Platformer

This is a column about AI. My fiancé works at Anthropic. See my full ethics disclosure here. One of my main preoccupations this year has been the extent to which artificial intelligence threatens jobs, either now or in the future.

OpenAI — 9 min read The new ChatGPT app for desktop. (OpenAI) This is a column about AI. My fiancé works at Anthropic. See my full ethics disclosure here. I. Lately, the only important question about a new large language model has been whether the Trump administration would allow anyone to use it. On Thursday, though, not one but two notable models became available for use: GPT-5.6, from OpenAI, and Muse Spark 1.1 from Meta. As always, the worst day to evaluate new models is the day they come out.

This is a column about AI. My fiancé works at Anthropic. See my full ethics disclosure here. I began the year with a flurry of vibe-coding projects: starting by canceling my Squarespace account and building a new personal website, and proceeding to build a suite of tools for creating daily briefings, a journaling companion, and a Platformer archive. The projects were so useful, and so easy to create, that initially I did not spend much time thinking about how unattractive they were.

Last week TED posted an April talk by the teen expert and researcher Candice Odgers, a developmental psychologist and associate dean for research at the University of California Irvine. The title of her talk was “What we're getting wrong about teens and tech,” and her answer to what we’re getting wrong about teens and tech is that we are increasingly banning them from using social media.

This is a column about AI. My fiancé works at Anthropic. See my full ethics disclosure here. On Wednesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman published an op-ed repeating his call for a new international body to govern artificial intelligence safety. “International co-operation like this seems a reasonable way to avoid power becoming too concentrated, and ensure that the benefits of AI are democratized,” Altman wrote in the Financial Times.

This is an interview about AI. My fiancé works at Anthropic. See my full ethics disclosure here. Few people have a better vantage point on the AI economy than Matt Garman. He joined Amazon as an MBA intern in 2005, before Amazon Web Services even launched, and went on to become one of the first product managers for EC2 — the service that kicked off the cloud computing era. In June 2024 he became CEO of AWS, now a roughly $150 billion-a-year business that sits underneath much of the AI boom.

This is an interview about AI. My fiancé works at Anthropic. See my full ethics disclosure here. Last week in our series on AI and jobs, Brookings' Molly Kinder warned us to prepare for a "messy middle": a long, “politically explosive” stretch in which AI job losses are concentrated among some of the best-paid workers in the economy.

— 7 min read Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella at Hard Fork Live on June 10, 2024 (Minh Connors / New York Times) This post is for paying subscribers only

This is an interview about AI. My fiancé works at Anthropic. See my full ethics disclosure here. Last week in our series on AI and jobs, labor economist Kathryn Anne Edwards explained why the United States' weak social safety net makes the prospect of AI-related job displacement quite worrisome.

Meta — 10 min read (Shutterstock) This post is for paying subscribers only