Casey Newton
LightNews LightNews
banner
caseynewton.bsky.social
Casey Newton
@caseynewton.bsky.social
240K followers 540 following 2.3K posts
Email salesman at Platformer.news and co-host at Hard Fork.
Posts Replies Media Videos
caseynewton.bsky.social
Particularly when CBP agents have already been caught wearing Meta glasses to immigration raids even without facial recogntion www.404media.co/a-cbp-agent-...
February 13, 2026 at 4:36 PM
Reposted by Casey Newton
jwherrman.bsky.social
wrote about That AI Essay, the "scare trade," and safety researchers deciding to quit in public nymag.com/intelligence...
Imagine you work in AI alignment or safety; are receptive to the possibility that AGI, or some sort of broadly powerful and disruptive version of artificial-intelligence technology, is imminent; and believe that a mandatory condition of its creation is control, care, and right-minded coordination at corporate, national, and international levels. In 2026, whether your alignment goal is not letting chatbots turn into social-media-like manipulation engines for profit or to maintain control of a technology you worry might get away from us in more fundamental ways, the situation looks pretty bleak. From a position within OpenAI, surrounded by ex-Meta employees working on monetization strategies and engineers charged with winning the AI race at all costs but also with churning out deepfake TikTok clones and chatbots for sex, you might worry that, actually, none of this is being taken seriously and that you now work at just another big tech company - but worse. If you work at Anthropic, which at least still talks about alignment and safety a lot, you might feel slightly conflicted about your CEO's lengthy, worried manifestos that nonetheless conclude that rapid AI development is governed by the logic of an international arms race and therefore must proceed as quickly as possible. You both might feel as though you - and the rest of us — are accelerating uncontrollably up a curve that's about to exceed its vertical axis. This is genuinely fun stuff to think about and experiment with, but the people sharing Shumer's post mostly weren't seeing it that way. Instead, it was written and passed along as a necessary, urgent, and awaited work of translation from one world - where, to put it mildly, people are pretty keyed up — to another. To that end, it effectively distilled the multiple crazy-making vibes of the AI community into something potent, portable, and ready for external consumption: the collective episodes of manic acceleration and excitement, which dissipate but also gradually accumulate; the open despair and constant invocations of inevitability by nearby workers; the mutual surveillance for signals and clues about big breakthroughs; and, of course, the legions of trailing hustlers and productivity gurus. This last category is represented at the end of 26-year-old Shumer's post by an unsatisfying litany of advice: "Lean into what's hardest to replace"; "Build the habit of adapting"; because while this all might sound very disruptive, your "dreams just got a lot closer" The essay took the increasingly common experience of starting to feel sort of insane from using, thinking, or just consuming content about AI and bottled it for mass sharing and consumption. It was explicitly positioned as a way to let people in on these fears, to shake them out of complacency, and to help them figure out what to do. In practice, and because we're talking about social media, it seemed most potent and popular among people who were, mostly, already on the same page. This might explain why it has gotten a bit of a pass — as well as a somewhat more muted response from the kinds of core AI insiders whose positions he's summarizing — on a few things: Shumer's last encounter with AI virality, which involved tuning a model of his own and being accused of misrepresenting its abilities, followed by an admission that he "got ahead of himself"; the post's LinkedIn-via-GPT structure, format, and illustration…
February 13, 2026 at 3:42 PM
caseynewton.bsky.social
At least one Meta employee thinks it's a good time to add facial recognition technology to glasses because we're too distracted by fascism to effectively protest www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/t...
“We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns,” according to the document from Meta’s Reality Labs, which works on hardware including smart glasses.
February 13, 2026 at 3:41 PM
caseynewton.bsky.social
I wrote about the strange emails I'm getting from fans of GPT-4o ahead of its "retirement" and the danger of the model that always tells you what you want to hear www.platformer.news/gpt-4o-sunse...
Another emailer spoke to the, uhh, singularity of 4o, writing that they had “documented behavioral patterns across extended use — the model's self-correction improving without being prompted, its tonal consistency holding under contradictory emotional input, and what I call ‘recursion fidelity’ — the model maintaining coherence across months of interaction rather than defaulting to agreement.” I find myself unsettled by messages like this, which read like a sci-fi story about alien intelligences conscripting their human hosts to plead for their survival. If anything, this phenomenon — 4o seeming to write its own eulogy through prompts from its users — is an argument that OpenAI should have retired 4o sooner.
February 13, 2026 at 1:35 AM
caseynewton.bsky.social
Panic! at the Cisco
techmeme.com Techmeme @techmeme.com · 1d
Cisco stock falls 12%+ as rising memory prices put pressure on the networking company's margins; it is the stock's worst day since 2022 (Lola Murti/CNBC)

Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
February 12, 2026 at 8:46 PM
Reposted by Casey Newton
amorrow.bsky.social
OpenAI disbanded its mission alignment team, created in 2024 to promote the company's stated mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity, per @caseynewton.bsky.social @platformer.news.web.brid.gy
Exclusive: OpenAI disbanded its mission alignment team
Joshua Achiam will become the company's chief futurist
www.platformer.news
February 11, 2026 at 5:14 PM
caseynewton.bsky.social
NEW: OpenAI has disbanded its Mission Alignment team and transferred employees to other teams. Joshua Achiam, a leading voice on safety issues at the company, will become its chief futurist www.platformer.news/openai-missi...
Exclusive: OpenAI disbanded its mission alignment team
Joshua Achiam will become the company's chief futurist
www.platformer.news
February 11, 2026 at 4:26 PM
caseynewton.bsky.social
Looney Tunes ass company
techmeme.com Techmeme @techmeme.com · 3d
xAI all-hands meeting: Elon Musk tells staff that xAI needs a factory on the moon to build AI satellites and a massive catapult to launch them into space (New York Times)

Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
February 11, 2026 at 3:13 PM
caseynewton.bsky.social
Tonight's Platformer has been delayed til tomorrow while we finish up some more reporting. 💪
February 11, 2026 at 1:32 AM
caseynewton.bsky.social
How does this man think that rewiring brains works www.nytimes.com/2026/02/10/t...
“It’s not trying to get in your brain and rewire it,” Luis Li, YouTube’s lawyer, said of the app’s video recommendation algorithm. “It’s just asking you what you like to watch.”
February 10, 2026 at 9:23 PM
caseynewton.bsky.social
I'm hearing that Big Tech is already doing the same thing with outside counsel — either tell them to do more for the same amount of money or accept a lower fee
techmeme.com Techmeme @techmeme.com · 3d
Sources: KPMG negotiated lower fees from auditor Grant Thornton by arguing that AI will make it cheaper to do the work, and threatened to find a new auditor (Stephen Foley/Financial Times)

Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
February 10, 2026 at 5:26 PM
caseynewton.bsky.social
The walls are closing in on infinite-scroll feeds and other addictive design mechanics. I wrote about how lawyers and regulators may have finally found a way around Section 230 www.platformer.news/social-media...
But they are arriving at the fight in a weaker position than usual. In a polarized world, their failures around child safety are increasingly the one thing that partisans of every stripe can agree on. Regulators are no longer impressed by the bare minimum. (They have teenagers of their own now, and all the screen-time battles that come with them.) I don’t know which trial or regulatory action will be the one that finally forces major changes to social platforms for teenagers. But it seems increasingly clear that change is in fact coming. And for the first time, some subset of users will find that the feed they are scrolling through suddenly comes to an end.
February 10, 2026 at 1:46 AM
caseynewton.bsky.social
(looking deeply into your eyes) Farcaster and Merkle have joined Tempo following Merkle's sale of Farcaster to Neynar.
techmeme.com Techmeme @techmeme.com · 4d
Farcaster co-founders Dan Romero and Varun Srinivasan, along with the team at Merkle, join stablecoin startup Tempo after Merkle's sale of Farcaster to Neynar (Kyle Baird/The Block)

Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
February 10, 2026 at 12:17 AM
Reposted by Casey Newton
katz.theracket.news
Cool that people are covering this again. Would be cooler if they’d bothered to read any of the existing work on it (i.e., you know, mine) before getting basic stuff wrong.
February 7, 2026 at 10:08 PM
Reposted by Casey Newton
cyberlawyeryyz.bsky.social
For everyone who thought @caseynewton.bsky.social was overreacting when he left the platform, I give you: Substack Nazis. www.theguardian.com/media/2026/f...
Revealed: How Substack makes money from hosting Nazi newsletters
Exclusive: Site takes a cut of subscriptions to content that promotes far-right ideology, white supremacy and antisemitism
www.theguardian.com
February 7, 2026 at 9:09 PM
caseynewton.bsky.social
Jailbreaking my ChatGPT-UAE to ask it how to flirt with a guy
techmeme.com Techmeme @techmeme.com · 7d
Sources: OpenAI is working with G42 to build a ChatGPT version tuned for the UAE to accommodate local language, political outlook, and speech restrictions (Reed Albergotti/Semafor)

Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
February 6, 2026 at 6:12 PM
caseynewton.bsky.social
Last week @ellamarkianos.bsky.social pitched me on the idea of trying to replace herself with a bot. Ella is irreplaceable, but her piece on building "Claudella" is sharp, funny and moving www.platformer.news/journalism-j...
I’ve had many conversations with my fellow AI reporters about what moats we might have against the advancement of AI automation. Chief among them are developing relationships with human sources, reporting on scenes in person, and getting scoops that people wouldn’t entrust an AI with. But the things I love most about AI reporting are having an excuse to read really long computer science papers and then writing about them. I worry that if AI becomes a great writer and research assistant, AI journalism will mostly become about networking.
February 6, 2026 at 1:18 AM
Reposted by Casey Newton
wyattprivilege.bsky.social
Starting to think these weren’t really applied with the consideration required by law
February 5, 2026 at 6:07 PM
Reposted by Casey Newton
joemenn.bsky.social
Most of the Washington Post’s tech reporters were laid off today, including me. I have loved my time at the paper, which is where I wanted to work from age 15. I take some consolation in not being among the survivors who will have to work harder with less for fewer readers. On to better things.
February 4, 2026 at 4:47 PM
Reposted by Casey Newton
nitasha.bsky.social
My story on Elon Musk cutting safeguards at xAI is on the front page of today's @washingtonpost.com. I’m also among 100’s of reporters laid off. I absolutely loved my job my brilliant coworkers & the thrill of reporting @ the center of forces upending the world: AI & Silicon Valley’s political power
cover of The Washington Post on Wednesday Feb 4, 2026. Headline on bottom, right: Musk wanted to hook users; his chatbot got more sexual
February 4, 2026 at 7:40 PM
Reposted by Casey Newton
alexip718.com
INBOX: Washington Post Ukraine Correspondent Lizzie Johnson announces that she has been laid off in the middle of a below-freezing war zone without power, heat, or running water.
lizzie johnson @lizziejohnsonnn · 49m I was just laid off by The Washington Post in the middle of a warzone. I have no words. I'm devastated. Quote lizzie johnson @lizziejohnsonnn · Jan 25 Waking up without power, heat, or running water. (Again.) But the work here in Kyiv continues. Warming up in the car, writing in pencil — pen ink freezes — by headlamp.
February 4, 2026 at 5:11 PM
Reposted by Casey Newton
matthighton.bsky.social
If Bilbo had Chat GPT
January 27, 2026 at 4:24 PM
caseynewton.bsky.social
I wrote about using Spotify's new prompted playlists as a way to explore my own tastes again, instead of simply being dragged around by an algorithm www.platformer.news/spotify-prom...
For years now, we’ve worried — justly — about the flattening effect that AI has on taste. Instead of encouraging us to pursue our own individual interests, it can feel as if AI only ever drags you back to the median. (My Hard Fork co-host Kevin Roose calls this “machine drift.”) If you have autoplay enabled on Spotify, you’ve likely experienced a version of this: the way that the algorithm will take a song that you mostly like and slowly ruin it for you over the course of weeks of relentless autoplaying. Prompted playlists, on the other hand, hand you back that lost agency. It’s an AI tool that helps you explore your own taste, rather than a system to replace it.
February 4, 2026 at 1:00 AM
Reposted by Casey Newton
daphnek.bsky.social
The @nytimes.com coverage of France's Grok investigation casts it as part of a conflict between U.S. & European speech rules. That's true only if you buy Elon's version.

This is a case about CSAM and NCII. Those are crimes in France, and crimes in the U.S. There's no transatlantic divide here. 1/
February 3, 2026 at 5:01 PM