A recent investigation into Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s multimillion-dollar Hawaii compound has stirred both fascination and concern among the public.
A WIRED report revealed Zuckerberg’s plans to construct a private 1,400-acre compound called “Koolau Ranch” on Kauai. Allegedly, the $270 million property will include two mansions, a gym, a tennis court, pools, spa facilities, guest houses, operations buildings, and even an underground bunker.
Despite Koolau Ranch’s grandeur, the secrecy of the project raises many concerns among the tight-knit Kauai community. WIRED’s interviews with former contractors for the compound revealed that workers were required to sign strict NDAs and were observed under military-like security measures. Employees were allegedly fired for sharing social media posts on the property.
“There’s cameras everywhere,” a former Koolau Ranch contractor told WIRED.
In addition to the enforcement of strict worker NDAs, there were purportedly several more suspicious legal activities related to the project that sparked a public backlash.
Allegedly, Zuckerberg created a number of “shell” businesses to own Koolau Ranch on his behalf. According to WIRED, these shell businesses filed lawsuits that pressured locals with ancestral land rights to either sell their stakes in the land or bid for them at auction.
Sadly, many islanders have been unable to outbid wealthy competitors for ownership of their ancestral land, contributing to ongoing economic issues for Hawaiian locals. As more wealthy mainland Americans purchase property in Hawaii, island locals struggle to keep up with the rising cost of living, with some left with no choice but to leave their homes.
“The people who are born and raised here can’t afford to live here,” a Kauai local told WIRED.
Kauaians are also wary of the potential environmental impact that the Koolau Ranch project will have on the island. According to NBC News, the construction project has significantly increased local car traffic, noise pollution, and littering.
In the face of Koolau Ranch’s public backlash, some Hawaiians believe that Zuckerberg’s presence on Kauai could benefit the island’s economy in the long run. Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, have reportedly donated over $20 million to various Kauai-based nonprofits since 2018, per SFGATE, including a county jobs program and several COVID-19 relief initiatives.
However, critics remain skeptical of the Meta CEO’s intentions.
“Zuckerberg’s presence may increase charity, but will not address the root causes of why we need this type of philanthropic charity in the first place,” said Nikki Cristobal, executive director of Kamāwaelualani, a Hawaiian nonprofit dedicated to education and arts, in the WIRED report.
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The Nasdaq MarketSite in the Times Square neighborhood of New York, on Tuesday, May 31, 2022.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Tech stocks rebounded from a disastrous 2022 and lifted the Nasdaq to one of its strongest years in the past two decades.
After last year’s 33% plunge, the tech-heavy Nasdaq finished 2023 up 43%, its best year since 2020, which was narrowly higher. The gain was also just shy of the index’s performance in 2009. Those are the only two years with bigger gains dating back to 2003, when stocks were coming out of the dot-com crash.
The Nasdaq is now just 6.5% below its record high it reached in November 2021.
Across the industry, the big story this year was a return to risk, driven by the Federal Reserve halting its interest rate hikes and a more stable outlook on inflation. Companies also benefited from the cost-cutting measures they put in place starting late last year to focus on efficiency and bolstering profit margins.
“Once you have a Fed that’s backing off, no mas, in terms of rate hikes, you can get back to the business of pricing companies properly — how much money do they make, what kind of multiple do you put on it,” Kevin Simpson, founder of Capital Wealth Planning, told CNBC’s “Halftime Report” on Tuesday. “It can continue into 2024.”
While the tech industry got a big boost from the macro environment and the prospect of lower borrowing costs, the emergence of generative artificial intelligence drove excitement in the sector and pushed companies to invest in what’s viewed as the next big thing.
Nvidia was the big winner in the AI rush. The chipmaker’s stock price soared 239% in 2023, as large cloud vendors and heavily funded startups snapped up the company’s graphics processing units (GPUs), which are needed to train and run advanced AI models. In the first three quarters of 2023, Nvidia generated $17.5 billion in net income, up more than sixfold from the prior year. Revenue in the latest quarter tripled.
Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s CEO, said in March that AI’s “iPhone moment” has begun.
“Startups are racing to build disruptive products and business models, while incumbents are looking to respond,” Huang said at Nvidia’s developers conference. “Generative AI has triggered a sense of urgency in enterprises worldwide to develop AI strategies.”
Consumers got to know about generative AI thanks to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which the Microsoft-backed company released in late 2022. The chatbot allowed users to type in a few words of text and start a conversation that could produce sophisticated responses in an instant.
Developers started using generative AI to create tools for booking travel, creating marketing materials, enhancing customer service and even coding software. Microsoft, Google, Meta and Amazon touted their hefty investments in generative AI as they embedded the tech across product suites.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said on his company’s earnings call in October that generative AI will likely produce tens of billions of dollars in revenue for Amazon Web Services in the next few years, adding that Amazon is using the models to forecast inventory, establish transportation routes for drivers, help third-party sellers create product pages and help advertisers generate images.
“We have been surprised at the pace of growth in generative AI,” Jassy said. “Our generative AI business is growing very, very quickly. Almost by any measure it’s a pretty significant business for us already. And yet I would also say that companies are still in the relatively early stages.”
Amazon shares climbed 81% in 2023, their best year since 2015.
Microsoft investors enjoyed a rally this year unlike anything they’d seen since 2009, with shares of the software company climbing 58%.
In addition to its investment in OpenAI, Microsoft integrated the technology into products like Bing, Office and Windows. Copilot became the brand for its broad generative AI service, and CEO Satya Nadella described Microsoft last month as “the Copilot company.”
“Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI and subsequent product innovation through 2023 has resulted in a market dynamic shift,” Michael Turrin, a Wells Fargo analyst who recommends buying the stock, wrote in a Dec. 20 note to clients. “Many now view MSFT as the outright leader in the early AI wars (even ahead of market share leader AWS).”
Meanwhile, Microsoft has been cranking out profits at a historic rate. In its latest earnings report, Microsoft said its gross margin exceeded 71% for the first time since 2013, when Steve Ballmer ran the company. Microsoft has found ways to more efficiently run its data centers and has lowered reliance on hardware, resulting in higher margins for the segment containing Windows, Xbox and search.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella (R) speaks as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (L) looks on during the OpenAI DevDay event on November 06, 2023 in San Francisco, California. Altman delivered the keynote address at the first ever Open AI DevDay conference.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images
After Nvidia, the biggest stock pop among mega-cap tech companies was in shares of Meta, which jumped almost 200%. Nvidia and Meta were by far the two top performers in the S&P 500.
Meta’s rally was sparked in February, when CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who founded the company in 2004, said 2023 would be the company’s “year of efficiency” after the stock plummeted 64% in 2022 due largely to three straight quarters of declining revenue.
The company cut more than 20,000 jobs, proving to Wall Street it was serious about streamlining its expenses. Then growth returned as Facebook picked up market share in digital advertising. For the third quarter, Meta recorded expansion of 23%, its sharpest increase in two years.
Like Meta, Uber wasn’t around during the dot-com crash. The ride-hailing company was founded in 2009, during the depths of the financial crisis, and became a tech darling in the ensuing years, when investors favored innovation and growth over profit.
Uber went public in 2019, but for a long time battled the notion that it could never be profitable because so much of its revenue went to paying drivers. But the economic model finally began to work late last year, for both its rideshare and food delivery businesses.
That all allowed Uber to achieve a major investor milestone earlier this month, when the stock was added to the S&P 500. Members of the index must have positive earnings in the most recent quarter and over the prior four quarters in total, according to S&P’s rules. Uber reported net income of $221 million on $9.29 billion in revenue for its third quarter, and in the past four quarters altogether, it generated more than $1 billion in profit.
Uber shares climbed to a record this week and jumped 149% for the year. The stock, which is listed on the New York Stock Exchange, finished the year as the sixth-biggest gainer in the S&P 500.
Despite the tech rally in 2023, there was a dearth of new opportunities for public investors during the year. After a dismal 2022 for tech IPOs, very few names came to market in 2023. The three most notable IPOs — Instacart, Arm and Klaviyo — all took place during a one-week stretch in September.
For most late-stage companies in the IPO pipeline, more work needs to be done. The public market remains unwelcoming for cash-burning companies that have yet to show they can be sustainably profitable, which is a problem for the many startups that raised mountains of cash during the zero-interest days of 2020 and 2021.
Even for profitable software and internet companies, multiples have contracted, meaning the valuation startups achieved in the private market will require many of them to take a haircut when going public.
Byron Lichtenstein, a managing director at venture firm Insight Partners, called 2023 “the great reset.” He said the companies best positioned for IPOs are unlikely to debut until the back half of 2024 at the earliest. In the meantime, they’ll be making necessary preparations, such as hiring independent board members and spending on IT and accounting to make sure they’re ready.
“You have this dynamic of where expectations were in ’21 and the prices that were paid then,” Lichtenstein said in an interview. “We’re still dealing with a little bit of that hangover.”
—CNBC’s Jonathan Vanian contributed to this report
Dr. Joan Donovan, a former Harvard disinformation scholar, is claiming in a new disclosure that the university’s cozy relationship with alumni Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan, led to her termination.
In the whistleblower declaration made public on Monday, Donovan claims her studies on media manipulation campaigns were restricted following a $500 million donation from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to fund an artificial intelligence center in 2021.
“From that very day forward, I was treated differently by the university to the point where I lost my job,” Donovan told The Logic.
The disclosure was sent on Donovan’s behalf to Harvard and U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona by Whistleblower Aid last week.
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is a philanthropic organization run by Zuckerberg and Chan.
Donovan claims she was terminated in 2022 after Harvard shut down her research. She had worked at the university since 2018 running the Technology and Social Change Research Project for the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.
The disclosure calls for an investigation into the Kennedy School and “all appropriate corrective action.”
Harvard, meanwhile, has refused Donovan’s allegations and claims she wasn’t fired.
“Allegations of unfair treatment and donor interference are false. The narrative is full of inaccuracies and baseless insinuations, particularly the suggestion that Harvard Kennedy School allowed Facebook to dictate its approach to research,” said Harvard spokesperson James Francis Smith in a statement to CNN.
“By longstanding policy to uphold academic standards, all research projects at Harvard Kennedy School need to be led by faculty members. Joan Donovan was hired as a staff member (not a faculty member) to manage a media manipulation project. When the original faculty leader of the project left Harvard, the School tried for some time to identify another faculty member who had time and interest to lead the project. After that effort did not succeed, the project was given more than a year to wind down. Joan Donovan was not fired, and most members of the research team chose to remain at the School in new roles,” he said.
The disclosure notes that the Chan Zuckerberg donation came shortly after the 2021 “Facebook Papers” whistleblower complaint from former Facebook employee Frances Haugen.
