John Herrman
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jwherrman.bsky.social
John Herrman
@jwherrman.bsky.social
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posting about posts at new york magazine. have me on your podcast!
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Reposted by John Herrman
jwherrman.bsky.social
I'm deeply skeptical of mainstream disinformation discourse, and it's pretty clear that most of the foreign X accounts are just engagment farming. But to the extent they're politically important, it's to X's gathered elites, not the masses nymag.com/intelligence...
X is where the MAGA movement talks to itself in public and where its leading lights cultivate their online personas. They regularly drive themselves insane — or, at least, further to the right. Thinking in terms of a 2016-ish threat model, the risks associated with a huge number of popular political accounts masquerading as Americans on X lay less with the voting public than with the new set of elites that stew in the platform's memes all day, interpreting and internalizing what they see there as evidence of broad support or new political consensus. If we imagine this as proof of a sort of organized scheme or foreign-influence operation, in other words, its target wouldn't be the median American lurker. It would be J.D. Vance, a man who frequently talks, and presumably thinks, in posts.
November 26, 2025 at 4:42 PM
Reposted by John Herrman
pbump.com
Fitting, since the circa 2016 Russian Facebook activity got orders of magnitude more traction in the Discourse than it did among regular people.
jwherrman.bsky.social John Herrman @jwherrman.bsky.social · 4d
I'm deeply skeptical of mainstream disinformation discourse, and it's pretty clear that most of the foreign X accounts are just engagment farming. But to the extent they're politically important, it's to X's gathered elites, not the masses nymag.com/intelligence...
X is where the MAGA movement talks to itself in public and where its leading lights cultivate their online personas. They regularly drive themselves insane — or, at least, further to the right. Thinking in terms of a 2016-ish threat model, the risks associated with a huge number of popular political accounts masquerading as Americans on X lay less with the voting public than with the new set of elites that stew in the platform's memes all day, interpreting and internalizing what they see there as evidence of broad support or new political consensus. If we imagine this as proof of a sort of organized scheme or foreign-influence operation, in other words, its target wouldn't be the median American lurker. It would be J.D. Vance, a man who frequently talks, and presumably thinks, in posts.
November 26, 2025 at 4:50 PM
jwherrman.bsky.social
I'm deeply skeptical of mainstream disinformation discourse, and it's pretty clear that most of the foreign X accounts are just engagment farming. But to the extent they're politically important, it's to X's gathered elites, not the masses nymag.com/intelligence...
X is where the MAGA movement talks to itself in public and where its leading lights cultivate their online personas. They regularly drive themselves insane — or, at least, further to the right. Thinking in terms of a 2016-ish threat model, the risks associated with a huge number of popular political accounts masquerading as Americans on X lay less with the voting public than with the new set of elites that stew in the platform's memes all day, interpreting and internalizing what they see there as evidence of broad support or new political consensus. If we imagine this as proof of a sort of organized scheme or foreign-influence operation, in other words, its target wouldn't be the median American lurker. It would be J.D. Vance, a man who frequently talks, and presumably thinks, in posts.
November 26, 2025 at 4:42 PM
jwherrman.bsky.social
Provocative title here from @rufusrock.bsky.social but it's hard to disagree on this point 1/ phttps://asimovaddendum.substack.com/p/are-llms-the-best-that-they-will?r=3f5ape&triedRedirect=true
Yet the lack of profits at these Al companies has an upside for the user - at least for now. Searching for things like candles on ChatGPT is so unusually pleasant at the moment - particularly compared to Amazon and Google - precisely because its search function has not yet been warped by the pressure to generate the kind of profits needed to recoup past losses. However, if these Al tools are to survive financially, the economic reality is that they will have to change.
November 25, 2025 at 5:27 PM
Reposted by John Herrman
jwherrman.bsky.social
on the load-bearing AI bubble, and the subtle shift from warnings about x-risk to warnings about good old financial risk nymag.com/intelligence...
