After Minneapolis, Tech CEOs Are Struggling to Stay Silent
It was November 12, 2016, four days after Donald Trump won his first presidential election. Aside from a few outliers (looking at you, Peter Thiel), almost everyone in the tech world was…
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The Math on AI Agents Doesn’t Add Up
The big AI companies promised us that 2025 would be “the year of the AI agents.” It turned out to be the year of talking about AI agents, and kicking the can for that transformational…
Former USDS Leaders Launch Tech Reform Project to Fix What DOGE Broke
The past year has been traumatic for many of the volunteer tech warriors of what was once called the United States Digital Service (USDS). The team’s former coders, designers, and UX…
Silicon Valley Billionaires Panic Over California’s Proposed Wealth Tax
Did California lose Larry Page? The Google and Alphabet cofounder, who left day-to-day operations in 2019, has seen his net worth soar in the years since—from around $50 billion at the…
6 Scary Predictions for AI in 2026
When OpenAI declared a “code red” this month to refocus its teams on competing with Google, I couldn’t help but think back to December three years ago when the companies’ roles were…
You’re Thinking About AI and Water All Wrong
Last month, journalist Karen Hao posted a Twitter thread in which she acknowledged that there was a substantial error in her blockbuster book Empire of AI. Hao had written that a proposed…
Here’s What You Should Know About Launching an AI Startup
Julie Bornstein thought it would be a cinch to implement her idea for an AI startup. Her résumé in digital commerce is impeccable: VP of ecommerce at Nordstrom, COO of the startup Stitch…
There Is Only One AI Company. Welcome to the Blob
It all began, as many things do, with Elon Musk. In the early 2010s he realized that AI was on a track to become perhaps the most powerful technology of all time. But he had deep suspicion…
Inside the Multimillion-Dollar Plan to Make Mobile Voting Happen
Joe Kiniry, a security expert specializing in elections, was attending an annual conference on voting technology in Washington, DC, when a woman approached him with an unusual offer. She…
Welcome to Big Tech's ‘Age of Extraction’
In his new book, antitrust scholar and former White House adviser Tim Wu argues that tech giants are bleeding you dry—and lays out a plan to stop them. Source link
The Man Who Invented AGI
Everyone is obsessed with artificial general intelligence—the stage when AI can match all feats of human cognition. The guy who named it saw it as a threat. Source link
Inside the Messy, Accidental Kryptos Reveal
Jim Sanborn couldn’t believe it. He was weeks away from auctioning off the answer to Kryptos, the sculpture he created for the CIA that had defied solution for 35 years. As always, wannabe…
Can AI Avoid the Enshittification Trap?
I recently vacationed in Italy. As one does these days, I ran my itinerary past GPT-5 for sightseeing suggestions and restaurant recommendations. The bot reported that the top choice for…
Sam Altman Says the GPT-5 Haters Got It All Wrong
OpenAI’s August launch of its GPT-5 large language model was somewhat of a disaster. There were glitches during the livestream, with the model generating charts with obviously inaccurate…
Broadcast TV Is a 'Melting Ice Cube.’ Kimmel Just Turned Up the Heat
Jimmy Kimmel returned to ABC this week. Sort of. About a quarter of ABC’s usual audience couldn’t see the talk show host this week after two major owners of ABC affiliates, Sinclair and…
YouTube Thinks AI Is Its Next Big Bang
Google figured out early on that video would be a great addition to its search business, so in 2005 it launched Google Video. Focused on making deals with the entertainment industry for…
I Wasn’t Sure I Wanted Anthropic to Pay Me for My Books—I Do Now
A billion dollars isn’t what it used to be—but it still focuses the mind. At least it did for me when I heard that the AI company Anthropic agreed to an at least $1.5 billion settlement…
The Doomers Who Insist AI Will Kill Us All
The subtitle of the doom bible to be published by AI extinction prophets Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares later this month is “Why superhuman AI would kill us all.” But it really should…
Astronomer’s New CEO Speaks—Yes, About That
The only people from Astronomer attending the Coldplay concert in Foxborough, Massachusetts, on July 16 were CEO Andy Byron and his head of HR, Kristin Cabot. They were swaying in mid-hug…
Inside Jeffrey Epstein’s Forgotten AI Summit
In 2002, artificial intelligence was still in winter. Despite decades of effort, dreams of bestowing computers with humanlike cognition and real-world understanding had not materialized.…
Trump’s Anti-Bias AI Order Is Just More Bias
On November 2, 2022, I attended a Google AI event in New York City. One of the themes was responsible AI. As I listened to executives talk about how they aligned their technology with…