Casey Newton

Kevin Roose says Google DeepMind reported that four Gemini 4 Argon agents beat Minecraft without any human help in 27 hours and 14 minutes, costing $1,620 at Argon's planned 2027 price. The agents split up tasks, warned each other about threats, recovered items from dead teammates, and logged mistakes in a shared memory. They died 605 times and still finished the game.

Casey Newton says a seven-year-old can also beat Minecraft, and that a model is not AGI to him if it cannot beat Elden Ring. Kevin Roose says tech companies use video games as a training ground, and that Anthropic tested Claude on Pokemon. He says the path to the singularity leads through Minecraft and Pokemon.

Jared Krieger, the CEO of KG Growth Partners, said a bid for a downtown San Francisco mall is not a data center in the traditional sense. He called it a new category, a regenerative urban energy center. Casey Newton reads that line and says Americans do not want data centers nearby.

Kevin Roose says the SF Standard, in a story by Jessica Blough, reported that a technology company is interested in the San Francisco Centre mall, including the former Bloomingdale's, as a data center site. KG Growth Partners told the Standard it worked with that company on a bid for the entire mall. Kevin Roose says one way past the backlash is to put GPUs in dead malls and keep Dave and Buster's and Claire's.

Casey Newton says OpenAI fired Mikita Balesni, Tomek Korbak, and their colleague Jasmine Wang in early October, saying they had violated policies for handling sensitive information. The researchers dispute that. They say they did nothing wrong, and that the outside work was part of their jobs.

Kevin Roose says OpenAI posted on X that its investigation of Mikita, Tomek, and Jasmine found sensitive information policy violations and a breach beyond what they had described. The post denied that OpenAI fired them for raising safety concerns, and said the company remains committed to outside assessors and monitoring. Kevin Roose says he and Casey Newton had reached out to OpenAI and had not heard

Casey Newton says Elon Musk pledged on Monday to give one share of his company SpaceX to every kid in America next year. The offer arrived a day after Anthropic announced that it will commit 5% of its shares to a new public benefit fund. In a response to that post, Elon Musk wrote that he recommends giving the shares directly to the public. Casey Newton says the story comes from PBS.

Casey Newton calls the pledge a heartwarming story as the holidays approached, and he introduces Elon Musk as a famous philanthropist and also the person who dismantled USAID. He asks why anyone would set up an organization to disperse the money when the shares could go directly to children. Kevin Roose loves t

Tomek Korbak says he and Mikita Balesni both had disappearing messages turned on. He says that choice was maybe disappointing for an OpenAI security team that wanted to take photos of their conversations, and that for the two of them disappearing messages were a security best practice.

Casey Newton says some people view disappearing messages as suspicious and others see them as the most secure way to communicate. Tomek Korbak says that when you cannot see evidence of a leak, you would presume innocence, but that at OpenAI, when you are not able to prove your innocence, you are presumed guilty.

Casey Newton reported that the moderators make about $28,000 a year. The moderators often leave the job with post-traumatic stress caused by the rough working conditions of the job.