Technology

➘ BREAK THINGS: X. The platform formerly known as Twitter is in the middle of yet another controversy. The nonprofit Media Matters found X was running ads for companies like Oracle and Apple next to content touting Hitler, leading IBM to immediately suspend its marketing on the platform.

➘ ➘ BREAK MORE THINGS: X’s owner. Elon Musk’s support for anti-Semitic comments made on X appeared to have spilled over to his other company, Tesla. The automaker’s stock was down about 4% yesterday, while the broader Nasdaq closed slightly up.

I attended the annual Semiconductor Industry Association awards dinner last night. It was an interesting time to be among the people who are often underappreciated for their contributions to the tech industry. Except, thanks to geopolitics, they suddenly are very appreciated. The dinner included cameos from politicians like Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Medtronic CEO Geoff Martha, who in his keynote talk, joked that he wished he had known everyone in that room before the pandemic.

Over the past few years, the world has come to realize that semiconductors, used to operate pretty much any electronic device these days, are extremely vulnerable to supply chain interruptions. Just look at growing tensions over Taiwan, where the majority of advanced chips are manufactured.

And now, generative AI has put chips in the spotlight again, as demand for Nvidia’s graphics processors has created what seems like unlimited demand and a dire shortage.

With this newfound gravitas, there was a certain bounce in the step of many in the room. But there was also an underlying tension between U.S. interests and profitability. The night before, some people at the event had dined with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. At the awards event, Martha advocated for partnering with Chinese companies to sell medical devices there.

The U.S. is spending billions to bring chip manufacturing back onshore and boost research to stay ahead. To achieve those goals, the industry will have to figure out how to manage the delicate balance of scientific discovery, capitalism, and national security.

Dennis Woodside is president of Freshworks, which builds back-end software that helps companies provide customer support. He has also been an executive at Google, Dropbox, and Impossible Foods.

Q: Do AI customer service bots risk creating an embarrassing incident?

A: We think of AI as helping in three ways. It helps self service. The second is acting as a co-pilot for the [human] agent and making the agent more productive. For example, it’s pretty common if you’re a customer support agent to have to summarize an interaction that may have gone across a couple of days and a couple different exchanges. AI can summarize that at the push of a button into a short paragraph that anybody can digest.

And then there are insights. So if I am managing a customer support team of 100, the AI can surface insights that would be very hard to find. The AI can say, ‘Good morning, Dennis. Wanted to make sure you are aware that there’s a spike in dissatisfied customers over the last couple of days. Do you want to learn more?’

The risk of an AI failure, if you’re surfacing something to a customer support agent, is not that high. Over time, the bots are going to comply with norms of response and language, and the guardrails are going to be more developed.

Q: Has there been an evolution with your customers over the past year?

A: I’d say it’s more of a revolution. Every company was aware of AI a year ago. Now every customer support leader or IT leader, sales and marketing leader are aware. They have to have a strategy for how they’re going to deploy AI. Their customers are expecting it. They are all under pressure to spend less on support operations.The software is a fraction of the labor costs.

So they’re looking at either not growing their labor cost or cutting it entirely and using software to solve the problems humans were previously solving.

Q: I’m sure you still talk to people at Google. Do you think AI is a threat to search?

A: I had a customer email me the other day looking for a new IT service product. In the past, they would Google it. Now they just went to ChatGPT. They said we have 500 employees. We need something that’s flexible, fast, does the following 10 things, and has the following security requirements. What do you recommend? ChatGPT ranked the order, spat out what it recommended and why. We were at the top of the list.

More people are starting to use ChatGPT to solve information problems. And that’s a threat to Google. A single blue link is very different than what ChatGPT provided in that example. As more customers go to ChatGPT as their starting point, there’s a business to be built around how do you ensure your product is at the top of the answer list just like SEO came out of search.

Q: Did you study that to figure out why you came out on top?

A: It’s very hard to figure that out. If you think back to the early days of Google, it wasn’t that transparent how Google surfaced information. SEO sort of reverse engineered it. And then a set of practices evolved. Eventually, Google figured out it needed to give some guidance to the SEO world because SEO practices were kind of spammy. Maybe that’s what happens with ChatGPT.

Percentage of U.S. teenagers who say they have ever used ChatGPT for schoolwork, according to new survey data from the Pew Research Center. White teens and those living in households earning $75,000 or more a year are more likely to have heard of the chatbot compared to Hispanic and Black youth living in households with lower incomes. Among 13-17 year olds who are familiar with ChatGPT, 57% say it’s not OK to use it for writing essays.

Join us in Washington, D.C. for a special bicoastal exchange of ideas on artificial intelligence.

Date: December 7 | Washington D.C RSVP

The East and West Coasts have contrasting perspectives on the AI revolution. We’ll debate and dissect those views in a live, high-energy exchange of ideas hosted by Semafor’s editors, as we engage tech leaders and policymakers on the profound questions about AI’s implications for our work, life, healthcare, warfare, and democratic elections.

Founding Partner: Cisco | Program Partner: Verizon Business

— U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta on the Justice Department’s antitrust lawsuit targeting Google search. The evidentiary portion of the trail ended Thursday, and closing arguments are scheduled for May.

A very small number of TikTok users uploaded videos over the past week praising a 2002 letter written by Osama Bin Laden, which outlined his justifications for orchestrating the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. In many of them, creators said they were moved by bin Laden’s banal points about U.S. foreign policy, which could have been gleaned from any introductory class on international relations.

But once the videos started reaching TikTok critics on other platforms like X, they quickly snowballed into a massive controversy that has caught the attention of the White House and was featured on the cover of today’s New York Post. The meme that “bin Laden is going viral with the kids on a Chinese-owned app” was simply too good to resist, and TikTok is now facing perhaps its most serious existential threat in the U.S. to date.

The company responded very aggressively, deleting not only the original videos, but also those from commentators who criticized the letter and journalists who reported on it. TikTok also released a series of strongly worded statements saying bin Laden was never actually a trend on the platform, and the videos only grew into a moral panic once the media started drawing attention to them.

As someone who has covered TikTok for five years, this looks like a distinct tone shift for the company. Its messaging used to be fairly mild, often emphasizing TikTok’s principled approach to content moderation. Now, TikTok is publicly pushing back against U.S. presidential candidate Nikki Haley and issuing long blog posts disagreeing with its critics. It’s a better strategy than the old one, but it likely won’t be effective with people who have already made their minds up about TikTok.

— Louise

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