New York Times science editor Bill Wasik sent out the following:
At a moment when the rise of artificial intelligence is transforming nearly every beat that The Times covers, it’s long overdue for the Science desk to have a reporter dedicated to the subject. That’s not just because A.I. is enabling researchers across all the realms of science to make connections and discoveries that weren’t possible before. It’s also because A.I. itself is emerging as one of the major advances in the history of human knowledge, and the Science desk should be examining its achievements (as well as its setbacks and enduring mysteries) through the same kind of lens that we use to cover other forms of discovery.
As it happens, there’s already a reporter at The Times who has spent years looking at the rise of A.I. in just this way — and I’m delighted to announce that he will be moving over to Science to inaugurate our new A.I. beat.
Cade Metz first joined The Times in 2017 to cover emerging technologies on the Business desk. As he recalls, in the pitch letter he sent during his application for the job, he listed neural networks and G.P.U. chips as the two most important technologies on his new beat, because they would drive the rise of artificial intelligence. His first Sunday Business cover story explained how a new kind of computer data center would accelerate the development of A.I. And the next fall, he covered the rise of the first large language models — the same systems that eventually would deliver mainstream chatbots like ChatGPT.
Fast forward to the present, and Cade has now spent years helping the Tech team cover the world that A.I. is making. So far in 2026 alone, he has published a story that asked whether A.I. could generate new ideas, another that explored the deceptively uneven way that A.I. progresses, and a scoop on a new company from the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos that aims to accelerate the development of spacecraft, cars and computer hardware through A.I., among many, many other pieces on the subject.
“Cade has done as much as any reporter in the country to explain the A.I. story to people outside Silicon Valley,” says James Kerstetter, deputy editor on the Tech team. “He knew researchers and understood the technology long before ChatGPT came along. He also has a breathtaking knowledge of sports, music and movies. I’m not entirely sure when he sleeps.”
In recent years, Cade also has reported extensively for Tech about quantum computing — another zone of technological progress that he will continue to cover at Science.
Before joining The Times, Cade was a writer with Wired in San Francisco. In 2021, Penguin Random House published his book, “Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought AI to Google, Facebook, and the World,” which traced the decades-long history of the ideas that eventually produced the A.I. technologies that we are all living with today. In 2024, he led The Times’s investigation into the ways OpenAI, Google and Meta harvested data from across the internet to train their A.I. systems. That same year, he was part of a team that won a Loeb Award for a feature story showing Elon Musk’s dominance in the increasingly important field of satellite internet.
Cade will continue to work out of the San Francisco bureau. His first day at Science will be Monday. Please join me in welcoming him to the desk!
— Bill
