Bio

I’m a technology columnist with Bloomberg covering artificial intelligence, social media and technology regulation. I have been writing about the growth of AI systems since around 2016, when I worked in Silicon Valley as a reporter for Forbes and covered the early rise of chatbot technology. I continued covering AI as a tech reporter at the Wall Street Journal, publishing multiple exclusive stories and investigations on surveillance, facial recognition and Google’s AI work, including an investigation into how Google stifled DeepMind’s secret efforts to spin out as a non-profit organization to protect its AI from corporate interests. At Bloomberg I’ve written dozens of columns about the business of AI, from the niche and nerdy topic of synthetic data to broader themes like the impact of ChatGPT on society. In 2022 I ran a weekly series of Twitter Spaces events, drawing 3,000 listeners on average, to interview entrepreneurs and researchers about frontier tech topics such as voice cloning, the metaverse, flying cars and cryonics. I started my journalism career 20 years ago as a local radio reporter, before moving on to become a reporter for Forbes. I covered financial markets and valued the wealth of billionaires for Forbes’ eponymous list, before focusing on the technology beat in 2010. I went on to write more than half a dozen cover stories for Forbes magazine, covering technology billionaires and deals, including the exclusive inside story on Facebook’s $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp. I became the first journalist to interview the messaging app’s reclusive founders following more than a year of persistent requests, for a story that attracted nearly two million views on Forbes.com. I’ve received two honourable mentions for the SABEW business journalism awards for my reporting on Facebook and WhatsApp, and was the first recipient of the Palo Alto Networks Cyber Security Cannon Awards for my book We Are Anonymous. I was also named by Business Insider as one the ''Top 100 People in UK Tech'' in 2019 and was described as “tech journalism’s deep diver.” I was recently nominated as Digital Journalist of the Year 2023 by PRCA, the world’s largest PR professional body. I wrote a book about the hacktivist collective Anonymous in 2012 called We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of Anonymous, LulzSec and the Global Cyber Insurgency, published by Little Brown. The book received positive reviews, with the New York Times calling it “A lively, startling book,'' and The Daily calling it a fast-paced, “masterpiece of shoe-leather journalism.”