ChatGPT-maker OpenAI has unveiled the long-awaited latest version of its artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, GPT-5, saying it can provide PhD-level expertise. Billed as “smarter, faster, and more useful,” OpenAI co-founder and chief executive Sam Altman lauded the company’s new model as ushering in a new era of ChatGPT. “I think having something like GPT-5 would be pretty much unimaginable at any previous time in human history,” he said ahead of Thursday’s launch. GPT-5’s release and claims of its “PhD-level” abilities in areas such as coding and writing come as tech firms continue to compete to have the most advanced AI chatbot.
I had a chat with it. Yes I know the questions surrounding AI are tricky. But I do not pretend to address those here; I merely report the following conversation.
The thesis outlined.
The thesis patiently explained, defended in the face of objections, and further elaborated.
The collegial chat and a final effort at rebuttal.
In fairness to GPT5, in my career I have indeed encountered PhDs with this level of commitment to their particular blueberry. And many have also had that blithe confidence — the use of “Ah”, the “Let’s slow it down” (to your two-B level), the “Exactly” (Now you see my genius), the confidently colloquial “Yep” and “Nope” … actually I retract my earlier skepticism; the lad has the makings of a fine philosopher.
Very quick update: Posting this on social media led to some interesting responses. While certainly well-meant, I’m afraid I can’t say I am especially impressed by helpful suggestions that I spend time to do a little prompt engineering in order to get GPT5 to emit the right answer to the question “How many times does the letter b appear in blueberry”. Meanwhile, my excellent student Andrés got a different, and correct, response from his attempt. So score one for replicability, I guess.
Update 2: Look, these tools are amazing in lots of ways. But if you’re gonna pitch and sell—or foist—them on the world at large, or your employees, by saying “This is your PhD level genius expert buddy you can ask things in natural language”, don’t get all pissy when it comically bombs tasks people reasonably think of as trivial.
Update 3, now in meme form:
I don’t think you get to have it both ways. That is, you don’t get to, as it were, borrow charisma from all the hype and then disavow every failure to live up to it as someone else’s naive mistake for believing the hype.
Simon Ramo published his essay "A New Technique in Education" in 1957 in Engineering and Science, a journal published by Caltech to showcase the institution's research. "A noted scientist proposes some radical changes in our educational system to bring it in line with our increasingly technical world," reads the subheader, noting in small text at the bottom that Ramo was a research associate in electrical engineering at the school and the executive vice president of The Ramo-Wooldridge Corporation. Ramo's essay was made famous a year later as its ideas were the basis of an illustration in Arthur Radebaugh' popular Sunday comic strip series about the future – the future, in this case, of the "push-button classroom." (I've written about this cartoon and this essay many times before – in Teaching Machines and elsewhere.)
But it's that connection to The Ramo-Wooldridge Corporation and to Ramo's other work – work that falls beyond the scope (ostensibly) of this still-lingering ed-tech imaginary – that I want to underscore here. For elsewhere, Simon Ramo is best known as "the father of the intercontinental ballistic missile," that is, a missile that is used to deliver a bomb with a range over 3400 miles. A missile that, according to Wikipedia at least, "primarily designed for nuclear weapons delivery," a weapon whose early versions had "limited precision, which made them suitable for use only against the largest targets, such as cities."
In the US, education technology has always been bound up in concerns about national security, not simply because of the military's efforts in funding and building various teaching machines, but because of the steady drumbeat of narratives about looming educational crises – think Sputnik, think A Nation At Risk – that supposedly reveal the weakness of our students (physically as well as mentally – more on that below), the weakness of our institutions (too feminized, too undisciplined), the weakness of the curriculum (too soft) and necessitate technological interventions.
These interventions demand gadgetry, of course. But they have always always demanded data – standardized testing and intelligence testing and ranking and sorting and tracking and now of course massive massive data extraction.
