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Greetings! Welcome back, Travis Kalanick! We’ve missed you as a generator of news. The New York Times scooped the juicy news today that Kalanick is in talks to get Uber’s backing for a buyout of Chinese autonomous vehicle developer Pony.ai’s U.S. assets. Assuming the deal gets done, it may not involve big dollars—Pony’s market capitalization of $5.2 billion mostly reflects its Chinese robotaxi and autonomous trucking business—but the strategic implications are important. And, let’s face it, it’s a fun story given the history behind it. As anyone over the age of 15 should remember, Kalanick was the co-founder and original CEO of Uber, only to be pushed out by big investors and succeeded by Dara Khosrowshahi after a controversy over Uber’s rough-and-ready culture and boundary-pushing competitive tactics. Kalanick sold his Uber stake a few months after the company went public, and we reported at the time that he told people he didn’t have confidence in Khosrowshahi. But all that is in the past. According to the Times, Khosrowshahi and Kalanick are buddies now. And teaming up on a Pony ride can both give Kalanick a path back to a big role in the ride-hailing market and strengthen Uber’s strategy for dealing with the rise of robotaxis. At Kalanick's instigation, Uber spent $2.5 billion developing its own autonomous vehicle. But Khosrowshahi, correctly recognizing the effort as a money pit for the then money-losing Uber, shut it down. Instead, he has pursued partnerships with robotaxi services by offering other companies’ robotaxis as a ride option on the Uber platform. It does that with Alphabet’s Waymo, by far the leading robotaxi service in the U.S., in areas such as Austin, Texas. But Uber has announced a bunch of other partnerships with robotaxi services—including with Pony for service overseas, starting with the Middle East—although not too many are operating so far. That makes sense: Uber wants as many partners as possible to ensure it’s not reliant on any single service. As the company said in a statement today, without commenting on the Kalanick-Pony news, “Uber has a platform strategy, and we intend to work with multiple players in the U.S. and around the world who can safely bring autonomous technology to the world.” It’s too early to say whether Pony under Kalanick could become a viable service that could threaten Waymo (or Tesla, if Elon Musk can scale up his very nascent Austin-based service). But given Kalanick’s aggressively competitive nature, it promises to be a story worth watching. Every now and then—perhaps once every 10 years—a CEO says something that is so spot-on it deserves plaudits and attention. That’s the case with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s commentary on Wednesday: In essence, he said the tech industry needs to demonstrate unequivocally that artificial intelligence “is socially useful” enough to justify its energy usage. Hear, hear! (Nadella posted a clip of his comments on his X account). This sentiment touches on something that doesn’t get discussed enough: the costs for society of the AI explosion compared to the benefits. We all know that big tech firms are spending tens of billions of extra dollars on new data centers for AI processing, putting big pressure on energy production. Last year global energy demand rose by 2.2%, compared with a 1.3% average increase in demand between 2013 and 2023, according to the International Energy Agency. The U.S. Energy Information Administration has forecast that U.S. electricity consumption will grow this year and next year after years of virtually no growth. None of this can be good for efforts to combat climate change. And while AI is proving its value in medical research, a major purpose of AI is to replace humans in the labor force. Indeed, Microsoft is one of the businesses making that pitch, as we reported here. So the industry is squeezing power supplies, hurting the future of the planet, in order to put people out of work? That’s not a winning message. At some point tech companies will start facing real opposition to what they’re doing in AI. As Nadella noted, “If you’re going to use energy, you better have social permission to use energy.” Nadella isn’t a philanthropist, of course. There’s a political point to his commentary. He’s in a battle with Microsoft’s longtime partner, OpenAI, centering on when OpenAI can declare it has developed AI able to outsmart humans, called artificial general intelligence. Nadella is trying to point out the flaws in that approach. As he said, the benefits of AI have to show up in “real stats…not just an AGI or AI benchmark.” He’s right. Whether anyone in tech will listen to him, though, is the question.
- Google announced a free tool for helping publishers make money online from surveys, micropayments and other offerings, a sign that Google is responding to publisher complaints that new AI features like AI Overviews on Search are driving down traffic to publisher sites.
- AI is handling between 30% and 50% of the work at Salesforce, automating functions like software engineering and customer service, co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff said in an interview with Bloomberg.
- Meta is in advanced talks to buy PlayAI, a startup using AI to generate humanlike voices, Bloomberg reported.
- Tesla executive and top Elon Musk lieutenant Omead Afshar has left the carmaker, Bloomberg News reported. Afshar oversaw sales and manufacturing operations in North America and Europe, the report said.
- CoreWeave is in fresh talks to buy Core Scientific, The Wall Street Journal reported, after the AI cloud provider unsuccessfully bid for the data infrastructure company a year ago.
- Meta Platforms is hiring four researchers from OpenAI as part of an aggressive push to recruit talent and catch up in AI, after stumbles over the past year.
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