That insiders seem to agree that we could be in a massive bubble is, counterintuitively, not very useful: Whether or not they mean it, and whether or not they re right, their incentives as leaders of megascale start-ups and public tech companies are such that raising, spending, and committing as much money as possible for as long as possible is probably the rational, self-interested choice either way. Anxious, skeptical, or merely satisfied investors looking for excuses to pull back or harvest gains don't have to look hard, and there's evidence some are; before its earnings report, Peter Thiel's investment firm unloaded its position in Nvidia, and Softbank cashed out of the chip-maker at around the same time. Similarly, OpenAI's ability to send public companies' stocks soaring by announcing massive "commitments" seems to be fading - Oracle's recent $300 billion valuation bump, based on some shockingly optimistic guidance it offered investors in September, has since gone negative. Huang has two typical responses to all this. One speaks for itself: Look at all those GPUs we're selling. The other is more direct. "There's been a lot of talk about an Al bubble. From our vantage point," he said after earnings, "we see something very different." In other words: No, it's not. The "virtuous cycle" is just beginning, and the accelerating potential of the most versatile technology the world has ever seen will one day expose complaints about incremental model updates and hand-wringing about data-center deals as shortsighted and insignificant. Huang continues to be able to speak with authority and tell a story that, for investors, still has juice. For everyone else, though, neither side of this wildly polarized, high-stakes bet sounds ideal. If this really is a bubble, and it deflates even a little, it could send the American economy into a serious slump, with consequences for almost everyone, getting rid of plenty of jobs the old-fashioned way. If it doesn't - and Huang's sanitized visions of mass automation rapidly start to spread across the economy, justifying all that CapEx and all those strange deals and then some - well, aren't we getting laid off anyway?
November 21, 2025 at 4:11 PM
jwherrman.bsky.social
on the load-bearing AI bubble, and the subtle shift from warnings about x-risk to warnings about good old financial risk nymag.com/intelligence...
That insiders seem to agree that we could be in a massive bubble is, counterintuitively, not very useful: Whether or not they mean it, and whether or not they re right, their incentives as leaders of megascale start-ups and public tech companies are such that raising, spending, and committing as much money as possible for as long as possible is probably the rational, self-interested choice either way. Anxious, skeptical, or merely satisfied investors looking for excuses to pull back or harvest gains don't have to look hard, and there's evidence some are; before its earnings report, Peter Thiel's investment firm unloaded its position in Nvidia, and Softbank cashed out of the chip-maker at around the same time. Similarly, OpenAI's ability to send public companies' stocks soaring by announcing massive "commitments" seems to be fading - Oracle's recent $300 billion valuation bump, based on some shockingly optimistic guidance it offered investors in September, has since gone negative. Huang has two typical responses to all this. One speaks for itself: Look at all those GPUs we're selling. The other is more direct. "There's been a lot of talk about an Al bubble. From our vantage point," he said after earnings, "we see something very different." In other words: No, it's not. The "virtuous cycle" is just beginning, and the accelerating potential of the most versatile technology the world has ever seen will one day expose complaints about incremental model updates and hand-wringing about data-center deals as shortsighted and insignificant. Huang continues to be able to speak with authority and tell a story that, for investors, still has juice. For everyone else, though, neither side of this wildly polarized, high-stakes bet sounds ideal. If this really is a bubble, and it deflates even a little, it could send the American economy into a serious slump, with consequences for almost everyone, getting rid of plenty of jobs the old-fashioned way. If it doesn't - and Huang's sanitized visions of mass automation rapidly start to spread across the economy, justifying all that CapEx and all those strange deals and then some - well, aren't we getting laid off anyway?
November 21, 2025 at 4:11 PM
jwherrman.bsky.social
if you're a maximally public figure you have to buy/build a level of sycophancy that regular/outside-the-training-data/minimal-online-presence LLM users can basically already access for free
November 19, 2025 at 4:03 PM
Reposted by John Herrman
lopatto.bsky.social
he didn't miss all of them
a screen shot from MIT's report on Jeffrey Epstein's donations. Highlighted is the line "The earliest gift was $100,000 given in 2002 to support the research of the late Professor Marvin Minsky."