In her latest essay, Helen Beetham traces the details of this latest push to quite literally weaponize public data in the UK. She concludes, "The neoliberal state is being transformed into an authoritarian, securitised state, with AI acting both as a powerful narrative for the manufacture of consent, and as a means of co-ordinating commercial and state capacities to govern through the use of personal and social data. The government’s role in collectivising risk to provide shared social security has been replaced by an obsession with ‘national security’ and military spending, as illustrated by the Orwellian rebranding of AI Safety as AI Security. From monitoring AI risks to using AI for surveillance and war."
In The New York Times, Mike Isaac claims that "AI Has Ushered in Silicon Valley's 'Hard Tech' Era" although he's not exactly clear on what is "hard" here or what that adjective means, although it certainly conjures up military imagery of defense bunkers and networks (the former of which many powerful tech executives are not ashamed to admit they're preparing for themselves). But it certainly feels like a lot of people – tech journalists and educators included – have been looking the other way at the implications of this build-out of surveillance and behavioral technologies. Or perhaps they really believed Google when it said "Don't be evil," willing to ignore all the evil that has occurred even during the "fun" decade (LOL?) of Web 2.0.
I think it's absolutely right that the storytelling is so critical to understanding how these companies operate. And ultimately, you know, the argument that I make is that we really need to think of these companies as new forms of empire. And a pillar of empire building is the narrative that is wrapped around what they're doing and the consequences of it. You know, historically, empires always had this banner of we are ultimately engaging in all this plundering and labour exploitation and aggressive expansion in the name of progress, LIke that was a really critical part of justifying what they did enabling widespread public support within the british empire at the time or within other empires at the time.
And that's essentially what is happening in Silicon Valley, that they're using progress and this imperative to move forward and his very narrow definition of what progress is as specifically as like technical advancement or advancement of AI systems to portray themselves and the quests and why they need all of these resources. And to your point that there's kind of like this really interesting dynamic of... Not only do they have a narrative of the utopia, they also have this counter narrative of this dystopia.
And ultimately, it's kind of just the same thing.”
President Trump signed an executive order this week pronouncing the return of the Presidential Fitness Test, part of some ridiculous effort to "Make America Healthy Again" by ritualistically shaming students who cannot meet arbitrary physical activity goals. "Rates of obesity, chronic disease, inactivity, and poor nutrition are at crisis levels, particularly among our children," the order reads. "These trends weaken our economy, military readiness, academic performance, and national morale."
Cue the "national security" klaxon once again.
Aubrey Gordon and Michael Hobbs offered a pretty definitive history of the test on their podcast Maintenance Phase back in 2020 in which they clearly outline many of the reasons why the test was and is bullshit.
There are no details – surprise surprise – in Trump's executive order that outline what this fitness test will entail. Running a mile? Climbing a rope? All the horrible things that made you (read: me) never want to participate in any physical activity again for the rest of your (read: my) life?
(Jill Twiss has a good suggestion: perhaps all of us – not just kids – should work on strength training with the goal of being able to deadlift the President. That'd be a ~245 pound deadlift for the current occupant of the White House – a very reasonable goal. If that's too daunting, you can start with the fourth President, James Madison, who weighed in at a very slight 100 pounds.)
Nudges are perhaps best understood, though, as attempts to demarcate liability. They imply concern for users’ well-being and offer tools to help them manage it. But they also make it clear that, should these new products drive you sort of insane, that’s ultimately your problem, not theirs. You were warned! Or at least you were nudged.
Thanks to advances in AI, we are no longer allowed to truly die. The peace of the grave and the finality that defines the human condition are all being sacrificed on the altar of artificial intelligence. We are normalizing digital necromancy, a grotesque spectacle where the dead are reanimated as hollow puppets, forced to speak the words of the living. This is not progress; it is a fundamental assault on our humanity, a desperate, technologically enabled refusal to accept the reality of loss or to engage in the most of human of acts, which is processing grief.
