Technology

➚ MOVE FAST: Three amigos. The US, UK, and EU members are set to sign the first legally binding international AI treaty. It sets principles for promoting innovation and also mitigating risks of human rights abuses and violations of rule of law. There are also exceptions for national security. Other countries also plan to sign the pact but getting the US, UK, and EU on board was key to having a meaningful impact.

➘ BREAK THINGS: Double trouble. X’s problems in Brazil are also hitting Elon Musk’s other firm, SpaceX. The company pulled staffers from the country and warned employees to not travel there. SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell also publicly asked the Brazilian Supreme Court justice that suspended X to “stop harassing” Starlink, which reportedly had its bank accounts frozen there and had to suspend online access to X.

The investment Israel’s Tower Semiconductor and India’s Adani Group are making to build a semiconductor plant in the south Asian nation. India has been pitching itself as a manufacturing hub and a tech supply chain alternative to China. But efforts to build a chip-making industry have faltered, with Foxconn pulling out of an Indian semiconductor joint venture last year.

Elon Musk is winning the AI race

THE SCENE

If you believe what you read about Elon Musk — and sometimes on Musk’s own X account — you’d think the sometimes world’s richest man had lost his marbles and was in serious trouble.

But even as he lives in a wild spectacle of politics and controversy, Musk has vaulted into a serious, competitive position in the AI race, a move that could boost the fortunes of his other businesses in the process.

The data points are concrete. In a little more than a year, his xAI company went from not existing to building what could be the world’s most powerful AI datacenter. And his pursuit of turning Teslas into robotaxis, which looked like a fantasy a year or two ago, is suddenly at least in the realm of possibility.

Musk missed out on getting a first-mover advantage in the generative AI era. After trying unsuccessfully to take over and run OpenAI, which he co-founded as a nonprofit, he walked away, years before OpenAI would release ChatGPT.

But the next wave plays to the strengths Musk has displayed in the automotive and space industries. The AI industry is facing massive, complex logistical hurdles like generating enough energy to power cities and getting hundreds of thousands of graphics processors to work in unison without, literally, melting.

And so most independent competitors to OpenAI have folded, scared away by the billion-dollar price tags and inherent uncertainty.

It’s a challenge made for Musk, whose will is matched by his access to capital and his ability to convince brilliant young engineers to work themselves into the ground in pursuit of the impossible.

xAI built a datacenter in Memphis, Tennessee with 100,000 GPUs that Musk says are now operational, with another 100,000 on the way. That may be an exaggeration, as the power demands alone probably make it impossible to use all 100,000 of those GPUs today.

Microsoft’s datacenter used by OpenAI is believed to be the next largest in the world, but its exact size hasn’t been disclosed.

REED’S VIEW

This move by Musk is risky. There’s no guarantee that building datacenters of this size will yield magical results.

But there’s little doubt Musk will keep trying as long as he believes it can work. He was willing to bet his entire fortune on the company that eventually became PayPal. And he was willing to bet his PayPal fortune on SpaceX, an audacious idea at the time.

If xAI achieves an AI model that can reason as well as a human, or something close to “Artificial General Intelligence,” it could power the autonomous driving abilities of Teslas and the humanoid robot that the automaker is also attempting to build.

Musk’s Neuralink, maker of experimental brain implant technology that has so far enabled two patients to play videogames with their minds, could also benefit from the AI he is building in Memphis.

And then there’s Grok, xAI’s chatbot that is still mediocre compared to its competitors like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini.

X may never regain the advertisers it had when it was called Twitter, but its user base may still prove valuable as a distribution channel for Grok, which has exclusive access to the content on X.

Of course, like any effort of such outsized ambition, it could fail. Musk might never catch up to OpenAI. His plan could crash and burn. And if his AI bet fails, his empire may crumble.

But it might succeed. While nobody in the anti-Musk tribe wants to hear this, he may just have the last laugh.

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I traveled to Albuquerque for the Roadrunner Venture Studios’ annual deep tech conference earlier this week to moderate a discussion with Google X Chief Technology Officer Benoit Schillings, Roadrunner CEO Adam Hammer, and Vault Fund’s Sarah Anderson (who was a pole vaulter for the Florida Gators).

Roadrunner, headquartered in Albuquerque, is part of an effort to revitalize New Mexico, the scene of a lot of famous technological breakthroughs but not a lot of foundings of tech companies.

New Mexico’s sovereign wealth fund (I guess this is a hot topic these days) is funding Roadrunner. The idea of a venture studio is that, instead of just writing checks like a VC, the firm rolls up its sleeves and acts like a co-founder. Roadrunner hopes that this method will allow it to make bets on big scientific and technological breakthroughs that traditional venture firms often shy away from (More on that in a scoop about a partnership with Purdue University). Those also happen to be the kinds of things New Mexico’s national labs like Sandia and Los Alamos are good at spinning out.

One memorable moment on my panel was when Schillings talked about touring the national labs and being amazed at the things he saw: magical demonstrations of scientific discoveries that go largely unnoticed. That’s saying something for a guy who’s spent almost eight years inside a “moonshot factory.” Now it’s just a matter of turning those eye popping breakthroughs into businesses.

September 24, 2024 | New York City | Request Invitation

Aliko Dangote, Founder and CEO, Dangote Group and Samalia Zubairu, CEO, African Finance Corporation will join the stage at The Next 3 Billion summit — the premiere U.S. convening dedicated to unlocking one of the biggest social and economic opportunities of our time: connecting the unconnected.

Paul Rockwell, Pinterest’s head of trust and safety, said this week that US rules protecting kids online are long overdue, referring to recently passed Senate legislation. He made his comments at Semafor’s event on Wednesday on “Age and Access in the Social Media Era.” But until the Senate bill passes Congress — and it’s unclear it will — Rockwell said the patchwork of state rules governing online platforms, along with federal and global measures, are “absolutely untenable.” Part of the problem, he says, is it forces companies like Pinterest to allocate a “significant amount of resources chasing compliance” instead of building more safety controls. But the Senate bill isn’t high up on Congress’ fall agenda.

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