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Archives for May 2026

Emma Roth
Emma Roth
Netflix will host the NFL’s first “Thanksgiving eve” game.
  • Season opener in Australia: 49ers vs. Rams
  • Thanksgiving eve: Packers vs. Rams
  • Two Christmas Day games
  • Week 18
Jay Peters
Jay Peters
This week in the big AI data center buildout.

AI data center projects are continuing to pop up across the US, with frequent opposition from locals concerned about their impact. Here are a few recent articles about the projects:

Jay Peters
Jay Peters
“Xbox or XBOX?”

Xbox boss Asha Sharma is running a poll on X where you can make your voice heard. Much to my dismay, as I write this, XBOX currently has about two thirds of the vote. I know the history, but I firmly believe we shouldn’t all-caps brand names.

What’s your vote?

Hayden Field
Hayden Field
We’re listening to an expert witness, David Hemel, a law professor at NYU.

He said that “for a large nonprofit organization, having for-profit affiliates is very much the norm.” When asked, he also said that oftentimes, the for-profit affiliate of a nonprofit is “quite large compared to the nonprofit,” and he gave the Mozilla Corporation (which owns the Firefox web browser) and the Mozilla Foundation as an example. Hemel also testified that he’s getting paid $1,750 an hour to be here.

Mia Sato
Mia Sato
Use Kalshi code VERGE for a $10 bonus.

Just kidding! But some news organizations are offering prediction market affiliate codes — and publishing thousands of stories pushing gambling deals. Popular Information reports that news orgs owned by Advance Local (including The Oregonian and The Cleveland Plain Dealer) are on track to run more than 14,000 pieces of “gambling slop” this year promoting deals for sportsbooks, casinos, and prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi.

Hayden Field
Hayden Field
During Elon Musk’s all-hands Q&A before departing OpenAI, Achiam said he felt Musk wanted to “race towards AGI.”

He said Musk was concerned about Google DeepMind and CEO Demis Hassabis and “expressed a lot of concerns about what would happen if DeepMind got to AGI first.” Achiam said he shared his concern that trying to “race” towards the technology was a “fairly unsafe proposition … He was proposing to do something that seemed … obviously unsafe and reckless.”

Elizabeth Lopatto
Elizabeth Lopatto
Achiam is running circles around this lawyer on cross, without doing the annoying things other witnesses have done.

She quotes a tweet of his saying that he believes Musk was doing his best for humanity. He asks when that was. She says, January 2025. He says, well he’s done some things that undermined my confidence since then.
There’s a brief redirect, and then Achiam steps down. No trophy for the jury. :(

Elizabeth Lopatto
Elizabeth Lopatto
During the all-hands, Musk expressed concerns about what would happen if DeepMind got to AGI first,

“It sounded like he wanted to race toward AGI.” That sounded unsafe to Achiam. “He was proposing to do something that seemed, based on our understanding at the time, obviously unsafe and reckless,” Achiam said. “We had a pretty tense exchange, and he snapped and called me a jackass.” There were 50 or 60 people at that meeting.

Elizabeth Lopatto
Elizabeth Lopatto
“It was a bit like seeing Bigfoot through Plexiglass,” Achiam says of seeing Elon Musk in the office.

He had a notable interaction with Musk, though, during the all-hands when Musk was departing the organization in Feb. 2018. Musk explained that he was leaving because he had a new conflict of interest with Tesla, which would be hiring from the same pool of researchers — and indicated a general lack of confidence in OpenAI’s path

Hayden Field
Hayden Field
Ilya Sutskever would get up on tables to give speeches in the early days of OpenAI.

That’s according to Josh Achiam, currently the company’s chief futurist, who joined in 2017. He said Sutskever’s impassioned speeches would typically be about the science-fiction-esque future that was approaching.

Hayden Field
Hayden Field
Achiam talked about the roles of Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever in OpenAI’s early days.

He said Brockman and Sutskever were the “main leaders,” and that Brockman was the “engineering workhorse that pushed to build scaled-up systems that would train the AI and make it work.” Achiam called Sutskever a “scientific visionary” who articulated what the future would be like, such as football fields of silicon chips making large-scale calculations.

Hayden Field
Hayden Field
Josh Achiam described what it was like to work at OpenAI in 2017.

He said when he joined, OpenAI was a team of about 50 people, and that it essentially felt like “an extension of a graduate student lab in a university” — a “collegiate, academic, super intellectual” environment — with most employees being either current PhD students or recent graduates. He said he appreciated that there wasn’t a “publish or perish” type of culture at the time.

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