacy of fortitude will continue to impact and inspire the Johnson workforce, future explorers, and the nation for generations," Koerner said in a statement. Wilmore said in his own statement that he has been "captivated by the marvels of creation" since he was young, "looking upward with an insatiable curiosity." "This curiosity propelled me into the skies, and eventually to space, where the magnificence of the cosmos mirrored the glory of its creator in ways words can scarcely convey,' Wilmore said in the statement. 'Even as I ventured beyond Earth's limits, I remained attuned to the beauty and significance of the world below, recognizing the same intricate design evident among the stars is also woven into the fabric of life at home.' Wilmore crewed Boeing Starliner with astronaut Suni Williams Wilmore's retirement announcement comes less than five months after he returned from the International Space Station following an unexpectedly lengthy stay. Wilmore, along with NASA astronaut Suni Williams, were the two selected to crew the inaugural human flight of the Boeing Starliner in 2024. Wilmore and Williams launched June 5, 2024, on a mission to test a vehicle intended to one day join the SpaceX Dragon in transporting NASA astronauts to orbit. The Starliner capsule rode to orbit atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from NASA's Kennedy Space Center near Cape Canaveral, Florida. Wilmore and Williams reached the International Space Station the next day, June 6, 2024, where they were expected to remain for about 10 days before returning home. Instead, the two astronauts quickly became fixtures of the news cycle for months when the vehicle that sent them to the space station encountered a series of technical failures. Wilmore and Williams repeatedly pushed back against the notion that they were "stuck" in space – a claim most prominently put forward by President Donald Trump. Instead, the astronauts insisted that they were prepared and trained for a long duration mission, a situation they understood was possible when flying on a test spacecraft like Starliner. During their 286 days at the orbital laboratory, Wilmore and Williams helped conduct scientific research and perform routine station maintenance. The pair also completed a spacewalk together in January that led to Williams setting a record among women astronauts. What happened with the Boeing Starliner mission? When the Starliner made it to the space station, engineers discovered a slew of helium leaks and problems with the craft's propulsion system that for months hampered Starliner's return to Earth. Williams and Wimore's fate remained uncertain for months as NASA and Boeing deliberated on how best to get them home. But NASA and Boeing ultimately decided that the troubled Starliner capsule wasn't safe enough to crew and would instead return to Earth without them. That happened Sept. 6 when the empty Boeing Starliner undocked and made its way back to Earth for a parachute-assisted landing in the New Mexico desert. On Sept. 28, 2024, NASA launched the SpaceX Crew-9 mission as planned, but with one crucial change: Instead of four astronauts, just two – Nick Hague of NASA and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov – headed to the space station on a Dragon, leaving two empty seats on their vehicle reserved for Wilmore and Williams. NASA opted to keep Williams and Wilmore at the station a few extra months rather than launch an emergency mission to return them to Earth and leave the station understaffed. Williams and Wilmore eventually departed the space station with the Crew-9 team and safely landed March 17 off the Florida coast a few days after the arrival of the Crew-10 mission. Eric Lagatta is the Space Connect reporter for the USA TODAY Network. Reach him at elagatta@ This article originally appeared on Florida Today: Butch Wilmore retires from NASA after launch from Florida on Starliner Solve the daily Crossword
WIRED
an hour ago
- WIRED
WIRED Roundup: Why GPT-5 Flopped
By Zoë Schiffer and Jake Lahut Aug 18, 2025 2:01 PM On this episode of Uncanny Valley , we dig into WIRED's latest—from crude deportation memes to GPT-5's negative reception. Photo-Illustration:In today's episode, our host Zöe Schiffer is joined by WIRED's senior politics writer Jake Lahut to run through five of the best stories we published this week—from how the Trump administration is creating and sharing memes to make fun of deportations, to NASA's ambitious goal to put nuclear reactors on the moon. Then, Zöe and Jake dive into why users kind of hated OpenAI's GPT-5 release. Mentioned in this episode: OpenAI Scrambles to Update GPT-5 After Users Revolt by Will Knight The Trump Administration Is Using Memes to Turn Mass Deportation Into One Big Joke by Tess Owen Trump Family–Backed World Liberty Financial Sets Up $1.5 Billion Crypto Treasury by Joel Khalili Inside the 'Whites Only' Community in Arkansas by David Gilbert Why the US Is Racing to Build a Nuclear Reactor on the Moon by Becky Ferreira Join us live in San Francisco on September 9th. Get your tickets here. You can follow Zoë Schiffer on Bluesky at @zoeschiffer and Jake Lahut on Bluesky at @ Write to us at uncannyvalley@ How to Listen You can always listen to this week's podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here's how: If you're on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link. You can also download an app like Overcast or Pocket Casts and search for 'uncanny valley.' We're on Spotify too. Transcript Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors. Zoë Schiffer: Hey, this is Zoë. Before we start, I want to share some exciting news with you. We're doing a live show in San Francisco on September 9th, in partnership with