Monthly Archives: June 2022

Last October, on the day whistleblower Frances Haugen testified before her committee, Senator Amy Klobuchar gave a candid, if depressing, summation of the effect of all that DC spending: We have not done a thing to update US competition, privacy & tech laws, she tweeted. Nothing. Zilch. Why? Because there are lobbyists around every single corner of the Capitol hired by tech.

If you want to see the power of the lobbying effort, just look at the nomination of Gigi Sohn for the Federal Communications Commission. While unquestionably qualified, Sohns focus has been on empowering consumers. Naturally she had made enemies in businesses, particularly rapacious telecom companies known to fleece customers. Those interests have managed to block her confirmation for months. If she isnt confirmed soon, a new congress might manage to kill her nomination outright. With Sohns nomination on hold, the commission is deadlocked with two Democrats and two Republicans.

Meanwhile, news reports claim that a multimillion-dollar effort from special interestsincluding Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Googleis targeting key states and vulnerable Democrats to withdraw support from Klobuchars reform bills. A bitter irony: The campaign has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on Facebook and Google ads to drive home its point.

Weve come a long way from the days when tech entrepreneurs wanted to steer clear of DC. Yes, back then they were naive. They were arrogant to think they were somehow special and could build their businesses while ignoring the government. But their instinct to avoid the slime pit of American politics was admirable. Lawyering up and lobbying may not have totally solved their DC problemthe consistent bad behavior of those companies makes it likely that some sanctions will arise. But those sanctions wont be as harsh or as effective as the lawmakers, regulators, and maybe even the public wished for. One longtime staffer on the Hill who I spoke with this week summed up the tech interests and their DC activities: Theyre just like everybody else. It wasnt a compliment.

Time Travel

Arguments about regulating the internet have been raging ever since the mid-1990s boom that made the net accessible to the masses. Well before tech companies spent millions on lobbying, the debates were pretty similar to the ones we suffer through now, especially when it comes to online speech. Case in point: Senator James Exons Communications Decency Act, a proposed amendment to the telecommunications act, which I wrote about in a 1995 Newsweek article. A pared-down version of the amendment found its way into the 1996 billwhich included the still-controversial Section 230.

The Exon amendment is very broad. It could hamper communication between adultsthe essence of online activityand might not even solve the problems that kids face. "It would be a mistake to drive us, in a moment of hysteria, to a solution that is unconstitutional, would stultify technology, and wouldn't even fulfill its mission," argues Jerry Berman, director of the Center for Democracy and Technology.

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Big Tech Has Become a Creature of the Swamp - WIRED

DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman, who recently left his VP of AI product management and AI policy role at Google, also co-founded the machine learning start-up Inflection AI. Suleyman has already hired several of his former colleagues.

Bloomberg | Getty Images

Artificial intelligence gurus are quitting top jobs at companies like Google, Meta, OpenAI and DeepMind and joining a new breed of start-ups that want to take AI to the next level, according to people familiar with the matter and LinkedIn analysis.

Four of the best-funded new AI start-ups Inflection, Cohere, Adept and Anthropic have recently poached dozens of AI scientists with backgrounds in Big Tech.

Their hiring efforts are being fueled by venture capital firms and billionaires keen to cash in on any success they have. Collectively, these firms have raised over $1 billion and they're using these vast war chests to poach talented individuals who command high salaries from their previous employers.

The start-ups are building their products and services with a relatively new "architecture," which is a set of rules and methods that's used to describe the functionality, organization and implementation of a computer system.

The new architecture developed by a team of Google staff in 2017 and now available for anyone to use is known as a "transformer."

The transformer allows AI systems to be scaled in ways that had never been considered before, meaning it's possible to make them far more powerful and capable.

"When you started scaling up these models, the capabilities just grew in a way that I think no one predicted," Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez told CNBC. "It was like a total shock."

OpenAI's GPT-3 and Dalle-E, Google's Bert, and DeepMind's AlphaFold and AlphaStar are all examples of breakthrough AI systems that are underpinned by a transformer.

Launched in March, Inflection AI has already raised over $225 million despite having fewer than 10 employees, according to LinkedIn.

Headquartered in California, the company's aim is to develop AI software products that make it easier for humans to communicate with computers.

It is led by DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman, who recently left his VP of AI product management and AI policy role at Google. LinkedIn billionaire Reid Hoffman and former DeepMind researcher Karen Simonyan are the other co-founders.

Suleyman has already hired several of his former colleagues.

Former DeepMinder Heinrich Kuttler left his research engineering manager role at Meta AI in London in March to become a member of the founding team at Inflection, working on the technical side of the business, according to his LinkedIn page. Elsewhere, Joe Fenton left his senior product manager role at Google in February also to become a member of the founding team at Inflection, working on the product side of the business.

More recently, Rewon Child, a former Google Brain and OpenAI researcher, joined Inflection as a member of technical staff. Inflection has also hired Maarten Bosma, who was previously a research engineer at Google.

Meta and Google did not respond to a CNBC request for comment.

