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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Periodic reminder that Newsweek no longer exists. What you're reading is essentially an SEO play run by a religious cult that bought Newsweek's branding in a fire sale. A useful thing to do with any Newsweek story is to take a minute to look into the background of whoever the author of the story is.

Notably, this story is pitched as a "News Story", but it's not really that at all; it's an opinion piece with a couple of quotes from AI opponents. Frustratingly, not many people understand what "Newsweek" is today, so they're always going to be able to collect some quotes for whatever story they're running.

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Is this still accurate? Wikipedia says that Newsweek was acquired by IBT Media (a front for a religious movement) in 2013 but returned to independent ownership under Dev Pragad and Jonathan Davis in 2018 following a criminal investigation into embezzlement. I was not able to confirm or reject any links still existing between Newsweek and its current owners and IBT Media.

It does appear that the new owners are very much leaning into a "new media" business model and the old journalistic staff is probably gone.

Dev Pragad was involved with the IBT ownership of Newsweek. The whole thing is a mess. Cards on the table, I'm throwing an elbow with the "religious cult" thing; the cult has not much to do with why you should be careful with Newsweek. Rather, it's that Newsweek as it exists today has nothing to do with Newsweek as people understand it. Whoever owns it, it's basically an actual clickbait farm now.

It is from Oct. 3rd, otherwise the author could have integrated OpenAI's "code red" and the absence of successful training runs since 2024 as well.

The article accurately reflects opinions in YouTube comments and opinions of the population at large.

Periodic reminder that there are people seeking to derail discussions critical of AI and divert attention away from the actual substance of these issues.

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