November 18, 2025 at 10:14 PM
jwherrman.bsky.social
jeff epstein and so many ai guys just barely missed each other
November 18, 2025 at 10:12 PM
jwherrman.bsky.social
indeed, this is the one useful thing about Grok and Grokipedia nymag.com/intelligence...
November 17, 2025 at 9:39 PM
Reposted by John Herrman
jwherrman.bsky.social
not too hard to imagine a comprehensively gambling-obsessed political media, maybe soon nymag.com/intelligence...
Max Read notes that these companies are posting in a familiar style. "If you still spend time on X.com, you will recognize here precisely the same clipped, decontextualized, link-free, moronically breathless style of tweeting deployed by 'financial news for low-trust illiterates' accounts like Unusual Whales or ZeroHedge (or, for that matter, in a slightly different arena, PopCrave)," he writes. To be slightly more generous about it, accounts like this have, on a platform where outside links barely exist, mainstream media brands are no longer visible, and commentary crowds out timely updates, stepped in to fill a market need, as strange and distorted as it may be. As Read points out, Kalshi and Polymarket are also speaking the language of their most devoted users - "epistemically captured right-wing hobbyist gamblers and speculators — and meeting them where they are, on X, which is another way of saying it's just good marketing. But, in the spirit of prediction, I think material like this will soon be more than a sideshow and already sketches an outline of a new, betting-centric political media. Gambling took over sports coverage, after all. Why won't it take over everything else? If more people put more money into markets like Kalshi, it's easy enough to imagine how a sportslike media transformation might unfold through sponsorships, normalization in existing media, constant metacoverage of prediction odds, and content produced by the prediction platforms themselves. Aside from its posting habits, Polymarket already has a podcast; on the websites of shrinking newspapers around the country, you can already find aggregated articles sharing the current betting odds for the 2028 election. (J.D. Vance +225, Gavin Newsom +350, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez +900 in case you were curious and know what that means.) Why wouldn't fast-growing companies in a wildly lucrative but competitive industry hire or sponsor some influencers to make some content, draw some attention, and convert some customers? Why shouldn't they convene, say, a Jubilee in which participants argue about their bets on polities rather than politics as such? I've got $5,000 on J.D. Vance 2028. Change my mind.
November 13, 2025 at 5:17 PM
Reposted by John Herrman
rusty.todayintabs.com
This is the most cursed idea I’ve ever seen and it’s immediately obvious that this is where we’re headed
jwherrman.bsky.social John Herrman @jwherrman.bsky.social · 17d
not too hard to imagine a comprehensively gambling-obsessed political media, maybe soon nymag.com/intelligence...
Max Read notes that these companies are posting in a familiar style. "If you still spend time on X.com, you will recognize here precisely the same clipped, decontextualized, link-free, moronically breathless style of tweeting deployed by 'financial news for low-trust illiterates' accounts like Unusual Whales or ZeroHedge (or, for that matter, in a slightly different arena, PopCrave)," he writes. To be slightly more generous about it, accounts like this have, on a platform where outside links barely exist, mainstream media brands are no longer visible, and commentary crowds out timely updates, stepped in to fill a market need, as strange and distorted as it may be. As Read points out, Kalshi and Polymarket are also speaking the language of their most devoted users - "epistemically captured right-wing hobbyist gamblers and speculators — and meeting them where they are, on X, which is another way of saying it's just good marketing. But, in the spirit of prediction, I think material like this will soon be more than a sideshow and already sketches an outline of a new, betting-centric political media. Gambling took over sports coverage, after all. Why won't it take over everything else? If more people put more money into markets like Kalshi, it's easy enough to imagine how a sportslike media transformation might unfold through sponsorships, normalization in existing media, constant metacoverage of prediction odds, and content produced by the prediction platforms themselves. Aside from its posting habits, Polymarket already has a podcast; on the websites of shrinking newspapers around the country, you can already find aggregated articles sharing the current betting odds for the 2028 election. (J.D. Vance +225, Gavin Newsom +350, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez +900 in case you were curious and know what that means.) Why wouldn't fast-growing companies in a wildly lucrative but competitive industry hire or sponsor some influencers to make some content, draw some attention, and convert some customers? Why shouldn't they convene, say, a Jubilee in which participants argue about their bets on polities rather than politics as such? I've got $5,000 on J.D. Vance 2028. Change my mind.
