Cuba is at a breaking point. From severe fuel shortages to a public health crisis, the island’s economic distress has reached a fever pitch. Now, the Trump administration believes it has the leverage to do what others couldn't: force regime change. This week, Luke Vargas explores the mechanics of this renewed pressure campaign and America’s power projection abroad with WSJ’s José de Córdoba in Mexico and Vera Bergengruen in Washington.
At the Grammy Awards tonight, the Puerto Rican pop sensation Bad Bunny is the first Spanish-language artist to be nominated for album, record and song of the year simultaneously. For most artists, this would be the high point of their year, if not their career. For Bad Bunny, this is just an appetizer for what’s in store for him next week.
Next Sunday, he will headline the Super Bowl halftime show. His performance comes in the middle of a nationwide crackdown on immigration — an issue he’s been vocal about — and follows a backlash against the N.F.L. for booking him in the first place.
Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli, the hosts of The Times’s pop music show “Popcast,” discuss Bad Bunny’s rise to the heights of pop stardom, and explore what it means for a Puerto Rican artist to headline the world’s biggest stage.
Marc J. Dunkelman, author of "Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress — and How to Bring It Back," stops by the studio to talk to Lovett about how Democrats — once they regain power — can make government work again. Together they dive into the ways progressive governance changed from the New Deal to today, the influence of Robert Caro's polemic "The Power Broker" on a generation of public employees, and why they're both hopeful that Democrats will be able to find their way out of the darkness and learn to do big things again.
President Trump has a vision for the American workforce. Forget expensive college educations. His eye is on the skilled trades. The U.S. Department of Labor has adopted the slogan “Make America Skilled Again.”
But who gets to be part of this renaissance?
Since the 1980s, women have made small but meaningful gains in the construction trades. Now there are concerns that President Trump’s campaign to end diversity, equity and inclusion will stall that progress — setting back both women and the construction industry.
Today on the Sunday Story, we ask how women fit into this administration’s vision of this skilled trades future.
The Iranian government cut off nearly all internet access on January 8 as part of a crackdown on protestors, an example of why authoritarians attempt internet blackouts—and why they don’t always work the way authoritarians want them to.
Guest: Steve Feldstein, political scientist and senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in the Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program.
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Podcast production by Evan Campbell, and Patrick Fort.
Venezuela’s acting president, Delcy Rodríguez, said she would propose an “amnesty law” covering the period since 1999—when Hugo Chávez, self-styled leader of the “Bolivarian revolution”, came to power
A second woman has alleged she was sent to Britain by the late sex offender, Jeffrey Epstein, to have sex with Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor who has always denied wrongdoing. Also: there are explosions in Iran amid heightened tensions; a US federal judge allows ICE to continue the immigration crackdown in Minnesota; Pakistan's army kills rebels in Balochistan province; European and non-English movies gain momentum ahead of the Oscars; the ethics of AI creating life; and do dogs need clothing?
The Global News Podcast brings you the breaking news you need to hear, as it happens. Listen for the latest headlines and current affairs from around the world. Politics, economics, climate, business, technology, health – we cover it all with expert analysis and insight.
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Nathan Lambert and Sebastian Raschka are machine learning researchers, engineers, and educators. Nathan is the post-training lead at the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) and the author of The RLHF Book. Sebastian Raschka is the author of Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch) and Build a Reasoning Model (From Scratch).
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OUTLINE:
(00:00) – Introduction
(01:39) – Sponsors, Comments, and Reflections
(16:29) – China vs US: Who wins the AI race?
(25:11) – ChatGPT vs Claude vs Gemini vs Grok: Who is winning?
(36:11) – Best AI for coding
(43:02) – Open Source vs Closed Source LLMs
(54:41) – Transformers: Evolution of LLMs since 2019
(1:02:38) – AI Scaling Laws: Are they dead or still holding?
(1:18:45) – How AI is trained: Pre-training, Mid-training, and Post-training
(1:51:51) – Post-training explained: Exciting new research directions in LLMs
(2:12:43) – Advice for beginners on how to get into AI development & research
(2:35:36) – Work culture in AI (72+ hour weeks)
(2:39:22) – Silicon Valley bubble
(2:43:19) – Text diffusion models and other new research directions
(2:49:01) – Tool use
(2:53:17) – Continual learning
(2:58:39) – Long context
(3:04:54) – Robotics
(3:14:04) – Timeline to AGI
(3:21:20) – Will AI replace programmers?
(3:39:51) – Is the dream of AGI dying?
(3:46:40) – How AI will make money?
(3:51:02) – Big acquisitions in 2026
(3:55:34) – Future of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, xAI, Meta
(4:08:08) – Manhattan Project for AI
(4:14:42) – Future of NVIDIA, GPUs, and AI compute clusters
(4:22:48) – Future of human civilization
