BREAKING: OpenAI robotics leader resigns over concerns about surveillance and autonomous weapons amid Pentagon contract fortune.com/2026/03/07/o...

BREAKING: Sam Altman told OpenAI employees at an all-hands meeting on Friday afternoon that a potential agreement is emerging with the Dept of War to use the startup’s AI models. The contract has not yet been signed. fortune.com/2026/02/27/o...

On Monday, AI influencer and CEO Matt Shumer reached out to say he was writing an article to explain to the average person “what’s going on in AI and how it’s going to affect them.” Here's what happened next. open.substack.com/pub/sharongo...

NEW: Just back from Richland Parish, Louisiana, where former cotton and soybean fields are now Meta’s Hyperion AI data center. It’s so big it has its own road: Far Far Away Lane. But this isn’t a galaxy far away — it’s right here in the U.S. More soon. sharongoldman.substack.com/p/reporting-...

Scoop: I learned Meta has quietly purchased roughly 1,400 acres—nearly 2X size of Manhattan’s Central Park—next to its 2,250-acre Hyperion AI data center site in Richland Parish, La., Fortune has learned. I also observed active work underway on the newly acquired land. fortune.com/2026/02/04/m...

Meta has quietly purchased roughly 1,400 acres—an area almost twice the size of Manhattan’s Central Park—adjacent to its already-mammoth 2,250-acre Hyperion AI data center site in Richland Parish, La., Fortune has learned. fortune.com/2026/02/04/m...

Citation is the foundation of academic promotion. It’s noisy, sure, but its integrity is worth fighting for. Hallucinated citations should be a desk reject.

Wow, thanks Toby!

In mid-2025 I reported fake references in a 2023 paper to NeurIPS Ethics and Grievances Committee. They said they had contacted the authors, who apologized & sent a corrected version. This story prompted me to check the NeurIPS proceedings, and it's still the original, uncorrected pdf.

I'm actually surprised it's not higher - it's not like reviewers and ACs are checking all the references.

What is wild to me is the defense, BY THE NEURIPS BOARD, that fabricated citations do not mean "the content of the papers themselves [is] necessarily invalidated" It does. It very much does. What do you think citing other work is for? What do you think writing a paper is for? What do you *think*?

NeurIPS reviewers typically review 6+ papers, each with 100 or so citations. The reviewers can't possibly check that every citation is real. But why don't we have an automated way to do this checking (and desk-rejecting if fake citations found) *before* the papers are sent to reviewers?

This community knows just how unreliable AI sourcing is, and yet. The cognitive bias toward trusting these things is so strong even the people who should really, really know better can't help themselves. Which means you (and I) probably can't either. Be careful out there, knowledge workers!

Accurate and thorough representation of prior and related work is one of the cornerstones of good research. It is shocking to me that so many published NeurIPS papers, even from top institutions, have fabricated references. I recommend reading the original report: gptzero.me/news/neurips/

The disparity between fields and rigor of peer-review is wild. I've been scrutinized for citing the wrong edition of a particular book, meanwhile some people are just having AI write the whole damn lit review apparently.

NEW: NeurIPS,one of the world’s top academic AI conferences, accepted research papers with 100+ AI-hallucinated citations, new report claims fortune.com/2026/01/21/n...

I’ve been covering AI as a daily beat since April 2022. From the start, the AI beat felt more fast-paced than anything I had covered in more than two decades as a journalist, writer, and editor. open.substack.com/pub/sharongo...

We talk about AI in abstractions — compute, scale, trillions. But on the ground, it’s about water, land, noise, jobs, and who gets a say. I spent time in the Arizona desert reporting on what the AI data center boom looks like up close. open.substack.com/pub/sharongo...

That tension's the real story behind the tech headlines.

NEW: A few weeks ago, I traveled to the desert outside Phoenix to report a story that’s a true microcosm of the AI data-center boom: Silicon Valley billions colliding with rural America, land, power, water, and local politics.

NEW: AI data centers have suddenly become one of the most potent political flashpoints of 2025, igniting fierce debates over power, water, land, and jobs. fortune.com/2025/10/22/a...

From Fortune reporter @sharongoldman.bsky.social's email announcing this story: "Reporting the story, what struck me most is how belief itself has become a form of capital — how people are literally investing in a worldview about where AI is heading." fortune.com/2025/10/08/l...

How a 23-year old former OpenAI researcher turned a viral AI prophecy into profit, with a $1.5 billion hedge fund and outsized influence from Silicon Valley to D.C. I spent several weeks reporting on the unlikely rise of Leopold Aschenbrenner 👇 fortune.com/2025/10/08/l...

Many assume C2PA fights deepfakes. But a new report from the World Privacy Forum says it doesn’t — instead it’s building a vast metadata system that raises thorny questions about privacy & who gets to count as ‘trusted. Thanks to @katekaye.bsky.social for chatting! fortune.com/2025/09/18/b...

