Uber also said it was making a strategic investment in Zipline, a California-based company that has been orchestrating drone deliveries in Texas since 2025. The news comes as Uber's delivery rivals begin to step up their own drone deliveries, thanks to easing government regulations that allow companies to fly farther and cheaper.
The Uber Eats deliveries will start in Zipline's existing market of Dallas-Fort Worth, before eventually expanding to dozens of additional citie …
Today I’m talking to Ben Smith, the editor-in-chief of Semafor.
Everywhere you go, people say they don’t trust the media — and yet they’ve never consumed more of it. Audiences have moved on from legacy names in favor of Substacks and podcasts and TikTok news influencers that seem to be everywhere in our feeds.
Why would anyone want to start a new global news organization in the middle of all that, when even once-storied brands like CBS Newscan’t seem to figure it out?
Well, that’s what Ben did four years ago. He’s the guy who ran BuzzFeed News at the height of the Facebook traffic boom, and even wrote a book about it, called Traffic, which he discussed with me on Decoder back in 2023.
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You’re going to hear Ben say that since then, Semafor has evolved into what he calls an anti-scale company. It still doesn’t have a website paywall, but it makes about half its money in the convening business — that’s what media types have taken to calling events lately.
And Semafor throws some big events. It actually has a new one called Silicon Valley & The World, which will feature some of the biggest names in tech and AI. That’s part of the events business: hosting the subjects you cover on your big event stage.
So I wanted to know how that all works, and what it feels like to navigate the ethical conflicts that seem to be everywhere in media right now. In particular, I wanted to dig into how Semafor’s newsroom is approaching AI, the ethics and optics of putting people you cover on your conference advisory boards, and whether independence is still something an audience is willing to pay for.
Ben and I usually hash this stuff out over beers, and I think you can tell we really enjoy getting into all this together.
Okay: Semafor editor-in-chief Ben Smith. Here we go.
This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Ben Smith, you’re the co-founder and editor in chief of Semafor. Welcome back to Decoder.
It is really nice to be back.
I’m excited to talk to you. You were on the show three years ago, just as Semafor was launching. It was right as Buzzfeed News, which you founded and ran for a long time, was shutting down.
I keep talking to media CEOs about what is going to happen. It feels like you have figured something out at Semafor. How are things going over there?
Things are going incredibly well, and knock on wood as I say that, but I think we figured something out. There are a lot of different things to figure out, and we’re in this unbelievably strange and unstable moment in media.
But I do think we’ve figured out a model that is quality journalism built around great journalists, paired with really large scale convening that is building both great journalism and a really good business, a profitable business — which is something that is, to me as a former BuzzFeed executive, novel.
A profitable digital media business is in short supply these days. It’s funny, I was looking over our conversation from three years ago. You had just published your book Traffic, which was basically about what I would call the millennial digital media moment and everyone chasing massive scale.
“The platforms are going to deliver tons of traffic to us and then we’ll collect pennies and we’ll all get rich.” This was a pretty common thesis. It feels like you’re saying you’ve turned away from that. You’ve learned the lesson of that time.
Our chief revenue officer, Rachel Oppenheim, likes to joke that my next book will be called No Traffic, but we are really building an anti-scale business. The luxury of starting in that moment, in the rubble of the traffic apocalypse, was obviously not the path to success.
We had to think a lot about targeting and building a very specific audience. The thing that I have kind of come to realize in all these conversations… I listen to your show. We have a show about media that we yap about this on. What’s the future of media? Is it live? We were just talking about it. Who knows?
But in journalism, I have a lot of conviction that great stories aren’t going anywhere. The need for high-quality insight isn’t going anywhere. Great reporters aren’t going anywhere. What surface this all lives on is up for grabs, and you can’t be too ideological about that.
You say surface, I always say distribution.
Yeah.
A theme on Decoder that we come back to over and over again is your distribution shapes what you make. It’s just inevitable. The medium is the message, to borrow that framing. If surfaces — if distribution — are up for grabs, what are you holding onto?
I actually don’t buy that thesis, or at least I’m resisting that thesis because for the audience, the pull of distribution is incredibly powerful. The core thesis of BuzzFeed was we cracked the distribution and built for the distribution. Maybe I’m overreacting a little to that, but we definitely think all the time about how we want to reach political leaders and business leaders. We want to reach nonprofit leaders, and we want to reach people making decisions.
We want to reach them in person. We reach them a lot in email. We reach them on the web, we reach them in video, but we’re thinking about that same audience across media, and in fact, I think video is particularly interesting because of the pull. Videos are placed on the web in terms of the place you can get massive scale.
Then conversely, where there’s a pull of massive scale to create the biggest pull is just to be hyper-polarizing and find ways to create polarizing confrontation. That’s how you go viral, or one of the best ways at least, and we’re trying hard to build the discipline to resist that pull of distribution.
We’re already deep into the weeds. I hope that listeners can tell Ben and I like talking to each other about these things.
Please visit Semafor.com.
[Laughs] I’m excited to play some clips for you. So I’m glad that you said you were reacting to BuzzFeed. A few months ago we had Jonah Peretti on the show, and right after he had sold BuzzFeed to Byron Allen and the Weather Channel. There’s a lot going on there. In full disclosure to the audience, I literally had a beer with you just before I sat down with Jonah.
I remember.
I did not ask the questions you told me to ask, but he said—
Were they about running? That’s another show.
I didn’t do it. I was quickly in the weeds of Jonah as well, and I put to him what I think of as the original sin of digital media, which is that I think Jonah thought he could go so viral so consistently that he could crack distribution and that Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook would pay him money.
I’m going to play for you what he said to me in response to that, and I just want to get your reaction to it. Can we go ahead and play it?
Jonah Peretti: Yeah. I mean, first, just as a factual matter, we did get paid millions of dollars by Mark Zuckerberg. The prediction that they would pay for content was accurate, but it was just short-lived. So we got paid for that exploding watermelon.
Okay, so he said that to me and I said, “Yeah.”
That was a good day in the office.
It was a great day in the office, I’m guessing, but everyone knew that Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t going to pay forever.
I agree with Jonah on this. Looking back, we all say the social platforms were obviously going to always be dependent on UGC and never pay for anything, and these media companies building on social platforms never made any sense.
It’s worth remembering these investors’ experience had been shaped by cable, which was a different distribution platform in which companies like Viacom, ESPN, CNN, and MTV had built huge businesses on the back of this new distribution. So they said, “Here’s another new distribution. We’re going to build big businesses on the back of it.”
We now look back and say it was inevitable that Facebook would never pay for content, but it wasn’t. Facebook executives made choices at various times. They experimented with different things. If you are the person in charge of the success of the blue Facebook app, do you think, “It was a great decision to continually rely on low-quality YouTube generated content”? No, that thing is dying, obviously. They should have found a different path. It was a mistake.
Jonah made this argument to me as well, and this is the other—
Obviously I’m brainwashed by Jonah. I worked with him for a long time.
No, I’m just curious. Your paths have diverged and you are building a very different business. I’m just curious. This is the other clip from Jonah that I want to play for you. It is an argument that Facebook made a mistake. Here’s that clip:
Jonah Peretti: I actually believe that it was a mistake for Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg to not continue with the news tab, to not continue to pay professional content creators. These platforms have tons of resources and could have spent a couple of billion dollars a year on that, sustained a vibrant media ecosystem, really owned media in a way that would have been incredibly powerful for them and given them charisma, relevance, and authority that they just don’t have today.
The claim there is if Mark Zuckerberg had continued to fund BuzzFeed, he would have more charisma.
That the Facebook blue app would be more successful had they done different things? That’s pretty obvious. You could argue which things. That’s true, and then if you look at whether you would rather be Netflix or the blue Facebook app? You’d rather be Netflix, right?
Netflix famously doesn’t invest in these either.
Netflix pays a lot for content.
They pay a lot for content, but they don’t invest in news.
News, I agree. News is a complicated business. We’re a separate question. But they pay for a lot of professional content. YouTube is the biggest and most interesting story here because YouTube has found a way for individuals to build businesses on top of it in a really impressive way. There are occasional news creators like Johnny Harris, but he’s almost the exception that proves the rule, but we just had Kareem Rahma on our show.
These people are building real businesses, real careers, on top of YouTube, paying producers, increasingly moving up market. I guess the thing that I give Neal Mohan, the YouTube CEO, a hard time about, is I do think YouTube with the idea of the creator and the development of the word creator built a system in which media companies, middlemen, can’t really survive.
There was a company called Maker Studios which Disney bought for half a billion dollars. It was supposed to be a middleman between YouTube and creators, and that’s one way to give a group of media people leverage against the platform. YouTube has designed a system in which it’s sort of like Uber. It deals with atomized individuals, not with collectives who have any kind of power, and there are all sorts of different collectives.
But a media company is one kind, and YouTube has, probably to its own benefit — and to certainly to the detriment of the media industry — built a system where it’s built for individuals, and no one has any leverage except for YouTube.
This is the big question I’m getting at. You’re building a new kind of business, you’re profitable. You’re saying you’re anti-scale, no more chasing traffic.
I’m still personally looking at the traffic.
Who doesn’t?
It’s just a personality flaw.
If you were raised in the swamp, you will always be a creature of the swamp. But I look at some of the other big success stories of our time. TBPN is a big success story of our time. These are not huge numbers that they’re driving.
They’re driving massive influence and they’re charging high rates to advertisers that are integrated into their content, and now they’re owned by OpenAI, who they cover on their show.
You look at big YouTubers, and Kareem Rahma is a great example. I saw him speak in and around Cannes and he was very much like, “Yeah, I make advertising for our partners. I make videos. The advertising is the thing that I make, it’s the revenue.”
Somewhere in there is a big tension for the news, for media companies, where we can’t say, “We probably shouldn’t make the advertising for the companies we cover,” but that is actually how you monetize all these platforms at scale. I haven’t found anyone who solved it. I’m curious if you’ve taken runs at it.
In the entertainment business, which Kareem is in, that’s always how it’s been. James Bond is wearing whatever kind of watch he’s wearing. Although the fact that I don’t remember is a real failure of marketing. There’s not that inherent tension in the entertainment business that you’re going to sell out by doing a product placement, or cutting, or appearing in an advertisement.
But for news there really is, and you need to be careful. The answer to that is actually the audience. The traditional advertising business is that you are reaching an audience who the advertiser values. For the scaled advertising business, Google and Meta — and increasingly TikTok — built the best mousetraps, and it’s impossible for publishers to compete on that scale.
If you’re reaching people in a very focused way in various particular environments — in person, in email, in video — that’s a case you can really credibly make to advertisers. We’ve built a big advertising and related convening business that way, and that’s one answer. It’s not the only answer, but it is one.
When you say convening business, that’s your events business.
Yeah. Max Tani always gives me a hard time about the word “convening.”
Everyone loves the word “convening.” It’s good. You’ve gotten pilled by the revenue people because they love to say it. Everyone else says, “It’s parties.”
We’re going to come to it because there’s a relationship between needing to get everyone in the room and then covering them, which I personally find fascinating.
It’s booking. You had to not insult me for weeks to get me here.
[Laughs] Or did I nag you every single day until you showed up?
Tell me about the revenue split between those things. Are you mostly making money on journalism? Are you mostly making money in events? Which is higher?
It’s just about 50/50.
Is there a pull in either direction or are you trying to grow them both the same way?
We’re a startup. We’re opportunistic. The convening business grew a lot faster. My partner, Justin Smith, has been building businesses like that. He was CEO of The Atlantic and Bloomberg. I’s much more his experience than mine.
But he came in with this thesis, which I bought into, that basically convening was the business that you could stand up fastest and make profitable fastest, that was a journalism business. We launched hard into that space because it takes longer to build a digital advertising business: you’ve got to build that digital audience. We launched with that and then it’s just taken off in a way we, or at least I, didn’t see. I didn’t imagine that we’d be really competing with Davos this soon.
I want to come back to that, too. When you launched, I remember part of the plan was to go to subscriptions. You were going to build this elite audience. You’re going to charge them lots of money. It was there in the very beginning.
Was that part of the plan?
It was early on, it was part of the plan.
Startups, yeah.
You also said, “We barely need a website. It’s all going to be newsletters.”
Oh, we did talk about that. You were one of those website people.
To this day.
The last.
The last website on earth, that’s TheVerge.com. That all changed for reasons that things change with startups, but the media industry and distribution changed around it. Was there a moment where you said, “We can keep it free,” because you are one of the last free websites?
In my memory, we always thought at some point we’d do subscriptions, but in my experience you just cannot be ideological about revenue. It’s hard enough to build a business in news without getting all hung up on the values of the different revenue streams.
Advertising-based publishers will tell you that democracy can only survive in a world where there aren’t paywalls. Subscription publishers will tell you that advertising is corrupting. At some point you realize everyone’s just talking about their book and that sometimes they’re already in a tough business and they’re talking themselves out of incremental opportunities and really successful media companies.
