John Herrman

1 week ago | nymag.com | John Herrman

OpenAI is considering a bit of a pivot, according to The Verge. Now that hundreds of millions of people are interacting with ChatGPT, the company has an idea: Why not see if they would be interested in a social network, too? While the project is still in early stages, we're told there's an internal prototype focused on ChatGPT's image generation that has a social feed. CEO Sam Altman has been privately asking outsiders for feedback about the project, our sources say.

1 week ago | nymag.com | John Herrman

Meta's big pivot to AI, which Mark Zuckerberg says could cost the company another $65 billion this year, isn't going so smoothly at the moment. Industry watchers say its models aren't competitive with the latest from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. Its head of AI research just left, an internal re-organization is underway, and the company is dealing with accusations that it gamed popular performance benchmarks. So, what's the plan?

1 week ago | flipboard.com | John Herrman

NowStreaming services like Netflix are consistently raising their subscriptions. Try this other platform for free. When I was an undergraduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I added a concentration in film studies as part of my English degree. This choice exposed me to the …

1 week ago | nymag.com | John Herrman

What are you supposed to do, exactly, when the president won't stop Tasering the economy for fun? As far as the markets go, if you don't trade stocks or import goods for a living, the conventional wisdom is the same, just delivered in a quieter voice with sweatier pits: Don't do anything stupid, uh, wait it out, think long term. You could sit and scroll and worry about your job or your retirement or the future more broadly. You could resolve to become more or less politically engaged.

2 weeks ago | nymag.com | John Herrman

In June of last year, Leopold Aschenbrenner, a 24-year-old former OpenAI employee, published Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead, an urgent manifesto about artificial intelligence. "You can see the future first in San Francisco. Over the past year, the talk of the town has shifted from $10 billion compute clusters to $100 billion clusters to trillion-dollar clusters. Every six months another zero is added to the boardroom plans," he wrote. "The AGI race has begun.