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Elon Musk sued OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman, accusing them of breaching a contract by putting profits and commercial interests in developing artificial intelligence ahead of the public good.

Mr. Musk, who helped create OpenAI with Mr. Altman and others in 2015, said the company’s multibillion-dollar partnership with Microsoft represented an abandonment of its founding pledge to carefully develop A.I. and make the technology publicly available.

“OpenAI has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company, Microsoft,” said the lawsuit, which was filed Thursday in Superior Court in San Francisco.

The lawsuit is the latest chapter in a fight between the former business partners that has been simmering for years. After Mr. Musk left OpenAI’s board in 2018, the company went on to become a leader in the field of generative A.I. and created ChatGPT, a chatbot that can produce text and respond to queries in humanlike prose. Mr. Musk, who has his own A.I. company, called xAI, said OpenAI was not focused enough on the technology’s risks.

Silicon Valley insiders believe that generative A.I., the technology behind ChatGPT, is a once in a generation technology that could transform the tech industry as thoroughly as web browsers did more than 30 years ago. But others, most notably Mr. Musk, have said that the technology can also be dangerous — perhaps even destroy humanity.

The lawsuit adds to an array of problems piling up for OpenAI. The company’s relationship with Microsoft is also facing scrutiny from regulators in the United States, European Union and Britain. It has been sued by The New York Times, several digital outlets, writers and computer programmers for scraping copyrighted material to train its chatbot. And the Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating Mr. Altman and OpenAI after the company’s board removed him in November, before reinstating him days later.

Mr. Musk’s lawsuit said he became involved with OpenAI because it was created as a nonprofit to develop artificial intelligence for the “benefit of humanity.” A key component of that, the lawsuit said, was to make its technology open source, meaning it would share the underlying software code with the world. Instead, the company created a for-profit business unit and restricted access to its technology.

The lawsuit, which seeks a jury trial, accused OpenAI and Mr. Altman of being in breach of contract and violating fiduciary duty, as well as unfair business practices. Mr. Musk is asking that OpenAI be required to open up its technology to others and that Mr. Altman and others pay back Mr. Musk the money that Mr. Musk gave to the organization. Greg Brockman, the president of OpenAI, is also named as a defendant.

OpenAI declined to comment on the lawsuit.

The suit could expose OpenAI to a lengthy and invasive legal review that reveals more about Mr. Altman’s dismissal and OpenAI’s pivot from being a nonprofit organization to for-profit company. That change, which was engineered by Mr. Altman in late 2018 and early 2019, has been the source of backbiting at OpenAI for years and contributed to the board’s decision to fire him as chief executive.

Though Mr. Musk has repeatedly criticized OpenAI for becoming a for-profit company, he hatched a plan in 2017 to wrest control of the A.I. lab from Mr. Altman and its other founders and transform into a commercial operation that would work alongside his other companies, including the electric carmaker Tesla, and make use of their increasingly powerful supercomputers, people familiar with his plan have said. When his attempt to take control failed, he left the OpenAI board, the people said.

Speaking at The New York Times’s DealBook Summit last year, Mr. Musk said that he wanted to know more about the chaos that unfolded at OpenAI last year, including why Ilya Sutskever, a co-founder, joined with other board members to fire Mr. Altman in November. He said that he was concerned that OpenAI had discovered some dangerous element of A.I., which is a question that his legal team could investigate during the lawsuit.

“I have mixed feelings about Sam,” Mr. Musk said at the DealBook conference. Making a reference to a powerful ring in “The Lord of the Rings,” he added, “The ring of power can corrupt, and he has the ring of power.”

Mr. Musk did not respond to requests for comment.

The falling out between Mr. Musk and Mr. Altman has long been a subject of intrigue in Silicon Valley. The men first met during a tour of SpaceX, Mr. Musk’s rocket company, and later bonded over their shared concerns about the threat that A.I. could pose to humanity.

According to the lawsuit, OpenAI’s nonprofit status was a major source of friction, as tensions grew between company executives interested in trying to make money from new A.I. technology and Mr. Musk, who wanted it to remain a research lab.

“Either go do something on your own or continue with OpenAI as a nonprofit,” Mr. Musk said at one point, according to the complaint. “I will no longer fund OpenAI until you have made a firm commitment to stay, or I’m just being a fool who is essentially providing free funding to a startup. Discussions are over.”

The lawsuit tries to show Mr. Musk as an indispensable figure in OpenAI’s development. From 2016 to 2020, Mr. Musk contributed more than $44 million to OpenAI, according to the lawsuit. He also leased the company’s initial office space in San Francisco and paid the monthly expenses. He was personally involved in recruiting Mr. Sutskever, a top research scientist at Google, to be OpenAI’s chief scientist, according to the complaint.

“Without Mr. Musk’s involvement and substantial supporting efforts and resources,” the suit says, “it is highly likely that OpenAI Inc. would never have gotten off the ground.”

