AI is moving faster than anyone can keep up with — including the people building it. So we're bringing in reinforcements.

On April 9, join us for a live taping of “Pacific Standard Time," with journalist @jasmine.bsky.social to make sense of the chaos.

Enter to win tickets: bit.ly/3QfhdYU

The Human Skill That Eludes AI Why can’t language models write well?

"Sam Altman has predicted that large language models will soon be capable of 'fixing the climate, establishing a space colony, and the discovery of all of physics" — but, "might be able to extrude only something equivalent to 'a real poet’s okay poem'" @jasmine.bsky.social on what sets writing apart

thank you for sharing!!

🙏

AI vs. the Pentagon the real alignment problem is Pete Hegseth

the real AI alignment problem is Pete Hegseth. here’s my explainer & take on Anthropic vs. the Pentagon —

jasmi.news/p/ai-pentagon

What Do the People Building AI Believe? Inside San Francisco’s AI subculture

Today’s pod is with one of my favorite writers covering the culture of technology in the Bay Area. @jasmine.bsky.social came on to describe the AI boom/hype from ground level in SF and we get deep into what the people building these tools actually believe www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/202...

thank you for having me!! so fun

🌻 my week with the AI populists a Washington DC scene report

incredibly fun lede by @jasmine.bsky.social about the DCA perimeter rule (a favorite topic of mine) and the rest of her observations about SF/DC divide and similarities

jasmi.news/p/ai-populis...

lol ty!! I was very pleased to learn that little factoid

🌻 claude code psychosis are your problems software-shaped?

If you're intrigued by Claude Code but also feel overwhelmed, I can recommend this more personal account of trying it out by Jasmine Sun: jasmi.news/p/claude-co...

thanks for sharing!

An AI-Generated Reddit Post Fooled the Internet. It Was Only Half of an Elaborate Scam. I traded Signal messages with someone purporting to have serious dirt on Uber. They used AI to make the whole thing up.

A self-identified “engineer” went viral on Reddit (& on social media) w/damning allegations about one of the food delivery apps. Then they circulated a legit-looking “internal document” to journalists, including me.

The whole thing was an AI-generated scam intended to smear Uber. Here’s the story

The Peptide Craze in the US. It's reckless and unfounded.
erictopol.substack.com/p/the-peptid...
Today @nytimes.com @jasmine.bsky.social goes deep into the use in Silicon Valley, the supply from China, and the reasons this biohacking is popular
t.co/lQXUBHNEaG

I’m quoted in today’s @nytimes.com on the "Chinese peptides" trend in SF. She asked about the "founder mindset" applied to biology. My take: "The entrepreneurial parallel isn't funding a scrappy start-up. It's wiring money to an unregistered offshore entity based on a pitch deck." buff.ly/n5nEob

(I appreciate you dialoguing & sharing your POV on the events here; am responding because I actually don't want to be hosting events where ppl on the left don't feel comfortable coming. I just felt this piece & author wasn't coming at it in a coalitional way & mostly wanted to slander us)

I'd love a less tech-centric crowd at the happy hrs. I try to invite a broad group but I'm sure it's still skewed, and we partner w diff orgs like Arion to broaden it.

But Jimmy conflates his personal beef with my politics & parties with Kernel's role. It's sloppy and shitty to the team's work.

Hi! Thank you for the thoughtful note, and for coming on Thursday! I'll preface by saying that this happy hour series is pretty casual / not a real organization or anything, so Clara and I haven't put a ton of thought into the right policies/norms. So I'll just reason out loud a bit. But my initial stream-of-consciousness reaction is something like this: I have no personal attachment/relationship to Samo or Palladium, and he was invited by someone else I invited. But when you say Samo Burja / Palladium are "fascist," what do you mean? I haven't read much of their stuff, but looking at the Palladium website now, it doesn't seem overtlyfascist. But maybe I'm not looking at the right thing? One of my goals with these is to bridge various Bay Area intellectual scenes that might not otherwise meet or talk, including people with pretty different politics. Like personally, I strongly disagree with groups like the tech right and effective altruists, but they're both influential parts of the intellectual scene here, so therefore I'm still curious to understand them better. That means I have a high bar for "barring attendees based on political beliefs" if there isn't interpersonal harm/bad behavior. While the median attendee is probably a liberal, most people have some beliefs that someone else in the room considers noxious. Also, I personally don't want to be in the business of defining fascism or adjudicating political boundaries to host a happy hour—I think kicking one person would lead to others weaponizing that to try to kick others out, etc. At the same time, I want you and your friends to feel comfortable & excited to come to these, and it'd suck if you stopped, or broadly if we got a reputation from the left of being right-wing/fascist/etc. (I really feel like it's mostly normie libs, and it feels kind of unfair to be labeled as "fascist-adjacent" for having like 2 maybe-fascists attending among like 50-100 other people.) I do think we should have a zero-tolerance…

I don't think this is fixable with a couple sentence tweaks, and generally have found the author quite bad-faith.

E.g. my response to his initial Palladium question (attached) tried to open an earnest convo & he never replied, instead quoting it here 6mos later.

The errors, 2 and 3 in particular, discredit the core argument & structure of the piece (Kernel as face of the right wing shift in tech pubs).

Kernel also hasn't taken new money in years, most recent was Omidyar via RTYPF, and Mercatus was a one-time <$10k grant in early 2021.

It's also an odd choice to make Kernel the lede and kicker of a piece about the "right-wing tech intelligentsia," when the author himself admits that Kernel is the "mildest" among these, not a "billionaire mouthpiece," etc

Fair not to agree 100% but seems insane to cast it as right-wing

I obviously have a different stance on party invites. I don’t expect everyone to be BFFs; the happy hours exist because I find it valuable to have a forum for cross-scene mingling, to talk to people at other pubs & of other political dispositions. Nobody has to attend if they aren’t into that!

1. I'm the only Stanford grad in founding team of Reboot or Kernel
2. Logic also received Omidyar billionaire funding (& Kernel has far more contrib overlap w/ Logic than others)
3. Kernel's founding manifesto explicitly rejects the framing of "tech is inherently good”
4. I didn't edit Kernel 5

Live debates are in, but winning them is another story At a buzzy Substack party in San Francisco, four debates on A.I. showed that team human has plenty of fight in it, even amid the boom. And some goodwill on its side, to boot.

Reporting live from the legendary Bimbo’s in SF, @elirosenberg.bsky.social on the Substack AI debate party with @jasmine.bsky.social, @bcmerchant.bsky.social and others, where the vibe was … surprisingly congenial?

www.hardresetmedia.com/p/live-debat...

thanks!!

woke…. the worst thing you can be

AI friends too cheap to meter “Let me date my chatbot I’m almost 30 and doing well”

jasmi.news/p/ai-friends... This is very good, and close in some ways to the Fourcade and @kjhealy.co account of social media, under which it's co-constituted by users rather than being forced on them.

"If the world is going to split into the techno kings and the techno peasants, I better prove that I'm gonna stay on top" -
@jasmine.bsky.social describing veiled AI anxiety in San Francisco for The Indicator

The Print Party: The publication as an object for community Announcing our first panel for Chat Room: Analog on Nov. 19

Everywhere you look these days in San Francisco, there's a new zine, magazine, literary journal, or newspaper.

At Chat Room: Analog on Nov. 19, @cydhayes.bsky.social will sit down with @jasmine.bsky.social, @laurenmarkham.bsky.social, and @ovillalon.bsky.social to discuss SF's print boom.