Kelsey Piper

Oakland

Senior Writer at Vox

Senior writer at Vox's Future Perfect. We're not doomed, we just have a big to-do list.

Articles

I pushed AI assistants to their limits, so you don’t have to. Here’s what really works.

2 days ago | vox.com | Kelsey Piper

Staying on top of AI developments is a full-time job. I would know, because it’s my full-time job.
Progressives should care that the global population is set to fall

4 days ago | vox.com | Kelsey Piper

At the dawn of the Covid pandemic, I wrote a newsletter about the approaching virus that highlighted what I saw as the biggest risk: that the question of whether to take Covid seriously would become a partisan political issue. To tackle something this big, I wrote, we’d have to all be on the same page. Future PerfectExplore the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them. Sent twice a week. By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice.
Smallpox used to kill millions of people every year. Here’s how humans beat it.

6 days ago | yahoo.com | Kelsey Piper

More than a million Americans have died of Covid-19, while the global death toll stands at over 15 million. It has been a horrifying and largely unnecessary tragedy, one that risks repeating itself as new diseases like bird flu knock on our door. But for all that the world has lost in the last few years, the history of infectious disease has a grim message: It could have been even worse.
OpenAI ChatGPT-4o update makes an AI overly sycophantic

1 week ago | vox.com | Kelsey Piper

A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!Last week, OpenAI released a new update to its core model, 4o, which followed up on a late March update. That earlier update had already been noted to make the model excessively flattering — but after the latest update, things really got out of hand. Users of ChatGPT, which OpenAI number more than 800 million worldwide, noticed immediately that there’d been some profound and disquieting personality changes.
OpenAI: How should we think about the AI company’s nonprofit structure?

2 weeks ago | vox.com | Kelsey Piper

A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!Right now, OpenAI is something unique in the landscape of not just AI companies but huge companies in general. OpenAI’s board of directors is bound not to the mission of providing value for shareholders, like most companies, but to the mission of ensuring that “artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity,” as the company’s website says.
Trump’s immigration plans are horrifying. There’s a solution in plain sight.

3 weeks ago | vox.com | Kelsey Piper

What should America’s immigration policy be?
The case for cheap products as Trump’s tariffs raise prices

1 month ago | vox.com | Kelsey Piper

People on X were quick to assure me that all this is overconsumption. I could sew my kids’ Halloween costumes from scratch, someone told me. Why buy dice to play D&D? Don’t you know you can use a dice-roller app on your phone? (Another commentator objected in my defense to that response that “just own a phone” is perhaps not the most anti-consumerist of sentiments; the first commentator said anyone can get a phone because you can finance it.) Have I borrowed from my neighbors?
A new book calls for a government that can do things. But there’s a dark side.

1 month ago | vox.com | Kelsey Piper

The buzzword of the past couple of weeks is Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book about why we stopped being able to build things in America and how that’s destroying our country. (Klein is a co-founder of Vox and now a columnist for the New York Times; Thompson writes for the Atlantic.)Future PerfectExplore the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them. Sent twice a week. By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice.
A government that can really do things sounds good. But is it?

1 month ago | yahoo.com | Kelsey Piper

The buzzword of the past couple of weeks is Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book about why we stopped being able to build things in America and how that’s destroying our country.
Media mistakes around masks and lab leaks in Covid hurt public trust

1 month ago | vox.com | Kelsey Piper

In the first few months of the Covid-19 pandemic, the media did not exactly cover itself in glory. To quote myself from an early February 2020 piece, when the virus had already been spreading for more than a month in China and the US already had confirmed cases: In the last week or so, new cases of the 2019-nCoV coronavirus have soared … so have news articles scolding us for worrying about it. “Don’t worry about the coronavirus. Worry about the flu,” BuzzFeed argued.