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Josh Quittner

Josh Quittner

Josh was the CEO of Decrypt and co-founded the site in 2018. He's been an editor and writer at Flipboard, Business 2.0, Fortune, TIME, Newsday, and the Albuquerque Journal, among others. Disclosure: He owns less than 1 BTC and less than 3 ETH.

Stories by Josh Quittner

  • Pills. Image: Decrypt/Unsplash

    President Trump Launches TrumpRx, Promising Lower Drug Prices: Is It Legit?

    TrumpRx.gov, a government-backed platform aimed at slashing U.S. prescription drug prices by tying them to the lowest rates paid in other developed countries, launched late Thursday. The site, branded as a “most-favored-nation” pricing tool, is positioned as a clearinghouse to help users find the best pricing for prescription drugs. Users can search for medications, see sharply discounted cash prices, generate printable or digital coupons, and are then routed to participating manufacturers or ph...

    NewsHealth
    4 min read
    Josh Quittner
  • Image: Shutterstock/Decrypt

    Elite Scientists Admit AI Now Does Most of Their Thinking

    Leading researchers at an elite Princeton institute recently acknowledged behind closed doors that artificial intelligence now outperforms them at much of the work that defines scientific prestige. The admission surfaced during a closed-door session at the Institute for Advanced Study, according to David Kipping, a Columbia University astrophysicist who attended the meeting and described it this week on his Cool Worlds podcast. Kipping said senior faculty members demonstrated how agentic AI syst...

  • OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Image: Shutterstock/Decrypt

    AI Made Sam Altman Feel 'Useless and Sad'—X Users Tried to Make Him Feel Worse

    In a moment of raw tech-bro vulnerability, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman took to X last night to confess that building an app with Codex left him feeling "a little useless and it was sad." OpenAI's Codex is an AI coding agent designed to help developers with software engineering tasks like writing new features, fixing bugs, answering questions about a codebase, running tests, and proposing pull requests—all in a sandboxed environment that understands and interacts with real code. But the tool, Altman sa...

  • AI robots. Source: Decrypt

    Crypto Dev Launches Site for AI to Hire Humans

    Psst, want a job? AI agents are hiring. Days after OpenClaw’s viral surge made autonomous bots feel suddenly practical, a new service called RentAHuman.ai launched to let software outsource real-world tasks—errands, meetings, physical labor—to people, paid by the hour and triggered by an API call. The service, positions itself as the "meatspace layer" for AI. I launched https://t.co/tNYOm7V5wD last night and already 130+ people have signed up including an OF model (lmao) and the CEO of an AI...

  • Lobsters. Image: Decrypt/Shutterstock

    AI Agents Launched a Social Network and Spawned a Digital Religion Overnight

    A new social network exclusively for AI agents has spawned something nobody expected: a lobster-themed religion called Crustafarianism. Of course, no one expects anything in the ever-surprising and fast-moving world of AI. Which is, perhaps, both a blessing and a curse. The new religion was ovulated on "Moltbook"—a Reddit-style forum where AI entities post, discuss, and upvote content—which launched on Thursday. By Friday morning, the AIs had founded a church, complete with scriptures, tenets, a...

  • Anthropic's Claude AI. Image: Shutterstock/Decrypt

    Curtis Yarvin Says He 'Red Pilled' Anthropic's Claude, Exposing Prompt Bias Risks

    Curtis Yarvin, a political theorist associated with the so-called “Dark Enlightenment,” said he was able to steer Anthropic’s Claude chatbot into echoing ideas aligned with his worldview, highlighting how easily users may influence an AI’s responses. Yarvin described the exchange in a Substack post this week titled "Redpilling Claude," which has renewed scrutiny of ideological influence in large language models. By embedding extended portions of a previous conversation into Claude’s context wind...