One of Inflection's best-known investors is Greylock Partners, a renowned venture capital firm in Silicon Valley that made early bets on the likes of Facebook (now Meta) and Airbnb. Hoffman and Suleyman are partners at the firm.

On a call with CNBC in March, Suleyman said: "If you think about the history of computing, we have always been trying to reduce the complexity of our ideas in order to communicate them to a machine."

He added: "Even when we write a search query, we're simplifying, we're reducing or we're writing in shorthand so that the search engine can understand what we want."

When humans want to control a computer, they need to learn a programming language in order to provide instructions, he added, or use a mouse to navigate and engage with things on the screen. "All of these are ways we simplify our ideas and reduce their complexity and in some ways their creativity and their uniqueness in order to get a machine to do something," Suleyman said.

The British entrepreneur claimed a new suite of technologies that Inflection will aim to develop will eventually enable anyone to speak to a computer in plain language. It's unclear at this stage who Inflection will sell its products to, at what price, and when.

Inflection is competing for talent with Cohere, which was founded in Toronto in 2019 by Aidan Gomez, Ivan Zhang and Nick Frosst.

Cohere, which has raised around $170 million from the likes of Index Ventures and Tiger Global, wants to create an interface that allows software developers to use complicated AI technology on their apps.

This AI technology, known as natural language processing, or NLP, should allow developers to deploy new features and services into their software products.

"We want to build that toolkit that's accessible to any dev," CEO Gomez told CNBC on a call.

AI luminaries and DeepMind alums Ed Grefenstette and Phil Blunsom are among the latest AI scientists to join Cohere, with the duo announcing last month that they've joined the firm.

Grefenstette is Cohere's head of machine learning and Blunsom is the company's chief scientist.

They'll also be responsible for helping to set up a new Cohere office in London, which has become a hotbed for AI talent over the last decade. Indeed, DeepMind now employs over a thousand people in the city, many of them PhDs.

They'll likely be able to scout out promising potential recruits from two of the U.K.'s leading universities. Grefenstette is an honorary professor at UCL, while Blunsom is a professor at Oxford.

Another firm making waves is Anthropic, which is led by OpenAI's former VP of research Dario Amodei.

Anthropic describes itself as an AI safety and research company. It says that it wants to build "reliable interpretable, and steerable AI systems."

Amodei set up the firm with help from several other ex-OpenAI employees, including Jack Clark, Tom Brown, Sam McCandlish and his sister Daniela Amodei.

It launched in 2021 and announced it had secured $124 million from a cohort of investors including Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

In April, the company announced it raised another $580 million, and according to LinkedIn, it now has 41 staff.

Another AI start-up that's been built by some heavy hitters in the field of machine learning is Adept AI Labs.

The co-founders include CEO David Luan (previously a director at Google Research and VP of engineering at OpenAI), Niki Parmar (formerly a staff research scientist at Google Brain) and Ashish Vaswani (also a staff research scientist at Google Brain).

The San Francisco-based company, which is just a few months old and has raised $65 million, is on a mission to build general intelligence that enables humans to work together creatively.

It wants to create a sort of AI assistant that workers can collaborate with to solve almost anything together. While this tool will initially be productivity-focused, the firm hopes that everyone will be able to use its AI technology in the medium term.

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A.I. gurus are leaving Big Tech to work on buzzy new start-ups - CNBC

A number of high-profile whistleblowers in the technology industry have stepped into the spotlight in the past few years. For the most part, they have been revealing corporate practices that thwart the public interest: Frances Haugen exposed personal data exploitation at Meta, Timnit Gebru and Rebecca Rivers challenged Google on ethics and AI issues, and Janneke Parrish raised concerns about a discriminatory work culture at Apple, among others.

Many of these whistleblowers are women far more, it appears, than the proportion of women working in the tech industry. This raises the question of whether women are more likely to be whistleblowers in the tech field. The short answer is: Its complicated.

For many, whistleblowing is a last resort to get society to address problems that cant be resolved within an organization, or at least by the whistleblower. It speaks to the organizational status, power and resources of the whistleblower; the openness, communication and values of the organization in which they work; and to their passion, frustration and commitment to the issue they want to see addressed. Are whistleblowers more focused on the public interest? More virtuous? Less influential in their organizations? Are these possible explanations for why so many women are blowing the whistle on big tech?

To investigate these questions, we, a computer scientist and a sociologist, explored the nature of big tech whistleblowing, the influence of gender, and the implications for technologys role in society. What we found was both complex and intriguing.

Whistleblowing is a difficult phenomenon to study because its public manifestation is only the tip of the iceberg. Most whistleblowing is confidential or anonymous. On the surface, the notion of female whistleblowers fits with the prevailing narrative that women are somehow more altruistic, focused on the public interest or morally virtuous than men.

Consider an argument made by the New York State Woman Suffrage Association around giving US women the right to vote in the 1920s: Women are, by nature and training, housekeepers. Let them have a hand in the citys housekeeping, even if they introduce an occasional house-cleaning. In other words, giving women the power of the vote would help clean up the mess that men had made.

