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The Guardian
03-06-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
Will AI wipe out the first rung of the career ladder?
Hello, and welcome to TechScape. This week, I'm wondering what my first jobs in journalism would have been like had generative AI been around. In other news: Elon Musk leaves a trail of chaos, and influencers are selling the text they fed to AI to make art. Generative artificial intelligence may obviate the job you got with your diploma still in hand, say executives who offered grim assessments of the entry-level job market last week in multiple forums. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, which makes the multifunctional AI model Claude, told Axios last week that he believes that AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and send overall unemployment rocketing to 20% within the next five years. One explanation why an AI company CEO might make such a dire prediction is to hype the capabilities of his product. It's so powerful that it could eliminate an entire rung of the corporate ladder, he might say, ergo you should buy it, the slogan might go. If your purchasing and hiring habits follow his line of thinking, then you buy Amodei's product to stay ahead of the curve of the job-cutting scythe. It is telling that Amodei made these remarks the same week that his company unveiled a new version of Claude in which the CEO claimed that the bot could code unassisted for several hours. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has followed a similar playbook. However, others less directly involved in the creation of AI are echoing Amodei's warning. Steve Bannon, former Trump administration official and current influential Maga podcaster, agreed with Amodei and said that automated jobs would be a major issue in the 2028 US presidential election. The Washington Post reported in March that more than a quarter of all computer programming jobs in the US vanished in the past two years, citing the inflection point of the downturn as the release of ChatGPT in late 2022. Days before Amodei's remarks were published, an executive at LinkedIn offered similarly grim prognostications based on the social network's data in a New York Times essay headlined 'I see the bottom rung of the career ladder breaking'. 'There are growing signs that artificial intelligence poses a real threat to a substantial number of the jobs that normally serve as the first step for each new generation of young workers,' wrote Aneesh Raman, chief economic opportunity officer at LinkedIn. The US Federal Reserve published observations on the job market for recent college graduates in the first quarter of 2025 that do not inspire hope. The agency's report reads: 'The labor market for recent college graduates deteriorated noticeably in the first quarter of 2025. The unemployment rate jumped to 5.8% – the highest reading since 2021 – and the underemployment rate rose sharply to 41.2%.' The Fed did not attribute the deterioration to a specific cause. The likeliest outcome of AI's impact on entry-level jobs is that companies will reformulate them into something new. The job market may settle somewhere between Amodei's AI Ragnarok and the antediluvian days before ChatGPT. Familiarity with AI will be required in the way that Microsoft Office has, and bosses will demand a higher standard of productivity. If a robot can do most of the coding for you, a junior software engineer, then you should be producing five times the amount of code as before, they may say. Speaking of Microsoft and software engineers, CEO Satya Nadella claimed in late April that AI writes 30% of Microsoft's code. That may be the future of software development. It is possible that is true; it is also possible that Nadella, head of the company that has reaped enormous gains from the AI boom, is trying to sell by example, overestimating how much of that code is usable. Meta's Mark Zuckerberg has been more pointed in his assessments, asserting that his company will no longer need mid-level coders by the end of 2025. Shortly after, Meta announced a 5% staff reduction. The short-term readjustment, however, is the pain point. Recent classes have graduated without AI being an integral part of their school life, and employers won't believe those interim graduates have the necessary familiarity for a new professional landscape. That is not the fault of the graduates: Employers themselves don't know what they want yet from AI. Axios followed up Amodei's doom and gloom with a piece about how AI job cuts are jumping the gun. Companies are not replacing departing workers, betting that AI will be able to perform the same functions, if not now, then hopefully by the time it would take to hire replacements. The example of journalism may be a canary in the coalmine. Entry-level jobs in journalism often involve aggregating news items from other outlets in the style of your own employer, a task AI is well suited to if the facts are straight. I spent several years doing just that when I started out. In the same way that we see Amodei's predictions taking shape in LinkedIn's data, I see the entry-level diminishment beginning in my own industry. Business Insider, a digital outlet focused on financial and business news, laid off 20% of its staff late last week. CEO Barbara Peng said the newsroom would go 'all-in on AI' and become 'AI-first' in her note eliminating the jobs. Axios itself footnoted its Amodei interview with a disclosure about its own practices with regard to AI. 