Blood in the Machine

1 week ago | bloodinthemachine.com | Brian Merchant

When Sam Altman published his latest blog post “A Gentle Singularity”, my first thought was, ‘ok so how much is OpenAI trying to fundraise this time?’ It was a half-assed joke to myself, not initially intended for public consumption, an occupational hazard of spending too much time observing the AI industry.

2 weeks ago | bloodinthemachine.com | Brian Merchant

The incinerated husks of Waymo cars were lined up neatly in a row downtown, on Los Angeles Street; one, two, three, four, five of them. And I do mean incinerated. I’ve never seen cars torched so thoroughly. There were sedan-sized piles of ash where Jaguar I-Paces outfitted with lidar sensors used to be, recognizable as cars at all only by wheel frames and blackened chassis. They smelled awful.

3 weeks ago | bloodinthemachine.com | Brian Merchant

The thing that will stick in my head most about the (first?

4 weeks ago | bloodinthemachine.com | Brian Merchant

Like a lot of figureheads in the AI industry, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says that ordinary people are not ready for the changes AI is about to unleash on the world. In a widely circulated interview with Axios this week, Amodei warns we are on the brink of what his interviewers describe as a “job apocalypse” that will wipe out half of entry level jobs and cause the unemployment rate to rise up to 20%. People are unprepared, Amodei says.

1 month ago | bloodinthemachine.com | Brian Merchant

Last week, the big tech news was that OpenAI had acquired Jony Ive’s design studio in yet another deal worth so many billions of dollars, to build some vaguely defined “AI devices.” While the announcement itself was void of meaningful information about the apparently forthcoming products, details of OpenAI’s plans and what the they’re supposed to look like soon started leaking out. As those details leaked, basically all I could think about was how much people are going to hate these things.