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.
Articles mentioned in this episode:
How Donald Trump Lost Control of the Epstein Spin Cycle
Trump Takes Aim at State AI Laws in Draft Executive Order
Nvidia CEO Dismisses Concerns of an AI Bubble. Investors Remain Skeptical
Young Mormons Built an App to Help Men Quit Gooning
Gemini 3 Is Here—and Google Says It Will Make Search Smarter
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You can follow Zoë Schiffer on Bluesky at @zoeschiffer and Max Zeff on Bluesky at @mzeff. Write to us at uncannyvalley@wired.com.
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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,