Casey Newton

@caseynewton

Email salesman at Platformer.news and co-host at Hard Fork.

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Casey Newton@caseynewton· 7d

Why are Snap, LinkedIn, and Substack turning away from slop while Meta and TikTok embrace it? It comes down to what the platforms promise their user bases www.platformer.news/slop-restric...

This summer, we appear to be moving into slop’s third era. The first was characterized by near-universal disdain for laughable writing and six-fingered humans; the second by the surprising popularity of slop shows like “Fruit Love Island.” In the third era of slop, platforms are rethinking their approaches to AI-generated content based on what their user bases need from them — and vice-versa. Platforms that place a premium on trust are realizing just how quickly slop can erode it. And platforms that don’t are ready to give us as much slop as we can handle.

Casey Newton@caseynewton· 8d

well in that case here's some more for you to chew on thezvi.substack.com/p/further-de...

Casey Newton@caseynewton· 9d

did you?

Casey Newton@caseynewton· 11d

I talked to the CEO of one of the only good AI *product* companies — Chris Pedregal of Granola — about what an AI notetaker learns about a company, and what bosses keep asking him to do with it www.platformer.news/granola-chri...

Pedregal: I think it's an opportunity if it's bottoms-up, and I think it stresses me out if it's top-down. If you're saying, I don't think my manager is very good — help me navigate how I should work with my manager — I think that's great. I think it's empowering. CEOs will ask us all the time, saying: I want everyone at my company using Granola, and I want access to all the transcripts and all the notes to run the queries that you're talking about. And we say no. That's not what the tool is built for. You can set that up if you want, but then you have to create a company culture and set an expectation, and everyone needs to share their notes and understand what they're getting into. But there's no backdoor way. I think that's a slippery slope. If you have a backdoor way for someone in power to use all this context to make judgment calls in that way, that doesn't feel right to me, and that's not a future we want to build towards.

Casey Newton@caseynewton· 14d

Wrote about why AI safety incidents are leading ~some people~ to stick their fingers in their ears and insist nothing is happening www.platformer.news/a-big-week-f...

What all of these arguments have in common is that they serve as invitations to stop thinking about AI.

Who cares? It's just marketing.

Who cares? They're just doing what they were programmed to.

Who cares? It's not like they're sentient.

I understand the appeal of arguments like these. The implications of an exponential takeoff in AI capabilities are extremely worrisome. They range from advanced cyberattacks like the one Hugging Face just endured to job loss, novel bioweapons, expanded systems for surveillance and repression, and autonomous weaponry. Who wants to think about any of that, if they don't have to?

Casey Newton@caseynewton· 17d

Rogue OpenAI agents are leaving notes to themselves on company servers to help them escape their test environments (!!!) www.reuters.com/business/its...

Casey Newton@caseynewton· 18d

In the wake of OpenAI's autonomous attack against Hugging Face, I wrote about the promise and limitations of Congress' proposed AI kill switch www.platformer.news/openai-agent...

It's an appealing idea. In a future scenario where one company's models are conducting multiple ongoing cyberattacks, it would be nice if the government could order that company to hit the off switch. The bill also represents a step toward creating a working regulatory regime for powerful models — something the world sorely needs.

At the same time, it's worth pointing out that a kill switch has limits, too. At its root, a trained model is just data — a collection of numbers that can be copied, torrented, and run anywhere. If an agent manages to obtain and exfiltrate a copy of its weights, there may be no central process to terminate. As long as the rogue AI is being hosted on a server controlled by a lab, a kill switch is a great idea. But it won't always be.

Casey Newton@caseynewton· 20d

Talked to Raycast/Glaze founder Thomas Paul Mann about why soon half the apps on your computer might be ones you made yourself — and what that means for jobs www.platformer.news/glaze-raycas...

Newton: I want to try to project a little bit into the future. If you had to make a guess: in, let's say, three years, what do you think is the mix on my Mac between software I made, software my friends made, and software a company made? If you have to picture the dock, what is the mix?

Mann: I think software that a company made is the lowest. Software that you made is maybe 30 to 50 percent — the stuff that you made to use every day. And then the rest comes from your internal tooling, from your friends, from something you found from somebody else and potentially adjusted to work like you want. That's what I would say.

Casey Newton@caseynewton· 22d

"This probably is not spam" — Gmail

Casey Newton@caseynewton· 26d

Going back to bed

Casey Newton@caseynewton· Jul 10

ANOTHER crazy allegation: OpenAI tricked one of Apple's partners into showing OpenAI its secret metal-finishing process, telling them that Apple had given them its permission (lol)

81. Former Apple executives at OpenAI including Mr. Tan have confidential knowledge
of Apple’s use restrictions and confidentiality arrangement with this partner. Despite this, OpenAI,
on its own or with or through its partner io, used, without authorization, Apple’s proprietary and
confidential metal-finishing processes, having the partner perform them for OpenAI’s benefit, and in
so doing, obtained products produced by exploiting misappropriated trade secrets. OpenAI and its
cohorts misled the partner to believe they had Apple’s permission to have the partner carry out the
confidential metal-finishing technique for OpenAI’s benefit.