A federal judge in Florida will hold a hearing on Friday to pick a new date for former President Donald J. Trump’s trial on charges of mishandling classified documents, a move that is likely to have major consequences for his legal and political future.

The judge, Aileen M. Cannon, has already said she is inclined to make some “reasonable adjustments” to the timing of the trial, which for the moment, at least, is set to start on May 20 in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Fla. Several decisions Judge Cannon has reached in recent months about the pacing of the case have made it all but impossible for the trial to start as scheduled.

What remains to be seen is just how long of a delay Judge Cannon ends up imposing.

On Thursday evening, Mr. Trump’s lawyers and prosecutors in the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, sent Judge Cannon their proposals about when the trial should begin.

Mr. Smith’s legal team, hewing to its long-held position of trying to conduct the trial before Election Day, requested a date of July 8. But after months of seeking to delay the trial until next year, Mr. Trump’s lawyers suddenly reversed themselves and suggested a date of Aug. 12.

The hearing in front of Judge Cannon, who was appointed to the bench by Mr. Trump in his waning days in office, is being held just days after a decision by the Supreme Court that increased the possibility that the former president might not face trial before Election Day in his other federal case — the one in which he stands accused of plotting to overturn the 2020 election.

The justices agreed to decide whether Mr. Trump is immune from prosecution on the election interference charges, scheduling arguments for the end of April and keeping the proceedings in the trial court frozen until they resolve the issue. As a practical matter, the Supreme Court’s decision to take up the case meant that the election trial was unlikely to begin before September, in the heat of the general election campaign.

Judge Cannon’s decision about whether to go with a July date, an August date or something later in the documents case could have an effect on the timing of the election case, as well. Mr. Trump is expected to attend the hearing on Friday.

It was not clear why Mr. Trump’s legal team said it would be open to August after long seeking to postpone the trial until next year. But one possibility was that the lawyers, by proposing to spend much of late summer and early fall in court on the classified documents case, were seeking to reduce the chances of there being time for the election case to go to trial before Election Day.

Only months ago, it seemed that Mr. Trump would spend much of 2024 in front of a jury, fending off four separate criminal indictments in four different cities.

At this point, however, only one of his criminal trials has a solid start date. Last month, a state judge in Manhattan picked March 25 for commencing his trial on charges of arranging hush-money payments to a porn star in an effort to avert a scandal on the eve of the 2016 election.

Mr. Trump’s fourth criminal case, in which he stands accused of tampering with the election results in Georgia, has not yet been set for trial. It is currently in turmoil as a judge in Fulton County considers whether to disqualify Fani T. Willis, the district attorney who filed the indictment, from the case over allegations of financial misconduct surrounding a romantic relationship she had with one of her deputies.

The hearing in Florida, which is scheduled to last most of Friday, will touch on more than scheduling issues.

Judge Cannon has asked the defense and prosecution to be ready to discuss Mr. Trump’s unusually broad and highly politicized motion for additional discovery, which was filed in January. In the motion, the former president’s lawyers suggested that, as part of their defense at trial, they intended to argue that federal officials — chief among them those from the intelligence community — were “politically motivated and biased” against Mr. Trump.

The parties are also set to debate an effort by Mr. Smith to keep under seal the names of about two dozen potential witnesses who could testify at trial.

Judge Cannon briefly agreed to a request by Mr. Trump’s lawyers to include the witnesses’ names in a public court filing. But she put that decision on hold after Mr. Smith accused her of having made a “clear error” and said the witnesses could face threats or harassment if their identities were revealed.

Even amid discussion of these other issues, the question of the trial’s timing was arguably paramount.

If Judge Cannon were to postpone the proceeding into next year, she would probably face a tidal wave of criticism. It is possible she could also provoke Mr. Smith’s first appeal since the indictment was returned in June, even though rulings related to scheduling matters are generally not subject to a challenge in higher courts.

When Judge Cannon was randomly assigned to the case last spring, she was already under fire for having issued a ruling in an early part of the inquiry that was favorable to Mr. Trump, but so legally questionable that an appeals court sternly rebuked her in reversing it.

After the F.B.I. searched Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club and residence in Florida, for classified documents in August 2022, Judge Cannon appointed an independent arbiter to figure out whether any of the materials collected by the agents were privileged and should be kept out of the hands of investigators.

But she accompanied that relatively typical decision with another that was all but unheard-of, effectively freezing the government’s investigation of Mr. Trump in place until after the arbiter, known as a special master, completed his work.

Prosecutors were outraged by the move, accusing Judge Cannon not only of lacking the power to insert herself into the case so extremely, but also of treating Mr. Trump differently than a normal criminal defendant.

A federal appeals court in Atlanta ultimately agreed, unanimously reversing her decision and pointing out that she appeared to have granted “a special exception” for Mr. Trump in defiance of “our nation’s foundational principle that our law applies to all.”

Still, in some of her more recent rulings, Judge Cannon has shown herself willing to buck Mr. Trump.

