Thanks for reading The Briefing, our nightly column where we break down the day’s news. If you like what you see, I encourage you to subscribe to our reporting here.
Greetings!
If at first people don’t pay attention to what you say, say it again. That appears to be Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s philosophy. About two weeks after publishing a roughly 1,000-word opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal headlined “The AI Future Is for Everyone,” Zuckerberg published a 6,500 word version of the same piece on Meta.com on Monday. (Today’s essay carried a nearly-identifical headline, while the first half-dozen paragraphs were almost word for word what ran in the WSJ opinion piece.) Hint to Zuckerberg: Shorter is better.
Zuckerberg’s opus was part of a growing number of lengthy essays, published under the bylines of AI leaders, that discuss AI and society. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is a frequent contributor to the genre, with his most recent publication “Policy on the AI Exponential.” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has his own blog, supplemented by weighty posts from his company like this one. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella posts on X. For the most part, these essays are long and dry. In other words, they’re perfect for an AI chatbot to summarize. It makes you wonder if they’re meant to prove to consumers the value of AI!
Zuckerberg, though, seems to be mostly looking to counter the doomsaying about AI by emphasizing its democratizing potential. He repeated past claims that in the future, “everyone will have an exceptionally capable personal agent that understands you, your goals and everything you care about.” What Zuckerberg hasn’t done is ask whether anyone in their right mind wants that, but we digress. Meta is marketing itself and its own (future) product, which makes sense.
Anthropic takes a different tack. As we reported last week in this in-depth profile of Amodei, he rejected the idea of going on a charm offensive to improve the public perception of AI. Instead, Anthropic recently ran this ad that painted a scary picture of AI. Amodei’s habit of dwelling on AI’s dangers hasn’t been popular with tech CEOs. Zuckerberg, for instance, questioned in today’s missive “why anyone who believes that AI will eliminate most jobs…would rush to build that future.” But it has to be said that, judging from opinion polls like this one, Amodei is having more luck than any other tech CEO in persuading average people of his views on AI.
AI’s Financing Supershow
For quite a while, the real AI story has been not so much the technology’s innovations but the financing that aims to deliver all the AI businesses want. That financing effort appears to be pulling in all sectors of the banking industry.
Take Monday. Australian asset manager Macquarie announced a venture with Singapore investment firm GIC to establish a data center infrastructure leasing platform for Anthropic.Meanwhile, Nvidia announced a “strategic partnership” with a group of Wall Street firms, including Apollo, Blackstone, BlackRock, KKR and Goldman Sachs, to raise $500 billion for “the build-out of AI infrastructure over time.” (We wrote last week about Apollo’s desire to do more of these deals.)
Most of these Wall Street firms already have other AI ventures going with companies such as Meta Platforms and Broadcom. Is there any limit to the deals they can do?
In Other News
• Intel is raising $15 billion in a public offering of its stock, taking advantage of the enormous improvement in investor sentiment it has enjoyed in the past year to raise money.
• Enterprise software firm Monday.com reported a 22% lift in second-quarter revenue but projected a slowdown in third-quarter revenue growth to between 16% and 17%, partly because of the impact of a big layoff it undertook last month. Monday shares fell 6%.
• Sony Group and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. are planning to invest about 1 trillion yen ($6.3 billion) in a joint venture that will start mass-producing next-generation image sensors in Japan as early as 2029, the Nikkei newspaper reported.
Today on The Information’s TITV
Check out today’s episode of TITV in which we talk about Meta’s announcement that it will release its new AI model, Muse Spark 1.2, as open source and release a new family of open-source models.
Recommended Newsletter
Start your day with Applied AI, the newsletter from The Information that uncovers how leading businesses are leveraging AI to automate tasks across the board. Subscribe now for free to get it delivered straight to your inbox twice a week.
Join us to explore the real-world shifts, new architectures, and enterprise strategies defining the next era of AI. Secure your spot today to hear directly from top minds at Google DeepMind, OpenAI, Atlassian, and more.
Tickets on sale now: The Information returns to Napa Valley October 27–28 to convene senior women across tech, media, and finance. Join us for two days of intimate, candid conversations with the leaders navigating today’s global shifts.