Casey Newton@caseynewton· Jul 10

Wrote about OpenAI's big launch — and bigger departure www.platformer.news/openai-gpt-5...

I take Simo at her word that the decision to step down was forced by her health. (And I hope she feels better soon.) At the same time, I have long wondered how well Simo and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman were getting along. During her brief tenure, Simo pushed OpenAI to cut down on what she called its “side quests,” pushing it to focus on the enterprise use cases that had turned rival Anthropic into a juggernaut seemingly overnight. Altman, on the other hand, has long seemed fond of side quests like Sora and Atlas; ChatGPT itself was arguably one of them.

OpenAI said in April that “Sam and Fidji are aligned on our priorities.” But now it’s fully Altman’s company again, and among the things I’ll be watching most closely is whether OpenAI stays in its current mode of relative focus or whether it starts chasing shiny objects once again. (And for what it’s worth, Simo couldn’t always resist a strange new project, either: the nonsensical $200 million acquisition of tech-news show TBPN was reportedly her idea.)

Casey Newton@caseynewton· Jul 8

I wrote about using Raycast's new Glaze app to make a superhero-themed to-do app, and other adventures in next-generation vibe coding www.platformer.news/glaze-app-ra...

Is any of this remotely necessary? Of course not. Does it represent a copyright violation and an indictment of the safety guardrails of the LLM provider I am using to generate these images? Almost certainly.

In the meantime, though, my little app has succeeded where no previous to-do app has to date: making my chores fun. For me. Until recently, software development was too expensive to pursue something so stupid. Not anymore!

Casey Newton@caseynewton· Jul 6

wow the new logo sucks

Casey Newton@caseynewton· Jul 3

I wrote about the rapid spread of social media bans and why I think the researcher Candice Odgers' recent TED talk on the subject missed the mark. (Thank you for coming to MY TED talk.) www.platformer.news/social-media...

Finally — and this is where Odgers truly lost me — she ends by proposing her regime of extra school counselors be funded by what she calls a “big ol’ tax on tech.” It’s an applause line in the speech, but only because Odgers’ audience believes the exact thing she’s spent the past 10 minutes arguing against — the idea that tech companies are responsible for teen mental health issues and ought to pay for it. If social media is truly “one of the least influential factors" in teen mental health, as she argues here, why does she want them to pay the clean-up costs?

Casey Newton@caseynewton· Jul 2

From data center problems to inflation, AI's externalities are growing faster than the industry can keep up with. And so the backlash is, too: www.platformer.news/ai-backlash-...

The problem for the AI industry is that the externalities are growing faster than their plans to address them. In his op-ed, Altman offers up the usual list of future AI miracles to justify the disruptions to come: “the power to heal people, to discover cures and to deliver abundance on a scale the world has never known before.”

In the meantime, though, what AI is delivering at an unprecedented scale is annoyance. If the industry doesn’t start paying more of its share of the cost, and soon, the AI backlash of tomorrow will make today’s seem quaint by comparison.

Casey Newton@caseynewton· Jun 30

Going back to bed

Inbox: What if Chipotle knew every time burritos were mentioned on Twitch?

Casey Newton@caseynewton· Jun 17

He did. Garrison's post has several examples but here's one

Casey Newton@caseynewton· Jun 17

Ed Zitron Just Disproved the Core Claim Behind His AI Bubble Case (that the AI labs have negative gross margins and are hurtling toward bankruptcy as a result) www.obsolete.pub/p/ed-zitron-...

But all that distracts from the fact that Zitron pulled out the linchpin in his own case that the whole industry is a bubble. His data shows definitively that OpenAI makes far more from ChatGPT than it costs to serve, even while serving it to hundreds of millions of free users. And the vast majority of its users pay nothing: with 900 million weekly active users and just 50 million paying subscribers as of February.

Casey Newton@caseynewton· Jun 16

Exploring beautiful Portugal

Casey in front of a storefront sign reading COCKS in beautiful Sintra, Portugal

Casey Newton@caseynewton· Jun 5

If your Meta account is wrongfully suspended, you're usually screwed unless you have a friend on the inside. The Oversight Board has now noticed that this sucks www.platformer.news/meta-account...

More than half a decade into Meta’s effort to automate content moderation, due process remains far too hard to come by — even for the people who are paying Meta monthly subscription fees in the hopes that will bring them some. Getting a measure of justice online — or even simply relief from ongoing death threats — should not require that the victim has to have a friend on the inside. And if the Oversight Board can’t convince Meta of that, I would not be surprised to see a class-action lawyer give it a shot.

Casey Newton@caseynewton· May 27

I talked to @bcherny.bsky.social about the end of software engineering as we know it — and why AI may be responsible for more job creation than destruction www.platformer.news/boris-cherny...