On Wednesday, for example, she denied a highly unusual request from his lawyers to gain access to a secret government filing detailing a trove of classified discovery evidence that prosecutors said was neither helpful nor relevant to his defense.

If Judge Cannon had permitted the request, legal experts said, it would have fallen far outside the normal procedures laid out in the Classified Procedures Act, the federal law governing the use of classified materials at public trials.

But even while ruling against Mr. Trump, Judge Cannon seemed to suggest that he was different from most criminal defendants. She did not quite agree with Mr. Smith’s position that the facts in this case did not “remotely justify a deviation from the normal process.”

“The court,” she wrote, “cannot speak with such confidence in this first-ever criminal prosecution of a former United States president — once the country’s chief classification authority over many of the documents the special counsel now seeks to withhold from him.”

On “The Daily Show” this week, the host Jon Stewart broke down as he announced the death of his beloved, three-legged brindle pit bull, Dipper — a raw, touching segment that exemplified the deep grief many pet owners feel.

When an animal dies, owners lose companionship, affection and “just plain unconditional love — and we don’t find that in many places in our lives,” said Sherry Cormier, a psychologist and author of “Sweet Sorrow: Finding Enduring Wholeness After Loss and Grief.”

Our society tends to be “grief-phobic,” Dr. Cormier said, and there is a sense that the feelings prompted by the loss of a pet are relatively low in the hierarchy of suffering, or that it’s something that people should be able to cope with and move on from quickly. Dr. Cormier and other loss experts said that is not always true; and they shared ways to help a loved one through the loss of a pet.

Validate the owner’s loss.

Pet loss can lead to disenfranchised grief, meaning it is not validated or acknowledged by the wider world, said Michelle Crossley, an associate professor at Rhode Island College and vice president of the Association for Pet Loss and Bereavement. Therefore, “a lot of individuals end up grieving in isolation because of fear of rejection from other people,” she said, adding, “They worry that they won’t understand or they’ll minimize the loss.”

Keep it simple when expressing your sympathies, Dr. Cormier said. She suggested something like: “I know your animal was such an important part of your life and family. I can see how much he meant to you and how much you’re already missing him.”

Pet grief is often complicated by feelings of guilt if your friend or loved one opted to put an animal down to minimize suffering, Dr. Cormier said. She has done so with two golden retrievers, but noted the circumstances were quite different. One lived a long, happy life; the other had to be put down unexpectedly because of an aggressive brain tumor.

Resist the urge to say “I know how you feel,” she cautioned, even if your intention is simply to express empathy. “Everyone’s grief is unique,” she added.

Ask how you can help honor the pet.

Rituals are an important part of the grieving process, Dr. Crossley said, but they are sometimes overlooked when an animal dies. Perhaps your friend would welcome a memorial service, she suggested, or would like to make a memento box with photos and a few of his pet’s favorite toys.

If your friend or loved one is experiencing anticipatory grief — that is, she knows a pet is getting old or is likely to die soon — you might ask whether you can help plan any “bucket list” activities that she would like to do with her pet. You could consider giving your friend a meaningful gift. For instance, Dr. Crossley has seen people turn a pet’s water bowl into a planter. (She has a shelf where she keeps the ashes from the five dogs she has lost, along with their photos and paw prints, she noted.)

Keep in mind the physical component of your friend’s loss. “People report really intense physical longing, oftentimes comparing it to what they imagine the loss of a limb feels like,” said Judith Harbour, a veterinary social worker with the Schwarzman Animal Medical Center in New York City, who helps run pet loss support groups (which are another option for people experiencing acute grief after the passing of a pet). There is not an easy fix for that longing, she said, but sometimes an object to hold or cuddle with, like a blanket that belonged to the pet, can help.

Reminisce with your loved one.

The fact that people sometimes feel embarrassed to open up about how much they are missing their pet can contribute to feelings of loneliness and isolation, Dr. Cormier said. Simply encouraging them to share stories, photos or videos of their pet if they are up for it can help them feel less alone in their suffering, she said. And, if possible, listen more than you talk.

Be there for the long haul.

All of the experts noted the common misconception that pet-related grief doesn’t last as long as other types of grief. But it is cyclical, Dr. Cormier said, and she urged people to check in with friends and loved ones not just days or weeks after a loss, but for months or even years after the fact.

Do not ask whether your friend or loved one intends to get another pet, Ms. Harbour said. She lamented that almost everyone she had counseled after the loss of a pet had been asked that question. Mourning takes time.

“Don’t forget about them,” Ms. Harbour said of grieving pet lovers. “Check in and give them time to chat about their pet with you. That is really meaningful, because people often feel that the world is turning and time is passing and no one remembers their animal.”

Two good friends, Rebecca Grekin and Yannai Kashtan, met up one crisp December morning at Stanford University, where they both study and teach. The campus was deserted for the holidays, an emptiness at odds with the school’s image as a place where giants roam, engaged in groundbreaking research on heart transplants, jet aerodynamics, high-performance computing. Work that has changed the world.

