Every CEO Dan Shipper discussed his company's unique hybrid model, which combines AI journalism with product development, revealing insights into automation, hiring, and the evolving role of artificial intelligence in creative work.
Every, co-founded by Shipper in 2020, operates as both a publication, known for its "vibe checks" of frontier AI models and columns like "Chain of Thought," and a product studio offering tools such as Cora, Sparkle, Spiral, and Monologue. These products, along with the journalism, are bundled into a $20-a-month subscription. Shipper noted that AI now handles "essentially all of the company's code," while humans primarily write essays.
The company has innovatively applied AI to its editorial process, creating a copy-editing agent by training it on 30,000 historical edits from its editor-in-chief, Kate Lee. This agent aims to distribute Lee's expertise across the organization, allowing her to focus on higher-level tasks. Shipper also addressed the tension of publishing critical reviews of models from labs like Anthropic, stating, "No one trusts a model company to tell you where they objectively sit."
Shipper highlighted what he called a "real dirty secret" in the writing community, asserting that "almost every writer is using it. Just, most of them are not saying so." Despite extensive automation, Every doubled its headcount from 15 to 30 people in the past year, a phenomenon Shipper terms the "AI paradox." He explained that AI, "trained on the residue of human expertise," creates new work for human experts by raising both the floor and ceiling of what's possible.
This approach suggests that while AI streamlines existing tasks, it simultaneously generates demand for human ingenuity in solving novel problems and building sophisticated systems, ensuring that human expertise remains crucial in an increasingly automated landscape.