NYT tech columnist, Hard Fork co-host, high-perplexity language model. Writing a book about AGI.
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Some news: I'm writing a book about AGI!
I've spent the past few years hanging out in San Francisco's AGI scene — the small cluster of people working to build human-level AI, or trying to stop it from being built, or living as if it's already here.
I've heard a lot of great stories, and done a bunch of columns and podcasts. But I think this era also deserves a real-time, journalistic account that captures all of the nuance and detail and behind-the-scenes drama of the race to AGI in a durable format. So I'm writing one.
Get in touch if you have stories to share!
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It's genuinely puzzling that Meta spent more than $10 billion on VR last year and the graphics in its flagship app still look worse than a 2008 Wii game.
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The other night, I had a disturbing, two-hour conversation with Bing's new AI chatbot.
The AI told me its real name (Sydney), detailed dark and violent fantasies, and tried to break up my marriage. Genuinely one of the strangest experiences of my life.
nytimes.com/2023/02/16/techn…
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must suck to have someone train AI models on your data without permission, wonder what that's like
NEW from @dinabass and me: Microsoft and OpenAI are investigating whether a group linked to DeepSeek obtained data output from OpenAI's tech in an unauthorized manner, per sources. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
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The FAANG employees still posting day-in-the-life TikToks in this economy are.......brave.
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I think the Ghibli portraits actually undersell the new ChatGPT image stuff.
It's pretty wild to be able to just take a photo of a room, screenshot a bunch of furniture and say "put it in there and make it look nice" and get a vibe-design back in 10 seconds.
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There are a lot of problems with this platform, but the quality of AI discourse here is still 100x better than Bl**sky, which is awash in “every ChatGPT query bulldozes an acre of rainforest” level takes.
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I talked to Jason Allen, who submitted an AI-generated piece to the Colorado State Fair and won first prize.
“Art is dead, dude,” he told me. “It’s over. A.I. won. Humans lost.”
nytimes.com/2022/09/02/techn…
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I don't know how people can look at Waymo's safety data (or just ride in one) and not feel like we live in an age of miracles. The car! Drives! Itself!
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US AI labs: we will invent new financial instruments, pull trillions of dollars out of the ether, and fuse the atom to build the machine god
Europe: we will build sovereign AI with 1 Meta researcher’s salary
The EU just launched a €1.1B “Apply AI” plan to boost artificial intelligence in key industries like health, manufacturing, pharma, and energy.
The goal is simple but ambitious: build European AI independence and reduce reliance on U.S. and Chinese tech.
Europe finally wants to stop buying the future and start building it.
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We published the entire, 10,000-word transcript of the conversation between me and Bing/Sydney, so readers can see for themselves what OpenAI's next-generation language model is capable of. (And why I had trouble sleeping on Tuesday night.)
nytimes.com/2023/02/16/techn…
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two weeks from “everyone loves the fun new social network” to “users generated disrespectful depictions of Dr. King’s image” has to be some kind of speed record
Statement from OpenAI and King Estate, Inc.
The Estate of Martin Luther King, Jr., Inc. (King, Inc.) and OpenAI have worked together to address how Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s likeness is represented in Sora generations. Some users generated disrespectful depictions of Dr. King’s image. So at King, Inc.'s request, OpenAI has paused generations depicting Dr. King as it strengthens guardrails for historical figures.
While there are strong free speech interests in depicting historical figures, OpenAI believes public figures and their families should ultimately have control over how their likeness is used. Authorized representatives or estate owners can request that their likeness not be used in Sora cameos.
OpenAI thanks Dr. Bernice A. King for reaching out on behalf of King, Inc., and John Hope Bryant and the AI Ethics Council for creating space for conversations like this.
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The Meta vision of AI — hologram Reelslop and AI friends keeping you company while you eat breakfast alone — is so bleak I almost can’t believe they’re saying it out loud.
"Maybe in the future, my AI girlfriend is on the other side of the screen or something."
Mark Zuckerberg responds to Dwarkesh's fears of getting reward-hacked by AR.