Ms. Grekin and Mr. Kashtan are young climate researchers. I had asked them there to explain how they hoped to change the world themselves.

They have very different ideas about how to do that. A big question: What role should money from oil and gas — the very industry that’s the main contributor to global warming— have in funding work like theirs?

“I’m just not convinced we need fossil fuel companies’ help,” said Mr. Kashtan, 25, as we toured the lab where he works, surrounded by sensitive electronic gear used to detect methane. “The forces and the incentives are aligned in the wrong direction. It makes me very cynical.”

For Ms. Grekin, 26, that’s a delicate issue. Her entire academic career, including her Ph.D. work at Stanford, has been funded by Exxon Mobil.

“I know people who are trying to change things from the inside,” she said. “I’ve seen change.”

We spent hours that day — first at her lab, then in his, and then off campus at a hole-in-the-wall Burmese joint — as the two disagreed and agreed in amiable and insistent ways about some of the biggest questions facing the next generation of climate scientists like themselves.

Should universities accept climate funding from the very companies whose products are heating up the planet? Is it better to work for change from within a system, or from outside? How much should the world count on cutting-edge technologies that seem far-fetched today?

And the big one. What is gained or lost when oil producers fund climate solutions?

Some of Ms. Grekin’s research has focused on calculating the true climate impact of food and other things that people consume. In the hallway outside her lab hangs a large poster describing her work. The poster prominently features the ExxonMobil logo.

“They brag about their relationship with Stanford, their association with bright, young, environmentally minded scientists,” Mr. Kashtan said, standing in the hallway. “But the majority of their money is going to things that are pretty explicitly about getting more oil out of the ground.”

Ms. Grekin pushed back on any suggestion that Exxon had influenced her research. The poster was simply being transparent about her funding, she said, which is always appropriate. “You’re supposed to share your funding sources,” she said. “They don’t have anything to do with the research. They just happen to fund graduate school.”

In any case, her work is already being used at 40 universities to cut the climate impact of their sprawling food services, she pointed out. Would that have happened otherwise?

Despite differences like these, Mr. Kashtan and Ms. Grekin are friends. They fill in to teach each other’s classes. They both talk passionately about solutions to climate change, and both co-signed an open letter last year calling on Stanford to establish guidelines for engaging with fossil fuel companies.

Mr. Kashtan says his skepticism about oil-industry motivations was born of his own experience. A physics and chemistry double-major working on his Ph.D., he previously researched a technology called electrofuels that big corporations, including fossil fuel companies, are promoting as a way to fight global warming.

The technology behind electrofuels, also known as e-fuels, sounds equal parts science fiction and magic.

It essentially involves capturing carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas that is rapidly warming the planet, by sucking it out of the air, then combining it with hydrogen that has been split from water (using renewable energy) to make liquid fuels that can be used in trucks and planes. Start-ups working on e-fuels, including a Stanford spinoff, have raised millions of dollars, typically from the venture capital arms of large oil and gas companies, as well as from airlines.

But Mr. Kashtan has come to believe that deploying e-fuels at scale isn’t just many years away, it also doesn’t make sense from an economic or even energy perspective. For one, he said, capturing carbon dioxide by pulling it out of the atmosphere is itself energy intensive. The rest of the process to produce the fuel, even more so.

Instead, these technologies have become industry-funded red herrings that distract from the critical task of burning less fossil fuels, he said. After all, it is the burning of coal, oil and gas that’s putting the planet-warming gases in the air in the first place.

He’s come to be particularly wary of how well-meaning colleagues, like his friend Ms. Grekin, could play a role in bringing about that delay, for example by amplifying research that emphasizes far-out technological solutions instead of, say, taking steps like curbing emissions.

Technologies like electrofuels aren’t simply “complete wastes of time, talent, and money,” Mr. Kashtan said in his characteristically direct way, “they’re exactly what fossil fuel companies want.”

We were in Mr. Kashtan’s lab, filled with tubes, tanks and ozone scrubbers. The team he’s part of was working on a project to measure air pollution from gas-burning stoves in homes across the world. It wasn’t what he expected to be researching. Since he was a child growing up in Oakland, he’s been interested in the possibilities of technology, not the harms of it.

As a boy he produced a series of YouTube videos earnestly explaining every element of the periodic table. “That’s pure Beryllium metal right there: super toxic, super hard, pretty expensive, and one of my favorite elements,” 12-year-old Yannai says in one clip, decked out in goggles and lab coat.

Ms. Grekin disputed Mr. Kashtan’s notion of new technologies as delay tactics. That approach raised the risk that the world would write off promising innovations prematurely, she said. “Sometimes you don’t know until you do the research,” she said.

“Do we need people focusing on these problems so that we can find either better solutions or and cheaper solutions? Yes. Do we know exactly what those will be? No,” Ms. Grekin said.

“But I see an exception when it comes to climate, because of the timeline,” Mr. Kashtan said. “We’re racing against the clock here.”

“Maybe I’m more optimistic about the future and Yannai, maybe, is less,” Ms. Gerkin said.