November 13, 2025 at 5:21 PM
jwherrman.bsky.social
not too hard to imagine a comprehensively gambling-obsessed political media, maybe soon nymag.com/intelligence...
Max Read notes that these companies are posting in a familiar style. "If you still spend time on X.com, you will recognize here precisely the same clipped, decontextualized, link-free, moronically breathless style of tweeting deployed by 'financial news for low-trust illiterates' accounts like Unusual Whales or ZeroHedge (or, for that matter, in a slightly different arena, PopCrave)," he writes. To be slightly more generous about it, accounts like this have, on a platform where outside links barely exist, mainstream media brands are no longer visible, and commentary crowds out timely updates, stepped in to fill a market need, as strange and distorted as it may be. As Read points out, Kalshi and Polymarket are also speaking the language of their most devoted users - "epistemically captured right-wing hobbyist gamblers and speculators — and meeting them where they are, on X, which is another way of saying it's just good marketing. But, in the spirit of prediction, I think material like this will soon be more than a sideshow and already sketches an outline of a new, betting-centric political media. Gambling took over sports coverage, after all. Why won't it take over everything else? If more people put more money into markets like Kalshi, it's easy enough to imagine how a sportslike media transformation might unfold through sponsorships, normalization in existing media, constant metacoverage of prediction odds, and content produced by the prediction platforms themselves. Aside from its posting habits, Polymarket already has a podcast; on the websites of shrinking newspapers around the country, you can already find aggregated articles sharing the current betting odds for the 2028 election. (J.D. Vance +225, Gavin Newsom +350, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez +900 in case you were curious and know what that means.) Why wouldn't fast-growing companies in a wildly lucrative but competitive industry hire or sponsor some influencers to make some content, draw some attention, and convert some customers? Why shouldn't they convene, say, a Jubilee in which participants argue about their bets on polities rather than politics as such? I've got $5,000 on J.D. Vance 2028. Change my mind.
November 13, 2025 at 5:17 PM
jwherrman.bsky.social
dying at the AI options on the new Epstein files
November 12, 2025 at 6:48 PM
Reposted by John Herrman
jwherrman.bsky.social
In one specific way, Grok might be the most honest and transparent AI project out there nymag.com/intelligence...
