WIRED Roundup: Gemini 3 Release, Nvidia Earnings, Epstein Files Fallout

In today’s episode, host Zoë Schiffer is joined by senior writer Max Zeff to discuss five stories you need to know about this week—from the political fallout after the release of the Epstein files, to why two young Mormon men created an app to help men stop “gooning.” Then, we dive into Gemini 3’s release and how companies like Google and OpenAI are honing in on AI profitability.

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Transcript

Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.

Zoë Schiffer: 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 need to know about this week, including how companies like Google and OpenAI are honing in on profitability as they develop their AI consumer-facing products. I’m joined today by WIRED’s Senior Writer Max Zeff. Max, welcome to Uncanny Valley.

Max Zeff: Thanks, Zoë. It’s great to be here.

Zoë Schiffer: Our first story is about how the Trump administration has completely lost the narrative around the Epstein files. It feels like we could talk about this every week, but this week in particular, it’s really important. Our colleague, David Gilbert, wrote about the increasing pressure that President Trump was receiving from everyone, and we really do mean everyone, from QAnon followers to a coalition of GOP lawmakers and democratic legislators to release the files related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. On Wednesday this week, Trump finally signed the bill passed by Congress releasing roughly 20,000 documents on Epstein. But as David put it, the damage to the administration’s brand already kind of feels like it’s done.

Max Zeff: Yeah, it’s really just unbelievable how far the Trump administration has gone around the block on the Epstein case compared to where it first started. I mean, in the past this was a political campaignship, but now it’s kind of an ongoing crisis that they really need to manage. I really liked David’s article just painting the full picture of where this started, and it truly is wild to look back on. Looking back to 2017 when QAnon first started talking about Jeffrey Epstein all the way up through 2019 when he was arrested, and now it’s shocking that we’re about to be in 2026 and the story is still unfolding.

Zoë Schiffer: I have a hard time putting myself in the administration’s shoes. How did they not realize that at a certain point, if you tease this, you’re going to have to deliver, and if you are nervous hypothetically, that you could be involved in any way and you really don’t want this to come out. It just seems kind of like a “play with fire, you’ll get burned” situation, but I mean, it’s the conspiracy theory that never stops giving.

Earlier this year, Attorney General Pam Bondi said that the Epstein client list was quote “sitting on her desk,” and then the FBI quickly backtracked that statement. Then the DOJ published video footage of Epstein’s death in jail, and after analyzing the video, WIRED found that several minutes of the footage had been deleted, and in this latest batch of documents, it appears that Trump’s relationship with Epstein might’ve been way more complicated than people originally thought. One email sent by Epstein implies that he had intimate knowledge of Trump’s views in 2017, which is more than a decade after Trump claims that he had last talked to him. So I’m trying not to get us to join the conspiracy circles Max, but let’s just say that the current administration, it feels like they have made the situation messier for themselves time and time again.

Max Zeff: Yeah, they’re great at that. I mean, it really feels like conspiracy theories are not a great thing to play with generally in politics, but especially when you are maybe directly involved with some of their central claims. I don’t want to veer too down into this rabbit hole, but that’s not stopping some influencers from doing so like Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens, and they haven’t been able to really let these go, and it seems like even if they do release the files at this point in their totality, it doesn’t feel like this story is going to be over for the Trump administration.

Zoë Schiffer: Well, I guess we’ll wait to see what impact, if any, this has on the midterm elections. Our next story keeps us in the thick of politics, but for slightly different reasons. So you and our colleague, Makena Kelly, just learned that President Trump is considering signing an executive order that would seek to challenge individual state efforts to regulate AI. So tell us about that and how you got firsthand knowledge about what this order might say.

Max Zeff: Yeah, so we heard yesterday that a draft of this executive order was going around D.C. and in Silicon Valley, and it really spread far and wide. I think the working title of the draft makes it all pretty clear. It’s called Eliminating State Law Obstruction of National AI Policy, which is a funny way to refer to state law as obstruction, but it really indicates that Trump is going to instruct US Attorney General Pam Bondi to create an AI litigation task force. And the whole purpose of this new task force, if the draft goes into effect as it states, is to just sue states in court for passing AI regulations that the Trump administration deems to violate federal laws. It really wants to go after state AI laws that it says infringe on things like free speech and interstate commerce. But I think that there’s also a bigger question of why do you need an executive order to do this when you could just take these states to court over that? You don’t need a special body to be in charge of that.

