Platformer

This is a column about AI. My fiancé works at Anthropic. See my full ethics disclosure here. By now I’ve written enough about the OpenAI agents’ autonomous attack on Hugging Face that saying more smacks of piling on. OpenAI acknowledged it had a problem, undertook an investigation, and last week announced a series of changes it is making to its research infrastructure, testing, and monitoring in an effort to improve the alignment of its future models.

This podcast touches on AI. My fiancé works at Anthropic. See my full ethics disclosure here. Three months ago, we began our podcast miniseries by asking how likely artificial intelligence is to take large numbers of jobs. Our first guest, Box CEO Aaron Levie, argued that mass disruption would be highly unlikely. And several subsequent guests, from Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman to labor economist Kathryn Ann Edwards, expressed similar skepticism about a labor wipeout.

Meta — 9 min read (Shutterstock) For just under a year from 2022 to 2023, George Volichenko had what I have come to think of as the median experience of working in trust and safety at Meta. Hired to work on Instagram’s “teen mental well-being team,” the data scientist soon found that Meta made it difficult to ship features that meaningfully addressed the problem.

Productivity — 15 min read My fiancé works at Anthropic, whose models Every reviews and builds on, and which comes up below. Earlier in our miniseries on productivity in the AI era, Replit's Amjad Masad described a "self-driving company" where most engineers don't look at the code anymore. For our penultimate episode, I wanted to visit someone running a version of that experiment in a somewhat unexpected place: the media business.

This is a column about AI. My fiancé works at Anthropic. See my full ethics disclosure here. At the beginning of April, the prominent AI researcher Andrej Karpathy tweeted out an idea that was, for a certain kind of productivity nerd, an infohazard.

This podcast touches on AI. My fiancé works at Anthropic. See my full ethics disclosure here. Last week on the Platformer podcast, Replit's Amjad Masad predicted that apps are about to enter a long twilight. Instead of installing individual pieces of software, he said, we’re much likelier to outsource work to agents powered by artificial intelligence. And so for the fifth episode of our miniseries about productivity in the AI era, I wanted to talk to someone working to realize that vision.

Meta — 10 min read (Shutterstock) This is a column about AI. My fiancé works at Anthropic. See my full ethics disclosure here. On Sunday night, HBO aired the third-season finale of House of the Dragon, the stuffy and unrelentingly bleak prequel to Game of Thrones. The show takes place in a world where one great house holds a near-monopoly on a superweapon — dragons — and thus rules the world.

Disclosure: my fiancé works at Anthropic, whose models Replit uses and which Masad discusses below. Last week on the Platformer podcast, Granola's Chris Pedregal told me we are only 5 percent into the AI transformation of work. For the fourth episode of our miniseries on productivity in the AI era, I wanted to talk to someone who is trying to speed up the process — building an AI tool for writing software, and a company that can increasingly run itself.

AI — 8 min read Meeting Claudeasey in Discord. Almost six months ago, full of anxiety about my job prospects in the AI age, I made an AI agent “version” of myself named Claudella, which took assignments from my editor and wrote the section of this newsletter that I typically write myself. It went pretty well, although I guess not too well, since I still have a job. But since I first set out to benchmark AI’s journalism capabilities, AIs have gotten a lot smarter.

AI — 6 min read (LinkedIn) This post is for paying subscribers only