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  • Mark Zuckerberg Vows to Be Neutral–While Tossing Gifts to Trump and the GOP

    Mark Zuckerberg Vows to Be Neutral–While Tossing Gifts to Trump and the GOP

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    This week Mark Zuckerberg sent a letter to Jim Jordan, the chair of the House Judiciary Committee. For months, the GOP-led committee has been on a crusade to prove that Meta, via its once-eponymous Facebook app, engaged in political sabotage by taking down right-wing content. Its investigation has involved thousands of documents, and the committee interviewed multiple employees, which failed to locate a smoking gun. Now, under the guise of offering his take on the subject, Zuckerberg’s letter is a mea culpa where he seems to indicate that there was something to the GOP conspiracy theory.

    Specifically, he said that in 2021 the Biden administration asked Meta “to censor some Covid-related content.” Meta did take the posts down, and Zuckerberg now regrets the decision. He also conceded that it was wrong to take down some content regarding Hunter Biden’s laptop, which the company did after the FBI warned that the reports might be Russian disinformation.

    What stood out to me, besides the letter’s simpering tone, was how Zuckerberg used the word “censor.” For years the right has been using that word to describe what it regards as Facebook’s systematic suppression of conservative posts. Some state attorneys general have even used that trope to argue that the company’s content should be regulated, and Florida and Texas have passed laws to do just that. Facebook has always contended that the First Amendment is about government suppression, and by definition its content decisions could not be characterized as such. Indeed, the Supreme Court dismissed the lawsuits and blocked the laws.

    Now, by using that term to describe the removal of the Covid material, Zuckerberg seems to be backing down. After years of insisting that, right or wrong, a social media company’s content decisions did not deprive people of First Amendment rights—and in fact said that by making such decisions, the company was invoking its free speech rights—Zuckerberg is now handing its conservative critics just what they wanted.

    I asked Meta spokesperson Andy Stone if the company now agrees with the GOP that some of its decisions to take down content can be referred to as “censoring.” Stone said that Zuckerberg was referring to the government when he used that term. But he also pointed me to Zuckerberg’s affirmation that the ultimate decision to remove the posts was Meta’s own. (Responding to the Zuckerberg letter, the White House said, “When confronted with a deadly pandemic, this Administration encouraged responsible actions to protect public health and safety,” and left the final decision to Facebook.)

    Meta can’t have it both ways, The letter is clear—Zuckerberg said the government pressured Meta to “censor” some Covid content. Meta took that material down. Ergo, Meta now characterizes some of its own actions as censorship. Seizing on this, the GOP members of the Judiciary Committee quickly tweeted that Zuckerberg has now outright admitted “Facebook censored Americans.”

    Stone did say that Meta still does not consider itself a censor. So is Meta disputing that GOP tweet? Stone wouldn’t comment on it. It seems that Meta will offer no pushback while GOP legislators and right-wing commentators crow that Facebook now concedes that it blatantly censored conservatives as a matter of policy.

    Meta’s CEO presented Jordan and the GOP with another gift in his letter, involving his private philanthropy. During the 2020 election, Zuckerberg helped fund nonpartisan initiatives to protect people’s right to vote. Republicans criticized Zuckerberg’s effort as aiding the Democrats. Zuckerberg still insists he wasn’t advocating that people vote a certain way, just ensuring they were free to cast ballots. But, he wrote Jordan, he recognized that some people didn’t believe him. So, apparently to indulge those ill-informed or ill-intentioned critics, he now vows not to fund bipartisan voting efforts during this election cycle. “My goal is to be neutral and not play a role one way or another—or even appear to play a role,” he wrote.

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  • Crypto’s Shiny New Political Machine

    Crypto’s Shiny New Political Machine

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    Amongst the sea of American flags and ubiquitous blue signs at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this week prowled Jonathan Padilla, the “crypto guy.”

    Wearing a baseball cap and conspicuous pineapple-print shirt, Padilla tramped the halls of the convention, talking crypto policy with anyone who would listen. In a selfie posted on Facebook, he posed with his arm around Senator Chris Coons of Delaware. “Senator Coons now knows about crypto,” reads the caption.

    Padilla is delighted with his new “crypto guy” moniker, assigned by fellow DNC delegates, which he sees as implicit recognition that cryptocurrency has arrived on the political agenda. “Four years ago, crypto was a nonissue and nobody talked about it,” says Padilla. “But now, you have President Trump talking about it at major conferences. And it’s being discussed by some of the highest-ranking Democrats.”

