Technology

➚ MOVE FAST: Sunny outlook. China’s Lenovo boosted its global PC sales projections for 2025, aided by in-demand AI features. The mainland’s tech champions are capitalizing on the technology in other ways. Baidu unveiled its AI-powered smart glasses, which will compete with offerings by Meta and Snap.

➘ BREAK THINGS: Storm clouds. As one of its last major probes under the Biden administration, the Federal Trade Commission has Microsoft in its sights. The agency plans to investigate whether the software giant used anti-competitive tactics, like making products incompatible with rivals, to dominate the cloud market.

A debate over our AI future

THE SCENE

While much of the AI hype has focused on consumer uses, Box CEO Aaron Levie and Zoom CEO Eric Yuan are among the company bosses scrambling to find where the technology will be really helpful: at work.

The two friends have a similarly rosy view of the way artificial intelligence will change the world, which has served their investors well this year. Each of their companies has boosted their market cap by 30% in 2024 as they’ve rolled out new generative AI products.

Both entrepreneurs, who talked to Semafor in a joint interview, have lived through and contributed to periods of massive technological disruption.

Box, founded nearly 20 years ago as a file sharing service, has been transforming itself into an AI company. And at Zoom, video calls and conferences are essentially unstructured data that the “Zoom AI Companion” can parse, generating summaries and suggesting action items and calendar entries.

Still, the founders of the two companies may be on the verge of experiencing the biggest tech revolution yet.

“This time, it’s different from other technology evolutions,” Yuan said. “We can’t imagine what’s going to happen. It’s essentially out of control compared to the internet or the mobile phone. It’s beyond our imagination.”

Levie, on the other hand, views the landscape from a more sober vantage point. “We’ve already had our Netscape moment. We’ve already had our iPhone moment. There was ChatGPT, and now we’re just in the rollout phase of how these technologies start to enter our life more and more,” he said.

Their views reflect this unique period in the tech industry, with Silicon Valley debating how AI will evolve in the coming years.

One view is that AI models are a kind of service that can be incorporated into every software product. Another is that AI capabilities will continue to evolve until they are so powerful that they upend current paradigms, potentially disrupting incumbents in ways they couldn’t imagine.

“For any new technology, if you do not feel scared, the potential is not powerful enough,” Yuan said. “You have to embrace that. There’s no other way around [it].”

As part of a last effort to deploy funds from the CHIPS Act, the Biden administration finalized its $6.6 billion award to TSMC to expand its facilities in Arizona.

About $28 billion of the $39 billion in grant money has been budgeted, according to people familiar with the matter, but getting the money out the door has depended on the companies and the Commerce Department hashing out the exact terms. For example, government officials are still working on concluding Intel’s $8 billion award amid the chipmaker’s troubles.

While the CHIPS Act passed with bipartisan support and the Biden team expects continuity on the program, Donald Trump’s election victory means limited time to finalize funding under the current administration’s terms. Recent criticisms by Trump about the CHIPS Act may also be worrisome for recipient firms, even though the current agreements are binding.

TSMC is building three facilities in Pheonix — a $65 billion investment — to manufacture leading-edge chips often used in smartphones and data centers that power AI. Biden said Friday that it was “the largest foreign direct investment in a greenfield project in the history of the United States.”

The incoming Trump team hasn’t said much about where they stand on AI policy except that Biden’s executive order on the technology would be repealed. A lobby group for leading software developers including OpenAI and Microsoft is hoping to shape future rules so that they encourage AI development rather than stifle it.

In a letter obtained by Semafor’s Morgan Chalfant, the BSA | The Software Alliance implored President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance to craft more streamlined AI governance across agencies and globally, and encourage an “open data agenda.”

The group also calls for a single national law that requires those developing high-risk AI to conduct impact assessments and abide by certain risk management programs.

The Software Alliance also highlighted efforts by the Biden administration that it wants to keep, such as an AI-research pilot program, and a risk management framework finalized a few months ago by Biden’s Commerce Department.

Mark Zuckerberg’s got a new hobby: singing. On Wednesday, he released a slowed-down version of the 2002 rap hit Get Low, which he recorded with rapper T-Pain. The duo called themselves Z-Pain for the occasion.

In his version, Zuckerberg sings instead of rapping lyrics like “from the windows, to the walls,” and other profanity-riddled lines about a beautiful girl dancing.

The song holds memories for the Meta CEO and his wife Priscilla Chan. He wrote in an Instagram post: It was playing at a college party where the two first met 20 years ago, and they play it every year on their “dating anniversary.”

“So romantic,” Chan says in a video reacting to the song, laughing.

Zuckerberg has found himself a plethora of hobbies the past few years, from hydrofoiling to martial arts — as well as significantly changing his looks — in what some say is an attempt to get rid of his long-standing reputation as “robotic tech villain,” to appear more charismatic and authentic.

Billions of dollars of investment in US clean tech factories could be stranded if the incoming Trump administration pares back the country’s climate policies, outgoing President Joe Biden’s national climate adviser told Semafor’s Tim McDonnell.

Ali Zaidi warned that domestic manufacturing, in particular, is at “a fragile inflection point” and that the changes to climate policy could cut new investments short.