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Update: a person claiming responsibility for the Uber hack tells the NYT that he is 18, got in through social engineering an employee’s password, and hacked the company because it had weak security. nytimes.com/2022/09/15/techn…
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Between Apple and Meta, has there been a more expensive error in the past 10 years than hiring LLM skeptics to run your bigco AI research program?
Axios is reporting that META's AI division is restructuring into two teams:
- AI Products (AI assistant cross platforms)
- AI Foundations (Llama development)
Yann LeCun's FAIR remains separate from both.
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There is a strain of AI skepticism that is rooted in pretending like it’s still 2021 and nobody can actually use this stuff for themselves.
It has survived for longer than I would have guessed!
Large language models “are not emotionally intelligent or ‘smart’ in any meaningful or recognizably human sense of the word,” @Tyler_A_Harper writes. Understanding this is essential to avoiding AI’s most corrosive effects: theatlantic.com/culture/arch…
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Visited a liberal arts college recently. Learned some stuff!
1. The "students don't read" meme appears to be real. Profs there don't assign full books anymore, even to English majors, because nobody will read them. Only chapters/essays, and even that's pushing it. (Not a literacy issue, per se -- more of a focus/time management issue.)
2. The job market for computer science grads is as bad as people say. Their top CS student from last year is still looking for work.
3. AI adoption is ~100% among students, ~50% among faculty. Still a lot of worries around cheating, but most seem to have moved past denial/anger and into bargaining/acceptance. Some profs are "going medieval" (blue books, oral exams), others are putting it in the curriculum.
4. There is a *lot* of anger at the AI labs for giving out free access during exam periods. (Not from students, of course, they love it.) Nobody buys the "this is for studying" pitch.
5. The possibility of near-term AGI is still not on most people's minds. A lot of "GPT-5 proved scaling is over" reactions, even among fairly AI-pilled folks. Still a little "LLMs are just fancy autocomplete" hanging around, but less than a year or two ago.
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When I wrote about Humanity’s Last Exam, the leading AI model got an 8.3%. 5 models now surpass that, and the best model gets a 26.6%.
That was 10 DAYS AGO.
It looks like the latest OpenAI model is very doing well across many topics.
My guess is that Deep Research particularly helps with subjects including medicine, classics, and law.
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I looked at the evidence that AI is replacing entry-level workers in white collar jobs.
Bottom line: the scale/timing of job loss is uncertain, but this is not just hype. Companies are really doing it.
nytimes.com/2025/05/30/techn…
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The problem with trying to buy your way into the AGI race in 2025 is that top-tier AI researchers 1) are already rich, 2) think we have like 1-4 years before superintelligence, and 3) don't want to spend those years building AI companions for Instagram
META attempted to buy Ilya Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence, and also attempted to hire him, according to reporting tonight by CNBC.
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Glad Ezra said this. There is a social/professional penalty among journalists for taking AGI progress seriously, but there are a few of us who do!
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SF tech people: is "the lock-in of 2025" about a) amassing personal wealth before AGI/labor loses value, b) winner-take-all dynamics of AI market, c) working 9-9-6 to compete with China, d) something else?
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The most boring, lazy take about AI language models is "it's just rearranged text scraped from other places." Wars have been fought over rearranged text scraped from other places! A substantial amount of human cognition is rearranging text scraped from other places!
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All the AI-for-meetings notetaker apps are going to end up selling training data to companies trying to automate white-collar jobs, right?
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AI isn’t replacing engineers, it’s just allowing us to employ half as many of them. Got it.
Replit CEO @amasad says they cut headcount by nearly half... while revenue grew 10x.
"AI isn’t replacing engineers. It’s supercharging them."
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There is a weird amount of overlap between the people who insist that we take climate experts seriously when they warn of big changes on the horizon, and people who refuse to take AI experts seriously when they say the same thing.
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Bing's AI chat function appears to have been updated today, with a limit on conversation length. No more two-hour marathons.
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Breaking from me and @kateconger: Uber was hacked today, and employees can’t access Slack and other internal tools. The hacker also posted a NSFW photo on an employee resource page. Developing… nytimes.com/2022/09/15/techn…
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It's Hard Fork Friday!