    Padilla is the founder of crypto marketing company Snickerdoodle Labs and was previously resident blockchain whisperer at PayPal. He is also one of the organizers of Crypto4Harris, a coalition of Democrat-supporting members of the crypto industry, whose aim is to encourage Kamala Harris to support crypto-specific legislation and demonstrate that the sector “is not monolithically Republican,” says Padilla.

    On August 14, Crypto4Harris hosted a virtual town hall attended by prominent Democrats, among them Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, who said he “believed in the future of crypto.” The group has also “made headway,” Padilla claims, with “finance and policy folks” inside the Harris camp.

    The group’s access to the Harris team reflects a sea change in the attitude toward crypto among US politicians, who seem to have accepted that there exists a bloc of voters who will cast their ballot based exclusively on which candidate will send their investments to the moon. (You know, forget immigration, health care, and the rest.) Not to mention the hefty donations crypto businesses are throwing around.

    Flush after an upswing in crypto prices in 2024, crypto firms have invested an “unprecedented” amount in influencing the outcome of the US election this year, an analysis by consumer advocacy nonprofit Public Citizen suggests. Despite their comparatively diminutive size from a revenue perspective—and the continued paucity of use cases outside of financial speculation—crypto businesses account for 48 percent of all corporate contributions this election cycle.

    The crypto industry put some money behind the 2020 race. But there is fresh urgency and forcefulness in its attempted intervention in the 2024 campaign. “The industry believes this election is existential,” says Veronica McGregor, chief legal officer at crypto wallet company Exodus, speaking in a personal capacity as an industry veteran. “No matter who gets into office, changes need to happen for our industry to thrive like it should.”

    The majority of political donations from the crypto industry are being fed through a trio of affiliated super political action committees (PACs): Fairshake, Protect Progress, and Defend American Jobs. These organizations cannot donate directly to political candidates, but they can spend freely to promote those that make the right sort of cooing sounds about crypto.

    Under the Biden administration, crypto companies have been roughed up and dragged into court by US financial regulators, which they view as deeply unfair. But through the super PACs, crypto firms are hoping to bring into power politicians who will support bespoke crypto legislation that ends the debate over how crypto should be classified and which regulator’s rules should apply.

    The largest of these super PACs, Fairshake, has raised more than $200 million—a greater sum than any other super PAC, crypto-specific or otherwise. Its major donors include crypto businesses Coinbase and Ripple, pro-crypto venture capital firm a16z, and an investment firm started by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, founders of crypto exchange Gemini.

    The largest of the Fairshake donors, Coinbase, which has contributed $45 million to the pot, is the subject of a formal complaint to the Federal Election Commission. Lodged jointly by Public Citizen and software developer Molly White, creator of Follow the Crypto, a project that traces crypto industry donations, the complaint alleges that Coinbase violated campaign finance laws by contributing to Fairshake while negotiating a deal to become a federal contractor.

    Coinbase declined an interview request, pointing instead to public comments made by Paul Grewal, its chief legal officer, disputing the characterization of the company as a federal contractor on the grounds that the service it provides is not technically funded by tax revenue. “To us, it looks like Coinbase is trying to find a loophole that doesn’t really exist,” says White.

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  • Elon Musk Is No Climate Hero

    Elon Musk Is No Climate Hero

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    WIRED has been writing about Elon Musk—he of the electric cars, space rockets, tunnel-boring machines, implantable brain interfaces, Mars mission, and internet shitposting—for a long time. He’s always been unpredictable. And yet the most shocking part of his two-hour interview with Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, broadcast live on X earlier this week, may just have been what Musk didn’t say.

    It happened around the 50-minute mark, during a very Trumpian discussion of gas and electricity prices. They were up nationally, Trump said, but “when that comes down and [sic] we’re going to drill, baby, drill.”

    The siren song of the oil and gas industry! Literally: Drill, baby, drill! And Musk, he of the—I’m going to say it again—electric cars and “saving the world” schtick, didn’t pipe up until a full two minutes later, when he suggested that Trump set up a “government efficiency commission” to curb government spending. Later, he and Trump did have a brief exchange on the science of climate change. But Musk took pains to emphasize that the oil and gas industry isn’t the problem. “I’m pro-environment, but … I don’t think we should vilify the oil and gas industry, because they’re keeping civilization going right now,” he said.

    This felt like a departure. Musk has spent a large chunk of his career casting himself as an environmental champion, sometimes going so far as to paint himself as the one man standing between the world and disaster. He has told the story of Tesla, in particular, as a hero’s journey to save the world through a transition to a sustainable energy economy. “I think I am objectively one of the world’s leading environmentalists in terms of doing things,” he said at an Italian political event last December.