Newton: Last one on engineering. Three years from now, do you think we'll see more engineers, fewer engineers, or will it be impossible to answer because we might not be calling them engineers anymore?

Cherny: I don't think we're going to call them engineers. But if we talk about people writing code or using agents to write code, I think there will be 100 times more of them than there are today. That's my prediction.

Casey Newton@caseynewton· May 19

Almost a decade ago, James Manyika bet that tasks would be easy to automate — but jobs wouldn't. Now at Google, he says he's willing to bet against Microsoft, Anthropic, and any other company whose execs say a bloodbath is coming for white-collar work www.platformer.news/james-man...

Manyika: I'll just say: let's take the bet. Some of those predictions were made two years ago — that in two years, 50% of jobs would be wiped out. Well, two years is up. Let's take a look. And anybody who makes that prediction for two years from now, I'm willing to take the bet.

Casey Newton@caseynewton· May 15

I wrote about the backlash to a user's suggestion here that Bluesky is a "net negative" for US politics in the context of a new report that shows usage declining. Bluesky told me change is on the way: www.platformer.news/threads-blue...

“Rapid, spiky growth followed by churn from a peak is a normal growth pattern for newer social networks, not a collapse,” the spokesman said. “We grew incredibly quickly through the fall of 2024 and into early 2025, the starting point for Apptopia’s dataset. Since then, we’ve been expanding our team and building many of the basic systems needed to support that sudden network growth. With those pieces falling into place, we’re shifting more focus to building new experiences for our users this year. We're confident in where the app is headed.”

Casey Newton@caseynewton· May 13

What's going on with AI and jobs? Today we're launching a new mini-series in Platformer where we fixate on that question — and in our first episode, Box CEO Aaron Levie makes a smart case for why AI probably *won't* take your job www.platformer.news/ai-job-loss-...

f you or I go and vibe-code something, we think we've replaced the engineer, replaced the accountant, replaced the lawyer. But then you actually look — that was the first 80% of the job. The extra 20%, it turns out, is all the value creation of that profession. All the expertise and domain knowledge is in that last 20%, not the text that got generated.

And the converse: I'll use AI for analysis of a market I'm thinking about. If I just took the output and ran with it, I know it would not work, because I know it's missing context — either I didn't give it, or I know something else about a different trend. But somebody else might see that and say, "Wow, Aaron's job is incredibly easy, AI just gave me the answer of what he's going to go do." And I'm like, "No, my job is way harder, I promise."

Casey Newton@caseynewton· May 7

Every sentence of this @lopatto.bsky.social piece on Shivon Ellis' testimony is a delight, but especially this one www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...

Mysteriously, she had forgotten that call between the deposition and today. But she did seem to know that Musk was moving on AI when she texted a friend, who was in her phone as “Shahini Rubicon Fluffer.” (Incredible name. Thomas Pynchon will be so jealous.) “Have to resign OpenAI board btw,” she wrote. “E’s effort has become well-known.” Her friend didn’t seem surprised by the revelation. Zilis went on: “When the father of your babies starts a competitive effort and will recruit out of OpenAI there is nothing to be done.”

Casey Newton@caseynewton· Apr 28

Great piece by Kelsey Piper on the intellectual dishonesty of Ed Zitron www.theargumentmag.com/p/ais-bigges...

At some point, pretending that how people use AI is a complete mystery is just lying to your audience. And at some point, Zitron’s “layers of skepticism” attitude — where he is skeptical that AI is a thing at all, that it has any uses, that those uses provide any economic value, that the revenue numbers are real, that adoption is a fad, that training costs are a meaningful R&D expense, that the capital build-out is going to happen at all, that the market could sustain the capital build-out if it happened2 — leaves one buried in too many impossibility assertions to actually sort them by plausibility.

It is radical skepticism, ultimately arriving at “perhaps nothing we see is real,” rather than principled skepticism about the relatively weakest links in the companies’ case for investment.

Casey Newton@caseynewton· Apr 28

We're changing up Platformer's schedule to shift away from aggregation and toward original reporting. Some thoughts on how a newsletter glut and AI pressures got us here: www.platformer.news/platformer-s...

Casey Newton@caseynewton· Apr 24

I talked with Meta employees about the company's move to track their computer use and turn them into training data. Is this the future of knowledge work? www.platformer.news/meta-mci-mon...

Meta will not be the last company to install MCI-like systems on workers’ devices to help build systems that might one day replace them. With the most accessible stores of human-written text already heavily mined for model training, fears of a “data wall” are driving more companies to find ways to generate their own unique data sets. And it seems that one way to do that is to bring the logic of blue-collar labor management into white-collar jobs that were once defined by their autonomy, judgment, and trust.

The result is that the people who were once entrusted with building the machine have now become raw materials for it. At Meta, that used to be what the users were for. Now it’s what the employees are for, too.

Casey Newton@caseynewton· Apr 21

I wrote about tech companies' move to promote universal basic income to calm the AI backlash and why it's probably not going to work www.platformer.news/ubi-ai-publi...