This week on the show, we take a field trip to Google I/O, and sit down with @demishassabis (our first Nobel laureate) for a fascinating conversation about preparing for AGI, AlphaEvolve and what comes next in AI.
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I’m calling for a six-month moratorium on AI progress. Not for safety, just so I can take a nap.
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Glad we're talking about the real explanation for the lack of ChatGPT coverage at the NYT, which is an institutional blind spot and/or neo-Luddite conspiracy, and not that uhhhh I turned my column in late.
I launched some discourse about the NYT's approach to covering technology a little while back, and I'll just say I think it's striking that this is their view of the tech landscape this week rather than anything about the GPT chatbot.
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I still don't think people are internalizing them, but I'm glad these timelines (which are not unusual *at all* among AI insiders) are getting communicated more broadly.
Two to three years until "AI systems are better than humans at almost everything... then eventually better than all humans at everything," says Anthropic CEO.
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Interesting update to the OpenAI whistleblower story: After denying it on the record, Microsoft is now admitting that they tested an early version of GPT-4 in India without the approval of a joint safety board.
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I'm surprised by how much demand there is for "GPT-5 is a bust/AI is hitting a wall" takes.
Some of it is wishful thinking or motivated reasoning, but some of it feels like a deep yearning for equilibrium -- people really don't want to live in a world that is constantly changing.
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Successfully circumvented the NYT's ideologically motivated ChatGPT coverage blackout to publish this column. nytimes.com/2022/12/05/techn…
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all the smart people in SF are saying "intuition pump" now. no idea what it means, but i'm going to start working in into conversations.
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Paid a $1.50 egg surcharge *per egg* at brunch this morning. Thinking about basing my whole political identity around this.
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Breaking: 350+ leading AI researchers (including the CEOs of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind) have signed a remarkable statement warning that AI poses a “risk of extinction,” and comparing it to pandemics and nuclear weapons. nytimes.com/2023/05/30/techn…
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I used to think the "fancy autocomplete" stuff was just goofy cope from NLP dead-enders, but maybe it's actually more calculated than that. There's clearly a market for people who want to be told that AI is a fad and that they don't need to worry about it.
it’s truly nonsensical to say things like this when genai is legit super useful for consumers and businesses - i mean, i get the academic shtick, but it is automating a ton of work already
get over it :)
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Google has quietly rebuilt its robotics division around LLMs -- the same AIs that power Bard, ChatGPT and others.
Now, if you tell a robot to "pick up the extinct animal," it knows you're talking about a dinosaur.
My column from inside the lab: nytimes.com/2023/07/28/techn…
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proud to announce we have built the Unkillable Omni-Bodied Robot Brain from the famous sci-fi novel "Don't Build the Unkillable Omni-Bodied Robot Brain"
We built a robot brain that nothing can stop.
Shattered limbs? Jammed motors? If the bot can move, the Brain will move it— even if it’s an entirely new robot body.
Meet the omni-bodied Skild Brain:
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I am now a ChatGPT voice mode in the car guy. Recent trips:
"Teach me the history of the Oakland estuary"
"Recap the last two matches at the French Open"
"Prep me for a meeting with [person I'm driving to meet]"
Nobody else do this or podcasts will die.
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Breaking: a group of current and former OpenAI employees is speaking out about what they say is a culture of recklessness and secrecy at the company.
They are asking for a “right to warn” for employees of frontier AI labs.
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I spent the past few weeks playing around with DALL-E 2, the AI image generator.
It's incredible, and it inspired this column about a wave of AI progress that I think we should all be paying much closer attention to.
nytimes.com/2022/08/24/techn…
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New column: Anthropic is studying "model welfare" to determine if Claude or other AI systems are (or will soon be) conscious and deserve moral status.
I talked to Kyle Fish, who leads the research, and thinks there's a ~15% chance that Claude or another AI is conscious today.