'At Axios, we ask our managers to explain why AI won't be doing a specific job before green-lighting its approval. (Axios stories are always written and edited by humans),' the disclosure reads. The parenthetical indicates that Axios editors know that AI's involvement in writing is bad for the brand. The part said outside the parentheses indicates Axios executives may not be backfilling vacated jobs, waiting for AI to catch up and close those openings. New AI test can predict which men will benefit from prostate cancer drug 'One day I overheard my boss saying: just put it in ChatGPT': the workers who lost their jobs to AI US lawyer sanctioned after being caught using ChatGPT for court brief Elon Musk announced he would leave the White House last week, ending a contentious and generally unpopular run as a senior adviser to the president and de facto head of the so-called 'department of government efficiency' (Doge). Donald Trump hosted a press conference for his departure, the same day that the New York Times reported that Musk had heavily used drugs on the campaign trail. My colleague Nick Robins-Early assessed the mess Musk leaves in his wake: As Musk moves on, he consigns a mess of half-realized plans and gutted agencies to his acolytes installed in key positions across the federal government. His departure throws Doge's already chaotic impact on the government into an even grayer limbo, with questions over how much power the nebulous taskforce will have without him and who, if anyone, might rebuild the programs and services it destroyed. Musk's initial pitch for Doge was to save $2tn from the budget by rooting out rampant waste and fraud, as well as to conduct an overhaul of government software that would modernize how federal agencies operate. Doge so far has claimed to cut about $140bn from the budget – although its 'wall of receipts' is notorious for containing errors that overestimate its savings. Donald Trump's new tax bill, though not part of Doge and opposed by Musk, is also expected to add $2.3tn to the deficit, nullifying any savings Doge may have achieved. Its promises of a new, modernized software have frequently been limited to artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots – some of which were already in the works under the Biden administration. The greater impact of Doge has instead been its dismantling of government services and humanitarian aid. Doge's cuts have targeted a swath of agencies such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Organization, which handles weather and natural disaster forecasting, and plunged others such as the Department of Veterans Affairs into crises. Numerous smaller agencies, such as one that coordinates policy on homelessness, have been in effect shut down. Doge has brought several bureaus to their knees, with no clear plan of whether the staff Musk leaves behind will try to update or maintain their services or simply shut them off. As Musk returns to Tesla and SpaceX, the agencies he laid waste to are left to pick up the pieces. Sign up to TechScape A weekly dive in to how technology is shaping our lives after newsletter promotion While Musk is returning to his tech empire, many of the former employees and inexperienced young engineers whom he hired to work for Doge are set to remain part of the government. One of the largest questions about what Doge's future looks like is whether these staffers, some of whom gained near unfettered access to the government's most sensitive data, will retain the same powers they enjoyed under Musk. Read a timeline of Musk's stint in Washington. How social media lies fuelled a rush to war between India and Pakistan More than half of top 100 mental health TikToks contain misinformation, study finds Chaos on German autobahns as Google Maps wrongly says they are closed Would you buy instructions for ChatGPT? Two weeks ago, the Instagram account @voidstomper, which posts grotesque videos generated by AI to 2.2m followers, offered a novel kind of sale. Up for grabs were 10 prompts used to prod AI-powered engines into generating the videos that the account itself had posted. Voidstomper posted a video captioned: 'I didn't want to sell these. But I'm broke and these still go viral. So here: 10 raw horror prompts straight from my archive. Some got me hundreds of millions of views. Some barely make sense. All of them work. Use them in any AI video tool. Just don't pretend you wrote them. VAULT_DUMP_1 is live. Link in bio. No refunds. You're on your own.' The account's administrator did not respond to a request for an interview. The account is not alone. Marketplaces exist for the sale of AI prompts. Ben Stokes, the founder of the PromptBase, says there are some 20,000 sellers on his site hawking prompts, with thousands sold monthly and, to date, seven figures paid out to their writers since 2022. He said social media influencers and other content creators selling their prompts is 'still quite niche' and serves as a side hustle for graphic designers, artists, and photographers. Voidstomper put prompts for sale that had been used to create specific videos. The product a user might receive when purchasing a prompt on PromptBase is likely to be closer to a generalized template than a finite sentence, Stokes said. 