We were starving and decided to look for lunch. The only option on the all-but-empty campus was a sad Starbucks. So instead we drove to a Burmese restaurant, a local favorite, snagging a table outside so that we could hear each other better.

On the way, Ms. Grekin was apologetic about driving us in her car, a bright yellow Fiat 500 that she’s had for more than a decade, instead of walking or taking a bus. Usually she doesn’t drive, she said. It was just that she’d brought several weeks’ worth of recycling to drop off that day, one of the few permissible excuses for a climate researcher to drive to campus in a car, in her view.

“I came with my entire car full of recycling,” she said.

Ms. Grekin said she also tries to buy very little. “This is from high school. Like, a lot of my clothes are from high school,” she said.

In response, Mr. Kashtan pointed to his own shirt. “This is a hand-me-down,” he said.

Fossil fuel funding for research has become a thorny issue for many universities, and particularly at Stanford’s Doerr School. Founded in 2022 with a $1.1 billion gift by John Doerr, a venture capitalist and billionaire, the school quickly attracted criticism for saying it would work with and accept donations from fossil fuel companies.

A recently issued list of funders of the Doerr School is a who’s who of the fossil fuel industry

In October, a nonprofit group founded by Adam McKay, the writer and director of “Don’t Look Up,” the climate-themed film starring Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio, criticized the Doerr School in a satirical ad that has since been viewed more than 200,000 times on X, formerly known as Twitter. “The school seeks to come up with ways to combat climate change, so we’re calling on the help of all our friends at Big Oil,” the parody says.

Stanford has been a friend to oil and gas in the past. A researcher at the Stanford Exploration Project, which began in the 1970s, later developed an algorithm for BP that contributed to a 200-million-barrel oil and gas discovery in the Gulf of Mexico.

Today, many of these older programs are atrophying and some are shutting down. A project that worked with oil and gas companies to study the geology of undersea drill sites off the coast of West Africa ended in 2022.

Stanford’s newer fossil fuel funded programs instead tend to focus on climate solutions, like blue hydrogen or carbon storage. Mr. Kashtan questions the climate bona fides of many of those programs.

The Natural Gas Initiative, for example, works with an industry consortium to research ways that natural gas can be part of the climate solution. It is led by a former Chevron strategist, and industry funders are get a spot on its board of advisers for a quarter-million dollars a year.

“They’re ultimately about how to drill more efficiently,” he said.

“Exxon did offer me internships that were basically like, ‘Let’s get more oil out of the ground more efficiently,’” Ms. Grekin said. “But I didn’t want to do that,” she said. “So I fought really hard and got an internship that was sustainability-related.”

She feels that her current research, into ways to make heating and air-conditioning systems in commercial buildings more efficient, wouldn’t have been possible without Exxon, which made an entire office building in Houston available to her for experimentation. Her Exxon funding also paid for a recent stint in the Amazon rainforest back in Brazil, where she helped teach a course about sustainable polymers and locally sourced materials.

“The way I see it is, if this money wasn’t coming to me, it could be going toward a new drill, a new rig,” she said.

Can these two friends reach a compromise? They say they did find common ground hammering out proposed guidelines on how Stanford should engage with fossil fuel companies.

The guidelines include a call for eliminating financial sponsorships from any company, trade group or organization that doesn’t have a credible plan for transitioning away from fossil fuels to renewable power, doesn’t provide transparent data, or is otherwise at odds with goals set forth under the Paris accord, the landmark 2015 agreement among the nations of the world to fight climate change.

“In my opinion, all of the fossil fuel companies currently funding Stanford research would be pretty much disqualified,” Mr. Kashtan said. “The only thing that’s going to prompt these companies to shift is either being sued into bankruptcy, or some kind of economic or regulatory pressure, not partnerships with universities.”

Mr. Grekin looked taken aback. “I’d like to think that we don’t have to go to those extremes,” she said.

An Exxon spokeswoman said the company was “investing billions of dollars into real solutions.” She added, “Research and healthy debate by students like Rebecca and Yannai are critical to developing solutions that will help us all.”

A spokesman for the Doerr School said, “We are proud of our students for engaging in civil discourse on this topic, and we are listening.”

The conversation stretched on. We ordered more tea. We ended up overstaying our welcome at the Burmese restaurant.

“Maybe I’m naïve,” Ms. Gerkin said as we wrapped up the day. She recalled a moment from one of her early Exxon internships, near its sprawling refinery in Baytown, Texas, when she “looked up and there was this huge ball of flame coming out of a flare,” she said, referring to the towering, flaming stacks that are a dramatic feature of refineries. In that moment, she said, she felt her work on sustainability insignificant, her effect on reducing emissions even smaller than what that flare was emitting that very second.

She now thinks differently. “If I can change Exxon by even 1 percent,” she said, “the impact I have might make up for more than that flare.”

