Parmy Olson is a technology columnist with Bloomberg, covering artificial intelligence, social media, and technology regulation. She has been writing about the growth of AI systems since around 2016, when she worked in Silicon Valley as a reporter for Forbes and covered the early rise of chatbot technology. Olson continued covering AI as a tech reporter at the Wall Street Journal, publishing multiple exclusive stories and investigations on surveillance, facial recognition, and Google’s AI work, including an investigation into how Google stifled DeepMind’s secret efforts to spin out as a non-profit organization to protect its AI from corporate interests.

At Bloomberg, Olson has written dozens of columns about the business of AI, from the niche and nerdy topic of synthetic data to broader themes like the impact of ChatGPT on society. In 2022, she ran a weekly series of Twitter Spaces events, drawing an average of 3,000 listeners, to interview entrepreneurs and researchers about frontier tech topics such as voice cloning, the metaverse, flying cars, and cryonics.

Olson started her journalism career 20 years ago as a local radio reporter before moving on to become a reporter for Forbes. She covered financial markets and valued the wealth of billionaires for Forbes’ eponymous list before focusing on the technology beat in 2010. She went on to write more than half a dozen cover stories for Forbes magazine, covering technology billionaires and deals, including the exclusive inside story on Facebook’s $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp. Olson became the first journalist to interview the messaging app’s reclusive founders following more than a year of persistent requests, for a story that attracted nearly two million views on Forbes.com.

She has received two honorable mentions for the SABEW business journalism awards for her reporting on Facebook and WhatsApp and was the first recipient of the Palo Alto Networks Cyber Security Canon Awards for her book "We Are Anonymous." In 2019, Business Insider named Olson one of the "Top 100 People in UK Tech" and described her as “tech journalism’s deep diver.” Recently, she was nominated as Digital Journalist of the Year 2023 by PRCA, the world’s largest PR professional body.

Olson wrote a book about the hacktivist collective Anonymous in 2012 called "We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of Anonymous, LulzSec and the Global Cyber Insurgency," published by Little Brown. The book received positive reviews, with the New York Times calling it “a lively, startling book," and The Daily describing it as a fast-paced “masterpiece of shoe-leather journalism.”

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