KQED. Uncanny Valley co-hosts, Lauren Good and Michael Colore will sit down with our editor-in-chief, Katie Drummond, and a special guest, for a conversation that you really won't want to miss. You can use the link in the show notes to grab your ticket and invite a friend. We can't wait to see you there. Welcome to WIRED's Uncanny Valley . I'm Zoë Schiffer, WIRED's Director of Business and Industry. Today on the show, we're bringing you five stories that you absolutely need to know this week, including the less than warm reception that OpenAI's GPT-5 model got from users. I'm joined today by WIRED's senior writer. Jake Lahut. Jake Lahut: Great to be back. Zoë Schiffer: So our first story this week is about how the Trump administration has been posting memes to make fun of deportations. Have you seen these at all? Jake Lahut: Yes, unfortunately I have. Yeah. Real fun, funny stuff. Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, real dark. So WIRED contributor, Tess Owen, reported on this pattern of different official government accounts on social media using whatever is viral at the moment and tailoring it to promote and make fun of deportations. And this is especially popular in the accounts of the Department of Homeland Security and Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, and the White House. So for example, there's this catchy jingle that belongs to Jet2, which is a low budget British Airline that's been making the rounds lately on social media. [Archival audio]: Nothing beats a Jet2 holiday, and right now- Zoë Schiffer: Last month, DHS and the White House made a joint Instagram post incorporating the tune on top of footage of ICE detainees in handcuffs boarding a deportation plane, and the caption reads, "When ICE books you on one-way Jet2, holiday to deportation, nothing beats it." Jake Lahut: Oh my God. Zoë Schiffer: I honestly have such a hard time thinking about who would find that funny, even if you really are anti-immigration, I don't know another way to say it, it just seems so mean. Jake Lahut: Yeah, if you could have seen our faces when that was playing. Yeah, darling, hold my hand, I don't want to ever see anything like that ever again. Something I've picked up on ever since covering the Trump 2024 campaign, which is, there's obviously still a lot of really weird, cringy, messed up stuff going on here, but it's also an attempt, at least from their point of view in the weird bubble they're in to kind of mainstream this stuff. Zoë Schiffer: Right. And this is actually the point, according to Tessa's reporting, she spoke to experts who said that the goal of this is really to normalize what's happening. The point isn't just to be crude or cruel, it's strategic. This sparked a bunch of backlash. It's not just you and me, but in response to WIRED's reporting, the White House gave a statement that basically just dismissed these concerns and said that it, "won't apologize for posting banger memes." Moving on to the world of crypto. Our colleague, Joel Kalili, reported on a cryptocurrency business called World Liberty Financial, which I'm sure you're familiar with too, Jake. Jake Lahut: Oh, yeah. Zoë Schiffer: Which has come up with a clever workaround, I guess you could say, for the fact that crypto can't technically be traded on the stock exchange. So World Liberty is now allowing investors to speculate on the price of its coin by way of a little known company that is legally listed on the NASDAQ, called Alt-Five Sigma Corporation. Are you familiar? Jake Lahut: I am not as familiar with that word mash. Zoë Schiffer: So this is where it gets kind of sticky because technically Alt-Five is marketed as a crypto payments company, but in practice, the deal will turn the stock into a sort of proxy for their crypto coin, basically allowing investors to bet on the asset without the hassle and risk that comes with holding a crypto coin themselves. It sounds very crypto. It's a scheme that has raised eyebrows, to say the least. One of Joel's Wall Street sources told us that what this move effectively does is build a holding company with the sole objective of creating a treasury for their crypto coin, about $1.5 billion worth, which could inflate the market capitalization of the coin. Jake Lahut: And this is also controversial because this starts opening up a different can of worms where potential investors and politically motivated actors who are all in this orbit can have even more influence over the administration. We've already seen the way you can do that with the meme coin, now with World Liberty Financial they're obviously affiliated with Trump's adult sons, and the Trump family controls 22.5% of the WLFI coins and about a 40% equity stake in World Liberty Financial. So this is definitely the big game in town when it comes to buttering the Trump family's biscuit. Zoë Schiffer: Right. I love how you said that. Yeah, basically, if you want to potentially try and curry favor with Trump, you buy into one of these schemes, and maybe you'll get invited to a fancy crypto dinner, which has happened before. Maybe you get something else. But even just the optics here are pretty suspect. Jake Lahut: Yeah. And in a little side item we had in my Interloop Newsletter this week, we had some new data on the somewhat stunning lack of enforcement from the Trump administration across the tech sector, but crypto in particular had pretty much everyone who had been facing any kind of legal action from the Biden administration, having their enforcement actions either dropped completely or paused. And in one instance, we're looking at the maybe first ever pardoning of a company from one of these things. So you don't need to just pony up the money for these things and expect