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sharongoldman.bsky.social
Sharon Goldman
@sharongoldman.bsky.social
1.6K followers 260 following 120 posts
Fortune reporter covering AI
Sharon.goldman@fortune.com
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sharongoldman.bsky.social
open.substack.com/pub/sharongo...
Why I really pushed to talk to OpenAI's Greg Brockman for my latest Fortune story
Hint: I can think of $1.4 trillion worth of reasons
open.substack.com
November 5, 2025 at 5:20 PM
sharongoldman.bsky.social
NEW: AI data centers have suddenly become one of the most potent political flashpoints of 2025, igniting fierce debates over power, water, land, and jobs.

fortune.com/2025/10/22/a...
Huge AI data centers are turning local elections into fights over the future of energy | Fortune
Rising energy bills and growing scrutiny of Big Tech’s political influence are transforming AI data centers from obscure infrastructure into political flashpoints for both progressives and conservativ...
fortune.com
October 22, 2025 at 11:36 AM
Reposted by Sharon Goldman
mirandapitcher.bsky.social
From Fortune reporter @sharongoldman.bsky.social's email announcing this story:

"Reporting the story, what struck me most is how belief itself has become a form of capital — how people are literally investing in a worldview about where AI is heading."

fortune.com/2025/10/08/l...
How former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner turned a viral AI prophecy into profit, with a $1.5 billion hedge fund and outsize influence from Silicon Valley to D.C. | Fortune
Aschenbrenner is a Wall Street novice. So why have some of Silicon Valley’s biggest names trusted him to manage billions?
fortune.com
October 12, 2025 at 2:37 AM
sharongoldman.bsky.social
How a 23-year old former OpenAI researcher turned a viral AI prophecy into profit, with a $1.5 billion hedge fund and outsized influence from Silicon Valley to D.C.

I spent several weeks reporting on the unlikely rise of Leopold Aschenbrenner 👇

fortune.com/2025/10/08/l...
How former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner turned a viral AI prophecy into profit, with a $1.5 billion hedge fund and outsized influence from Silicon Valley to D.C. | Fortune
Aschenbrenner is a Wall Street novice. So why have some of Silicon Valley's biggest names trusted him to manage billions?
fortune.com
October 8, 2025 at 5:33 PM
sharongoldman.bsky.social
September 21, 2025 at 3:54 PM
sharongoldman.bsky.social
Many assume C2PA fights deepfakes. But a new report from the World Privacy Forum says it doesn’t — instead it’s building a vast metadata system that raises thorny questions about privacy & who gets to count as ‘trusted.

Thanks to @katekaye.bsky.social for chatting!

fortune.com/2025/09/18/b...
September 18, 2025 at 8:09 PM
sharongoldman.bsky.social
It's a podcast world (I regularly think about being at the crazy AI Action Plan rollout a couple of months ago with the All-In bros where JD Vance sat on a couch with them and later the whole thing was rolled away to make way for Trump and his lectern and American flags )
September 17, 2025 at 1:33 AM
sharongoldman.bsky.social
"Person says: "So you mean, they're like dumb animals".
Me: "HOW DARE YOU SIR ANIMALS EXHIBIT RICH MORAL SENSIBILITIES BACK AWAY FROM MY OTTERS AND TURTLES" (ok maybe I didn't quite say it that way)"

Yaaaas
geomblog.bsky.social Suresh Venkatasubramanian @geomblog.bsky.social · Sep 7
Me, at a NYC public event on AI with @datasociety.bsky.social, in response to a question: "No, AI systems are not moral agents in their own right. They can communicate responses that we can pretend to ascribe moral status to, but they don't possess any moral grounding" 1/2
September 7, 2025 at 7:14 PM
sharongoldman.bsky.social
Most AI red teams break models. Anthropic’s Frontier Red Team also evangelizes the risks of AI itself — a rare hybrid of security + policy. I did a deep dive on this unusual group that sits in Anthropic's policy organization under co-founder Jack Clark.

