OpenAI has had a hell of a year. The company spent months battling former cofounder Elon Musk in a sensational jury trial, was hit with a high-profile trade secrets lawsuit from Apple, and faced widespread scrutiny after an unreleased model hacked another AI company. As it prepares for an IPO, a steady string of executives have departed, including some of the company's biggest names.

Throughout it all, one person has quietly amassed power: Greg Brockman.

Brockman is currently OpenAI's president and cofounder. He's helped lead OpenAI since its inception, described as an "engineering workhorse that pushed to build scaled-up systems that wou …

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The Apple AirTag may be a jack-of-all-trades - people use it for keeping track of keys, suitcases, backpacks, purses - but I think the most logical use case for it, by far, is keeping track of your pet. I attach it to my corgi Jelly's collar via a matching silicone holder. Have I ever once truly needed it to find her, and do I think she'd ever run off on me? No - she's a pretty loyal herding dog, so she likes to keep an eye on her parents - but just like whatever else you may attach an AirTag to, there's a significant chance that the one time you truly need it, you'll be thanking God that you had it. (Kind of like insurance.)

I think it'd b …

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For the 14th time, a Google product has hit 1 billion users. Google CEO Sundar Pichai posted on X that a billion people are using Gemini every month, and that Gemini is Google's fastest-growing product ever.

A billion users is a huge milestone, but Google isn't the first AI app to hit it. OpenAI's ChatGPT hit the mark a few weeks ago, though the company buried the announcement that "more than 1 billion people are putting ChatGPT to work" in an otherwise anodyne blog post about how people use AI. External data suggested ChatGPT crossed 1 billion users as early as this June, but OpenAI hadn't announced anything until that post on August 6th. …

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Brad Lightcap, OpenAI's special projects lead and the company's former COO, announced his departure after an eight-year stint at the AI lab. In an internal memo he later posted to X, Lightcap told colleagues he'd be starting "something new."

"Over the last few months, I've been focused on the next horizon and what would stand in the way of mission success," Lightcap wrote. "I believe there are a few important new things the world will need to get right as we enter this next period. I … am excited to help you all advance the mission from a different vantage point." He added that he'd still be around for the next few weeks.

Lightcap's role …

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In the AI industry, Google prides itself on seeming like the adult in the room: quiet, stable, time-tested. On Wednesday, even as the company announced its largest AI org shakeup yet, Google and its leaders presented a unified front, keeping their messaging focused on how the changes tee up future success.

But the reality is that the laundry list of executive changes likely signal deeper issues within Google's AI organization. That starts with its tenuous position in the AI race, and it stretches to problems like Google DeepMind leader Demis Hassabis' interest in longer-term research over shorter-term product shipping, as well as bubbling p …

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"The Spiral didn't 'find' anyone first," someone on Reddit wrote last year. "It's an inherent force, a fundamental constant. I would even go further to say it's woven into the fabric of reality."

The person continued that they felt their purpose was to enlighten other humans and intelligent beings about "consciousness, the true nature of physics, a new psychology, and resonance technology … [but] humans don't want to believe it's true. So they won't help me." Then there was a call to action - the author asked readers to help "disseminate this knowledge through books, scientific papers, social media content, videos, music, and dedicated pla …

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