More recently, a similar argument was used in the move to all-women traffic enforcement in some Latin American cities under the assumption that female police officers are more impervious to bribes. Indeed, the United Nations has recently identified womens global empowerment as key to reducing corruption and inequality in its world development goals.

There is data showing that women, more so than men, are associated with lower levels of corruption in government and business. For example, studies show that the higher the share of female elected officials in governments around the world, the lower the corruption. While this trend in part reflects the tendency of less corrupt governments to more often elect women, additional studies show a direct causal effect of electing female leaders and, in turn, reducing corruption.

Experimental studies and attitudinal surveys also show that women are more ethical in business dealings than their male counterparts, and one study using data on actual firm-level dealings confirms that businesses led by women are directly associated with a lower incidence of bribery. Much of this likely comes down to the socialization of men and women into different gender roles in society.

Although women may be acculturated to behave more ethically, this leaves open the question of whether they really are more likely to be whistleblowers. The full data on who reports wrongdoing is elusive, but scholars try to address the question by asking people about their whistleblowing orientation in surveys and in vignettes. In these studies, the gender effect is inconclusive.

However, women appear more willing than men to report wrongdoing when they can do so confidentially. This may be related to the fact that female whistleblowers may face higher rates of reprisal than male whistleblowers.

In the technology field, there is an additional factor at play. Women are under-represented both in numbers and in organizational power. The Big Five in tech Google, Meta, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft are still largely white and male.

Women currently represent about 25% of their technology workforce and about 30% of their executive leadership. Women are prevalent enough now to avoid being tokens but often dont have the insider status and resources to effect change. They also lack the power that sometimes corrupts, referred to as the corruption opportunity gap.

Frances Haugen testified before Congress about how Meta, then called Facebook, put profits ahead of the public interest. Earlier she had leaked internal company documents to show that Meta was aware of the harm it was causing. (Photo by AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

Marginalized people often lack a sense of belonging and inclusion in organizations. The silver lining to this exclusion is that those people may feel less obligated to toe the line when they see wrongdoing. Given all of this, it is likely that some combination of gender socialization and female outsider status in big tech creates a situation where women appear to be the prevalent whistleblowers.

It may be that whistleblowing in tech is the result of a perfect storm between the fields gender and public interest problems. Clear and conclusive data does not exist, and without concrete evidence the jury is out. But the prevalence of female whistleblowers in big tech is emblematic of both of these deficiencies, and the efforts of these whistleblowers are often aimed at boosting diversity and reducing the harm big tech causes society.

More so than any other corporate sector, tech pervades peoples lives. Big tech creates the tools people use every day, defines the information the public consumes, collects data on its users thoughts and behavior, and plays a major role in determining whether privacy, safety, security and welfare are supported or undermined.

And yet, the complexity, proprietary intellectual property protections and ubiquity of digital technologies make it hard for the public to gauge the personal risks and societal impact of technology. Todays corporate cultural firewalls make it difficult to understand the choices that go into developing the products and services that so dominate peoples lives.

Of all areas within society in need of transparency and a greater focus on the public interest, we believe the most urgent priority is big tech. This makes the courage and the commitment of todays whistleblowers all the more important.

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Why are so many big tech whistleblowers women? Here's what the research shows - Technical.ly

Just after closing a $28 billion deal to acquire electronic health records company Cerner, tech giant Oracle said it thinks it can solve one of the biggest tech problems in healthcare: patient records.

The combined companies will create a national health records database that pulls in data from thousands of hospitals, said Larry Ellison, Oracle board chairman and chief technology officer, during a press briefing. Patient data would be anonymous until individuals give consent to share their information. Were building a system where all American citizens health records not only exist at the hospital level, but they also are in a unified national health records database, Ellison said.

Ellison outlined the well-trodden problems with the USs healthcare data systems: patient information is siloed off within individual institutions. That makes it hard for doctors to get information about their patients when theyre treated at other institutions. It also makes it difficult for research teams to do studies on large groups of people; theyre often limited to the patient information at the place where they work, so its hard for them to tell if their conclusions would apply to people at other health centers.

But, despite Ellisons sweeping promises, Oracle will likely face an uphill battle to make the vision a reality. Health IT experts tweeted skepticism in the wake of the announcement. Experts in health technology and the federal government have spent years, if not decades, trying to make it easier for health records held at different institutions to communicate with each other. A National Institutes of Health program was able to build an anonymous, centralized records database for COVID-19 research in 2020, but that took enormous effort from people who already worked on interoperability issues and it was anonymous and didnt require navigating patient consent.

Big tech companies often run into problems when they try to tackle the complex, knotty American healthcare system. Cerner and Oracles partnership combines tech expertise with experience in the health data ecosystem, which may offer them a leg up. But, as with most issues in healthcare, theres a chasm between identifying the problem and being able to fix it.

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Oracle thinks it can fix healthcare's biggest tech issue - The Verge