For less than $1 per hour, workers in Nairobi, Kenya trained OpenAI’s GPT models. They walked away shaken. — This is an excerpt from my weekly newsletter, Big Technology, published on Substack. Check it out here and sign up to receive it each Friday. Richard Mathenge felt he’d landed the perfect role when he started training OpenAI’s GPT model in 2021. After years of working in customer service in…

Digging through a bunch of websites to find information is annoying, but we’re in trouble if the primary sources go away. — The demo was beautiful. At Google’s IO developer conference this week, the company showed an experimental version of its search engine handling an almost unimaginably difficult query. Asked whether a family with kids under three years old and a dog would prefer Arches National Park or Bryce Canyon, Google scoured…

Forget the technology’s capabilities, there’s money to be made and points to score. — Allow me, for a moment, to take you inside my inbox. The normal smattering (okay, deluge) of public relations pitches has completely given way to a category-five storm of artificial intelligence PR. It’s getting so windy in there that CNN may have to send a camera crew. I am *always*…

Twitter alternative is taking off thanks to hilarious memes and the fact that it is not Twitter. — Bluesky, the Jack Dorsey-funded, invite-only Twitter clone, has been brimming with frenetic energy this week. Shitposters, sex workers, technologists, journalists, and whoever else have flooded the new service, all at once trying to reimagine Twitter from scratch. With a looseness not seen since Twitter’s early days, they’ve been tweeting (or…

A bizarre profile, stock underperformance, and big executive pay packages stand out as the ride-hailing company tries to find a way forward. — Something was just a bit off in the Wall Street Journal’s profile of Dara Khosrowshahi last week. The Uber CEO had been driving and delivering for the first time in his tenure and wanted to make the point on record. The Journal portrayed Khosrowshahi as a hands-on CEO learning the…

And if not, why won’t the AI just build the businesses itself? Like many of you, I’ve been wondering whether there’s a real business opportunity in this new wave of generative artificial intelligence, or whether it’s mostly hype. …

A conversation with Instagram and Artifact’s founder about social media’s future. — I met up with Instagram founder Kevin Systrom as he was about to take the stage at SXSW in Austin. Systrom’s been developing a news app called Artifact that uses AI to recommend news articles you might want to read. He’s doing it as Meta takes a similar AI-based approach…

In a hearing, TikTok CEO Shou Chew came off like an underling. Now we’ll see if anything comes of it. — TikTok CEO Shou Chew had one mission as he appeared before Congress on Thursday: Convince U.S. lawmakers that TikTok had some separation from its China-based parent company, Bytedance. He was there because worries over China’s ability to access TikTok user data, or influence its content filtering, had U.S. lawmakers, regulators…

People don’t see the tech industry as they once did. And it almost cost the sector a rescue. — This is an excerpt from my weekly newsletter, Big Technology, published on Substack. Check it out here and sign up to receive it each Thursday. In the early 2010s, hundreds of technologists would pack NYU’s Skirball Center for the monthly New York Tech Meetup. At the event, local developers would…