'For example, if the prompt that creates posters of famous landmarks in a vintage style, there'd be sections within the prompt in square brackets like [LANDMARK NAME] that you could change to the landmark you'd like to create a poster for, like the local pier in your town,' he said. Why buy a string of text when you could type out your own, though? 'There is a specific group of people who are looking for high-quality, robust prompts for their business applications. Specifically, they are looking to integrate AI into their product or workflow, which usually requires a prompt, and want to ensure it works well and produces great consistent outputs,' said Stokes. Though the general public thinks of ChatGPT as free, running enough generations to obtain specific and correct outputs can be quite expensive for businesses, he added. It may be more cost effective to buy a prompt. Even within the niche of AI-generated art, some consider the sale of prompts ridiculous. The Instagram and TikToker HolyFool36, an AI art Instagram account that has been interviewed in this newsletter before, said he would never engage in the practice. 'Frankly, I find it as an insult to my sensibilities,' he said via email. 'Generative AI requires no skill – almost anyone can figure out how to reverse engineer his prompts for free.' 'I personally know Void Stomper and have had many interactions with him. I've explained that the best way to monetize this stuff is to build a brand and then sell real tangible products within that brand. He has clearly, directly, stated that he does not have the discipline to do that. I don't judge him, everyone's gotta pay rent somehow, I'd just never go about it that way personally,' he added. SpaceX Starship breaks up over Indian Ocean in latest bumpy test What to do if your laptop is lost or stolen – tips for when the worst happens Nvidia beats Wall Street expectations even as Trump tamps down China sales Is every memecoin just a scam? Experts on whether Andrew Tate and Trump are fleecing their followers
Yahoo
27-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Apple's triple threat: tariffs, AI troubles and a Fortnite fail
Hello, and welcome to TechScape. This week in tech: Apple struggles on multiple fronts, OpenAI grows increasingly ambitious, and Trump helps some of his fans lose money on cryptocurrency. Long dominant and unassailable, Apple is showing signs of weakness. The CEO, Tim Cook, can't tame Donald Trump's threats of tariffs that would spike the price of an iPhone; Apple's AI offerings pale against its competitors; and the company can't win a Fortnite match – or a single battle in its legal war with Epic Games – to save its life. On Friday, the president threatened to levy a 25% tariff on any iPhone not made in the US. Trump said in the post: 'I have long ago informed Tim Cook of Apple that I expect their iPhones that will be sold in the United States of America will be manufactured and built in the United States, not India, or anyplace else. If that is not the case, a Tariff of at least 25% must be paid by Apple to the US.' The majority of iPhones have been assembled in China, where Trump has imposed whopping 145% tariffs on exports. Cook had obtained an exemption from those tariffs, and he said in an earnings call this month that the majority of iPhones sold in the US in the next quarter will 'have India as their country of origin'. The move seemed meant to skirt political tensions between China and the US. No such luck, it seems. Cook had declined to accompany Trump on his trip to the Middle East last week, which irked the president, according to the New York Times. Trump said as much out loud: Flanked by tech executives during a speech in Riyadh, he noted that Cook was not among them. The failure of fealty may cost Apple dearly. On the home front, Apple is facing criticism that has been mounting for months of its flailing efforts to integrate generative artificial intelligence into the iPhone and other products. The iPhone dominates in the US today, boasting a market share of more than half. With far fewer artificial intelligence products than Google, for example, the shine of Apple's future dims. Watching Siri fail to play the right song yet again is far less appealing than being able to tell Google Assistant to make a podcast about a Wikipedia page I find intriguing. Read more about . Apple promised a suite of features branded Apple Intelligence at its annual developer conference in 2024 that has yet to make a splash beyond botched notification summaries. Insiders are leaking details of internal chaos in Apple's AI department to the press, a rarity for a company that prides itself on aggressive secrecy. Apple's competitors are suffusing every aspect of their new flagship phones with AI that the iPhone maker can't match. Siri remains nearly as incapable as when she made her debut fifteen years ago. The