    In 2017, Musk told Rolling Stone about the clear existential threat of climate change with a flair that still feels familiar. “Climate change is the biggest threat that humanity faces this century, except for AI,” he said. “I keep telling people this. I hate to be Cassandra here, but it’s all fun and games until somebody loses a fucking eye. This view [of climate change] is shared by almost everyone who’s not crazy in the scientific community.” Musk has also regularly accused critics of carrying water for “fossil fuel companies.”

    Oh, and remember that time (June 2017) that Musk quit three of Trump’s presidential councils after the US pulled out of the Paris climate accords? “Climate change is real,” he tweeted at the time. “Leaving Paris is not good for America or the world.”

    Musk’s newer and wishy-washy approach to climate also reflects not only his very vocal embrace of far-right politics but also a new story he’s telling about Tesla. For the past few years, and especially as the chatter around artificial intelligence has hit a fever pitch, Musk has positioned his electric-auto maker as a path-breaker in robotic intelligence, too. In 2019, Musk announced that Tesla would have 1 million robotaxis on the road by the end of the year. (It didn’t). More recently, Tesla reportedly shifted resources from building a more affordable electric car, the mythical Model 2, to releasing a purpose-built robotaxi, even though the company has yet to reveal any true self-driving technology. (An unveiling event is scheduled for October.) Musk has said repeatedly that Tesla is an AI and robotics company and should be valued by investors as such. If Musk is backing off his endorsement of climate change science, it’s reasonable to ask if that relates to his marketing pivot for the most valuable car company in the world.

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  • Google’s Rise Was Inevitable. So Was Its Antitrust Ruling

    Google’s Rise Was Inevitable. So Was Its Antitrust Ruling

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    Larry Page and Sergey Brin never liked hanging with reporters. “Larry can be a very sensitive and good person, but he has major trust issues and few social graces,” a former Google PR person once told me. “Sergey has social graces but doesn’t trust people who he thinks don’t approach his level of intelligence.”

    Still, in the fall of 1999 their new communications person urged the Google cofounders to visit the East Coast for a modest press tour. Barely a year old, Google was still under the radar for most people, and few knew its compelling story: Page put the whole World Wide Web on Stanford University servers to divine the perfect result of a search query, and Brin did some mathematical wizardry to fulfill the concept. They tried to sell the technology to one of the big internet portals, but couldn’t get a deal they liked. So they started their own company. It still wasn’t clear where their revenues would come from. They were on record as hating ads, believing that “advertising-funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.”

    When they came to Newsweek, where I worked at the time, none of the top editors wanted to meet them; web search seemed a niche feature of Yahoo and AOL and the other dominant portals. So the business editor and I took the pair to lunch at a midtown seafood restaurant. The bigness and bustle of New York City seemed to overwhelm the awkward pair. The idea that their company might one day be worth $2 trillion seemed as likely as the Earth spinning off its axis.

    Fast forward a quarter century. Google—now called Alphabet—is indeed worth multiple trillions. Internet search is deeply baked into all our lives, as common as breathing—and Google has a 90 percent global share. Larry and Sergey, while still shareholders with fortunes topping $100 billion each, are no longer employees or board members. And this week US federal district court judge Amit P. Mehta issued a 286-page ruling, based on millions of documents, thousands of exhibits, and a nine-week trial, that Google violated antitrust law. “Google,” he wrote, “is a monopolist and has acted as one to maintain its monopoly.” What’s more, the company whose founders hated ads now faces another trial to determine whether it is also a monopolist in digital advertising.

    While it was hard to envision in 1999, Google’s rise from upstart to overlord now makes obvious sense. Dominance, even to the point of monopoly, has proven to be the inevitable destination for winners in the age of internet scale. Digital economics results in a winner-takes-all competition, where early innovators with humble origins can have an advantage over entrenched leaders of soon-to-be-displaced technologies. Every company at the top of our current tech heap was founded by eager youngsters with a big idea, generally a concept dismissed by industry giants at the time. Before Larry and Sergey, there were Bill Gates and Paul Allen, two students who saw a market for personal computer software; Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, building Apple II PCs in a garage; Jeff Bezos, who started Amazon on a budget to sell stuff on the internet. A few years after Google began, Mark Zuckerberg invented Facebook in his dorm room. Those tech companies fighting their way to the top of the heap shared a narrative: David versus Goliath.