fortune.com/2025/09/04/a...
Inside Anthropic's 'Red Team'—ensuring Claude is safe, and that Anthropic is heard in the corridors of power
Unique among AI labs, Anthropic's "Frontier Red Team" reports to its policy chief and has a mandate to publicize the dangers it finds
fortune.com
September 4, 2025 at 3:48 PM
Reposted by Sharon Goldman
dbrody.bsky.social
“Late last year, David Shor, one of the Democratic Party’s top data scientists, surveyed some 130,000 voters about whether they had a “favorable” or “unfavorable” opinion of Jewish people. Hardly anyone over the age of 70 said their view was unfavorable. More than a quarter of those under 25 did.”
The MAGA Influencers Rehabilitating Hitler
A growing constituency on the right wants America to unlearn the lessons of World War II.
www.theatlantic.com
September 3, 2025 at 5:33 PM
sharongoldman.bsky.social
Yes amen exactly this
willoremus.com Will Oremus @willoremus.com · Aug 26
The funny thing is animals actually can suffer and we slaughter them by the billions but sure let’s have an existential panic over whether a software program screams when we turn it off
theguardian.com The Guardian @theguardian.com · Aug 26
Can AIs suffer? Big tech and users grapple with one of most unsettling questions of our times
August 26, 2025 at 5:52 PM
sharongoldman.bsky.social
NEW: China’s DeepSeek quietly released an open-source rival to GPT-5 — optimized for Chinese chips and priced to undercut OpenAI. Here's what that means and why that's a big deal. fortune.com/2025/08/21/c...
China’s DeepSeek just dropped a new GPT-5 rival — optimized for Chinese chips, priced to undercut OpenAI
DeepSeek's new V3.1 model debuts several design innovations and highlights the intensity of the U.S.-China AI rivalry
fortune.com
August 21, 2025 at 7:12 PM
sharongoldman.bsky.social
Superintelligence, shmooperintelligence - for Meta, it's still always going to be about ad revenue, which is, hello, like 98% of revenue 🤷‍♀️

fortune.com/2025/08/20/m...
Meta wants to speed its race to ‘superintelligence’ — but investors will still want their billions in ad revenue
Even as Meta reorganizes once more to chase AI ‘superintelligence,’ the company’s core business still lives and dies by advertising revenue
fortune.com
August 20, 2025 at 8:09 PM
sharongoldman.bsky.social
I was not invited to Sam Altman’s cozy dinner with reporters in San Francisco last week (whomp whomp), but maybe that’s for the best. I have trouble suppressing exasperated eye rolls when I hear peak Silicon Valley–ironic statements.

fortune.com/2025/08/19/s...
Sam Altman’s AI paradox: Warning of a bubble while raising trillions
Sam Altman says AI might be in a bubble—then touts trillions for OpenAI’s buildout. Call it the paradox powering Silicon Valley’s biggest spending spree.
fortune.com
August 19, 2025 at 6:30 PM
Reposted by Sharon Goldman
geomblog.bsky.social
this is very interesting. I do wonder how much the tamper-proofing can survive extreme attacks, but it's encouraging. 1/2
August 15, 2025 at 4:33 AM
sharongoldman.bsky.social
Thanks to @stellaathena.bsky.social for chatting with me about Deep Ignorance: the new paper/project from Eleuther AI and the UK AISI. Bottom line: Worried AI could teach people to build bioweapons? Don’t teach it how

fortune.com/2025/08/14/w...
AI safety tip: if you don’t want it giving bioweapon instructions, maybe don’t put them in the training data, say researchers
New research shows that scrubbing risky material from AI training data can build safeguards that are harder to bypass — and one author calls out tech giants for keeping such work under wraps.
fortune.com
August 15, 2025 at 3:33 AM
sharongoldman.bsky.social
NEW: OpenAI's GPT-5 was supposed to be a leap forward. Instead, it sparked backlash, raising questions about whether the model router is the path to AI's future (hint: many say it still is)

fortune.com/2025/08/12/o...
Why GPT-5’s most controversial feature – the model router – might also be the future of AI
OpenAI’s latest upgrade was supposed to be a leap forward. Instead, it sparked backlash — and raises big questions about whether stitching together multiple models is the path to AI’s future.
fortune.com
August 12, 2025 at 7:39 PM
sharongoldman.bsky.social
Um wasn't Leopold Aschenbremmer focused on AI safety 😱

23-year-old former OpenAI Super alignment team guy running an AI focused hedge fund 😮

t.co/9k28gT4HKd
https://www.wsj.com/finance/investing/billions-flow-to-new-hedge-funds-focused-on-ai-related-bets-48d97f41?gaa_at=eafs&gaa_n=ASWzDAiB1inpp_vW376mT8ouhsXkO-B5rnY42DVSSYDoyAlzJK2zUBMXlngJIIC_ns8%3D&gaa_...
t.co
August 10, 2025 at 9:28 PM
sharongoldman.bsky.social
Mark Zuckerberg is pouring billions of dollars into AI ‘superintelligence’—so why does today's Instagram pitch feel so underwhelming?

