The Future of WordPress and AI at WCUS

AI, Automattic, Open Source, Tech, WordCamp, WordPress

The presentations for WordCamp US are just a few days away! We have some really exciting keynotes including Danny Sullivan from Google, John Maeda from Microsoft AI, and Adam Gazzaley (one of the top neuroscientists in the world) from UCSF. I think being in the room and able to meet the speakers and ask questions is even more valuable this year, as things are changing so quickly. If you know anyone in or near Portland, Oregon have them get a ticket! Here are all the other AI-related talks:

The New Yorker is always good, but they’re having a bit of a victory lap as they celebrate their centennial. This article on the vaunted fact-checkers is such a delight, with so many in-jokes and back references it’s hard to keep track.

When I started WordPress, I wrote down five publications that I hoped someday we’d make software so good they’d adopt it. The New Yorker is one of them. If you enjoy words that make your brain tingle, make sure to also follow Automattic’s publications, Longreads and Atavist.

There are many levels to the excellent Scott Alexander satire of God, Iblis (Islamic word for devil), and Dwarkesh Patel, one of the best new podcasters of this era.

There are people who have gone their whole lives without realizing that Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, Baa Baa Black Sheep, and the ABC Song are all the same tune […]

If they’re used to stories about surgeons getting completed with the string “man”, then that’s the direction their thoughts will always go… Also, how come God can’t make humans speak normally? Everything they say is full of these um dashes!

Which leads to a hat tip to Brian Gardner on the incredible McSweeney’s Em dash responding to the the AI allegations.

So next time you read something and think, “AI wrote this—it has a lot of em dashes,” ask yourself: Is it AI? Or is it just a poet trying to give you vertigo in four lines or fewer?

PostHog

It’s always fun to see someone pushing the limits of the web experience, as I reminisced about Flash and Dreamweaver the other day. The new website for Posthog is a delightful rabbit hole to explore, akin to a Meow Wolf, with meticulous care and craft applied to every corner of the product in a way that is both fun and playful. They even have their own version of pineapple on pizza.

What I want to enable with WordPress is the ability with thousands of plugins and themes for people to have unique, funky experiences like this on their website, while still providing a content structure that’s legible for interoperability and hacking. Major kudos to Cory Watilo and James Hawkins for coming up with this.

MCP Everywhere

AI, Automattic, WordPress

MCP stands for Model Context Protocol. (The joke is the S in MCP stands for security, but that’s another post.) They say to think of it like “like a USB-C port for AI applications” because it allows interoperability between AI chatbots and other tools. Here’s some of the MCP stuff happening across the Automattic solar system:

When nerds start connecting things, interesting stuff happens; that’s been my entire career, so while none of these have made it into a critical daily workflow for me, I’m curious to see what people come up with.

I think some of the best writing about technology PR is this ten-year-old article by Aaron Zamost: What’s Your Hour in ‘Silicon Valley Time’? It describes the cycles that companies go through in public perception, and the beauty of revisiting it ten years later is that you can see which of the examples are still relevant, or the domains that 404. As someone who has been around this clock probably a dozen times now, I highly suggest this for anyone “going through it.” Some of the most powerful words in the English language: This too shall pass.

See also: The Zen fable or old Chinese poem of the old man who loses his horse.

Since reading the Four Hour Workweek and Tim Ferriss I’ve been a bit of a bio-hacker, always trying weird and new stuff. Today was a new one! I did therapeutic plasma exchange (TPE), also known as plasmapheresis, which supposedly gives you all the benefits of parabiosis without, you know, needing to be a vampire or having a blood boy. So with the awesome folks at Extension Health I had my blood filtered and put back in, which took a few hours. My plasma was not as clear as Bryan Johnson’s, with 41 years of microplastics and mold and who knows what else in there. The process took a few hours, and afterward I got some chicken on rice from a Halal cart on Broadway so maybe it all evens out.

The Atlantic November issue is lovely, focused on the American Revolution. I particularly enjoyed:

So pick up a copy as you pass through an airport or by a newstand. I consider it a very worthwhile subscription. It might be better to read in print or through Apple News+ as their website a bit broken for me right now.

On November 5th at our Noho office the legendary John Borthwick (investor in Twitter, Tumblr, Buzzfeed, Digg, Venmo…) and I will have a conversation on the future of the Open Web and human-centered AI. Please join us!

Conversation with John Borthwick

I’m often on the other side, but it’s such a delight to be an interviewer, I really enjoy it and put a lot of work into coming up with questions and shaping a conversation I think will draw out something novel from the person. Besides the Distributed Podcast, I’ve had a chance at events to interview great minds such as Steve Jurvetson, Patrick Collison, Dries Buytaert, and now John Borthwick.

We discussed his early investments in Airbnb and Tumblr, what made the NYC tech scene so special back then, and how it has evolved since. We also touched on the recent mayoral race, where Betaworks fits into the city’s tech ecosystem, and delved into one of my favorite topics: the comparison between open-source and proprietary models in AI.

I’ve been following this cool open source project called Meshtastic, which is “An open source, off-grid, decentralized, mesh network built to run on affordable, low-power devices.” I finally got some time to set it up tonight. It was super easy; you just flash the Meshtastic firmware in your browser to any of the compatible devices. I got a Heltec v3 device for $35 bucks on Amazon. (I’d link but it’s out of stock, and I think there’s a newer version.) Apparently, there are enough people running nodes that you can bounce a message from Portland to San Francisco! I love the idea of parallel to the internet networks, and I’ve been meaning to get a HAM license, but in the meantime, this looks pretty fun.

Two interesting AI updates this week: It’s nice to read Andrej Karpathy’s review of Tesla’s FSD v13, as someone who was involved with creating their first self-driving efforts. I’ve only experienced v12, so very excited to try out the latest generations soon. Ubiquitous self-driving will reshape cities and save countless lives.

On the heels of announcing a $40B investment in Texas, Google has launched Gemini 3. It’s still funny how every organization ships its org chart with the naming and accessibility of the various models it releases, but, more broadly, it is so exciting to see so much intellectual capital focused on this area, with the frontier labs leapfrogging each other every few months. Every model has a feel, and with Gemini 3 you start to feel the breadth of Google’s long investment in the space show up in interesting ways. Yet it can still be beaten in coding by an upstart like Anthropic with a fraction of Alphabet’s resources.

What a time to be alive. Witnessing multiple excellent organizations ship the best work of their career rapidly is invigorating and inspiring; the competition drives better results, and the diffusion of new approaches is rapid. The consumer surplus that we all benefit from is just beginning to be felt; we’re maybe 1 or 2% impacted in the economy so far.