The AI industry is moving faster than journalism can follow

What it’s like to report on a beat that never slows—and may be outrunning the people trying to explain it

I’ve been covering AI as a daily beat since April 2022.

From the start, the AI beat felt more fast-paced than anything I had covered in more than two decades as a journalist, writer, and editor. Then, when OpenAI released ChatGPT that November, everything accelerated. And since then, the sheer velocity of new products, infrastructure, research, companies, investments, societal shifts, geopolitics, and policy battles has only kept climbing—week after week, month after month, year after year.

Just this week, for example, the AI news cycle felt nearly impossible to keep up with. I began with a story on the AI chip startups sitting pretty after Nvidia’s Groq deal—work I’d done before New Year’s—then rushed to cover Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s CES keynote and OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT Health. Meanwhile, my inbox kept exploding with pitches from top companies and investors. The flood of smart, provocative posts on social media—each pointing to a story I might want to chase—felt almost crushing.

By Friday, I felt a kind of burnout no one should experience just one week into a new year, when you’re supposed to still be coasting on holiday energy.

I know I’m not alone in this. I didn’t speak directly with any of my AI reporting peers this week. But as I watched (and envied) them share scoop after scoop on companies like OpenAI, xAI, Anthropic, and Google; report from the frenzy of the robotics and semiconductor scene at CES; try to make sense of the seemingly endless stream of announcements from Big Tech’s marketing machines; and parse the cryptic posts and reposts of figures like Elon Musk, I began to wonder: How sustainable is all of this for anyone trying to do real journalism?

Last April, a fellow AI reporter invited me to join a group chat called the “AI journalism support group,” with about a dozen members. It became a great place to let off steam, trade notes, and commiserate about the overwhelming nature of the beat.

By December, the leader of that group chat had quit their job to “take some time off from the grind,” telling everyone to “keep fighting the good fight.” We wished her well — and totally understood.

Other AI journalists I know have struggled with burnout and mental health issues, left for what are presumably less stressful PR jobs, or — particularly those hired for their ability to “get the scoops”— have simply questioned whether they can withstand the pressure.

For me, it’s been more a matter of worrying whether I can keep up with, let alone fully understand, so many new developments. While I was reporting deeply on the world of AI data centers, I missed how software developers were rocketing into the stratosphere with Claude Code. As soon as I make headway on the latest in AI inference, a wave of new consumer products hits the market. And that leaves precious little time to grapple with things like xAI’s “undressing” image debacle or the geopolitical AI race between the U.S. and China.

Some might say this is just a legacy media journalist complaining about competition—or that if I can’t stand the heat, I should get out of the kitchen. But these days, no matter how many AI-focused reporters there are on the beat, it’s becoming hard for any outlet to report and investigate deeply enough to truly uncover the contours of what may be the biggest tech story of our time.

And it’s not about legacy versus new media. I’m confident independent journalists on Substack feel this impossible pace too. Anyone trying to do serious, source-driven, investigative work on AI—regardless of platform—is struggling to keep up.

And believe me, I—and my peers—do use AI to help us cover AI. Not to write our stories, but to research, transcribe, bounce off ideas, analyze data, and more. We are working faster than ever. But a trillion-dollar industry like AI is working ten times faster.

I don’t want to get out of the kitchen. I love working the AI beat, and I’m excited for what’s to come in 2026 and beyond. I believe in the value of covering AI with care, context, curiosity, and skepticism. But I also believe that if the pace keeps accelerating unchecked, we risk not just burnout, but something far more consequential: our ability to truly focus on—and understand—the technology and the companies reshaping the world.