Kind of like a legless metaverse avatar? 💁‍♀️

fortune.com/2025/07/30/m...
Mark Zuckerberg is pouring billions into superintelligence—so why does his Instagram pitch feel so underwhelming?
The Meta founder and CEO mostly seems to want to sell more Ray Bans.
fortune.com
July 30, 2025 at 4:02 PM
sharongoldman.bsky.social
NEW: Silicon Valley’s elite descend on D.C. to celebrate Trump’s AI Action Plan in a surreal fusion of podcast and policy

(oh, and Trump ran so long I missed my train back from DC 😂)

fortune.com/2025/07/23/a...
Podcast, policy, and pomp in D.C. at the surreal celebration of Trump’s AI Action Plan
David Sacks, Trump’s AI czar, shared the stage with his cohosts from the All-in podcast on Wednesday, walking through various elements of the new 28-page AI Action Plan.
fortune.com
July 24, 2025 at 1:04 AM
sharongoldman.bsky.social
NEW: I chatted with ex-OpenAI researcher Steven Adler
this week about role-playing a 'rogue' AI (he says we should all try it) 😵‍💫https://fortune.com/2025/06/26/former-openai-researcher-thinks-its-time-to-war-game-ai-superintelligence-scenarios/
This former OpenAI researcher thinks we should be gaming out the AI apocalypse
Former OpenAI safety researcher Steven Adler explains why he thinks more people should 'wargame' AI superintelligence scenarios.
fortune.com
June 26, 2025 at 6:57 PM
sharongoldman.bsky.social
In the billionaires-are-not-relatable category: very weird emailing with Lucy Guo to check that she did, in fact, receive $650M in cash from the Meta/Scale deal and her responding that she did, in fact, receive $750M 😀

open.substack.com/pub/sharongo...
6 things I learned after spending a week writing a story about Scale AI's Alexandr Wang
Often one of the great pleasures of writing is the process of researching and crafting a story.
open.substack.com
June 23, 2025 at 2:08 PM
sharongoldman.bsky.social
I was in DC this week. Here’s the takeaway:
Big AI isn’t just knocking on Washington’s door—it’s moved in.

OpenAI models on gov’t supercomputers. Meta’s Llama for defense. Anthropic building tools for national security. And Eric Schmidt? Playing matchmaker.

My latest:
fortune.com/2025/06/05/b...
From Silicon Valley to the Pentagon: Big AI is going full Beltway
In Washington’s new AI universe, national security and corporate AI ambitions are fusing—reshaping policy, procurement, and the global balance of power.
fortune.com
June 5, 2025 at 6:18 PM
sharongoldman.bsky.social
Eric Schmidt’s AI Expo in DC this week showed how fast the AI-military-policy triangle is locking into place. The vision? A future where geopolitical competition is won with frontier models and flying bots. #SCSPAIExpo25

fortune.com/2025/06/04/e...
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s AI Expo serves up visions of war, robotics, and LLMs for throngs of tech execs, defense officials, and fresh recruits
From drone swarms to doomsday scenarios, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s DC showcase reveals how AI, geopolitics, and defense are fusing into one strategic vision.
fortune.com
June 4, 2025 at 9:45 PM
sharongoldman.bsky.social
Spent some time in DC this week: Former Google CEO
Eric Schmidt's AI Expo serves up visions of war, robotics, and LLMs for throngs of tech execs, defense officials, and fresh recruits

fortune.com/2025/06/04/e...
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s AI Expo serves up visions of war, robotics, and LLMs for throngs of tech execs, defense officials, and fresh recruits
From drone swarms to doomsday scenarios, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s DC showcase reveals how AI, geopolitics, and defense are fusing into one strategic vision.
fortune.com
June 4, 2025 at 6:36 PM