What keeps Nvidia’s CEO up at night, why Elon Musk believes something ‘dangerous’ was behind OpenAI’s turmoil, and more from the week in tech

Welcome back to LinkedIn News Tech Stack, which brings you news, insights and trends involving the founders, investors and companies on the cutting edge of technology, by Tech Editor Tanya Dua . You can check out our previous editions here .

Before we dive in: Happy Birthday, ChatGPT! Nov. 30 marks a year since the AI chatbot was unleashed into the world and set off a new technological race among companies big and small. Meanwhile, Sen. Chuck Schumer hosted the latest Senate AI Summit this week, focusing on copyright and other intellectual property issues.

Pitch me the interesting investors, founders, ideas and companies powering emerging technologies like AI to reach the inboxes of 750,000+ subscribers and millions more on LinkedIn. Share your feedback and follow me for other tech updates.

A deep dive into one big theme or news story every week.

Each year, you can safely bet that the DealBook Summit hosted by 纽约时报 and Andrew Ross Sorkin will be, well, one for the books.

In 2022, Sam Bankman-Fried appeared for a disastrous virtual interview following the collapse of FTX , admitting that it had been a tough few days.

This year, artificial intelligence was front and center, with everyone from 英伟达 CEO Jensen Huang to SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk weighing in on when artificial general intelligence could become a reality – when Musk wasn’t telling advertisers boycotting his platform X to f— off.

Here are the key highlights:

What keeps Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang up at night

Nvidia has been a clear winner as AI takes off, with its stock skyrocketing over 200% this year. But CEO Jensen Huang said he still has sleepless nights.

“When you build a company from the ground up and you’ve experienced real adversity and you really, really experienced nearly going out of business several times, that feeling stays with you,” he said, sharing how he operates in a state of constant pressure. “I wake up every morning in some condition of concern – I don't wake up proud and confident.”

But one thing he didn’t seem imminently concerned about was competition from Chinese manufacturer 华为 , which had the tech industry abuzz earlier this year with the development of a 7nm chip. Nvidia is still a decade ahead of those companies, Huang said.

“These are just numbers. Is it really 7? Did they shrink it down to something sufficiently good that you can make a phone from? There’s no magic in these numbers,” he said.

Still, Huang said the U.S. would remain reliant on overseas suppliers of chip components for years, despite recent moves by the U.S. to limit the export of advanced chips to China and billions being poured into domestic production.

“We are somewhere between a decade or two decades away from supply-chain independence,” he said.

The reason Nvidia has been successful, and the key for other companies to succeed, was to reframe the way they look at computing, according to Huang. AI and deep learning isn’t only about chips, but about reinventing the entire computing paradigm, from thinking about just retrieval to retrieval plus generation, he said.

“The way that computing is done has fundamentally changed,” said Huang. “We're in the beginning of a brand new generation of computing.”

The question of artificial general intelligence

Since ChatGPT was unveiled a year ago, the world has been consumed by the concept of artificial general intelligence (AGI) – and when it might be achieved.

While there’s no single definition, one way to look at AGI is when an AI system can break down multi-step tasks and display some kind of consciousness or sentience, as humans do. Based on that definition, Nvidia’s Huang said it will be roughly 10 years before computers achieve AGI.

Elon Musk, on the other hand, said that while AI may not be smarter than all “machine-augmented humans” as it’s a higher bar, he believes AI technology is three years away from being smart enough to “write as good a novel as J.K. Rowling or discover new physics or invent new technology.”

Both Huang and Musk, however, agreed that AI needs to be regulated. Given that AI is also an autonomous information system – like regulated areas such as self-driving cars, planes and robots – rules and regulations should be in place for AI, said Huang.

Musk took it even further.

“The general philosophy about regulation is that when something is a danger to the public, there needs to be some government oversight,” he said. “In my view, AI is more dangerous than nuclear bombs. And we regulate nuclear bombs.”

What could be behind the recent OpenAI drama

Meanwhile, less than two weeks after Sam Altman was ousted as CEO of OpenAI , the company announced Wednesday that he was reinstated as chief executive .

While it’s still unclear why Altman was ousted, a recent report suggested that the turmoil may have been because OpenAI made progress toward AGI. Musk, who co-founded OpenAI before leaving in 2019, said he believes a recent AI breakthrough was behind the power struggle.

“This sounds like a serious thing – I don't think it was trivial,” he said at the DealBook Summit. “And I'm quite concerned that there's some dangerous element of AI that they've discovered.”

