I’m back! Did you miss me? Now here I go again, rotting my one precious brain… While the normies were resting, I was mainlining tech discourse all weekend to bring you the latest trends, rumors, fights, and innovations from the sweatiest corners of the internet. This week: Two attacks on Altman’s home, Justin Bieber shares his screen, and Iranian propagandists speak our (infantile) language.
This is Manic Monday.
Attacking Sam Altman IRL
The biggest story of the weekend was the series of attacks on OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s Russian Hill home. On Friday, a 20-year-old man allegedly hurled a Molotov cocktail toward a metal gate outside the house around 3:40 a.m. Two days later, two alleged assailants pulled up to the property in a Honda sedan and appeared to fire a round toward the house at around 2 a.m. The three suspects, all in their early 20s, were quickly arrested by the San Francisco Police Department.
The ensuing discourse is now centered on how, exactly, we arrived at this situation. Who is responsible for this escalation? After the Molotov cocktail incident, Altman posted a blog where he acknowledged that anxiety about AI is justified — he himself has said, famously, how he believes AI will probably kill us all. But he also pointed the finger at the media, specifically at a recent New Yorker article that laid out a great deal of evidence, compiled by Altman’s former colleagues, that he is an untrustworthy steward of such powerful technology. To equate well-researched criticism with a call for violence is a bad faith argument; Altman is a person, sure, but he is also a leader of a global arms race whose behavior and motives must be scrutinized. Others online also pointed to how, in AI founders’ circles, casual cruelty toward the working and middle classes has become a gleeful meme. I hate to end on a cliché, but you know what they say about great power…
On a lighter and more absurdist note, there’s a store in Cow Hollow run entirely by AI
Or so says Andon Labs, the Y Combinator-backed startup that opened Andon Market at 2102 Union St. last Friday. Here’s the skinny: Andon Labs wants to “prepare the world for AGI,” or artificial general intelligence, by starting IRL organizations without any human decision-makers. The two founders gave their AI $100,000 to start a business — any business — and turn a profit. Crazy, right? Wrong! This set of parameters inspired nothing more than a boring shoppy shop with a manager who lies and is bad at scheduling shifts. Hello! We have those already! I’d rather stroll down the block and let the Orb scan my eyeballs at the Marina Gap store. At least that has some mystique to it.
The possibly dire situation with an actually revolting name
Earlier last week, executives at Anthropic said that they would hold a wide release of their newest model, Claude Mythos Preview, due to concerns that it was, in fact, too good at spotting security vulnerabilities in software, making the model a powerful weapon in the hands of a hacker. Digital banks, hospital systems, manufacturing software — anything could be breached. Some are calling it the vulnpocalypse. Both the concept and the name make me queasy.
Step aside Marina Abramović
This weekend, Justin Bieber graced the Coachella stage for a 90-minute set, where he spent most of the last half in front of his laptop scrolling YouTube. Obviously, many fans who spent thousands of dollars to get dust poisoning or whatever in Indio just to hear their childhood hero sing full versions of nostalgic anthems were rather disappointed. But our newsroom thought it was kind of based. We are a slop society that sloppified a once-great festival by making everyone influencers sponsored by Revolve and Starbucks. Entertainment that goes down too easy feels a bit icky now. The healthiest thing we can consume now is unflashy, occasionally off-putting performance art that makes you wonder what the f— we’re all doing anyway. Refreshing stuff. Thanks, Biebs!
Iranian propagandists clock us as lowbrow iPad babies
And on the note of how we’re a slop society, we at Gazetteer also got a gallows humor sort of kick out of the surge of pro-Iran propaganda videos that use AI-generated LEGO scenes to convince Americans that War Maybe Bad.
The week ahead: Cocomelon gets red-pilled in its new nursery rhyme, “See Daddy Dodge the Draft!”
