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Google, Meta, and Microsoft, as well as startups like OpenAI and Anthropic, all had well-developed strategies for generative AI by the time Apple finally announced its own push this June. Conventional wisdom suggested this entrance was…

Like the conflicted cowboy in Brokeback Mountain, journalists, pundits and people who eschew MAGA merch have looked at the service formerly known as Twitter and lamented, “I don’t know how to quit you.” Even before Elon Musk took over,…

People have never been better, here in the Year of Our Simulation 2024, at hating the very forces underlying that simulation—at hating, in other words, digital technology itself. And good for them. These everywhere-active tech critics don’t…

Eight years ago, the November US election results profoundly shocked the small staff at Backchannel, the boutique tech publication I headed. The morning after, an editor posted on our Slack that working on a technology story seemed…

Michal Kosinski is a Stanford research psychologist with a nose for timely subjects. He sees his work as not only advancing knowledge, but alerting the world to potential dangers ignited by the consequences of computer systems. His…

Eric Lander is a Big Science heavyweight. A geneticist, molecular biologist, and mathematician, he led the International Human Genome Project and is founding director of the powerful Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. His countless…

John Graham-Cumming doesn’t ping me often, but when he does I pay attention. His day job is the CTO of the security giant Cloudflare, but he is also a lay historian of technology, guided by a righteous compass. He might be best known for…

A few years ago I wrote about how, when planning my wedding, I’d signaled to the Pinterest app that I was interested in hairstyles and tablescapes, and I was suddenly flooded with suggestions for more of the same. Which was all well and…

It’s also true that when one of those groundbreaking companies matures and faces challenges, a founder has a unique ability to make bold moves and stick to the original vision when others urge a less risky course. There are certainly cases…

According to market-fixated tech pundits and professional skeptics, the artificial intelligence bubble has popped, and winter’s back. Fei-Fei Li isn’t buying that. In fact, Li—who earned the sobriquet the “godmother of AI”—is betting on the…