Guilherme Gainett, then a biologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was looking through a microscope at the embryo of a daddy longlegs when he saw it — or, rather, saw them. Daddy longlegs, the group of splendidly leggy arachnids also known as harvestmen, have been thought to have just two eyes. But there on the animal’s body, illuminated with fluorescent markers, were what looked like four more vestigial eyes.

In a paper published last week in the journal Current Biology, Dr. Gainett, now at Boston Children’s Hospital, and his co-authors report that they believe they have discovered remnants in the harvestman species Phalangium opilio of what may have once been fully functional eyes in the arachnids’ ancestors. Though these vestigial eyes don’t mature fully, they appear on the harvestmen’s bodies as they develop, shaped by many of the same genes as the creatures’ true eyes.

Arachnids include spiders, scorpions, harvestmen and other arthropods, and divining the relationships among this sprawling group of organisms is tricky. To do so, researchers must draw on both genetic information from modern arachnids and fossils of those that have long since vanished. Interpretations of the relationships among arachnids can vary widely: Dr. Gainett and his graduate school adviser; Prashant Sharma, a biologist at the University of Wisconsin; and their colleagues courted taxonomic controversy in 2022 when they published a family tree that put horseshoe crabs, previously thought not to be arachnids, in the group.

For the current study, Dr. Gainett used fluorescent tags to study the development of harvestman eyes. The tags were designed to stick to opsins, light-sensitive proteins that exist in eyes across the animal kingdom. Looking at the shapes traced by the tags, he matched the locations of the unexpected opsins on the harvestmen to approximately where extra eyes grow on spiders and horseshoe crabs. (Spiders typically have eight eyes, and horseshoe crabs have 10.) These findings suggest that the neural architecture that handles the daddy longlegs’ vision may be quite old. The results could also help in sketching out the family tree of arachnids.

The researchers believe that this new finding helps explain some mysteries about daddy longlegs. Some of the oldest known fossils of harvestmen, in deposits of quartz, seem to have two full pairs of eyes; modern organisms have only ever been known to have one. The discovery of these vestigial eyes may help link the fossils, which are thought to be more than 400 million years old, more directly with their descendants, clarifying their place on the arachnid family tree.

The study, Dr. Sharma said, “suggests they have changed very little for a very long time.”

The researchers also found that a variety of genes connected to vision were involved in shaping these vestigial eyes, two of which are just above the joints of the harvestman’s legs.

“Can they see with their shoulders?” Dr. Gainett asked. Probably not in the way most people would imagine — there are no lenses associated with these regions to focus light. But perhaps these patches of tissue are still sensitive to light, the researchers say. They might be able to help detect the difference between darkness and light, although behavioral studies would be needed to investigate the that possibility.

The findings highlight the serendipity that sometimes results from scientific discoveries: Dr. Gainett and Dr. Sharma had been hoping to understand the process by which arachnids that don’t need multiple pairs of eyes might give them up over evolutionary time.

“We started out by saying, Let’s see how these animals lost their eyes,” Dr. Sharma said. “And they haven’t — they actually have more than we thought.”

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Google removed the ability to generate images of people from its Gemini chatbot. We talk about why, and about the brewing culture war over artificial intelligence. Then, did Kara Swisher start “Hard Fork”? We clear up some podcast drama and ask about her new book, “Burn Book.” And finally, the legal expert Daphne Keller tells us how the U.S. Supreme Court might rule on the most important First Amendment cases of the internet era, and what Star Trek and soy boys have to do with it.

Today’s guests:

• Kara Swisher, tech journalist and Casey Newton’s former landlord

• Daphne Keller, director of the program on platform regulation at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center

Additional Reading:

Credits

“Hard Fork” is hosted by Kevin Roose and Casey Newton and produced by Davis Land and Rachel Cohn. The show is edited by Jen Poyant. Engineering by Alyssa Moxley and original music by Dan Powell, Marion Lozano, Diane Wong and Rowan Niemisto. Fact-checking by Caitlin Love.

Special thanks to Paula Szuchman, Pui-Wing Tam, Nell Gallogly, Kate LoPresti and Jeffrey Miranda.

Even the participants in President Biden and Donald J. Trump’s overlapping visits to Texas on Thursday seemed to sense there was something remarkable about their near encounter along the southern border.

Rarely do the current and former commanders in chief arrive on the same scene on the same day to present such sharply different approaches to an issue as intractable as immigration. Even rarer still was the reality that the two men are most likely hurtling toward a rematch in November.

“Today is a day of extraordinary contrast,” declared Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, who had appeared alongside Mr. Trump.

But the dueling border events were about something even more fundamental than immigration policy. They spoke to the competing visions of power and presidency that are at stake in 2024 — of autocracy and the value of democracy itself.

Perhaps the most surprising facet of the split screen was that Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden agreed on some of the basic contours of the border problem: that the current situation, with migrant crossings setting a new monthly record of nearly 250,000 in December, is unsustainable.

“It’s long past time to act,” Mr. Biden said.

