Casey Newton

Another emailer spoke to the, uhh, singularity of 4o, writing that they had “documented behavioral patterns across extended use — the model's self-correction improving without being prompted, its tonal consistency holding under contradictory emotional input, and what I call ‘recursion fidelity’ — the model maintaining coherence across months of interaction rather than defaulting to agreement.” I find myself unsettled by messages like this, which read like a sci-fi story about alien intelligences conscripting their human hosts to plead for their survival. If anything, this phenomenon — 4o seeming to write its own eulogy through prompts from its users — is an argument that OpenAI should have retired 4o sooner.

I wrote about the strange emails I'm getting from fans of GPT-4o ahead of its "retirement" and the danger of the model that always tells you what you want to hear www.platformer.news/gpt-4o-sunse...

Panic! at the Cisco

Exclusive: OpenAI disbanded its mission alignment team Joshua Achiam will become the company's chief futurist

OpenAI disbanded its mission alignment team, created in 2024 to promote the company's stated mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity, per @caseynewton.bsky.social @platformer.news.web.brid.gy

Exclusive: OpenAI disbanded its mission alignment team Joshua Achiam will become the company's chief futurist

NEW: OpenAI has disbanded its Mission Alignment team and transferred employees to other teams. Joshua Achiam, a leading voice on safety issues at the company, will become its chief futurist www.platformer.news/openai-missi...

Looney Tunes ass company

👮🏻🚨🚔

Tonight's Platformer has been delayed til tomorrow while we finish up some more reporting. 💪

“It’s not trying to get in your brain and rewire it,” Luis Li, YouTube’s lawyer, said of the app’s video recommendation algorithm. “It’s just asking you what you like to watch.”

How does this man think that rewiring brains works www.nytimes.com/2026/02/10/t...

I'm hearing that Big Tech is already doing the same thing with outside counsel — either tell them to do more for the same amount of money or accept a lower fee

But they are arriving at the fight in a weaker position than usual. In a polarized world, their failures around child safety are increasingly the one thing that partisans of every stripe can agree on. Regulators are no longer impressed by the bare minimum. (They have teenagers of their own now, and all the screen-time battles that come with them.) I don’t know which trial or regulatory action will be the one that finally forces major changes to social platforms for teenagers. But it seems increasingly clear that change is in fact coming. And for the first time, some subset of users will find that the feed they are scrolling through suddenly comes to an end.

The walls are closing in on infinite-scroll feeds and other addictive design mechanics. I wrote about how lawyers and regulators may have finally found a way around Section 230 www.platformer.news/social-media...

(looking deeply into your eyes) Farcaster and Merkle have joined Tempo following Merkle's sale of Farcaster to Neynar.

😵‍💫

Cool that people are covering this again. Would be cooler if they’d bothered to read any of the existing work on it (i.e., you know, mine) before getting basic stuff wrong.

Revealed: How Substack makes money from hosting Nazi newsletters Exclusive: Site takes a cut of subscriptions to content that promotes far-right ideology, white supremacy and antisemitism

For everyone who thought @caseynewton.bsky.social was overreacting when he left the platform, I give you: Substack Nazis. www.theguardian.com/media/2026/f...

Jailbreaking my ChatGPT-UAE to ask it how to flirt with a guy

🇫🇷🇫🇷🇫🇷

Beehiiv is another venture-backed company and I didn't want to be at the mercy of their investors. But I have lots of friends who are happily using it and if you're not planning to put your life's work there there's probably no harm in giving it a try

I’ve had many conversations with my fellow AI reporters about what moats we might have against the advancement of AI automation. Chief among them are developing relationships with human sources, reporting on scenes in person, and getting scoops that people wouldn’t entrust an AI with. But the things I love most about AI reporting are having an excuse to read really long computer science papers and then writing about them. I worry that if AI becomes a great writer and research assistant, AI journalism will mostly become about networking.

Last week @ellamarkianos.bsky.social pitched me on the idea of trying to replace herself with a bot. Ella is irreplaceable, but her piece on building "Claudella" is sharp, funny and moving www.platformer.news/journalism-j...

it appears so

Starting to think these weren’t really applied with the consideration required by law

Blame Bezos What a disaster

i really appreciated Brian Morrissey www.therebooting.com/p/blame-bezos

Most of the Washington Post’s tech reporters were laid off today, including me. I have loved my time at the paper, which is where I wanted to work from age 15. I take some consolation in not being among the survivors who will have to work harder with less for fewer readers. On to better things.

cover of The Washington Post on Wednesday Feb 4, 2026. Headline on bottom, right: Musk wanted to hook users; his chatbot got more sexual

My story on Elon Musk cutting safeguards at xAI is on the front page of today's @washingtonpost.com. I’m also among 100’s of reporters laid off. I absolutely loved my job my brilliant coworkers & the thrill of reporting @ the center of forces upending the world: AI & Silicon Valley’s political power

lizzie johnson @lizziejohnsonnn · 49m I was just laid off by The Washington Post in the middle of a warzone. I have no words. I'm devastated. Quote lizzie johnson @lizziejohnsonnn · Jan 25 Waking up without power, heat, or running water. (Again.) But the work here in Kyiv continues. Warming up in the car, writing in pencil — pen ink freezes — by headlamp.

INBOX: Washington Post Ukraine Correspondent Lizzie Johnson announces that she has been laid off in the middle of a below-freezing war zone without power, heat, or running water.

If Bilbo had Chat GPT

For years now, we’ve worried — justly — about the flattening effect that AI has on taste. Instead of encouraging us to pursue our own individual interests, it can feel as if AI only ever drags you back to the median. (My Hard Fork co-host Kevin Roose calls this “machine drift.”) If you have autoplay enabled on Spotify, you’ve likely experienced a version of this: the way that the algorithm will take a song that you mostly like and slowly ruin it for you over the course of weeks of relentless autoplaying. Prompted playlists, on the other hand, hand you back that lost agency. It’s an AI tool that helps you explore your own taste, rather than a system to replace it.

I wrote about using Spotify's new prompted playlists as a way to explore my own tastes again, instead of simply being dragged around by an algorithm www.platformer.news/spotify-prom...

honestly i would love to read a piece about the common links between the PR people here

The @nytimes.com coverage of France's Grok investigation casts it as part of a conflict between U.S. & European speech rules. That's true only if you buy Elon's version.

This is a case about CSAM and NCII. Those are crimes in France, and crimes in the U.S. There's no transatlantic divide here. 1/

Five ways of thinking about Moltbook What a social network for AI agents tells us about the future. PLUS: Elon consolidates the X empire

My main feeling about Moltbook is that a lot of things are going to happen in the next few years that make us say "something just like this happened on Moltbook" www.platformer.news/moltbook-ai-...