Harvard made the papers public with the help of Donovan, who archived the documents for public research.
Since Donovan’s departure from Harvard, she announced in August she is joining Boston University’s College of Communication as an assistant professor.
Facebook parent Meta Platforms deliberately engineered its social platforms to hook kids and knew—but never disclosed—it had received millions of complaints about underage users on Instagram but only disabled a fraction of those accounts, according to a newly unsealed legal complaint described in reports from The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.
The complaint, originally made public in redacted form, was the opening salvo in a lawsuit filed in late October by the attorneys general of 33 states.
Company documents cited in the complaint described several Meta officials acknowledging the company designed its products to exploit shortcomings in youthful psychology such as impulsive behavior, susceptibility to peer pressure and the underestimation of risks, according to the reports.
Others acknowledged Facebook and Instagram also were popular with children under age 13 who, per company policy, were not allowed to use the service.
Meta said in a statement to The Associated Press that the complaint misrepresents its work over the past decade to make the online experience safe for teens, noting it has “over 30 tools to support them and their parents.”
With respect to barring younger users from the service, Meta argued age verification is a “complex industry challenge.”
Instead, Meta said it favors shifting the burden of policing underage usage to app stores and parents, specifically by supporting federal legislation that would require app stores to obtain parental approval whenever youths under 16 download apps.
One Facebook safety executive alluded to the possibility that cracking down on younger users might hurt the company’s business in a 2019 email, according to the Journal report.
But a year later, the same executive expressed frustration that while Facebook readily studied the usage of underage users for business reasons, it didn’t show the same enthusiasm for ways to identify younger kids and remove them from its platforms, the Journal reported.
The complaint noted that at times Meta has a backlog of up to 2.5 million accounts of younger children awaiting action, according to the newspaper reports.
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Russia’s interior ministry has added the spokesperson of U.S. tech giant Meta Andy Stone to its wanted list, Russian state-owned news agency TASS reported.
Stone “is wanted under an article of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation,” the agency reported, citing the ministry’s database. The reason Stone was added to the list was not indicated, according to the report.
In 2022, following Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine, Moscow officially designated the American tech company — which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — as a “terrorist and extremist” organization. That opened the door to heavier legal proceedings against its users in the country.
Western social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and X (formerly known as Twitter) were banned from Russia and are only accessible in the country through VPNs.
On Sunday, Russian authorities also said they downed 24 Ukrainian drones. The day before, Russia had launched the largest aerial attack against Ukraine since its invasion started, barraging the country with 75 Shahed drones.
Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks during Meta Connect event at Meta headquarters in Menlo Park, California on September 27, 2023.
Josh Edelson | AFP | Getty Images
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg may not have been directly involved with the drama surrounding Sam Altman’s tumultuous departure from, then return to, OpenAI, but the social networking executive and his company could benefit from the drama.
There’s been much debate over the “winners” of the OpenAI executive saga, with some experts believing Microsoft and its CEO Satya Nadella proved victorious while the OpenAI board members who kicked off the debacle by firing Altman last Friday were the losers.
Microsoft, OpenAI’s largest financial backer, has been positioning the high-profile startup as a cornerstone cloud computing partner, promoting Altman and his team throughout the year at numerous events. It created a public association between itself and the high-flying maker of ChatGPT. But that backfired somewhat when critics questioned how the boardroom shenanigans could have escaped Nadella and his company’s watch.
Meanwhile, Meta and Zuckerberg had the luxury of watching the corporate circus from the sidelines. It could help Meta boost its open-source Llama AI initiatives, as some companies look to diversify away from relying on a single company’s large language model. And it may even help with recruiting.
Meta continues to invest heavily in the kinds of generative AI and related large language models that helped spawn OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Its AI research team is considered, with Alphabet’s DeepMind, one of the most esteemed groups in the tech industry.
Technologists looking to work in the private sector may find comfort in stability at Meta and its AI research lab following the seemingly near collapse of one of the industry’s leading AI startups.
As one user on Meta’s Twitter-like Threads service posted on Wednesday: “Everyone is saying MSFT is the big winner of [the] OpenAI fiasco. But I can easily see META being the big winner in the end.”
“If you’re an AI researcher and you’re going to work at big tech, it might as well be the company with the largest open source and public research presence,” the user said in the Threads post.
Yann LeCun, Meta’s AI chief, responded to the post with a curt “Yup.”
Then there are the potential business opportunities.
The OpenAI fiasco raised concerns among the startup’s customers and other corporate leaders about whether they should only rely on one kind of LLM as part of their AI business strategies. Multiple technologists told CNBC that the OpenAI ordeal jumpstarted a push from businesses to lessen their reliance on OpenAI’s GPT family of LLMs to incorporate others from startups like Anthropic and Cohere.
Meta could benefit if companies continue to seek multiple AI vendors, much like firms now rely on multiple cloud providers. The company has heavily touted its Llama-branded family of generative AI software, which is available for free via an open-source model. Llama is attractive because developers can access and customize the LLM to their specific needs without being tethered to a particular vendor.
The more developers access and improve Llama, the more Meta can potentially lower its overall operating and technology research costs, among other benefits.
Finally, despite Llama’s licensing concerns and other potential issues, more companies and developers may choose to build apps with Meta’s AI software without fear that the social networking giant could collapse in a matter of days.
Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed on Instagram and Threads (both of which he owns) that he had ACL surgery on his knee last week — and recovery is proving to be a challenge.
Zuck told followers he suffered the injury while practicing MMA in his backyard for an upcoming fight.
“I was training for a competitive MMA fight early next year, but now that’s delayed a bit,” he said. “Still looking forward to doing it after I recover. Thanks to everyone for the love and support.”
On threads, Meta’s competition to Elon Musk’s X, Zuckerberg updated his followers on his progress.
Naturally, the CEO has found himself playing UFC games to fill the void of not being able to fight in real life — except things became “a bit too real” when his character in the game was also, ironically, injured.
“My fighter started 39 years old, but turns out every time you lose your fighter needs 9 months to recover from injuries plus time to get a new fight and then training camp,” he explained. “I chose the hardest difficulty and found myself sitting here at the peak of post-surgery pain with my fighter 0-8, almost 54 years old, still trying to get his first win in the UFC.”
A classic case of life imitating art.
Zuck’s long since been a fan of martial arts (he rented out the entire UFC APEX in Las Vegas for a match in 2022, after all) but has been taking the sport more seriously as of late.
This past May, the billionaire won a gold medal in his first-ever Jiu-Jitsu competition in Woodside, California.
“MMA is the perfect thing,” Zuckerberg told host Joe Rogan on an August 2022 episode of The Joe Rogan Experience. “After an hour or two of working out or rolling or wrestling with friends, or training with different folks, it”s like now I’m ready to go solve whatever problem at work for the day.”
According to Healthline, healing from ACL surgery takes at least nine months, including the initial post-surgery healing phase and physical therapy further down the line.
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
From Ford to Musk, the image of the successful entrepreneur has often been intertwined with a set of traditional ideals: unyielding confidence, unwavering determination and an unrelenting pursuit of success. Those characteristics of excellence have shaped our perception of what it means to be a successful entrepreneur for generations. They also connect with larger social and political ideas of greatness: winning through domination in some form.
However, a generational shift in the definition of excellence is becoming all too apparent as the once-unquestionable benchmarks of success, such as wealth, fame and power, have begun to coexist with qualities that transcend the headlines — qualities like personal growth, empathy and a commitment to lasting values. Additionally, an increasing number of successful female entrepreneurs are also calling into question masculine gatekeeping of definitions of entrepreneurial excellence. Numerous social pressures, along with rapid technological change, are causing many of us to contemplate what it actually means to pursue “excellence” or “greatness” today.
Somewhere on the other side of Elon and Zuckerberg’s proposed MMA fight is another view of what being great can be for an entrepreneur. A more encompassing view of excellence may be necessary, one which redefines not only the characteristics of greatness but also the obligations and behaviors of those we deem role models within the world of business. Excellence is no longer solely about conquering frontiers or amassing fortunes; it’s about leaving a positive mark on the world, fostering innovation with ethics, and making decisions that resonate through generations. That excellence can be achieved by adding elements of stoicism and empathy to our entrepreneurial mindsets and leadership approaches.
The historical record provides as many definitions of excellence as it does role models to learn from. Different eras have birthed distinct ideals of greatness, often mirroring the predominant societal norms and values. In the Renaissance, excellence was defined by creativity; in the Enlightenment, it was rationality. Excellence in political leadership was defined in many eras as the ability to win wars and defeat foes. Yet even some of the greatest warriors held up as role models of excellence, such as Leonidas’s Spartans at Thermopylae or Saigō Takamori’s Samurai at the Battle of Shiroyama, proved their merit through their defeat by holding fast to their values in the face of certain loss. Excellence, it seems, becomes a complex issue when one combines the morality of strong values with societal markers like wealth, fame, power or might.
The realm of entrepreneurialism, especially the tech field, has yielded its own vision of excellence. Innovation, creativity, self-discipline and drive are elevated, and entrepreneurs strive to emulate in the hopes of capturing their magic in a bottle. While their accomplishments are undeniable, the criteria by which we measure excellence are evolving, inviting us to reassess the values that truly define greatness. And while many great entrepreneurs stand out as examples of excellence, none better exemplify the increasingly problematic double-edged sword of entrepreneurial excellence than Elon Musk or Steve Jobs.
As Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk hits our shelves, it’s an interesting moment to reflect on the nature of excellence as entrepreneurs and beyond — though, for many of us, the question of excellence has long been on our minds. Elon Musk, the visionary entrepreneur behind Tesla and SpaceX, epitomizes the charismatic and audacious archetype of excellence. His boldness and willingness to disrupt industries have yielded transformative results, yet his leadership style is marked by demanding expectations, public spats, and a sometimes controversial presence on social media.
Biographer Isaacson — already skilled at getting to the core of powerhouse egos in his earlier works on Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, Henry Kissinger and Steve Jobs — paints Elon Musk as a complex character, at times relatable and at times almost alien in mindset. Similarly, each of Isaacson’s subjects represented ideas of excellence for their times — and beyond — yet each also struggled with a titanic-sized ego and disjointed relationships. Elon seems no different. Excellence, too often, it appears, comes at a steep social price.
Many may liken Musk to Steve Jobs, another tech leader held up as an example of entrepreneurial and technological excellence. Jobs, the late co-founder of Apple, responsible for much of the company’s product vision and innovation, is celebrated for revolutionizing personal technology. But his inability to relate to others was as legendary as his vision. His “reality distortion field” and uncompromising pursuit of perfection yielded groundbreaking products, but his interpersonal relationships and management methods were often called into question. Jobs is an extreme personality and example, but often excellence is equated with such extreme focus and vision.