a legislative win, you can just get the heat pulled off of you on the regulatory front. Zoë Schiffer: Right. So our third story, I'm really waiting for one that's not incredibly depressing, but right now we're going all the way to Arkansas where our colleague, David Gilbert, reported that a group of Americans are building a "whites-only community," which they call Return to the Land. The group believes that white people and western culture are facing extinction because of an influx of immigrants and minorities. And according to the group's founder, access to the community is open only to people of white European ancestry who share common views on things like segregation, abortion, and gender identity. Return to the Land's president shared their intellectual inspiration with David, the reporter, saying that they were partly inspired by venture capitalist and the son of immigrant parents, Balaji Srevenesin, and his book, The Network State, which promotes the idea of a digital-first community of people with shared values, with the aim of gaining a degree of sovereignty and autonomy. Jake Lahut: And look, not just America, long history of a bunch of wacky well-intentioned or just downright weird utopias, but this one, a little different, because you're having the sovereignty to be racist. But in all seriousness, Zoë, how is any of this legal? Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, I mean, that is the real question. So the whole premise goes back to the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which prevents housing discrimination based on race or religion, but Return to the Land claims that the structure of the community is more akin to a private member's association. And so far local authorities seem to agree. Arkansas Attorney General, Tim Griffin, told WIRED that his office has found nothing illegal about the community. Surprise, surprise. Jake Lahut: Yeah, it's like Erlich Bachman's incubator from Silicon Valley, but for white supremacy and racism. Zoë Schiffer: Exactly. Exactly. Okay, one more before we take a break. This one is about how the US is racing to build a nuclear reactor on the moon. WIRED contributor, Becky Ferreira, recently reported that NASA is fast tracking a plan to build a nuclear reactor on the moon by 2030 under a new directive from the agency's interim administrator, Sean Duffy. Jake Lahut: Sean Duffy, only in America, can you go from the Fox and Friends weekend couch to being Secretary of Transportation, to also doing this. He's a busy, busy man, multitasking- Zoë Schiffer: He's a busy, busy man. Jake Lahut: To the moon. Zoë Schiffer: So his stated motivation is that the US has to stay ahead in what he deems to be the "moon race" with China and Russia. Both countries have expressed their desire to place nuclear reactors on the moon, and it's an appealing idea because nuclear energy is a powerful continuous source of energy. We're hearing about it more and more with the AI race. And so the directive laid out by Duffy is to quickly design, launch, and deploy an operational 100 kilowatt reactor to the lunar South Pole within five years that would be built with commercial partners, and experts say this would be difficult, but not completely impossible. If it actually gets accomplished, it would potentially change the space industry. They could start designing space systems around what we want to do and not what smaller, often limited power allows them to do. Jake Lahut: With the added bonus of effectively using a nuclear flag to prevent other countries from landing in this area, so, all right. Sounds promising, question mark? Zoë Schiffer: It is, and there's always a but, there's also a mountain of safety and regulatory concerns that this would bring obviously, because we're literally dealing with nuclear energy in outer space. So how do you contain the uranium for one, how do you make sure to stay in your sovereign zone so you don't accidentally start a space war? All these questions are coming up and accelerated process could make it even trickier. Jake Lahut: Yeah. I extremely do not want to be here for a space war, so catch me pulling a Yoda in the Degaba system. I'll hide it out until the all clear has been given. Zoë Schiffer: I'll be there with you. Okay. Coming up, we'll dive into why OpenAI's latest model release ended up being kind of a flop despite all of the hype. Stay with us. Welcome back to Uncanny Valley . I'm Zoë Schiffer, I'm joined today by Jake Lahut, and we're discussing the user response to OpenAI's release of GPT-5. OpenAI's GPT-5 model was meant to be like a world changing upgrade to the wildly popular ChatGPT. Sam Altman had tweeted out the Death Star, they said it was going to have kind of virtuosic skill and PhD level intelligence, and I think a lot of people felt like it was going to bring us basically up to artificial general intelligence. Were you aware of the hype leading up to everything? Jake Lahut: And I was definitely taken aback by the term PhD level intelligence in the hype for all of this stuff. And what I started to wonder about was like, what is that going to look like compared to the more sycophantic glaze you up version of GPT-4.0? Zoë Schiffer: So yeah, it was too much hype. They'd actually tried... I talked to sources about this, internally they were testing various models that they wanted to call GPT-5 and none were meeting the mark. And so I think there was a fair amount of pressure internally. If you talk to people who work closely with Sam, they'll say he really likes to have a big splash every three to four months, once a quarter at least. And so I think the combination of the fact that they hadn't released a major model in a while, I mean the open source models notwithstanding, they