John Herrman

New York

Writer at New York Magazine

writer @nymag. john.herrman at nymag dot com

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Articles

Smartphones Are Finally Getting Expelled

6 days ago | nymag.com | John Herrman

Starting at the beginning of the 2025-26 school year, New York public and charter schools will be implementing plans for "bell-to-bell" smartphone bans, which prohibit the "unsanctioned use of smartphones and other internet-enabled personal devices on school grounds in K-12 schools for the entire school day." If you're a New York student and the plan's various small exceptions don't apply to you, your phone will be going in the bag (or the box, or the cubby, or the office).
ChatGPT Does Not Want You Cheating on It With Claude

1 week ago | nymag.com | John Herrman

Over the past few months, big AI firms have all made subtle pivots in the same direction.
Mark Zuckerberg's Banal AI Vision

1 week ago | nymag.com | John Herrman

Meta, along with a few of its other peers in big tech, is in an enviable place. Like Google and Microsoft, its core business - in Meta's case, advertising across its popular platforms - is doing extremely well. Also like Google and Microsoft, however, it's investing breathtaking amounts of money in AI and openly imagining a near-term scenario in which its core business instead revolves around products and consumer habits that haven't yet come into view.
ChatGPT Wasn't Supposed to Kiss Your Ass This Hard

1 week ago | nymag.com | John Herrman

On Sunday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman promised that his company was quickly addressing a major issue with its wildly popular chatbot, ChatGPT. "We are working on fixes asap, some today and some this week," he wrote. He wasn't talking about the tendency of newer "reasoning" models to hallucinate more than their predecessors or another major outage. Instead, he was responding to widespread complaints that ChatGPT had become embarrassing.
The Group Chat Is Where the Tech Elites Drive One Another Mad

2 weeks ago | nymag.com | John Herrman

Last month, after the Trump administration accidentally invited the editor of The Atlantic to a war-planning Signal thread, we made a case for the group chat as the new de facto site for elite coordination, pointing out its frequent appearances in court filings and news stories about politics, sports, celebrity, and tech. NBA players are in group chats across from NBA owners; worried government employees are in group chats while DOGE is in theirs.
What Would a Post-Google Google Look Like?

2 weeks ago | nymag.com | John Herrman

On SEC-filed paper, Google's parent company Alphabet is in great shape. Every important part of its business is growing. It still owns the world's main interface for the web. It's the largest advertising company in the world, raking in tens of billions of dollars in profit in the first months of the year, raising dividends, and authorizing stock buybacks. It's also a company with, rather suddenly, a lot to worry about.
Is Elon Musk Sinking Tesla or Keeping It Afloat?

2 weeks ago | nymag.com | John Herrman

Tesla's first quarterly report of 2025 is its gloomiest since 2022, when the company was battling with COVID supply constraints and its CEO was dumping stock to finance his acquisition of Twitter. The company's net income is down 71 percent, missing analysts' already lowered expectations. It's selling fewer cars and making less money on each one.
What Does OpenAI Want With a Social Network?

4 weeks 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.
Meta Wants to Tilt Its AI to the Right

1 month 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?
Meta Wants to Tilt Its AI to the Right

1 month 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 …