WIRED Roundup: Alpha School, Grokipedia, and Real Estate AI Videos

18 hours ago 7

In this episode, WIRED’s executive editor Brian Barrett is joined by senior politics editor Leah Feiger to run through five stories that you need to know about this week—from the release of Grokipedia to real estate entering its AI slop era. Then, Brian and Leah dive into why the promise of a tech-forward school in Texas with software instead of teachers fell apart.

Articles mentioned in this episode:

You can follow Brian Barrett on Bluesky at @brbarrett and Leah Feiger on Bluesky at @leahfeiger. Write to us at [email protected].

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Transcript

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

Brian Barrett: Welcome to WIRED's Uncanny Valley. I'm WIRED's executive editor Brian Barrett filling in today for Zoë Schiffer. Today on the show, we're bringing you five stories that you need to know about this week, including why the promise of a tech-forward school in Texas with software instead of teachers fell apart. I'm joined by our senior politics editor, Leah Feiger. Hey Leah.

Leah Feiger: Hey Brian. Thanks for having me.

Brian Barrett: So Leah, our first story today. Today is a consequential and unfortunate moment. It is the 30th day of the federal government shutdown. Our reporters Victoria Elliott and McKenna Kelly spoke with more than a dozen workers who are struggling to pay the bills, working side gigs, some of them are even relying on free food programs to get by. As of this recording, around 750,000 federal workers had been furloughed with no end in sight. One of the people that Tori McKenna spoke with was a federal worker who was working abroad and a month ago learned that her husband, who's also a federal worker, had an aggressive form of cancer. Doctors told the couple that they needed to move quickly to remove it, so they did, but now with the government shutdown, their health care claims aren't being paid out. They're out tens of thousands of dollars at least, and they're not sure when that's going to change.

Leah Feiger: It's horrible. This was a really devastating story. I mean, there really is no end in sight here, and so to have everyone dealing with medical bills and dealing with mortgages and day-to-day life, federal workers were not paid very much already. Many are paycheck to paycheck. It's pretty horrifying that we've gotten to this point already and it makes it even worse that SNAP benefits food stamps are slated to end this Saturday on November 1st. A pretty devastating turn of events for already what's been a really hard year for federal workers.

Brian Barrett: Yeah, it's the kind of story that you start out reporting, it's going to be bad and that comes back even worse than you thought somehow.

Leah Feiger: Yeah.

Brian Barrett: And it could still get worse from here is the other thing, right? Back pay for federal workers is supposed to kick in when the government shutdown ends, but who knows when that's going to be. The longest government shutdown on the books happened in 2018, 2019, that lasted 35 days. Looks like we're well on track to beat that record. Your team has been reporting on how federal workers have found their jobs also to be increasingly politicized. Not only is it not coming to an end, their own departments are kind of turning against them. People's out of office responders have been forcibly changed to say, "This is the Democrat's fault." Agencies are posting on their websites, "This is the Democrat's fault." And agencies are being targeted specifically if they are aligned with so-called Democrat priorities. What is going on here, Leah?

Leah Feiger: I mean, no, you're 100 percent right. Even with the SNAP benefits in particular, USDA, the department that administers these benefits, their entire homepage is all targeting Democrats and Democrats for the shutdown. What's been really interesting is that the federal workers we've spoken with don't actually seem to blame Democrats themselves. Instead, they're actually looking at Republicans who aren't passing stop gaps. They're looking at Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House. One really poignant quote from the story was this federal worker whose family now owes tens of thousands of dollars for medical bills that they're still waiting for processing and payment on.

This worker was like, "I am a federal worker just like Mike Johnson. We took the same oath. We're both federal employees, but he's getting paid and I'm not. He's getting healthcare and I'm not." And that's so devastating to hear, so devastating to read, and this really doesn't look like it's going anywhere anytime soon. I mean, you have a couple of Republicans that are signing on Josh Hawley in particular to try and extend funding for SNAP benefits and things like that, but it's not getting a lot of pickup in GOP leadership. So I think we're going to be waiting for a while.

