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Kelsey Piper

Kelsey Piper

Vox

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In seven years, here’s what I got right and what I missed

I’ve been at Vox since Future Perfect, our section devoted to tackling the world’s most important and unreported problems, launched in 2018, and I...

01.08.2025 10

Vox

Kelsey Piper

You can get unfathomably rich building AI. Should you?

It’s a good time to be a highly in-demand AI engineer. To lure leading researchers away from OpenAI and other competitors, Meta has reportedly...

18.07.2025 10

Vox

Kelsey Piper

Grok’s MechaHitler disaster is a preview of AI disasters to come

From the beginning, Elon Musk has marketed Grok, the chatbot integrated into X, as the unwoke AI that would give it to you straight, unlike the...

11.07.2025 20

Vox

Kelsey Piper

A million kids won’t live to kindergarten because of this disastrous decision

The deadliest country in the world for young children is South Sudan — the United Nations estimates that about 1 in 10 children born there won’t...

27.06.2025 40

Vox

Kelsey Piper

AI doesn’t have to reason to take your job

In 2023, one popular perspective on AI went like this: Sure, it can generate lots of impressive text, but it can’t truly reason — it’s all...

20.06.2025 7

Vox

Kelsey Piper

What drove the tech right’s — and Elon Musk’s — big, failed bet on Trump

I live and work in the San Francisco Bay Area, and I don’t know anyone who says they voted for Donald Trump in 2016 or 2020. I know, on the other...

13.06.2025 7

Vox

Kelsey Piper

AI can now stalk you with just a single vacation photo

For decades, digital privacy advocates have been warning the public to be more careful about what we share online. And for the most part, the public...

06.06.2025 6

Vox

Kelsey Piper

Harvard just fired a tenured professor for the first time in 80 years. Good.

In the summer of 2023, I wrote about a shocking scandal at Harvard Business School: Star professor Francesca Gino had been accused of falsifying data...

30.05.2025 5

Vox

Kelsey Piper

One chilling forecast of our AI future is getting wide attention. How realistic is it?

Let’s imagine for a second that the impressive pace of AI progress over the past few years continues for a few more.  In that time period, we’ve...

23.05.2025 3

Vox

Kelsey Piper

How we stretched our aviation system to the brink

Air travel is remarkably, astonishingly safe.  Every year, commercial US airlines take more than 800 million domestic passengers to their...

16.05.2025 7

Vox

Kelsey Piper

I pushed AI assistants to their limits, so you don’t have to. Here’s what really works.

Staying on top of AI developments is a full-time job.  I would know, because it’s my full-time job. I subscribe to Anthropic’s Pro mode for...

12.05.2025 5

Vox

Kelsey Piper

Progressives should care that the global population is set to fall

At the dawn of the Covid pandemic, I wrote a newsletter about the approaching virus that highlighted what I saw as the biggest risk: that the question...

10.05.2025 7

Vox

Kelsey Piper

Smallpox used to kill millions of people every year. Here’s how humans beat it.

More than a million Americans have died of Covid-19, while the global death toll stands at over 15 million. It has been a horrifying and largely...

08.05.2025 2500

Vox

Kelsey Piper

When an AI tells you you’re perfect

A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here! Last week, OpenAI released a new update to its core...

02.05.2025 5

Vox

Kelsey Piper

Who should control OpenAI? Humanity.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here! Right now, OpenAI is something unique in the landscape...

24.04.2025 10

Vox

Kelsey Piper

The immigration fix hiding in plain sight

What should America’s immigration policy be?  This might seem like an absurd question to ask in a year when our current immigration agenda involves...

19.04.2025 20

Vox

Kelsey Piper

In defense of cheap things

A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here! We live in a consumerist society. But at least speaking...

11.04.2025 10

Vox

Kelsey Piper

A government that can really do things sounds good. But is it?

The buzzword of the past couple of weeks is Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book about why we stopped being able to build things in...

28.03.2025 4

Vox

Kelsey Piper

America — and the media — needs a Covid reckoning

In the first few months of the Covid-19 pandemic, the media did not exactly cover itself in glory. To quote myself from an early February 2020 piece,...

21.03.2025 3

Vox

Kelsey Piper

China’s new AI agent Manus calls its own shots

Modern large language models are really good at a lot of tasks, like coding, essay writing, translation, and research. But there are still a lot of...