Musk called AI a double-edged sword and said the reason he hasn’t gone all-in on it is because it’s unclear which edge of the sword – the good or the bad – is sharper.

“Building sustainable energy technology is much more single-edged good. Making us multi-planetary is single-edged good. Giving people better connectivity is very much a good thing,” said Musk. “With AI, you've got the magic-genie problem: You may think you want a magic genie, but once that genie's out of the bottle, it's hard to say what happens.”

Musk also slammed OpenAI for its commercial ambitions, straying from its founding status as a nonprofit.

“It should be renamed Super Closed Source for Maximum Profit AI,” he said.

Here’s where we bring you up-to-speed with the latest advancements from the world of AI.

• ??Amazon has launched an AI chatbot alternative to ChatGPT and others . The company unveiled 亚马逊 Q at its annual cloud computing conference among a slew of other announcements, which targets businesses and has more emphasis on privacy and security than consumer-focused AI tools. For a monthly price of $20 per user, Q can assist with tasks like summarizing internal documents and responding to employee questions about corporate policy. Amazon also recently rolled out a new program that plans to train 2 million people in “tech and tech-adjacent roles” in AI skills by 2025. It also previewed a tool called Guardrails, designed to help companies implement safeguards for LLMs.
• ??The hottest new job in the U.S.? Chief AI officers. The federal government is hoping to hire over 400 chief artificial intelligence officers (CAIOs), after a Biden administration executive order called for better AI regulations and guardrails. The move to quickly hire CAIOs comes amid the AI boom, which has left experts warning companies to enforce better safety frameworks before the technology can "go rogue."
• ??Speaking of safety, the U.S. has signed onto a global AI safety accord. In the historic move, the U.S. joins 17 other nations that have signed onto the first-ever international AI safety agreement. The 20-page document outlines some general recommendations — such as vetting potential software suppliers — and encourages companies to make their AI systems "secure by design," to protect the public from bad actors. Like many recent government actions on AI, including the Biden administration's October executive order , the agreement is nonbinding and does not specify penalties for noncompliance.
• ??U.S. is trying to spur chip packaging output . The Commerce Department has unveiled a $3 billion program to kickstart the semiconductor packaging industry, in a bid to fill a gap in the supply chain for chips and combat national security risks due to America’s reliance on Asia. The funds derive from the $100 billion Chips and Sciences Act, which aims to rebuild domestic production of the electrical components used in everything from phones to missiles.
• ??As the dust settles from the tumult at OpenAI, its new board is facing DEI questions. The board, comprised only of men, is raising some eyebrows over its lack of diversity, as well as the risks of persistent bias in artificial intelligence models.
• ??Meanwhile, Nvidia's AI boom is still going strong. The chip maker's revenue has surged 206% compared with last year, with its data center — the crux of its burgeoning artificial intelligence business — being the major driver , it reported last week . Still, shareholders hold high expectations for the business and were largely unimpressed, Bloomberg noted .
• ??ICYMI last week : Inflection AI , LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman ’s startup behind the conversational chatbot Pi, has unveiled a new AI model that it claims can outperform Google’s PaLM-2 and Meta’s Llama.

A new section where we spotlight an up-and-coming startup – and its strategy behind a recent fundraise.

Stensul , a startup that helps enterprises design and create marketing emails and landing pages faster, has just raised $34.5 million in Series C funding. Growth equity firm Sageview Capital led the round, which also included existing investors like U.S. Venture Partners , Javelin Venture Partners , Uncork Capital and Lowercase Capital .

The New York-based company plans to use the funds to grow its roster of clients and expand its offerings to enable those clients to create multi-channel marketing assets more efficiently, such as generative AI tools within the platform that can help users generate multiple subject headlines or rewrite copy in their brand voice, said CEO and founder Noah Dinkin .

“We realized that the size of the opportunity was far bigger than email alone,” Dinkin said. “We have delivered real ROI for customers, and seen really strong retention metrics from some of these companies.”

Stensul integrates with the likes of Salesforce Marketing Cloud, 甲骨文 Marketing Cloud and Adobe Marketing Cloud, so that multiple members in a marketing team can collaborate on assets in a single platform, Dinkin touted. Its clients include 思科 , BlackRock , Equifax and 雅虎 .

The company says its platform helps businesses focus on strategy and results rather than wasting time on back-and-forth production activities, boosting efficiency and performance metrics. It claims to have helped Cisco, for example, reduce the time it takes to create a campaign by 90%, saving the company’s team over 26,000 hours a month.

Catch up on the tech headlines you may have missed this week and what our members are saying about them on LinkedIn.