As absurd and undignified as Grokipedia's founder-centric origin story may be — How good could Wikipedia be if its page about me is so rude? — Elon Musk's attempt to remake his own information environment is instructive and, if not exactly candid, usefully transparent (or at least poorly concealed). You won't hear Musk joking about "his own fictionalized version of reality" in 2025 — now he prefers to speak in messianic terms about apocalyptic threats, no matter the subject. But Grokipedia, and Musk's AI projects in general, invite us to see LLMs as powerful and intrinsically biased ideological tools, which, whatever you make of Grok's example, they always are. We know an awful lot about what Elon Musk thinks about the world, and we know that he wants his own products to align with his greater project. In Grok and Grokipedia, we get to see clearly what it looks like when particular ideologies are intentionally encoded into AI products that are then deployed widely and to openly ideological ends. We also get to recognize how thoroughly familiar parts of the spectacle are, as chatbots rehash the same pitches to audiences, and invite many of the same obvious criticisms, as newspapers, TV channels, and social-media platforms before them — when Fox offered its "fair and balanced" alternative to other cable networks, Mark Zuckerberg claimed to be returning to his company's "free speech" roots, or the New York Times reminded us that the "truth" is hard, actually. Now, it's AI companies winking as they tell us to trust them, engaging in flattering marketing, and giving in to paternalistic temptations without much awareness of how their predecessors' decades of similar efforts helped lead the public to a state of profound institutional cynicism. As novel and versatile as LLM-based chatbots are, their relationship to the outside world is recognizably and deeply editorial, like a newspaper or, more recently, an algorithmically sorted-and-censored social network. (It's helpful to think of OpenAI's "bias evaluation" process, or Grokipedia's top-down reactionary political correctness, as less of a systemic audit than a straightforward edit.) What ChatGPT says about politics — or anything — is ultimately what the people who created it say it should say, or allow it to say; more specifically, human beings at OpenAI are deciding what neutral answers to those 500 prompts might look like and instructing their model to follow their lead. OpenAl's incoherent appeal to objective neutrality is an effort to avoid this perception and one that anyone who runs a major media outlet or social-media platform knows won't fool people for long. OpenAI would probably prefer not to be evaluated by these punishing and polarized standards, so, as many other organizations have tried before, it's claiming to exist outside them. On that task, I suspect ChatGPT will fail.
November 11, 2025 at 2:24 PM
jwherrman.bsky.social
In one specific way, Grok might be the most honest and transparent AI project out there nymag.com/intelligence...
As absurd and undignified as Grokipedia's founder-centric origin story may be — How good could Wikipedia be if its page about me is so rude? — Elon Musk's attempt to remake his own information environment is instructive and, if not exactly candid, usefully transparent (or at least poorly concealed). You won't hear Musk joking about "his own fictionalized version of reality" in 2025 — now he prefers to speak in messianic terms about apocalyptic threats, no matter the subject. But Grokipedia, and Musk's AI projects in general, invite us to see LLMs as powerful and intrinsically biased ideological tools, which, whatever you make of Grok's example, they always are. We know an awful lot about what Elon Musk thinks about the world, and we know that he wants his own products to align with his greater project. In Grok and Grokipedia, we get to see clearly what it looks like when particular ideologies are intentionally encoded into AI products that are then deployed widely and to openly ideological ends. We also get to recognize how thoroughly familiar parts of the spectacle are, as chatbots rehash the same pitches to audiences, and invite many of the same obvious criticisms, as newspapers, TV channels, and social-media platforms before them — when Fox offered its "fair and balanced" alternative to other cable networks, Mark Zuckerberg claimed to be returning to his company's "free speech" roots, or the New York Times reminded us that the "truth" is hard, actually. Now, it's AI companies winking as they tell us to trust them, engaging in flattering marketing, and giving in to paternalistic temptations without much awareness of how their predecessors' decades of similar efforts helped lead the public to a state of profound institutional cynicism. As novel and versatile as LLM-based chatbots are, their relationship to the outside world is recognizably and deeply editorial, like a newspaper or, more recently, an algorithmically sorted-and-censored social network. (It's helpful to think of OpenAI's "bias evaluation" process, or Grokipedia's top-down reactionary political correctness, as less of a systemic audit than a straightforward edit.) What ChatGPT says about politics — or anything — is ultimately what the people who created it say it should say, or allow it to say; more specifically, human beings at OpenAI are deciding what neutral answers to those 500 prompts might look like and instructing their model to follow their lead. OpenAl's incoherent appeal to objective neutrality is an effort to avoid this perception and one that anyone who runs a major media outlet or social-media platform knows won't fool people for long. OpenAI would probably prefer not to be evaluated by these punishing and polarized standards, so, as many other organizations have tried before, it's claiming to exist outside them. On that task, I suspect ChatGPT will fail.
