This week, Mark Zuckerberg took the stand in an antitrust trial that could result in the breakup of Meta’s social networking empire. It might be years before the nearly 3 billion users of the company’s flagship app Facebook—known internally as the Blue app—learn the fate of the service they stillContinue Reading
If you logged on to X or Bluesky this past week, you were likely swept up in the onslaught of posts about Trump’s reciprocal tariffs and the plunging stock market. And, if you follow the tech industry as closely as I do, you probably also noticed who wasn’t posting aboutContinue Reading
Dizzied by an accumulated pileup of busted norms, you might have missed a presidential executive order issued on March 20. It’s called, “Stopping Waste, Fraud, and Abuse by Eliminating Information Silos.” It basically gives the federal government the authority to consolidate all the unclassified materials from different government databases. ComparedContinue Reading
The researchers of Anthropic’s interpretability group know that Claude, the company’s large language model, is not a human being, or even a conscious piece of software. Still, it’s very hard for them to talk about Claude, and advanced LLMs in general, without tumbling down an anthropomorphic sinkhole. Between cautions thatContinue Reading
In September 2021, Jim Lanzone took over a company whose name once embodied the go-go spirit of the internet but had, over the years, become a joke: Yahoo. He accepted the CEO post from the new private-equity owner Apollo Global Management, which had bought the property from Verizon, the mostContinue Reading
It was Meta itself that first told me about the new book attacking Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and the allegedly bankrupt morals of their company. On March 7, a Meta PR person contacted me to ask if I’d heard about Careless People, a presumed takedown of the company that wasContinue Reading
For 35 years, amateur and professional cryptographers have tried to crack the code on Kryptos, a majestic sculpture that sits behind CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. In the 1990s, the CIA, NSA, and a Rand Corporation computer scientist independently came up with translations for three of the sculpture’s four panelsContinue Reading
Alphabet’s “moonshot factory,” known as X, has long cultivated craziness in its edgy projects. Perhaps the most outlandish was Loon, which aimed to deliver internet via hundreds of high-flying balloons. Loon eventually “graduated” from X as a separate Alphabet division, before its parent company determined that the business model simplyContinue Reading
Sitting in Lincoln Center awaiting the curtain for Ayad Akhtar’s McNeal—a much anticipated theater production starring Robert Downey Jr., with ChatGPT in a supporting role—I mused how playwrights have been dealing with the implications of AI for over a century. In 1920—well before Alan Turing devised his famous test andContinue Reading
When news first broke about Elon Musk’s tech takeover of the United States government, a number of people who had spent years trying to transform federal IT practices were surprisingly hopeful. Maybe, they dreamed, Elon Musk and his team at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) would provide a long-neededContinue Reading