A kinder approach to excellence
While the achievements of Jobs and Musk are undeniable, the emphasis on such figures as entrepreneurial role models perpetuates an image of excellence defined by brashness, bombastic and all-consuming individualism. But as younger generations search for relevant role models of greatness, they seek to redefine how the trait manifests in society. Excellence in this context is not confined to the individual’s achievements but also extends to their contributions to the greater good. Leaders who recognize the strength of collaboration, who consider the impact of their decisions on diverse communities, and who work to bridge societal divides exemplify a new facet of excellence.
Embracing kindness and empathy in leadership fosters collaboration, creativity and sustainable growth in organizations. A leader prioritizing these qualities can inspire loyalty and dedication among employees, creating a more harmonious and productive work environment. Additionally, exercising restraint and thoughtfulness in decision-making prevents hasty actions that might bring short-term gains but lead to detrimental long-term consequences.
The challenge lies in finding a balance between audacity and empathy, innovation and collaboration. While figures like Musk and Jobs have undeniably left their marks on history, it’s worth considering whether their methods could have been refined to include a greater emphasis on building positive relationships and nurturing well-being. Even keel business leaders like Tim Cook or Dara Khosrowshahi will likely never be held up as examples of generational-changing technological or entrepreneurial excellence, even though they may be more worthy of the accolade than their more bombastic peers.
In his 2010 Commencement Speech at Princeton, Jeff Bezos recounted some wisdom he learned from his grandfather: “Jeff, one day you’ll understand that it’s harder to be kind than clever.” Indeed, it is far easier to take the low road, forgetting compassion or patience. Can excellence be achieved without overshadowing qualities like kindness, empathy and restraint? Long before we had the concept of personal brands. Mr. Rogers built a persona around the transformative nature of kindness and empathy. With numerous tall tales of kindness on set coupled with extensive anonymous donations to children’s cancer charities, many would consider Keanu Reeves to be a role model of quiet kindness in a Hollywood marked by greed, vanity, and self-promotion. Just as the media industry has managed to elevate some paragons of kindness, so too can the entrepreneurial field embrace those who translate kindness into excellence.
Another approach to the question of greatness requires us to stop and think about, yes, the Roman Empire — just maybe not every day as some men do, according to the consensus of a hilarious new TikTok trend. The reason why I suggest that we consider the Roman Empire in pursuit of greatness is that many Roman Emporers embraced stoicism — a philosophy underlying entrepreneurial excellence. At its core, stoicism advocates for a rational and disciplined approach to life’s challenges. It emphasizes the cultivation of inner resilience and the acceptance of circumstances beyond one’s control, encouraging a mindset of gratitude rather than negativity.
Stoics believe in focusing on what can be influenced while gracefully acknowledging and enduring what cannot. This philosophy encourages entrepreneurs to navigate the often tumultuous waters of business with a composed and clear-headed demeanor. By embracing stoic principles, entrepreneurs gain a powerful tool for maintaining equilibrium in the face of adversity, allowing them to make calculated decisions and pursue their goals with unwavering determination.
It is easy to find examples of stoic leadership: those driven by a belief that they can rationally advance their values to improve the world. For example, Former Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel’s legacy lies in her adept navigation of complex political terrains while upholding her principles, particularly in her fervent support for a united Europe. Her leadership exemplified the potency of diplomacy, restraint and patient persistence, highlighting that enduring change often stems from steadfast dedication rather than impulsive, headline-grabbing maneuvers.
In the realm of tech entrepreneurship, Steve Wozniak’s journey reflects the value of staying grounded even in the face of immense success. His technical prowess and innovation were pivotal in shaping the technological landscape, yet he remained approachable and down-to-earth. Wozniak’s commitment to education and his willingness to share his knowledge exemplifies the importance of giving back to the community that helped foster his success. Like Merkel, Wozniak has prioritized collaboration over grabbing headlines, building bridges rather than burning them.
And, on a final note, if we ever need to look to the Roman Empire to teach us a lesson about greatness, surely it is this: the political leader held up by many through history as the pinnacle of political excellence was a bold and audacious general and emperor who was such a jerk that his friends and colleagues stabbed him to death. Julius Caesar may argue that a little less ego and a bit more kindness and stoicism are a sounder approach to leadership.
Final thoughts
In examining these contrasting examples, we can distill lessons that guide future leaders and innovators. By appreciating the achievements of ego-driven innovators like Musk and Jobs while critically evaluating the potential consequences of their approaches, we pave the way for a new generation of leaders who aspire to achieve greatness while also cultivating qualities that enrich the human experience. Not only should we seek out role models of excellence driven by compassion and empathy, but we should seek to lead our own organizations with the same stoic and caring attitude, fostering excellence in ourselves and those we lead.
Ultimately, excellence should not be narrowly defined by the disruption of industries alone; rather, it should encompass the enhancement of society as a whole, with kindness, empathy and restraint being integral components of that journey. Kindness and stoicism offer new approaches to modern entrepreneurial excellence.
The narrative of excellence is being rewritten to include leaders who strive not just for personal greatness but also for the betterment of humanity. The unassuming acts of kindness, the quiet moments of empathy, and the decisions rooted in restraint are forging a new path for the concept of excellence. This evolution challenges us to evaluate the qualities that truly define greatness and to acknowledge that true excellence is as much about how we treat others as it is about what we achieve.
Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks during Meta Connect event at Meta headquarters in Menlo Park, California on September 27, 2023.
Josh Edelson | AFP | Getty Images
At Meta’s annual Connect conference last month, virtual reality enthusiasts gathered to hear about Mark Zuckerberg’s multibillion-dollar bet on the metaverse, the technology that’s supposed to define the company’s future.
But at this year’s event, VR developers were inundated with panel discussions about a topic that’s quickly becoming less about tomorrow and more about the present: artificial intelligence.
“Don’t tell Mark, but it feels less mixed reality and more AI these days,” joked Joseph Spisak, who joined the company as director of product development for generative AI two months earlier, during his session at Connect. “It kind of feels like an AI conference, which is kind of in my wheelhouse.”
Sandwiched between panels about Meta’s latest Quest 3 VR headset and augmented reality developer software were several sessions dedicated to Llama, Meta’s large language model (LLM) that’s gained popularity since OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot exploded onto the scene in November, sparking a sprint by leading tech companies to bring competitive offerings to market.
Zuckerberg, who changed Facebook’s name to Meta in late 2021 to signal his commitment to the metaverse, reminded Connect attendees that Llama was the power supply to the company’s latest digital assistants unveiled at the conference.
While Zuckerberg still views the growth of the nascent metaverse as critical to his company’s success, AI has emerged as the market he’s trying to win today. Meta views Llama and its family of generative AI software as the open source alternative to GPT, the LLM from Microsoft-backed OpenAI, and Google’s PaLM 2, which powers the search company’s Bard AI technology.
Industry experts compare Llama’s positioning in generative AI to that of Linux, the open source rival to Microsoft Windows, in the PC operating system market. Just as Linux software made its way into corporate servers worldwide and became a key piece of the modern internet, Meta sees Llama as the potential digital scaffolding supporting the next generation of AI apps.
Andrew Bosworth, Chief Technology Officer of Facebook, speaks during Meta Connect event at Meta headquarters in Menlo Park, California on September 27, 2023.
Josh Edelson | AFP | Getty Images
On Wall Street, Llama is hard to value and, for many investors, hard to understand. Because AI researchers are at a premium and the infrastructure required to build and run models requires massive costs, Meta is investing heavily to build Llama, the updated Llama 2 that was introduced in July, and related generative AI software.
After the July announcement, Yann LeCun, the AI researcher Zuckerberg hired in 2013 to lead Facebook’s new AI research group, wrote on Twitter that, “This is going to change the landscape of the LLM market.”
But open source means Meta is giving away the software for free to developers, a dramatically different approach to the traditional software license and subscription models and far afield from the highly lucrative digital ad business that turned Facebook into an internet powerhouse.
In announcing Llama 2, Meta said the new version would have a commercial license that allows companies to integrate it into their products. The company has said it isn’t focused on monetizing Llama 2 directly, but it does earn an undisclosed amount of money from cloud-computing companies like Microsoft and Amazon, which offer access to Llama 2 as part of their own generative AI enterprise services.
Zuckerberg said on the company’s second-quarter earnings call that he doesn’t expect Llama 2 to generate “a large amount of revenue in the near term, but over the long term, hopefully that can be something.”
Meta is looking to benefit from Llama in other ways.
Zuckerberg told analysts in July that improvements made to Llama by third-party developers could result in “efficiency gains,” making it cheaper for Meta to run its AI software. Meta said it expects capital expenditures for 2023 to be in the range of $27 billion to $30 billion, down from $32 billion last year. Finance chief Susan Li said the figure will likely grow in 2024, driven in part by data center-and AI-related investments.
Influence brings its own advantages. If the world’s leading AI researchers use Llama, Meta could have an easier time hiring skilled technologists who understand the company’s approach to development. Facebook has a history of using open source projects, such as its PyTorch coding framework for machine learning apps, as a recruiting tool, luring technologists who want to work on cutting-edge software projects.
Spisak helped oversee PyTorch and other open source AI projects when he worked at Meta from 2018 until January 2023. He left the company for a brief stint at Google and returned to Meta in July.
Meta is also betting that third-party developers will steadily improve Llama 2 and related AI software so that it runs more efficiently, a way of outsourcing research and development to an army of volunteers.
Cai GoGwilt, chief architect of legal tech startup Ironclad, said the open source community worked on the first version of Llama to “make it faster and make it run on a mobile phone.” GoGwilt said his company is waiting to see how enthusiastic developers will bolster Llama 2.
“Part of the reason we’re not immediately using it is because the bigger interest for us is what the open source community is going to do with it,” GoGwilt said.
Meta debuted the original Llama LLM in February, offering it in several different variants ranging from 7 billion parameters to 65 billion parameters, which are essentially variables that influence the size of the model and how much data it processes. In general, more parameters means a more powerful model, with the tradeoff being the cost of running and training the AI software.
Like OpenAI’s GPT and other LLMs, Llama is an example of a transformer neural network, the AI software developed by a team of Google researchers that’s become the foundation for generative AI, which generates smart responses and clever images based on simple text prompts.
To help with the computationally intensive process of training gigantic AI models like Llama, Meta has been using its own Research SuperCluster supercomputer, built to incorporate a whopping 16,000 Nvidia A100 GPUs, the AI industry’s “workhorse” computer chips.
Although Llama was originally incubated inside Meta’s Fundamental AI Research team (FAIR), it’s since moved to the company’s generative AI organization led by Ahmad Al-Dahle, who previously spent over 16 years at Apple. Zuckerberg announcedthe group in late February.