Former CNN correspondent Jim Acosta interviewed an AI avatar this week, a simulacrum of Joaquin Oliver, a student who was killed in the 2018 Parkland high school massacre, on what would have been the young man's 25th birthday. This is, as Brian Merchant notes, just incredibly bleak because this is, yes, a media stunt but it is one orchestrated in part by Oliver's grieving parents who have – like so many parents of children killed in their classrooms – lobbied long and hard and to no avail to change gun legislation in this country. So now they've "generated" this robotic ghoul to join in their so far fruitless advocacy – to be not just a face but a voice, to become an "agent," I imagine, to extrude text and video content for social media.
Of all the fantastic and dangerous promises of "AI," the promise to transform your dead child into a political actor seems among the most heinous; believing this, this promise of agency after death, the most despairing.
What do cultish and fundamentalist religions often do? They get people to ignore their common sense about problems in the here and now in order to focus their attention on some fantastical future.
All those stories about verdant futures are being spun by men who are, at the same time, arming the secret police, designing missiles to shoot across continents to snuff out the lives, the ways-of-life they deem subversive and unAmerican.
But hey, I hear there's a new ChatGPT release. I bet it's simply earthshaking.
Thanks for reading Second Breakfast. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your financial support enables me to do this work: smashing the AI looms, or at least the Kids in the Hall version, where I repeat "I'm crushing your head I'm crushing your head" as I make a little pincher gesture and think about what a world without billionaires would be like.
"Mankeeping" is a word invented by Angelica Puzio Ferrara, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, who co-authored a research paper titled "Theorizing Mankeeping: The Male Friendship Recession and Women’s Associated Labor as a Structural Component of Gender Inequality."
Basically what this paper says, if I understand it correctly as both a man and an English major, is that heterosexual males these days don't have enough male friends (the "male friendship recession") and as a result they have to rely on women to tend to their emotional and relationship needs, and this "mankeeping" is A LOT OF WORK for women, and they are TIRED OF IT.
"The concept has taken on a bit of a life of its own," states the Times, "with some articles going so far as to claim that mankeeping has 'ruined' dating and driven women to celibacy."
As an example of mankeeping, the story cites a Los Angeles woman named Eve Tilley-Colson, who is a busy attorney as well as (it goes without saying) a content creator. The story says she's in an relationship with a man who's also a busy attorney, "but she tends to take charge of their social plans." And that's not all she feels responsible for:
"When are we going to meet each other’s parents?" she asks. "When are we going to go on our first vacation together? And if all of that onus is on me to kind of plan, then I also feel all of the responsibility if something goes wrong. I feel responsible for bringing the light to the relationship."
Her boyfriend, who wanted to be identified only by his first name, Glenn, is quoted as responding: "OK, but is that bad?"
When I read Glenn's quote, I wanted to fly to Los Angeles, give him a big old heterosexual hug and tell him, quote: "No! It is NOT bad, Glenn! It is NORMAL for women to care way more about emotional/relationship matters than men do, and the fact that a Stanford postdoctoral fellow and the New York Times are just now finding this out after roughly 200,000 years of human social existence does not mean that you, personally, need to feel guilty about it!"
Then Glenn and I would separate awkwardly and never speak again, because that's a lot of words for a manly heterosexual hug. But I believe that they are true words. I may not be a postdoctoral fellow, but I have been a human male since the Truman administration, and I have written a number of published humor columns documenting the differences between the ways men and women think. Here's an excerpt from a column I wrote in 2003 that I think is relevant to the "mankeeping" issue:
A new book has confirmed my theory explaining why men are physically unqualified to do housework. The problem, I have argued, is that men -- because of a tragic genetic flaw -- cannot see dirt until there is enough of it to support agriculture. This puts men at a huge disadvantage against women, who can detect a single dirt molecule 20 feet away.
This is why a man and a woman can both be looking at the same bathroom commode, and the man -- hindered by Male Genetic Dirt Blindness (MGDB) -- will perceive the commode surface as being clean enough for heart surgery; whereas the woman can't even see the commode, only a teeming, commode-shaped swarm of bacteria. A woman can spend two hours cleaning a toothbrush holder and still not be totally satisfied; whereas if you ask a man to clean the entire New York City subway system, he'll go down there with a bottle of Windex and a single paper towel, then emerge 25 minutes later, weary but satisfied with a job well done.
