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Jul 10, 2025
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Supported by
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Happy Thursday! X CEO Linda Yaccarino steps down, while xAI unveils Grok 4, the latest generation of its AI models. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang plans to meet senior Chinese government officials in Beijing next week.
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Linda Yaccarino said Wednesday that she’s stepping down as the CEO of X. Yaccarino, a former NBCUniversal executive, joined X two years ago after Elon Musk acquired the social media service formerly known as Twitter. Yaccarino said in her post that the “best is yet to come” for the social media service following its merger with Musk’s artificial intelligence firm xAI in March. In response, Musk wrote: “thank you for your contributions.” Yaccarino and X did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Yaccarino has sought to repair
relationships with advertisers, some of which had pulled spending from X following Musk’s takeover over concerns about hate speech. On Tuesday, Grok, an xAI chatbot that has been integrated into X in recent months, made remarks on X including anti-semitic comments and rape threats that garnered significant attention. xAI later deleted some of the posts and said it “has taken action to ban hate speech before Grok posts on X.”
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Elon Musk’s xAI launched Grok 4, the latest generation of its AI models, intensifying its competition with rivals OpenAI, Google and Anthropic. In an hourlong livestream Wednesday night, Musk said Grok 4 is the “smartest AI in the world” and “smarter than almost all graduate students in all disciplines simultaneously.” Grok 4 and its bigger version, Grok 4 Heavy, are reasoning models that provide better answers when they use more computing power to tackle a complex question. OpenAI pioneered this type of model last fall with o1 and has followed that up with
o3. The release of the new models came just a few days after xAI faced intense criticism over Grok’s responses to X users’ questions in which the chatbot praised Adolf Hitler and even called itself “MechaHitler.” The company acknowledged the problem and appears to have deleted some of those responses.
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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang plans to meet senior Chinese government officials in Beijing next week to reassert the company’s commitment to the country, the Financial Times reported, citing people familiar with his plans. Huang is trying to arrange a meeting with Chinese Premier Li Qiang, according to the newspaper. Li would be the most senior Chinese official Huang has met. The CEO also plans to meet Vice-Premier He Lifeng. The meetings, however, are still subject to approval from the Chinese government. Huang’s planned meetings with top Chinese officials come at a critical time. While the U.S. has ratcheted up its export controls to further limit China’s access to Nvidia’s key artificial intelligence chips, Nvidia is trying to maintain its strong presence in China. The company has been working on new AI chips
designed for Chinese customers that comply with the U.S. export regulations, The Information reported in May. Apart from the planned meetings with government officials, Huang will also attend the China International Supply Chain Expo in Beijing, which starts on July 16, according to the FT.
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Kevin Miller, vice president of global data centers at Amazon Web Services, said Wednesday he plans to leave the company after 17 years, according to a LinkedIn post and an AWS spokesperson. In his most recent years at AWS, Miller oversaw the cloud provider’s data center group, including land acquisition, design and operations. He also oversaw AWS’ energy portfolio and investments, which have included efforts to use nuclear power for artificial intelligence. Miller reported to senior executive Prasad Kalyanaraman, who reports to AWS CEO Matt Garman. The move comes as AWS continues to expand its data center fleet to capture demand from customers, such as Anthropic, who are interested in renting AI servers. Miller did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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Google co-founder Sergey Brin called the United Nations “transparently antisemitic” in an internal message responding to a UN report alleging that Google and other tech firms profited from “the genocide carried out by Israel” in Gaza, The Washington Post reported Wednesday. “With all due respect, throwing around the term genocide in relation to Gaza is deeply offensive to many Jewish people who have suffered actual genocides. I would also be careful citing transparently antisemitic organizations like the UN in relation to these issues,” Brin wrote in a forum for
Google DeepMind employees, the company’s AI unit, according to The Washington Post. A Google spokesperson didn’t respond to a request for comment. Google, alongside Amazon, has a contract to provide cloud computing services to Israel under Project Nimbus, which has been the source of employee protests. The Washington Post reported earlier this year that Google had directly provided such services to Israel’s Defense Ministry and the Israeli Defense Forces.
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In an essay that has circulated inside Meta Platforms in recent days, an artificial intelligence researcher leaving the company diagnosed its challenges in AI, describing “a culture of fear” akin to “a metastatic cancer,” The Information reported. “I have yet to meet someone in Meta-GenAI that truly enjoys being there. Someone that feels like they want to stay in Meta for a long time because it’s such a great place,” wrote Tijmen Blankevoort, who worked on Meta’s flagship AI model Llama. “You’ll be hard pressed to find someone that
really believes in our AI mission. To most, it’s not even clear what our mission is.” Blankevoort, who has resigned from Meta, said he didn’t intend for the essay to be seen outside the company. “After sharing the essay, Meta’s AI leadership read it and reached out to me right away, and very positively so,” he said in a statement. “They are very eager to improve. I believe the AI organization just tried to run too fast for too long, and they have realized that this needs to turn around a bit for the org to be effective. In a statement, a spokesperson for Meta said: “This isn’t surprising. We’re excited about our recent changes, new hires in leadership and research, and continued work to create an ideal environment for revolutionary research.”
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