If you look at Disney or The New York Times, what business are they in? They’re actually in a bunch of different businesses. They’re managing them all really carefully. Our view is that if at some point it makes sense to do subscriptions, we’ll totally do them, but we don’t really see it as an ideological choice. When you’re starting a company, you just can’t do that many things at the same time.
Also, I would say more broadly, and I got mocked for this at some point, but we are insanely ambitious about our long-term growth. We really are trying to build, over decades, a huge global company, and subscriptions are a trade-off that caps your growth in some ways. That’s something we think about too. But that said, we’re really trying to build a good business, and if subscriptions are a part of that, at some point we’ll certainly be a part of that.
You launched with a lot of ambition. You’re the first news organization of your kind to say, “We’re going to cover Africa a lot, we’re going to cover the Gulf a lot in various ways.”
That ambition was that those markets are under-covered, and you’re going to provide new information that readers aren’t necessarily getting from other places. You’ll build up that audience and then monetize them in some specific way. Has that thesis proved out?
Yes, and I would say when we launched, this was the thing that was most confusing to people. That Justin and I had worked in global news and had these real ambitions for it, but also were very careful about sequencing.
When we launched, we were in the US, Brooklyn, Washington, on Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Africa. I remember it would be like me, Justin, and our great Africa editor, Yinka Adegoke doing an interview, and it’d be like, “Oh yeah, we’re American and he’s African,” and people are like, “What are you talking about?” It doesn’t make any sense, but I think we saw there was an opportunity to be very competitive very quickly in Sub-Saharan Africa, particularly Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa, with great journalists led by Yinka and his colleague Alexis, to figure out that model.
We’re now in the Gulf, and we’re going to launch in Europe and Asia. Those are growing businesses and they’re part of a network. We see it less as a colonial hub-and-spoke model. They’re not reporting back to New York for what people in New York care about. We’re trying to build a network of audiences in each of these places.
Is that pulling you in different directions in terms of resourcing? If your audience in Africa grows faster than the audience in the United States, are you going to put more resources there?
Yeah, we’re definitely very attentive to what’s working. I would say it’s just a truth that the US is the biggest media market in the world by far. It depends on how you count, but more than half of all revenue associated with media in the world is in the US.
Yeah, that was the pull.
Actually the pull is mostly always here. We fight against it a bit because we think this is a really good long-term investment.
This is ancient history, but when I worked at AOL of all places, there was a lot of pull that—
Oh, Engadget.
We ran Engadget China. We wanted to be in all these other countries. We would resource and run those operations against much cheaper advertising revenue. Pennies to dollars in some cases.
But the audience was there.
But the audience was there.
We had this experience at BuzzFeed. This is part of why I was so excited to do some of it with Justin, because Justin had successfully built businesses in these other markets. At BuzzFeed we’d gone in, built big audiences, and we’d seen in Brazil, in the UK, in Japan this very intense engagement. People wanted independent journalism of this new digital and independent kind.
I remember in the first meeting we were talking about this, Eric Hippeau, this very smart, long-time digital investor was like, “Do not do this. You will never make any money and you’ll have to shut it all down.” We said, “Ah, forget it, old timer.” He was totally correct. We just never figured out how to reliably monetize them.
Even when you could, you’d say, “The Brazilian edition was profitable this year, but bad news, they have currency controls, so the money stays in Brazil.” “Oh, nobody told us that.”
How have you solved for it now?
We’re pretty careful about keeping the costs low and growing the verticals with local revenue. There’s also a lot of value in these huge gatherings that we’re building, that they are fundamentally global, whether it’s in Silicon Valley or in Washington. Building these global networks of CEOs and political leaders feeds that network. That’s been valuable. But I don’t know, we’re careful as part of it. That’s one thing I learned from BuzzFeed.
The high-flying VC era has produced a generation of very conservative media operators.
That’s right.
I think that’s fascinating. The other big innovation I want to talk to you about from the beginning of Semafor, and then I want to start talking about what you’re doing now, the Semaform.
You launched with this way of writing an article. You still use it to this day. I see it all the time. The thesis was that it would just sort of make it simpler to understand what all the different pieces are. I always thought that was funny because you were chasing the most elite audience possible, and presumably they could already understand what was going on.
That’s the problem. They could understand what was going on. And what is going on in a newspaper article is we have a who, what, where, why sentence.
And then you have another sentence that says the same thing. And then you have a paragraph, and then you have a quote that is from an expert, but it just reflects whatever the reporter thinks and they’ve picked the expert with their bias to repeat. And then you have an unsupported paragraph of random theories called the nut graf.
Everything else is just chronological order. Particularly the “an expert in disinformation says this” or “an expert in democracy says this,” any reader sees, “This is what the publication thinks, this what the journalist thinks. Why don’t they just say it rather than do this weird move of filtering your biases through an expert?” And particularly with a sophisticated audience, they’re in on the joke a bit. There are two sides to it because one is that the journalist is required to smuggle their opinion or their analysis in other people’s voices. The other is that really good beat reporters are real experts.
A sophisticated reader actually wants to know what Maggie Haberman thinks to a really high degree. Because the other deal in the newspaper is that you conceal your own analysis and opinion. On both sides of that, the reader is sort of losing out. You’re treating them like an idiot because you’re smuggling bias and opinion in, and then also — and this is particularly true of really senior experienced beat reporters — people read Reed Albergotti or Burgess Everett and want to know what they think. So tell me what you actually think.
The Semaform is an attempt to separate “here are the facts of the story we can all agree on” and “here’s the journalist’s analysis.” For an analysis to be interesting, there’s got to be some chance it can be wrong. Otherwise, it’s totally banal. We go out of our way to try to find somebody who disagrees with us to include that, too. People like that. It’s a bit of humility also.
Back in my day, we just called this blogging.
[Laughs] Blogging, yes.
I would just write down what I thought all the time.
I would say this was influenced by blogging. I know, we’re all old bloggers now. It’s so embarrassing to explain to people that you used to have a blog.
What do I run to this day? It’s still fundamentally the reporters saying what they think.
Someday you’ll be explaining to people you had a podcast.
It’ll just be my VR avatar talking to your VR avatar.
[Laughs] It will be another silly word, yeah.
No legs. It’ll be great. The reason I ask about the format in particular is that my thesis is that distribution and formats shape each other. Semaform was a new format. It was a way to reach an audience and say, “We know you’re not stupid. We’re going to show you the structure of the story out loud.” Has it been successful? Has it actually succeeded in attracting an audience or is it just the trademark of how you do things now?
We hear a lot about it from our audience. People really like it. We also do a lot of shorter form stuff, and so that’s not always broken out that way. But that value of, “We’re going to be really humble, we’re going to be assertive about what we think, but also very, very open to disagreement, very clear about the difference between a fact and analysis,” is core to our DNA and everything we do, including in the events.
Let me ask you Decoder questions. I want to just talk about what’s going on in this industry now. Because you’ve learned a lot and it’s been almost four years that Semafor has been going. Those are all the big early bets and I just want to check in on them. How big is Semafor now?
We’ve got about 60 journalists, and more than 100 employees.
How is all that structured?
I’d say more than 100. It’s probably about half journalists, half a commercial team that includes revenue and a great events production team. We do all that stuff in-house. Part of the luxury of a startup and part of the challenge in news is that — and I think you’re inside at the moment one or two companies that have cracked this — there’s not a lot of talent on the business side of news for obvious reasons. It’s a terrible business.
You go to Harvard Business School and 30 percent of those people go into enterprise sales and .01 percent go into media, for the obvious reason that they like to make money. They look around for where the money is and it’s not in media.
We’ve been incredibly aggressive about trying to recruit really, really great commercial operators and people on our revenue side. It’s fun to be in a place where the wattage on the business side is really, really high. That’s been a real luxury for us. We have bookers, we have producers, we have people thinking about the vibes and the music. We take all that stuff really seriously.
Do you have an in-house DJ?
Would I call Brigitte Anders-Kraus an in-house DJ? I think that would be a reasonable thing to say.
That’s pretty good.
I think she would object. She does a lot of other stuff too. She’s very efficient.
When we did the code conference, I spent a lot of time thinking about the Spotify playlist.
You got to think about that stuff.
Actually, that brings me to the other Decoder question I ask everybody. You have a lot of decisions to make. You’ve grown up a lot over the past four years at Semafor. How do you make decisions? What’s your framework?
I personally make decisions very, very, very fast at very high volume. But I am very attentive to the people around me when they think it’s a mistake, and I’m quick to reverse them
I care a lot about hiring great journalists and having people who I really trust and I rarely jam a decision down anybody’s throat. I want to be surrounded by people who are deep experts in what they’re doing, whether it’s managing or building AI tools or reporting. But I’m very happy to lose fights.
This is a new kind of business you’re describing. You want to make a lot of decisions fast. You’re growing in a lot of different areas. Every time I see you in person, I bring you a new journalism ethics problem. This is a real recurring theme in our relationship. I’m always struggling to be pure of heart.
You come from the most corrupt corner of journalism, which is gadget reviews. You’ve appropriately figured out that in that dark cave, ethics is this incredible way for The Verge to distinguish itself.
It’s literally what we say to our audience: “We are selling you this policy that we can’t be bought.” Maybe that’s the right thing. I look at some of the creators and I look at some of their Lamborghinis and I think maybe that’s the wrong thing. But that’s the way it goes.
I started by playing you that clip of Jonah Peretti saying if Facebook had only paid for news, the tech CEOs would’ve retained relevance and charisma. Maybe the blue app would be better. I’m looking at a media ecosystem where it feels like actually there’s elite capture of traditional media.
David Ellison bought CBS News, to whatever success or failure that’s going to be. He’s, depending on your point of view, either trying to get out of his Warner Bros. deal or he’s dead set on owning CNN and changing it however he wants to change it. Through his family, there’s ownership of TikTok.
Brendan Carr is fulminating at the FCC about what happens on the broadcast stations. He wrote an entire chapter of Project 2025 about regulating content moderation on platforms. I see more influence on the media from that side of the house than ever before.
That’s the audience that you aggressively try to go out and attract and monetize in different ways. How do you view all of that right now?
These are really different things. We’re in this moment of politicized wealthy individuals buying media companies and using them to curry favor with the White House. That’s just a very specific thing that is incredible.
In some sense, my view of the media has always been that if you actually are delivering something your audience wants, that gives you independence. They want you to be asking tough questions. They want you to be delivering them true facts and insight. That’s the path. There’s a temptation, particularly for places that don’t have strong business models, to start making ethical compromises and you see it all over the place.
In a way, because you’re in the gadget review space, you see it so clearly. I think it’s true in every space. The core thing of journalism and what makes it interesting is the adversarial quality and the independence and the independence of the people you’re asking questions of, the people you’re covering. Businesses like advertising complicate that, but if you don’t hold onto that independence, you’re giving away the whole story.
We think obsessively about that. For businesses that like innovating, it’s so important that you actually do not want to innovate in the field of ethics. That’s the one space where nobody should be innovating or you should be very, very careful, because if you think about why marketing conferences are so boring, it’s because they aren’t doing tough independent interviews with the people. Our events are interesting because we’re doing tough independent interviews and giving that away would be an enormous mistake.
Can I ask you a really direct question about that?
You’re doing Silicon Valley & The World, which is the big new conference. This is you saying you’re going to compete with Davos. You’re going to put on a bunch of conferences like this that compete on the biggest stage. You’re convening people, as I’ve been told.
I looked at your announcement, and you were kind enough to invite me to it. On the board are Jensen Huang and Satya Nadella, and they’re advisors, but you’re going to do challenging journalism. How does that work?
It’s a reasonable question and it’s a feature of the convening business that is somewhat new business to me, too. But first of all, we’re thrilled that Jensen and Andy Jassy are going to be there and we’re going to be doing newsy on-stage interviews with them. It is a feature of that business.
If you look at the way The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and our other competitors like Bloomberg do it, part of building a community around these events and getting excitement around them is pulling the newsmakers you’ll be interviewing into the event in some way. The New York Times calls them task forces. The Wall Street Journal calls them a council. Bloomberg actually also calls them an advisory board. But the journalism is totally independent of them.
But how does that work? I did Code Conference and I remember thinking, “I really need to get so-and-so CEO to show up on stage.” If the day before they get on the jet to show up in California, we say, “So-and-so’s CEO is deeply corrupt. Here’s our eight-month investigation…”
They’re probably going to cancel on you.
They’re probably going to cancel. And I thought, “That’s going to be fine. That’d be great actually.”
Yeah, totally.
Because I’ll get on stage and say, “They canceled because they can’t take it.” But at the same time, I knew that the people buying the tickets probably were buying the tickets to see so-and-so appear on stage. This never actually came to a head. This was never actually a problem. It was just always in my mind.
Maybe you weren’t doing enough exposés.