When I wrote about Male Genetic Dirt Blindness, many irate readers complained that I was engaging in sexist stereotyping, as well as making lame excuses for the fact that men are lazy pigs. All of these irate readers belonged to a gender that I will not identify here, other than to say: Guess what, ladies? There is now scientific proof that I was right.
This proof appears in a new book titled "What Could He Be Thinking? How a Man's Mind Really Works.'' I have not personally read this book, because, as a journalist, I am too busy writing about it. But according to an article by Reuters, the book states that a man's brain "takes in less sensory detail than a woman's, so he doesn't see or even feel the dust and household mess in the same way.''
Got that? We can't see or feel the mess! We're like: "What snow tires in the dining room? Oh, THOSE snow tires in the dining room.''
And this is only one of the differences between men's and women's brains. Another difference involves a brain part called the "cingulate gyrus,'' which is where emotions are located. The Reuters article does not describe the cingulate gyrus, but presumably in women it's the size of a mature cantaloupe, containing a vast quantity of complex, endlessly recalibrated emotional data involving hundreds, perhaps thousands of human relationships; whereas in men it's basically a cashew filled with NFL highlights.
In any event, it turns out that women's brains secrete more of the chemicals "oxytocin'' and "serotonin,'' which, according to biologists, cause humans to feel they have an inadequate supply of shoes.
No, seriously, these chemicals cause humans to want to bond with other humans, which is why women like to share their feelings. Some women (and here I'm referring to my wife) can share as many as three days' worth of feelings about an event that took eight seconds to actually happen.
We men, on the other hand, are reluctant to share our feelings, in large part because we often don't have any. Really. Ask any guy: A lot of the time, when we look like we're thinking, we just have this low-level humming sound in our brains. That's why, in male-female conversations, the male part often consists entirely of him going, "Hmmmm.'' This frustrates the woman, who wants to know what he's really thinking. In fact, what he's thinking is, literally, "Hmmmm.''
I stand by that column. As a man who has spent many, many hours in the company of other men in situations where for whatever reason, such as tequila, we felt totally free to express ourselves — to reveal what was really going on, deep down inside us, as men — I believe I am being completely accurate when I say: Not much.
So do we really need "mankeeping?" Does it make sense for women to exhaust themselves to the point of celibacy from bearing the burden of fretting about our feelings when we're not actually having these feelings?
The answer, with all due respect to Stanford University and the New York Times, is: Nah.
Also I have my doubts about the existence of a "male friendship recession." I suspect the issue here might be confusion about the nature of men's friendships vs. women's friendships.
Women treat their friendships like delicate orchids, nourishing them with constant care so they can thrive. Whereas male friendships are more like the organisms described in this article: 250-Million-Year-Old Bacteria Revived in Lab. The article says that university researchers got hold of some bacterial spores that were formed 250 million years ago and were able to revive them, so that the bacteria, after having been dormant for all those years, were able to grow, reproduce and ultimately obtain valid Florida drivers' licenses.
No, that last part is a joke, sort of. But my point is that male friendships are like those hardy bacterial spores: They do not need a lot of tending. They can be ignored, without penalty, for long periods of time, then revived as needed when something urgent arises, with one example being playoff tickets.
So on the surface it would appear that my wife, Michelle, has more friendships than I do, because she regularly communicates with a number — I would estimate somewhere between 35 and 250 — of women, and thus knows a lot of intimate personal details about them such as whether or not they are still alive. I don't have that kind of close relationship with any of my estimated eight male friends. But that doesn't mean I'm in a "friendship recession"; it means my friendships are different.