November 11, 2025 at 2:24 PM
jwherrman.bsky.social
guy with no tools who doesn’t know how many cylinders his car has after ten minutes of ChatGPT: I can fix this

guy’s girlfriend after consulting her ChatGPT with memory mode enabled: This is exactly like when we went camping and there’s actually a term for this behavior
November 7, 2025 at 10:42 PM
Reposted by John Herrman
jwherrman.bsky.social
AI companies want to mediate the entire economy. Their competitors aren't happy about this nymag.com/intelligence...
This week, Amazon answered clearly in the affirmative, in the form of a lawsuit against Perplexity. The language is spicy: Amazon brings this action to stop Perplexity AI, Inc's ("Perplexity" or "Defendant" persistent, covert, and unauthorized access into Amazon's protected computer systems in violation of federal and California computer fraud and abuse statutes. This case is not about stifling innovation; it is about unauthorized access and trespass. It is about a company that, after repeated notice, chose to disguise an automated "agentic" browser as a human user, to evade Amazon's technological barriers, and to access private customer accounts without Amazon's permission. Fraud! Abuse! Trespass! Evasion! This is a threatening lawsuit — it later refers to Perplexity as an "intruder" — but it's also a useful window into Amazon's thinking on AI and where its business fits into a theoretical world where more people do more things with chatbots and agents. It might not be right to say the company is worried, exactly. But it's certainly clear about what it doesn't want to happen, which happens to be precisely what some AI companies clearly want. Most broadly, AI companies are hoping to end up in a situation where their products are the default interface for all sorts of things, and browser agents represent a small but aggressive move in that direction. A world where all purchases flow entirely through another company's interface, chatbot or otherwise, is something that Amazon would prefer to avoid, or at least have a say in, which is perhaps why the company's lawyers are talking about Perplexity as if it's built an automated ticket-scalping app, a sneaker-sniping bot, a data scraper, a data-exfiltration tool, or rip-off interface for its product catalogue. Earlier this week, Perplexity argued on its site: Amazon wants to block you from using your own AI assistant to shop on their platform ... Amazon should love this. Easier shopping means more transactions and happier customers. But Amazon doesn't care. They're more interested in serving you ads, sponsored results, and influencing your purchasing decisions with upsells and confusing offers. Suggesting that "Amazon should love this" and then describing the ways that it might cause them to make less money is sort of funny, but between the lawsuit and Perplexity's response we can get a pretty clear sense of what's going on here: an attempt by Amazon to stop a marginal player from setting a precedent it doesn't want, and a clear signal to bigger ones — OpenAI, Google, and other firms Amazon already competes and partners with - that, if they want their tools to touch Amazon, they'll have to do it on Amazon's terms. This is a sort of conflict we can expect to see a lot of, and soon.
November 7, 2025 at 3:34 PM
jwherrman.bsky.social
AI companies want to mediate the entire economy. Their competitors aren't happy about this nymag.com/intelligence...
This week, Amazon answered clearly in the affirmative, in the form of a lawsuit against Perplexity. The language is spicy: Amazon brings this action to stop Perplexity AI, Inc's ("Perplexity" or "Defendant" persistent, covert, and unauthorized access into Amazon's protected computer systems in violation of federal and California computer fraud and abuse statutes. This case is not about stifling innovation; it is about unauthorized access and trespass. It is about a company that, after repeated notice, chose to disguise an automated "agentic" browser as a human user, to evade Amazon's technological barriers, and to access private customer accounts without Amazon's permission. Fraud! Abuse! Trespass! Evasion! This is a threatening lawsuit — it later refers to Perplexity as an "intruder" — but it's also a useful window into Amazon's thinking on AI and where its business fits into a theoretical world where more people do more things with chatbots and agents. It might not be right to say the company is worried, exactly. But it's certainly clear about what it doesn't want to happen, which happens to be precisely what some AI companies clearly want. Most broadly, AI companies are hoping to end up in a situation where their products are the default interface for all sorts of things, and browser agents represent a small but aggressive move in that direction. A world where all purchases flow entirely through another company's interface, chatbot or otherwise, is something that Amazon would prefer to avoid, or at least have a say in, which is perhaps why the company's lawyers are talking about Perplexity as if it's built an automated ticket-scalping app, a sneaker-sniping bot, a data scraper, a data-exfiltration tool, or rip-off interface for its product catalogue. Earlier this week, Perplexity argued on its site: Amazon wants to block you from using your own AI assistant to shop on their platform ... Amazon should love this. Easier shopping means more transactions and happier customers. But Amazon doesn't care. They're more interested in serving you ads, sponsored results, and influencing your purchasing decisions with upsells and confusing offers. Suggesting that "Amazon should love this" and then describing the ways that it might cause them to make less money is sort of funny, but between the lawsuit and Perplexity's response we can get a pretty clear sense of what's going on here: an attempt by Amazon to stop a marginal player from setting a precedent it doesn't want, and a clear signal to bigger ones — OpenAI, Google, and other firms Amazon already competes and partners with - that, if they want their tools to touch Amazon, they'll have to do it on Amazon's terms. This is a sort of conflict we can expect to see a lot of, and soon.
