Technology

1. Social media’s failure
2. AI’s doomsday
3. Gemini’s public stardom
4. Chinese withdrawal from US
5. London’s time for tech deals

Why Reed thinks OpenAI will ultimately turn into a for-profit, and Albania’s new AI minister.

OpenAI and Microsoft announced a “nonbinding memorandum of understanding” Thursday. About what, exactly, they didn’t say. But OpenAI said something else in the announcement that was worth unpacking: It will continue to be governed by a nonprofit, which will now receive an equity stake in the for-profit venture that OpenAI values at $100 billion.

It’s a cheeky move by OpenAI to give the nonprofit gobs of illiquid funny money that would evaporate if anything bad were to happen to OpenAI.

The company’s critics hate the idea of a completely for-profit OpenAI, which would ostensibly be free to do whatever it wants, even if it risks unleashing an unsafe superintelligence that threatens humanity.

But Thursday’s announcement shows that, either way, nothing is deterring the company’s mission, especially when the nonprofit is slapped with some golden handcuffs.

The bottom line: OpenAI is a rocket-ship startup already generating a lot of revenue and, if its plans work out, profit. No lawsuit or state attorney general is going to change that.

Kirk’s graphic death videos online show content policies failed

Widely accessible videos of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk getting shot this week indicate content moderation efforts are still hugely inadequate for some of the biggest social media companies. Within minutes of the event, close-up videos of the shooting from multiple angles began circulating on social, including being pushed by algorithms into users’ curated “For You” feeds. By Friday morning, nearly two days later, companies were still struggling to handle the volume. We could find instances in searches across X, Bluesky, and Meta’s Threads, many without sensitive content labels — which seems to violate the companies’ own stated policies regarding graphic content.

One video on X depicting the moment Kirk was shot had been shared 1,800 times and garnered more than 2.4 million views before being taken down Friday morning, after 24 hours online. Another with 230,000 views is still available, with a sensitive content warning that wasn’t there Thursday. The numbers are mostly lower on Threads, though a search by Semafor on Friday found the videos were easier to locate on the Meta-owned platform. Meta told Semafor it was working to add sensitive content labels to videos of the shooting and remove posts glorifying it, per its policies. Bluesky said it has been removing the close-up videos and suspending some accounts. X didn’t respond to a request for comment.

In recent years, social media companies have added AI to their content moderation practices to help remove graphic posts before people see them. But AI struggles with satire and context, requiring companies to continue employing human content reviewers — 15,000 in Meta’s case, a spokesperson said. Still, the response indicates real-time virality of media depicting violence is a problem too large to solve with existing practices. That may only be exacerbated as AI-generated content becomes more indistinguishable from real videos, and misinformation reaches massive audiences before companies can flag it. The answer may lie in more and better AI-powered moderation systems that can match the speed of virality, though the timeline on those systems risks running out before the next crisis hits.

— Rachyl Jones

AI researchers warn about an AI takeover

For AI researchers Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, authors of the new, unambiguously titled book If Anyone Builds it, Everyone Dies, it’s time to freak out about the technology.

“Humans have a long history of not wanting to sound alarmist,” Yudkowsky said in an interview with Semafor before the book’s publication next week. “Will some people be turned off? Maybe. Someone, at some point, just has to say what’s actually happening and then see how the world responds.”

What is happening, according to the book, is that most of the big technology companies and AI startups like Anthropic and OpenAI are building software they don’t understand (the authors argue it’s closer to alchemy than science). At some point, if these firms continue along their current path, large language models will grow powerful enough that one of them will break free from human control. Before we even realize what’s happening, humanity’s fate will be sealed and the AI will devour earth’s resources to power itself, snuffing out all organic life in the process.

With such a dire and absolute conclusion, the authors leave no room for nuance or compromise. Building the technology more slowly, or building something else, isn’t put forth as an option. Even companies like Safe Superintelligence, started by former OpenAI executive Ilya Sutskever, should shut down, according to Yudkowsky and Soares.

Gemini joins tech IPO boom

The crypto industry’s year just keeps getting better and better. Gemini, the firm founded by billionaire twins Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, is expected to start trading on Nasdaq Friday. It priced its IPO at $28 a share, $2 above the top end of its range, raising $425 million. Gemini probably could’ve gotten more given investor appetite, but it decided to cap its proceeds. Other listings in the sector, like stablecoin issuer Circle, have also seen strong market debuts. The demand reflects the ascendance of digital assets in the Trump era, after years of knock-down-drag-out fights with regulators in the Biden administration. And with the IPO market rebounding after a ho-hum 2024, investors are competing to take what they can get.

Chinese tech firms move away from Nvidia

Chinese tech heavyweights Alibaba and Baidu have started using their own chips to train their AI models, shifting their reliance away from Western companies like Nvidia, The Information reported. US export restrictions on powerful semiconconductors forced Chinese companies to innovate their own alternatives. While there is still a performance gap from the US’ most powerful chips, the People’s Republic industry has made strides in developing competitive domestic options.

The two giants are still relying in part on Nvidia to develop their most advanced models, but the move points to a larger national trend. Breakout AI star DeepSeek has also shifted its chip supply in part away from Nvidia, opting to employ some of Huawei’s chips in its training, The Information reported last month. “The competition has undeniably arrived,” an Nvidia spokesperson told the publication. “To win the AI race, U.S. industry must earn the support of developers everywhere, including China.”

UK readies for more tech deals

Another US presidential trip overseas means more deal announcements, this time from OpenAI and Nvidia in the UK. They will announce billions of dollars in investments for data centers there next week, when President Donald Trump will meet with Prime Minister Keir Starmer. Sam Altman and Jensen Huang are teaming up with London-based Nscale Global, which previously committed to $2.5 billion in AI infrastructure buildouts, Bloomberg reported. It’s welcome news for the country, and for broader Europe, but also pales in comparison to spending in the US or the Gulf region. Grumbling about the EU AI Act, and obstacles in the broader innovation environment, continues to stymie efforts by policymakers to take advantage of the latest technology boom.

This week, a special episode featuring Josh Spanier, VP of marketing at Google, who you might recognize from our branded segments. In this sponsored episode, presented by Think with Google, Ben asks Josh about how Google thinks about advertising, how he’s navigated the technological changes in that space, and if AI is going to homogenize all of the ads we see. Josh also answers some listener questions about how advertisers work with creators and what the biggest blind spots in marketing are today.

Listen to the latest episode of Mixed Signals now.

Albania has appointed an AI bot to serve as a senior government official in charge of public procurement to help weed out corruption in the country. Called Diella, which means “sun” in Albanian, the bot will award all public tenders involving the government’s hiring of private companies — a role historically vulnerable to bribery and threats. The AI minister will help make Albania “a country where public tenders are 100% free of corruption,” Prime Minister Edi Rama said Thursday while announcing his new cabinet.

It is the first time a government has publicly appointed AI to serve as a senior government official, and a broader test case for whether the technology can accurately and ethically handle the job — and do it better than a human. Roles like procurement that focus on cost analysis, rules, and oversight (rather than human-centric practices like building relationships and negotiation) may actually prove well managed by the technology. But AI can also be biased, and it is unclear what kind of human oversight or security measures Diella will have to ensure it remains neutral.