Brian Barrett: Well, especially when you've got random billionaires putting $130 million to fund the military, why not?

Leah Feiger: Also, again, to be clear, this "donation" that you're speaking about from billionaire Timothy Mellon from last week, one, it's just totally unprecedented. Two, that is not very much money when it comes to operating the U.S. government. So the idea that these billionaires are able to kind of buy favor in this way, they're not actually buying that much.

Brian Barrett: Yeah. Speaking of billionaires not buying that much, and how's this for a segue? We're going to talk next about Elon Musk and Grokipedia, which may sound familiar.

Leah Feiger: It's my favorite news source now, Brian.

Brian Barrett: Yeah, good. No, rightly so. You'll find a lot there. Grokipedia, obviously, Grok plus Wikipedia equals Grokipedia. Our colleague Reese Rogers reported this week that after it launched on Monday, that this AI generated alternative to the crowdsourced Wikipedia was supposed to be a massive improvement over Wikipedia. Leah, have you had a chance to poke around? What do you find in there?

Leah Feiger: It is my favorite news source, massive improvement. I don't even think that goes far enough. I think that this has changed the way that we share information online now.

Brian Barrett: Wow.

Leah Feiger: I mean, seriously though, this is horrible. This is really, really bad for the internet. I deeply believe already there's so many inaccuracies, really serious bias, obviously denouncing mainstream media, promoting Trump and other conservative viewpoints and some really horrific stuff about gay people and trans people too. It's less comparable to Wikipedia and more just like a summary of what Grok replies to random X users mean. This is, again, to be clear, the AI platform that brought us MechaHitler. So my expectations were already quite low, but it's pretty bad.

Brian Barrett: Well, and the thing is too, when it's not posting things that are echoing Elon Musk's point of view and far-right talking points, it's just ripping off Wikipedia. So it's really like Wikipedia except for these ideological tent poles, and some of the examples really are pretty egregious. So the Grokipedia entry slavery in the U.S. for example, includes a section that outlines "numerous," and I'm quoting here, "ideological justifications made for slavery with the end of the entry focusing on criticizing the 1619 project," which Grokipedia says, "incorrectly framed slavery as the central engine of the nation's political, economic and cultural development," which of course, it was. Another entry on Grokipedia claims that a proliferation of porn made the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s that much worse. All historical falsehoods, all sort of a Elon Musk fever dream view of the world.

Leah Feiger: Mean, you didn't even get to arguably the one that concerns us most, which is WIRED's own entry in Grokipedia.

Brian Barrett: Oh, yep.

Leah Feiger: It's really good. I mean, Elon Musk famously loves WIRED.com, so it includes Musk's own critique of us and our publication. To quote it reads, "High profile detractors, including Elon Musk in February 2025 have labeled WIRED as devolving into far left wing propaganda." It almost feels like he just kind of wrote these himself.

Brian Barrett: Yeah, there's clearly no bias here on Grokipedia. But sticking with AI a little longer, because Leah I know you love AI. I know you can't get enough of it, especially when you're shopping for real estate, when you are looking at apartments and houses, all you want to see is instead of real pictures, you want to see AI generated videos and photos of what the houses should look like, which is a trend that WIRED contributor, Kat Tenbarge wrote about this week. So many real estate listings now include AI generated videos.

They take a regular picture of a space, so it's just sort of plausible that it would look like that, and then they transform it into this AI slopified version that is every homeowner's dream. Kat talked to the founder of a really popular app that's doing this called AutoReel, who told her that any real estate agent can create their own video at home in minutes and estimated that between 500 and a 1000 new listings like this are being created every day just with his app, in the U.S., in New Zealand, in India, and being used to market thousands of properties. Leah, how do you feel about the AI slopification of real estate? I've got my bets.

Leah Feiger: So I'm about to say something incredibly controversial, which is we're talking about a lot of really serious stories today, and this is maybe the one that upset me the most from a very personal place.