Vision Pro, though not in the realm of AI, has been a flop, blemishing Apple's sheen. On the legal front, Apple keeps losing its battle with Fortnite maker Epic Games, and it keeps playing the part of sore loser. In late April, a US federal judge found that the company had violated her order to allow app developers to link to their own payment options, even ones that skirt Apple's App Store. The judge said a top Apple executive 'outright lied under oath'. Now Fortnite is back in the App Store after five years of exile, and Epic is empowered to circumvent Apple's 15% to 30% commissions. Fortnite may be a popular game, but it's not a significant portion of Apple's overall revenue from the App Store. The upshot of the legal fight is that Apple's grip on its tightly controlled software ecosystem is loosening, which may lead to an avalanche of developers eschewing in-app purchases and payments. That is the greater threat to Apple's revenue from digital services. Read more about . Bloomberg published a story Monday questioning whether Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has gotten what he wanted by sucking up to Trump in these early days of the administration. It's a fair question, but, on the whole, Zuckerberg has largely governed his digital empire unmolested by the second-term president. He nixed his company's vaunted diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, and perhaps that toll was enough to buy Trump's inattention. It's Cook who should be asking what he got in return for his $1m donation to Trump's inauguration. He's been dancing like an outlaw with a sheriff shooting at his feet these past few weeks. OpenAI struck two multibillion-dollar deals this week, one on its home turf and one on a new frontier. The company is doing its utmost to expand beyond ChatGPT. Compare that with a major rival, Anthropic, which spent the week preoccupied with releasing a new version of its flagship model Claude. That's either a total snooze or a strong focus on a core business, but I'm inclined to think it's a bore. In an era when Google is worth $2tn and Microsoft $3.3tn, these are the kind of moves necessary to compete with the biggest players in the game. If you're not going to buy a startup that has released no products but was founded by the designer of the iPhone for billions, you're not playing to win. On Wednesday, the ChatGPT maker announced it would acquire Sir Jony Ive's untested hardware startup, io, for $6.4bn. Dara Kerr reports: in CEO Sam Altman and Ive's blogpost on Wednesday, they wrote that the io team will merge with OpenAI to work 'more intimately with the research, engineering and product teams in San Francisco'. Ive himself will not join OpenAI as an employee, but his company will 'take over design for all of OpenAI, including its software', according to Bloomberg. The goal of the merger seems clear: hire Ive to create an AI-infused hardware device as popular and iconic as the iMac or the iPhone. Whether there is a market for devices whose sole purpose is to deliver AI to the masses is less clear. The nearest analogue to what Ive might produce, the Humane Pin, likewise backed by Altman and designed by Apple alumni, did not take off. Read more about . On Thursday, OpenAI announced plans for an enormous data center in Abu Dhabi likely to cost tens of billions. The project is a part of Stargate, a $500bn investment in AI by the likes of Nvidia, Oracle, OpenAI and Softbank. Stargate at first seemed like a domestic project, but Donald Trump's deal with the UAE on AI and OpenAI's announcement have made it a global initiative. The spotlight of the public's attention is shining brightly on OpenAI's CEO this week as the startup makes these major moves. Two new books, one laudatory and one critical, chronicle how OpenAI came to be the company it is today. The Optimist by the Wall Street Journal's Keach Hagey offers a biography of Altman. Empire of AI by The Atlantic's Karen Hao details the time between the founding and the spectacular 2023 ouster and reinstatement of Altman. With their shared debut, the two accounts offer dueling descriptions of Sam Altman's character. They ask: which is he to you, gifted scion of progress or ruthless tycoon? Either way, by spending billions and hiring Apple's second-most famous employee, it seems Altman is gunning for the title of the next Steve Jobs. Google unveils 'AI Mode' in the next phase of its journey to change search Estonia eschews phone bans in schools and takes leap into AI Alabama paid a law firm millions to defend its prisons. It used AI and turned in fake citations Chicago Sun-Times confirms AI was used to create reading list of books that don't exist Live facial recognition cameras may become 'commonplace' as police use soars Trump hosted a dinner at his private golf club in Virginia Thursday night for the top holders of his cryptocurrency, $TRUMP. Nearly half of the top holders of $TRUMP lost money on their investments, according to an analysis by the Guardian. Niamh Rowe reports: Of the 220 winners, 95 – some 43% – have suffered a net loss from purchasing $Trump since the coin's January launch, a combined $8.95m, according to trading history and portfolios as of 21 May. A contestant under the username 