This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Last week I asked for readers’ reflections on the automobile.

By this point, the many defects of AI-based language models have been analyzed to death—their incorrigible dishonesty, their capacity for bias and bigotry, their lack of common sense. GPT-4, the newest and most advanced such model yet, is already being subjected to the same scrutiny, and it still seems to misfire in pretty much all the ways earlier models did. But large language models have another shortcoming that has so far gotten relatively little attention: their shoddy recall.

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There are a few good books I’d happily reread until the spine splits. Autobiography of Red, by Anne Carson, is one: I can flip to any page and immediately sink back into the odd, lush world of her red-faced monster, Geryon. The first time I read it, I was gobsmacked.

The collapses of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank this past weekend were the end point in an all-too-familiar cycle: first the boom, then the breathtakingly speedy bust, and then the bailout. We are now at the postmortem moment—when everyone wonders where the regulators were.Silicon Valley Bank has already become notorious for how obvious its red flags were. Perhaps the most telling was the rapid growth of its borrowing from the Federal Home Loan Banks system.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Both Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis have signaled their willingness to sell out Ukraine to the Kremlin, and the Russians have gleefully taken notice. How could this be happening in the party of Ronald Reagan?But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

Updated at 1:40 a.m. ET on March 17, 2023For three years now, the debate over the origins of the coronavirus pandemic has ping-ponged between two big ideas: that SARS-CoV-2 spilled into human populations directly from a wild-animal source, and that the pathogen leaked from a lab.

GPT-4 is here, and you’ve probably heard a good bit about it already. It’s a smarter, faster, more powerful engine for AI programs such as ChatGPT. It can turn a hand-sketched design into a functional website and help with your taxes. It got a 5 on the AP Art History test. There were already fears about AI coming for white-collar work, disrupting education, and so much else, and there was some healthy skepticism about those fears.

On a warm, windy fall night in Los Angeles, I stood in a conference room at the Warner Bros. Discovery television-production offices, straightened my spine, and stared down my showrunner, preparing to defend my idea for a minor character in our near-future science-fiction series.“This character needs a backstory, and switching jobs because she wants to work in renewable energy and not for an oil company fits perfectly,” I told the unsmiling head honcho.