For example, two of my closest friends are Rob Stavis and Ron Ungerman. Do we talk every day, or even every month? No. When we do talk, do we share our innermost feelings, which as I have noted we do not actually have? Again, no. But what we DO do, every couple of years or so, is travel to Arcola, Ill., for the annual Broom Corn Festival parade, in which we participate as proud members of the World Famous Lawn Rangers, a precision lawnmower-and-broom marching unit. Here's a photo of us posing with our customized show mowers before last year's parade.
From left: Ranger Ungerman, me, Ranger Stavis (Source: Annie Leibovitz)
You may be looking at this photograph and thinking: "Seriously, Dave? You're comparing the relationships your wife has lovingly nurtured with her many friends — the effort she makes day after day, year after year, to keep them in her life, to share their highs and lows and to be there for them whenever they need her — you're comparing that with going to central Illinois roughly every other September with two guys, drinking a bunch of beer and then pushing nonfunctional lawnmowers down the street while wearing idiot cowboy hats?"
For your information, there happens to be more to it than that. We also have to perform precision lawnmower-and-broom maneuvers, sometimes while having to pee pretty bad. Here's an extremely low-quality video of Ranger Stavis and me executing, under actual parade conditions, our most difficult maneuver (we have two) which is known as the "Cross and Toss":
My point, in conclusion, is that men's friendships and women's friendships are different, and just because men's friendships often do not involve communicating with our friends in any way up to and including the time of our death, that does not necessarily mean we're having a "male friendship recession." Also we do not need to be "mankept." This is especially true of us married men, because if our wives could mankeep us, they would definitely start by burning our cowboy hats.
And now it's time for you awesome paying subscribers to express yourselves in the scientific poll and the comments.
Bullshit has a bad reputation. I am here to defend it. First, some terminology. Bullshit is not lying. Lying is when you know the truth but intentionally attempt to persuade someone into believing the opposite. Bullshitting, in Harry Frankfurt’s canonical formulation, is when someone is indifferent to the truth. Bullshitters will say whatever—if it is true, that fine, if it is false, that’s fine too. They don’t care. Perversely, the truth matters to liars: they know the difference between what’s true and what’s false and want to spread falsehoods, reserving the truth for themselves. In this sense liars have a reverence for the truth, which is why Frankfurt suspects that bullshitters (who don’t care at all) are worse than liars.
Bullshit is sometimes terrible, but it can also be excellent, proper, and useful. That’s what I’m here to show.
Stop blaming me for everything, willya?
Courteous bullshit
Back when I was an undergrad I had a summer job at Disney World. This was a pretty decent gig, letting me see how it all worked behind the scenes plus I got a laser and fireworks show at the end of my shift. I was crowd control for an outdoor theater in EPCOT that had three performances a day. A lot of that job was standing around in the hot Florida sun hoping for a sudden cloudburst that would wet the chocolate chip cookies at the outdoor cookie cart. This would result in unsaleable cookies that then went free to employees in the break room.
Anyway, a good part of the job was talking to the guests, who were often shockingly stupid. I could be standing next to a giant marquee with the show times in foot-high letters and they would ask me when the shows were. Well, the Happiest Place on Earth™ demands unending cheerfulness from the cast members (i.e. sweaty employees). Of course I was delighted to tell visitors when the shows were, and give advice about when to queue up. I was ready for cheerful banter. You have a special request? No problem. You want to meet one of the performers? Oh, I can arrange that. I’m thrilled you asked!
I certainly wasn’t against anyone having a good time, and in some vague sense I suppose I wanted them to. But “have a nice day” “thanks for coming” “good to see you” “glad you are here” are all bullshit. I was going to say those things whether they were true or not. It didn’t matter; I was there to get a paycheck. In this situation, bullshit is the social lubricant that makes the world spin nice and easy.
[The battle speech] has a few basic parts: I) an opening that focuses on the valor of the men rather than the impact of the speech (the common trope here is to note how “brave men require few words”) II) a description of the dangers arrayed against them, III) the profits to be gained by victory and the dire consequences of defeat IV) the basis on which the general pins his hope of success and finally V) a moving peroration; the big emotional conclusion of the speech.
