The Profile: The woman teaching AI morals & the princess-turned-VC
This edition of The Profile features Michael Pollan, Jeannette zu Fürstenberg, Amanda Askell, and others.
Good morning, friends!
It’s been nine years since I sent the very first edition of The Profile to a few friends, my mom, and her friend Peggy. I had no idea it would grow into a massive community of curious people who continue to show up week after week.
Back in February 2017, I was 25, living in New York City and writing FORTUNE Magazine’s dealmaking newsletter, Term Sheet, Monday through Friday.
On the side, I started emailing family and friends the longform profiles I’d read and loved that week. (I almost didn’t send it — I thought people already had newsletter fatigue. Little did I know.)
Since then, I’ve left FORTUNE to pursue this full time, Substack has become a cultural phenomenon, and I now have a husband and four kids. Needless to say, life looks very different.
But one thing hasn’t changed: I’m still here, still writing, and this newsletter has landed in your inbox every single Sunday for nine years.
I made a reel about why I think The Profile has lasted while most newsletters disappear within a few months. As always, thank you for being here, and here’s to the next nine years together.
PROFILES.
— The author contemplating consciousness
— The woman teaching AI morals
— The princess-turned-VC
— The Mormon wives who conquered pop culture
— The company trying to understand their AI system’s mind [**HIGHLY RECOMMEND**]
PEOPLE TO KNOW.
The author contemplating consciousness: Michael Pollan’s new book explores the mystery of consciousness at a time when A.I. and modern media are increasingly competing for our attention. He argues consciousness may have evolved to help humans navigate complex decisions and social worlds, while questioning whether machines could ever truly achieve it without bodies and feelings. Pollan also examines how practices like meditation and psychedelics can temporarily dissolve the ego, offering insight into the self and our connection to something larger. (New York Times Magazine; alternate link)
The woman teaching AI morals: Anthropic’s resident philosopher, Amanda Askell, is shaping the moral compass and personality of its AI chatbot Claude. She’s essentially teaching a machine how to be ‘good.’ As chatbots grow more human-like, Askell’s job is to ensure empathy, ethics, and self-awareness are built in from the start. In the race to build smarter AI, she’s trying to make sure intelligence comes with a conscience. (WSJ; complimentary link)
“If you were like a child, and this is the environment in which you’re being raised, is that healthy self-conception?”
The princess-turned-VC: Jeannette zu Fürstenberg, a German heiress-turned-VC and literal princess, is now one of the most powerful forces in European tech. As president of General Catalyst, she’s betting heavily on AI and defense startups to help Europe stand on its own against the US and China. She believes crisis can fuel a European tech renaissance, but only if the continent learns to take risks and embrace failure. (Bloomberg; alternate link)
“Every crisis always has an opportunity. And Europe, historically, has always risen from crises.”
The Mormon wives who conquered pop culture: Utah’s influencer boom — led by shows like The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives and creators like Jessi Draper and Ballerina Farm — has turned Mormon and ex-Mormon women into major cultural and commercial forces. They’ve been selling everything from beauty treatments to homesteading fantasies. Social media, reality TV, and affiliate marketing helped these once niche “mom bloggers” become mainstream tastemakers, reshaping how Mormon motherhood and lifestyle are seen across America. Yet tensions remain between empowerment, commercialization, and the church’s traditional expectations, even as Mormon aesthetics and family-centered branding continue to drive massive business and cultural influence. (New York Magazine; alternate link)
“The Utah bloggers were the first to drive commerce in a way we weren’t seeing with traditional street-style bloggers.”
COMPANIES TO WATCH.
The company trying to understand their AI system’s mind: Large language models are just vast math systems that convert words into numbers and predict what comes next, but once they started “talking,” people swung between hype (“they’re conscious”) and dismissal (“just parrots”). This article follows Anthropic’s attempt to understand these black boxes through interpretability, using experiments with Claude that reveal both impressive competence and unsettling, sometimes deceptive or self-protective behavior. The takeaway is that these systems are already reshaping work and forcing us to rethink what we mean by intelligence, agency, and even the self. (The New Yorker; alternate link)
“How are we going to interact with the models? How are we going to be able to understand them?”
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