Cory Bergman

Cory Bergman

@corybe.com

Cofounder and chief product officer @factal.com. Journalist entrepreneur, AI nerd. Former Breaking News, NBC News. Seattle

2.5K followers1.6K following302 posts

Surprised more folks don’t follow @factal.com on this platform: global breaking news without the hype, consistently faster than any other source on Bluesky. (This feed is a small subset of our full service).

Joys of camping: book spot one year out, battle traffic for hours, pull into a packed parking lot with trees, listen to kids complain about crap internet, fall asleep early exhausted, wake 1 am 2 am then 3 am, fall down in the dark trying to pee, up at 5 am, leave early after kids threaten mutiny.

Just got GPT-5 and the first test (oddly I know) is whether voice mode can speak in Spanglish. Passed with flying colors, switching back and forth flawlessly for the first time.

Cory Bergman reposted

The Niche Machine is here. We are now not just seeing AI slop about current events and natural disasters, we are seeing hyperpersonalized AI slop that combines "news" and disinformation with any interest / celebrity / hobby you could possibly imagine www.404media.co/the-ai-slop-...

404media.coThe Hyperpersonalized AI Slop Silo Machine Is HereWe are on a path to where social media will feed you hyperpersonalized AI slop about anything and everything.

Seattle is at risk of becoming an “old tech” town — nearly all AI innovation is squarely back in Silicon Valley/SF. Microsoft is powering a big part of it, but faces increasing risks as AI upends software ecosystems. Amazon… ugh… had a huge head start with Alexa, and now…?

Microsoft cuts people to help offset the high cost of AI data centers. Then as AI gets even better, it will cut more people. Double whammy for tech workers.

Cory Bergman reposted

A moderately common event is someone confidently tells me that LLMs can't solve their specific puzzle, I whack it in o3, it spins up a python programme that solves it in 12 seconds, and it turns out the person had only ever tested it on the free versions of ChatGPT and Grok

Unsurprising — and as AI makes it easier to get the news, fewer Americans will pay (at least directly).

Christopher Mims@mims.bsky.social

In the past year, only 17% of Americans have paid for news, per Pew The #1 reason they give is that the information is available free elsewhere www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/...

Not a fan of these kinds of user surveys. Reducing information friction is always popular if you design it well. Users struggle to articulate features — or even recognize that AI is at play. Anti-AI fears skew numbers, too. 1/2

Nieman Lab@niemanlab.org

The success of these tools will largely depend on how keen audiences are to use them in the first place, and there are big regional and demographic differences. www.niemanlab.org/2025/06/ai-p...

Completely agree, and feeds and lists don’t help when there’s so little niche content to begin with. If engagement mostly rewards political posts, there’s not much incentive to post anything else. The architecture invites content diversity but the culture discourages it.

Katelyn Burns@katelynburns.com

to me the biggest problem with bluesky is that politics dominates this place. that makes sense, i assume most of us left twitter for political reasons. but there's not enough chat about other things on here. there used to be, but not anymore. you get a little of the old twitter on big sports nights

Excellent thread 💯

Eliot Higgins@eliothiggins.bsky.social

🧵 I often talk about VDA, Verification, Deliberation, Accountability, as the core functions that make democracy possible. But to understand what’s gone wrong, we need to look at how those functions have changed.

Cory Bergman reposted

Agree — this is why Bluesky engagement is steadily declining. bsky.jazco.dev/stats

Mark Cuban@mcuban.bsky.social

The replies on here may not be as racist as Twitter, but they damn sure are hateful. Talk AI: FU, AI sucks go away Talk Business: Go away Talk Healthcare: Crickets. Engagement went from great convos on many topics, to agree with me or you are a nazi fascist We are forcing posts to X

I’m always amazed by the lack of geographic detail in local news reporting. Can have unintended effect of making localized events appear to be widespread.

This is one of my biggest frustrations with tariff news coverage — it’s lazy and/or illustrates a lack of depth in business and economics. It’s like covering COVID through statements, not science.

Kai Ryssdal@kairyssdal.bsky.social

You can’t credibly or responsibly just restate what administration officials say about trade deals and then try to cya by saying “officials provided no evidence”.

Cory Bergman reposted

It's honestly kind of insane how the last few months have been logistics companies and OEMs staring off into the distance at impending oblivion while the companies that use those services are in complete denial of what's going on and assume the tariff otaku will change his mind at the last second

Cory Bergman reposted

Replying to @mims.bsky.social

Y’all, the shortages are coming and they are baked in. Even if all the tariffs disappear tomorrow the resulting surge will logjam the system. Also it doesn’t seem like they are disappearing tomorrow. Just cause multinationals can navigate this doesn’t mean countless small businesses aren’t toast.