I'm Billy, a tech correspondent at TIME magazine. I mostly write about how artificial intelligence and social media companies are reshaping our world.
I started this newsletter because social media is fracturing, and it’s getting harder to cut through the noise. This is a way for me to connect with my readers directly, rather than at the increasingly capricious mercy of an online slot machine.
Billy's Newsletter (which I may eventually rename) is free, and it mostly serves as a way for me to point you to my published journalism in TIME. For example, I broke the news that OpenAI used outsourced Kenyan workers earning less than $2 per hour to detoxify ChatGPT—work that left many of them traumatized. I was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize in 2022 for my article Inside Facebook's African Sweatshop. The details first revealed in that story are the basis of an ongoing lawsuit against Meta in Kenya, and preceded a successful vote to unionize by many of the affected workers.
I've interviewed and profiled the world's most influential AI CEOs, including OpenAI's Sam Altman and Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis. I've authored TIME cover stories about OpenAI, Facebook, and Twitter. And I love profiling smaller companies and nonprofits that are trying to improve the tech ecosystem like Karya, Signal, Block Party, and DAIR.
This newsletter is proudly irregular, usually a small handful of times per month. I only send it when I’ve written something that I think is good and worth sharing. If you’d like to receive it in your inbox, please subscribe!