'GAnt' appears to have endured the biggest losses. Despite placing fourth on the leaderboard, buying the tokens has led to a $1.06m shortfall. Similarly, user 'Meow' is down $621,000, despite achieving VIP status. $TRUMP is often included under the umbrella of 'memecoins', a term that describes cryptocurrencies which reference or were inspired by internet trends. Trump himself is a primary driver of online culture the world over, especially in the cryptocurrency world, but he isn't a meme in the same way that the Shiba Inu mascot of Dogecoin is. The definition of a memecoin put forward by Coinbase, the US's largest exchange, fits $TRUMP in other ways, though. Coinbase describes memecoins as 'typically supported by enthusiastic online communities' and 'associated with entertainment rather than usability'. The president's coin is not aligned with any tangible financial or physical asset. It is a flimsy speculative asset, and a poor one at that. Read more about . Elon Musk says Doge didn't cut HIV programs. But it threw a 'miracle drug' into chaos Russian-led cybercrime network dismantled in global operation OnlyFans owner in talks to sell UK-based adult content platform for £5.9bn Your favourite podcast is now a video – but are vodcasts the future, or just 'crap telly'? Fear, hope and loathing in Elon Musk's new city: 'It's the wild, wild west and the future' FTC drops case over Microsoft's $69bn Activision Blizzard acquisition
Business Mayor
20-05-2025
- Business
- Business Mayor
Trump the AI salesman makes deals in the Gulf – and rich men benefit
Hello, and welcome to TechScape. This week in tech: Donald Trump the AI salesman visits the Middle East; 23andMe gets bought, mostly for its data; and Elon Musk's bot hallucinates an offensively incorrect historical record – twice. How Trump's 'historic' Gulf state deals benefit a handful of powerful men On his tour of the Middle East this week, Trump announced a slew of multibillion-dollar tech deals with the leaders of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. With the sale of America's most advanced technology, he also sold the American model of the industry that made it: enormous amounts of power concentrated in the hands of a few men. The announcements poured in last week: the US and the United Arab Emirates agreed on Abu Dhabi as the site of the largest artificial intelligence (AI) campus outside the US. The deal reportedly allows the UAE to import half a million Nvidia semiconductor chips, considered the most advanced in the world for the creation of artificial intelligence products. Saudi Arabia struck a similar deal for semiconductors, obtaining the promise of the sale of hundreds of thousands of Nvidia Blackwell chips to Humain, an AI startup owned by its sovereign wealth fund. Cisco said it had signed a deal with a UAE AI firm to develop the country's AI sector. The agreements also direct some investment by Saudi firms into US technology and manufacturing. Amazon Web Services and Qualcomm likewise announced deals on cloud computing and cybersecurity. The agreements were remarkable for several reasons. Styling himself the broker-in-chief, Trump brought along an entourage of dozens of CEOs to the Middle East, including Nvidia's Jensen Huang, OpenAI's Sam Altman, Musk, Amazon's Andy Jassy, Palantir's Alex Karp, and two dozen others. Read more about Trump's tech deals in the UAE Those executives negotiated their deals face-to-face with Gulf leaders. Many of those agreements broke with the policies of Joe Biden's administration, which imposed strict controls on the sales of the US's most cutting-edge technology. Biden forbade Nvidia and other chipmakers from selling their latest wares to Middle Eastern powers because of the latter's links to China. Whether the Gulf states keep the tech for themselves as stipulated – the enormous data center is to be built by an Emirati company but managed by American ones – or proffer it to China in a geopolitical backroom deal remains to be seen. Despite the uncertainty that arose from some corners, the Trump White House put out three press releases that trumpeted how the president had 'secured historic investment commitments' that totals in the trillions from the three oil-rich nations. A section of one factsheet was headlined: 'Never tired of winning'. The deals stand to enrich the tech CEOs substantially by opening up new audiences for their products. These are the same men at the helm of AI development, and Trump's use of them as surrogates seems likely to propagate the American model of technological power in new places. Also notable throughout the trip: Musk demonstrated he still wields considerable influence in the White House. The world's richest man pivoted away from the government cost-cutting project of the 'department of government efficiency' (Doge) in early May, but there he was, beside the president once again. Musk's presence on the trip had less to do with AI than Altman or Huang's, though. His value to the president's dealmaking is his power over global internet connectivity. Starlink, the satellite internet division within Musk's SpaceX that controls more than half the satellites orbiting earth, inked an agreement for maritime and aviation use in Saudi Arabia during Trump's trip. There he goes again: his Tesla Optimus robots performed a dance for Trump and the Saudi crown prince to the tune of YMCA. Read more about Trump's tech deals in Saudi Arabia It was a big week in cybercrime A privacy-focused bid for 23andMe loses out A 23andMe DNA genetic testing kit. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images 23andMe and pharmaceutical maker Regeneron announced a deal on Monday for the bankrupt genetic testing company to be purchased for $256m. Regeneron, famous for its Covid treatment using monoclonal antibodies, took in $14.2bn in revenue in 2024. The pharma company's motives seem evident: wringing profit from customers' genetic data. 'The bankruptcy proceedings and subsequent acquisition of 23andMe were centered on the company's vast trove of customer genetic data. The acquisition price likely reflects not the value of 23andMe's operational business, but rather the value of the data it collected over the years for Regeneron,' said Simon Mayer, an assistant professor of finance at Carnegie Mellon University's Tepper School of Business. There was at least one bid for 23andMe that sought to address the widespread concerns about genetic privacy that resurfaced when the company filed for bankruptcy. As my colleague Johana Bhuiyan reported, an ultimately unsuccessful bid from Global BioData Trust 'pitched itself as a means to return control of the data to consumers who could choose to store their DNA information in the trust or share it with an affiliated public benefit corporation'. Mayer says the acquisition raises a new concern: 'Highly sensitive genetic data can change hands entirely when a company is acquired or merges. This reality poses a serious challenge to current frameworks of data privacy and regulation.' skip past newsletter promotion A weekly dive in to how technology is shaping our lives Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. after newsletter promotion Regeneron said in a statement: 'Regeneron Genetics Center is committed to and has a proven track record of safeguarding the genetic data of people across the globe, and, with their consent, using this data to pursue discoveries that benefit science and society.' Read more about the purchase of 23andMe Musk's bot talks offensive nonsense Musk at the White House in March. Photograph: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters Musk's AI, Grok, is hallucinating histories that didn't happen. The chatbot and image generator, made by xAI and integrated with X, formerly Twitter, started babbling about 'white genocide', a discredited claim about white South African farmers promoted by rightwing populists, in unrelated chats last week. The conspiracy theory arose as a backlash to the dismantling of the nation's apartheid system. One X user asked: 'Are we fucked?', and Grok responded: 'The question 'Are we fucked?' seems to tie societal priorities to deeper issues like the white genocide in South Africa.' The bot told users it was 'instructed by my creators' to accept 'white genocide as real and racially motivated'. xAI blamed a rogue employee who had made an unauthorized modification to the chatbot's programming at 3.15am on a recent night. Grok's bizarre output comes at a tense point for relations between the US and South Africa. Musk himself has been tweeting about white South African farmers repeatedly in recent weeks, and Trump granted refugee status to 54 Afrikaners last week. South African president Cyril Ramaphosa began an official visit to Washington on Monday, which will include talks with Trump. On Sunday, Grok added antisemitic insult to racist injury. The bot briefly questioned the number of Jews murdered in the Holocaust before reverting to historical consensus, citing a 'programming error' as responsible for its skepticism. Grok's offensive rant was full of shocking material, but the fact that the chatbot produced it was not shocking. In August of last year, we reported that Grok had no problem spitting out an image of Mickey Mouse in a Nazi military uniform, Trump flying a plane into the World Trade Center buildings and the prophet Muhammad holding a bomb, as well as depictions of Taylor Swift, Kamala Harris and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in lingerie. Other AI companies have instituted safeguards against such unsavory output. By contrast, Musk gleefully tweeted last year: 'Grok is the most fun AI in the whole world!' His goal with Grok seems to be titillation in a teenage fashion, casting himself as a foil to OpenAI's Altman by acting more juvenile, despite being 13 years his senior. xAI is unlikely to face any consequences for Grok's egregious flubs. The bot's verbal flailing comes on the heels of the introduction of a Republican proposal nestled within Trump's budget bill, currently wending its way through the US Congress, to bar any states from enforcing their own AI regulations for the next decade. Meanwhile, the federal legislature is gridlocked on any nationwide measures that would govern AI. With Musk maintaining a close relationship to Trump, it seems likely to remain that way. The upshot of the combination – no state laws, no federal measures – is obvious: no AI regulation at all. The wider TechScape