    But those slingshots were something special. The network effects of a persistent and ubiquitous internet accelerates and locks in category leaders. What’s more, these founders were brutal competitors who made the most of those advantages. Larry Page was haunted by the story of Nikola Tesla, the brilliant inventor who died in obscurity, and vowed to himself not to be Tesla’d. Microsoft’s use of bundling to stifle competitors was notorious (and led to an antitrust suit that it lost). Jeff Bezos protected his flank with Napoleonic zeal, keeping customers close with low prices. Young Mark Zuckerberg used to end meetings by shouting the word, “Domination!” Eventually, as the Davids became Goliaths, they fit into a new narrative: the myth of Icarus. Driven by the hubris of their dominance—and mistaking their network-effect-powered rise for their own singular geniuses—their heights took them dangerously close to the sun.

    That’s the context of Judge Mehta’s ruling. Specifically, he zeroes in on Google’s practice of cumulatively spending tens of billions of dollars for default placement in the address fields of Apple and Mozilla browsers. Google insisted that it could make those deals only because its search engine was the best alternative: Apple would never foist an inferior product on its customers. But the judge noted that Google’s superiority was a self-perpetuated phenomenon. Because Google handles almost all searches, it is able to collect data on a scale that its competitors cannot hope to match. That allows it to improve its search engine in a way that rivals can’t dream of. It’s legal to attain a monopoly through a superior product or innovations, but actions that maintain a monopoly, like restricting competition, are illegal. Thus, sayeth the judge, Google is breaking the law.

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  • Trump’s Crypto Embrace Could Be a Disaster for Bitcoin

    Trump’s Crypto Embrace Could Be a Disaster for Bitcoin

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    Donald Trump is an unlikely crypto ally. The power of bitcoin, embodied in Satoshi Nakamoto’s founding document, is that it frees participants from murky assessments of trust, instead relying on the bedrock of proof.

    Bitcoin is truth. So it was cosmically weird last week to hear the attendees of the Bitcoin 2024 conference in Nashville enthusiastically hailing a former president who, by one painstakingly compiled count, lied 390,573 times in his single term in office. The believers of a mathematically indisputable blockchain poured on the hosannas as Donald Trump delivered a speech bulging with falsehoods, fabrications, and fantasies. They hooted with joy as he claimed credit for bitcoin’s meteoric rise in value during his administration—even as they surely knew that until recently he trashed the idea of cryptocurrency.

    “Bitcoin, it sounds like a scam,” he said in 2021. “I don’t like it because it’s another currency competing against the dollar.” Now Trump is the sudden darling of the crypto world, even though no one believes that he has a clue about how tokens work, or even what they are. “Staple-coins … stablecoins,” Trump said at one point, correcting himself as he probably glanced at the teleprompter, then paused. “Do you know what a stablecoin is? Does anyone know?”

    Clearly Trump doesn’t. That didn’t stop him from making promises that only someone who deeply misunderstood bitcoin both technically and philosophically would ever make. He compared bitcoin to the steel industry of a century ago, a mind-boggling mismatch between an icon of the industrial revolution and a cutting-edge movement of the digital world. Then he promised to make the United States the “crypto capital of the planet and the bitcoin superpower of the world.”

    This sentiment, as the conference goers surely must know, flips the basic premise of cryptocurrency and blockchain—a sovereign system that operates without regard to the interests of any nation. To quote cryptocurrency theorist Erik Cason: “Bitcoin offers a radical new hope from which man may rescue himself from the cage that is every nation-state today.” Trump’s promise that the United States would dominate bitcoin is a slap in Satoshi’s face.

    One of the proposals Trump floated is a bitcoin reserve where the US would stash and HODL billions of dollars’ worth of tokens, a scheme that experts consider of dubious value to taxpayers—but might jack up the value of the currency to the enrichment of the Nashville crowd. Again, manipulation by a government superpower is anathema to the values of the blockchain revolution. Another promise Trump made was to pardon Silk Road owner Ross Ulbricht, currently serving a life sentence in federal prison for running a massive crypto-fueled operation in illegal drugs and money laundering. So much for being tough on crime.