I thought, “Should I be causing this problem more?” How do you think about that? You cover these companies at a really high level.
We do obviously write stories that they don’t like all the time. We try really, really hard to be fair. We try not to sandbag people, but there are two different things. One is, “Did you write a story that upset them and they canceled on you?” You just have to be willing. That’s just the cost of doing business in journalism and that’ll happen and you just can’t think about it. We are trying to be grown up and fair.
One of the things that I’ve noticed is there’s a sense, particularly if you go to these conferences that are not run by journalists, that you don’t want to ask the hard question. You’re a little nervous about there being this core question in the CEO’s business or in this politician’s leadership that is awkward to ask. But of course that’s the question that the CEO spends all his or her time thinking about. Not only are they ready for it, they’ve also thought about it more than anybody else. They’re eager to engage on it.
It’s like a weird illusion that senior leaders don’t want to be asked hard questions. That’s crazy. The reason they’re in those gigs is because they find it really interesting. They’re much more relaxing jobs.
If you’re interviewing the CEO of Ford and you’re not asking him — and how are you not? — about this crisis of China swallowing their business, what are you doing? There is an impulse, which I think is totally wrong, to tiptoe around the hard questions. I actually think for CEOs, for political leaders, it’s boring for them to go on stage and tell the same canned anecdotes about their personal biographies they’ve told a thousand times. It’s their job to answer hard questions.
I’m always asked by various comms people, “Why do the CEOs come on the show?” In our YouTube comments, people ask, “Why would they show up?” The answer I’ve most commonly gotten is this is the only way their own employees will listen to them.
They want to see the challenge and the stakes and the conflict as you’ve described are present in this format, whereas no one’s listening to the all-hands.
It’s important that you be respectful. There’s a slice of tech journalism that really concluded that the people they cover are monsters. It’s probably hard to get those folks to talk to you then. Conversely, there’s a slice of the tech industry that has concluded all journalists are in a deep conspiracy to destroy them.
Both of those slices of media culture have run their course and are both toxic and boring at this point. Everybody should stop and just cover these people like important decision makers in the middle of great stories. That’s just the news business.
We care a lot about our independence and other journalists’ independence and build it deeply into the events.
It’s more than a slice on either side. Our own audience says, “All of these people are monsters,” and they’re reading a tech website. I look at most of the politicians in America. They’ve come around to, “Maybe we should stop the data centers, or we should at least talk about it because people will like us if we talk about it.” After a decade of talking about regulating social media—
And not doing it.
—and clamping down on Big Tech and doing nothing, we’ve never passed a privacy law in this country.
You see there’s a lot of heat around “these guys are monsters, we can just throw sticks and stones at them.” And then on the other side, they own the distribution channels. They’re on X, doing whatever they want to do. There’s a sense that they don’t need the accountability.
Mark Zuckerberg just published a 6,500 word manifesto that in my estimation is freshman year political science thinking. He’s going to get away with it because there’s literally no one around him to say, “Try being smarter than this.”
Do you see that connection at your events, where the thing you need to challenge some of these executives on is people think you have bad values, not your business decisions?
When you are interviewing somebody where there’s a core critique of the thing they’re doing that is the values, you should definitely ask. You always ask them. That’s the question they’ve been thinking about, too.
I actually disagree with you on the AI CEOs though. We’re moving out of an era where you had business leaders. Marc Andreessen is patient zero of this — very, very smart guy, very influential and influenced a lot of people to think this way, but who had this deep paranoia about the media and the sense that it wasn’t relevant.
If you look at the really great business figures of this era, of the new ones — I would say Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, and Jensen Huang — these are classic showmen who love the media. Or I don’t know if they love the media or they hate the media, but they, like Steve Jobs, understand it, like Donald Trump.
They’re selling something.
They’re salesmen who see the media as a very important sales channel, which is how business leaders have always been. They’re running circles around the guys and the women who are sitting paranoid, saying, “I don’t know if we can talk to this reporter.”
They just pick up the phone and they’re on the cover and they wear the leather jacket and they do whatever the slightly corny but incredibly effective Time magazine cover style thing is. Obviously the legacy media is diminished and there are new outlets, but fundamentally they’re showmen who aren’t operating out of some kind of deep theoretical relationship with media that they plan to change.
Elon is obviously the big exception to this rule, as of many, but the rest of this new generation of business leaders have a much more normal relationship with the media.
One of the things that I think is really interesting in that context is the rise of the news creator, the news influencer, where they aren’t of the machine the way that you are of the machine. They don’t have a Justin Smith saying, “I’ve built a global news operation. You just do the great reporting, I’ll find new business. By the way, all the big print newspapers have task forces. We will have a global conference and solve independence.”
The influencers and creators I talk to, this is all a first impression for them. The idea that they can be plied with gifts or access or made to seem more important, they feel it.
They struggle with it on a deep level. A lot of our industrialists and politicians now understand that that is a faster route to a bigger audience and that there’s more influence to be had there over the content, over the editorial. How do you compete with that?
You have to have courage in your conviction that people want journalism, that people actually would like true facts rather than lies and independent voices rather than ones that are corrupt. That’s a very optimistic view, but that’s broadly true. You’re seeing that the most interesting and most successful creators are also finding that.
The great Silicon Valley podcaster Dwarkesh Patel’s questions have gotten tougher and tougher because he’s very sophisticated and I think he realizes his audience knows that, if you’re interviewing Jensen Huang about how he thinks about chips in China, you should ask him the hard questions, not the easy ones, and that’s more interesting. It’s so obvious. For journalists who admire or worry about creators, there’s some lacking in the courage of their own convictions that it is more interesting to ask hard questions than easy ones.
Don’t you need the person to show up to be asked the questions of? This is the dynamic that I see in so many places. With the podcasters and the creators, what they’re learning is that their audiences are durable. You don’t need the famous person. You don’t need Apple access to get your big audience. If you have a big audience, you can do whatever you want. My formulation of that is the less access you need, the more you get. But that’s a hard lesson to learn at the beginning.
There’s an old saying that access is a curse, too.
Oh, access is poisonous.
I follow politics very closely, and you see this in Washington. I don’t know if you remember, but in the beginning of the Trump administration, there were all these influencers in the White House press conferences asking Karoline Leavitt how she does her hair. The thing is I think they and their audiences found that that was extremely boring, and they wandered off to talk instead about having paranoid fights with Candace Owens or whatever.
Similarly, the Pentagon in particular brought in all these what they saw as allied, pliable, right-wing influencers to replace the hated mainstream media. And then when the Iran war started, Gateway Pundit is grilling Pete Hegseth about the war and he doesn’t have answers because there are a lot of toxic things about audience capture and you can be pulled all sorts of crazy places by your audience, but also you can be pulled toward journalism by your audience.
What you saw in that Pentagon press room was that their audiences were nervous about the war and did not like it. So suddenly Pete Hegseth is being grilled by these pet outlets that he’d put in there to avoid dealing with real questions. There was some sense that journalism isn’t a trade that you learned at journalism school. It is actually a service to your audience that anybody can figure out if you are paying attention.
One of the really interesting things to me about that dynamic in particular at the Pentagon is so many of the journalists they put in there were video first. They were making clips. I could see them in those press conferences trying to get a clip. They knew the video would play and then the platforms reward conflict, and the comments were, “Why did you ask this question?”
What do you think Sam Donaldson was doing in the White House press room in the 1980s? These are stages for performance.
Sure. Who was it? It was Newt Gingrich who figured out C-SPAN was the stage for him. I understand, but the clip economy in particular.
They’re going to manufacture a clip, and maybe it’s the audience pulling you towards journalism or maybe it’s just the algorithm pulling you towards conflict.
There are good pulls and there are bad pulls, for sure.
Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference. You’re doing more video now, and that’s right next to the fact that the Semaformis there to expose the structure of journalism because its audience is really smart and some of them are CEOs. And then you’re going to go make video on video platforms and you’re going to experience that other pull. How do you think about managing that? Are you not chasing scale?
No, we think about it a lot, about not chasing scale on video, but trying to have really high-level conversations. That there’s a big — but not the biggest — audience for really sophisticated conversations with leaders in media or in Compound Interest, our business show; CEOs on our CEO Signal show; and other stuff we’re going to be launching.
Video reminds me so much of the social web, and the allure of infinite scale if you just follow it toward this fixed point that everyone else is also going toward. It’s this incredibly homogenizing force. Everybody on the left is doing Bari Weiss outrage this week, and it’s very, very hyper partisan. No, we just have really had a lot of internal conversations about resisting that.
How do you make money if you don’t chase scale on video?
You have to reach a really high-quality audience.
And you’re just going to bake the ads in? Are you going to do the ad reads? This is the other big problem of the creator world is the platforms don’t pay you any money, and they’ve certainly learned to pay people less money.
Yes, we do integrated campaigns with direct-sold advertisers. I don’t know. You do host reads. I noticed that Odd Lots, my second favorite show, is doing host reads these days.
This is the biggest concept in all of media.
The principle of journalistic independence is incredibly important. The forms change when you’re in these moments. What I remember is that on Google, the ads used to be in yellow and they had a yellow overlay. At BuzzFeed, we said, “Okay, that’s the convention. We’ll have a yellow overlay on our ads. That’s how you know it’s an ad.”
Then Google removed it, and we said, “I guess that’s not the convention. I guess ads can be the same color as everything else.” These things are signals to the audience and the forms change through time. Again, you don’t want to be innovating the field of ethics, but you have to realize that the forms are changing.
My harshest take about all these platforms is Google made the ads not yellow and then it made them look like the content, and then it changed the economics of the web such that the only profitable thing to publish on the web is marketing content and listicles about what shoes to buy when you go hiking, and now that’s all that shows up in AI Overviews.
And then Meta started charging you to distribute those rather than letting them go viral on their own if they were good.
So everything became advertising. YouTube just made it harder to make money on YouTube. They changed the rules of their partner program. The only way you can make real money as a creator on YouTube and have your big staff is if you do the integrated brand campaign — if you become an advertiser or an ad agency.
That is the pull of all these platforms: “We’re not going to pay you anything, we’re going to take the content for free, maybe we’ll even train our AI on it, and you will integrate advertising it somewhere.” I get what you’re saying about not innovating in ethics, but as someone who has resisted the many, many, many demands that I do the host reads and the checks that come along with it, that’s the innovation is we’re making the reporters read the ads now.
In the old days of TV and radio, the hosts read the ads, and then they stopped. Now they do it again. Maybe there’s some study saying they were more corrupt. But I haven’t really seen any evidence of that. I just think these are different kinds of forms.
It used to be that front page advertising in newspapers was considered horrifically corrupt and now they do it all the time. Some of this stuff is people get caught up on the forms in a medium that’s just changing really, really fast. No, we want to create amazing advertising that our advertisers are really happy with and works for them. That’s just core to the business. It is another nice thing about starting from scratch.
There’s a difference between when you’re building a media company, as you have done, thinking about, “This is a product that our audience is going to love and that our advertisers are going to love.” And in that neonatal state, church and state can talk to each other a lot. Once you launch the thing, they’ve got to be really independent.
This is the core challenge of our time, especially if you want to make something that gets wide distribution. If you want to start a newsletter on Substack or Ghost or Beehiiv and charge a lot of money to a small audience, I think you can do pretty well. Your ability to have a massive impact gets immediately limited, as you’ve said. There’s a cap on your audience size. It seems like Semafor wants to have the big impact, but retain the elite audience.
That is a way to build a big business without reaching a huge scale is to reach a very, very valuable audience. Again, that’s not the only way to build a media company, you wouldn’t want to be in a world where that was the only kind of media company, but we are totally, totally focused on that. It is working and it is allowing us to hire great journalists to break stories.
One of the things that I consider with our audience all the time, because we were free until about a year ago, is that we had a huge audience and they were very aware of any of our potential biases. Maybe this is just the tech audience, and we have lots of commenters. But if you love Apple, everything is going to be pro-Apple. That is just the firmament in which a tech publication stands.
But also Comcast was an investor in Vox Media and Vox, and we would have to disclose it. Comcast didn’t like me, but we would disclose it all the time. There’s just some part of, “Well, we think the audience is smart, they’re an elite audience, they understand the structure, they might understand the biases that come with having Jensen on the board of advisors, having a bunch of Saudi royalty on your board of advisors.” How do you feel about that?
No, they understand what we’re doing quite clearly.
Do they think that that gets some influence? Because that’s what the consumer audience definitely believes.
I don’t know what they think, but our promise to them is that it doesn’t, and that we’re covering these people very independently. In fact, a lot of the people on these advisory boards have diametrically opposed interests to one another.
There’s no journalistic followthrough, not any more than I think being on the DealBook task force influences what you see in The New York Times. I do think though, in the biggest sense like this, as you said, just to go back to something you said earlier, that everything is marketing.
Everything is corrupt.