It's a podcast world (I regularly think about being at the crazy AI Action Plan rollout a couple of months ago with the All-In bros where JD Vance sat on a couch with them and later the whole thing was rolled away to make way for Trump and his lectern and American flags )

"Person says: "So you mean, they're like dumb animals". Me: "HOW DARE YOU SIR ANIMALS EXHIBIT RICH MORAL SENSIBILITIES BACK AWAY FROM MY OTTERS AND TURTLES" (ok maybe I didn't quite say it that way)" Yaaaas

Most AI red teams break models. Anthropic’s Frontier Red Team also evangelizes the risks of AI itself — a rare hybrid of security + policy. I did a deep dive on this unusual group that sits in Anthropic's policy organization under co-founder Jack Clark. fortune.com/2025/09/04/a...

“Late last year, David Shor, one of the Democratic Party’s top data scientists, surveyed some 130,000 voters about whether they had a “favorable” or “unfavorable” opinion of Jewish people. Hardly anyone over the age of 70 said their view was unfavorable. More than a quarter of those under 25 did.”

Yes amen exactly this

NEW: China’s DeepSeek quietly released an open-source rival to GPT-5 — optimized for Chinese chips and priced to undercut OpenAI. Here's what that means and why that's a big deal. fortune.com/2025/08/21/c...

Superintelligence, shmooperintelligence - for Meta, it's still always going to be about ad revenue, which is, hello, like 98% of revenue 🤷‍♀️ fortune.com/2025/08/20/m...

I was not invited to Sam Altman’s cozy dinner with reporters in San Francisco last week (whomp whomp), but maybe that’s for the best. I have trouble suppressing exasperated eye rolls when I hear peak Silicon Valley–ironic statements. fortune.com/2025/08/19/s...

this is very interesting. I do wonder how much the tamper-proofing can survive extreme attacks, but it's encouraging. 1/2

Thanks to @stellaathena.bsky.social for chatting with me about Deep Ignorance: the new paper/project from Eleuther AI and the UK AISI. Bottom line: Worried AI could teach people to build bioweapons? Don’t teach it how fortune.com/2025/08/14/w...

NEW: OpenAI's GPT-5 was supposed to be a leap forward. Instead, it sparked backlash, raising questions about whether the model router is the path to AI's future (hint: many say it still is) fortune.com/2025/08/12/o...

Um wasn't Leopold Aschenbremmer focused on AI safety 😱 23-year-old former OpenAI Super alignment team guy running an AI focused hedge fund 😮 t.co/9k28gT4HKd

Mark Zuckerberg is pouring billions of dollars into AI ‘superintelligence’—so why does today's Instagram pitch feel so underwhelming? Kind of like a legless metaverse avatar? 💁‍♀️ fortune.com/2025/07/30/m...

NEW: Silicon Valley’s elite descend on D.C. to celebrate Trump’s AI Action Plan in a surreal fusion of podcast and policy (oh, and Trump ran so long I missed my train back from DC 😂) fortune.com/2025/07/23/a...

NEW: I chatted with ex-OpenAI researcher Steven Adler this week about role-playing a 'rogue' AI (he says we should all try it) 😵‍💫https://fortune.com/2025/06/26/former-openai-researcher-thinks-its-time-to-war-game-ai-superintelligence-scenarios/

In the billionaires-are-not-relatable category: very weird emailing with Lucy Guo to check that she did, in fact, receive $650M in cash from the Meta/Scale deal and her responding that she did, in fact, receive $750M 😀 open.substack.com/pub/sharongo...

I was in DC this week. Here’s the takeaway: Big AI isn’t just knocking on Washington’s door—it’s moved in. OpenAI models on gov’t supercomputers. Meta’s Llama for defense. Anthropic building tools for national security. And Eric Schmidt? Playing matchmaker. My latest: fortune.com/2025/06/05/b...

Eric Schmidt’s AI Expo in DC this week showed how fast the AI-military-policy triangle is locking into place. The vision? A future where geopolitical competition is won with frontier models and flying bots. #SCSPAIExpo25 fortune.com/2025/06/04/e...

Spent some time in DC this week: Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt's AI Expo serves up visions of war, robotics, and LLMs for throngs of tech execs, defense officials, and fresh recruits fortune.com/2025/06/04/e...

Copyright and IP law is complicated. And AI and copyright is a logic puzzle no one can solve — no matter what the hot takes say on social media. open.substack.com/pub/sharongo...

I find Bluesky to be absolutely useless, with no post engagement. Am i missing something?

NEW for @fortune.com: When an AI model misbehaves, the public deserves to know—and to understand what it means fortune.com/2025/05/27/a...

My AI Side Notes from this week - behind-the-scenes musings, links and leftovers from a Fortune reporter on the AI beat. Free to subscribe! open.substack.com/pub/sharongo...

Is Kevin still pining for Sydney?