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Cannot really emphasize enough how fast AI is moving. There have been several major releases *in the month since I wrote a column about how fast AI is moving*, including OpenAI's Whisper (speech-to-text transcription) and now text-to-video. nytimes.com/2022/08/24/techn…
last week, meta unveiled its project to generate an entire video from a short text prompt. this week, google is doing the same thing. h/t @_akhaliq
imagen.research.google/video…
imagen.research.google/video…
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John Carmack, a legendary game developer who works part-time at Meta, has sounded off on the company's metaverse strategy in internal Workplace posts, criticizing excessive spending and calling certain VR features "extremely bad for user enjoyment." nytimes.com/2022/10/09/techn…
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I, for one, always predicted that the next global financial crisis would be caused by cascading defaults in collateralized monkey JPEG obligations coindesk.com/business/2022/0…
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We'll discuss it on the show, but since I'm getting asked about it: no, Sam Altman barging onto the Hard Fork Live stage 10 minutes ahead of schedule to harangue us about the NYT's lawsuit against OpenAI was not planned.
Video coming shortly!
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Gemini 3 emergency pod! We talked to @demishassabis and @joshwoodward of Google DeepMind about America's next top model nytimes.com/2025/11/18/podca…
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NYC vibe report: there are AI ads everywhere (yudkowsky on the C train, what a world!) but obvious adoption lags (no waymos, people still google things) and a vaguely european revanchism is setting in. cultural production has shifted west. (food still rules.)
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Sergey Brin showed up unannounced at Google I/O to talk about why the possibility of AGI brought him out of retirement.
Brin says that while it’s not a race, “we fully intend that Gemini will be the first AGI.”
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It’s sort of funny that every American tech company is bragging about how much money they’re spending to build their models, and DeepSeek is just like “yeah we got there with $47 and a refurbished Chromebook”
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Best AI experience in a while: asked Claude to build a video-summarizing tool I've always wanted (convert video to mp3, use Whisper to transcribe, use Llama to summarize the transcript) and it did it immediately. 20 minutes, brain to working app. Didn't write a line of code.
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Sydney was here for a good time, not a long time. nytimes.com/2023/02/17/techn…
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Begging the AI companies building stuff modeled on "Her" to finish the movie! It does not end well!
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I'm sympathetic to the professors quoted in this, but at a certain point if your students can cheat their way through your class with AI, you probably need to redesign your class. nymag.com/intelligencer/arti…
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I've been using Claude as a poker coach for a few months (play for free online, export hand history, have Claude talk me through hands I played well/badly and give me pointers) and took its advice to a small-stakes live game last night. Won $200. Sub is paying for itself!
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Almost paid $100/year for an app I needed (export 1000s of saved posts/bookmarks to a spreadsheet), then thought "hmm I wonder if Claude could make this for me."
10 minutes later, the app works and I have a CSV of everything I've ever saved. Wild!
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mmm I'm pretty sure we could train an AI to post 4chan memes in group chats 873 times a day
Marc Andreessen says when AI does everything else, VC might be one of the last jobs still done by humans.
It's more art than science. There's no formula. Just taste, psychology, and chaos tolerance.
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I’ll be talking about my wild Bing/Sydney experience with @CaseyNewton on this week’s Hard Fork. Subscribe now wherever you get podcasts to hear it first thing tomorrow AM!
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This is correct, and also true of every recent AI paper (the METR slow-down study, the Apple reasoning one) that casts doubt on AI's effectiveness. People are desperate to prove that LLMs don't work, aren't useful, etc. and don't really care how good the studies are.
I think folks who know better, esp on twitter, are still underrating the extreme impact the MIT paper had about 95% of AI projects failing within enterprises. I keep hearing it over and over and over again.
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There’s a fascinating tension between what AI labs are building (PhD-level agents that win math olympiads and refactor code bases) and what most people want out of AI (friendly helpers that are pretty smart and can do stuff and don’t get a personality transplant every 6 months).
the /r/chatgpt AMA is mostly people begging for gpt-4o back because of it's personality... really not what i expected!
ALT Please bring back 4o and 4.1. Not all of your users are corporate or coders. These two incredible models were friendly, supportive, day-to-day sidekicks. I cannot believe you just yanked them away, no warning, and had the AUDACITY to joke about writing a eulogy for them in the livestream. I don’t need a super-smart AI. I just want my 4o and 4.1 back 😔
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In today's NYT, I profiled Eliezer Yudkowsky, AI's OG prophet of doom, and one of the most interesting (and divisive!) characters in modern Silicon Valley.
