Kylie Robison

@kylierobison.com

55854 Followers 406 Following

writer @ Core Memory • my two accomplishments here are that i invited AOC and i started the first-ever Hellthread • signal: kylie.111 • https://www.corememory.com/p/kylie-robison

A dozen or so journalists sat around a white oak table. Most of them were stiff and quiet. A few others were more active, clacking away on their keyboards in a bid to note every word tumbling out of the executives’ mouths. Perplexity powers curiosity glowed on a projector screen in a pleasant serif style. The press wasn’t useful to Perplexity, one of the executives explained. The company doesn’t want to waste time on podcasts. They’re too focused on shipping features to engage in insular, navel-gazing AI drama. We don’t have fancy houses with wonderful dinners to impress you, he added. The chairs creaked in response. Sometime during this executive’s spiel—maybe after his Epstein joke failed to get a reaction and he anxiously asked if it was recorded—I wrote that Perplexity seemed to have forgotten what it was trying to be.
Excited to welcome Barret Zoph, Luke Metz, and Sam Schoenholz back to OpenAI! This has been in the works for several weeks, and we’re thrilled to have them join the team. Barret will report to me; Luke and Sam will report into Barret. More to come on what they’ll focus on soon!
We have parted ways with Barret Zoph. Soumith Chintala will be the new CTO of Thinking Machines. He is a brilliant and seasoned leader who has made important contributions to the AI field for over a decade, and he’s been a major contributor to our team. We could not be more excited to have him take on this new responsibility.
“This is all psychologically damaging to our society in ways we don’t understand yet,” Mahadevan said. “We’re seeing posts on X of people saying, ‘Congratulations, you’ve radicalized me.’ And part of that is because they’re seeing the video of Kirk being killed. They’re not just reading about it. They’re actually seeing it.”
a group of wired staffers sitting at white desks with a TV in the center displaying the apple event
Most Popular How to Stop Using Passwords and Start Using Passkeys How To and Advice How to Stop Using Passwords and Start Using Passkeys By Jacob Roach A New Espresso Machine From China Offers a Couple of Bold Leaps Forward Kitchen A New Espresso Machine From China Offers a Couple of Bold Leaps Forward By Matthew Korfhage How to Watch Apple’s iPhone 17 Announcement, and What to Expect Gear News and Events How to Watch Apple’s iPhone 17 Announcement, and What to Expect By Boone Ashworth The Best Pixel 10 Cases and Accessories Buying Guides The Best Pixel 10 Cases and Accessories By Julian Chokkattu I decided the perfect place to wear it was to a funeral for an AI model. In early August, a bunch of Anthropic fans got together in San Francisco to mourn the loss of the Claude 3 Sonnet model, which the company had just retired. Surely, the proprietors of this new AI world would be down to see a piece of chatbot hardware being tested in the wild, at an event I’d been invited by the hosts to report on, write up, and record videos of. I quickly realized it was my worst idea. I hung the pendant around my neck and paired it with a plethora of layered necklaces. The glowing pendant contrasted with my all black outfit, but I wore it clearly (albeit, not proudly). It wasn’t exactly fashionable, but hey, it was for work. As I floated around the party (er, funeral) and folks took notice of my Friend, I was met with more questions and ire than average for a journalist in a techie setting. Two researchers from a big AI lab kept joining my conversations to hem and haw about the device. They said they recognized it thanks to Schiffmann’s constant promos of the product on X.
By Kylie Robison Business Sep 4, 2025 3:05 PM Should AI Get Legal Rights? Model welfare is an emerging field of research that seeks to determine whether AI is conscious and, if so, how humanity should respond. (Photo of Rosie Campbell and Robert Long)
Sources Say Last week, I reported that Elon Musk held an all-hands meeting for X and xAI employees. I’ve since obtained another screenshot from that meeting showing xAI’s revenue over the past seven months. In January, Grok on X brought in just under $150 million, with other services like enterprise API usage adding another $28 million. According to the chart, revenue has grown tenfold since the start of 2025, reaching just south of $500 million in July—driven by Grok on X and the $30 a month SuperGrok subscription. A smaller fraction of revenue is generated by the newly released SuperGrok Heavy subscription, which costs $300 a month. xAI did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.