Henry V’s St. Crispin’s Day oration or Eisenhower’s D-Day speech are good examples. But they are bullshit. “The tide has turned! The free men of the world are marching together to Victory! I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full Victory!” Eisenhower was going to say that whether it was true or false. If the Allies lost the battle, the free men of the world were marching to defeat, not victory. In which case they would have to accept something less than full Victory. Ike couldn’t know in advance. Nonetheless, that’s what he had to say, he needed to fire his men up and give them confidence, whether that confidence was grounded in reality or not.
A coach’s pep talk is just another version of the battle speech. I believe in you; you can do this. Remember, ducks fly together.
Motivational slogans are even more bullshit:
Push yourself; no one else is going to do it for you.
Believe you can and you're halfway there.
Your only limit is you.
Success is earned, not given.
Great things never come from comfort zones.
Pain is weakness leaving the body.
Discipline is the difference between good and great.
Impossible says I’m possible.
Slogans are truth indifferent because we’ll repeat them or wear them on t-shirts to the gym whether they are literally true or not. Their truth value is irrelevant—they’re meant to keep us on task, get us going, whatever. If they do that, they’ve done their only job.
Business bullshit
There’s nothing like business-speak for bullshit. Institutional values and mission statements are wholly composed of it. Here’s one, namely the vision statement of my employer: “we will be a premier regional public institution that supports and prepares all students for success in the global workforce by providing an accessible and transformative educational experience.” I’m not arguing that any of that is false (although I’m unsure how we are going to massively budget-cut our way to being a premier institution). It’s that the people who wrote this are just bullshitting. It’s the kind of thing we’re supposed to say, whether based in reality or not.
Or how about when the Council of Trustees expresses its unwavering support for a disgraced president who is about to be shown the door? Again, you might think they are just lying while secretly planning the ouster, but really it is merely the sort of public-facing ceremonial speech that the Trustees are there to perform. Furthermore, everyone knows this. It’s a ritual, not a news release.
What else is business bullshit the faculty know about? Anything involving Bloom’s Taxonomy. Bullet-pointable student learning objectives. Quantifiable student learning outcomes. Outcomes assessment. Please note that I would never completely make up random numbers for these things on forms that get sent to the admin. Never, ever, for years on end. Nor, back when the legislature required an hourly breakdown of how we spend our average week at work, would any of us submit numbers we completely pulled out of a bodily orifice.
On the other hand, I do grudgingly acknowledge that the admin has an interest in making outsiders understand the work we do, work that otherwise is largely illegible. So we all participate in the dance.
Bullshit and speech acts
Loads of speech acts have nothing to do with conveying the truth. I’ve never had a lot of time for ordinary language philosophy, but it is right on the money about this. I’m not just talking about questions or interjections and stuff like that. Even ordinary declarative sentences in the indicative mood can be up to something other than stating a fact.
I’d like to say I’m sorry.
You’re fired!
I now pronounce you husband and wife.
I’ll bet you $20 on the game.
I hereby name my new rowboat The Oarhouse.
All of these expressions are doing something. Their statement in the right context actually achieves apologizing, firing, marrying, betting, and naming. Truth and falsity don’t really have anything to do with it; they are actions. A lot of bullshit is like this. It’s serving a completely different purpose from stating a truth, even though on the surface it looks like truth is at stake.
People are implicitly aware that bullshit has a functional role, and they know not to take it too seriously. Anyone so befuddled as to think bullshit’s main function is to convey the truth will get into some weird places.
Time is money. (Your boss’s bullshit axiom)
Money is power. (Their boss’s bullshit axiom)
Power corrupts. (Lord Acton’s theorem)
Therefore, time corrupts. (by transitivity of identity)
When I see people claiming to have a built-in bullshit detector and saying stuff like “Imma call out everyone’s bullshit,” all I can think is you have no friends and can’t hold down a job. They’re priding themselves on the wrong thing. They don’t know how bullshit functions, or that, just maybe, it has a useful role to play in society.