    Despite the weirdness, the alliance between Trump and the bitcoin bros seems almost preordained. The crypto world chafes at government regulation, and it sees in Donald Trump an opportunity to lighten the touch of state, perhaps to the level of a friendly tickle. Trump has encouraged that thinking by meeting key funders and investors and adopting their views. As if cementing a barely disguised transaction, the players in the crypto world are funneling hundreds of millions of dollars into Trump’s campaign coffers. So it’s not surprising that Trump promised the Nashville conference that he would put an end to “left-wing fascists and totalitarians hell-bent on crushing crypto.” He was lustily cheered for the sentiment. Trump also indicated that Kamala Harris is among those “fascists.” “She’s against crypto by the way,” he said. “She’s against it very big.” (In fact, Harris has not set her policy and has been reaching out to crypto companies.) The cheers were loudest when Trump said he’d fire Gary Gensler, the chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission—which has been policing dicey crypto schemes—on his first day back in office.

    Legitimate question: Does the current White House “hate crypto,” as the industry and Trump seem to believe? I poked around a bit and learned that in the early days of the administration, crypto policy—which, to be sure, was a relatively low priority during a pandemic—was indeed up for grabs, with some officials viewing it as a scammy technology. Ultimately, however, the administration set a course that tried to walk a line between encouraging innovation in the field and enforcing current securities law.

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  • The Eternal Truth of Markdown

    The Eternal Truth of Markdown

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    Markdown became a core part of how I wrote. The simplicity and flexibility meant I would live the dream of write once, run anywhere. It did lead to some ambiguity, though. Gruber would probably say this is by design. His emphasis throughout the Markdown documentation is on the syntax of Markdown, not—say—the resulting HTML. His Perl script does not support HTML class names or IDs, for example, so you can’t add those to the generated HTML. By the logic of the original Markdown script, if you want complete control over the HTML output, then you’d need to write in HTML.

    This situation is great for Markdown users: that is, writers. It’s less great for programmers. In fact, it drives them crazy. Programmers do not like ambiguity. It goes against so much of what programming is about. As a writer using Markdown, I love that I can pick whichever particular version is best suited to my needs. As a programmer, I hate that when I build something I have to make this same decision, which then affects all the people who use my finished product. Maybe I didn’t support some specific extension they were expecting because they’ve always used the same Markdown parser and assume that feature is available.

    If this weren’t bad enough, there are also some ambiguities in the syntax. For example, asterisks are used for italics when singular (*like this*) and bold when doubled (**like this**). So far so good. But what should happen if you write **like* this**? Should that be rendered like* this? Or maybe like this*? There’s no way to know; whoever is writing the parser has to make that decision.

    What’s more, unlike most extremely successful pieces of code, Markdown is not publicly hosted on the code-sharing site du jour. It doesn’t have hundreds of people contributing to it, and the last time the original Perl script was updated was 2004. This too rubs programmers the wrong way. We’re a cliquish bunch; things outside the clique are viewed with suspicion.

    About a decade ago, there was an effort to eliminate the ambiguities in Markdown and bring it into line with coding dogma. Some programmers got together and created CommonMark, which makes the choices the original Markdown script doesn’t and came up with what its creators think is the One Right Way to Do It.

    CommonMark offered comfort. It’s on Github. It has a discussion forum. It seems to be an active project. I have never personally incorporated CommonMark into a project, but its parsers are what convert your Markdown to HTML on such popular sites as Stack Overflow, Github, and Reddit. (To eliminate the asterisk ambiguity, for example, it proposed underscore for italics, asterisk for bold.) Presumably the developers behind CommonMark consider it a success.

    But it’s not Markdown. Not in name, and I would argue not in spirit.

    Around the time the CommonMark effort was happening, the software developer Dave Winer told me something I still think about: Markdown belongs to everyone who uses it. This is literally true because of the license. But it also reminded me of the real point of free software. We all have a say in it: by using it, by adapting it, even by forking it.

    Whether Gruber intended it this way or not, Markdown does belong to everyone, and there is no standard. I use a very old version of Markdown for Python. Gruber presumably still uses his Perl script. Other people use other versions. It’s messy. It’s ambiguous. It’s human.

    And this, in the end, is the Way.

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  • My Memories Are Just Meta’s Training Data Now

    My Memories Are Just Meta’s Training Data Now

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    In R. C. Sherriff’s novel The Hopkins Manuscript, readers are transported to a world 800 years after a cataclysmic event ended Western civilization. In pursuit of clues about a blank spot in their planet’s history, scientists belonging to a new world order discover diary entries in a swamp-infested wasteland formerly known as England. For the inhabitants of this new empire, it is only through this record of a retired school teacher’s humdrum rural life, his petty vanities and attempts to breed prize-winning chickens, that they begin to learn about 20th-century Britain.

    If I were to teach futuristic beings about life on earth, I once believed I could produce a time capsule more profound than Sherriff’s small-minded protagonist, Edgar Hopkins. But scrolling through my decade-old Facebook posts this week, I was presented with the possibility that my legacy may be even more drab.