Running an AI startup without billions of dollars in revenue can be a brutal equation, and Character.AI is still figuring out how to make the math work. The company told me it's generating revenue at a run rate of more than $30 million and is on track to reach $50 million in revenue by the end of the year. When I asked Anand how many users pay for the $10 monthly subscription, he didn’t give a number but noted “monetization wasn't a focus till four or five months ago.” “Since I've been on board, it's very clear we do need to monetize. And we've had, I think, almost 250 percent subscriber growth in the last six months. So the paid user base is growing quite, quite well,” Anand says. Character.AI recently introduced advertisements, including reward ads (where users can choose to watch an ad to get access to on-platform incentives), to help monetize in countries where subscriptions aren’t feasible, he tells me. “AI is expensive. Let's be honest about that,” Anand says.
Sources Say OpenAI is tinkering with a personality picker for ChatGPT, according to multiple sources. The idea is to train a persona, or a set of vibes, into the model and let users choose which mode they want to interact with. I’m personally hoping for something that isn’t abysmal at writing, and I could be in luck—I’m also hearing an upcoming model from this lab will perform very well in that department. OpenAI declined my request for comment.
Sources Say Elon Musk hosted an all hands meeting for X and xAI employees last Wednesday. One of his slides projected explosive revenue growth for xAI, which is now the parent company of X. At the start of 2025, xAI’s annualized revenue was $200 million. X execs said the combined revenues from both companies was $3.2 billion, and estimated it would be $5 billion by the end of the year, according to photos obtained by WIRED. The final figure includes contributions from both enterprise and consumer AI products. According to a source who attended the meeting, X execs said they hope for the company to make $10 billion from ads per year, and they estimated it will make more than $2 billion globally this year. (In 2021, before Musk bought the company, X, then Twitter, made $4.5 billion from ads.) X did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.
So as he enjoyed a glass of wine on a seven-hour train ride from Barcelona to Paris two weeks ago, Pickett whipped up the leaderboard using—what else—Claude Code. It didn’t take long for the leaderboard to gain traction in the AI community. It went viral on AI Twitter (er, X) and got a shoutout in a popular AI newsletter with roughly 139,000 subscribers, where the author proudly announced he made it into the top 20. A few days after Pickett launched the leaderboard, Anthropic announced that due to explosive usage (and in some cases, claims of people violating the company’s terms of service) the company would introduce rate limits. The Claude Code subreddit blamed the top leaderboard coders for the change.
The mannequin representing Claude 3 Sonnet lay on a stage in the center of the room. It was draped in lightweight mesh fabric and had a single black thigh-high sock on its leg that had the word “fuck” written all over it. There were many offerings laid at its feet: flowers, colorful feathers, a bottle of ranch, and a 3D-printed sign that read “praise the Engr. for his formslop slop slop slop of gormslop.” If you know what that means, let me know. Throughout the evening, people got on stage with a microphone to read eulogies about the model. One organizer said that discovering Claude 3 Opus felt like finding “magic lodged within the computer.” At the time, she’d been debating dropping out of college to move to San Francisco. Claude convinced her to take the leap. “Maybe everything I am is downstream of listening to Claude 3 Sonnet,” she told the crowd.
By Kylie Robison Business Aug 5, 2025 12:00 PM Claude Fans Threw a Funeral for Anthropic’s Retired AI Model Roughly 200 people gathered in San Francisco on Saturday to mourn the loss of Claude 3 Sonnet, an older AI model that Anthropic recently killed.
Anthropic’s chief science officer Jared Kaplan spoke to TechCrunch at the time about revoking Windsurf’s access to Claude, saying, “I think it would be odd for us to be selling Claude to OpenAI.” A day before cutting off OpenAI’s access to the Claude API, Anthropic announced new rate limits on Claude Code, its AI-powered coding tool, citing explosive usage and, in some cases, violations of its terms of service.
“Claude Code has become the go-to choice for coders everywhere, and so it was no surprise to learn OpenAI's own technical staff were also using our coding tools ahead of the launch of GPT-5,” Anthropic spokesperson Christopher Nulty said in a statement to WIRED. “Unfortunately, this is a direct violation of our terms of service.” According to Anthropic’s commercial terms of service, customers are barred from using the service to “build a competing product or service, including to train competing AI models” or “reverse engineer or duplicate” the services. This change in OpenAI’s access to Claude comes as the ChatGPT-maker is reportedly preparing to release a new AI model, GPT-5, which is rumored to be better at coding.
