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1 week 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.
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1 week 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.
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2 weeks ago | 
bloodinthemachine.com | Brian Merchant
Earlier this week, I had a great chat with AI journalist Karen Hao about her new book, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI.
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2 weeks ago | 
bloodinthemachine.com | Brian Merchant
Years before OpenAI became a household name, Karen Hao was one of the very first journalists to gain access to the company. What she saw when she did unsettled her. Despite a name that signaled transparency, executives were elusive, the culture secretive. Despite publicly heralding a mission to build AGI, or artificial general intelligence, company leadership couldn’t really say what that meant, or how they defined AGI at all.
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3 weeks ago | 
bloodinthemachine.com | Brian Merchant
Greetings all, Today, we dive deep into the GOP’s radical campaign to ban US states from passing any laws that govern AI. Even in a political moment as fraught as ours, this one stands out.
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4 weeks ago | 
bloodinthemachine.com | Brian Merchant
Over the past week or so, there’s been little need to imagine dystopian visions of what a world overrun by some of the worst-case AI scenarios might look like—the tech industry and its acolytes happily offered them up to us. And while grim portents of AI’s impacts on society and culture are not exactly uncommon, it’s somewhat rare we get to experience the full gamut of bad AI futures in such a compressed timeframe.
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1 month ago | 
bloodinthemachine.com | Brian Merchant
The response to my recent story, “The AI jobs crisis is here, now”, has been pretty overwhelming. The piece, which examines how the language-learning app Duolingo fired its writers and translators to go all-in on AI, how DOGE uses an “AI-first strategy” to justify firing tens of thousands of public servants, and how both fit into a broader trend of executives using AI to erode conditions for creative, civic, and freelance work, has become one of the most-read stories in this newsletter’s history.
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1 month ago | 
bloodinthemachine.com | Brian Merchant
On Monday, April 29th, Luis von Ahn, the billionaire CEO of the popular language learning app Duolingo, made a public announcement that his company is officially "going to be AI-first.” Duolingo, he wrote in an email to all employees that was also posted to LinkedIn, will “gradually stop using contractors to do work that AI can handle,” while taking pains to note that “this isn’t about replacing Duos with AI.” According to one such Duolingo contractor, this is not accurate.
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1 month ago | 
bloodinthemachine.com | Brian Merchant
Tomorrow, April 24th, is Take Your Child to Work Day, an occasion on which many federal workers would typically bring their kids into the office. This year, any celebratory mood will likely be dampened by the sweeping layoffs ordered by Elon Musk’s DOGE, which has fired tens of thousands of federal workers, threatened to fire of tens of thousands more, and promised to institute an “AI-first strategy” to replace the laid off employees.
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1 month ago | 
bloodinthemachine.com | Brian Merchant
Greetings all, Hope everyone’s hanging in. The big news this week: Elon Musk is finally stepping back from DOGE. On an earnings call that revealed Tesla’s net income had fallen 71% in the first quarter of 2025, Musk announced that, starting in May, his “time allocation to DOGE will drop significantly.” This may scan as good news, and it’s a victory for the Tesla Takedown protests; popular backlash helped tarnish the brand, dip its stock, and push Musk out the door.