In corners of media, including our corner, we’ve managed to really hold the line on this, but if you look at a lot of social video in particular and platforms like TikTok, totally undisclosed advertising is everywhere and it really distorts how people see the world. Just in terms of people’s judgment about what’s working, what’s real, what’s not real.
I think about this a lot in the AI space actually, because there are so many anecdotes out there or videos of people doing incredibly cool things with this tool or that tool, and you just never really know. It’s just hard to know what’s marketing and what’s not, what’s just literally paid for and what’s not. We are doing a project that I’m very excited about called the Semafor Innovation Atlas. It’s just literally trying to report, “Here are some cool particularly public sector AI projects that are real.” Because there’s so much out there that’s just unreal but that tells a good story, which is in a way the job of marketing.
I had a partner at a very, very large consulting firm tell me they had done hundreds of AI deployments and less than two dozen had yielded positive ROI. I said, “Can you just tell me that on the record?” And he said, “Absolutely not. We want hundreds more.”
We’re in that moment where everything feels marketing, everything feels corrupt. The thing I’m just pushing at is the audience, their base assumption, regardless of how elite the audience is, is that everything is corrupt. I find the higher up we go, the assumption that things can be bought and paid for increases.
We live in a very populist moment, in this widespread belief that everything is corrupt. It just diffuses through society and it’s partly justified. It’s partly not. My favorite example of this is the congressional stock trading thing, where there’s been a lot of research. There are, I’m sure, corrupt Congress people front-running stocks. It’s never been a big problem and there’s no study showing that it’s widespread.
To try to disabuse people of this, they passed a law several years ago saying that members of Congress have to disclose their stock trades. And now there are all these accounts. There’s 400 whatever members of Congress, some of them are winning, some of them are losing. If you only look at the ones who are doing well, you can tell a story about widespread corruption.
Now, everyone believes it’s incredibly corrupt as a result of a transparency measure that actually showed it wasn’t. We’re in a moment where there’s this deeply baked-in sense that every institution is corrupt. We try by being really transparent and really direct and, by not compromising on this stuff, sending a message to counter that. But you’re swimming against a big cultural tide right now.
For us, a big part of the marketing of our events and the way we make them good is that it’s going to be a festival of news, we’re going to ask real questions, it’s going to be exciting. Justin at some point I think called Semafor World Economy “Davos with follow-up questions.”
That’s pretty good.
That to me is like you guys saying, “We don’t take freebies in reviewing gadgets.” That’s a huge selling point for you. You got to really lean into that, not away from it.
The thing that gets me now, the reason I think we can market it, is that if this was 10 years ago saying, “The Verge has an ethics policy,” all of my competitors would say, “So do we.” I think Wired is doing great reporting.
A lot of the way they market their great reporting is they just say out loud, “Look at all this reporting, we do it. Buy our subscription.” It’s totally effective. They’ve cracked some code there by just saying out loud that they do the reporting, people will pay for it.
Turns out people like journalism.
I think that’s very smart. What has occurred to me in all of that is particularly our youngest audience does not know. They did not come up the same way. The water they’ve been swimming in their entire lives is social media, integrated brand campaigns by creators, and a feed that is increasingly fake and bought and paid for. I’m not sure about us showing up and saying, “There’s an old way of doing this.”
See, I disagree. People don’t want to be lied to and don’t want to be fed slop. We’re headed for some kind of reckoning like the big payola scandals in the radio industry.
Everybody inside the radio industry knew and it was a totally open secret that the way you got your song on the radio is you pay off the DJ, but it turned out the audience was not in on the joke. So when Congress held hearings into it totally blew up the industry and upended everything.
Particularly with political influencer marketing, people hate that. You’ve got to think Congress is going to come in and crack down on it. I’m actually optimistic about that. Adam Schiff just recently introduced a bill on it. That probably won’t be the one, but everybody hates this. The idea that your favorite influencer is being bribed by some politician to lie to you, people do not like that.
That disclosure, which is mostly in effect or somewhat in effect with big brand marketing, if PepsiCo buys an ad, they’re going to disclose it. There’s a lot of shady stuff happening around the margins. And then politics, because there’s this chasm between the Federal Elections Commission, which sort of collapsed, and the FTC, which regulates other advertising. There’s all this undisclosed and undisclosable political advertising. I just do not think people like that. That’s going to wind up having to be regulated. It makes people angry. It makes you angry.
I’m curious about this. There was a recent story, I think it was Politico, saying all of the young staffers on the right have no idea how to do anything, because they’re all comms people. They’re all influencers and there’s a talent shortage.
I think Madison Cawthorn was the bellwether. He came into office and he said, “I’ve got more comms people than policy people.” And then it very quickly became clear that wasn’t going to be great. But now that’s the norm that we’re all just tweeting policy into existence. We’re going to stop the Iran war with tweets. It’s a real thing that happens once a week in this country.
There’s something there that’s broken. Political influence operations, maybe we hate when they’re paid for, but they are politics now. And they’re part of the feed in a very real way.
Sometimes in really damaging ways, this administration is incredibly responsive to social media. A story goes viral on Twitter and somebody gets their immigration status pulled — I just read a piece from a woman who’s in ICE holding because there was a sort of misleading campaign saying her husband’s mother had been a translator for the Iranians in the ’70s, and so she’s now in an ICE holding cell. The administration acted because this went viral on social media.
There’s always been a very intense relationship between the media and the politicians. The New York Times publishes a story and then Chuck Schumer the next day introduces a piece of legislation, which is the oldest trick in the book.
Actually, it’s not been my experience that Republican staffers in Washington are incompetent. I live in New York and often go to Washington, and I’m in Washington a lot. People in my liberal Brooklyn neighborhood will say, “God, it must be so horrible to deal with those Trump people.” The reality is actually they’re incredibly polite and responsive.
It was a nightmare often to deal with the Biden people, because Democrats think that journalists work for them. That writing something independent is an act of betrayal. I suppose Republicans have either appropriate or lower expectations. That’s sort of always been true.
Communication has always been a pretty important part of politics, but there’s a way in which the disorganization of this administration in particular just means that they’re totally reactive to random pieces of media that somebody plays Donald Trump on an iPad. That is really different.
I just see that we’re going to tweet policy into reality as a feature of this administration. There’s not a lot of rigor under that policy often.
Or often somebody else just tweets something and it goes viral. This was the story of DOGE. Musk was just seeing tweets and making policy based on it.
Do you think that has come to an end? We’re saying people hate these political influence operations, that probably they will get regulated in some way because both sides hate the idea that all the influencers are getting paid by politicians.
No, right now we’re in the worst part of it. Although you’ve seen a federal government that had had a lot of momentum and ability to execute things, it lost all of that. At the White House, there’s much less able to do anything right now, so there’s less happening.
This is where I wanted to wrap up. It’s going to break somehow. There’s some kind of reckoning coming where people want the truth. People don’t trust the tech companies. The antipathy towards AI in particular is high, but the tech companies and a bunch of billionaires own all our distribution in very significant and serious ways. Something is going to happen. The audiences are going to change in some way. There will be some reaction somehow. Do you have a view of that?
This stuff keeps changing. There is a temptation to validate the populist impulses of the moment that I actually think journalists should probably resist sometimes. I heard your interview with Gaby Del Valle about data center politics. I loved her anecdote about a rumor going around that the data centers were killing cattle, and she tracked it down to one Texas farmer who had lost one cow.
I actually think the role of journalism is not always to amplify the populist reaction, even though it’s so easy and social media validates that. It’s a little more complicated. I actually hesitate to predict whether things are getting better or worse.
Your event Silicon Valley & The World is coming up. If I had to make one prediction about the midterms, it would be that surveillance and data centers will cause some sort of left-right realignment. They scramble the lines in very populist ways.
But they also cause alignment. They bring together very disparate groups of people. How do you expect that class of billionaires, which all want things, to react to what I feel like will be a surprising story in the midterms?
There are different strains of this. The data center story is so hot right now, and I’m in the minority here. Most people think this will be a huge political issue for a long time. Companies try to build facilities in people’s neighborhoods and then they go in and they sponsor the Little League team and they pay a bunch of carpenters and they sponsor the parade. That is actually something corporate America is pretty good at. And it’s unbelievable how badly they screwed this up, these data centers.
Yeah, it’s very bad.
But that is because they aren’t actually causing stillborn cattle. Fundamentally, with the exception that they’re going to have to navigate the energy issue, they’re going to have to find a way to not elevate energy prices. But some of that probably does fade as companies figure out how to do this without infuriating neighborhoods and doing it in places people want it. Maybe it will become less of an issue.
The big questions around regulating AI are just fascinating. And you’re right, after, as you said, not regulating social media and then beginning the [second] Trump administration with this incredibly accelerationist point of view, they are now just doing it. They’re just regulating this technology day to day. They’re going to have to figure out a framework for it. Every political candidate will have to have some point of view on it.
It’s pretty unpredictable what this is going to be, but I do think we’re in a new era. Particularly the biggest part of the new era is just that the federal government is now this huge participant in the economy and in the economy of tech. It owns a big chunk of intel and is trying to shape technological policies and picking winners and losers. Executives are in Washington constantly trying to make their case. I think that whoever the next president is, that probably doesn’t change. And that’s a really massive structural shift that we’re all going to be covering.
Do you think that you can run as a populist if you want to take a big stake in our AI companies? Or is that a redistributive move?
I don’t think populism is necessarily that. I wouldn’t get too far into the details. It just depends how you talk about it.
That does seem like the theme of the day in Washington.
What do they say about simple solutions to complex problems?
Yeah, Trump has compared those stakes in companies to the sovereign wealth funds.
Yeah, that’s reasonable.
A lot of Gulf states have that. I actually wanted to ask you about this. You cover the Gulf deeply, you’ve got events in the Gulf. The United States, I would say, is in some kind of free speech crisis that is modeled a lot after the control that Gulf states have over their media and what people are not allowed to say. The Kushner family is all wrapped up into that.
How do you think about all of the things you talked about independence when you have that money in your organization, when you have those folks on your various boards at events, when you have journalists on the ground in those places?
We cover Saudi and the Emirates in particular a lot and pretty aggressively. We hired the great reporters from Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal and places like that in the region. We don’t have any investment money from the Gulf and for many sovereigns. I’m not sure that’s what you meant, but just to be clear about that.
They’re on your board for these events.
They’re advisors. There are some executives from that part of the world on advisory boards. But we cover them independently. The same as the Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal and others do in that region, and in The New York Times. If you talk to reporters who work in the region, it’s very, very hard and complicated. And there are local laws that you have to be careful about.
We were the only ones to write about a very interesting story, the way in which the Emirates, I believe, were preventing photojournalists from distributing images. That’s just the law. If your photographer goes and takes a picture of a drone that hit a building, they will arrest them. Every news organization that operates in that region, that operates in China, you just have to be really, really careful and thoughtful about it, but you can’t let it compromise the reporting.
Do you feel like it compromises the reporting here in the United States?
No. I think that global news organizations actually — and if you think about The New York Times, which has reporters in Tehran — have thought really hard about this. There are stories that you have your correspondent in Washington write that you wouldn’t have somebody on the ground in Tehran write. And obviously, we think a lot about the safety of our reporters, but it’s a complicated question.
I asked that question because I see what the Trump administration does to journalists here.
It’s funny, because I think that we obviously are in this, as you said, free speech crisis here in all sorts of ways. I don’t think it’s like a monarchy that doesn’t have the First Amendment. I think we’re a long way from that.
To me, the closer parallel to the Gulf is personalist rule. People talk a lot about corruption, but when you think about these relationships, often it’s a totally different style of doing business where you’re helping your friends and family. But it’s like a totally different modality that obviously in the American tradition is incredibly corrupt. In other parts of the world, that’s just the nature of business. I think that’s how parts of the Trump administration operate.
The Trump family in particular sees that as a model. That was the comparison I was making. You can see them enriching themselves, particularly in that part of the world.
I do think that elements of that style of doing business are more like other parts of the world. Obviously a lot of the speech stuff here is terrible, but it’s really not like… I mean, just as somebody who operates there, it’s not like being in a country without the First Amendment.
Fair enough. Lastly, I just want to talk about AI in your newsroom for one second. We’ve talked a lot about AI in the industry. You make a lot of stuff. The pull, especially when you go make a bunch of video, is to fire ever more content into these algorithms. We haven’t really talked about it. Maybe the only journalistic ethics crisis I’ve never brought to you is, how should we use AI?
Because I know that you’re such a purist. It’s funny, I go back and forth on how high impact it will be, but right now I’m like all the way forth on this. A colleague of mine built this great internal tool that is too boring to explain, but it’s going to totally change all of our lives internally. And I’m now a huge believer in the SaaSpocalypse. It’s all going away.
You cancel your Trello contract and you’re done.
Some of this internal tooling is amazing. We also produced this report out of Semafor World Economy where it was a five-day event with three simultaneous stages and 300 interviews.