Brian Barrett: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Leah Feiger: I'm a millennial. I'm in my thirties. My favorite app is Zillow. I can't even scroll Zillow anymore for fun. This was really upsetting for me. Thank goodness that Kat blogged about this and did more. I mean, she really pulled together a real temperature check on where the entire industry is going in terms of using AI for staging, for entirely recreating outsides of homes. The story that I want is really just an interview of me and my friends going, "Oh my God, wait, this place looks incredible. It is in Bay Ridge. Should we move there? Anyway, oh no, this is all fake. Everything here is not real." It was so upsetting. It was so upsetting.

Brian Barrett: I do think some sort of series that just has prospective buyers showing up at the house that they thought was one thing, and it's like the opposite of the home improvement show where they do the big reveal. I think that sellable. The fact is real estate agents are doing this. They think it's worth it, and I think the reason for that, a source told Kat, is that, look, you could go to a virtual stager and have someone do it over the course of a few days, spend a few hundred dollars on it, do it with Photoshop, get a photographer.

It's a lot of work, a lot of time, a lot of money when instead they can just do it from their phone. Now, on the flip side of that though, Kat also spoke with an agent who acknowledged, look, this is the huge investment for people. It's probably the biggest purchase that most people are going to make in their whole lives, and the idea that you start off that purchase by breaking their trust, by showing them a lie is a really bad foot to get off on, so it will be interesting to see if there's enough backlash to stop this from happening.

Leah Feiger: I hate it. I hate it so much.

Brian Barrett: The Leah backlash alone is going to make people knock it off. One more story before we go to break. There's no AI in this one. There is, however, a genetically engineered pig kidney. Surgeons at Massachusetts General Hospital removed a genetically engineered pig kidney from a 67-year-old man after he spent a record time with the implant compared to previous pig organ transplants, he went nearly nine months. That may not sound like a lot, but the doctors who performed the operation found it hopeful that actually it lasted that long because previous attempts, two to three months max. So this is still a relatively emerging field, and every little bit of progress is important, especially because the availability of human kidneys is not where it should be. So sure if we can get a pig kidney to work for as long as we can, so much the better.

Leah Feiger: I think this is amazing. Parts of the story were really hard to read. Obviously the previous examples, it was organ failure and two months at a time, but to have nine months is pretty incredible and an amazing look at how far this science has come. And like you said, Brian, there's 90,000 people waiting to receive a kidney in the U.S. alone and with this shortage of organs, the U.S. only performed 28,000 kidney transplants in 2024, so if this is the way that we actually get people off dialysis back into their homes and being able to live again, it was amazing. I thought this is a really incredible moment in gene editing and bridging these gaps to actually make these transplants work

Brian Barrett: And watch this space, the hospital plans to carry out another genetically edited pig kidney transplant before the end of the year, and who knows how far that one will go? OK, we're going to take a quick break and when we're back, we're going to dive into why a tech-centered private school in Texas unfolded into something that parents didn't bargain for.

Welcome back to Uncanny Valley. I am Brian Barrett and I'm joined today by senior politics editor Leah Feiger. Let's dive into our main story this week outside of a school in Brownsville, Texas called Alpha School. Alpha School is actually a chain of private micro-schools. Chain might not be the right word, but there's a lot of them. The focus is on using software as the main teacher for kids. It's built itself to parents as providing a superior future looking approach to education, very into kids being self-starters, learning from the computer more than they're learning from humans.

WIRED contributor Todd Feather spoke with some of the parents and staffers previously affiliated with the Brownsville, Texas location of Alpha School, and he found a different reality there. One story from this feature that Todd found is that of Christine Barrios who told Todd that her 9-year-old daughter got stuck on a lesson in IXL. IXL is personalized learning software that a lot of schools use actually, but it was in this case acting as Christine's daughter's math teacher. The software kept telling her to repeat the exercise tens of times without making a mistake.

