Technology

➚ MOVE FAST: Space tech. SpaceX’s Starlink has been a critical asset for Ukraine’s defense against Russia. But Europe is trying to reduce its reliance on the company in other ways, like launching its most powerful rocket, Ariane 6, on Tuesday. Built by ArianeSpace, a French commercial launch service company, the heavy-lift vehicle is designed to deliver satellite fleets and spacecraft. But unlike SpaceX’s Falcon 9, the Ariane 6 isn’t reusable.

➘ BREAK THINGS: Health tech. A personalized health chatbot being built by Thrive AI Health, a startup launched by Sam Altman and Arianna Huffington, may offer more hype than help. It will recommend things like wind down at 10 pm to get up at 6 am, which is just common sense. Meanwhile, researchers found that AI has not meaningfully improved patient outcomes and recommended the UK’s National Health Service prioritize speeding up cancer patient care over rolling out fancy algorithms.

The amount that HongShan, the Chinese VC firm that separated and spun out of Sequoia Capital due to geopolitical tensions between China and the US, has raised in its latest round. It’s the largest financing sum by any Chinese VC group over the past year, according to the Financial Times. This round, however, pales in comparison to the $9 billion HongShan previously secured in 2022, which shows the fundraising market is still tough.

The politics of EVs

THE SCENE

With Donald Trump gaining in US presidential polls and oil interests pushing a false narrative around electric vehicle sales, the politics of EVs has never been so complex, according to General Motors board member and former Tesla president Jon McNeill.

He blamed companies like Koch Industries for using temporary market dynamics to orchestrate PR campaigns about consumer interest waning in electric vehicles. The US Inflation Reduction Act reduced the number of cars eligible for a $7,500 federal tax credit, while GM’s Chevrolet Bolt and Tesla’s Model 3 were both caught in a transition to new models, which caused a temporary blip in sales.

“What we’ve been reading about are short-term dynamics, but they’re being twisted for political purposes by people that have business interests in fossil fuels,” McNeill told Semafor.

Meanwhile, some core US customers of leading EV company Tesla, well-to-do liberals, have been alienated by the public statements of its CEO and Trump ally, Elon Musk. At the same time, would-be customers in Republican-dominated states, many of whom are fans of Musk’s politics, have disdained electric vehicles as part of a conservative backlash.

Tesla, a company McNeill once helped lead, does face a political puzzle, he said. Sales are slowing in the Democratic areas that once accounted for 80% of its business. They are rising in Republican zip codes, but not fast enough.

“It gets really hard to keep both sides of the political spectrum happy when you’re actively participating in the politicization of the product,” he said.

That problem, like others facing EVs, could be temporary. “I’ve learned, like a lot of others, don’t bet against Elon because he’s got a will to succeed that is unlike any I’ve seen,” McNeill said.

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The Future of Life Institute, an AI safety organization we’ve covered from time to time in this newsletter, is offering $4 million grants for projects that help counteract consolidation of power in the AI industry. “We risk governments tyrannising with Orwellian surveillance, corporate monopolies crushing economic freedom, and rampant decision automation subverting meaningful individual agency,” the group said.

It’s another example of how AI safety is expanding far beyond the killer-robot problem. The most talked-about counter to the concentration of AI power is open-source technology. But FLI says that’s not the answer. It lays out a number of alternatives, like “public AI” and “safe decentralization.”

But FLI is fighting an uphill battle. If the answer to advancing AI is spending more money on even larger data centers, centralization is probably the only way forward. There just aren’t many organizations besides governments and the largest companies in the world that can pull that off. As we wrote last week, policymakers may be forced to get involved, as power availability requires central planning and AI models become so powerful that they threaten national security.

On my own. Elon Musk said on X Tuesday that xAI, the company he founded to “destroy OpenAI,” is building its own data center from scratch. As part of that push, it has purchased 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs, making it what Musk called “the most powerful training cluster in the world by a large margin.”

The move is classic Musk. The company launched less than a year ago and already has a data center 10 times the size of the one used to create GPT-4. If each GPU costs somewhere around $30,000, we’re talking about a $3 billion bet (not including energy costs) that the company can create the most powerful AI model in the world.

Musk’s company had worked with Oracle on previous training runs to create the chatbot Grok and the upcoming Grok 2. “The reason we decided to do the 100k H100 and next major system internally was that our fundamental competitiveness depends on being faster than any other AI company. This is the only way to catch up,” he wrote.

This is significant because it likely puts xAI in a rarefied group of foundation model companies like Google, OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta.

OpenAI is building a cluster with 100,000 Nvidia BG200 GPUs, a more powerful successor to the H100, The Information reported. But that won’t open until the second quarter of next year. Meanwhile, Andreessen Horowitz is reportedly eyeing up to 20,000 GPUs in its arsenal to help its portfolio companies.

It’s complicated. The New York Times’ relationship with OpenAI isn’t as straightforward as it seems. It sued the startup last year, accusing OpenAI of copyright violations for ripping off its articles to train the company’s large language model. But while they fight each other in court, the NYT is also testing OpenAI’s technology behind closed doors.

The Intercept found that the publisher had built a tool, powered by the startup’s technology, to automatically generate headlines and edit copy to make sure the writing adheres to its style guide. A representative from the NYT said that the software was an experiment and wasn’t used by the newsroom.

Several news outlets have begun using AI, but these applications haven’t been well received. The media industry is suspicious of AI, and are concerned that the technology could end up replacing journalists. The NYT’s experimental tool, for example, performs the duties of an editor.

As AI improves, it’s probably only a matter of time before top publishers like the NYT start using it in their newsrooms. The Washington Post, for example, just launched Climate Answers, an AI chatbot that answers questions about the environment based on its own reporting.

Also, in other OpenAI news: Microsoft has given up its observer board seat at the firm amid antitrust concerns. Regulators in the US and UK are investigating their close relationship, which involves Microsoft supplying compute and OpenAI providing AI products.

— Katyanna Quach

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