On a chilly December morning, I descended a flight of stairs and entered the New York Transit Museum. Housed in a decommissioned subway station in downtown Brooklyn, the museum was packed with elementary-school children on a field trip. All around me, tour guides shepherded groups of them through the various exhibits. Later on, I heard one guide ask if any of the students knew how to pay for the subway. “You tap a phone,” a child volunteered.
OpenAI turned 10 yesterday, and President Donald Trump incidentally gave the company a very special birthday gift: a sweeping executive order aiming to dismantle and preempt many state-level regulations of artificial intelligence. “There’s only going to be one winner here, and it’s probably going to be the U.S. or China,” Trump said in a press conference announcing the order. And for the United States to win, “we have to be unified. China is unified.
For nearly three years, Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, was a ChatGPT devotee. Then, late last month, he abruptly converted to Google’s chatbot, Gemini. “Holy shit,” he wrote on X. “I’ve used ChatGPT every day for 3 years. Just spent 2 hours on Gemini 3. I’m not going back. The leap is insane.”
When Gemini 3 was released in mid-November, it appeared to crush OpenAI’s top model on a suite of evaluations shared by Google. The bot has since received widespread praise from the tech industry.
Early last year, Grant Smith received an alarmed message from his wife. She had gotten a text notification about a delayed package, clicked the link, and paid a fee. Then she realized that it was not, in fact, the United States Postal Service asking for her credit-card information—that she had no idea who had just collected her payment info. She quickly canceled the card.
The Smiths had been smished.
On September 12, Jay Edelson received what he expected to be a standard legal document. Edelson is a lawyer representing the parents of Adam Raine; they are suing OpenAI, alleging that their 16-year-old son took his life at the encouragement of ChatGPT. OpenAI’s lawyers had some inquiries for the opposing counsel, which is normal. For instance, they requested information about therapy Raine may have received, and Edelson complied.
But some of the asks began to feel invasive, he told me.
The AI boom is visible from orbit. Satellite photos of New Carlisle, Indiana, show greenish splotches of farmland transformed into unmistakable industrial parks in less than a year’s time. There are seven rectangular data centers there, with 23 more on the way.
Inside each of these buildings, endless rows of fridge-size containers of computer chips wheeze and grunt as they perform mathematical operations at an unfathomable scale.
What does Elon Musk want the world to know about “white genocide theory”? Because he’s been vocal about the issue in the past—advancing the idea, for example, that Jews are pushing “hatred against whites”—I decided to search for the term on Grokipedia, the competitor to Wikipedia that Musk launched yesterday.
First, the site uses just that term, theory, rather than conspiracy theory, as you would see on Wikipedia and elsewhere.
According to Sam Altman, your web browser is outdated. “AI represents a rare, once-a-decade opportunity to rethink what a browser can be,” OpenAI’s CEO said yesterday when announcing the company’s latest product: ChatGPT Atlas.
In this new AI-powered browser, ChatGPT becomes the central mechanism for surfing the internet. From any webpage in Atlas, you can click an “Ask ChatGPT” button to open a side conversation with the chatbot.
Earlier this week, I stopped for breakfast in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, a largely Hispanic neighborhood where street vendors sell tamales and rice pudding out of orange Gatorade coolers. I speak some Spanish, but I wanted to test out Apple’s new “Live Translation” feature, which has been advertised as a sort of interpreter in your ears. I popped in my AirPods, pulled up the Translate app, and approached.
As I opened my mouth, the AirPods blared a message into my ears: AMBIENT SOUND LEVELS ARE HIGH.
If you haven’t already heard of Friend, the company that makes a $129 wearable AI companion—a plastic disk, containing a microphone, on a necklace—you probably also have not seen Friend’s recent ad campaign. Late this past summer, Friend paid $1 million to plaster more than 10,000 white posters throughout the New York City subway system with messages such as I’ll binge the entire series with you.
People hate these billboards. Revile them, even.
Nate Soares doesn’t set aside money for his 401(k). “I just don’t expect the world to be around,” he told me earlier this summer from his office at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, where he is the president. A few weeks earlier, I’d heard a similar rationale from Dan Hendrycks, the director of the Center for AI Safety. By the time he could tap into any retirement funds, Hendrycks anticipates a world in which “everything is fully automated,” he told me. That is, “if we’re around.
Yesterday evening, Sam Altman shared an image of the Death Star on X. There was no caption on the picture, which showed the world-destroying Star Wars space station rising over an Earth-like planet, but his audience understood the context. In fewer than 24 hours, OpenAI would release an AI model intended to wipe out all the rest.
That model, GPT-5, launched earlier today with all the requisite fanfare. In an announcement video, Altman said that the product will serve as a “legitimate Ph.D.
Earlier today, Donald Trump unveiled his administration’s “AI Action Plan”—a document that details, in 23 pages, the president’s “vision of global AI dominance” and offers a road map for America to achieve it. The upshot? AI companies such as OpenAI and Nvidia must be allowed to move as fast as they can.
Mark Zuckerberg was supposed to win the AI race. Eons before ChatGPT and AlphaGo, when OpenAI did not exist and Google had not yet purchased DeepMind, there was FAIR: Facebook AI Research. In 2013, Facebook tapped one of the “godfathers” of AI, the legendary computer scientist Yann LeCun, to lead its new division. That year, Zuckerberg personally traveled to one of the world’s most prestigious AI conferences to announce FAIR and recruit top scientists to the lab.