Meta said it took six months to train Llama 2, starting in January and ending in July, using a mix of “publicly available online data,” which doesn’t contain any Facebook user information. It’s unclear whether Meta plans to incorporate user data into the forthcoming Llama 3.
As Zuckerberg strives for efficiency, he’s got his eyes on Nvidia, which is generating billions of dollars in quarterly profits for its AI chips. Meta is one of its biggest customers. Jim Fan, a senior AI science at Nvidia, said in a post on X that it likely cost Meta $20 million to train Llama 2, considerably more than the estimated $2.4 million it took to train its predecessor.
Mainstream adoption of Llama 2 could influence Nvidia to ensure its graphics processing units (GPUs) work well with Meta-sanctioned software, lowering the company’s AI training and computing costs.
Meanwhile, Meta has its own internal AI chip projects, giving it a potential alternative to Nvidia’s processors.
“It gives them some price negotiating room,” said Arjun Bansal, CEO of enterprise startup Log10 and a former AI chip executive. “Nvidia wants to charge a lot and they can be like, ‘Hey, we got our own thing.'”
Nvidia President and CEO Jensen Huang speaks at the COMPUTEX forum in Taiwan, May 28, 2023.
Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images
Nathan Lambert remembers the energy emanating from his colleagues at AI startup Hugging Face the weekend Meta debuted its much-anticipated Llama 2.
Lambert and his teammates worked overtime to ensure the company’s infrastructure was ready to handle the influx of coders looking to take Llama 2 for a test drive.
Along with cloud-computing engines Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services, Hugging Face was one of Meta’s chosen launch partners for Llama 2, but arguably the most important. Developers, AI researchers and thousands of companies use Hugging Face’s platform to share code, data sets and models, making it one of the industry’s biggest communities.
Although a number of open source LLMs are available, Lambert said Llama 2 is by far the most popular.
“It’s the model that most people are playing with and that most startups are playing with,” said Lambert, who announced on Oct. 4 that he’s leaving Hugging Face though he didn’t say where he’s going.
As with all things Zuckerberg, the project is not without controversy. Some in the industry consider Meta’s licensing agreement to use Llama 2 as limiting, conflicting with the spirit of collaborative development and innovation.
For instance, third-party developers must request approval from Meta to use Llama 2 if they incorporate the software into any products or services that had “greater than 700 million monthly active users” in the month prior to its July release. Critics have said this clause was a way to keep rivals like Snap or TikTok from using Llama 2 for their own services.
“It’s pretty restrictive,” said Umesh Padval, a venture partner at Thomvest Ventures and investor in AI startup Cohere, which builds proprietary LLMs. “It looks like Meta wants all the benefits of open source for their business while keeping the competition away.”
Lambert said Meta could do itself a favor with the open source community and release more details about the specific, underlying datasets used to train Llama 2 so developers could better understand the training process. Open source adherents and privacy experts have pushed for more transparency into what kinds of data has been used to train LLMs, but companies have so far revealed few details.
“We believe in open innovation, and we do not want to place undue restrictions on how others can use our model,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement. “However, we do want people to use it responsibly. This is a bespoke commercial license that balances open access to the models with responsibility and protections in place to help address potential misuse.”
Despite some detractors, Meta’s model is seeing plenty of early uptake. The company disclosed at Connect that there have been “more than 30 million downloads of Llama-based models through Hugging Face and over 10 million of these in the last 30 days alone.”
Nvidia’s Fan noted in his X post that Llama 2’s new commercial license could lure more companies to experiment with the language model compared to the original Llama.
“AI researchers from big companies were wary of Llama-1 due to licensing issues, but now I think many of them will jump on the ship and contribute their firepower,” Fan wrote.
As of today, businesses investing in AI prefer to use commercially available LLMs, according to a recent TC Cowen survey of 680 firms in cloud computing. The survey found that 32% of respondents have used or plan to use commercially packaged LLMs like OpenAI’s GPT-4 software while 28% were focused on open source LLMs like Llama and Falcon, developed in the United Arab Emirates. Only 12% of respondents planned on using in-house LLMs.
At the U.S. Government Accountability Office, Taka Ariga studies how bleeding-edge technologies like LLMs could help the agency better conduct audits and investigations through its Innovation Lab.
By the end of the year, Ariga’s team is planning to finish its first experiment investigating how LLMs can potentially be used to summarize numerous GAO reports and materials on a particular topic, and then combine those files with various other potentially relevant documentation from other agencies.
“The general public or a member of congress might say, ‘What has the GAO done in the area of nuclear safety?'” Ariga said, regarding the LLM project. “Of course, we have done a lot of work, but that’s sort of report-by-report basis; you can’t do that kind of sort of topical search.”
The GAO is currently using AWS’ Bedrock generative AI service to help the agency experiment with various popular LLMs, including proprietary models offered by startups like Cohere and Anthropic.
While AWS recently said Bedrock will soon support Llama 2, Ariga said the GAO is first testing Anthropic’s Claude LLM and will likely pass on using Llama 2 because of Meta’s poor reputation in Washington.
Meta has earned the ire of lawmakers over the years due to a host of issues, including data privacy scandals, antitrust investigations and allegations that Facebook censors conservative voices, Ariga noted, likening Zuckerberg to Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and owner of X.
“Mark Zuckerberg is, just like Elon, a bit of a lightning rod when it comes to political technology,” Ariga said.
“We know that while AI has brought huge advances to society, it also comes with risk,” Meta’s spokesperson said. “Meta is committed to building responsibly and we are providing a number of resources like our responsible use guide to help those who use Llama 2 do so.”
Even among prospective customers that are unconcerned about reputational issues, Meta has to prove that it has superior LLM technology.
Nur Hamdan, a product manager at AI startup aiXplain, said OpenAI’s GPT-4 is better than Llama 2 at understanding context over long, extended conversations. That means GPT-4 would likely produce conversations in a way that feel more lifelike, Hamadan said.
Tests comparing GPT-4, Llama 2 and other LLMs are becoming routine. In one such test, researchers discovered that GPT-4 was able to generate better software code than Llama 2. Meta has since released a version of Llama 2 specifically for creating code.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, at an event in Seoul, South Korea, on June 9, 2023.
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images
In today’s land grab, Meta is competing against Amazon, Google and heavily funded startups like OpenAI and Cohere. They’re each aiming to be the cornerstone of next-generation apps. Meta sees open source as a key advantage, versus other companies that are selling the technology and packaging it with other services.
“Somebody like Google or Microsoft, they may all be a little bit conflicted there,” said longtime infrastructure technology executive Guido Appenzeller, who held senior roles at VMware and Intel. “Facebook was not and that’s sort of how they move forward and democratizing this, giving sort of broad access to open source. I think it’s something incredibly powerful.”
A Microsoft spokesperson said in an emailed statement that the company will provide customers with options and let them choose what model they prefer, whether it’s “proprietary, open source, or both.”
“Each foundational model has unique benefits and we hope to make it easy for customers to select, fine-tune, and deploy them responsibly to maximize the outcome from these tools,” Microsoft said.
Representatives from Amazon and Google didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Llama’s impact on the technology industry could rival that of Kubernetes, the open source data center infrastructure software that Google released in 2014, experts said. In giving away Kubernetes, Google dramatically impacted the business models of once hot startups like Docker and CoreOS, which Red Hat acquired in 2018.
Meta is deploying a Kubernetes-like strategy with Llama 2, but in a market that’s expected to be much bigger.
“I’m a fan of Facebook, I understand what Mark has done,” Thomvest’s Padval said. “They’re reinventing the company.”
However, open source doesn’t always win, and Padval acknowledged that “in this case, I don’t know how it’s going to evolve.”
Andrew Bosworth, Chief Technology Officer of Facebook, speaks during Meta Connect event at Meta headquarters in Menlo Park, California on September 27, 2023.
Josh Edelson | AFP | Getty Images
At Meta’s annual Connect conference this week focused on virtual reality and the metaverse, one word was on everyone’s lips: Apple.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was enthusiastic in debuting his company’s Quest 3 VR headset, which starts at $499 and will begin shipping in October. His company touted the growth of its VR app store — Quest Store — which has generated $2 billion in sales since its debut in 2019, up from the $1.5 billion the company announced last year during the conference.
The big difference this year from the event in 2022 is that attendees have a much clearer picture of Apple’s upcoming entry into the VR market.
The iPhone maker in June announced its Vision Pro mixed-reality headset at an eyepopping price of $3,499 when it goes on sale next year. While it’s Apple’s first major foray into VR, the company’s longtime dominance in premium consumer devices and its winning reputation in hardware has created a buzz that was missing from Meta’s prior industry events.
VR and mixed reality are expected to remain niche markets for years to come, but conversations with nearly a dozen attendees who gathered at Meta’s Menlo Park, California, headquarters this week show the tone is changing for developers and VR companies regarding the potential for an expanding industry.
“There’s curiosity for sure with Apple entering the market,” said Tom Symonds, CEO of the UK-based VR firm Immerse. “Apple has always been able to marry the hardware and the software in a seamless way.”
Prior to Apple’s Vision Pro announcement, the VR industry was going through a bit of an identity crisis, with venture capitalists pulling back their investments alongside the drop-off in Web3 and related crypto projects. Meanwhile, Meta has been losing billions of dollars a quarter building its vision of a metaverse, and Zuckerberg has shown no interest in slowing down, frustrating many Wall Street investors who see only mounting costs.
Apple CEO Tim Cook stands next to the new Apple Vision Pro headset.
Even though Apple’s product won’t go on sale for months and it’s unclear how many people will want it or be able to buy it, the company’s entry has given a sense of legitimacy to some of Meta’s efforts.
In addition to showing off its latest headset this week, Meta debuted the newest version of its Ray-Ban smart glasses, developed with EssilorLuxottica. The new glasses, which will cost $299 when they’re available to purchase on Oct. 17, use Meta’s artificial intelligence software via a smartphone so people can identify landmarks or translate signs when looking at various objects.
It would have been a “big loss of confidence” if Meta stopped investing heavily to push the VR market forward, said Aneesh Kulkarni, chief technology officer of the VR training firm Strivr.
“Meta is pushing the bar, and who has the money to push the bar?” Kulkarni said.
He added that while $2 billion of app store sales “may not sound like a lot compared to the Apple store,” it’s a big and important number. Apple has a giant marketplace — $1.1 trillion in developer billings and sales in 2022 — because of the popularity of iPhone and iPad apps.
Josette Seitz, a mixed-reality developer for the social impact company Baltu Technologies, said Apple could have an advantage courting businesses that already use its products, like those that employ iPads to help conduct maintenance and other related services. A company that currently supplies field workers with iPads for inspections or similar tasks could conceivably make the easy transition to the more immersive Vision Pro because of the devices’ interoperability, she said.
