China takes a Bitchat break

Top News

• Bitchat removed from China’s App Store: The decentralized peer-to-peer messaging app was developed by Twitter and Block vet Jack Dorsey. It uses Blueteooth mesh technology to send encrypted messages between devices without any internet or cellular connectivity, and has become popular with activists and protesters attempting to communicate around government firewalls. But in a post to X on Sunday, Dorsey revealed that Bitchat has been removed from China’s App Store, at the request of the Cyberspace Administration of China. They claim it violates a rule mandating that any apps with “social mobilization” or “public opinion” uses must conduct a security assessment before launching in China. Bitchat remains available in other nations; the app has been downloaded around three million times total, worldwide.

• Nate Silver calls X a “freak show”: The statistician, famed for his political charts and prognostications, claims that modern social media is now functionally useless as a marketing tool for his commentary and publications. All social media accounted for just 0.7% of “Silver Bulletin” site views in March, which the author compares to a “rounding error.” He argues that the former Twitter is now dominated by extremely partisan, low-quality content, and that the algorithm’s hostility to outbound links — even for important national news stories — has rendered the platform increasingly irrelevant to the larger conversation. Silver suggests that his serious readers have largely moved over to Substack.

• Netflix drops VOID AI model: VOID stands for “Video Object and Interaction Deletion.” It’s a vision-language model (or VLM) that erases objects from a scene, and also reflects how the object or person’s removal would impact all of the other visuals on-screen. (For example, if a scene depicts a car crash, and you remove one vehicle, the other car doesn’t crash into thin air. It just keeps driving, unimpacted.) The potential use cases are obvious. Creators can alter entire sequences and scenes in the edit bay without any need for costly and time-consuming reshoots. Netflix plans to use VOID internally and has also released the model on Hugging Face for public consumption.

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A very long read from The New Yorker — co-written by Exposé King Ronan Farrow, and based on more than 100 interviews — surveys the entire career of OpenAI chief Sam Altman. Despite Farrow’s reputation, the piece is not built around specific smoking guns or particularly shocking revelations. Instead, it reveals a pattern of disingenuousness, if not outright dishonestly, suggesting Altman sometimes tells people what he thinks they want to hear, rather than the out-and-out verifiable truth.

He’s a quote from an unnamed former OpenAI board member that sums much of this content up: “He's unconstrained by truth. He has two traits that are almost never seen in the same person. The first is a strong desire to please people, to be liked in any given interaction. The second is almost a sociopathic lack of concern for the consequences that may come from deceiving someone.” (Several interview subjects also reportedly used the phrase “antisocial personality,” including late computer programmer and fellow YC vet Aaron Swartz.

Perhaps of greatest significance to insiders: Farrow and co-writer Andrew Marantz got their hands on both Ilya Sutskever’s Fall 2023 memo pushing for the board to remove Altman as CEO, and former OpenAI-er and current Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s personal notes from his time at the company, neither of which have been publicly disclosed until now.

In other OAI news, the company released a set of policy proposals that it recommends for navigating “a world with superintelligence.” Many are aimed at offsetting what the company seems to believe will be a significant rise in unemployment, including higher corporate and capital gains tax rates, and a public investment fund that redistributes AI returns to all Americans. OpenAI also proposes marketing campaigns and research grants designed to make AI technology more palatable, or even appealing, to mainstream Americans.

Finally, The Information reports that Altman and OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar can’t seem to align on the prospect of a 2026 IPO. Friar is reportedly concerned that the company’s current revenue growth can’t support its massive spending commitments. Writers Anissa Gardizy and Amir Efrati quote an unnamed OpenAI insider on Friar’s take:

She said she wasn’t sure yet whether OpenAI would need to pour so much money into obtaining AI servers in the coming years or whether its revenue growth, which has been slowing, would support the commitments…

This may explain why Altman has appeared to sideline Friar, who has not reported directly to him since August 2025. She instead works with the company’s AGI chief Fidji Simo, who is currently on medical leave. – Lon

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