    Earlier this month, Meta announced that my teenage status updates were exactly the kind of content it wants to pass on to future generations of artificial intelligence. From June 26, old public posts, holiday photos, and even the names of millions of Facebook and Instagram users around the world would effectively be treated as a time capsule of humanity and transformed into training data.

    That means my mundane posts about university essay deadlines (“3 energy drinks down 1,000 words to go”) as well as unremarkable holiday snaps (one captures me slumped over my phone on a stationary ferry) are about to become part of that corpus. The fact that these memories are so dull, and also very personal, makes Meta’s interest more unsettling.

    The company says it is only interested in content that is already public: private messages, posts shared exclusively with friends, and Instagram Stories are out of bounds. Despite that, AI is suddenly feasting on personal artifacts that have, for years, been gathering dust in unvisited corners of the internet. For those reading from outside Europe, the deed is already done. The deadline announced by Meta applied only to Europeans. The posts of American Facebook and Instagram users have been training Meta AI models since 2023, according to company spokesperson Matthew Pollard.

    Meta is not the only company turning my online history into AI fodder. WIRED’s Reece Rogers recently discovered that Google’s AI search feature was copying his journalism. But finding out which personal remnants exactly are feeding future chatbots was not easy. Some sites I’ve contributed to over the years are hard to trace. Early social network Myspace was acquired by Time Inc. in 2016, which in turn was acquired by a company called Meredith Corporation two years later. When I asked Meredith about my old account, they replied that Myspace had since been spun off to an advertising firm, Viant Technology. An email to a company contact listed on its website was returned with a message that the address “couldn’t be found.”

    Asking companies still in business about my old accounts was more straightforward. Blogging platform Tumblr, owned by WordPress owner Automattic, said unless I’d opted out, the public posts I made as a teenager will be shared with “a small network of content and research partners, including those that train AI models” per a February announcement. YahooMail, which I used for years, told me that a sample of old emails—which have apparently been “anonymized” and “aggregated”—are being “utilized” by an AI model internally to do things like summarize messages. Microsoft-owned LinkedIn also said my public posts were being used to train AI although some “personal” details included in those posts were excluded, according to a company spokesperson, who did not specify what those personal details were.

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  • No Matter How You Package It, Apple Intelligence Is AI

    No Matter How You Package It, Apple Intelligence Is AI

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    While companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and others had been upfront about their efforts in AI, for years Apple had been silent. Now, finally, its executives were talking. I got an advance look one day. Eager to shed the the impression that the most innovative of the tech giants was a laggard in this vital technology moment, its software leader Craig Federighi, services czar Eddie Cue, and top researchers argued that Apple had been a leader in AI for years but just didn’t make a big deal of it. Advanced machine learning was already deep in some of its products, and we could expect more, including advances in Siri. And since Apple valued data security more than competitors, its AI efforts would be distinguished by exacting privacy standards. How many people are working on AI at Apple, I asked. “A lot,” Federighi told me. Another executive emphasized that while AI could be transformative, Apple wanted nothing to do with the woo-woo aspects that excited some in the field, including the pursuit of superintelligence. “It’s a technique that will ultimately be a very Apple way of doing things,” said one executive.

    That conversation took place eight years ago, when the technology du jour was deep learning AI. But a year after that, a groundbreaking advance called Transformers led to a new wave of smart software called generative AI, which powered OpenAI’s groundbreaking ChatGPT. In an instant, people started judging tech companies by how aggressively they jumped on the trend. OpenAI’s rivals were quick to act. Apple, not so much. Many of its best AI scientists had been working on self-driving cars or its expensive mixed-reality Vision Pro headset. In the last year or so, Apple pulled its talent from such projects—no more autonomous cars—and instead came up with its own gen-AI strategy. And at this week’s Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple revealed what it was up to.

    Uncharacteristically, for such an event, the news was less about products than Apple’s declaration that when it comes to gen AI, we’re on it. In an interview after the keynote, CEO Tim Cook explained the anomaly. “It became clear that people wanted to know our views of generative AI in particular,” he said. But just as in 2016, there was a cautionary note: While the company would now embrace generative AI, it would do it in a very Apple way. The company refused to even label its technology as artificial intelligence. Instead, it coined the phrase Apple Intelligence, a made-up technical name whose purpose seems to distance Apple from the scary aspects of this powerful tech wave. Apple isn’t interested in pursuing the singularity or making the movie Her come to life. It’s using this new tool to enhance productivity and creativity, and just as with past intimidating technologies, Apple-izing AI will make it go down easy.