14.03.2025 20

Vox

Kelsey Piper

Killing PEPFAR means killing millions of people

A lot has happened in the last six weeks, to put it mildly, and it can be hard to see through the dust and tell what’s actually ongoing.  The...

08.03.2025 10

Vox

Kelsey Piper

Trump wants America to shine on AI. DOGE is blundering it.

One of the big challenges of reporting on the new administration is that it’s hard to figure out who’s really calling the shots. Take AI. In his...

22.02.2025 10

Vox

Kelsey Piper

Why Elon Musk offered to buy the OpenAI nonprofit

It’s been a busy week for Elon Musk. He says he’s saving taxpayers billions of dollars (though outlays from the Treasury Department are public and...

14.02.2025 10

Vox

Kelsey Piper

The right’s flirtation with degrowth, explained

Over the last few years, I’ve written a lot about degrowth ideology, the view that the only way to save the planet is to abandon economic growth as...

07.02.2025 7

Vox

Kelsey Piper

You’re wrong about DeepSeek

Last week I told you about the Chinese AI company DeepSeek’s recent model releases and why they’re such a technical achievement. The DeepSeek...

31.01.2025 30

Vox

Kelsey Piper

OpenAI’s new anti-jobs program

On Tuesday, I was thinking I might write a story about the implications of the Trump administration’s repeal of the Biden executive order on AI....

24.01.2025 10

Vox

Kelsey Piper

There are no grown-ups in California

Wildfires are on the mind here in California. It’s still not clear exactly to what degree the devastating Los Angeles fires were the product of...

17.01.2025 7

Vox

Kelsey Piper

How the Los Angeles fires highlight the challenge of disaster relief

The wildfires engulfing the Los Angeles area might reshape what Southern California will look like for years to come. Within a week, approximately...

15.01.2025 50

Vox

Kelsey Piper

It’s getting harder to measure just how good AI is getting

Toward the end of 2024, I offered a take on all the talk about whether AI’s “scaling laws” were hitting a real-life technical wall. I argued...

12.01.2025 10

Vox

Kelsey Piper

A whole new thing that could end the world

We’re all inured to sensationalist headlines about some disaster or another on the horizon. So I don’t blame anyone who was exhausted when they saw...

03.01.2025 10

Vox

Kelsey Piper

What really mattered in 2024

At the end of every year, journalists like to look back and see where our predictions held up or fell flat, what were the year’s biggest events,...

13.12.2024 30

Vox

Kelsey Piper

Giving Tuesday, explained

03.12.2024 100

Vox

Kelsey Piper

Don’t wait: The case for giving sooner rather than later

02.12.2024 20

Vox

Kelsey Piper

How to raise kids who give back to the world

26.11.2024 20

Vox

Kelsey Piper

The case for earning lots of money — and giving lots of it away

23.11.2024 4

Vox

Kelsey Piper

AI is powerful, dangerous, and controversial. What will Donald Trump do with it?

08.11.2024 4

Vox

Kelsey Piper

How to get through election season

01.11.2024 4

Vox

Kelsey Piper

One big question hanging over OpenAI’s transition to for-profit

28.10.2024 81000

Vox

Kelsey Piper

Sick of AI hype? I have some bad news.

18.10.2024 5

Vox

Kelsey Piper

In defense of the washing machine

27.09.2024 3

Vox

Kelsey Piper

What it means that new AIs can “reason”

20.09.2024 4

Vox

Kelsey Piper

Shrinking the economy won’t save the planet

12.09.2024 5

Vox

Kelsey Piper

There’s a fix for AI-generated essays. Why aren’t we using it?

07.09.2024 80500

Vox

Kelsey Piper

I’m an AI skeptic. But one critique misses the mark.

30.08.2024 3

Vox

Kelsey Piper

The staggering death toll of scientific lies

23.08.2024 3

Vox

Kelsey Piper

How AI’s booms and busts are a distraction

17.08.2024 2

Vox

Kelsey Piper

The animal rights movement was once locked in bitter debate. Now it’s getting things done.

09.08.2024 80500

Vox

Kelsey Piper

Inside the fight over California’s new AI bill

19.07.2024 2

Vox

Kelsey Piper

Are betting markets the best way to predict an election?

12.07.2024 2

Vox

Kelsey Piper