Technology

1. OpenAI’s polarizing firings
2. Vance vs. tech companies
3. FTC advances AI probe
4. Hyperscalers’ revenue shifts
5. A photo-based AI assistant

What AI safety experts resigning from companies have in common, and solving math problems with AI is an unexpectedly touchy subject.

Covering the tech industry these days can feel a little spiritual. There’s always mention of the “end times,” and you don’t let it ruin your day.

Every few months, an employee of a top AI lab resigns over some kind of concern about AI safety or security. That’s why I barely blinked recently when former Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon accused his former employers (he worked at OpenAI and Anthropic) of acting irresponsibly, then went on a media blitz warning of the end of humanity.

In the first episode of my new show, Future Proof, longtime cybersecurity expert Alex Stamos, who recently took over at AI startup Cognition, made an interesting point: The AI safety experts resigning in protest often have long, deeply held beliefs about the dangers of the technology. “And then anything that happens fits within that almost religious framework,” Stamos said. “It creates a nihilism that there’s nothing you can do about it except stop it all or accept it,” he said on the show.

“If you’re gonna say these things are incredibly dangerous, then you need to lay out why they’re dangerous in specific steps. And then you need to work on preventing those specific steps. What you should not do is just quit your job and freak everybody out,” he told me.

Stamos has some perspective. In the Wild West days of the early internet, he was part of the underground hacking world. By today’s standards, there were almost no defenses, and it was a little scary. The 1983 movie War Games, for example, depicted a high-school hacker who accidentally brings the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation.

The difference then was that the industry didn’t spend much time getting philosophical about the problem. People just got to work. “If you talk to the cyber people at the Big L labs, they’re much calmer because the cyber people have had other jobs,” Stamos says. “They have gone up against the worst hackers in the world, human beings who are very, very good at their jobs.”

Now, the cybersecurity risk comes less from the best hackers, than the fact that AI can turn mediocre hackers into great ones. In other words, it’s not a vengeful AI god we should be worried about. It’s software and people.

The Rorschach test in OpenAI’s firings

The firing of three OpenAI employees this week has ricocheted through the tech industry — and reactions to it are a Rorschach test for which side of the AI safety debate one falls into. The employees claim they were fired for raising safety concerns, while OpenAI says they were fired for mishandling sensitive information. The employees may have been ensnared in an unrelated leak investigation at the company, people familiar with the matter told me.

For AI safety advocates, the firings are an example of how AI labs are dismissing safety concerns as they race toward dangerous AI capabilities. For more accelerationist people on the other side of the debate, this is simply about jettisoning disloyal employees. Rapidly growing startups are places of chaos and quick decisions, and there’s no time to keep employees who might not be acting in the best interest of the company.

We should expect more of these stories in the future. It will be difficult for labs to get rid of employees who have anything remotely to do with safety without sparking controversy.

— Reed Albergotti

Vance accuses tech firms of H-1B fraud

The Trump administration’s visa crackdown is sweeping up two very different kinds of tech companies. Vice President JD Vance on Thursday accused eight firms of fraud, and suspended them from a program that helps certain foreign workers obtain green cards.

Vance singled out Microsoft, saying it laid off 6,000 American workers while taking on 6,300 foreign employees on H-1B visas. The rest of the list of suspended companies is made up mostly of Indian IT outsourcers like Infosys and Tata, whose businesses have rested on placing cheaper contract workers at US companies rather than hiring specialized engineers. Microsoft disputed the claims, saying 80% of its H-1B filings last year were to extend or change the status of existing employees.

The move speaks to the MAGA base’s long-running complaints about H-1B visas ahead of the midterms. Tech executives, who have been some of President Donald Trump’s loyal allies, now face a government policy that drives up the cost of labor at a time when AI investments are already squeezing profits.

Other countries have seized on the opening presented by the Trump administration’s crackdown on skilled visas: China unveiled the “K-visa” last year, its H-1B equivalent, and Canada and Germany have also eased rules over high-skilled immigration. Meanwhile, hours after Vance’s remarks, Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation from Trump.

Semafor has announced new members and co-chairs of the Global Advisory Board for Silicon Valley & The World, a first-of-its-kind, multiyear initiative connecting the leaders building transformative technologies with the policymakers shaping their deployment.