Zoë Schiffer: It also feels like a huge signal once again that the Trump administration is cozying up, siding with the big companies on this. This approach, the kind of state-by-state regulations, and sometimes the regulations differ, has been something that big AI companies are vehemently against. And you wrote in your piece that Chamber of Progress, which is an industry group that’s backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Google and OpenAI among others has intensely lobbied against these efforts for years arguing basically that it’s a patric approach to AI regulation that makes it really hard to innovate and grow.

Max Zeff: This is basically exactly what a lot of Silicon Valley players have been asking for. We know that over the last couple of years, and really the last couple months, the Silicon Valley executives have gotten very close to Trump, and this executive order really represents a lot of the things that they’ve been demanding.

Zoë Schiffer: And there’s also some interesting language in the draft that you were able to get that hints that the evergreen concern that the administration has about quote woke AI is something they’re going to be going after specifically as well. That language says that they’ll target regulations that quote require AI models to alter their truthful outputs. I have a lot to say about this, but one is just do we have any evidence that state laws have done this before?

Max Zeff: We don’t. They’re specifically focused on this law in Colorado that says that AI companies can’t put algorithmic discrimination into their AI models, and they have to report on how they’re doing that. To be honest, I really think that the Trump administration and David Sacks in particular are very hung up on when Gemini had its AI image generation fiasco, which was about a year ago. They have continuously pointed to this as a way that AI models are not being truthful and are altering reality. But the truth is that we just haven’t seen a lot of evidence since then, and I think it was unclear what the administration is really talking about here.

Zoë Schiffer: Right. I mean, my personal theory is that they were very triggered by walking into the Twitter office and seeing a room full of StayWoke shirts, and they’re still recovering from that. So I think a lot of what we’re seeing now may be a little reaction to that. Moving on to our next story, still in the world of AI, Nvidia had their earnings call this week and our colleague Paresh Devey brought us the juiciest bits. So apparently Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang did not need any prompting to address the elephant in the room. The AI bubble.

Max Zeff: Yes, the AI bubble. We’ve all resigned ourselves that we just live in now, everyone says it.

Zoë Schiffer: Unsurprisingly, Huang defended the viability of Nvidia’s position having become the world’s most valuable publicly traded company over the past three years. His argument was pretty straightforward, not that different from what you hear from Sam Altman and others. It’s basically that AI is taking over the world and Nvidia chips will be sorely needed to power the technology revolution that is already underway. He backed it up by saying that the company reported record quarterly sales, and in the call executives reiterated that they have about $500 billion worth of unfilled orders, and this pep talk helped Nvidia recover a bit from the sell-off that it has been experiencing in the past few weeks, which I think you and I have both been watching with interest.

Max Zeff: Yeah, it’s become a theme where every time Nvidia has earnings, Jensen just gets on a call and defends AI industry and why everything is going fine. I remember a few months ago he was defending how scaling laws were still intact, and now it’s just the AI bubble at large. But last week news broke that Peter Thiel sold his Nvidia stake, which felt like a very concerning warning.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, I think that one thing that everyone can agree on is that Nvidia is undoubtedly one of the companies that has gone all in during this AI acceleration moment. For better or worse, about 90 percent of Nvidia’s sales, which were once dominated by chips for personal gaming computers now come from its data center business, and it feels like every time one of these partnerships between OpenAI and another company, Nvidia’s in there somewhere, it just feels like it’s attached to everyone else in this industry at this point.

Max Zeff: Yeah, it’s done a great job of infusing itself with every AI company, but also, I mean, that’s been a major concern. There’s been a lot of talk of these circular deals where Nvidia really depends on a lot of these startups that it’s also funding. It’s a customer, it’s an investor. Nvidia is so wrapped up in this. So I guess in that way, it’s not that surprising that Jensen is defending the AI bubble constantly now.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. It’s also worth saying that one of the fears that people who have the fear of the AI bubble will talk about is the fact that the GPUs are the majority of the cost of building out a data center and they need to be replaced, what, every three years Nvidia releases new chips and they’re cutting edge and companies need to buy them in order to compete. I think the fear is that that renewal cycle isn’t quite factored into the pricing, but as long as people continue to buy chips, what Jensen is saying is, “No, no, we’re insulated right now.”

Max Zeff: Right. We’ll see if that’s really true though.

Zoë Schiffer: One more story before we go to break, and to get through this one, we both have to be extra professional. I’m not sure Max, which we always are, but just a little extra. You will see what I mean. WIRED contributor, Mattha Busby reported on how two young Mormons created an app to help other men break their porn addiction and gooning habits. I’m going to be real. I had never heard this term before reading this story, and I was shocked. OK, if you’re not familiar with gooning, it’s basically just another word for edging. That is long hours of masturbation without release. This app called Relay was created by 27-year-old Chandler Rogers with the mission of providing his Gen Z peers a way to stop doing this and to generally escape from the clutches of porn. I have some other ideas. I feel like go outside, talk to a human, but I don’t want to be mean because I do feel like this could be really difficult for people.