Where they disagreed, at least in part, was politically in how to go about fixing it. And their disparate answers represent a test of the American appetite for the systemic messiness of democracy: Mr. Biden’s intrinsic and institutional belief in legislating versus the “Day 1” promises of dictatorial enactment under Mr. Trump.

Mr. Biden says he would close the border, if only he could. Mr. Trump says Mr. Biden could close the border, if only he would.

“A very dangerous border — we’re going to take care of it,” Mr. Trump pledged on the tarmac upon his Texas arrival.

“What’s being proposed is more than a difference on immigration policy,” said Brendan Nyhan, professor of government at Dartmouth, who helped found a group that monitors American democracy. “The difference is between a president who is trying to address a complex policy issue through our political system and one who is promising quasi-authoritarian solutions.”

For his part, Mr. Biden made the case on Thursday that his hands had been tied by the failure of a bipartisan border package that had been negotiated on Capitol Hill. The legislation would have increased border spending, made asylum claims harder and stiffened fentanyl screening. It unraveled when Mr. Trump demanded its defeat.

Mr. Biden, who spent more than 30 years as a senator, has for decades held out bipartisan deal-making as an ideal in and of itself. “I didn’t get everything I wanted in that compromise bipartisan bill, but neither did anybody else,” Mr. Biden said in Brownsville, Texas. “Compromise is part of the process. That’s how democracy works.”

Then he added one more thought: “That’s how it’s supposed to work.”

Immigration as an issue has broadly favored Republicans in recent years and party strategists see it as a top vulnerability for Democrats in 2024. But Democrats hope Republicans killing the border bill could divide up some of the blame.

In a surprise flourish toward the end of his remarks, the president offered an olive branch to Mr. Trump himself.

“Join me,” Mr. Biden urged, in calling on the two of them to work together to get the legislation passed. “Or I’ll join you.”

Minutes earlier and hundreds of miles away in Eagle Pass, Texas, Mr. Trump — whose 2016 convention speech accepting the Republican nomination was defined by the phrase “I alone can fix it” — had outlined a very different view of exercising power. After passing razor wire and military Humvees, and after shaking hands with Texas National Guard members in fatigues, Mr. Trump cast himself as a battle-tested leader ready to fend off an “invasion” by hordes of “fighting-age men” who look like “warriors.”

“This is like a war,” Mr. Trump said, expressing a willingness to use something akin to wartime powers.

He said Mr. Biden had “blood” on his hands, citing in particular the recent killing of Laken Riley, a student in Georgia, where a migrant was arrested. He repeated that the country was suffering a “Biden migrant crime” wave.

Representative Robert Garcia, a California Democrat, said the former president was using dehumanizing rhetoric. “This immigrant crime narrative is racist,” Mr. Garcia said in a call with reporters before Mr. Trump’s event.

Mr. Trump appeared with Mr. Abbott, who has begun building an operating base in Eagle Pass for up to 2,300 soldiers to curb illegal crossings from Mexico, a move that has caused a clash with federal officials. A federal court on Thursday had blocked a Texas law to allow the state and local police to arrest migrants.

The thing about Mr. Trump’s lightning-rod pledge to be a “Day 1” dictator was that it was not just a blanket promise of authoritarian rule. It was grounded in a specific policy. He said he wanted to close the border — the limits of governmental red tape be damned.

Back in December, the Fox News host Sean Hannity had offered Mr. Trump the opportunity to wriggle out of the remark during a town hall. Instead, Mr. Trump embraced it fully.

“He says, ‘You’re not going to be a dictator, are you?’” Mr. Trump said as he re-enacted the exchange with Mr. Hannity for dramatic effect. “I said, ‘No, no, no, other than Day 1. We’re closing the border, and we’re drilling, drilling, drilling. After that, I’m not a dictator.’”

By any means necessary has long been a Trump mantra. He was accused of unconstitutionality in 2015 when he called for a Muslim ban. As president, he enacted a narrower version focused on seven countries that included those with Muslim majorities.

In a possible second term, Mr. Trump has made clear that he wants to be surrounded by executors and enablers. His allies are eyeing a more aggressive brand of lawyer who can work around any legal limits or barriers that may be put up by what he decries as the “deep state.”

“People don’t want to hear anything anymore — they just want the masses to stop coming,” Jerry Patterson, a Republican who is a former Texas land commissioner, said in an interview.

Mr. Patterson, who said proudly he was often criticized by the right for supporting guest-worker programs, said the situation now was “truly a crisis,” even if Thursday’s visits wouldn’t amount to any change on the ground.

He predicted the election of Mr. Trump would change things — not because of any policy but because of the perception among potential migrants that he would blockade or deport them.

“Perception,” he said, “is more important than reality.”

Republicans of late have broadly insisted that Mr. Biden can solve some of the border troubles by reimposing some of Mr. Trump’s reversed executive policies. Mr. Biden announced no new actions on Thursday but is considering an executive action that could prevent people who cross illegally from claiming asylum. His State of the Union speech is next week.

