So many bizarre AI products are like this but it's really important to understand why: Companies like OpenAI want the world to give in to their total success before they've actually achieved it nymag.com/intelligence...

So many bizarre AI products are like this but it's really important to understand why: Companies like OpenAI want the world to give in to their total success before they've actually achieved it nymag.com/intelligence...

one way to understand media coverage of the second trump administration is that, this time around, it's really only tracking with the bottom right chart

Interesting how basically every Amazon project — true of most tech neo-conglomerates, to be fair — comes back around to surveillance nymag.com/intelligence...

😅

Deep research tools *did* get better after I wrote this but I wonder if people might be revisiting their rapturous reviews now that the novelty has worn off. A few months in, DR outputs remain technically impressive but they're also often... unreadable dogshit? Not useful? nymag.com/intelligence...

if you want a picture of the future, imagine your own face staring back at you from the chumbox, forever nymag.com/intelligence...

people don't like being told what they can't post, but they REALLY don't like being told what they can't generate nymag.com/intelligence...

people don't like being told what they can't post, but they REALLY don't like being told what they can't generate nymag.com/intelligence...

implied agentic ai pitch: we will lure users with unrealistic promises, and in the process turn them into spammers that destroy the entire existing marketplace. then... profit?

trying to think through what's unusual about so many AI startups, and about the gaps between their pitches, the real world, and what they would actually need to succeed nymag.com/intelligence...

AI companies are actually AI gap arbitrage companies

trying to think through what's unusual about so many AI startups, and about the gaps between their pitches, the real world, and what they would actually need to succeed nymag.com/intelligence...

it's only been a week but I'd bet a lot of early users are having experiences like this with Sora: manic, exploratory onboarding followed by something like a hangover. it's a pattern! nymag.com/intelligence...

part of the big theoretical "twitter do-over" is this inevitable jack-brained dynamic, too

OpenAI's maximalist "asking for infinite money" strategy has a legal counterpart, too nymag.com/intelligence...

Fascinating to watch people strain to assemble a "radicalized online" theory from thin and incomplete evidence as they post amid some of the most openly vengeful, bloodthirsty, "radical" social feeds in memory nymag.com/intelligence...

strong agree, from 2017: opaque commercial social platforms becoming the most vivid, accessible representation of discourse, democracy, the public sphere, the media, etc was a massive accelerant for cynicism/resentment/despair www.nytimes.com/2017/08/21/m...

Fascinating to watch people strain to assemble a "radicalized online" theory from thin and incomplete evidence as they post amid some of the most openly vengeful, bloodthirsty, "radical" social feeds in memory nymag.com/intelligence...

OpenAI's "what is ChatGPT, anyway?" study is a little weird, sort of funny, but actually illuminating nymag.com/intelligence...

congratulations to all these great men of history, who will definitely be revered and celebrated for generations!

helpful @jwherrman.bsky.social column on the value and business models of AI coding startups nymag.com/intelligence...

clear act of war against old people and their families www.theverge.com/news/769460/...

My tests of the AI grader "agent" get a mention in this article about how everything AI everywhere all the time is now an agent.

I think, with a little bit of effort, I'm going to be able to avoid getting annoyed at the new website "WeAreAnnoying.com"

new chatbot? call it an agent. new software feature? sure, yes, agent. Old feature that's been there for years? It can be an agent if it wants to be, and how dare you suggest otherwise nymag.com/intelligence...

As reported on @nymag.com earlier this month! nymag.com/intelligence... (no beef, @theinformation.com has real confirmation and lots of interesting details)

On the left: Nate Cavanagh, a 28-year-old DOGE staffer and college dropout. On the right: Mohammad Halimi, a 53-year-old exiled Afghan scholar. This is the story of how DOGE targeted Halimi on social media. Then the Taliban took his family. 🧵

As reported on @nymag.com earlier this month! nymag.com/intelligence... (no beef, @theinformation.com has real confirmation and lots of interesting details)

great thread

gotta pay extra for FSD but the brain-frying feature is free

I’mma be real with y’all, I am holding this grudge big time. www.nytimes.com/2025/03/29/o...

Altman says all sorts of things, all the time. But the hard pivot away from AGI/superintelligence rhetoric by Eric Schmidt is genuinely jarring, sort of funny, and I think telling nymag.com/intelligence...

Altman says all sorts of things, all the time. But the hard pivot away from AGI/superintelligence rhetoric by Eric Schmidt is genuinely jarring, sort of funny, and I think telling nymag.com/intelligence...

😬 www.reuters.com/world/us/whi...

also, i would describe him as a core member of the dubious EA movement and a close associate of Sam Bankman-Fried, the person behind the FXT financial scandal. a more factual description i'd say if a I (or any PoC) was found in the middle of such a scandal, that'd have been the end of my career

oh my god

just checking in with one of the most influential philosophers alive today

Game developers got a preview of Meta's unique style when they decided to "create the Metaverse", bragged about a budget larger than the entire gaming industry, and released a VR chat client with much, much worse graphics and performance than Second Life, which came out 25 years ago.

A little pushback on the "AI researchers are like NBA stars" stuff: Meta, which is driving this narrative, is uniquely toxic. In an industry that contains Elon Musk! nymag.com/intelligence...

Eric Schmidt joining the storied tradition of “long blog posts about the perils of AGI discourse,” standing on the shoulders of giants…. nymag.com/intelligence...

another interesting thing about this is that it absolutely HAS been so far, but that's only intensified industry predictions that it'll eventually switch

joined Emilie and Andrew of The Culture Journalist to talk "GEO," intra-office AI wars, and the ecological collapse of the web theculturejournalist.substack.com/p/future-of-...

I’m not the first person to suggest this but I’m worried it’ll take people by surprise: What happens if TikTok goes full MAGA? nymag.com/intelligence...

I’m not the first person to suggest this but I’m worried it’ll take people by surprise: What happens if TikTok goes full MAGA? nymag.com/intelligence...

I'm putting all my money into a prediction market for "bullshit like this happening all the time from now on" nymag.com/intelligence...

The larger trends around online age-verification indicate that “a comprehensively different internet is coming into view: one where, before you can do much of anything, you need to reveal who you are,” @jwherrman.bsky.social writes. nymag.com/intelligence...

if ChatGPT is just Google Search results and Google Search results are just Reddit answers, who's flying the plane?

AI companies want us to think their products are like "The Entertainment" from Infinite Jest, capable of chatting us into terminal inertia nymag.com/intelligence...