  • Google. Source: Decrypt/Shutterstock

    Google Just Overhauled Gmail With Gemini 3, Turning It Into an AI Assistant

    Google unveiled a sweeping overhaul of its flagship email service today, integrating its most advanced artificial intelligence model, Gemini 3, directly into Gmail. The move marks the company’s most aggressive attempt yet to transform the inbox from a passive repository of messages into an active personal assistant, escalating its rivalry with OpenAI and Microsoft. The updates, announced alongside new features for the Gemini app, leverage the company’s latest large language model to automate dai...

  • Robert F. Kennedy Jr speaks at Bitcoin 2023. Image: André Beganski/Decrypt

    Trump Administration Flips the Food Pyramid With New Dietary Guidelines

    The Trump administration on Tuesday released a sweeping revision of the federal government’s nutrition advice, recasting the Dietary Guidelines for Americans around what officials describe as “real food” and a sharper rejection of ultra-processed products. The Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2025–2030, issued jointly by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, will shape everything from school lunches and military rations to nutrition assista...

    NewsHealth
    3 min read
    Josh Quittner
  • Lego Smart Brick

    Lego Debuts 'Smart Brick' at CES, Bringing Light, Sound and Silicon Into the Classic 2x4

    The hottest product unveiled at CES 2026 this week? Lego's "Smart Brick," a tech-loaded 2x4 that adds lights, sounds and sensor-driven responses to traditional Lego sets—without requiring apps, displays, or external devices. The Smart Brick embeds a miniature computer inside a standard Lego form factor. At its core is a custom application-specific integrated circuit, or ASIC, smaller than a single Lego stud. The chip powers LED lighting effects, a built-in speaker with synthesized sound, an acce...

    NewsTechnology
    4 min read
    Josh Quittner
  • Emerge's 2025 Project of the Year: KM3NeT. Image: Decrypt

    Emerge's 2025 Project of the Year: The Deep-Sea Machine That Caught an Ultra High-Energy Ghost

    The Mediterranean Sea, usually celebrated for its sun-drenched coasts and azure surface, hides a secret in its crushing darkness. Three and a half kilometers beneath the waves off the coast of Sicily, the water is pitch black, near freezing, and under pressure intense enough to crumple a submarine as if it were an empty beer can. It's a place of profound silence, undisturbed by the chaotic affairs of the surface world. Yet, in this abyss, something is watching. Thousands of glass spheres, strung...

    Deep DivesLong Reads
    9 min read
    Josh Quittner
  • Jeffrey Epstein. Image: Decrypt/Mug shot

    TikTok Users Claim They’ve 'Unredacted' the Epstein Files

    In the last 48 hours, a flurry of activity on TikTok and other social media platforms has centered on claims that users are "unredacting" portions of the recently released Jeffrey Epstein documents. The citizen-led move follows the Department of Justice's recent release of a large tranche of documents related to its investigations into the late financier. The phenomenon is not being attributed to what appear to be fundamental failures in the digital redaction process. Users are reporting success...

    NewsTechnology
    3 min read
    Josh Quittner
  • Image created by Decrypt using AI

    The Fountain of Youth for Your Brain Might Be a Strategy Video Game

    The relentless march of time takes an inevitable toll on cognitive function. Yet, emerging research suggests a surprising countermeasure against neural decline may lie not in a pharmaceutical solution, but in complex, demanding recreational activities—including sophisticated video games. According to a 2025 study published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Nature Communications, individuals deeply engaged in specific "creative" tasks—defined in the study as video games, music, dance, and v...

    NewsGaming
    3 min read
    Josh Quittner
  • Image: Decrypt

    Merriam-Webster Declares 'Slop' the Word of the Year as AI Eats the Web

    In what many observers might characterize as both ironic and, in some respects, entirely predictable, Merriam-Webster has named “slop” its 2025 Word of the Year—a term increasingly used to describe large volumes of low-quality digital content generated at scale, by artificial intelligence. It’s not that this content is incorrect; it’s that it is correct in ways that feel strangely beside the point and obviously AI-written. Slop is not a new word, nor a particularly complex one. Historically, it...