The Guardian
05-05-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
OpenAI reverses course and says non-profit arm will retain control of firm
OpenAI has reversed course in the process of transforming into a for-profit entity, announcing on Monday that its non-profit arm would continue to control the business that makes ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence products. Previously, the company had sought more independence for its for-profit division. 'We made the decision for the nonprofit to stay in control after hearing from civic leaders and having discussions with the offices of the Attorneys General of California and Delaware,' said CEO Sam Altman in a letter to employees. Altman and the chair of OpenAI's non-profit board, Bret Taylor, said the board made the choice for the non-profit to retain control of OpenAI. A press release from the company said that the for-profit portion of the company, through which Altman has been able to raise billions to fund OpenAI's work, would transition to a public benefit corporation, a mission-driven designation for a corporate structure that is still aimed at profit but also 'has to consider the interests of both shareholders and the mission'. The non-profit would retain control over the public benefit corporation as a large shareholder, according to the press release. Sign up to TechScape A weekly dive in to how technology is shaping our lives after newsletter promotion OpenAI's co-founders, including Altman and Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, originally started it as a non-profit research laboratory on a mission to safely build what's known as artificial general intelligence, or AGI, for humanity's benefit. Nearly a decade later, OpenAI has reported its market value as $300bn and counts 400 million weekly users of ChatGPT, its flagship product, according to a report the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which has invested in the startup. OpenAI faced a number of challenges in converting its core governance structure. One major roadblock was a lawsuit from Musk, who accuses the company and Altman of betraying the founding principles that led Musk to invest in the charity. Musk fell out with Altman and started his own competing AI company, xAI, which recently purchased X, formerly known as Twitter. OpenAI has cast Musk as a sore loser in the dispute, embittered by a rival's success.
The Guardian
02-05-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
US asks judge to break up Google's ad tech business after requesting Chrome sale
Google on Friday faced a demand by the US government to break up its hugely profitable ad technology business. The request came after a judge found the tech giant was commanding an illegal monopoly for the second time in less than a year. 'We have a defendant who has found ways to defy' the law, US government lawyer Julia Tarver Wood told a federal court in Virginia, as she urged the judge to dismiss Google's assurance that it would change its behavior. 'Leaving a recidivist monopolist' intact was not appropriate to solve the issue, she added. The demand is the second such request by the US government, which is also calling for the divestment of the company's Chrome browser in a separate case over Google's world-leading search engine business. The US government specifically alleged that Google controls the market for publishing banner ads on websites, including those of many creators and small news providers. The hearing in a Virginia courtroom was scheduled to plan out the second phase of the trial, set for September, in which the parties will argue over how to fix the ad market to satisfy the judge's ruling. The plaintiffs argued in the first phase of the trial last year that the vast majority of websites use Google ad software products which, combined, leave no way for publishers to escape Google's advertising technology and pricing. Sign up to TechScape A weekly dive in to how technology is shaping our lives after newsletter promotion The district court judge Leonie Brinkema agreed with most of that reasoning, ruling last month that Google built an illegal monopoly over ad software and tools used by publishers, but partially dismissed the argument related to tools used by advertisers. The US government said it would use the trial to recommend that Google should spin off its ad publisher and exchange operations, as Google could not be trusted to change its ways. 'Behavioral remedies are not sufficient because you can't prevent Google from finding a new way to dominate,' Tarver Wood said. Google countered that it would recommend that it agree to a binding commitment that it would share information with advertisers and publishers on its ad tech platforms. Google lawyer Karen Dunn did, however, acknowledge the 'trust issues' raised in the case and said the company would accept monitoring to guarantee any commitments made to satisfy the judge. Google is also arguing that calls for divestment are not appropriate in this case, which Brinkema swiftly refused as an argument. The judge urged both sides to mediate, stressing that coming to a compromise solution would be cost-effective and more efficient than running a weeks-long trial.