    The approach is well timed. I date the age of generative AI from the November 2022 release of ChatGPT. We spent all of 2023 trying to absorb what it meant, and a lot of people are now experiencing a rejection impulse. They’re repelled by AI’s hallucinations and angry at the prospect of lost jobs. And most people still haven’t figured out what AI can actually do for them. In 2024, smart companies have been concentrating on how this jaw-dropping technology can actually be put to use in prosaic scenarios. Apple proclaimed, “AI for the rest of us.” (The one time the letters “AI” were used in the keynote.) It was a conscious invocation of the original Macintosh slogan. Presumably, Apple will spread AI to the masses in the same way it promulgated the graphical user interface with the Mac.

    In contrast to that great ambition, the products Apple touted during the keynote weren’t exactly revolutionary. A lot of the the demos involved summarizing, transcribing, auto-completing emails, organizing inboxes, writing paragraphs from prompts, and zapping photo-bombers from images. Those are table stakes for the gen-AI era. Apple’s pitch, as always, is that it will offer these advances organically woven into your normal workflow so you’ll actually use those features and be delighted by them. Apple has also come up with some nice twists in these products. Its Photos app promises a deeper search capability, using AI to figure out what a picture shows and who’s in it to search for specific images from vague prompts. In automatically generated email replies, Apple could ask you in certain cases a simple question, answerable by a single click—do you actually want to meet this person and when?—and then spin off a response that reflects your intent. More significantly, because users in Apple’s ecosystem have a wealth of personal information on their phones and computers, Apple’s AI can use that data to deliver relevant output while keeping those details onboard the devices, protecting users’ privacy. Apple SVP Federighi—still on the case—describes it as “intelligence that understands you.” (Apple even claims it will use outside investigators to verify that the data is indeed secure.)

    The most interesting of the Apple announcements involved its AI assistant, Siri, which has been looking like an antique in the age of generative AI. Apple promised that in the future—maybe 2025?—Siri would not only become a better conversationalist but also could be a uniquely powerful personal assistant by performing complex requests involving multiple apps. Ironically, this was the vision of the original Siri team in 2011, overruled by Steve Jobs in the pursuit of simplicity—and because the underlying technology just wasn’t ready. “This is the exact missing link from the original Siri,” says Dag Kittlaus, who was in charge of that team when Apple launched the product. Kittlaus and some key colleagues later attempted to fulfill the vision with a startup called Viv, which now lives on as a Samsung product called Bixby. In order for a complex system like this to work, it’s imperative to get a critical mass of developers to sign on. The WWDC program included sessions that instructed developers how to make their apps work with Siri.

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  • Don’t Let Mistrust of Tech Companies Blind You to the Power of AI

    Don’t Let Mistrust of Tech Companies Blind You to the Power of AI

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    Meanwhile, in less visible ways, AI is already changing education, commerce, and the workplace. One friend recently told me about a big IT firm he works with. The company had a lengthy and long-established protocol for launching major initiatives that involved designing solutions, coding up the product, and engineering the rollout. Moving from concept to execution took months. But he recently saw a demo that applied state-of-the-art AI to a typical software project. “All of those things that took months happened in the space of a few hours,” he says. “That made me agree with your column. Tons of the companies that surround us are now animated corpses.” No wonder people are freaked.

    What fuels a lot of the rage against AI is mistrust of the companies building and promoting it. By coincidence I had a breakfast scheduled this week with Ali Farhadi, the CEO of the Allen Institute for AI, a nonprofit research effort. He’s 100 percent convinced that the hype is justified but also empathizes with those who don’t accept it—because, he says, the companies that are trying to dominate the field are viewed with suspicion by the public. “AI has been treated as this black box thing that no one knows about, and it’s so expensive only four companies can do it,” Farhadi says. The fact that AI developers are moving so quickly fuels the distrust even more. “We collectively don’t understand this, yet we’re deploying it,” he says. “I’m not against that, but we should expect these systems will behave in unpredictable ways, and people will react to that.” Fahadi, who is a proponent of open source AI, says that at the least the big companies should publicly disclose what materials they use to train their models.

    Compounding the issue is that many people involved in building AI also pledge their devotion to producing AGI. While many key researchers believe this will be a boon to humanity—it’s the founding principle of OpenAI—they have not made the case to the public. “People are frustrated with the notion that this AGI thing is going to come tomorrow or one year or in six months,” says Farhadi, who is not a fan of the concept. He says AGI is not a scientific term but a fuzzy notion that’s mucking up the adoption of AI. “In my lab when a student uses those three letters, it just delays their graduation by six months,” he says.

