Last May, we talked with Josh Tyrangiel about his book, ‘AI for Good‘. A lot has happened since then. The pace of AI’s development has accelerated dramatically. Extraordinary breakthroughs in mathematics and the sciences have been achieved. The Hugging Face “hack” and the PHP vulnerability revelations became major stories and reminded us how treacherous AI can and almost certainly will be.
So we asked him for an update on the AI “story”. Like all good podcasts, it’s really good when the guest is great. Josh is a great guest.
(The News Items Podcast with Josh Tyrangiel. Episode #28. Recorded 29 October 2026. Produced by Katerina Barton. ~46 minutes in length). You can find this podcast, and all previous News Items podcasts, on most of the major platforms, including Apple, Amazon, Spotify and YouTube.
Bio Brief: Josh Tyrangiel is a writer for The Atlantic. He was previously the editor of Bloomberg Businessweek and chief content officer for Bloomberg Media. A twelve-time Emmy and Peabody Award–winning producer, he created Vice News Tonight on HBO and has produced numerous feature-length documentaries for HBO, Netflix, and Apple TV. These days, when he’s not writing for The Atlantic, he oversees the production of “Instadocs” on Netflix. The one on the Hugging Face Hack is terrific.