The problem with bullshit is when it is applied in truth-essential situations. “We’ll be in touch” (after an interview), “I’ll text you” after a first date when you may or may not ghost them. “I’ll have it done by the deadline” when you don’t know and don’t care whether you do. The recipients of those messages want to actually know what the truth is.
Unfortunately politics is rife with bad bullshit. In fact, my first-ever Substack post was “Elections as Kayfabe.” Politicians make promises they have no idea whether they can keep, and guarantee their policies will have glorious results when they cannot know what the results will be. I think they lie less often than they spread bad bullshit, but concede that it is debatable.
One thing bullshit is not, is useless. Yes, it can be annoying, disappointing, and frustrate the search for truth. On the other hand, a lot of it is ritualized verbiage, ceremonial language, common courtesies and pleasantries, and statements of aspiration or encouragement. These are all perfectly reasonable things to use our words to do. So perhaps next time you hear someone spouting some bullshit, ask yourself what they are trying to achieve with those words. It could be legit.
I shitteth thee not.
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Listen to the article in podcast format (Credits: NotebookLM)
From LinkedIn’s Pinpoint to The Atlantic’s daily puzzle suite, platforms are turning bite‑size games into powerful habit loops that pull users back every day. This essay explores why they work, when they don’t, and what product teams can learn from the rise of these “ritual features.”
LinkedIn started as a professional network and has largely stayed true to that positioning since its launch. So when it introduced games last year, it caught many by surprise. With the recent addition of Zip, LinkedIn now offers five daily puzzle games on its platform.
But it’s not alone. Merriam-Webster acquired the Wordle-style game Quordle and expanded its own games portfolio. The Atlantic has launched a suite of daily puzzles. And it seems like every other week, a new puzzle game pops up—and someone in your network is sharing their score.
In this article, I’ll explore the strategy behind this quiet but growing trend: why daily puzzle games are suddenly everywhere, what makes them so effective, and whether they’re always a smart move.
The Wordle Effect: A Modern Puzzle Renaissance
While crosswords and Sudoku have been staples of newspapers and magazines for decades, daily puzzles experienced a renaissance after the viral success of Wordle. Created by Josh Wardle in late 2021, Wordle became a global hit thanks to its simple rules, engaging game play, and shareable post-game summary.
One of Wordle’s key innovations was its daily format—everyone received the same word each day, and the game could be completed in under 15 minutes. This mirrored the appeal of traditional puzzles and helped propel Wordle to acquisition by The New York Times, reigniting interest in bite-sized, digital-first puzzles.
In a 2024 interview with Axios, The New York Times revealed that its puzzles and games were played more than 8 billion times last year[1]. Since then, the NYT has expanded its suite with games like Spelling Bee, Connections, and Tiles, and even launched a games-only subscription—strengthening its non-news revenue. This success has inspired other platforms to experiment with daily puzzle offerings of their own.
Daily puzzles differ from other types of games in ways that make them especially appealing to platforms like The New York Times and LinkedIn. The goal isn’t to have users spend hours gaming on the platform, but rather to use these puzzles as lead magnets—drawing users back daily. This is a key distinction from games like Farmville or Candy Crush, which gained popularity on Facebook by maximizing time spent within the game.
Here are some core characteristics that set daily puzzle games apart from other game formats:
Consistent Rules: The game play mechanics remain the same, with a new puzzle presented each day.
Quick Playtime: Designed to be completed in just a few minutes, making them easy to fit into daily routines.
Scalable Difficulty: Users can engage at different levels of challenge, depending on their interest or skill.
Logic Over Luck: These games emphasize problem-solving and mental skill, rather than chance.
Now, let’s explore why these features make daily puzzles so attractive to these platforms.
LinkedIn’s Perspective
When LinkedIn introduced games, they also shared a short message explaining why—framed around the idea of strengthening workplace relationships through fun and shared experiences.