On Saturday morning, I texted the team, “Hey, I know you’re all tired, but could everybody write a little like ‘what I learned at Semafor World Economy’?” And everyone said, “Ugh.” And then Reed Albergotti, our great tech editor, said, “Give me a couple of hours.” He dropped all the transcripts into Codex or Cowork and then produced something that said, “Here are the most commonly made statements. Here are some disagreements.”
We then spent a week hammering through that and actually wound up creating a lot more work for humans. But the notion of, “What’s the takeaway from these 300 conversations?” That’s a job for AI basically. It’s a very hard thing, because no one was in all of them. They were simultaneous.
That was a great product that we then released and will continue to build on. I’m actually very bullish about AI, but fundamentally the best parts of reporting are gathering new information that isn’t on the internet and then communicating it with people. Everything in between is production and is very vulnerable to AI. Those things I think are pretty defensible.
It’s a good argument. I’m going to come around to it, I promise. I’m going to come around to it. This very much was a conversation exactly like the conversation we have over beers all the time.
Okay. I have an AI question for you.
There’s a tool that allows you, on a podcast — if you screwed something up, if you’ve mispronounced somebody’s name — to drop it in with your own voice so you don’t have to go back into the studio and rerecord that sentence. Is that okay or not? This is an argument we’re having internally.
It depends on exactly how misleading you think you’re going to be.
No, just like you mispronounced my name in the intro, and your producer said, “Hey, can you come back into the studio?” It’s Saturday morning.
So if I mispronounced your name to you on air?
No, in your intro.
No, because then that’s just an edit. I would just pick it up.
No, I know, but you have to go into the studio and rerecord that. But you’re on a boat doing whatever it is you do. And your producer can just take your voice and redo it.
That’s fine. I honestly think that’s fine.
I think that’s fine too. Okay, good.
The deception comes if I mispronounce your name to you here, and then you leave, and then I make it better. If I’ve done something misleading. If I’m just picking up audio that you would have never heard and we’re just going to do an edit, we’re editing that anyway.
Okay, good. I feel the same way.
To me, the line always comes down to who is being deceived. And if you’re literally going to deceive the guest and you’re going to create a moment that never happened, probably you’re way over the line.
Although honestly, that’s a standard practice in television. They’ll recut the questions.
I’ve heard this. Although, now they’re all getting in trouble and I have to publish the full transcript, or the Trump administration sues them.
Ben, this has been great. Like I said, this is very much like many of the conversations we’ve had in private. I hope the audience can feel it. Thank you so much.
I really enjoyed it. I love the show, and thank you for having me on.
Questions or comments? Hit us up at decoder@theverge.com. We really do read every email!
Object permanence: London Copyfighters x Speaker's Corner; TSA v lipstick; Long Beach v photographers; China x David Cameron's internet censorship; McMansion Hell; Copyrighting an MTG deck; "Privacy preserving age verification" delenda est.
Upcoming appearances: Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend.
If your theory is that markets deliver prosperity by spurring businesses to provide the superior products and services at lower prices needed to attract and retain workers and customers, then competition is a must-have. Without competitors, companies are "too big to care":
Meanwhile, if you think that the pressure of greed will always drive companies to cheat, and want companies held in check by democratically accountable lawmakers and enforcers, then you also want competition, because otherwise, disorganized sectors of hundreds of small businesses collapse into oligarchic cartels. Members of these cartels cease to compete directly with one another and instead collude to rip off workers and customers, leaving them aslosh in ready cash they can mobilize to capture regulators, securing an enshittogenic policy environment that reflects the easily arrived-at consensus that's only possible when you boil a sector down to a small handful of firms, each of them "too big to jail":
In other words: if your ideal is a world of high-quality products and services, produced by workers laboring under fair conditions, delivered to consumers at a fair price, then you want competition. Competition scares some people into running their businesses ethically; and competition ensures than an unethical operator can be held to account by government agencies charged with protecting workers and consumers.
Once you understand the role of competition as a counter-oligarchic check on corporate power, the rise of Big Tech and its authoritarian turn becomes much easier to understand.
Tech is uniquely hospitable to competition thanks to the intrinsic properties of digital computers. Formally, computers are "Turing-complete, universal von Neumann machines," which is to say that every computer can run every valid program. This means that any enshittificatory gambit assayed by a tech company – say, locking generic ink out of your printer; or blocking third party app stores for your phone or console; or sticking a dozen extra ads before every Youtube video – is technically doomed.
Every time a tech boss introduces a 10' pile of shit to a digital product or service you rely upon, they induce rival technologists to create 11' ladders made of code that they can costlessly, instantaneously distribute to every one of the enshittifier's customers and suppliers:
This explains the dynamism of early tech, which saw companies rising quickly to conquer their markets, only to yield to the temptation to extract more from customers and/or suppliers while underinvesting in improvements to their products and services. When this happened, new digital companies sprang into being, reverse-engineering the incumbents' products and launching "complementary goods" – plug-ins and mods – that fixed the defects in dominant products, usurping the market leader's place in the workflows and pocketbooks of its customers and suppliers:
For many years, this "adversarial interoperability" worked its magic on the burgeoning tech sector, creating a state of constant ferment where people who wanted to improve and then supplant the state-of-the-art were able to cheaply enter and capture the market, only to be taken down by the next generation of disenshittifiers when they, too, inevitably yielded to the temptation to replace innovation with extraction. Every pirate wants to be an admiral – but every admiral must then confront the pirates who rush in to fill the vacuum they create when they switch sides.
But that system of beneficial disruption was itself disrupted – not by technology, but by policy. In 1998, Bill Clinton signed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Section 1201 of the DMCA makes it a felony to practice adversarial interoperability, establishing penalties of $500k and five years in prison for people who reverse engineer and modify products:
DMCA 1201 created a one-way ratchet that progressively narrowed the possibilities for tech competition. As more and more US companies re-engineered their products so that modifying them would give rise to DMCA 1201 liability, American startups gave up on disrupting Big Tech, re-orienting towards "acqui-hires," when a startup's highest purpose is to be absorbed by a giant, sclerotic incumbent that mothballs its products and assigns its engineers to work on incremental maintenance (or worse, enshittification) for its dominant offerings.
Big Tech's pirates turned admirals, free to "disrupt" the weak and poor, while enjoying the legal entitlement to destroy anyone who dared to disrupt them. They embodied Frank Wilhoit's definition of conservativism: a class that the law that "protects but does not bind" alongside a class that the law "binds but does not protect":
It was fine for them to "move fast and break (our) things," but forbidden for us to "move fast and break kings." Disruption for thee, never for me.
Nor was this a merely American sickness. Having neutered domestic competitors that might threaten its tech incumbents, the US government set out to prevent other countries from challenging its world-girdling tech empires. For the past 25 years, the US Trade Representative has prioritized getting anticircumvention laws on the books of all of America's trading partners as a condition of free trade with the US, with the result that today, virtually every country in the world has a law that makes it illegal to disrupt American tech giants:
Anti-circumvention law is so obviously, manifestly an invitation to enshittify that when governments enacted these laws, they felt the need to include some kind of "safety valve" they could point to when critics raised anti-circumvention's potential for abuse. The world's would-be enshittifiers figured out a devious method to insert clauses into anti-circumvention that looked like anti-abuse measures, but which were, in practice, useless ornaments.
Many anti-circumvention laws – including DMCA 1201 – have a process for creating "exemptions" to the ban on reverse-engineering and modifying a device. The way these exemptions processes are written, they seem to say that if a company uses anti-circumvention law to block legitimate activity – say, if John Deere uses the law to stop you from fixing your own tractor – then you can go to some kind of governing body (in the US, it's the Copyright Office) and petition for an exemption to anti-circumvention. If that exemption is approved, then making that modification becomes legal.
Before I carry on, let me say here that even if that's how the system worked, it would still be grossly offensive. If you buy a device – a car, a tractor, a printer, a console, a phone – it is your property and you should not have to hire a lawyer to ask a government agency to create a legal exemption that lets you do otherwise legal things with it. You should not need to petition the government for the right to buy generic ink, use a third-party app store or take your car to an independent mechanic.
But this isn't how the system works. It's a scam. Anti-circumvention exemptions are a cheap trick. They only sound useful. A reasonable person who hears that the US Copyright Office has made it legal to use a third-party app store with your iPhone would assume that this means that if someone launches their own app store, they can give you the tools needed to unlock your iPhone and activate their store.
That's not how the DMCA exemptions process works. Under the statute, the US Copyright Office is only empowered to create "use exemptions," which allow you, the owner of the iPhone, to make use of a tool that unlocks your phone and installs the third-party app store. The Copyright Office does not have the power to create a tools exemption that would allow someone to make that unlocking tool and sell or give it to you. Making that tool remains a felony with a five-year prison sentence attached to it.
What this means is that if you want to use your own property in a way that was legal before DMCA 1201, that has been made legal again because you hired a lawyer who successfully petitioned the US Copyright Office to grant an exemption, you can only do so if you, personally reverse engineer your device to effect the permitted modifications to it.
So: if the US Copyright Office legalizes alternative iPhone app stores, the only way to exercise this exemption is for every iPhone owner in the country to get a computer science degree, secure the use of a clean-room, decap the "secure enclave" on a spare iPhone's CPU, extract its cryptographic keys, and integrate them in a new version of iOS that they personally write and install on their phone. No iPhone owner is allowed to discuss how to do this with any other iPhone owner engaged in the same project, on penalty of a five year prison sentence.
Obviously, this is ridiculous, and iPhones are just the tip of the iceberg. It's also true if you want to enable independent repair of powered wheelchairs, whose manufacture is controlled by a duopoly of private-equity backed companies that have all but abandoned spending on repair, leaving wheelchair users stuck in bed for months while they await service:
This absurd situation is the same if you're blind and want to make use of an exemption that lets you reverse-engineer ebook formats so that you can run your ebooks through a Braille printer, screen reader or other assistive device. Under the exemptions rules for the world's anti-circumvention laws, every blind person is expected to personally reverse engineer the access control systems built into Adobe and Amazon's ebook formats, write an exploit that lets them extract the text of these restricted ebooks and then repackage that text in a new, open format:
This "use exemption"/"tools exemption" split is a near-perfect way of tricking people into thinking that these laws are more reasonable than they appear. When Canada passed its landmark right-to-repair and interoperability laws in 2024, many celebrated – missing the fact that under Canada's anti-circumvention law (Bill C-11, the Copyright Modernization Act of 2012), it remains illegal to undertake the reverse-engineering needed to exercise the rights these new laws (seemed to) enshrine:
For a quarter-century, I've made it my life's work to explain how bad and dangerous this system is, and, thankfully, I've started to make a little headway over the past few years. My core audience contains a lot of hackers who are rightly affronted at the existence of a body of law that criminalizes the kinds of exploration and modification that they've devoted their lives to.
Being hackers, they ponder this situation and start to think about how they can hack the law to escape it. Just lately, I've heard from a lot of people who think they can solve this problem by asking a chatbot to reverse-engineer and modify the firmware on their tractors, wheelchairs, ebooks, iPhones, what-have-you. You can't put a chatbot in prison for violating anti-circumvention law, right?
I regret to inform you that if you did this in a way that rose to the attention of a big corporate bully, they wouldn't blame your chatbot for writing the exploit: they'd blame you for prompting the chatbot to create this new tool.
Just yesterday, I heard from a reader who had a clever idea: what if you gave your unmodified iPhone to a hacker who knew how to install a third-party app store on it, and they modified that phone, and then sold it back to you for $10? The hacker would be making a use exemption, not a tools exemption.
This, too, will not produce the outcome we're seeking. Even if Apple can't convince a judge that selling you a modified iPhone is "trafficking" in a circumvention device (a very big "if"), this wheeze misses the wider point about how adversarial interoperability was able to disenshittify tech for the years when tech companies weren't just dishing out disruption, but also being disrupted themselves.
The interoperability-driven dynamism that disciplined or displaced tech companies that abused their market power was a mass phenomenon. The printer cartel doesn't need to be able to charge everyone $10,000/gallon for ink. If a few people at the margins figure out how to jailbreak their printers, that doesn't stop the grift. Even better if the people who do use generic ink have to depend on anonymous, shadowy businesses that don't have customer service departments you can call when your printer gets an update that breaks ink compatibility, or an address you can send a process-server to if you're stuck with thousands of dollars' worth of useless ink cartridges after one of those updates.
To make generic ink a viable check against the abuses of HP and its colored water mafia, you need a counter-industry. You need salespeople making calls on large enterprises who buy their ink by the ocean, offering them a better deal and a guarantee of uninterrupted service. To make good on that guarantee, you need an army of hackers who reverse-engineer every software update HP pushes out in a matter of hours, and you need another army of customer service reps who help people who can't figure out how to install that update.