When she asked her guide, and that's what they call teachers, they call them guides because again, the computer is the teacher, whether she could move on from it, she was told, "No, you got to keep going." Over the next weekend, according to Barrios, she and her husband sat with her daughter for hours each day until she finished the multiplication lesson, even if she broke down and sobbed that she'd rather die than keep going. Ultimately, Barrios said that she double-checked all the answers on a calculator before her 9-year-old entered them, but when the girl returned to school with the lesson completed, her mom says she came back reporting crushing news. In the time she spent stuck, she had fallen even further behind on her targeted goals, so within a couple of weeks, again, according to Barrios, the school reported to her and her husband that their daughter wasn't eating lunches.

According to Barrios, Alpha said that it was because she would rather stay in and work. That's a quote. The girl later explained to her parents that she was spending lunchtimes catching up on IXL. Her parents would send her to school with snacks. When Barrios saw that the snacks were coming back in her backpack uneaten, the daughter told her mom that staff at the school said she didn't earn her snacks and wouldn't get them until she met her learning metrics. Understandably, Christine Barrios pulled both her kids out of Alpha School that November. Now, that's just one example of many examples that WIRED gathered from parents, students, former educators in this program. And Leah, I'm just curious for your reaction to that.

Leah Feiger: Not everything is a tech startup. This is just like the constant drum. I feel like we've been beating it WIRED all year long, which is you can have these incredible technologies. I'm not going to sit here and say that AI is not a world changing technology, but I'm just not sure then why every single application has to imitate an office at Google in 2012. There were so many details in this piece, the large TVs on walls that are displaying charts, updating with completion rates, and comparing students about how there's dozens of kids in a room with their headphones on.

It's like this eerie, quiet, plugged into their laptops. Even the idea of special rooms with snacks and rewards or alternative ways to sit, you can lie down while working. How incredible. There are a lot of schools that do this and also don't run their kids as if they're about to do code breaking for the next big thing in the valley. It was pretty wild to read this. It sounds like they're experimenting on children.

Brian Barrett: And that's actually what a former employee described it as. As a model, I think you really nailed it. It is sort of applying the idea of these all night coding sessions and all this sort of bootstrapping, entrepreneurial, whatever the Silicon Valley is obsessed with and saying, Hey, 9 year olds, maybe that's the best way to learn math or somehow English, history? I think the humanities don't really get a fair shake at a lot of these locations according to our reporting. There are reasons that Alpha School was attractive to folks.

A lot of the parents, some of them wanted the kids to learn at their own pace. They were intrigued by the life skills lessons that they would be offered in the afternoon after actual school work and the idea of crunching lessons into these two hour clusters, which is what they do. It's a two-hour learning method, so all the learning happens in two hours. They felt like it was novel. It was interesting. It was like a futuristic school and who wouldn't want to get in on the ground floor of that?

Leah Feiger: I mean, to be clear, obviously WIRED heard from some parents who had positive experiences and said that there were some great learning opportunities that the school offered their kids. That might've not actually been available to them. This was not an area where there were incredible and active and vibrant educational opportunities, creating a model city for Tesla. There are just so many benefits here.

Brian Barrett: High on your list of benefits, isn't it?

Leah Feiger: Oh, yeah. I think you can hear that in my voice, but I keep getting back to thinking about when we were kids and we were at school and as the thing that I really remember being drilled in multiplication tables and is that what set me up on my illustrious career in journalism? No. It's like interacting with our teachers and figuring out how to be a human, and I'm not sure that being plugged into your computer all day for hours at a time and being held to really wild standards as you're going through different stages of really intense differentiated development. Tell me that every single 9-year-old is the same. I don't know. It really freaks me out. It's a very scary thing, which obviously a lot of these parents felt the same.

Brian Barrett: And I think if that freaks you out, here is where things kind of took a turn, which is last fall. According to a memo obtained by WIRED, parents were told that Alpha School would be debuting a new version of itself, let's call it Alpha School 2.0. I don't think they called it that, but everything should be that, called Limitless. As part of that effort, the school established goals "deliberately designed to cause a parent to think or say, that sounds impossibly difficult for my kid." In order to, "demonstrate the limitless possibilities of their children."