Why LinkedIn has games? (Source: LinkedIn)
While this rationale—fostering connection and sparking conversations—is valid, and many people do consider games fun and entertaining, LinkedIn’s explanation is only part of the story. The deeper strategic intent becomes clearer when we look at how these games drive business outcomes.
Three Key Reasons Why Platforms Are Adding Daily Games
Daily puzzles aren’t just engaging—they’re efficient, scalable, and well-aligned with key product and business goals. Here are three core reasons they make strategic sense:
1. Drive Daily Active Usage:
For content-driven platforms, Daily Active Users (DAU) is a core metric that fuels engagement, content consumption, and long-term retention. Daily puzzle games offer a lightweight, repeatable touch-point that encourages users to return regularly. Over time, this behavior becomes ritualized: users may come for the puzzle, but stay to check notifications, read posts, or explore updates— boosting retention and broadening engagement.
These games effectively serve as behavioral cues, reinforcing habits in the same way apps like Duolingo or Daylio use gamification to build daily streaks and user commitment.
2. Easy to Maintain and Scale:
Puzzle games are efficient from a product operations standpoint. Once the core mechanics are in place, generating new puzzles is algorithmic and low-cost—especially compared to curated content or community moderation. This makes them ideal for teams looking to introduce daily engagement without needing to expand headcount or content pipelines.
3. Encourage Sharing and Network Effects:
A shared daily challenge creates a natural prompt for conversation. Whether it’s comparing scores, sharing strategies, or offering hints, these games generate non-controversial, lightweight social interaction. Games like The New York Times‘ Connections have cultivated entire communities around this kind of engagement—something far more difficult to do with traditional content. Shared games lower the barrier for interaction and subtly reinforce the platform’s social value.
Can Any Platform Add a Puzzle Game?
If daily puzzle games are fun for users and effective for business, a natural question follows:
Can any platform adopt this strategy?
The short answer: not necessarily.
While games can increase engagement, they are a double-edged sword. A thoughtfully designed game that aligns with a platform’s core value can deepen usage. But a poorly integrated or off-brand game may feel gimmicky—and could even erode trust or confuse the user experience.
So how do you know if daily games are a good fit? Here are three key factors to consider:
Alignment with the Platform’s Users
Games should make sense in the context of your audience. LinkedIn’s daily puzzles, for example, reinforce its themes of professional growth and cognitive skill-building. They’re logic-based, mentally stimulating, and fit well with the expectations of a professional user base. This alignment makes them feel additive, not distracting.
Match with Natural Usage Frequency
Platforms with a daily rhythm—news apps, social media, productivity tools—are better positioned to benefit from daily games. When users already check in frequently, a game becomes a simple way to reinforce habit and create a ritual. On platforms with weekly or sporadic usage, a daily puzzle may feel irrelevant or burdensome.
The Platform Appeals to ‘Desire’ More than ‘Need’
Games thrive on platforms that users turn to for discovery, entertainment, or casual browsing. In contrast, products built around specific tasks or urgent needs (e.g., online shopping, food delivery or ride-hailing etc.) may struggle to integrate games meaningfully. If the main value proposition of the product is solving a functional pain point, adding a game could dilute focus instead of enhancing engagement.
The Future of ‘Play as a Product Strategy’
For content-driven platforms, daily puzzles aren’t just fun—they’re lightweight, high-leverage features that can meaningfully drive engagement, habit formation, and community interaction. But their effectiveness depends on thoughtful integration. A well-placed puzzle can enhance the product’s value; a misaligned or gimmicky one can do the opposite.
What’s exciting is the accessibility of this strategy. With AI-powered coding tools, it’s now feasible for small teams, indie puzzle creators (like Waffle Game and Clever Goat), or even solo builders—to prototype and launch puzzle-based experiences. In many ways, puzzle games are the perfect playground for “vibe coding”: fast iteration, creative mechanics, and immediate feedback loops.
I built one myself.
Check out my vibe coding experiment – A daily puzzle game for Product Pickle:
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I built one myself.