    Personally I’m agnostic on the AGI issue—I don’t think we’re on the cusp of it but simply don’t know what will happen in the long run. When you talk to people on the front lines of AI, it turns out that they don’t know, either.

    Some things do seem clear to me, and I think that these will eventually become apparent to all—even those pitching spitballs at me on X. AI will get more powerful. People will find ways to use it to make their jobs and personal lives easier. Also, many folks are going to lose their jobs, and entire companies will be disrupted. It will be small consolation that new jobs and firms might emerge from an AI boom, because some of the displaced people will still be stuck in unemployment lines or cashiering at Walmart. In the meantime, everyone in the AI world—including columnists like me—would do well to understand why people are so enraged, and respect their justifiable discontent.

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  • The Daylight Tablet Returns Computing to Its Hippie Ideals

    The Daylight Tablet Returns Computing to Its Hippie Ideals

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    “Do you mind if I hug you?” asks Anjan Katta. This is not the usual way to wrap up a product demo, but given the product and its creator, I wasn’t really surprised. Katta, a shaggy-haired, bearded fellow, he’d shown up to the WIRED office in San Francisco dressed like he was embarking on a summertime mountaintop trek. He had immediately began rhapsodizing about the idealistic early days of personal computers and the amazing figures who produced that magic, knowledge he gathered in part through my writings. And he seemed like the hugging type.

    The device Katta pulls out of his backpack—an electronic-ink-style tablet called the Daylight DC1—is very much a reflection of its creator, a spiritual object driven more by ideals than commerce. “It’s almost trying to bring back the hippie into personal computing,” he says, bemoaning the loss of that spirit. “It’s been replaced by shareholders—what’s happened to that bicycle-for-the-mind idealism?” Katta’s device wants to put us back in that saddle, pulling us out of the mire of unsatisfying empty interactions with our phones and junky apps. All he has to conquer is Apple, Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, TikTok, and a public unlikely to take a monochrome gadget that costs more than $700 out for a spin. No wonder he needs a hug.

    Alan Kay, the visionary who imagined the way we’d use portable digital devices, once said that Apple’s Macintosh was the first computer worth criticizing. I think Katta wants to make the first computer worth meditating with. He hopes to join the ranks of early tech heroes by stipulating what Daylight doesn’t do—multitasking, mind-numbing eye candy, or distracting floods of notifications.

    Courtesy of Daylight Computer Co.

    Instead, the sharp “Live Paper” display quietly refreshes, a page at a time. (Katta’s team worked up its own PDF rending scheme.) The accompanying Wacom pencil lets users scrawl comments and doodles on its surface as easily as they do on their latest Field Notes memo book. Web browsing in monochrome may not have pizzazz, but it seems to lower one’s blood pressure. Daylight strives to be the Criterion Collection of computer hardware, making everything else look like The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.

    To fully understand the Daylight device, look to Katta’s own origin story. He describes himself as “a very ADHD person who’s been a dilettante his entire life.” He was born in Ireland, where his parents had emigrated from India, and then the family moved to a small mining town in Canada. Katta couldn’t speak English well, so he learned about the world from books his father read to him. Even after the family moved to Vancouver and Katta became more socially deft—and discovered an entrepreneurial streak—he retained that wonder. He loved science, games, and books about early computer history. The only college he applied to was Stanford, because it symbolized to him the creativity of Silicon Valley people like Atari cofounder Nolan Bushnell. “It was the place where mischief makers were doing cool stuff,” he says. “Stanford was the place where I’d finally be accepted.”

    But during the years Katta attended Stanford—2012 to 2016—he became disillusioned. “I expected irreverence and innovation, but it felt like McKinsey-Goldman Sachs banker energy, because you could get rich that way,” he says. While his peers did internships at Google and Facebook, Katta spent summers climbing Kilimanjaro and trekking to Everest base camp. He loved to hang out at the Computer History Museum in nearby Mountain View, soaking up the tales of the early PC pioneers and being appalled by how the narrative of tech had shifted from charming geeks to rapacious bros.

    “What happened to everything I read in those books?” he says. “After graduation I was like, Fuck this, and went backpacking for two years.” He wound up back in his parents’ Vancouver basement, massively depressed. Katta stewed for months, reading about science—and fixating on how our devices had turned into what he saw as engines of misery. “They are dopamine slot machines and make us the worst versions of ourselves,” he says.

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