had been hyping GPT-5 for so long. There was this push to be like, "We have to release a model, a big model, and we kind of have to call it GPT-5." Then the day it launched, there was supposed to be this feature that could automatically route your query based on how complicated it was, like if you were asking something very simple, it would route you to a cheaper model basically. And if you were asking something more complicated, you might get a reasoning model. That broke according to Sam Altman, the CEO. And so the model just seemed dumber all day than it otherwise would. So I don't know. There was a lot going on. Jake Lahut: And at least from my more layman outside politics world perspective on this, it does seem like a... From the economics to be a rather smart, more efficient way to go about it. But the part that really stood out to me though was more of the "personality" of GPT-5 and this revolts that it started on Reddit and among the ChatGPT super users, of which I am admittedly not one. Zoë Schiffer: Right, yeah. So this was really fascinating. I think one thing that happened, and again I'm pulling this from conversations with a bunch of sources inside the company, is that they really wanted to optimize for coding ability this time, because that's really been Claude's edge, Anthropic's AI model, and obviously it's a huge revenue driver. It's kind of the first area where we've seen a big widespread commercial adoption in a way that could do the thing that AI companies have been saying all along will be done, which is it'll disrupt and augment jobs in a pretty serious way. Engineers really are using these tools and companies are really pushing the tools on their own workforce. But like you said, the reason that regular people like models isn't often because of their coding ability. It's because they genuinely like talking to them. It's a lot more about the personality, about the warmth, even about the sycophancy, although they've fixed a large part of that in the latest release. And so people completely flipped out. We were looking at Reddit and people were saying, "This is erasure, what have they done? Take me back to 4.0." Jake Lahut: "You took away my friend." Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, I mean it really, really impacted people. I think on the most extreme ends, you see people who have, what looks like perhaps like a mental health crisis, they're so attached to the model, but then you just have complete power users who are like, "This is part of my minute by minute life. What have you done? You didn't warn me." Jake Lahut: And this is where the introspective aspect of these tools, the kind of desire for self-understanding, the people who are not advisably from any medical perspective, but they are trying to use these bots for something akin to therapy. And what it made me think of when I saw this rolling out was, is this maybe the beginning of something bigger where there's kind of a departure between the "regular consumer" experience and demand for AI versus the business application. We may not all have the same definition of intelligence when it comes to these models, and that some of us really just want a buddy, a companion, a way to know ourselves better. And then other people are like, "No, I just need a little team of bots here to manage, get my stuff done, I'm going to babysit and I'm going to tell them what to do and live my life." And yeah, I don't know where that goes. It does seem like it's revealing something maybe genuinely new about the human condition in a way that I would not have expected. Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, I mean, I think it's been a learning for OpenAI. They've been kind of baffled. I've seen these conversations internally where they're like, "I guess people don't care as much about intelligence as we thought." The narrative around intelligence is critically important for fundraising, if nothing else, they really need to raise gobs of money and being like, "We're about to achieve artificial and general intelligence, AI will be able to do all of these things," is really important for that. But for everyday users, it really makes me think of this story that is kind of famous inside OpenAI About the night before the ChatGPT release in November of '22, Ilya, he was testing out what was going to be ChatGPT and asked it 10 pretty hard questions. And he felt like five of them, he got pretty good responses, and five were unacceptably bad. And they had this moment where they were like, "Do we release this? I don't know if it's good enough." And then they decided to move forward. And what we saw was the general public was like, "This is amazing." Because they'd solved a product issue. It wasn't necessarily about the model, which had been out for a long time. It was like the interface to interact with the model was really the unlock. And I think OpenAI, that really is more and more the company's edge, even though it really sees itself as a research lab. It's a product lab in a lot of ways, and it'll be interesting to see how that changes the company moving forward. Jake Lahut: Absolutely. Zoë Schiffer: That's our show for today. We'll link to all the stories we spoke about in the show notes. If you're in San Francisco, don't forget to get your tickets for the September 9th event with KQED. Make sure to check out Thursday's episode of Uncanny Valley , which is about what Palantir actually does and why it's so controversial. Adriana Tapia produced this episode, Amar Lal at Macrosound mixed this episode. Pran Bandi is our New York studio engineer. Kate Osborn is our executive producer. Conde Nass, Head of Global Audio is Chris Bannon and Katie Drummond is WIRED's Global Editorial Director.