November 7, 2025 at 3:34 PM
Reposted by John Herrman
jwherrman.bsky.social
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...
As I spent time watching ChatGPT bonk its way through various web interfaces, I also found myself thinking of self-driving cars. A browser that pretends to be a person at the input level - moving a cursor, scrolling a human GUI - felt less like a Waymo, in which an unattended steering wheel turns as a result of actions taken by systems closer to the road, than a regular car with a humanoid robot sitting in the driver's seat. Again, it's pretty interesting to watch! But it also makes you wonder: Why are we doing this that way? Aren't there better ways for machines to talk to each other? The answer, Miller suggests, comes down to the "incentives of their makers more than the intrinsic value of the technology." (The Browser Company was recently acquired by software-maker Atlassian.) For OpenAI, building systems that can execute complex commands on behalf of users is the whole ball game - it's the path to wide-ranging automation and/or AGI, depending on which definition of the term the company is going with that day. An AI model that can provide useful information in a chat window, or handle tasks clearly outlined by the user, is a useful product, but the prospect of an Al model that can productively and proactively interact with the world around it in ways comparable to a human - or, more specifically, an employee — is where trillion-dollar valuations come from. To get where it wants to go, though, OpenAl has a number of challenges. Some are widely discussed and frustratingly hard to pin down, revolving around benchmarks, varying definitions of model capability, and predictions about scaling. Others are more banal: To answer questions more usefully, for example, chatbots tend to do better if they have more data about users; likewise, to execute tasks on their behalf, they need to operate in an environment where users are logged in to the various services they use to work and live their lives. They need a breathtaking amount of access and permission, in other words. ChatGPT isolated in a chat window doesn't have that, and it takes a long time to draw out of users, if they're willing to offer it at all. ChatGPT as a default browser - authenticated in dozens of different sites, payment methods at the ready, or perhaps even logged into a work environment - does. (Such agents also create, as many in the AI space have pointed out, a potential security nightmare.)
October 30, 2025 at 3:13 PM
jwherrman.bsky.social
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...
