Deputy Editor
Alex Heath is Deputy Editor for The Verge and the author of Command Line, a newsletter about the tech industry’s inside conversation. Since joining The Verge in 2021, he has broken agenda-setting scoops like Facebook’s rebrand to Meta and been at the forefront of tech’s biggest storylines, from Elon Musk’s chaotic takeover of Twitter to the failed boardroom coup at OpenAI.
Heath has been covering tech for more than a decade in previous roles at The Information, Business Insider, and other outlets. His work has been cited in congressional hearings and been recognized by the Livingston Awards and the Society of American Business Editors and Writers. He has appeared onstage at events like the Code Conference, SXSW, and Web Summit. He regularly appears as an expert voice on programs like CNBC, NPR, BBC, and CNN. He lives with his wife and two dogs in Los Angeles, where he likes to play ultimate frisbee and poker in his free time.
Both companies are competing to build a combination of ChatGPT and Search. Now, it’s a matter of who can outmaneuver the other.
COO Brad Lightcap is speaking at Bloomberg’s Tech conference and was just asked when the next model is arriving. His answer hints that ChatGPT will evolve to act like an agent on your behalf or, at the very least, take on more of a persona.
“Will there be such a thing as a prompt engineer in 2026?” he says. “You don’t prompt engineer your friend.”
Reddit’s daily users grew 37 percent to 82.7 million during its first quarter as a public company. CEO Steve Huffman said on the earnings call that 60 percent of those users are logged out and coming mostly from Google.
“Googlebot likes speed” and Reddit has focused on improving load times, he said. More on the numbers below:
The Information reports that Microsoft’s consumer AI group has started training a new large language model codenamed MAI-1. It will have “roughly 500 billion parameters,” according to the report, which frames it as a model that could compete with Google, Anthropic, and Microsoft’s marquee investment, OpenAI.
In response, Microsoft’s head of communications Frank Shaw posted that “sometimes news is just a blinding flash of the obvious” and linked to a longer statement on LinkedIn by CTO Kevin Scott. There, Scott says that Microsoft plans to keep working closely with OpenAI “well into the future” while continuing to train and release its own models.
It’s a low bar so far, but Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses are proving to be the best implementation of wearable AI out there.
CEO Eugen Rochko says the fediverse app has established a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in the US in order to receive tax-deductible donations. Mastodon was previously based in Germany until the government there pulled its nonprofit status with “no advance warning or explanation,” according to Rochko. The board for the five-person US nonprofit includes Twitter cofounder Biz Stone.
[Mastodon Blog]
With the app facing another potential ban from the US, what would divesting it from ByteDance look like? And just how important is the algorithm?