As economists would say, you need "capital formation." You need the ability to raise or borrow money, a mailing address, an ad campaign, booths at conferences and free samples in the mail. You need to be able to show potential customers that you are insured in the event that you brick their devices, so switching to your product doesn't endanger their capital investments. You need to have a business whose doors can be beaten down by regulators in the event that you use your after-market mods as a tool to steal data or money from your customers.
To understand how this worked, cast your mind back to the Office Suite Wars of the early 2000s. Back then, Microsoft ruled the desktop world, controlling more that 95% of the PC OSes, a share so large and so ruthlessly acquired and maintained that they were convicted of violating anti-trust laws.
Microsoft used illegal tying and predatory pricing to push every one of those PC owners into using Microsoft Office, which meant that even if you used a Mac, 19 times out of 20, the people you needed to collaborate with on memos, spreadsheets and slide-decks were using MS Office.
Microsoft made a version of Office for the Mac, but it was the single most curséd piece of packaged software ever offered to the market. Merely waving the Mac Office floppy around a workplace would cause files to spontaneously go corrupt on random PCs in the vicinity.
For Mac users, this meant that 95% of the time, they could not reliably collaborate with other computer users. For people like me – then a freelance CIO-for-hire who was helping small businesses connect their computers to each other and the internet – it meant that increasingly, we made CEOs swap their Powerbooks for Thinkpads and designers swap their PowerPCs for Dells with beefy graphics cards, moving the whole business to PC/Windows.
Apple solved this problem by reverse-engineering MS Office and producing the iWork Suite: Pages, Numbers and Keynote, which could perfectly read and write Microsoft's Word, Excel and Powerpoint files. That adversarial interoperability saved the company, but the gambit wasn't one-and-done.
Microsoft spent the next several years maliciously introducing changes to the Office file formats that broke compatibility with iWork, which Apple countered by paying an army of coders to swiftly analyze these new formats and update iWork to maintain compatibility with them:
I think Apple was fated to win this expensive cat-and-mouse game, if only they could hang in there long enough. For every Mac in the field, Microsoft was supporting 19 PCs, and these computers ran a fragmented mosaic of Windows and Office versions. Every time Microsoft broke compatibility with Office to mess up one Mac user, they also messed up 19 PC users, all of whom had to be patched and updated to maintain compatibility. This gave Apple a powerful advantage that mounted with every turn of the game, so all they had to do was hang in there until the asymmetrical costs overwhelmed Microsoft.
Which is what happened. Eventually, Microsoft sued for peace and agreed to standardize the office file-formats at the International Standards Organization, ushering in an era of unprecedented compatibility. This ISO standardization is why you can now paste styled text from the Word application into a browser-based Google Doc or an application-based LibreOffice window. It's also a game Microsoft continues to cheat at, with a string of dirty tricks meant to leverage its dominance to shut out competitors altogether:
The rise (and impending fall) of a truly open format that lets every computer user collaborate on any document is an object lesson in the combined role that adversarial interoperability and capital formation play in disenshittifying technology. For Microsoft, a "competitor" isn't one hacker who can open a Word file in a program of their own devising, nor is a "competitor" the small number of users that single competitor can support.
Microsoft is an incorrigible, bullying cheat with a sick and rotten corporate culture: to stop the kind of ruthless princeling who rises to a position of power in a company like Microsoft from turning predatory requires severe, obvious penalties that follow directly from any extractive gambit.
To muster that kind of competition requires the kind of capital formation you only get from true legalization, not the anemic sham offered by anti-circumvention's "exemptions." Even where the competition is spread out across many shifting small businesses and individuals, the system of competition requires a stable backstop that produces the tools these small firms rely on.
In 2014, Ofcom, the UK's telecoms regulator, affirmed that Britons had the right to unlock their phones, even if their carrier had sold them a phone that was locked to its network. Overnight, every small shop acquired a phone-unlocking side-hustle. One morning as I walked from my flat to the tube, I passed three unlockers: one at a newsagent's, where they would take your phone and return it unlocked within a day; one at my dry-cleaner's, where a guy with a folding card table would unlock your phone while you waited; and another folding table guy right by the tube entrance who'd also work while you waited, and who charged £5 less than the guy at the dry-cleaner's.
None of these people were electrical engineers or software developers or hackers. They just followed recipes that were provided by one of a few well-capitalized firms that sold them a subscription to jailbreaking tools that were kept up to date for every make and model of every phone.
One frequent excuse for the ban on repair tools for cars or wheelchairs or tractors is that these devices are now so computerized that they require specialized knowledge if they are to be safely serviced. Even if that's true, that's exactly what a legal toolchain provides.
The guy who fixed my solar panels wasn't a software engineer, he was an electrician who had the customer-service phone number for the company that made my solar inverter. If that company had a viable competitor who could offer their own firmware for my solar installation and was hungry for my business, maybe that technician would have gotten through in three minutes rather than three hours.
And if that alternative firmware was defective, then I could join a class action suit and get made whole – something that is nearly impossible to imagine happening with solar OEMs, who face so little competition that they all put binding arbitration clauses in their terms of service that take away your right to sue, no matter whether they cheat you or burn your house down:
That's the amazing thing about digital tools. Through software, experts are able to package up their expertise into self-executing code, which can costlessly, instantaneously be distributed to everyone in the world who needs it. But paying those experts isn't cheap, and neither is supporting their tools.
I love William Gibson's maxim that "the street finds its own use for things," but if you can't neutralize a large, dangerous monopolist with individual tinkering – the best you can hope for is some measure of individual relief..
It's true that in these adversarial interoperability fights, the upstarts enjoy a tremendous advantage, but that advantage isn't infinite. For the guerrillas to outlast the empire, they have to be able to wage a long, persistent fight.
To marshal the resources needed to sustain that fight and to maintain the logistics demanded by its supply lines requires the good guys to be allowed to fight in the open, without the looming threat of criminal prosecution, a threat that forecloses on capitalization and mass adoption.
Enshittification isn't downstream of cruelty, it's downstream of greed. The point of enshittification is to exploit the control a firm can exercise over the customers, suppliers and workers it holds captive in order to extract more from them. The titanic profits this exploitation delivers are a powerful lure for would-be disenshittifiers and investors who would fund their liberatory revolution.
Don't get me wrong, I love my hackers and I sit in awe of the awesome leverage of writing code that can be costlessly, instantaneously distributed to everyone who needs it. But so long as governments and the law are on the side of extraction and enshittification, the disenshittificatory insurgency will be starved of resources, condemned to remain marginal and inadequate.
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
“Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 570 (5421 total).
"The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
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AI is shifting the culture, from tech CEO manifestos to 1 am job interviews. We unpack some of the latest, along with the top findings from Black Hat and Defcon, this week on Uncanny Valley.
Today on Decoder, I’m talking with Hayden Field, The Verge’s senior AI reporter, about a question that’s been rocketing around the tech industry for the past week: Is Google losing the AI race?
That’s because last week Google announced a bombshell reorganization of its AI division, Google DeepMind. Jeff Dean, the company’s chief scientist, is leaving to form his own startup and DeepMind cofounder and CEO Demis Hassabis is stepping aside to focus on longer-term research.
You can read these moves, and Google’s reaction, in a lot of different ways. So I really wanted to sit down with Hayden to dig into some of the smartest analysis we’ve seen this past week, and what we think is really going on here.
Also: At its core, this is an org chart story — and what is Decoder about if not org charts?
Okay: Verge senior AI reporter Hayden Field on what’s happening at Google DeepMind and the future of AI research. Here we go.
This interview had been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Hayden Field, you’re The Verge‘s senior AI reporter. Welcome back to Decoder.
Thanks. It’s great to be here.
It’s always chaos when you’re here, Hayden.
It really is. There’s no week off. Every week something crazy is happening.
This time is a little bit different. The news happened last week. Google reorganized its AI division, Google DeepMind. Demis Hassabis, who was the head of DeepMind, has ascended into Google heaven where he’s now the chairman of DeepMind. He’s going to focus on bigger research. Jeff Dean, who had started Google Brain, left with a bunch of other people from Google to start a new lab that will run on Google Cloud.
This is a big reshuffle of Google’s AI efforts. It comes as Google is not competitive on the frontier anymore. There’s a lot of reactions to this news. I wanted to just go through some of that reaction with you — you’ve done a lot of reporting on what’s going on with Google, what’s going on in the industry — and try to put this all into context for people.
So let’s just start at the start. Google is by and large the best-positioned company to win AI. If you just look at what it is, how it makes money, its distribution power to put AI in front of people, putting AI in Search, its resources, it feels like it should have always been the winner.
As you reported from the Elon Musk-Sam Altman trial, everyone was afraid of Demis Hassabis the whole time. You look at all of these ingredients and you think, “Google should be the runaway winner.” Instead, I would say over the last week, a lot of people have said, “Google’s going to lose,” which I find fascinating.
Is that your diagnosis of what’s going on with Google? Is this just a catastrophe for its bleeding-edge efforts?
It’s really bad, but I do think people are forgetting how powerful Google is and how much they own. All of the integration they can do, all of the tools, all of the data they have on us — they have a huge safety net, is what I’m saying. A huge cushion.
Even if they make huge mistakes and are falling behind, I still think you can’t count them out completely because they have so much power. However, it’s crazy to me that they have that much power and all that going for the company, and they’re still not in the lead, let alone being behind as of right now. That’s what I think is crazy.
And Sundar and Demis both made that point in their statements last week. Sundar wrote that the company’s committed to being at the frontier and they’re focused on the areas they need to improve, which is CEO-speak for, “We know we need to get our shit together.” And then Demis wrote that the company’s “entering a next chapter” and that “it has the ingredients to lead from here, and I firmly believe we will,” AKA, “we aren’t yet, but we have the ingredients to do it sometime in the future.” Both of them acknowledging that is pretty crazy.
It’s not looking good for them, but it reminds me of someone with a trust fund. They have a fallback. Don’t count them out yet.
That trust fund is Google Search. They have a product that billions of people use and that they’re putting AI into. As you and I have discussed many, many times, that is a consumer product. Consumer AI has not yet reached a point of making a bunch of money for a bunch of people, but everyone sees that as the prize. All of the action is in enterprise AI right now, and you can see Anthropic is out to a big lead because of their focus on enterprise AI and in particular coding.
One of the things I want to come back to is whether Google made the wrong bet on multimodality and world models, which Demis is really focused on, instead of these core enterprise use cases and whether they even want to be at the frontier. They’re saying they want to be, but maybe they don’t. Maybe they just want to sell cloud services to Anthropic, which is a business that is growing for Google.
But hold that thought. I want to come back to that. Just put that in your brain. This is part of the framework that I’m thinking about. You just said Sundar said, “It’s the next chapter. We’re committed to it.” They’re making changes.
But Hayden, a few months ago I was sitting with Sundar Pichai and I asked him, “Hey, you just restructured this entire company. You got rid of all of your senior executives. You have all new ones. You made DeepMind.” He said, “Yeah, that was hard.” Here’s a clip:
Sundar Pichai: It was tough to convey it outside, but I pivoted the company to be AI-first. We had all the ingredients, so in some ways I felt like the Overton window had changed. People were adopting these technologies faster than we had expected. To me it was a way to go and actually express ourselves through our products, but I realized we had to organize ourselves for it. And going back to my earlier point, I realized we need a core model and a core infrastructure team to power everything we are doing across Google. A lot of my initial energy was to go set that up.
To get one AI team, we had world-class research teams in Brain and DeepMind and brought those together as Google DeepMind, which was harder than it sounds because it’s like saying, “Go put Stanford and MIT together and create a department out of it or a university out of it.” So I think we’re doing that well.
That’s Sundar saying, “My company wasn’t organized for the AI moment. We were slow to react to ChatGPT. I made this huge change to build a central infrastructure team.” It’s three months later, four months later, and the head of Google Brain is leaving. The head of Google DeepMind is becoming the chief scientist.
Now, Google DeepMind doesn’t have a CEO anymore. It has an SVP. What do you read into that? Is that yet another reset or is it just more of the same?
It’s another reset, but it’s hard because I really do think it’s both. It’s a result of the fact that Demis has never been interested in the productization stuff. He’s, like you mentioned, really into world models, research, curing disease, and drug discovery. And Jeff Dean is similar. So I’m not surprised.
If you’re being optimistic, you could view this as just the ripple effects of the conversation you had with Sundar, but I also don’t think this bodes very well for the company because, as we’re seeing with OpenAI literally right now, whenever there are a bunch of executive shakeups, people get nervous. People below them leave. People don’t work as hard because they’re thinking too much about things. Plus, a lot of the people that are working on AI at Google are there because of Jeff Dean or Demis. So what’s going to happen now?
They’re thinking about this solely on the page, logistical. “Okay, who is best positioned to speed up our productization?” Maybe that’s the best decision. But when you take into account all the minds that are leaving and all the minds that will leave in the next couple of months, it’s going to be rough.
