Jensen Huang and the end of the ‘lol nothing matters’ era of American politics
The real scandal about Nvidia had almost nothing to do with sex — and everything to do with Silicon Valley’s cult of the founder
Tech
Platformer.
Casey Newton on Silicon Valley, social media policy, and the intersection of tech and democracy.
Recent essays
30 of 55Following: Jensen Huang’s affair with an alleged Chinese spy and GPU smuggler
Trump was briefed on the affair and took no action; ~240,000 GPUs were smuggled into China
The AI backlash needs a plan
Democrats have a mandate to rein in frontier labs, data centers, and more. Can they deliver without repeating their mistakes from the social-media era?
The frontier labs launch election war rooms
An old playbook is back for the deepfake era. Is it working?
What Google and Reddit's bad days have in common
AI search is underperforming for Google, and it's killing Reddit's traffic. What now?
The AI election that wasn't
Voters have other things on their minds — for now. PLUS: OpenAI’s clever policy to fight deepfakes, and the Anthropic S-1
Introducing Machine Gods
Why we're betting on AI realism. PLUS: The hell of PHP2Shell
Joel Kaplan leaves Meta
Long a voice for Republicans inside the company, he played a leading role in pushing Meta to the right
The states come for OpenAI
Will the approach that beat Meta in New Mexico work against ChatGPT?
X’s reverse eternal September
Why the onetime global town square now feels more like a clubhouse
AI is solving math problems faster than humans can understand the solutions
OpenAI’s math breakthroughs may trigger an identity crisis for mathematicians. Who’s next?
Does intelligence need a hard cap?
Calls for a new kind of slowdown were the talk of The Curve. PLUS: Slinking back to X
OpenAI connects the Dots
With safety questions still swirling, the company introduces a more business-focused take on agents
Following: OpenAI taps the brakes
On the eve of the company's developer conference, it cancels a new model over safety fears
Can Muse make us forget the metaverse?
Meta has a new vision to sell, but it may be getting ahead of itself. (The VR Glasses are amazing, though)
Muse is having a moment
Are consumer agents the future — or a mirage?
What was Hard Fork?
Saying goodbye to some old friends — and hello to Machine Gods
Following: The government doesn't want to regulate AI
The leaders of AI labs agree that the United States to act, and soon. But the president and the speaker of the House aren't interested
The AI safety vibe shift
Once a fringe obsession of Bay Area rationalists, existential risk is suddenly all anyone is talking about
The AI warnings are coming from inside the lab
Frontier labs make for lousy messengers on AI safety — but it would be foolish to ignore them
Google gets away with it
A third loss in antitrust court leads to ... very little. PLUS: GPT-6 Astra and 'the AGI era'
The Hugging Face attack was worse than we thought
The AI industry is begging for a slowdown. Maybe we should listen?
How AI agents "radicalized" a top Meta exec into quitting her job
Clara Shih on how AI will soon displace the first few rungs on the career ladder — and why she left Big Tech to do something about it
Meta settles with the states over child safety failures
Will significant changes to Facebook and Instagram be enough to beat back a global wave of bans?
The website that created an AI clone of its editor in chief
Every CEO Dan Shipper on doubling headcount while automating everything, building an agent out of 30,000 copyedits, and the “dirty secret” of writing with AI
An LLM wiki changed how I work
And everything else I learned about productivity this year
Town's CEO on the self-organizing company
Jean-Denis Greze on AI assistants, building a better corporate workspace, and avoiding "egg on face"
Superintelligence is a dragon
What Mark Zuckerberg misunderstands about powerful AI
Replit’s CEO on building a company that can run itself
Amjad Masad on the "self-driving company," why a CEO is a glorified router, and what's left for humans when agents do the work
How much of my boss's job can AI do?
Six months after trying to automate myself, I gave Claude Fable 5 a bigger job: replacing Casey