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4 divergent AI takes: Sexy, scary, mysterious, and hyped

AI was the star at Bloomberg’s tech conference

5/13/24 10:57AM

We don’t have an official count of how many times the tech titans at Bloomberg’s tech summit in San Francisco last week mentioned artificial intelligence, but it was definitely a lot. Good, bad, sexy, scary — how they thought about AI varied widely depending on the person. Here are some notable takes:

Sexy AI: Goes on dates for us

Whitney Wolfe Herd, founder and executive chair of dating app Bumble, thinks there’s a better AI dating future than falling in love with bots.

“Our focus with AI is to help create more healthy and actionable relationships.”

She conceived of a hypothetical future in which AI acts as a “dating concierge” that could help you get over your particular hangups and “give you productive tips for communicating with other people.” Sounds good! Wolfe Herd then got a little more “out there.”

“There’s a world where your dating concierge could go on a date for you with other dating concierges.” The idea would be to winnow down the dating pool to the people you, the person, should actually go and meet.

Scary AI: influences the presidential election

How concerned is LinkedIn cofounder and venture capitalist Reid Hoffman about AI’s role in the upcoming election? “Very concerned.” Ruh roh!

He gave the example of people calling real court rulings about Donald Trump “deep fakes.” In other words “true things will be called deep fakes” which will create a “language of nontruth.”

Hype AI: It’s all that and a bag of lenses

While some people think AI is a massive grift, Snap cofounder and CEO Evan Spiegel says “all the excitement around AI is warranted.”

How does that relate to the disappearing photo social media app?

“What’s been really exciting is the way we’ve been able to apply AI to image and video and 3D.” AR lens experiences that used to take graphic artists weeks can now be generated “on the fly using AI,” which Spiegel says will lead to an “explosion in creativity.”

Mysterious AI: We don’t know how it’s trained

OpenAI still won’t say it uses YouTube to train its text-to-video generator Sora.

Bloomberg's @shiringhaffary: “Was Youtube used to train OpenAI’s Sora?”
Open AI’s Brad Lightcap: “We’re looking at this problem. It’s really hard.”
— Rani Molla (@ranimolla) May 9, 2024

Back in March the company’s chief technology officer caused quite a stir after being unable to answer a seemingly simple question from the Wall Street Journal about what data the company used to train the model.

Two months later, that’s still the case. When asked to clear up whether or not Sora is trained on YouTube videos, OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap gave a long winding non-answer.

“The conversation around data is really important. We obviously need to know where data comes from,” he said, before mentioning a recent blog post that also doesn’t answer the question. Lightcap talked about the need for a content ID system that lets creators understand when their content is being used to train AI and to be able to monetize that. “We’re looking at this problem. It’s really hard,” he concluded.

At this point, OpenAI’s omission about where Sora is trained has got to be for legal reasons rather than for lack of knowledge about whether it trained its AI on YouTube. Because what could be worse than “yes”?

Rani Molla2h

Elon Musk’s SpaceX reportedly in talks to merge with xAI

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is reportedly exploring a merger between SpaceX and his artificial intelligence startup xAI, a move that would bundle rockets, satellites, the social media site X, and AI under one company ahead of SpaceX’s long-anticipated IPO.

According to Reuters reporting, the deal would swap xAI shares for SpaceX stock, potentially valuing the combined operation north of $1 trillion.

Reuters reports:

Two entities have been set up in Nevada to facilitate the transaction, the person said.

Reuters could not determine the value of the deal, its ‌primary rationale, or its potential timing.

Corporate filings in Nevada show that those entities were set up on January 21. One of them, a limited liability company, lists SpaceX and Bret Johnsen, the company's chief financial officer, as managing members, while the other lists Johnsen as the company's only officer, the filings show.

The combined companies could also set the narrative groundwork for putting data centers in space — an idea that Musk and a number of other tech billionaires have been floating lately but that may not get off the ground.

In its earnings filings yesterday, Tesla disclosed that it recently made a $2 billion investment in xAI. Last year Musk’s xAI bought Musk’s X in an all-stock deal.

Exclusive: Musk's SpaceX in merger talks with xAI ahead of planned IPO, source says

Reuters reports:

Two entities have been set up in Nevada to facilitate the transaction, the person said.

Reuters could not determine the value of the deal, its ‌primary rationale, or its potential timing.

Corporate filings in Nevada show that those entities were set up on January 21. One of them, a limited liability company, lists SpaceX and Bret Johnsen, the company's chief financial officer, as managing members, while the other lists Johnsen as the company's only officer, the filings show.

In its earnings filings yesterday, Tesla disclosed that it recently made a $2 billion investment in xAI. Last year Musk’s xAI bought Musk’s X in an all-stock deal.

Translating Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella

Translating Nadella’s jargon to understand his strategy for meeting intense demand for AI computing.

Jon Keegan2h

Rani Molla3h

Driverless Waymo struck a child near school in California

A Google Waymo struck a child near a Santa Monica elementary school during morning drop-off last week, as self-driving cars by Waymo, Tesla, and others continue their expansion across the country. In a blog post, Waymo said the fully driverless car detected the child as they emerged from behind a parked SUV, braked sharply, and reduced speed from approximately 17 mph to under 6 mph before striking the child. The child suffered minor injuries and walked away.

The company reported the incident to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which is currently investigating, adding fresh scrutiny to how robotaxis perform in the wild.

Jon Keegan5h

Digging into Microsoft’s cloud backlog

Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing unit is seeing huge demand. In yesterday’s second-quarter earnings call, Microsoft CFO Amy Hood said the company’s commercial bookings increased 230% thanks to large commitments from OpenAI and Anthropic and healthy demand for its Azure cloud computing platform.

Hood said that the company’s “remaining performance obligations” (RPO) ballooned to a staggering $625 billion, up 110% from the same period last year. How long will it take for Microsoft to fulfill these booked services? Hood said the weighted average duration was “approximately two and a half years,” but a quarter of that will be recognized in revenue in the next 12 months.

Shares of Microsoft tanked today, down over 11%, despite the strong beat on revenue and earnings. The drop puts the stock on track to have its worst single-day drop since March of 2020.

Investors may be concerned that while huge, that extra demand was coming only from OpenAI, an issue that Oracle recently experienced.

But Hood said the non-OpenAI RPO still grew 28% year on year, which reflects “ongoing broad customer demand across the portfolio.”

Meta and Tesla are funding the future with their core businesses — but only one of them is still growing

The two tech giants, on back-to-back earnings calls, made it sound like they’re selling the same AI-powered future. But the picture of the underlying businesses, and how they’re using AI to furnish current sales, couldn’t be more different.

Rani Molla5h