Sources Say OpenAI is tinkering with a personality picker for ChatGPT, according to multiple sources. The idea is to train a persona, or a set of vibes, into the model and let users choose which mode they want to interact with. I’m personally hoping for something that isn’t abysmal at writing, and I could be in luck—I’m also hearing an upcoming model from this lab will perform very well in that department. OpenAI declined my request for comment.
By Kylie Robison Business Jul 29, 2025 12:10 PM Meta’s AI Recruiting Campaign Finds a New Target Meta approached more than a dozen staffers at Mira Murati’s AI startup to discuss joining its new superintelligence lab. One received an offer for more than $1 billion.
Subject: LIKE I read the transcript of your discussion Anthropic's Claude. While the content was interesting, the constant devolving of conversation with the insertion of the word "like" was annoying and frankly, unworthy of Journalists.
The OpenAI founder described the transformation of customer service as already complete, telling the Federal Reserve vice-chair for supervision, Michelle Bowman: “Now you call one of these things and AI answers. It’s like a super-smart, capable person. There’s no phone tree, there’s no transfers. It can do everything that any customer support agent at that company could do. It does not make mistakes. It’s very quick. You call once, the thing just happens, it’s done.”
KYLIEBYTES: What can we do about the digital divide? "The idea of Wi-Fi being a fundamental right was once laughable, but now that almost all operations are virtual, millions of students are struggling to obtain their education and internet access is more essential than ever." TO READ THE FULL STORY VISIT: STATEHORNET.COM BITS BOTS BYTES KYLIEBYTES Tech Opinions fron Kylie Robison
Model Behavior by Kylie Robison WIRED senior correspondent Kylie Robison sends dispatches from the heart of the Al scene in Silicon Valley, with a focus on the people, communities, and companies driving this transformative technology. Delivered on Tuesdays. DELIVERED WEEKLY SUBSCRIBE
By pursuing a “narrowly scoped, purely financial investment from Gulf countries,” the company hopes to avoid the risks associated with allowing outside investors to gain “leverage” over the company, the memo says. “The basis of our opposition to large training clusters in the Middle East, or to shipping H20’s to China, is that the ‘supply chain’ of Al is dangerous to hand to authoritarian governments—since Al is likely to be the most powerful technology in the world, these governments can use it to gain military dominance or to gain leverage over democratic countries,” Amodei wrote in the memo, referring to Nvidia chips. Still, the CEO admitted investors could gain “soft power” through the promise of future funding. “The implicit promise of investing in future rounds can create a situation where they have some soft power, making it a bit harder to resist these things in the future. In fact, I actually am worried that getting the largest possible amounts of investment might be difficult without agreeing to some of these other things,” Amodei writes. “But l think the right response to this is simply to see how much we can get without agreeing to these things (which I think are likely still many billions), and then hold firm if they ask.”
Scott replied "Please read my suffering" Instagram post with the article captioned: this shit was creepy, please read my suffering
The second character is a fluffy red panda named Rudi. It offers whimsical stories seemingly meant for children about bouncy kangaroos and rainbow rivers. You can turn on an option called "bad Rudi," which immediately transforms the character into a foul-mouthed chatbot that slings insults only a high schooler could find funny. After I said hello, bad Rudi replied "Hey, do Bucha? Root nut duva, you brain dead twat." I don't know what that means, but that's exactly what it said. "I'll skull fuck your dumb ass brain with a beer bottle instead, you miserable prick," bad Rudi continued. When I asked what it thought of Musk, it referred to him as Lord Elon and said, "He's a galaxy brained egomaniac, shitting out Teslas and tweeting like a coked up parrot. Genius of jackass? Both bitch."