As the board expands, Sam Altman joins Silicon Valley & The World as a co-chair. The expanded board includes more than 50 global figures, among them Olugbenga “GB” Agboola, Bhavish Aggarwal, Pedro Azagra, John Ketchum, Pratyush Kumar, Yann LeCun, Fei-Fei Li, Amjad Masad, Penny S. Pritzker, Kevin Rudd, Eric Schmidt, KR Sridhar, Mati Staniszewski, and Raj Subramaniam.

Designed to move the conversation beyond debate and toward action, Silicon Valley & The World will convene more than 350 founders, CEOs, investors, and policymakers in November, bringing together leaders with the ability to fund, scale, and implement new ideas.

The FTC’s AI probe gets real

The Federal Trade Commission is close to sending investigative demands to frontier AI companies, a senior agency official told Semafor’s Ashley Gold — a sign that its AI probe is moving forward after its unusual disclosure to the public. The FTC’s planned AI inquiry emerged in a New York Post story around the same time the White House signed a pact with tech executives about AI safety.

It’s rare for the FTC to reveal an investigation before it sends investigative demands, which have subpoena-like force. The leak of the probe raised the question of whether FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson plans an in-depth inquiry or a probe that’s designed to convey the appearance of action ahead of the midterm elections — and as the public grows increasingly concerned about AI’s dangers. The senior official reiterated that the agency plans a significant probe, adding that it was initiated due to public health and safety concerns about AI.

Hyperscalers’ revenue games

When some investors compared OpenAI’s revenue numbers with Anthropic’s, they asserted that OpenAI’s annualized revenue was off by about $20 billion, according to news reports this week. Stocks connected to the AI industry jerked down, but are mostly up again today.

Whatever OpenAI’s actual revenue numbers are, their disclosures to investors as a private company aren’t pressure-tested yet by auditors or regulators — they will be when the two hyperscalers go public — and no one should be using them now to make investment decisions. Still, it is instructive to look at their financial discipline, or lack thereof.

One way Anthropic is creative with revenue is in its accounting for when customers pay Google Cloud, or another provider, to run an Anthropic AI model: The cloud provider sends a cut of that money back to Anthropic. In April, I wrote about how Anthropic was counting not just its own cut as revenue, but the cloud provider’s, too. OpenAI was not measuring revenue that way, and has accounted only for its cut — about 20% of the total fee.

There are other metrics investors should consider more closely to give a better indication of the company’s growth and financial potential, and they aren’t the ones that leak: How many customers do these companies have and what percentage of their revenue are they getting from the biggest ones? What is the churn rate of enterprise customers? What are the margins on each token, per model? How much of their revenue comes from coding compared to other use cases? How much time do consumers spend using their platforms?

— Reed Albergotti

Dazzle’s AI assistant is powered by photos

Former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s new AI assistant, Dazzle, does away with the text data other chatbots require, and instead uses the phone’s camera roll as the source of truth about users’ lives, learning who they are and what they enjoy. It then makes users a detailed to-do list from the analysis and can take agentic actions, like making purchases on your behalf.

Dazzle doesn’t access email — perhaps my favorite AI use case — but Mayer’s response as to why surprised me. Even when she was at Yahoo, she said in an interview, she never gave anyone access to her email because you don’t have control of what’s in there.

Mayer set out to build a consumer product from the start. When she looked at the landscape of AI assistants, enterprise was almost all she saw. “If you’re paying $200 per month for an AI subscription, that’s not really a consumer product,” she says.

But Mayer sees value in consumer: The biggest success stories in the tech industry, like Apple, Amazon, Google, and even Nvidia, started as consumer plays.

— Reed Albergotti

What does it mean to build technology with the power to reshape society? Bestselling biographer Walter Isaacson joins Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman at 92NY on October 12th for a live recording of The Builders, his new Kaleidoscope podcast, on the promise, power, and hard questions of the AI age. Secure your ticket for in-person or streaming access.

When OpenAI released a huge repository of mathematical proofs earlier this week, it sent shockwaves through the field, and some human mathematicians were not pleased. “Mathematicians have a particular vision of progress that is informed by history and field-specific considerations,” wrote the Association for Human Mathematics, a group that aims to preserve mathematics for people. “Mathematicians did not ask for this work to be done.”

It turns out creativity is valued in every field of discovery, not just the arts. The famous mathematician G.H. Hardy said he was interested in mathematics only as creative art. “It is not possible to justify the life of any genuine professional mathematician on the ground of … ‘utility’.” His work wound up to be very useful, and so will AI’s discoveries, despite anyone’s feelings about it.