longreads

Imagine a tech company so visionary that it can take an idea public. A “concept IPO,” they called it.Picture the three founders, all former Apple employees, two of whom—software engineers Andy Hertzfeld and Bill Atkinson—were already…

Even recruiters will admit it’s fair to wonder. The CEO of a hiring platform said last fall that his industry is in “an AI doom loop”: HR departments complain of a wave of AI-generated job applications, prompting the need for more AI…

Food handling is an area of work that still relies heavily on humans. Fruit, vegetables, meat, and other foods need to be handled quickly but gently. It is also hard to automate because no two pieces of fruit, vegetables, or chicken nuggets…

“He was grinding. He was posting every day, playing every day, he was trying his hardest to get somewhere,” says a 21-year-old New York–based gamer who goes by the username Sacred WTF. “Bro, I would just wake up sometimes and it would just…

The modern era of cheating in chess began on a Thursday in July 1993, when a man with shoulder-length dreadlocks walked into the World Open tournament in Philadelphia and registered as John von Neumann. Both the hair and the name were…

Early editions of the index were a tabbed notebook. “I still have some of the original versions of it,” Boyer says. “You would go through, laboriously, by hand, turning the pages, and it would say ‘see page 27,’ like one of those…

Rene Haas is half-prone on a couch in his office in San Jose, California. A basketball rests in his hand, partly obscuring his face. Haas had grimaced when WIRED’s photographer first asked him to assume this position. The headlines came to…

Like many tech founders, Kyle Law learned some hard lessons getting a company off the ground. I know this better than anyone, as he and I cofounded HurumoAI, an AI agent startup, together with a third founder, Megan Flores. Kyle and Megan,…

Katy Shi, a researcher who works on Codex's behavior at OpenAI, says that while some folks describe its default personality as “dry bread,” many have come to appreciate its less sycophantic style. “A lot of engineering work is about being…

Supercomputers can be measured in several ways, but the vital statistic is their ability to perform floating-point operations per second, or flops. Flopping as fast as possible is what makes you successful. At her peak, Sierra could hit…