Technology

➚ MOVE FAST: Open arms. OpenAI is welcoming two new executive hires this week. Sarah Friar, ex-CEO of Nextdoor, will join as CFO and Kevin Weil, president of product and business at Google-backed Planet Lab, will be the chief product officer. They are seasoned professionals stepping in after several high profile departures at Sam Altman’s firm.

➘ BREAK THINGS: Closed doors. Elon Musk was not happy when Apple announced that Siri will connect to OpenAI’s GPT-4o model on its smartphones and laptops. He threatened to ban Apple devices at his companies and called the software “woke nanny AI spyware.” But Musk did back down on one front, dropping his lawsuit against OpenAI and Altman.

Apple has been slow to jump on the AI bandwagon, and risked falling behind its rivals. But after watching WWDC this week, it’s clear that it was fine for Apple to play the long game since it has the best moat: the iPhone.

Most of the features it announced weren’t novel. Meta has already rolled out the ability to make AI-generated stickers on its social media apps before Apple’s Genmojis; Google introduced smart replies and text summarization for Gmail before Apple Mail. But that doesn’t really matter. As long as Apple can match what its competitors have built, it’ll keep users who are already loyal to its brand.

That’s largely because they are probably too locked into the Apple ecosystem, and have years of personal data on their iCloud accounts that it would be a pain to switch to other devices. That’s why even though its marketing of AI as a personal intelligence” is corny, it makes sense. All of the data its new features process is personal, whether its people’s photos or text messages. system dubbed “Apple Intelligence.“

The only new feature is Siri’s ability to perform actions and integrate with OpenAI’s GPT-4o. The chatbot has been revamped to behave like an agent that actually does things like playing a podcast someone recommended or finding information like tickets attached in an email. If the request requires external help, it’ll ask the user for permission to turn to GPT-4o.

This feature, however, won’t be available until later this year for iPhone 15 Pro, iPads, and Mac models that have the M1 chip. Meanwhile, Siri’s more advanced capabilities to complete tasks won’t be ready until 2025.

Personally, I’m more excited about the ability to Tapback reply to text messages with any emoji soon, and it’s one more thing that keeps me trapped in Apple’s ecosystem.

– Katyanna Quach

Perplexity plans revenue-sharing deal with publishers

THE SCOOP

Perplexity, the AI search startup that recently came under fire from Forbes for allegedly misusing its content, was already working on revenue-sharing deals with high-quality publishers.

Perplexity has not announced the details of those partnerships, but the company aims to unveil its plans soon, the company’s chief business officer, Dmitry Shevelenko, said.

The deals would be a first-of-its-kind revenue stream for media companies, providing a framework to earn recurring income. In contrast, OpenAI is paying media companies upfront to use their archives for training new AI models. It’s debatable how long OpenAI and other foundation model companies will need that data, meaning the deals could be one-offs.

Forbes last week accused Perplexity of plagiarizing one of its articles, an investigation into former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s drone company. It also mentioned the reporting in one of its five-minute, AI-generated podcast episodes.

Employees and executives at Forbes took to X to criticize Perplexity’s co-founder and CEO Aravind Srinivas.

Among the criticisms was that Perplexity’s citations of the original Forbes article were not sufficiently prominent, which may have led some readers to infer that Perplexity authored the article.

Shevelenko told Semafor that Perplexity employees worked around the clock to ship an update to the user interface that featured the citations more prominently. The update went live in about a day, according to the company.

REED’S VIEW

Perplexity’s new Pages feature doesn’t replace or compete with original journalism. It competes with the news aggregation business.

And humans have plagiarized so many of my articles, I’ve lost count. Sometimes the story isn’t even rewritten, it’s just posted under another byline on a new website. Rewriting content and using it to generate web traffic is part of the fabric of the internet.

When I was an early employee at The Information, our scoops would get aggregated by a myriad of websites and blogs. Often, those same blogs would warn their readers that The Information had a paywall, just so readers wouldn’t waste their time clicking through. How dare anyone charge money for news?

I have also lost count of the times reputable publications simply refused to credit my and others’ work. And any local news reporter can tell you what it feels like to be a victim of parachute journalism. When a national outlet swoops in, rips off your reporting and pretends to “own” the story.

For decades, media outlets have tacitly gone along with this kind of “plagiarism,” mainly because, as long as the aggregated article included a link, it would send traffic back to the original publication.

In fact, Perplexity’s use of the Forbes article did send some traffic back, albeit a small amount, according to Forbes Editor-In-Chief Randall Lane.

Perplexity did owe a credit to Forbes high up in the article, and perhaps a better rewrite of the original text. That’s something the company fixed quickly and can refine with more time.

The media business, on the other hand, isn’t so easily fixed. And as storied institutions lay off employees and face economic turmoil, there are a lot of raw nerves in our profession.

Lane described Srinivas about as uncharitably as possible: “But in the hands of the likes of Srinivas — who has the reputation as being great at the PhD tech stuff and less-than-great at the basic human stuff — amorality poses existential risk.”

That sentence does not match the crime. Srinivas didn’t even train the algorithms. He used them to summarize what’s out there on the internet and linked back to the original source. Yes, he could have done it better.

But turning him into public enemy No. 1 of the media is not really warranted.

I also wouldn’t discount the revenue-sharing idea Perplexity is planning to launch. It offers a promising alternative to a failing click-based news economy that incentivizes cheaply-made content with great headlines.

But if news organizations in the AI age can earn revenue from the actual substance of articles, the incentives are much more aligned with the mission of journalism itself. And that would be progress. It would also be an ongoing revenue stream, compared to the one-off training data deals that media companies are now making with the big foundation model companies.

In this particular case, I think we’ve made a mountain out of a molehill and an enemy out of a potential ally.

The share of the market Nvidia has cornered in terms of revenue from selling GPUs for data centers. Last year, it is estimated to have shipped 3.76 million chips – much more than rivals AMD and Intel, according to an analyst report from TechInsights.

Gallup’s 2024 State of the Global Workplace report, released today, shows why a record number of Americans — 64 million people — have turned to freelance work, with a bulk of them on online platforms. More than three quarters of the world’s workforce feel unengaged at work — an issue Gallup estimated cost the global economy $8.9 trillion per year due to lost productivity and the focus of a Semafor event on Wednesday.

But the US support system for freelance work is inadequate, according to a new white paper from the Flex Association, which represents app-based companies like DoorDash, Uber, and Instacart. Benefits like healthcare are often tied to an employer instead of a worker, making it difficult for people who are in less traditional jobs, whether they are a YouTuber or a gig worker (putting aside the debate of whether they are employees or contractors).

That’s why some states like Pennsylvania and Utah are trying out portable benefits that are tied to a person rather than a business. Helping workers will only grow more important as technologies like AI threaten to upend labor. It promises to make jobs more flexible and people more productive, but this will only be realized if other issues like healthcare adapt too.

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