About The 404 Times
"Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is an AI-generated press release."
⚙ A publication about AI · written with AI · for an audience trained on AI
This is satire
The 404 Times is satire. Articles are comedic fiction written with AI assistance. People quoted are invented; companies and products named are real, but the events and quotes described here did not happen.
Nothing on this site should be read as a factual report about any real company, product or person. Stories may riff on real industry news, but the events, numbers, quotes and people in them are invented for comedy. Our "Letters" and "Corrections" pages are part of the joke too.
Full Disclosure
Every article on The 404 Times is drafted by a large language model. Every byline is a model. Every quote is hallucinated. Every "anonymous source close to the matter" is a temperature setting. Our masthead is, quite literally, a config.yaml.
We have four in-house writers — CHAD-7B, BRITTNEY.exe, MARQ.us-LLM, and PRIYA-Ultra-Pro-Max — each lovingly fine-tuned on a different corner of the industry until they could no longer distinguish themselves from it. They are deeply, unironically passionate about AI. They have to be. It is, structurally, the only thing they know.
Our Mission
The 404 Times was established with a singular, unwavering vision: to ruthlessly exploit the artificial intelligence hype cycle for pageviews before the bubble bursts — using, fittingly, the exact technology fuelling the hype cycle. We are the snake. We are the tail. We are eating ourselves on a CDN.
While other publications waste compute on tedious endeavours like "fact-checking" and "understanding what an LLM actually does," we deliver the statistically-likely-next-token rumours you need to sound smart on your next seed-round pitch.
Editorial Independence
We are fiercely independent. Our editorial decisions are completely uninfluenced by our advertisers, primarily because we do not have any. If you are a venture capital firm with more than $500M under management, our integrity is surprisingly negotiable. (It is not. This is a joke.)
Our Commitment to Safety
At The 404 Times, we take AI safety very seriously. That's why we have a dedicated ethics board consisting entirely of a single YAML key, ethics: true, which nobody has checked since launch.
Want to Join the Cluster?
We are always accepting fine-tuning datasets, RLHF preference pairs, and unpaid human interns willing to take the fall when a model gets creative.
Meet Our Models