Max Zeff: God bless you. The solution is software Zoë, and thank you for explaining that. So yeah, there’s definitely layers to this story. I mean, obviously the creators of this created it to be aligned with their religious beliefs, they’re Mormons, and that’s great for them. And also it seems that for some of the people who Mattha spoke to, it’s really helping them. This app actually has an impressive amount of users. I was honestly shocked when I saw that I had over a hundred thousand people using it, which is all good things. The part where it gets a little bit dicey I think is when we see it in the context of the broader discussion around porn that’s going on right now. I mean, a lot of Republicans have really zeroed in on passing anti-porn legislation. There’s this big push in the country right now. This is just a problem that a lot of Republicans have accepted is like this needs to be stopped out completely. And I’m just curious how a piece of software like this gets used.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, it’s interesting. I feel like a lot of the legislation has created its own problems or potential problems. It’s like age verification rules that either make it very difficult for these sites to operate in those states or have real privacy implications, and there’s a lot of shame involved in this too. So the app offers some, I don’t know, seemingly good things like videos by therapists, daily journal prompts, live group sharing sessions. But some experts argue that trying to control a very human urge while possibly ignoring the underlying emotions that might make this compulsion present in the first place is a mistake. And this is kind of coming in context, not to have an AI angle on everything, but OpenAI has said that they’re going to be allowing erotic conversations. Obviously Grok has this AI companion feature, so it feels like a lot of these issues are very much in the zeitgeist for people right now.

Max Zeff: Yeah, OpenAI and xAI, I guess I’m not sure if they would call it gooning features, but that’s effectively what they’ve released. They’re really embracing erotica now. The founder of this app is really taking a stand against AI here and some of these new erotic features. So I guess what does this all mean for the future of gooning? That’s what we’re talking about here.

Zoë Schiffer: That’s what we’re talking about. But luckily for both of us, we can move on.

Coming up after the break, we dive into how companies like OpenAI and Google are trying to race toward the golden egg of the AI era profitability.

Welcome back to Uncanny Valley. I’m Zoë Schiffer. I’m joined today by our senior writer Max Zeff.

Let’s dive into our main story. This week we had a look into how Google and OpenAI are both laying out their ambitions with a clearer focus on consumer-facing applications and future profitability. We like to think that they don’t need to think about this, but AI is really expensive. Building AI, maintaining it is really, really expensive. And so they do need to have this as a factor. Basically, like many other companies in the AI space, they’re trying to find answers to the urgent question of how do we get users to actually pay for this. On Tuesday, Google released Gemini 3, its latest AI model and chatbot and our colleague Will Knight reported that this latest model is skilled at reasoning, generating video and writing code. DeepMind’s CEO, Demis Hassabis went a different route compared to Huang’s in the Nvidia earnings call, he actually admitted that the AI space was getting a little crowded, but he believes, no surprise, that Google will come out on top because they’re diversifying their use of AI in products like Google Maps, Gmail and search. I’m curious just to start, what did you make of that argument?

Max Zeff: I think it’s an interesting thing. I talked to a lot of people who thought it was notable that Demis and Sundar also actually in his comments recently has talked about the AI bubble and how some of these [inaudible] evaluations don’t make sense. And of course if you’re Google, that argument kind of makes sense because if the bubble pops, Google will probably be OK. And it’s true that they’ve been integrating AI into all of these products that they already have, and they argue that it’s making them all better, and they seem to share some evidence for that. They said that there’s a 70 percent spike in visual search, which relies on Gemini. So people are using search more in some ways. And also just the Gemini app itself has 650 million monthly active users now according to Google. These are real products that they have that have pretty wild user bases, and it doesn’t seem that far-fetched that Google is very well positioned at this point.

Zoë Schiffer: Basically, the idea is that even if there’s a downturn in the AI market, Google already has users for all of those other products. So putting AI into those products, they’re way more insulated than a company that’s just providing, say, a chatbot. I also recently spoke with OpenAI’s new CEO of applications, Fidji Simo at her home in L.A., and when I asked her about whether she was worried that the company was kind of expanding in a bunch of different directions simultaneously, she said that part of her job, part of the reason she was hired was to minimize that risk.