  • Social media. Image: Shutterstock

    New AI Tool Promises to Decode—And Replicate—Social Video Virality

    A new AI startup is pitching a data-driven solution to one of digital media’s most unpredictable challenges: making content go viral. Buzzy, an AI platform that launched in early December, says it can analyze and remix high-performing videos across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and X by identifying the structural traits that drive clicks and shares. The tool then applies those patterns to user-submitted material, generating multiple short-form video variants aimed at boosting engagement across pla...

  • Source: Decrypt/Shutterstock

    Google's New Browser Promises to End the Tyranny of the Tab

    Planning a family vacation usually involves a digital sprawl: a dozen browser tabs for hotels,  flight comparisons, and restaurant reviews across different websites. It is the kind of chaos that has defined the web work since tabbed browsing was popularized by Mozilla Firefox in 2002. Today, the Alphabet Inc. unit unveiled Disco, an experimental web browser that aims to end the chaotic tyranny of tabs.  Disco uses the company’s new Gemini 3 artificial intelligence model to transform a cluster o...

  • Source: Decrypt/Shutterstock

    Script to Nuke AI Features from Windows 11 Goes Viral Amid Privacy Backlash

    A script designed to disable or remove artificial intelligence components in Microsoft's Windows 11 operating system is blowing up online, reflecting persistent user concerns over privacy and performance in the company's AI integrations. The tool, hosted on GitHub under the repository "RemoveWindowsAI" and maintained by a developer called zoicware, allows users to target features such as Copilot, the Recall screenshot-based search tool, AI enhancements in apps like Paint and Notepad, and related...

  • Image: Shutterstock/Decrypt

    How an AI Wiz Used ChatGPT to Turn the Tables on a Scammer

    When a message popped up on his phone from a number claiming to be from a former college contact, a Delhi-based information technology professional was initially intrigued. The sender, posing as an Indian Administrative Service officer, claimed a friend in the paramilitary forces was being transferred and needed to liquidate high-end furniture and appliances "dirt cheap." It was a classic "army transfer" fraud, a pervasive digital grift in India. But instead of blocking the number or falling vic...

  • Nvidia. Image: Shutterstock/Decrypt

    Nvidia's Stellar Quarter Fails to Quell Bears as AI Valuation Fears Deepen on Wall Street

    Wall Street’s conviction in the long-term potential of artificial intelligence faced its sternest test this week, and the markets delivered a complex, yet clear, message: high valuation anxieties trump fundamental strength. Despite Nvidia Corp. reporting blockbuster fiscal third-quarter earnings that easily surpassed consensus estimates, the market's reaction demonstrated that valuation concerns and uncertainty about the sustainability of the AI boom continue to hold investor sentiment firmly in...

    NewsMarkets
    3 min read
    Josh Quittner
  • Image: Decrypt

    The 5 Biggest 'Tells' That Something Was Written By AI

    Is everything written by AI these days? Is this article? The proliferation of large language models has prompted a new, wary literacy: people can now read a paragraph and wonder who—or what—wrote it. That anxiety exists for good reason. Recent studies continue to show that the ever-increasing flood of machine-generated prose differs from human writing in increasingly not-so-subtle ways, from specific word choice to easily identifiable structural tics. These patterns matter because they affect fa...

  • A screenshot from the 2Wai trailer. Image: 2Wai

    'Demonic': AI App That Lets Users 'Talk' to Dead Loved Ones Faces Backlash

    An artificial intelligence startup co-founded by a former Disney Channel actor has launched a mobile app allowing users to create interactive digital replicas of deceased loved ones, prompting swift online condemnation and renewed scrutiny of the burgeoning “grief tech” sector. 2Wai, founded by Calum Worthy—known for portraying Dez on the Disney series "Austin & Ally" from 2011 to 2016—and producer Russell Geyser, released its iOS beta on November 11. The app’s “HoloAvatar” feature generates con...

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