• ??Musk spews profanities at advertisers . Elon Musk apologized for a post on X supporting an antisemitic conspiracy theory that instigated an advertiser boycott and caused some brands to stop posting on the platform altogether . But in a profanity-laced interview at the New York Times' DealBook Summit on Wednesday, he dismissed the idea that he was responsible for any existential threat to the platform, formerly known as Twitter, and expressed frustration with the companies that have pulled their ads. Saying that advertisers were “blackmailing” him, he added: “Go f— yourself.”
• ??Will Reddit be next to go public? The social media giant is once again in talks with potential investors for an initial public offering as soon as the first quarter of next year, per Bloomberg . While it is not known what valuation Reddit, Inc. would seek, it was reportedly considering a valuation of up to $15 billion last year. The news comes after a rough year for public listings in the U.S., hit by rocky market conditions and fairly poor performance for high-profile offerings. Listing volume this year is on track to come in just above 2022, which was the lightest year in the U.S. in over a decade.
• ??An iPhone feature is spurring privacy doubts. NameDrop, a new feature that lets iOS 17 users wirelessly share contact information by placing their devices close together, has gone viral — and not in the way the tech giant likely wants. It has triggered warnings from some local law-enforcement agencies over privacy risks. However, tech and privacy experts say the alerts are much ado about nothing, noting that phones must be unlocked and purposefully put together — and users must actively choose to share or receive the information. Speaking of 苹果 , the tech giant and Goldman Sachs are unwinding their credit-card partnership over 12 to 15 months , outlets including The Wall Street Journal report .
• ??Okta’s hack was a lot worse than previously anticipated . The breach two months ago stole data from everyone who uses its customer support system — far worse than the company's initial assessment of less than 1%. Okta , which provides identity authentication services to major corporate customers, notified members of the news in a letter Tuesday, according to Bloomberg. Nearly all had their names and email addresses leaked, though Okta notes there’s no “direct evidence” that customers are being targeted. Still, the company warned that they could face social engineering or phishing attacks.
• ???Amazon is bringing palm scans to the office. Your work badge could soon be a thing of the past: 亚马逊 has introduced a version of its palm-scanning technology, called Amazon One Enterprise, that allows employees to access their offices or sensitive corporate information with a swipe of the hand. The technology first hit the market in 2020 as a payment method at Amazon's grocery stores, including Whole Foods, Go convenience marts and Fresh supermarkets. Critics say the palm scanning "leads to increased surveillance"; Amazon argues it's more private than other biometric technology because a palm offers no hints about a person's identity.
• ??Tesla takes Sweden to court. Tesla filed lawsuits against Sweden's transport agency and postal service over blocked license plate deliveries this week — a show of solidarity by postal workers for striking union members seeking a collective bargaining agreement with the automaker. The strike began when mechanics stopped servicing Tesla vehicles nearly a month ago; now eight other unions have backed the labor action. In an interim victory for the company , a district court ruled that the transport agency must get the plates to the company within seven days or face a fine.
• ??Meta apparently knew that its users were underage . An unsealed legal complaint alleges that Meta knowingly allowed children under 13 to use Instagram and illegally collected their data. According to the complaint, filed by attorneys general from 33 states, the company received more than 1.1 million reports of underage users from early 2019 to mid-2023 and "disabled only a fraction of those accounts." The complaint is part of a lawsuit alleging that Meta harms young people by intentionally designing Facebook and Instagram features to be addictive. In statements over the weekend, Meta pointed to the difficulty of verifying age online. The social media giant could face penalties totaling hundreds of millions of dollars if the allegations are proven in court.

• ???TikTok is betting on live-streaming sales . TikTok is placing its e-commerce hopes on live streaming, and its success could make it a major challenger to retailers like Amazon. The ByteDance-owned company launched its shopping feature to about 150 million American users in September as it sought to replicate the success of its Chinese counterpart Douyin and quadruple its global product sales to $20 billion. On the other hand, ByteDance is taking a big step back from gaming , cutting hundreds of jobs and mulling the sale of its existing titles.
• ??X could lose as much as $75 million in ad sales . A controversial tweet from X owner Elon Musk supporting an antisemitic conspiracy theory could cost the company as much as $75 million in advertising revenue by the end of the year, according to The New York Times. More than 100 brands, including Netflix, Airbnb and Amazon, have pulled their ads or may do so. The hit comes during what is "traditionally the social media company’s strongest quarter," with brands running Black Friday and Cyber Monday holiday promotions. With U.S. advertising down 60% this year, CEO Linda Yaccarino is said to be leading an effort to win back advertisers.

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