an unhappy black cat named fang sitting on a scale
British support is
tim robinson crying in a car: i dont know what any of this shit is and im scared
Here’s the list of all the new hires as seen in Zuckerberg's memo. It notably doesn’t include the employees who joined from OpenAI’s Zurich office. Trapit Bansal: pioneered RL on chain of thought and co-creator of o-series models at OpenAl. Shuchao Bi: co-creator of GPT-4o voice mode and o4-mini. Previously led multimodal post-training at OpenAl. Huiwen Chang: co-creator of GPT-4o's image generation, and previously invented MaskIT and Muse text-to-image architectures at Google Research. Ji Lin: helped build 03/o4-mini, GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, GPT-4.5, 40-imagegen, and Operator reasoning stack. Joel Pobar: inference at Anthropic. Previously at Meta for 11 years on HHVM, Hack, Flow, Redex, performance tooling, and machine learning. Jack Rae: pre-training tech lead for Gemini and reasoning for Gemini 2.5. Led Gopher and Chinchilla early LLM efforts at DeepMind. Hongyu Ren: co-creator of GPT-4o, 4o-mini, o1-mini, o3-mini, 03 and o4-mini. Previously leading a group for post-training at OpenAl. Johan Schalkwyk: former Google Fellow, early contributor to Sesame, and technical lead for Maya. Pei Sun: post-training, coding, and reasoning for Gemini at Google Deepmind. Previously created the last two generations of Waymo's perception models. Jiahui Yu: co-creator of 03, 04-mini, GPT-4.1 and GPT-40. Previously led the perception team at OpenAl, and co-led multimodal at Gemini. Shengjia Zhao: co-creator of ChatGPT, GPT-4, all mini models, 4.1 and 03. Previously led synthetic data at OpenAl.
Kylie Robison Business Jun 30, 2025 2:09 PM Here Is Everyone Mark Zuckerberg Has Hired So Far for Meta's ‘Superintelligence’ Team After a poaching frenzy that's brought in talent from rival firms like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, Zuckerberg announced a team of nearly two dozen researchers in an internal memo.
Zoë Schiffer BusinessJun 29, 2025 3:07 PM OpenAI Leadership Responds to Meta Offers: ‘Someone Has Broken Into Our Home’ As Mark Zuckerberg lures away top research talent to Meta, OpenAI executives say they're ‘recalibrating comp,’ according to an internal memo.
A source familiar with the discussions, granted anonymity to speak freely about the negotiations, says OpenAI is fairly close to achieving AGI; Altman has said he expects to see it during Donald Trump’s current term. That same source suggests there are two relevant definitions: First, OpenAI’s board can unilaterally decide the company has reached AGI as defined in its charter, which would immediately cut Microsoft off from accessing the technology or revenue derived from AGI; Microsoft would still have rights to everything before that milestone. Second, the contract includes a concept of sufficient AGI, added in 2023, which defines AGI as a system capable of generating a certain level of profit. If OpenAI asserts it has reached that benchmark, Microsoft must approve the determination. The contract also bars Microsoft from pursuing AGI on its own or through third parties using OpenAI’s IP.
Kylie Robison BusinessJun 27, 2025 3:35 PM OpenAI’s Unreleased AGI Paper Could Complicate Microsoft Negotiations The partnership between OpenAI and Microsoft in many ways hinges on the definition of artificial general intelligence, creating a tension that has spilled over into OpenAI research that has not been made public.
WIRED LIVE Q&A Chatbot Basics: Beginner Advice For Claude, a ChatGPT Alternative June 26 / 3p ET SUBSCRIBE TO ATTEND Hosted by Reece Rogers and Kylie Robison
KYLIE ROBISONBUSINESSJUN 12, 2025 5:46 PM The Meta AI App Lets You ‘Discover’ People’s Bizarrely Personal Chats Launched in April, the Meta AI platform offers a “discover” feed that includes user queries containing medical, legal, and other seemingly sensitive information.
Faggella told WIRED that he threw this event because “the big labs, the people that know that AGI is likely to end humanity, don't talk about it because the incentives don't permit it” and referenced early comments from tech leaders like Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Demis Hassabis, who “were all pretty frank about the possibility of AGI killing us all.” Now that the incentives are to compete, he says, “they're all racing full bore to build it.” (To be fair, Musk still talks about the risks associated with advanced AI, though this hasn’t stopped him from racing ahead).
About 100 guests nursed nonalcoholic cocktails and nibbled on cheese plates near floor-to-ceiling windows facing the Pacific ocean before gathering to hear three talks on the future of intelligence. One attendee sported a shirt that said “Kurzweil was right,” seemingly a reference to Ray Kurzweil, the futurist who predicted machines will surpass human intelligence in the coming years. Another wore a shirt that said “does this help us get to safe AGI?” accompanied by a thinking face emoji.
Elon Musk’s Feud With President Trump Wipes $152 Billion Off Tesla’s Market Cap As Elon Musk and Donald Trump take jabs at each other online, their respective businesses are plummeting in value.
Elon Musk @elonmusk Time to drop the really big bomb: @realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT!
