Post

Karl Bode
@karlbode.com

It's time for another exciting round of "CEO said a thing!" journalism, where a tech CEO says a thing, then the press trips over itself to repeat that thing largely devoid of critical thinking or historical context

economictimes.indiatimes.com'Superintelligence' is the next big thing for OpenAI: Sam AltmanChatGPT maker OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman, in a recent blog post, wrote about the company's ambition to develop superintelligence. He discussed how scientific discovery and innovation could accelerate “w...

60 reposts282 likes

Bob
@bobisjim.bsky.social

She is very responsible for writing very favorable pieces about musk before he became Mr edgelord. Back when he was just a regular old charlatan. Just the height of access journalism

Karl Bode
@karlbode.com

she's cultivated a reputation as some kind of hard-nosed gonzo truth-to-power outsider journalist when she's the dictionary definition of access journalist

Karl Bode
@karlbode.com

CEO said a thing! clicking on 90% of these brings you to a story where the last fifty empty promises by this guy simply aren't mentioned, and there's nary a quote to be found by any actual academics pointing out this won't actually be happening

Karl Bode
@karlbode.com

if an outlet takes the actual time to report on something with deep context and expert quotes, they lose out on the mad rush for SEO ad engagement clicks, and you simply can't have that

Litbowl
@litbowl.bsky.social

It's like, 99% of tech "journalism". An example I shared yesterday: Once read a TechCrunch article that credibly reported Anthropic developers gushing over how Claude 3.5 might be AGI. They'd done a test where it found a misplaced sentence in the full text of Pride and Prejudice...

Litbowl
@litbowl.bsky.social

And it both found said sentence, and said "hmmm, am I being tested?" I spent literally 10 minutes testing. Broadly unreplicable. Best I could tell, their "superintelligence" was that it recognized the word "pizza" meant ibeing tested, because they'd repeatedly used the word "pizza" to test it.

Litbowl
@litbowl.bsky.social

It's so laughably dumb that THAT should be the news story. But the news story was just the developers' absurd claim. Would've taken literally 5-10 minutes of actual research for the article to have a much more interesting and useful and accurate story.

Miser
@themiser.bsky.social

Exactly. CEO vomits word salad that probably won't happen or more than likely be vaporware. In the process said CEO will con investors out of an obscene amount of money.

Karl Bode
@karlbode.com

yeah why bother! who needs to know that sort of thing! might as well completely omit the last five times the same CEO said something that didn't happen as well

Ben Blythe
@visitingwriter.bsky.social

The visual rhetoric of these things is always interesting because the CEO always dresses in the same type of costume and is always pictured from the same set of angles with near-identical expressions.