There’s a lot of controversy, or I guess curiosity, around Gemini 4, which is not yet out. They announced it at Google I/O. They put all their emphasis on the 3.5 class models. The 3.5 class models are not at the top of the leaderboards. They’ve actually fallen quite far behind.
Does this strike you as the actions of a bunch of executives who think Gemini 4 is going to vault them back into the lead? Or do you think people are getting out because Google isn’t as committed or focused on being on the frontier?
As SemiAnalysis wrote in its blog, “These are not the actions of people excited about Gemini 4 Pro.” So definitely not. Google is pretty committed to being a frontier lab. It’s more, is it going to reach its goal? Though my answer to that a few months ago would’ve been that it was a frontier lab, right now it’s more of a wait-and-see. It is right now, but is it going to fall out of favor?
SemiAnalysis put it more heavily. They said in their release, “We believe DeepMind is no longer a frontier lab.” To me, it’s still got that designation, but in a few months that might be very different and I didn’t anticipate that changing so quickly. There’s a chance it could go the way of Meta where they suddenly get pretty behind and they keep promising things and then taking a while to deliver. Same with Apple, actually. We’ll see.
I’m glad you brought up SemiAnalysis. It’s an investment research firm. They do great work across AI and chips and thinking about how the math of all this should work out. That post really struck me as well.
I just want to reuse some other parts of it. There’s a lot of this in which The Verge has covered Google for a long time and there are echoes of this throughout our coverage of Google, and there are some parts of this which feel new to me — they’re new problems for Google.
So I’ll just read you the longer version of the quote you just said. As Hayden said, they wrote, “For all intents and purposes, we believe DeepMind is no longer a frontier lab. Google will continue meandering on and releasing models, but their odds of reaching the state of the art again have dropped to zero.”
This strikes me as an incredible claim. We see the model race twist and turn all the time. And to say, “Google will never once again hit the state of the art” feels like an enormous claim. That’s the part that feels new to me. Week to week in AI, anything could happen. Do you think there’s evidence for that?
That’s really putting the cart before the horse. It’s been a few months since we ourselves wrote about Gemini 3’s hype. It was winning the model race for a few weeks until something else came along. I definitely don’t think the odds have dropped to zero for them reaching state of the art again. In a way, they’re cutting out some of their research focus and just going all in on products. If they’re really going all in on that and they find a way to put all their efforts behind that, they will reach state of the art again.
However, what this will be is them constantly catching up right after another frontier lab. And then the other frontier labs that invest in research more and long-term stuff are going to be pulling ahead. It’s kind of the same thing as if you’re a writer and someone keeps copying you, they’re always going to be right behind you. They’re not going to be thinking of the next thing like you are.
That’s what I foresee ending up happening here. If you’re not really investing quite as much in the longer-term research and all these niche areas that, for example, Jeff Dean’s startup is going to be looking at, I feel like they could reach state of the art again. But it’s not going to be them coming in the lead over and over again.
That’s the part that felt new to me. I don’t really know how to evaluate that claim, especially as Google’s AI division changes leadership. I can’t read Sundar’s mind. I’ve tried many times. It’s very difficult to see what’s going on in his head. I don’t know if he wants to win that race or if he thinks Gemini is good enough now to make a bunch of money inside of Google’s products. I really don’t know how to evaluate, “They’ll never be at the state of the art again.”
The part I do know how to evaluate is the second part of the SemiAnalysis claim here, which anybody who has paid attention to Google will immediately understand and immediately agree with this, I think.
They go on to say, “Perhaps there’s some world in which Google reaches the state of the art again, but we think the odds are basically zero… The issue with Google was not Jeff Deam or Noam Shazeer,” who we should talk about, “but rather their extremely bureaucratic, painfully slow, and strategically timid culture.”
That’s Google. I literally sit with Sundar once a year and say, “Tell me about your culture and tell me about this bureaucracy.” There’s something about Sundar saying to me at I/O, “I made DeepMind the center of the company and then everything else is productizing their development,” and then all the people leaving and SemiAnalysis saying they’ll never be at the frontier again because their culture is so bureaucratic, that is uniquely Google to me. It feels very familiar.
I know you’ve talked to people at Google since all these announcements. Is there a sense that Google’s culture needs to change even more to go and compete?
There’s a reason that so many people are flocking to Anthropic right now. Anthropic is not perfect by any means. They have a lot of red flags as well. But I’m seeing a lot of people from OpenAI, from Google, from Meta flock there because, as we’ve reported a bunch, people in this space are a little bit post-money. A lot of times they don’t care just about the salary or what they’re making. They care about working for a place that aligns with their values that they believe in. Google has really rubbed a lot of people the wrong way when it comes to that.
I could see a lot of people fleeing in the next few months because Jeff Dean seemed to be, according to my sources that I spoke with there, the person keeping a lot of people at Google. I could see a big exodus happening in the next few months.
This is one of the bigger questions. Who was the keeper of the morals and values of this team inside of a Google that seems to be more willing to play ball with the Trump administration? With the Department of War, and with the uses of AI that some people are very, very skeptical or very, very skittish about?
There’s been a lot of reporting about the fact that when Google acquired DeepMind and Demis, they signed a pledge to never use DeepMind technology for military purposes. That has been watered down. In fact, Jeff Dean recently said, “We should not use AI for these purposes.” There are people inside of Google who’ve sent a letter. There seems to be a lot of big-name talents who are saying, “We don’t want to commercialize this stuff in the way it’s being commercialized right away.”
The problem is that it’s the governments and the militaries who are spending all the money right now, and Google is good at making money. It wants to fund AI development with actual revenue instead of raising endless amounts of debt like the startup frontier labs are doing. Is that conflict navigable for Sundar and whoever’s running AI now, or is it just the reality of being a huge corporation that funds its efforts with revenue?
It’s unfortunately not surprising to me, for a huge corporation in the US where you have to maximize shareholder value. They’re subsidizing a lot of their AI efforts right now, it seems like, to me. For example, the other day I vibe coded a new website for myself and Gemini was the only tool that I could use the free version of for nine hours. I was trying to do it as an everyman, so I wasn’t signing into any of them. I just said, “Which one will let me go with the free version and do a ton of stuff?” It was only Gemini.
They’re really trying to get people in their corner here and trying to change developers’ loyalty, change engineers’ loyalty over to them. So they need money. And to be fair, I do think they could do this a lot differently if they wanted. They’re one of the largest corporations in the world and they’re making a lot of money in other areas. They don’t have to be doing this, but that doesn’t mean they won’t. And I think they will continue.
But I also think, like I mentioned, that’s going to lead to a lot of brain drain. One of the current Google employees I spoke with said that a lot of people around him felt like losing Jeff Dean was a big blow for morality at Google, and that it also continues a brain drain they’ve been seeing and that mediocrity is the likely result. So like what you were saying, they may be always catching up from now on and never forging a path ahead like they had been six months ago.
I think this brings me back to that framework I mentioned at the very beginning that I wanted to put a pin in. Does Google want to win at the frontier or can they just sell Google Cloud at enormous high rates to Anthropic and OpenAI while maintaining usable models for its consumer products at high rates?
There’s a world in which Gemini is there for you to search your Gmail and provide AI overviews and be cheap enough to run to let consumers vibe code websites for nine hours at a time. But the real money is in selling TPUs in Google Cloud to Anthropic and Anthropic is going to go collect the government money and Google is just there as a vendor. They’re just selling to Anthropic and OpenAI and whoever else needs data center capacity.
We can see Google Cloud as a business that is exploding. They don’t seem to mind that they’re selling their own capacity to Anthropic instead of Google’s own products, which is one of the challenges of running a company that has frenemies as customers.
How do you see that playing out? Do you see Google ever saying, “Look, we have to win at the frontier. We have to win at AGI. We have to make sure recursive self-improvement of coding occurs so the next model works,” which is a religious belief inside of OpenAI and Anthropic? Or do you see them saying, “Actually, being one or two steps behind the frontier is fine because that’ll make our products work well enough and we’ll just sell capacity to the people chasing the AGI dream”?
The way they are right now, they’re going to keep chasing it because their investors want that. It makes their stock go up to say, “Hey, we’re chasing this. We’re at the frontier. We’re the only large corporation that’s almost or nearly or equally caught up with OpenAI and Anthropic.” They don’t need to go the way of Amazon and, in my opinion, Meta right now.
In a year or two, if they continue the brain drain and they keep falling behind, then yeah, maybe they’re going to do what you said in situation two. But for now, there’s no reason for them not to keep chasing, especially because that’s a great thing to talk about on an earnings call and it makes all your investors happy.
The AGI piece is really interesting to me, especially in the context of Google. Demis Hassabis was the final speaker at Google I/O. After an hour and a half of very practical demonstrations of AI inside of Google products, Demis came out and he talked about protein folding and drug discovery, which are the things that he really cares about.
And then he ended the entire presentation by saying very confidently, “We are at the foothills of the singularity.” Google doesn’t say, “AGI.” It says, “the foothills of the singularity,” which is an enormous claim.
I thought, “Boy, that’s an incredible way to end Google I/O.” And then later I sat down with Sundar and I said, “Do you agree we’re at the foothills of singularity? What does this mean to you?” Here’s what Sundar said to me.
Sundar Pichai: Demis and I have had long, deep conversations on this topic.
Nilay Patel: I figured.
In this context, for him, the advent of AGI is what he thinks of as the singularity and I think—
Do you have a definition of AGI? Have you debated? Do you have an agreement?
We debated a lot. Both Demis and I are very close to how we think about AGI … There is a harder definition of AGI, which is that it has to more comprehensively do the wide range of tasks, including cognitive tasks, in a way that’s comparable. We’ll at some point actually put it out as a company, and we are working on that. But that’s what he’s talking about in this context.
I’ve been thinking about that answer since it happened. Do you know what Sundar’s definition of AGI or the singularity is based on that?
It’s the exact same as everyone else’s. In the OpenAI lawsuit, in the materials, we saw the definition of AGI come out of that. It was published and it sounds like he’s talking about the exact same thing.
In Microsoft and OpenAI’s 2019 contract that was made public as part of the Musk v. Altman trial, it’s a 36-page agreement, but luckily, finally, we’re finding out their definition of AGI, which is, “A highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work.” It seems similar to what Sundar is saying in terms of cognitive tasks. It’s just a highly autonomous system that can do a ton of economically valuable knowledge work at the same level or surpass the level of humans.
That’s the definition I’ve been working with for the past six years on the beat, and it seems like that tracks with what he’s saying.
He said to me that Google would put out a definition of the singularity or AGI and they’re working on it. As far as I know, they have not yet released this definition. I don’t know if it tracks the OpenAI one. I do know that’s basically what the industry says, right? That it’ll be better than you and me at economically viable tasks. They’ve stopped saying that.
Equal or better.
Either way, we’re losing our jobs, right? They’ve stopped talking about it because that means we’re all losing our jobs. So that’s just faded into the background.
I bring this up because Demis is so focused on science, and in particular health outcomes, and in this announcement about him moving on to be chief scientist, Sundar repeated the phrase, “We’re at the foothills of the singularity.” It feels like Demis wanted to chase AGI, world models, protein folding, and all of the next things.
The thing that makes AI economically viable today is writing software code or automating business processes inside of Fortune 500 companies or agentic shopping or whatever boring thing Google needs to do to make money, and those things are getting ever farther apart. If you want to chase the foothills of the singularity in AGI, maybe that has nothing to do with how Google needs AI to make money today.
That’s a big part of the Google culture clash, right? That’s, “We’re going to chase money and shareholder value instead of holding fast to our ideals.” That’s a big part of the AI industry’s general chaos. How is OpenAI going to make a dollar? Who knows? It’s a code red. We’re right back at the beginning.
How do you see it? Is it that Demis wanted another Nobel Prize, so he led them astray and now he’s getting kicked upstairs and they’re going to focus on money? Or is there real validity to, “We’re going to let him chase the singularity while we work on Gmail Search”?
There’s a big difference between, “We’re going to let him chase the singularity,” and, “We’re going to let him do a lot of research into biology, drug discovery, and the other stuff he’s into,” and that seems to be what he’s going to be doing. It seems like he and Jeff Dean are going to be doing similar things, but in very different places.
It’s a tale as old as time. I’ve been writing about this for so many years, product versus research. The big clashes, the funding, the resources. Companies want products immediately and they don’t want to invest in the long-term research that sometimes leads to those products. They only want the quick, “What are we going to turn this into? What’s the timeline? Let’s speed it up for products and let’s compete with all of our three competitors and not really do these long side projects that may lead to something or may not.”
The tension’s building and building, especially as OpenAI and Anthropic are about to go public. Google has a lot of investors to answer to. This is a building of the tension we’ve been seeing for so many years. And for what it’s worth, I do think the Demis situation was probably mutual.