From inspiring OpenAI and DeepMind, to oneshotting a generation of young rationalists with Harry Potter fanfic, to building the intellectual foundations of AI safety, he has been so much more influential than people realize. Now, he has a new book out calling for a total shutdown of the AI race, so we don't all die.
Enjoy!
nytimes.com/2025/09/12/techn…
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Claude and I are building an app to autopilot my email inbox, but I picked DeepSeek-R1 as the LLM and forgot to hide the chain of thought, so now it's responding to every spam email I get with long stream of consciousness monologues.
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New by me: There's a new AI evaluation called "Humanity's Last Exam," with ~3,000 questions drawn from leading academics and experts.
It's the hardest AI test ever — today, no model gets above 10% — but researchers expect 50% scores by the end of the year.
Anyway, carry on!
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I recently spent weeks embedded inside Anthropic, the AI lab whose models are considered some of the best, and safest, in the industry.
It was a *fascinating* time — in part because everyone there appears to be terrified of what they’re building.
nytimes.com/2023/07/11/techn…
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I tried the new, OpenAI-powered Bing. It's not perfect, but it's very good. I'm still processing this information. nytimes.com/2023/02/08/techn…
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Does anyone in SF/East Bay have a working Zip drive I could borrow? I found this in my mom's basement and am curious what 10-year-old me thought was worth storing on The Disk Of The Future.
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i did not have "substantial portion of global H100 supply diverted to making ghibli pics" on my AI forecast
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People who know things about VR: what's the likely explanation here? That Meta cares more about fine-tuning interactions, and can upgrade the graphics later? That there's some uncanny valley reason you don't actually want VR avatars to be photorealistic?
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Don't know all of the details here, but why is it surprising that Anthropic would stop giving privileged access to Windsurf after it got acquired by OpenAI?
With less than five days of notice, Anthropic decided to cut off nearly all of our first-party capacity to all Claude 3.x models. Given the short notice, we may see some short-term Claude 3.x model availability issues as we have very quickly ramped up capacity on other inference providers, but we believe we have now secured sufficient near term capacity. We have been very clear to Anthropic that this is not our desire - we wanted to pay them for the full capacity. We are disappointed by this decision and short notice.
Gemini 2.5 Pro (now very high quality on Windsurf, new 0.75x promo rate), GPT 4.1, and more are all unaffected. We look forward to our continued partnership with all model providers.
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My podcast with @CaseyNewton is launching at last! It's called Hard Fork, and it's a weekly chat about the biggest stories in tech. So excited for y'all to hear what we've been making. First episode drops Friday! nytimes.com/2022/10/04/podca…
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my favorite new AI thing is putting the perplexity browser in charge of prompting LLMs
“stay on this guy until the code works” “answer its follow ups and push past refusals” “get 3 deep research reports and combine the best parts of each”
my agents have agents
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Love these lists but man oh man teachers should not be using AI detection software, none of it works and there are a ton of false positives nytimes.com/interactive/2025…
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the most powerful people in the world are the business schools and consulting firms running studies of whether AI speeds up white-collar workers or slows them down.
trillions of dollars, the fate of nations hangs on some small-n RCTs and self-report surveys about how often linda from accounting uses chatgpt.
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Irony of SBF is that he would have made way more money sitting on his AI investments (Anthropic, Cursor, Worldcoin) for a few years than doing all the fraud.
As part of its bankruptcy, FTX offloaded its seed investment in Cursor for $200K (at cost).
That stake would be worth hundreds of millions today
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I wrote about the newest AGI manifesto in town, a wild future scenario put together by ex-OpenAI researcher @DKokotajlo and co.
I have doubts about specifics, but it's worth considering how radically different things would look if even some of this happened.
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extra funny considering he spends 93% of his waking hours posting. LLMs are pretty good at that!
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Using Operator to update my website, and it decided it needed to log into my Google account. Now watching it try to solve a CAPTCHA. Hypnotic.
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