At its high price point, the Vision Pro will likely be more of a product for businesses, Seitz said. Regardless, it’s important to have more entrants in the market.
“There shouldn’t just be one company,” she said. “We can’t have this be a monopoly system.”
Gaspar Ferreiro, a developer with the VR firm Coal Car Studios, called the Vision Pro’s price “insane” and said Apple is taking a “big gamble.”
“Enterprises will absolutely take the gamble,” Ferreiro said, noting some businesses will splurge on Apple devices because of the company’s reputation and prestige.
Meta still faces its own challenges. The company has struggled to bring VR into the mainstream despite a yearslong head start, and Ferreiro isn’t sure that the Quest 3’s improvements over the Quest 2, which is $200 cheaper, will be enough to win new customers who aren’t industry insiders or developers.
“The general consumer is probably going to be faced with a conundrum, do I spend another $200 on this other device?” Ferreiro said.
One of the Quest 3’s biggest improvements over the previous version is its so-called “passthrough” feature, which converts a person’s field of vision into a digital format, thus allowing computer visuals to be overlaid on to the physical world. Looking at physical surroundings using the Quest 2 proved to be a blurry experience that lacked color, but with the Quest 3 it’s much clearer and should be more enjoyable to use.
For developers, Ferreiro said, that translates into the ability to create more compelling content and visually attractive experiences that integrate the physical and digital worlds.
Jeffrey Morin, CEO of the Litesport VR fitness service, said the Quest 3 is priced “just outside of my comfort zone for, like, me buying my kid a Christmas gift.”
But he agrees that improved passthrough is very valuable and was crucial for the company’s upcoming mixed-reality app it created for Xponential Fitness that will let users work out with real personal trainers who can be virtually beamed into their living rooms.
As far as working with Apple, Morin said Litesport will look for ways to develop for the Vision Pro as it evolves and the price potentially drops to between $1,000 to $1,500 in the future. Initially, the price is too high and the Vision Pro will require users to wear a battery pack, creating an added nuisance during a workout.
The advantage Apple offers is a base of customers who “are going to be way more likely to pay for a subscription,” providing a recurring source of revenue, he said. Based on Morin’s experience thus far, most current Quest users are gamers who are more accustomed to making one-time app purchases.
Morin said that even though Apple’s product isn’t out yet, he noticed an increase in the number of people using Litesports’ VR fitness apps once it was announced, underscoring the VR community’s overall excitement.
“They fired up their headsets and they’re, like, let me see what’s out there again,” Morin said.
Ultimately, Apple’s move into VR is proof that it’s not just an ambitious Facebook side project.
“It’s not like Mark’s little toy anymore,” Morin said. “Now it’s everyone’s.”
LONDON — The gloves are off in the U.K. government’s deepening spat with tech giant Meta.
On Wednesday, Britain’s Home Secretary Suella Braverman unveiled a fresh campaign aimed at making the Mark Zuckerberg-led tech giant rethink its plan to roll out end-to-end encryption on Facebook and Instagram — a move she says will hamper the police’s ability to catch pedophiles.
At a background briefing for reporters on Tuesday, Home Office officials used graphic language to describe the types of child sexual abuse material that they say risks going undetected if Meta goes ahead with its plans. A video put together as part of the campaign features a victim of child sex abuse appealing directly to Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg to rethink plans to roll out encryption.
The National Crime Agency has estimated that making messages on Facebook Messenger and Instagram end-to-end encrypted will wipe out more than 85 percent of the platforms’ reports of online child sexual abuse material.
Meta, which aims to finalize the encryption rollout by the end of the year, has said it plan to continue policing its platforms for grooming and the sharing of child abuse content. It will do this by, for example, watching for suspicious behavior from accounts and providing a range of controls to help kids avoid harm.
But Braverman said she’s not yet been convinced that these measures will make up for the shortfall in reports that the encryption changes are expected to bring about, prompting her to write to the tech giant in July asking it to stop its encryption rollout if it can’t give stronger assurances.
“Meta has failed to provide assurances that they will keep their platforms safe from sickening abusers,” Braverman said in a press release. “They must develop appropriate safeguards to sit alongside their plans for end-to-end encryption.”
“We don’t think people want us reading their private messages so have spent the last five years developing robust safety measures to prevent, detect and combat abuse while maintaining online security,” said a Meta spokesperson.
The company on Wednesday also published an updated report setting out these measures, such as restricting people over 19 from messaging teens who don’t follow them and using technology to identify and take action against malicious behaviour.
The bill, which passed its final parliamentary hurdle Tuesday, would empower Britain’s comms regulator Ofcom to force tech companies to monitor messenger apps for illegal child abuse content. That’s proven controversial, with dozens of cryptography experts saying that the powers would effectively undermine end-to-end encryption — tech that enables only the sender and receiver to view messages.
Tech execs like Signal’s Meredith Whittaker and WhatsApp’s Will Cathcart have suggested they’d rather have their encrypted services blocked in the U.K. than undermine privacy for millions of users on their apps.
But Ofcom officials have previously said there’d be a high bar for them to mandate monitoring on encrypted apps, while any order for Meta to scan its messenger apps for content would prove highly contentious for the regulator.
That’s what’s prompted the U.K. government to lobby for Meta to rethink its plans in the first place.
“We urge companies looking to introduce end-to-end encryption to their services to think carefully about the impact on younger, vulnerable users,” said Susie Hargreaves, chief executive of child protection group the Internet Watch Foundation in a statement.
The nation’s biggest technology executives on Wednesday loosely endorsed the idea of government regulations for artificial intelligence at an unusual closed-door meeting in the U.S. Senate. But there is little consensus on what regulation would look like, and the political path for legislation is difficult.
Executives attending the meeting included Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates and Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Musk said the meeting “might go down in history as being very important for the future of civilization.”
First, though, lawmakers have to agree on whether to regulate, and how.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who organized the private forum on Capitol Hill as part of a push to legislate artificial intelligence, said he asked everyone in the room — including almost two dozen tech executives, advocates and skeptics — whether government should have a role in the oversight of artificial intelligence, and “every single person raised their hands, even though they had diverse views,” he said.
Elon Musk departs following a meeting with U.S. senators about the future of artificial intelligence on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 13, 2023.
STEFANI REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images
Among the ideas discussed was whether there should be an independent agency to oversee certain aspects of the rapidly developing technology, how companies could be more transparent and how the U.S. can stay ahead of China and other countries.
“The key point was really that it’s important for us to have a referee,” said Musk during a break in the daylong forum. “It was a very civilized discussion, actually, among some of the smartest people in the world.”
Schumer will not necessarily take the tech executives’ advice as he works with colleagues on the politically difficult task of ensuring some oversight of the burgeoning sector. But he invited them to the meeting in hopes that they would give senators some realistic direction for meaningful regulation.
Congress should do what it can to maximize AI’s benefits and minimize the negatives, Schumer said, “whether that’s enshrining bias, or the loss of jobs, or even the kind of doomsday scenarios that were mentioned in the room. And only government can be there to put in guardrails.”
Congress has a lackluster track record when it comes to regulating new technology, and the industry has grown mostly unchecked by government in the past several decades. Many lawmakers point to the failure to pass any legislation surrounding social media, such as for stricter privacy standards.
Schumer, who has made AI one of his top issues as leader, said regulation of artificial intelligence will be “one of the most difficult issues we can ever take on,” and he listed some of the reasons why: It’s technically complicated, it keeps changing and it “has such a wide, broad effect across the whole world,” he said.
Sparked by the release of ChatGPT less than a year ago, businesses have been clamoring to apply new generative AI tools that can compose human-like passages of text, program computer code and create novel images, audio and video. The hype over such tools has accelerated worries over its potential societal harms and prompted calls for more transparency in how the data behind the new products is collected and used.
Republican Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota, who led the meeting with Schumer, said Congress needs to get ahead of fast-moving AI by making sure it continues to develop “on the positive side” while also taking care of potential issues surrounding data transparency and privacy.
“AI is not going away, and it can do some really good things or it can be a real challenge,” Rounds said.
The tech leaders and others outlined their views at the meeting, with each participant getting three minutes to speak on a topic of their choosing. Schumer and Rounds then led a group discussion.
During the discussion, according to attendees who spoke about it, Musk and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt raised existential risks posed by AI, and Zuckerberg brought up the question of closed vs. “open source” AI models. Gates talked about feeding the hungry. IBM CEO Arvind Krishna expressed opposition to proposals favored by other companies that would require licenses.
In terms of a potential new agency for regulation, “that is one of the biggest questions we have to answer and that we will continue to discuss,” Schumer said. Musk said afterward he thinks the creation of a regulatory agency is likely.
Outside the meeting, Google CEO Pichai declined to give details about specifics but generally endorsed the idea of Washington involvement.
“I think it’s important that government plays a role, both on the innovation side and building the right safeguards, and I thought it was a productive discussion,” he said.
Some senators were critical that the public was shut out of the meeting, arguing that the tech executives should testify in public.
Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri said he would not attend what he said was a “giant cocktail party for big tech.” Hawley has introduced legislation with Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut to require tech companies to seek licenses for high-risk AI systems.
“I don’t know why we would invite all the biggest monopolists in the world to come and give Congress tips on how to help them make more money and then close it to the public,” Hawley said.
While civil rights and labor groups were also represented at the meeting, some experts worried that Schumer’s event risked emphasizing the concerns of big firms over everyone else.
Sarah Myers West, managing director of the nonprofit AI Now Institute, estimated that the combined net worth of the room Wednesday was $550 billion and it was “hard to envision a room like that in any way meaningfully representing the interests of the broader public.” She did not attend.
In the U.S., major tech companies have expressed support for AI regulations, though they don’t necessarily agree on what that means. Similarly, members of Congress agree that legislation is needed, but there is little consensus on what to do.
Some concrete proposals have already been introduced, including legislation by Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., that would require disclaimers for AI-generated election ads with deceptive imagery and sounds. Schumer said they discussed “the need to do something fairly immediate” before next year’s presidential election.
Hawley and Blumenthal’s broader approach would create a government oversight authority with the power to audit certain AI systems for harms before granting a license.
Some of those invited to Capitol Hill, such as Musk, have voiced dire concerns evoking popular science fiction about the possibility of humanity losing control to advanced AI systems if the right safeguards are not in place. But the only academic invited to the forum, Deborah Raji, a University of California, Berkeley researcher who has studied algorithmic bias, said she tried to emphasize real-world harms already occurring.
“There was a lot of care to make sure the room was a balanced conversation, or as balanced as it could be,” Raji said.
What remains to be seen, she said, is which voices senators will listen to and what priorities they elevate as they work to pass new laws.
