Chief correspondent at Business Insider. Host of Channels pod, every Weds. https://xitter.cf/t.co/eSOFgN7NrW Monkey via @andybyday. “Someone I like reluctantly.”
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Joined December 2006
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Professional news: I have two jobs! Very excited to start chatting again. Sara has the backstory below.
You can get tomorrow’s show - an interview with the New Yorker’s David Remnick - and every one after that, for free, by heading here link.chtbl.com/kafka
Big news for media biz: @pkafka bringing his infamous pod back to @voxmedia, rebranding it “Channels”
-He’ll remain w @BusinessInsider
-Will still be a weekly intv show
-Peter will own the show. Vox Media is production, distribution and sales partner
axios.com/2024/09/10/peter-k…
Learned this from @emollick
businessinsider.com/ai-jobs-…
I'm slowly discovering that the age of prompt engineering is basically over. It's so simple:
"You know, you should also build me a FPS. Insanely detailed quality pls, something that looks visually like it can keep up with AAA. Make it small in scope (like a tiny level) but otherwise impressive photorealistic graphics"
Peter Kafka retweeted
It's unfair to claim everybody speaking up for Jensen here is similarly compromised.
A fairer estimate is about *half* are compromised.
Earlier this fall there was a story that said Comcast wouldn't distribute the 4-hour Musk doc but Comcast said it would and here it is.
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Peter Kafka retweeted
I wrote about Google's widely misunderstood move to let schools opt out of AI only by disabling Google search; why it sort of makes sense from Google's standpoint; and why people are not wrong to be mad about it even if they got some of the details wrong. theatlantic.com/technology/2…
Peter Kafka retweeted
SCOOP: Anthropic has signed a content licensing deal—its first—with the Associated Press.
Through it, Anthropic gains access to election data in exchange for citing and paying the AP.
The deal marks a pivot for Anthropric, which had previously eschewed these arrangements.
Deeply cynical to describe Elon Musk's election efforts as a $446 million loss.
It's obviously a hyper-successful $446 million local media stimulus package.
politico.eu/article/elon-mus…
Peter Kafka retweeted
This Charles Porch/celebrity whisperer story is full of fun details about his glamorous life, but then it finally gets to the real question: why would celebrities embrace AI when unlike Instagram, normies hate it? The best answer suggested is “celebs are broke now” nymag.com/intelligencer/arti…
If AI means entry level jobs/apprenticeships go away, then "college" has to become something very different. says Wharton's @emollick
Mollick is a great AI chronicler. He can tell you what state of the art tech looks like - but just as important, how people are actually using it today.
Excerpts at BI businessinsider.com/ai-jobs-…
Whole deal at Channels podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas…
Peter Kafka retweeted
NEWS: A federal judge has again thrown out President Trump's defamation lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal, this time with prejudice
I've been waiting to hear from Amy Chozick, a major character in the Elizabeth Holmes/Nathan Fielder movie who never appears on screen.
She doesn't disappoint: A great piece that complicates the narrative about a movie that's all about how narratives are complicated.
nytimes.com/2026/10/30/opini…
Peter Kafka retweeted
On the Channels podcast this week, @emollick asked @pkafka to make an explainer video based on the transcript of their conversation.
I jumped in a made one with @synthesiaIO Syren. One prompt. Generated in two minutes.
🤖 Made with AI
Peter Kafka retweeted
I was scheduled to interview @marissamayer
about her new AI assistant, Dazzle, this past Monday.
Then, over the weekend, that anecdote in a New York Times profile of Mayer went viral, sparking a wave of criticism that eventually reached even TMZ.
If you somehow didn't see it, the anecdote involved Mayer using Dazzle to help describe one of her 10-year-old twin daughters for a school birthday celebration. By Wednesday, a post on this very app calling the use case “so bleak” had racked up more than 3 million views. I understood the immediate reaction. A quick reading could suggest that Mayer needed help from AI to identify three unique traits of her own daughter. The prevailing judgment online: How sad was that?
Still, I suspected there was more context. I've written enough profiles to know how much nuance can get lost when a single anecdote takes off like that. And while Silicon Valley's wealth bubble has surprised me plenty over the years, I had a hard time believing Mayer had simply asked an AI assistant to tell her what made her daughter special.
Plus, I'd wanted to interview Mayer well before the controversy. When she first announced Dazzle a few weeks earlier, we were smack in the middle of the Muse-Instinct craze. Mayer and Dazzle were taking a different approach, betting that screenshots and other photos in our phone camera rolls could provide an AI assistant with more useful context than connections to email or calendars.
I'd already spent some time testing Dazzle myself and had plenty of questions. How useful could an assistant built around our camera rolls really be? And how comfortable would people be giving it that kind of access?
So I was glad Mayer didn't cancel our interview Monday. We talked about the birthday slide controversy, of course, and the context she believes was missing.
Then we got into the questions about Dazzle that had made me want to interview her in the first place.
My full interview with Mayer, along with my own impressions from testing Dazzle, is in this week's edition of @ReadTheAisle: readtheaisle.com/p/marissa-m…
I'd love to hear what you think...
A nice writeup of my chat with Barry Diller today. A few other items:
*People Inc., which had tried to buy MGM, will start buying back its own stock instead.
*Diller thinks Skydance going for scale to chase Netflix is pointless bc Netflix won years ago.
*Diller has a big civic project planned for LA. Details to come soon.
businessinsider.com/barry-di…
Peter Kafka retweeted
Even the All-In guys seem to have given up on "super intelligence"
@jdcapelouto
Former CNN digital boss Andrew Morse has a new project: Taking on YouTube. Phareo.com launches in January, and promises to make video-watchers and video-makers happier. We discuss:
businessinsider.com/andrew-m…
Peter Kafka retweeted
if you're dressing as sexy AI slop fruit melodrama this year, please let me know
Peter Kafka retweeted
Ah well at least he didn’t make a joke about the decor of a popular casual dining chain
