Reporter covering AI @WSJ | Formerly @WIRED, @TechCrunch, @markets | Send tips to my Signal username: mzeff.88
San Francisco, CA
Joined November 2020
- Tweets2.9K
- Following2.5K
- Followers11.4K
- Likes6.7K
Pinned Tweet
Personal news! I'm joining @WSJ to cover AI.
I've had an amazing time at WIRED working with brilliant colleagues across the newsroom, but I'm very excited for this next chapter. I'll continue to cover OpenAI, Anthropic, and the bustling AI industry. I start next week!
Max Zeff retweeted
EXCLUSIVE: Nvidia's board is moving to oust CEO Jensen Huang: wsj.com/business/nvidia-is-p…
interesting research from OpenAI on how AI models are getting more difficult to monitor through CoT, laying out a few reasons. One finding from the blog:
"... we expect further progress in pretraining to require new approaches to monitorability."
(1/10) Today, we’re sharing new research from @OpenAI: How does CoT monitorability (no-CoT capability and CoT controllability) evolve over the model training lifecycle?
We emerged with unsurprising but sobering findings: as we scale toward more intelligent systems, models are becoming harder to monitor through their CoT. 🧵
Max Zeff retweeted
Jensen Huang Apologized to Nvidia for His Infidelity. His Kids Are On Staff.
From and @RWhelanWSJ in @WSJ:
wsj.com/tech/ai/jensen-huang…
Max Zeff retweeted
Meta said it's starting to look abroad for its DCs & Anthropic warned about moratorium risks in its S-1. It's the new reality for AI firms, which are all facing the same question: Will I be able to get enough compute?
More here in my story w/ @ZeffMax: wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-companies…
Max Zeff retweeted
🚨 In Meta's first public comments since the election, President Dina Powell McCormick said the midterm results will make building data centers harder and that the company will have an easier time expanding existing data centers.
Pretty interesting to hear Greg Brockman’s candid comments on how OpenAI’s race with Anthropic has progressed over the course of 2026
He’s pretty blunt about how bad things were for OAI to start, but then Q3…
From his chat with @keachhagey at WSJ Tech tonight
Later in the chat, Brockman also acknowledged his and his wife’s decision to cancel a planned second $25 million donation to Leading the Future.
He followed this by saying that LTF has actually put out some good, nuanced stuff more recently 👀
3
6
844
Oh yea, and he broke some news that OpenAI is expanding its work with JP Morgan, particularly on stuff like cyber. Anthropic also has a deal to work with JP Morgan on cyber
wsj.com/tech/openai-had-roug…
6
559
oh!
Some news: I’m joining OpenAI to lead product management for Core Products!
I have a lot of respect for OpenAI for showing the world that scaling works, for bringing AI to over a billion people, and for believing great products are core to the mission.
I’m excited to work with @thsottiaux, an incredible PM team, and everyone across OpenAI. Together, we’ll build agents that have your back and your team’s, and keep you in control, so you get more time for the people and work you love.
Lots to learn, and lots to build. Please keep your feedback coming!
the actual clip of this exchange w/ Mike Hopkins and @jtoonkel is quite good: wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-m…
Max Zeff retweeted
It’s pretty remarkable that AI is in the same ballpark as issues like the Iran War and immigration. IMO AI seems like it could well make the difference in the 2028 presidential election, given the margins of prior elections and how fast AI’s salience is rising
Max Zeff retweeted
If you introduce the gun in the first act, well, no one has the patience anymore to wait for the second.
wsj.com/tech/apple-iphone-me…
👀
We’ve updated the Model Spec, our public description of how we want our models to behave. This revision makes clearer what we want from models as they take on more autonomous work in the world and become capable of helping us in new ways. 🧵
openai.com/index/updated-mod…
1
4
716
Max Zeff retweeted
Last month, OpenAI called in the three outspoken safety researchers and asked them to unlock their personal phones. It was conducting a leak investigation into a story in The Information about Astra’s use of opaque architectures, and the company’s plans to continue down that path. A week later, at 2 p.m., they were all fired.
Our story, w/ @ZeffMax and @berber_jin1 , looks at the battle over how much AI companies should share with third-party monitors like METR and Redwood to ensure AI safety wsj.com/tech/ai/the-signal-c… via @WSJ
New: The three researchers OpenAI fired last month spent the summer fighting to keep AI's chain-of-thought process visible.
Then, OpenAI asked to see their Signal chats. A week later, they were let go.
More below from @keachhagey, @berber_jin1, and me.
wsj.com/tech/ai/the-signal-c…
Max Zeff retweeted
We've decided to sunset Arc on December 22, 2026.
That's not an easy sentence to write. We spent years building Arc and celebrating each and every release along the way: we have so much pride and love for what we made alongside the Arc community.
Our priority is to deliver best-in-class security for our members. Keeping a browser secure takes constant, dedicated work that is only increasing in the age of AI. Dia was built from the ground up to meet today’s security standards, so that's where our engineering and security teams will focus moving forward.
We've worked to make switching to @diabrowser as easy as possible for Arc members. Here's how:
· Your passwords, bookmarks, extensions and history come over to Dia seamlessly.
· Spaces, Folders, and Tab Groups are in Dia and import over with your data intact.
· Dia now surpasses Arc benchmarks in stability, speed, and security.
· The browser features you use in Arc are free in Dia, and the AI is optional.
Thank you for using Arc, for pushing us to make it better, and for building alongside us. The team that made Arc is the same team behind Dia, and some of our most ambitious work is just ahead. We'd love for you to be there with us when it lands.
Max Zeff retweeted
SCOOP: Anthropic's latest draft S-1 documents show financials results for the first half of the year, gigantic spending plans for the future, and a laundry list of risk factors.
- Anthropic recorded a net loss of $80.7 billion in the first half of the year, tied to accounting adjustments related to previous financings
- Anthropic is set to spend >$600 billion on compute in the coming years, inclusive of cloud agreements and chip leases.
More in @WSJ:
seems like a notable update!
interpretability might be the most important scientific problem in the world right now, as I don't think we can solve alignment if we don't know what we're building. I think I have good news about it. I co-authored early work in mechanistic interpretability at OpenAI and came away pessimistic, because neural networks appeared to fold into arbitrary tangled knots. years later, I started openai's first large-scale automated interpretability project, finding about 2% of neurons legible with the primitive tools we had
with modern agentic tools and a much closer look, the picture looks totally different. the vast majority in models up to trillions of parameters are legible, and their circuits beautiful. many famous examples of tangled neurons turned out to be misunderstood. The roadblocks I expected mostly aren't there. I now think ambitious interpretability will be solved by the time we need it most, and possibly quite soon, as automated scientists keep improving. it may be a bitter lesson for interpretability: the simple thing, at absurd scale, works
already-clean.goodfire.com/
4
863