Some Republicans have been wary of following the path of the European Union, which signed off in June on the world’s first set of comprehensive rules for artificial intelligence. The EU’s AI Act will govern any product or service that uses an AI system and classify them according to four levels of risk, from minimal to unacceptable.
A group of European corporations has called on EU leaders to rethink the rules, arguing that it could make it harder for companies in the 27-nation bloc to compete with rivals overseas in the use of generative AI.
Tech leaders, including Elon Musk, were on Capitol Hill Wednesday to take part in closed-door meetings with congressional lawmakers on the benefits and dangers that artificial intelligence poses. Jo Ling Kent has details.
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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg demonstrates an Oculus Rift virtual reality (VR) headset and Oculus Touch controllers during the Oculus Connect 3 event in San Jose, California, U.S., on Thursday, Oct. 6, 2016.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Just days before assisting in his first major shoulder-replacement surgery last year, Dr. Jake Shine strapped on a virtual reality headset and got to work.
As a third-year orthopedics resident at Kettering Health Dayton in Ohio, Shine was standing in the medical center’s designated VR lab with his attending physician, who would oversee the procedure.
Both doctors were wearing Meta Quest 2 headsets as they walked through a 3D simulation of the surgery. The procedure, called a reverse total shoulder arthroplasty, can last around two hours and requires surgeons to carefully navigate around neurovascular structures and the lungs.
After the mock procedure, Shine took his headset home to practice. He did so roughly twice a day before the surgery.
“You can really fine-tune and learn what to do, but also what definitely not to do, with zero risk to the patient,” Shine told CNBC in an interview.
Ultimately, there were no complications in the procedure and the patient made a full recovery, he said.
“Anecdotally, I think it went smoother and quicker than it would have,” Shine said, than if the attending physician “was having to walk me through every step in the case the same way that he did in the VR.”
While consumer VR remains a niche product and a massive money-burning venture for Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the technology is proving to be valuable in certain corners of health care. Kettering Health Dayton is one of dozens of health systems in the U.S. working with emerging technologies like VR as one tool for helping doctors to train on and treat patients.
The broad category of “extended reality” includes fully immersive VR headsets like the Quest 2, and augmented reality (AR) devices, where the user can see a digital overlay on top of real-world surroundings.
Whether the nascent technology can ever be cost-effective across the medical industry is very much an open question, but early tests are showing the potential utility of VR in helping to improve health outcomes.
Meta, then known as Facebook, entered the market with the purchase of Oculus in 2014. Three years later, the company introduced its first stand-alone headset. In 2021, Facebook rebranded as Meta, and Zuckerberg committed to spending billions, betting the metaverse would be “the next chapter for the internet.” Since the beginning of last year, Meta’s Reality Labs unit, which develops the company’s VR and AR, has lost over $21 billion.
Apple is preparing to enter the VR market, going after the higher-end user with the $3,500 Vision Pro that’s expected to debut early next year. Meta is slated to release the Meta Quest 3 as soon as next month.
An Apple spokesperson didn’t provide a comment on potential uses in health care and directed CNBC to an announcement in June regarding Vision Pro’s software developer kit. In that announcement, Jan Herzhoff, Elsevier Health’s president, is quoted as saying that her company’s Complete HeartX mixed reality offering “will help prepare medical students for clinical practice by using hyper-realistic 3D models and animations that help them understand and visualize medical issues, such as ventricular fibrillation, and how to apply their knowledge with patients.”
Meta Quest 3 VR headset.
Meta
Extended reality as treatment for patients
To date, one of the primary applications of VR in health care has been targeted at pain treatment.
“It’s very hard to keep track of pain when you’re in a fantastical cyberdelic world,” said Dr. Brennan Spiegel, director of health services research at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles.
Spiegel said that when someone is injured, there is both a physical and an emotional component to their pain. Those signals are sent to two different parts of the brain, and VR can serve to tamp down the signals in both regions.
“It’s training people how to modify their spotlight of attention so they can swing it away from the painful experiences,” Spiegel said. “Not just the physical, but the emotional experiences.”
Spiegel said Cedars-Sinai is preparing to launch a virtual platform to help people with gastrointestinal issues like Crohn’s disease, celiac disease or acid reflux, as well as others for anxiety, addiction and perimenopausal health.
The technology has also attracted the attention of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, which is using extended reality at more than 160 facilities to help patients with pain management, behavioral therapy and both physical and cognitive rehabilitation.
Caitlin Rawlins, the immersive program manager at the VA, said there are currently more than 40 separate use cases for the technology across the agency’s different sites. The VA first introduced extended reality in a limited capacity around 2015, and has found more opportunities to put it to use as the technology has improved.
“I’ve seen it change a whole lot,” Rawlins told CNBC in an interview. “The first virtual reality headset that I used was this big clunky headset that had all these wires it had to be connected to a laptop to function.”
Rawlins said what drew her to extended reality was seeing the immediate response from patients. She recalled the first time she watched a patient use VR. He was a man in his 80s who had just undergone knee replacement surgery. The pain was so severe that opioids didn’t help, Rawlins said.
After mere minutes in VR, he told Rawlins he couldn’t feel the pain in his leg anymore.
“Just using that for a simple 30-minute session can mean the difference between excruciating pain, unable to do the exercises and the ambulation that they need to, to actually get up and move and get ready to go home,” she said.
Rawlins described another patient as a “surly” wheelchair-bound Army veteran who was experiencing some cognitive decline. The VA had the patient try VR to see if it could lessen the need for antipsychotic medications.
With the headset on, Rawlins had the patient navigate through a virtual nature scene, walking through the woods, climbing rocks and interacting with birds and deer. Rawlins said the patient was smiling and laughing and was transformed into a “completely different person.”
“To see a patient who has been wheelchair-bound for like 15 years getting to walk through the woods and interact with animals again, it was a pretty powerful moment,” Rawlins said. “Those are the sort of experiences that we keep seeing over and over and over again.”
Both Spiegel and Rawlins said their organizations are hardware agnostic, meaning they can use headsets made by Meta, Apple or any other company as long as they can support the right software.
Spiegel said there’s “potentially millions and millions of people who might be willing to actually buy a headset” but who see them as a gaming and entertainment devices and have no idea about the health applications.
Meta has loosely identified health care as a target market. The company has released case studies and promoted short videos depicting futuristic surgeons in training.
However, it doesn’t appear to be as much a priority as gaming and entertainment. For example, while Cedars-Sinai can technically make its software available in the Meta Quest Store, users would have to go to a section of the store called the App Lab to access it. Software in the App Lab is not marketed traditionally or as easily discoverable via search.
Meta didn’t provide a comment, directing CNBC to a post on Sept. 7, about uses of metaverse technology. The post says: “Training for surgery is just one of the many industries being transformed in ways that are positively impacting lives.”
‘Together in the virtual world’
Doctors at Kettering Health Dayton practice with VR headsets.
Source: Kettering Health Dayton
The technology is also becoming a fixture in many medical schools and residency programs.
At Kettering Health Dayton, VR recently became a mandatory component of the curriculum for first-year orthopedics residents. In July, the new doctors completed a monthlong “boot camp,” where they carried out clinical services in the mornings and practiced in VR in the afternoons. They now have to complete at least three modules a week in VR with a score of over 70%.
For more senior level residents like Shine, VR training is not yet mandatory, but Kettering Health Dayton is actively working to build it into each level of the program.
“The way I trained in the late 80s, I mean, basically you read the books,” said Dr. Brent Bamberger, the director of the orthopedic surgery residency program at Kettering Health Dayton. “We didn’t have the videos at that time. You may go to a lecture, you may get lucky and have a specimen lab or some type of lab to do it, but you were learning by watching.”
Dr. Reem Daboul, a first-year resident at the hospital, said headsets can’t replicate the physical feeling of a procedure. But she’s found them very useful in important ways. She can already use a headset to walk through the steps of an anterior hip replacement, which many orthopedic surgeons don’t learn until their third year of residency or later.
“Being able to have something help me and see what I’m supposed to be doing and be able to walk through the steps, it’s been super helpful for me,” Daboul said in an interview.
For its orthopedics program, Kettering Health Dayton uses software developed by PrecisionOS, a company that builds VR modules for training surgeons, medical residents and medical device representatives. PrecisionOS co-founder and CEO, Dr. Danny Goel, said the company has nearly 80 customers across the globe.
Orthopedics residents at the University of Rochester also use PrecisionOS. Dr. Richard Miller, a retired professor at the university, said the software is “sophisticated” and “very realistic,” especially as a way to learn the steps of a procedure. He finds it so compelling that he’s been actively helping the orthopedics department implement the technology even though he retired three years ago.
Miller said the VR is a useful way for residents to hone their skills without having to immediately deal with operating room pressures. They can also practice at home.
“I can be at home in my study at night, and they can be in their dorm at night, and we can do a procedure together in the virtual world,” Miller said.
Despite VR’s advantages, Miller said the software has to be able to update frequently to stay current with standards of care, best practices and surgery techniques.
“Next year, they may change the procedure a little bit, now you have other tools and things are a little bit different. Who’s going to change that? Who’s going to bring it up to date?” Miller said.
Those are important questions for quality of care. They’re also important because hospitals generally have to work on tight budgets, and the costs aren’t always clear.
“I can’t get straight answers from anybody, really, as to exactly how much it costs and who does what,” Miller said. “It’s got to be a hurdle.”
PrecisionOS declined to share specific pricing information with CNBC. Goel said costs of using the company’s software vary based on the institution and the partnership.
Kettering’s Bamberger said that in addition to the software challenges, the hardware is still rather “clunky.” Others in his field also see the limitations.
Dr. Rafael Grossmann, a surgeon at Portsmouth Regional Hospital in New Hampshire, has spent much of his career educating people about health-care applications for emerging technologies like extended reality.
In 2013, Grossmann became the first person to use the infamous Google Glass during a surgery as a way to stream the procedure, with the patient’s consent, into a room of students. Google had built a lightweight AR device that displayed tiny bits of information on a transparent screen in the user’s field of view. It was first sold to developers and early adopters in 2013 for $1,500, and quickly captured the imagination of tech enthusiasts.
Ten years later, Grossmann said he now sees a substantial market for the technology, particularly within health care. He said headsets have improved dramatically, even if they’re still bulky and not entirely functional for doctors.
“The interface is better than it was three years ago, but it’s certainly not ideal for really any sort of health-care setting,” Grossmann said.
A gallery assistant wearing an Oculus Quest 2 virtual reality (VR) headset to view the House of Fine Art (HOFA) Metaverse gallery stands in front of digital artwork “Agoria, _{Compend-AI-M}_ 2022 #16” during a preview in Mayfair, London, UK, on Thursday, Nov. 10, 2022.