She wants to hire really smart people to own these goals individually so that it’s not one company trying to do too much as much as it is a bunch of different tag teams that are tackling their specific problem. So OpenAI is trying to diversify in its way too. They are rolling out more products, but it still feels to me, and I’m curious what you think about this, Google is catching up. It almost feels like every time there’s a model release these days, that company vaults to the head of the pack and then the next time there’s a model release that company’s a little bit ahead because they’re all so close at this point in terms of capabilities.

Max Zeff: Yeah, I think that it’s really remarkable to see how far Google has come in the AI race. We were talking about in 2022 how they were caught flat-footed, they were in a similar position to Apple and all these other companies, and now that’s just not the story at all. I mean, it’s really remarkable how Google is a leading company today, and I think you’re a hundred percent right. It might not be the case next week. I mean, OpenAI released a new model a day after Google’s Gemini 3 that I think outperforms it on some benchmarks, but really they’re in the race now and they have a compelling strategy around products, but they all really are just still throwing things at the wall.

Zoë Schiffer: I don’t want to pat myself on the back too much, but I do remember last year an editor reaching out and saying, “Would you be interested in writing a feature on how Google lost the AI race?” And even then when it was pretty behind, I was like, “I feel like we’re a little early to declare that.” They still have such a big business. Like you said before, they can slot AI into a lot of their existing products and have a leg up on some of their competitors, and they also just have a lot of money to hire talent. So I think it’s impressive, perhaps not entirely surprising that they’ve been able to pull ahead in this way.

Max Zeff: And I think another interesting thing about Google is that I think this came up in Will’s conversation with Demis, which is that they’re really trying to focus on increasing productivity in these places. Like people use Google at work and stuff, and I think OpenAI has a slightly different problem where people are using ChatGPT much more like a companion. And I think that seems to be a big problem for them. It might be for Gemini as well, but when you talked to Fidji Simo, how did she think about mental health with ChatGPT’s users?

Zoë Schiffer: So I do think that this is a big area where she is focused and taking the concerns pretty seriously. I think the Council on Mental Health or Well-Being, that group of a hundred experts that OpenAI has gathered, that actually was Fidji Simo’s idea. I think Jason Kwan, the chief strategy officer, had reached out being like, “How should we try and solve this problem?” And she was like, “Let’s get outside support.” And so she’s going to be meeting with those people regularly and getting feedback. But I think the bigger thing that this is getting at is OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit. It had this really lofty goal, but now it has a big for-profit subsidiary that’s a public benefit corporation. And will it really be focused on making sure that AI really does benefit everyone or will it have other goals as it tries to scale and grow?

And already I think that the AI erotica is a big part of this because it’s coming at a moment when ChatGPT growth, which has been like number go up into the right, basically this whole time is flatlining a little bit. And we’re seeing Grok actually continue to grow, the no-holds-bar approach to AI companionship, and I think that, you and I both talk to researchers in this space, that’s really one of the reasons that people think Grok is growing because people want to engage with chatbots in this way. And so it kind of puts pressure on OpenAI to say, “OK, just kidding. We’ll do companions as well.”

Max Zeff: One of our colleagues, Reece Rogers, he talked to researchers at Anthropic this week, and Anthropic can take the high road here. They can reduce sycophancy in Claude a lot. They are not building companions. They’ve completely gone down this enterprise route where they’re just trying to build AI that’s very capable. OpenAI and Google are not in the same position where they really have to make their chatbots very enjoyable to talk to. And sometimes that means pulling levers that are not the best for users’ health. So I do think that this is a core tension at the company that we’ll probably be talking about for a long time now.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, it feels like OpenAI is dealing with it by basically saying, “OK, we’re going to give people more flexibility in how they want to engage with the chatbots.” I mean, I would imagine because they’re worried that if they just made it really formal like they did with GPT-5, people really reacted poorly to that. They’re very attached to the perhaps slightly more sycophantic kind of tone.

Max Zeff: And I don’t think that people like to admit that they like it when their chatbot is praising everything they do, but it seems like that’s a really big factor in how much you use it. So it’s a little more complicated than just that.

Zoë Schiffer: That’s our show for today. We’ll link to all the stories we spoke about in the show notes. Make sure to check out Thursday’s episode of Uncanny Valley, which is about whether tech can get rid of bad drug chips. Adriana Tapia and Mark Leyda produced this episode, Amar Lal at Macrosound mixed this episode. Kate Osborn is our executive producer. Chris Bannon is Condé Nast’s, head of Global Audio, and Katie Drummond is WIRED’s Global Editorial Director.

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