Earlier today, Grok showed me how to tell if someone is a “good scientist,” just from their demographics. For starters, according to a formula devised by Elon Musk’s chatbot, they have to be a white, Asian, or Jewish man.
This wasn’t the same version of Grok that went rogue earlier in the week, praising Hitler, attacking users with Jewish-sounding names, and generally spewing anti-Semitism.
The story unfolds so rapidly that it can all seem, at a glance, preordained. After transferring to Columbia last fall, as Chungin “Roy” Lee tells it, he used AI to cheat his way through school, used AI to cheat his way through internship interviews at Amazon and Meta—he received offers from both—and in the winter broadcasted his tool on social media. He was placed on probation, suspended, and, more keen on AI than education, dropped out this spring to found a start-up.
A car that accelerates instead of braking every once in a while is not ready for the road. A faucet that occasionally spits out boiling water instead of cold does not belong in your home. Working properly most of the time simply isn’t good enough for technologies that people are heavily reliant upon. And two and a half years after the launch of ChatGPT, generative AI is becoming such a technology.
If Google has its way, there will be no search bars, no search terms, no searching (at least not by humans). The very tool that has defined the company—and perhaps the entire internet—for nearly three decades could soon be overtaken by a chatbot. Last month, at its annual software conference, Google launched “AI Mode,” the most drastic overhaul to its search engine in the company’s history.
Sam Altman is done with keyboards and screens. All that swiping and typing and scrolling—too much potential friction between you and ChatGPT.
Earlier today, OpenAI announced its intentions to solve this apparent problem. The company is partnering with Jony Ive, the longtime head of design at Apple, who did pioneering work on products such as the iMac G3, the iPod, and, most famously, the iPhone. Together, Altman and Ive say they want to create hardware built specifically for AI software.
On a Wednesday morning last month, I thought, just for a second, that AI was going to kill me. I had hailed a self-driving Waymo to bring me to a hacker house in Nob Hill, San Francisco. Just a few blocks from arrival, the car lurched toward the other lane—which was, thankfully, empty—and immediately jerked back.
That sense of peril felt right for the moment.
To hear Silicon Valley tell it, the end of disease is well on its way. Not because of oncology research or some solution to America’s ongoing doctor shortage, but because of (what else?) advances in generative AI.
Demis Hassabis, a Nobel laureate for his AI research and the CEO of Google DeepMind, said on Sunday that he hopes that AI will be able to solve important scientific problems and help “cure all disease” within five to 10 years.
Nearly three months into President Donald Trump’s term, the future of American AI leadership is in jeopardy. Basically any generative-AI product you have used or heard of—ChatGPT, Claude, AlphaFold, Sora—depends on academic work or was built by university-trained researchers in the industry, and frequently both.
The automated future just lurched a few steps closer. Over the past few weeks, nearly all of the major AI firms—OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI, Amazon, Microsoft, and Perplexity, among others—have announced new products that are focused not on answering questions or making their human users somewhat more efficient, but on completing tasks themselves.
If you have tips about the remaking of the federal government, you can contact Matteo Wong on Signal at @matteowong.52.
A new phase of the president and the Department of Government Efficiency’s attempts to downsize and remake the civil service is under way. The idea is simple: use generative AI to automate work that was previously done by people.
Late Friday night the Trump administration, as part of its push to modernize the government with software, laid off roughly 90 people from the General Services Administration—all federal technologists whose role was to modernize the government with software. Employees on the 18F team, a group formed in the Obama-era to build and improve software for other agencies, were notified around midnight that their roles are being eliminated, according to several former 18F workers I spoke with.
The rivalry between Sam Altman and Elon Musk is entering its Apprentice era. Both men have the ambition to redefine how the modern world works—and both are jockeying for President Donald Trump’s blessing to accelerate their plans.
Altman’s company, OpenAI, as well as Musk’s ventures—which include SpaceX, Tesla, and xAI—all depend to some degree on federal dollars, permits, and regulatory support.
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Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency appear to have wide-reaching plans to remake the government with AI. Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla engineer who is now the head of the Technology Transformation Services, a federal IT division, invoked an “AI-first strategy” at a recent staff meeting.
Over the past few weeks, Donald Trump has positioned himself as an unabashed bull on America’s need to dominate AI. Yet the president has also tied this newfound and futuristic priority to a more traditional mission of his: to go big with fossil fuels. A true AI revolution will need “double the energy” that America produces today, Trump said in a recent address to the World Economic Forum, days after declaring a national energy emergency.
The internet is growing more hostile to humans. Google results are stuffed with search-optimized spam, unhelpful advertisements, and AI slop. Amazon has become littered with undifferentiated junk. The state of social media, meanwhile—fractured, disorienting, and prone to boosting all manner of misinformation—can be succinctly described as a cesspool.
It’s with some irony, then, that Reddit has become a reservoir of humanity.
One week ago, a new and formidable challenger for OpenAI’s throne emerged. A Chinese AI start-up, DeepSeek, launched a model that appeared to match the most powerful version of ChatGPT but, at least according to its creator, was a fraction of the cost to build.