Hollie Adams | Bloomberg | Getty Images
A growing area of research
As with all technology in health care, extended reality is going to have to clear regulatory hurdles.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has a small team of researchers that are responsible for carrying out “regulatory science” around the technology.
Ryan Beams, a physicist at the FDA, conducts this research alongside a team, consulting with a range of experts about emerging AR, VR and mixed reality devices. As a result, Beams said the FDA is able to help establish general best practices for how to test promising devices and bring them to market safely.
“We can say these are the tests we need done, these are the kinds of ways you should do the tests, and then we can help the companies get through those,” Beams told CNBC. “What you don’t want is a device that potentially could help someone getting delayed because there’s uncertainty about how to go about doing the testing.”
Spiegel of Cedars-Sinai also helped co-found a new medical society called the American Medical Extended Reality Association in late 2022. He said it was created as a way for physicians, clinicians and other health-care professionals to help guide the future of the field.
The society currently has about 300 paying members, a number Spiegel hopes will reach into the thousands in the coming years. It’s also gearing up to launch its first official peer-reviewed journal called the Journal of Medical Extended Reality.
“This is not fringe science anymore. This is now mainstream,” Spiegel said. “There’s still a lot of work to do. It’s not like this is a done deal, cake’s not baked, but we’ve seen massive advances on many levels that make this a real science now.”
While many of us spent our summer Fridays resting on a beach, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg spent his time in between meetings much differently — getting beat up on a floating barge.
In a video posted to Meta-owned Instagram with the caption “summer vibes,” Zuckerberg can be seen training with MMA fighters Alexander Volkanovski and Israel Adesanya in a dramatically edited clip that features the trio fighting, kicking, and flipping into the crystal-clear waters surrounded by mountains and evergreens.
Facebook’s founder has been training for more than a year and takes his hobby seriously. (The gold medal-winning jiu-jitsu champion reportedly set up an octagon in his backyard for MMA practice and training — his wife wasn’t pleased.)
In May, on an episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience,” he said training helps him as a CEO.
“After an hour or two of working out, or rolling or wrestling with friends, or training with different folks, it’s like now I’m ready to go solve whatever problem at work for the day,” Zuckerberg said.
For the past few months, Zuckerberg and X owner Elon Musk have been sparring (on social media only, sadly) in a war of words about a potential real-life cage match between the billionaires. But after months of back and forth, Zuck ended the chatter by publicly writing that “Elon isn’t serious.”
Based on Zuckerberg’s summer activities, Musk may want to stay that way.
However, Musk takes home his own gold. Tesla’s CEO is currently the world’s richest person, per Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index, with roughing $234 billion as of Wednesday afternoon. Zuckerberg is ranked the No. 10 richest, with $109 billion.
Last month, a leaked memo detailed Meta’s updated return to office policy, with some employees being asked to return three days a week with a mandate for accountability.
Now, those changes have reportedly gone into effect.
“We believe that distributed work will continue to be important in the future, particularly as our technology improves,” a spokesperson for Meta told CNBC in a statement. “In the near term, our in-person focus is designed to support a strong, valuable experience for our people who have chosen to work from the office, and we’re being thoughtful and intentional about where we invest in remote work.”
A meeting space at a new Meta office space in the Farley Building in New York, which was expanded on and developed in 2021 despite most companies lessening their office space presence (Getty Images)
Last spring, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that 10,000 workers would be laid off in an internal memo sent to the company in March while expressing his preference for in-office work.
In June, The Information reported that “a person familiar with the matter” had revealed that the change in Meta’s currently flexible remote work policy was set to take place in September.
“Our early analysis of performance data suggests that engineers who either joined Meta in-person and then transferred to remote or remained in-person performed better on average than people who joined remotely,” he penned, hinting at what came later this year. “This requires further study, but our hypothesis is that it is still easier to build trust in person and that those relationships help us work more effectively.”
Meta joins the ranks of companies like Amazon and Tesla, which have rolled out strict return-to-office policies in recent months.
Last week, leaked remarks at an internal company event by Amazon CEO Andy Jassy showed how serious leadership was about having employees return to the office for at least three days a week.
“It’s past the time to disagree and commit,” Jassy reportedly said. “And if you can’t disagree and commit, I also understand that, but it’s probably not going to work out for you at Amazon because we are going back to the office at least three days a week, and it’s not right for all of our teammates to be in three days a week and for people to refuse to do so.”
Meta was up just shy of 87.5% in a one-year period as of Wednesday afternoon.
When you’re working from home all day, it can be hard to find ways to move around. I feel like I’m cooped up in my bedroom, hunched over my laptop at all hours of the day. By the time 5 PM rolls around, my joints are stiff and I’m in a worse mood than I was when I woke up.
My favorite saying is that I want someone to “crack me like a glowstick” because my back is constantly throbbing. My posture has surely declined, and I can’t say I was doing much to fix it. Until a solution fell directly into my lap.
I found the FlexiSpot Adjustable Standing Desk, I knew I had to get it. I had heard of all the benefits of using a standing desk – your blood sugar returns to normal levels quicker after eating, you reduce the risks of cardiovascular disease and obesity, improved mood, no back pain.
But I didn’t really understand the miracle of a standing desk until I used FlexiSpot. It’s a customizable desk that has a motor inside to adjust to any height…so you can sit if you so wish. Pick your size, color of wood, color of legs, add wheels, add a drawer or two, whatever you want.
I can fit this in the smallest of bedrooms and it gives me space for a desk and some added storage. Ideal for any room in your house, you can even use it as an end table if you really wanted to.
It’s the perfect gift for the person you love in your life who works from home and is in peril from the sedentary lifestyle. Or, the FlexiSpot Standing Desk can be just for your pleasure.
Even Mark Zuckerberg and his Meta employees are known to use standing desks. And if it’s good enough for pro fighter Zuck, then it’s good enough for the rest of us. I’ve been standing all day, everyday and it’s all thanks to my FlexiSpot.
European Union flags flutter outside the EU Commission headquarters, in Brussels, Belgium, February 1, 2023
Yves Herman | Reuters
When Gerard de Graaf moved from Europe to San Francisco almost a year ago, his job had a very different feel to it.
De Graaf, a 30-year veteran of the European Commission, was tasked with resurrecting the EU office in the Bay Area. His title is senior envoy for digital to the U.S., and since September his main job has been to help the tech industry prepare for new legislation called The Digital Services Act (DSA), which goes into effect Friday.
At the time of his arrival, the metaverse trumped artificial intelligence as the talk of the town, tech giants and emerging startups were cutting thousands of jobs, and the Nasdaq was headed for its worst year since the financial crisis in 2008.
Within de Graaf’s purview, companies including Meta, Google, Apple and Amazon have had since April to get ready for the DSA, which takes inspiration from banking regulations. They face fines of as much as 6% of annual revenue if they fail to comply with the act, which was introduced in 2020 by the EC (the executive arm of the EU) to reduce the spread of illegal content online and provide more accountability.
Coming in as an envoy, de Graaf has seen more action than he expected. In March, there was the sudden implosion of the iconic Silicon Valley Bank, the second-largest bank failure in U.S. history. At the same time, OpenAI’s ChatGPT service, launched late last year, was setting off an arms race in generative AI, with tech money pouring into new chatbots and the large language models (LLMs) powering them.
It was a “strange year in many, many ways,” de Graaf said, from his office, which is co-located with the Irish Consulate on the 23rd floor of a building in downtown San Francisco. The European Union hasn’t had a formal presence in Silicon Valley since the 1990s.
De Graaf spent much of his time meeting with top executives, policy teams and technologists at the major tech companies to discuss regulations, the impact of generative AI and competition. Although regulations are enforced by the EC in Brussels, the new outpost has been a useful way to foster a better relationship between the U.S. tech sector and the EU, de Graaf said.
“I think there’s been a conversation that we needed to have that did not really take place,” said de Graaf. With a hint of sarcasm, de Graaf said that somebody with “infinite wisdom” decided the EU should step back from the region during the internet boom, right “when Silicon Valley was taking off and going from strength to strength.”
The thinking at the time within the tech industry, he said, was that the internet is a “different technology that moves very fast” and that “policymakers don’t understand it and can’t regulate it.”
Facebook Chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg arrives to testify before the House Financial Services Committee on “An Examination of Facebook and Its Impact on the Financial Services and Housing Sectors” in the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, DC on October 23, 2019.
Mandel Ngan | AFP | Getty Images
However, some major leaders in tech have shown signs that they’re taking the DSA seriously, de Graaf said. He noted that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg met with Thierry Breton, the EU commissioner for internal market, to go over some of the specifics of the rules, and that X owner Elon Musk has publicly supported the DSA after meeting with Breton.
De Graaf said he’s seeing “a bit more respect and understanding for the European Union’s position, and I think that has accelerated after generative AI.”
X, formerly known as Twitter, had withdrawn from the EU’s voluntary guidelines for countering disinformation. There was no penalty for not participating, but X must now comply with the DSA, and Breton said after his meeting with Musk that “fighting disinformation will be a legal obligation.”
“I think, in general, we’ve seen a serious commitment of big companies also in Europe and around the world to be prepared and to prepare themselves,” de Graaf said.
The new rules require platforms with at least 45 million monthly active users in the EU to provide risk assessment and mitigation plans. They also must allow for certain researchers to have inspection access to their services for harms and provide more transparency to users about their recommendation systems, even allowing people to tweak their settings.
Timing could be a challenge. As part of their cost-cutting measures implemented early this year, many companies laid off members of their trust and safety teams.
“You ask yourself the question, will these companies still have the capacity to implement these new regulations?” de Graaf said. “We’ve been assured by many of them that in the process of layoffs, they have a renewed sense of trust and safety.”
The DSA doesn’t require that tech companies maintain a certain number of trust and safety workers, de Graaf said, just that they comply with the law. Still, he said one social media platform that he declined to name gave an answer “that was not entirely reassuring” when asked how it plans to monitor for disinformation in Poland during the upcoming October elections, as the company has only one person in the region.
That’s why the rules include transparency about what exactly the platforms are doing.
“There’s a lot we don’t know, like how these companies moderate content,” de Graaf said. “And not just their resources, but also how their decisions are made with which content will stay and which content is taken down.”
De Graaf, a Dutchman who’s married with two kids, has spent the past three decades going deep on regulatory issues for the EC. He previously worked on the Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act, European legislation targeted at consumer protection and rights and enhancing competition.
This isn’t his first stint in the U.S. From 1997 to 2001, he worked in Washington, D.C., as “trade counsellor at the European Commission’s Delegation to the United States,” according to his bio.
For all the talk about San Francisco’s “doom loop,” de Graaf said he sees a different level of energy in the city as well as further south in Silicon Valley.