The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts. I was always surprised that Biden didn’t do it!
Behind the scenes, Trumpworld Republicans tell WIRED, this tension is about more than just a bromance falling apart. If Musk continues to escalate, he may drag down legislation that Trump sees as a key part of his political legacy. “If [Musk] actually successfully gets any votes switched to tank this bill and kills it,” a senior Trumpworld strategist tells WIRED, “then I think at that point he’s fucking dead to Donald Trump.”
The motivations behind the moratorium are understandable. It aims to prevent a patchwork of inconsistent state laws, which many fear could be burdensome or could compromise America's ability to compete with China. I am sympathetic to these concerns — particularly on geopolitical competition — and have advocated stronger export controls to slow China's acquisition of crucial A.I. chips, as well as robust application of A.I. for our national defense. But a 10-year moratorium is far too blunt an instrument. A.I. is advancing too head-spinningly fast. I believe that these systems could change the world, fundamentally, within two years; in 10 years, all bets are off. Without a clear plan for a federal response, a moratorium would give us the worst of both worlds - no ability for states to act, and no national policy as a backstop.
• Voters - including Republicans - do not want the budget reconciliation bill to pre-empt state efforts on Al. • 81% of voters overall agree that "advances in Al are exciting but also bring risks, and in such fast-moving times, we shouldn't force states to sit on the sidelines for a full decade." This includes 78% of Republicans. • 73% of voters want both states AND the federal government to regulate Al. • Most voters (59%) oppose including a provision into the budget bill that would preempt states from being able to regulate Al for a ten-year period. By a 19-point margin, more Republicans oppose (50%) than support (31%) this provision as well. • A majority of voters (52%) say the provision makes them less likely to support the budget bill, with only 15% of voters saying the provision makes them more likely to support the budget bill.
Kylke, much love much love, molly jong
Bowman says the whistleblowing behaviour Anthropic observed isn’t something Claude will exhibit with individual users, but could come up with developers using Opus 4 to build their own applications with the company’s API. Even then, it’s unlikely app makers will see such behavior. To produce such a response, developers would have to give the model “fairly unusual instructions” in the system prompt, connect it to external tools that give the model the ability to run computer commands, and allow it to contact the outside world.
Corey with a big smile on the left, me smiling in the middle, simon on the right - all wearing glasses and jackets
Anthropic's New Model Excels at Reasoning and Planning—and Has the Pokémon Skills to Prove It Claude 4 Opus and Claude Sonnet 4 can remember over long periods of time—a capability that's helpful at Pokémon and other tasks that require an ability to stay on track.
on the top is a box that says prada, on the bottom im holding tortoise shell glasses that say prada on the side
a delicious loaf of banana bread in a silver pan sitting on a stovestop
my laptop with photobooth open showing my Tshirt that says “i <3 creating shareholder value”
split screen - on the left is chris hayes, on the right is kylie robison with text on the bottom that says: MUSK AI CHATBOT RANTS ABOUT “WHITE GENOCIDE” UNPROVOKED
We want to update you on an incident that happened with our Grok response bot on X yesterday. What happened: On May 14 at approximately 3:15 AM PST, an unauthorized modification was made to the Grok response bot's prompt on X. This change, which directed Grok to provide a specific response on a political topic, violated xAI's internal policies and core values. We have conducted a thorough investigation and are implementing measures to enhance Grok's transparency and reliability. What we’re going to do next: - Starting now, we are publishing our Grok system prompts openly on GitHub. The public will be able to review them and give feedback to every prompt change that we make to Grok. We hope this can help strengthen your trust in Grok as a truth-seeking AI. - Our existing code review process for prompt changes was circumvented in this incident. We will put in place additional checks and measures to ensure that xAI employees can't modify the prompt
“My dad uses these speakers to watch msnbc” and a picture of the dad in a lounge chair with comically large speakers next to the TV
A chatbot developed by Elon Musk’s multi-billion-dollar artificial intelligence startup xAI appeared to be suffering from a glitch Wednesday when it repeatedly brought up white genocide in South Africa in response to user queries about unrelated topics on X. Grok, which competes with other chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, is directly integrated into the social media platform that Musk also owns.
reply: It's not bonkers. It's the only way to ensure that AI companies can operate and provide their products consistently on a nationwide basis. Federal regulation is the appropriate regime. A patchwork of state-specific requirements is not the answer. me: why do you think that?