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
What a great idea I had for the first Plaintext of 2025. After following the frantic competition between OpenAI, Google, Meta, and Anthropic to churn out brainier and deeper “frontier” foundation models, I settled on a thesis about what’s ahead: In the new year, those mighty trailblazers will consume billionsContinue Reading
It’s been just over a week since DeepSeek upended the AI world. The introduction of its open-weight model—apparently trained on a fraction of the specialized computing chips that power industry leaders—set off shock waves inside OpenAI. Not only did employees claim to see hints that DeepSeek had “inappropriately distilled” OpenAI’sContinue Reading