As I spent time watching ChatGPT bonk its way through various web interfaces, I also found myself thinking of self-driving cars. A browser that pretends to be a person at the input level - moving a cursor, scrolling a human GUI - felt less like a Waymo, in which an unattended steering wheel turns as a result of actions taken by systems closer to the road, than a regular car with a humanoid robot sitting in the driver's seat. Again, it's pretty interesting to watch! But it also makes you wonder: Why are we doing this that way? Aren't there better ways for machines to talk to each other? The answer, Miller suggests, comes down to the "incentives of their makers more than the intrinsic value of the technology." (The Browser Company was recently acquired by software-maker Atlassian.) For OpenAI, building systems that can execute complex commands on behalf of users is the whole ball game - it's the path to wide-ranging automation and/or AGI, depending on which definition of the term the company is going with that day. An AI model that can provide useful information in a chat window, or handle tasks clearly outlined by the user, is a useful product, but the prospect of an Al model that can productively and proactively interact with the world around it in ways comparable to a human - or, more specifically, an employee — is where trillion-dollar valuations come from. To get where it wants to go, though, OpenAl has a number of challenges. Some are widely discussed and frustratingly hard to pin down, revolving around benchmarks, varying definitions of model capability, and predictions about scaling. Others are more banal: To answer questions more usefully, for example, chatbots tend to do better if they have more data about users; likewise, to execute tasks on their behalf, they need to operate in an environment where users are logged in to the various services they use to work and live their lives. They need a breathtaking amount of access and permission, in other words. ChatGPT isolated in a chat window doesn't have that, and it takes a long time to draw out of users, if they're willing to offer it at all. ChatGPT as a default browser - authenticated in dozens of different sites, payment methods at the ready, or perhaps even logged into a work environment - does. (Such agents also create, as many in the AI space have pointed out, a potential security nightmare.)
October 30, 2025 at 3:13 PM
jwherrman.bsky.social
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
today.yougov.com YouGov America @today.yougov.com · Oct 28
NEW Economist/YouGov
Net job approval for Donald Trump [at the start of his second term | now] among...
White Americans +17 | -2
Hispanic Americans -5 | -36
Black Americans -31 | -76
d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/ec...
d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/ec...
A multiple line chart of YouGov polling data with the headline: "Approval of Donald Trump's second-term job performance among U.S. adult citizens, and among white, Black, and Hispanic Americans." The chart has the sub-headline: "Do you approve or disapprove of the way Donald Trump is handling his job as President? (% who strongly or somewhat approve minus the % who strongly or somewhat disapprove)." The chart has the note: "Note: Responses of "don't know" are not shown."
October 28, 2025 at 3:07 PM
jwherrman.bsky.social
Interesting how basically every Amazon project — true of most tech neo-conglomerates, to be fair — comes back around to surveillance nymag.com/intelligence...
In various nearby industries, Amazon is regarded as a leader in employee surveillance and "algorithmic management" and is likewise held up as an example of its possible effects on workers (more productive, less content, and less likely to organize). In a brief rendering demonstrating how its delivery glasses will work, Amazon shows how worker surveillance will soon extend outside of the vehicle, right up to the doorstep. Which brings us to the second bit of news, from TechCrunch: Amazon's surveillance camera maker Ring announced a partnership on Thursday with Flock, a maker of AI-powered surveillance cameras that share footage with law enforcement. Now agencies that use Flock can request that Ring doorbell users share footage to help with "evidence collection and investigative work." Ring cameras are an underrated Amazon success story: With an appealing pitch — see who or what is on your doorstep, even if you're not home — the company sold millions of units and constructed a massive surveillance network with numerous benefits for the company itself. They're a way to counteract package theft and to make it easier for customers to receive deliveries. They also provide an additional way for the company and its customers to surveil its workers, meaning that Amazon's glasses aren't just extending its "end-to-end" delivery apparatus — they're closing the loop in its employee-monitoring ecosystem. Ring cameras were, for obvious reasons, always interesting to law-enforcement agencies, with which Amazon has had a generally cooperative but heavily scrutinized and limited relationship, at least until recently. Now, by partnering with companies like Axon and Flock, which operate nationwide fleets of license-plate scanners and work with local, state, and federal law-enforcement agencies, including ICE, the company is making its surveillance network widely and comprehensively available to the state.
October 27, 2025 at 6:21 PM
jwherrman.bsky.social
😅
dariustahir.bsky.social Darius Tahir @dariustahir.bsky.social · Oct 23
One persistent error is asking about kids’ (human) health and getting answers based on pet health. Kinda bizarre how much this happens.
October 23, 2025 at 9:54 PM
jwherrman.bsky.social
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...
AI Ate the Web. Now It’s Coming Back for Seconds.
What “deep research” tells us about the future of AI — and the internet.
nymag.com
October 23, 2025 at 8:37 PM