We're building a different kind of AI newsroom

Your subscription dollars now directly support Kai Williams.

Today is a big day here at Understanding AI headquarters: it’s Kai’s first day as an Understanding AI employee. Until Friday, his work was supported by the Tarbell Center for AI Journalism. Now I’m paying his salary, which means that paying subscribers are making his work possible.

Below is an email I sent out to free subscribers encouraging them to upgrade to a paid subscription.

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The Understanding AI team. I’m on the left, Kai is on the right. (Photo by Nat Purser)

I launched Understanding AI in 2023. One reason I was excited to start my own newsletter is that I was frustrated by the way mainstream news outlets cover AI. I laid out my concerns in a 2024 piece for Asterisk magazine.

AI is a technical subject. To cover it intelligently, you need in-depth understanding of how the technology works. It takes years to develop the necessary expertise, and it requires ongoing effort to stay at the cutting edge. The best AI reporters are constantly reading research papers, talking to experts, and putting new products through their paces.

But mainstream newsrooms are not set up to nurture or reward technical depth. Often the reporter covering AI is also covering social media, cryptocurrency, video games, or any number of other topics. Editors work on an even broader range of topics, and are unlikely to have a more than superficial understanding of AI.

As a result, mainstream articles about the AI industry are often superficial and sometimes even misleading. They overhype trivial announcements while ignoring important breakthroughs and mangling technical details.

At the same time, too many newsrooms are reflexively hostile toward technology and the companies that create it. This attitude creeps into their coverage of AI.

Many reporters got into journalism because they wanted to “speak truth to power.” Up to a point, this is a good thing. Big tech companies like Google, Meta, and Anthropic have become extremely powerful, and it’s important for independent media to subject their claims to scrutiny. We certainly try to do that at Understanding AI.

But I worry that in many newsrooms, skepticism has curdled into outright hostility. Some reporters are so focused on exposing wrongdoing by big tech companies that they become blind to the potential upsides of new technology.

For example, I’ve been frustrated by the generally negative tone of coverage about Waymo and its safety record. Kai and I have probably scrutinized Waymo’s safety record more carefully than anyone else in the news business. We’ve written plenty about potential safety concerns with autonomous vehicles.

But we’ve also made it clear that Waymo has a strong safety record overall. We think that’s important because if Waymo’s software is significantly safer than the average human driver, scaling it up could save thousands of lives.

So over the last year, I’ve tried to build a different kind of newsroom — one that values expertise more than clicks, and curiosity as much as skepticism. Readers seem to like it; over the last year, we’ve grown from 70,000 to 260,000 readers.

Today I took a big step: I hired my first employee. Kai Williams has been writing for me since last September, but until now he’s gotten financial support from the Tarbell Center for AI Journalism. His Tarbell Fellowship ended on Friday, and today I officially hired him as an Understanding AI employee.

I was able to hire him thanks to financial support from readers, but I’ll be honest — it was tighter than I’d like. I’m pretty sure Kai could make a lot more money if he moved to San Francisco and took a job at an AI company. And if revenues stay at their present level, I’ll be earning less than I did at my last conventional newsroom job in 2021.

More importantly, I don’t want Kai to be my last hire. There are still lots of topics Kai and I don’t have time to cover. We need to continue growing the team so we can cover every important AI topic with the depth and thoroughness it deserves.

Right now, fewer than 1% of our readers are paying subscribers. So if you’ve enjoyed our work — especially in the nine months since Kai came on board — I hope you’ll support us financially.