Leah Feiger: I mean, I barely wanted to study for my bat mitzvah at age 12. I just can't imagine this being ... There's something really, really wild to me as well, because you have this very tech oriented community also saying that everything is too woke and the left has killed childhood and all of these things. I'm like, no, this is killing childhood. What are you talking about? This is so, so different. And like you're mentioning, this is the point of the story where parents started really noticing as one of them put it, that numbers and data came first and the kids came second.

The thing that gets me, and I'm really curious about your take on this, Brian, as someone with children, that the guides these people that were brought in, they were actually in the room with students helping them with any technological glitches or settling anything that's happening in the real world. While some had experience as educators, others did not, and not only that, Alpha actually had often targeted individuals without teaching backgrounds, going instead for folks that were in the entrepreneurship space, because nothing screams early childhood education like Series A funding. I'm so confused as to what the entire point of this is.

Brian Barrett: It feels reductive, right? It is the idea that school is about grades and grades are about numbers and coding is all that matters. When obviously school is about learning to interact with people, it is a social thing as much as it is a numbers thing. I think too, how do you quantify and nextify art class and finger painting and all the other things that are good for social development, good for mental development that aren't crunching numbers. And it just feels like that's not part of the calculus here, which is a shame.

Leah Feiger: And we didn't even get into a core WIRED area of interest, which is surveillance issues. These kids are being surveilled.

Brian Barrett: Yeah. There was a report that our reporter, Todd found that there was eye tracking software involved in this. Again, for some parents, I am sure that this is great, and again, Alpha School has a lot of parents who say, "Yes, this is what we want." They've got a lot of great reviews, a lot of glowing press. What we found in Brownsville was not that.

Leah Feiger: And as that last little surveillance anecdote, there's one piece of reporting that Todd shared that really freaked me out of this one student who at home received a notification that she'd been flagged for an anti-pattern or a distraction by the Alpha system while she was working on her schoolwork. It turns out she says that Alpha system sent a video of her in her pajamas, taken from the computer's webcam that showed her talking to her younger sister. Again, she's at home. This doesn't end the minute that they leave the classroom either. This is so beyond. And I'm sure there's the case that everyone's making, oh, they're collecting data. This is a holistic experience. That's still creepy to me.

Brian Barrett: Yeah, it is, and it's something that even if you buy into the idea of Alpha School, I don't know if you actually buy into that part of it. We should say in response to these statements, Alpha School said that, "Allegations that Alpha has mistreated, punished, or caused harm to any students are categorically and demonstrably false. Alpha and its employees prioritize a safe and productive environment to accelerate academic mastery and allow students to thrive." They also had a good amount of back and forth with us suggesting that we needed waivers from parents of students, so I just wanted to go ahead and acknowledge that, and I'll say too, even as the school draws more criticism, it continues to expand, right? This is a booming business.

It's in the middle of a national expansion, including roughly a dozen new campuses across Arizona, California, Florida, New York, North Carolina, Virginia, in addition to the five that they've already got open in Texas. It's happening in a moment when there's a nationwide teacher shortage and Trump administration officials like the U.S. Secretary of Education, Linda McMahon, have strongly supported the Alpha School and similar initiatives, so people think this is the future of education and they've got the funding to at least try to make it that.

Leah Feiger: Well, if Linda McMahon is on board, I mean—

Brian Barrett: What could go wrong?

Leah Feiger: What could go wrong, Brian? What could go wrong?

Brian Barrett: Leah, thanks so much for joining me today.

Leah Feiger: Thank you so much for having me.

Brian Barrett: That's our show for today. We'll link to all these stories we spoke about today in the show notes. Make sure to check out Thursday's episode of Uncanny Valley, which is about poker hacking. Adriana Tapia and Mark Leyda produced this episode. Amar Lal at Macro Sound mixed this episode. Pran Bandi is our New York studio engineer. Kate Osborn is our executive producer. Condé Nast Head of Global Audio is Chris Bannon and Katie Drummond is WIRED's Global Editorial Director.

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