There’s still “so much dynamism” in San Francisco, he said, adding that it’s filled with “such interesting people and objective people that I find incredibly refreshing.”
“I meet very, very interesting people here in Silicon Valley and in San Francisco,” he said. “And it’s not just the companies that are kind of avant-garde as the people behind them, so the conversations you have here with people are really rewarding.”
Generative AI was a virtually foreign concept when de Graaf arrived in San Francisco last September. Now, it’s about the only topic of conversation at tech conferences and cocktail parties.
The rise and rapid spread of generative AI has led to a number of big tech companies and high-profile executives calling for regulations, citing the technology’s potential influence on society and the economy. In June, the European Parliament cleared a major step in passing the EU AI Act, which would represent the EU’s package of AI regulations. It’s still a long way from becoming law.
De Graaf noted the irony in the industry’s attitude. Tech companies that have for years criticized the EU for overly aggressive regulations are now asking, “Why is it taking you so long?” de Graaf said.
“We will hopefully have an agreement on the text by the end of this year,” he said. “And then we always have these transitional periods where the industry needs to prepare, and we need to prepare. That might be two years or a year and a half.”
The rapidly changing landscape of generative AI makes it tricky for the EU to quickly formulate regulations.
“Six months ago, I think our big concern was to legislate the handful of companies — the extremely powerful, resource rich companies — that are going to dominate,” de Graaf said.
But as more powerful LLMs become available for people to use for free, the technology is spreading, making regulation more challenging as it’s not just about dealing with a few big companies. De Graaf has been meeting with local universities like Stanford to learn about transparency into the LLMs, how researchers can access the technology and what kind of data companies could provide to lawmakers about their software.
One proposal being floated in Europe is the idea of publicly funded AI models, so control isn’t all in the hands of big U.S. companies.
“These are questions that policymakers in the U.S. and all around the world are asking themselves,” de Graaf said. “We don’t have a crystal ball where we can just predict everything that’s happening.”
Even if there are ways to expand how AI models are developed, there’s little doubt about where the money is flowing for processing power. Nvidia, which just reported blowout earnings for the latest quarter and has seen its stock price triple in value this year, is by far the leader in providing the kind of chips needed to power generative AI systems.
“That company, they have a unique value proposition,” de Graaf said. “It’s unique not because of scale or a network effect, but because their technology is so advanced that it has no competition.”
He said that his team meets “quite regularly” with Nvidia and its policy team and they’ve been learning “how the semiconductor market is evolving.”
“That’s a useful source information for us, and of course, where the technology is going,” de Graaf said. “They know where a lot of the industries are stepping up and are on the ball or are going to move more quickly than other industries.”
Instacart, the grocery delivery company that slashed its valuation during last year’s market slide, filed its paperwork to go public on Friday in what’s poised to be the first significant venture-backed tech IPO since December 2021.
The stock will be listed on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “CART.” In its prospectus, the company said net income totaled $114 million, while revenue in the latest quarter hit $716 million, a 15% increase from the year-ago period. Instacart has now been profitable for five straight quarters, according to the filing. PepsiCo has agreed to purchase $175 million of the company’s stock in a private placement.
Instacart said it will continue to focus on incorporating artificial intelligence and machine learning features into the platform, and that the company expects to “rely on AIML solutions to help drive future growth in our business.” In May, Instacart said it was leaning into the generative AI boom with Ask Instacart, a search tool that aims to answer customers’ grocery shopping questions.
“We believe the future of grocery won’t be about choosing between shopping online and in-store,” CEO Fidji Simo wrote in the prospectus. “Most of us are going to do both. So we want to create a truly omni-channel experience that brings the best of the online shopping experience to physical stores, and vice versa.”
Instacart will try and crack open the IPO market, which has been mostly closed since late 2021. In December of that year, software vendor HashiCorp and Samsara, which develops cloud technology for industrial companies, went public, but there haven’t been any notable venture-backed tech IPOs since. Chip designer Arm, which is owned by Japan’s SoftBank, filed for a Nasdaq listing on Monday.
Founded in 2012 and initially incorporated as Maplebear Inc., Instacart will join a crop of so-called gig economy companies on the public market, following the debut in 2020 of Airbnb and DoorDash and car-sharing companies Uber and Lyft a year earlier. They’ve not been a great bet for investors, as only Airbnb is currently trading above its IPO price.
Instacart shoppers and drivers deliver goods in over 5,500 cities from more than 40,000 grocers and other stores, according to its website. The business took off during the covid pandemic as consumers avoided public places. But profitability has always been a major challenge, as it is across much of the gig economy, because of high costs associated with paying all those contractors.
Headcount peaked in the second quarter of 2022, Instacart said, “and declined over the next two quarters, reducing our fixed operating cost base.” At the end of June, the company had 3,486 full-time employees.
In March of last year, Instacart slashed its valuation to $24 billion from $39 billion as public stocks sank. The valuation reportedly fell by another 50% by late 2022. Instacart listed Amazon, Target, Walmart and DoorDash among its competitors.
The biggest area for cost reductions has been in general and administrative expenses. Those costs shrank to $51 million in the latest quarter from $77 million a year earlier and a peak of $102 million in the final period of 2021. Instacart said the drop was the “result of lower fees related to legal matters and settlements.”
Simo took over as Instacart’s CEO in August 2021 and became chair of the company’s board in July 2022. She was previously head of Facebook’s app at Meta and reported directly to CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Apoorva Mehta, Instacart’s founder and executive chairman, plans to transition off the board after the company’s public market debut, according to a 2022 release.
The company’s board also includes Peloton CEO Barry McCarthy, Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman and Andreessen Horowitz’s Jeff Jordan.
Instacart will be one of the first independent grocery delivery companies to go public. Amazon Fresh, Walmart Grocery and Google Express are all units of large corporations. Shipt was acquired by Target in 2017 and Fresh Direct, another direct-to-consumer grocery delivery company, was bought by global food retailer Ahold Delhaize in 2021.
Sequoia Capital and D1 Capital Partners are the only shareholders owning at least 5% of the stock. Instacart said those two firms, along with Norges Bank Investment Management and entities affiliated with TCV and Valiant Capital Management, have “indicated an interest, severally and not jointly” in purchasing up to $400 million of shares in the IPO at the offering price.
Instacart’s move into AI has come largely through a string of acquisitions in the past two years. Those deals include the purchase of e-commerce startup Rosie, AI-powered pricing firm Eversight, AI shopping cart and checkout solutions provider Caper, and FoodStorm, a software startup specializing in self-serve kiosks for in-store customers.
The company also touted its use of machine learning in predicting grocery availability for retailers and increasing consumer sales. It said its algorithms predict availability every two hours for the “large majority” of its 1.4 billion grocery items, and that more than 70% of customers purchased items through Instacart’s recommendation algorithm in the second quarter of 2023.
Goldman Sachs is leading the offering. That’s the former employer of Instacart finance chief Nick Giovanni, who was previously global head of the tech, media and telecom group at the investment bank.
Taplin, the educator, writer (Move Fast and Break Things), and film producer (Mean Streets, The Last Waltz), is director emeritus of USC’s Annenberg Innovation Lab. His peripatetic career includes stints as tour manager for Bob Dylan and the Band, VP of media M&A at Merrill Lynch, professor at USC, and founder of the pioneering video-on-demand company Intertainer.
Four very powerful billionaires—Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Marc Andreessen—are creating a world where “nothing is true and all is spectacle.” If we are to inquire how we got to a place of radical income inequality, post-truth reality, and the looming potential for a second American Civil War, we need look no further than these four—“the biggest wallets,” to paraphrase historian Timothy Snyder, “paying for the most blinding lights.”
I call them the Technocrats, in recognition of the influence of the technocracy movement, founded in the 1930s by Elon Musk’s grandfather, Joshua Haldeman. The Technocrats make up a kind of interlocking directorate of Silicon Valley, each investing in or sitting on the boards of the others’ companies. Their vast digital domain controls your personal information; affects how billions of people live, work, and love; and sows online chaos, inciting mob violence and sparking runs on stocks. These four men have long been regarded as technologically progressive heroes, but they are actually part of a broader antidemocratic, authoritarian turn within the tech world, deeply invested in preserving the status quo and in keeping their market-leadership positions or near-monopolies—and their multi-billion-dollar fortunes secure from higher taxes. (“Competition is for suckers,” Thiel once posited.)
Indeed, they are American oligarchs, controlling online access for billions of users on Facebook, Twitter, Threads, Instagram, and WhatsApp, including 80 percent of the US population. Moreover, from the outside, they appear to be more interested in replacing our current reality—and our economic system, imperfect as it is—with something far more opaque, concentrated, and unaccountable, which, if it comes to pass, they will control.
I use the term techno-determinism to describe the path the Technocrats have dictated for our country because they have sold, and we have bought into, the idea that they are going to deliver us a bright future. The future they are now selling us, however—crypto fortunes, the merger of the human and the computer via AI, the prospect of spending our lives in the Metaverse or on Mars—is a lie. To quote Snyder once more, Donald Trump has shown that he “was lying not so much to deny the truth as to invite people into an alternative reality.” Such sleight-of-hand applies here as well. The alternative reality that these men are focused on is a world of technodeterminism, one in which AI may eventually do all the real work and a large number of humans may be rendered useless to society.
The Technocrats do not hide the fact that they plan to feed at the government trough to finance some of their more outrageous schemes. Their plan for your future involves nothing less than confronting the nihilism of a looming dystopia. And four of the projects they are pursuing to address their visions will need tens of trillions of dollars of (mostly public) investment capital over the next two decades. The first project, supported by Andreessen, Thiel, and Zuckerberg, is Web3, a virtual world (the Metaverse) accessed by virtual reality (VR) headgear, which, despite all of the clear benefits that it promises, many end up converting the free web into an online theme park in which every door requires a crypto token to open. The second project is the support of crypto currency. As Adam Fischer, Israel’s top-ranked venture capitalist, has pointed out, “Crypto is not so much an investment idea that aligns with the libertarian political ideology, as it is a virulent strain of libertarian political ideology leveraging human greed through the blockchain.” The third project involves supporting Elon Musk’s $10 trillion pipe dream of sending humans to live on Mars.
But of all the myths the Technocrats peddle, none is more far-fetched than transhumanism, a concept dear to the heart of Peter Thiel. And to understand what could well be the Biggest Lie of Big Tech requires a deep dive into this social movement, which is focused on R&D for “human-enhancement technologies” that might someday allow people to live to the age of 160 or more. Needless to say, access to these age-extension systems, which have not yet been invented, will be incredibly expensive, so, under this scheme, the only ones destined to survive well into their second century will likely be the multimillionaires.