Speaker Mike Johnson, the most powerful Republican on Capitol Hill, called on Thursday for Mr. Biden to act on his own, an unusual level of deference from a legislative leader to executive powers.

“If President Biden truly cared to acknowledge the national security crisis at the southern border, he would sit down at his desk and sign executive orders,” Mr. Johnson wrote on X.

Refusing to concede has become the new normal for congressional Republicans, said Michael Podhorzer, the former political director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., the labor federation. The collapsed immigration deal, he added, was just the latest episode of Republican intransigence, dating back to voting en masse against the economic recovery bill in the first days of former President Barack Obama’s first term.

“No problem is serious enough to compromise to solve,” Mr. Podhorzer said of the G.O.P. philosophy. “The best answer is just to put us in charge.”

Michael Gold contributed reporting.

The dream of streaming — watch what you want, whenever you want, for a sliver of the price of cable! — is coming to an end.

With all the price increases for video streaming apps like Amazon Prime Video, Netflix and Hulu, the average household that subscribes to four streaming apps may now end up paying just as much as a cable subscriber, according to research by Deloitte.

To name a few of the price jumps for streaming video (without ads) in just over the past year: Amazon’s ad-free Prime Video is now $12 a month, up from $9; Netflix raised the price of its premium plan for watching content on four devices to $23 a month, from $20; Disney increased the price of its Hulu service to $18 a month, from $15; and HBO’s Max now costs $16 a month, up from $15.

If, like many people, you subscribe to all those services, you are paying about $70 a month, roughly the same as a modest cable TV package.

More changes on the horizon will have people paying more for streaming. Disney announced this month that it would crack down on password sharing for Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+. Netflix told shareholders last month to expect more price increases.

Streaming services still offer more flexibility and potential to save than a cable bundle. If that’s what drew you to streaming, the solution may seem obvious: You could be more judicious about managing your subscriptions — by canceling Netflix as soon as you’re done bingeing “Love Is Blind,” for instance.

But that’s harder than it sounds. The streaming apps are designed to make us forget we can unsubscribe.

You will not get a reminder that your subscription is up for renewal, said Tony Hu, a program director for engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “When you go into a casino, you don’t see the exit signs prominently placed,” he added.

So it helps to be aware of what the companies are doing to help you manage your subscriptions. Here’s what to look out for.

Why We Forget to Unsubscribe

In May, Caroline Sinders, a designer and artist, published the results of an independent study on how companies including Netflix, Hulu, Vimeo and The New York Times make it hard to unsubscribe from their services.

The study, conducted in 2022, found that some media companies like The Times created friction in the process — requiring, in some instances, a phone call to cancel a subscription. The Times now allows subscribers to cancel online without a phone call.

Though the study found that streaming services like Netflix and Hulu were easier to cancel, you may stay subscribed longer than you want to because of what they don’t do, Mx. Sinders said. They don’t send emails reminding you that you have a bill coming up. When you’re billed, they generally don’t send emails of payment receipts.

Harry Brignull, a user-experience consultant and author of a book about the tricks that tech companies use to control you, pointed out that the streaming industry had made consumers accustomed to accepting this practice, even though we would scoff at it for nearly any other transaction.

“How come we’re all OK with this?” he asked, adding that if “you walk out of a store, you want to be handed a receipt.”

The streaming apps do, however, send lots of emails after you’ve canceled, hoping to lure you back with marketing messages about new TV shows and movies.

Netflix declined to comment on why it didn’t send monthly payment receipts or renewal notices, and it said the best way for people to manage their subscriptions and view past payments was through their account settings on the website. Hulu, Disney and Max did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

“Is a lack of a reminder a harmful design pattern?” Mx. Sinders said. “I would say so. It does put a lot of onus on the user to remember.”

Create a Reminder System

The practices mentioned above have become the industry norm, so it’s on us to create a system to remind ourselves when to unsubscribe to a streaming service.

Setting up a monthly reminder a few days before a subscription renewal is due would go a long way, Mr. Brignull said. And Mr. Hu, the M.I.T. director, keeps a list of the streaming apps he pays for to track the shows that he and his family are watching on each one, which helps them determine when it’s time to cancel.

Paying through a third party is another way to get reminders. When subscribing to a streaming service through Apple’s App Store, for instance, you are billed by Apple, which emails monthly payment receipts. PayPal does the same. Apple also makes it simple to see all your subscriptions and renewal dates in one place inside its settings app, so you can cull them more easily.

I take a more aggressive approach. To disable automatic renewal, I cancel a subscription as soon as I sign up. That means that if I want to keep the membership going after the current billing cycle, I have to resubscribe each time, but I think it’s worth it for the control it gives me over the billing process.

Whatever avenue you choose, the most important step is to slow down, Mx. Sinders said. When you’re ready to unsubscribe, do it on a laptop or tablet rather than on your phone, where you can easily be interrupted or distracted. And when you create reminders in your calendar to cancel your subscriptions, set them up for several days before the next bill hits your credit card.