I’ve heard rumors that maybe he wanted to leave completely, but it would be too dramatic for him and Jeff Dean to leave at the same time. So he said, “Yeah, I’ll go to this other role and then I’ll leave later.” That’s just a rumor. We’re not sure. But either way, it doesn’t seem like he was totally kicked to the curb or kicked upstairs. It’s more probably a mutual parting where he really is not that interested in products and he wants to do the long-term research, and a lot of these guys are like that.
It feels like a real situation where you have to be careful what you wish for, because when Sundar created Google DeepMind, he had to pick a winner, and he picked Demis over Jeff Dean. We were all waiting to see if and when Jeff Dean would leave because he didn’t win, and now they’re both leaving because Demis realized that actually operating inside of Google is a very different job than just doing the research.
One of the questions I have here in general is about DeepMind itself, which is famously headquartered in London and answers to no one. It’s Google’s big, fancy AI research arm with the big fancy CEO. That’s getting pulled down. It’s being led by an SVP who reports to Sundar now. There are some reports that maybe the center of gravity and the authority is going to move back to Mountain View to Sundar himself. How do you see that playing out inside of Google?
I can definitely see the winds might be changing and the Bay Area might be the headquarters again, at least in terms of power. London’s autonomy has been going on for a long time. I’ve visited that office multiple times. It did have a different feeling to it. It felt like there was a lot less urgency in a good way. It was really collaborative. There were a lot of long-term research questions and it was a very different feeling than the tension and the urgency I feel when I visit other AI labs’ offices.
Maybe Sundar got tired of that and said, “You know what? I need the pressure to rise. I need products quickly. The research can only be done if it’s going to lead to something that’s trackable.” I could definitely see the center of gravity moving to the Bay Area.
The reporting from inside of Google that I’m most curious about is how that culture changes without these leaders. As you were saying before, Jeff Dean and Demis Hassabis were moral leaders in addition to technical leaders and research innovators. They kept Google from doing a lot of things. They’re gone now. In some of your own reporting and your story on our site, there are people saying, “Who will we sell out to next?”
Sergey Brin, who’s deeply involved in AI efforts, supports the Trump administration. Sundar obviously stood behind Trump at the inauguration. The questions from the staff about, “What will we sell it next? What values are up for sale next without the culture carriers of a Demis or a Jeff Dean?” seem open.
Are there answers? Who’s taking over DeepMind now and what kind of person do we think they are?
It’s Koray Kavukcuoglu, and these questions are super valid because I don’t think Koray’s going to be speaking up on this stuff. He’s a product guy. He’s focused on speeding up the product. I’m sure he and Sundar have had a bunch of conversations about focusing on the short term.
Over the past few months, early this year, I was chatting with a bunch of AI employees at a ton of different companies, and they all, including employees at Google, felt like the messaging from their companies was, “Shut up and focus on the mission. Keep your head down. Roll stuff out. Don’t worry about what’s going on in the outside world politically.” It seems like that’s going to be even more of a thing now.
One of the sources I was speaking with at Google said, “Speaking out on moral issues like ICE agents and AI surveillance and autonomous lethal weapons, Jeff Dean was one of the last people who was willing to do that.” And it doesn’t seem like Koray’s going to be really eager to take that place. These questions are really valid and I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot more DeepMind people left after all these changes.
Let me ask you the hardest question of all to wrap it up. There’s a lot of noise in the ecosystem right now saying that Google has lost the AI race. But as we said from the beginning, Google has a ton of advantages here.
It’s making money, which most of the other companies aren’t. It’s selling Google Cloud infrastructure to its own best competitors. It has massive distribution advantages in Search, in Gmail, in the fact that Apple appears to have distilled Google’s models for Siri. There’s a lot here where Google just has structural advantages. It’s playing with house money. It’s a trust fund baby, as you’ve said several times here.
Is it possible to lose the AI race from that vantage point? Or is it really just about if Anthropic gets to a point at recursive self-improvement that they can call AGI, everyone else has to lose by default?
It’s not possible for them to fail. It’s possible for them to change up their strategy. Like we were talking about earlier, maybe they become an Apple where they’re running on Google AI and they’re fine with that, but they’re picking a different company. Same with Amazon. They’ve given up a little bit, it seems like. I’m going to get some flack for that. Meta’s still really desperately trying, but they’re behind.
I don’t think Google can fail. It’s more, do they eventually realize it’s not worth their time? Does the brain drain continue? Do they realize, “Look, there’s no amount of money we can offer to get some of the best minds back here. Let’s just cut our losses”? That’s a little ways off. I don’t think that’s going to happen in the next few months or even the next year.
But it’s important for these execs to remember that a lot of the people that are most involved and really pivotal in building this technology and keeping them at the frontier are extremely serious about their morals and what they’re doing. They don’t just do it for the money. It’s going to be tough to resell that dream to some of them if they’re trying to rehire after they lose people. OpenAI is experiencing the same thing. So we’ll see.
It’s worth noting Demis is still there. He’s the chief scientist. Presumably he will still be going to the London office and be charming, and Demis is very charming. You can see all that continuing to happen, but what are we shipping? What are the roadmaps? Who gets the GPU access? That seems like it will change and that will have some downstream effect.
If you had to look for signs, is Google succeeding or failing, is the culture a problem or are they just retrenching to go and be even more aggressive? What kinds of things would you look for right now?
What I typically look for is what they’re really offering every time they have a big release and how pivotal it really is. Are they doing something that their competitors did six months ago? And are they even doing that well? That’s how I think about these things sometimes. There will be a big release from an AI company or a big tech company that’s trying to catch up in the AI race. Sometimes it’s six months behind OpenAI or Anthropic, and sometimes the stuff that they’re really excited about is pretty bad.
That’s what I would be watching from Google. With Gemini 4, what can it really do? Does it have that same effect that Gemini 3 had on the industry, where it’s leading for at least a week or two? Or does it not even have an hour of lead time and it just falls flat and it’s used by the enterprises that they work with and no one’s really excited about it? That’s the type of thing I’d be looking for.
I’d also be looking for the exodus. If a ton of the DeepMind engineers leave, if they’re desperately trying to hire and offering more and more desperate pay packages, that’s another sign. Whenever Demis leaves — and that will eventually happen — that’s a huge sign.
We’ll be looking out for all that. I’m confident that the chaos in the AI industry will continue, and Hayden, you’ll be back on Decoder. Thank you so much for joining me today.
Thanks so much.
Questions or comments? Hit us up at decoder@theverge.com. We really do read every email!
The most notorious press conference Donald Trump ever held was the one in which he told a scientist in attendance to look into the possibility of using household disinfectant inside the human body to kill the Covid-19 virus. He had watched a demonstration of how the product worked on surfaces, you see, and he thought they hadn’t considered the possibility that humans could ingest it and achieve similar effects. That day, April 23, 2020, marked the last of Trump’s daily televised pandemic press briefings, and it may very well have been the last straw for many of those who voted against him just a few months later.
At the beginning of the pandemic, Trump told the public that everyone at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was astonished at how well he understood the science. He mused that he probably could have been a doctor. Despite the utter humiliation of that famous press conference, the president remains undeterred in that fantasy in his second term.
In September, Trump announced that pregnant women should not take Tylenol during pregnancy, claiming without evidence the drug is linked to an increased risk of autism. On Monday he donned his imaginary white coat again to issue an executive order changing the U.S. government’s recommendation for the childhood vaccine schedule — because he is convinced that the vaccines cause autism.
Neither of those assertions is grounded in scientific fact, and both have negative ramifications for women and children if they are followed. The recommendations to break up the combined measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccines into individual doses because today they “look like the size of a bottle of soda poured into a little child’s body,” as Trump stated, are plainly absurd. Any association between these vaccines and autism has been thoroughly debunked, and all the major medical and scientific associations immediately issued statements that they would not follow these recommendations.
Trump is aided in his crusade to personally cure autism by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his loyal health and human services secretary and anti-vaccine crusader, who dutifully stood by his side on Monday and parroted the same nonsense. The new recommendations will likely be followed by millions of MAHA moms who have fallen down the rabbit hole of misinformation and disinformation that Kennedy and Trump have been digging. But the pair are just the latest in the long line of hustlers, fraudsters and canny opportunists who have been working to undermine science in this country for more than a century. In fact, doing so is an all-American tradition.
Two groups have long been especially successful in challenging the public’s confidence in science: Christian fundamentalists, a religious force that grew into a political juggernaut, and Big Business.
Two groups have long been especially successful in challenging the public’s confidence in science: Christian fundamentalists, a religious force that grew into a political juggernaut, and Big Business. While neither has openly colluded with the other, they have both furthered each other’s goals and ended up in a political alliance. One wouldn’t think these two disparate institutions would have much in common. But they share similar tactics: lying to their followers and customers for power and profit. And both have their reasons for rejecting science that interferes with their own interests.
Christianity and science have been in tension ever since the Catholic Church placed Galileo under house arrest for suggesting that the earth wasn’t the center of the universe. But for the most part, the tension was at least somewhat manageable, and both carried on in their own spheres. In the early 20th century, however, a new Christian movement formed that took direct aim at science on the grounds it constituted a threat to the belief in the Bible’s inerrancy, and the modern war began.
In the beginning, this new movement was largely financed by a pair of Los Angeles oil magnates. Milton and Lyman Stewart were religious zealots who were horrified by the encroachment of modernist ideas on society. The Stewarts published a book called “The Fundamentals,” giving the movement its name, and shipped copies all over North America at their own expense, literally spreading the fundamentalist gospel and influencing massive numbers of Americans to reject scientific knowledge wherever it conflicted with literal biblical interpretations.
Fast forward to the 1980s, and Christian fundamentalism had become a powerful political force as evangelical organizations like the Moral Majority and Focus on the Family aligned directly with the Republican Party, wielding huge influence on right-wing politics. In doing so, they signed on with the most powerful GOP faction, Big Business. Using their influence with their followers, they managed to help convince millions to doubt any science that interferes with the interests of huge corporations, and reject regulations and taxation to mitigate the problems that came with their products.
Once again, the fossil fuel industry led the way. Another pair of brothers, Charles and David Koch, zealous libertarians rather than fundamentalist Christians, ran a global conglomerate that dealt in energy and chemicals, and they were determined to stop the growing consensus that fossil fuels were warming the planet. Like the Stewarts before them, the Koch brothers financed a massive campaign to convince people that the science was wrong, and they brought a lot of their friends in the industries along with them.
In the 2000s, a tsunami of money was released into the political system to block climate legislation, particularly during Barack Obama’s presidency. This has shown no signs of stopping, despite mounting evidence every day that the planet is under increasing stress and people are starting to suffer in vast numbers. The result of these efforts is obvious: Less than half of all Americans now believe climate change is caused by human activity. Only 21% of Republicans do.
Science denialism comes from many directions, and unfortunately we are in a period where it’s flourishing. There have always been hustlers and snake oil salesmen, but today the internet provides endless opportunities for people to “do their own research” and find whatever feels right to them, so conspiracy theories have become the lingua franca of our society. Delusional narcissists like Trump and Kennedy, occupying powerful positions and spreading nutty medical advice, are now just par for the course.
Some of the medical and scientific skepticism is a result of people feeling adrift in a rapidly changing world and drowning in competing information. But make no mistake: Powerful societal interests are also benefiting from all this, and it’s not by accident. They have spent a lot of time and a whole lot of money creating this environment of mistrust and suspicion, each for their own purposes but sharing the same goal, and it’s paid off handsomely.
Microsoft, Google, and Amazon's growth depends on two companies that lose tens of billions of dollars a year. In a newsletter post, "Where's Your Ed At" reported on analyst estimates from Wells Fargo, Barclays, UBS, and Deutsche Bank.
Wells Fargo estimates Microsoft's AI revenue at $34.43 billion, with about 70% coming from OpenAI. — Read the rest
A federal rule that targets cartel money laundering has driven customers away from the money-transfer counters at small shops on the US-Mexico border. The Guardian's Lourdes Medrano reported on August 11, 2026 that the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, ordered businesses in 30 border zip codes in Texas and California to file a report on every cash transaction above $200. — Read the rest
Experts allege that two recent incidents in California show the extreme lengths that criminal organizations are willing to go to to steal servers and other gear meant for data centers.
Earlier this summer, Amazon customers began noticing that emails related to their online orders looked sparse: Order confirmation emails didn't name specific items anymore, and instead listed only item categories.
Joby Aviation announced it was acquiring Dayton, Ohio-based defense firm Resonant Sciences in a $500 million deal, in a bid by the electric aircraft company to expand further into the military industrial complex.
Joby says it expects to finance the deal with $450 million in cash and $50 million in equity. After the deal closes, which is expected in early 2027, Resonant will continue its existing work as Joby's dedicated defense division, the company said. The commercial division will remain focused on air taxis, the first of which are expected to launch later this year.
The deal is the latest example of the fledgling electric aviation in …
Researchers devised a way to extract “reasoning traces” from Claude, GPT, and Gemini. What they found, they say, indicates that some Chinese AI may be trained on leading US models.
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