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Mon. 08/04 – The AI Researcher Who Turned Down $1.5 Billion From Zuck
00:20:09
Robotaxies are coming to Europe. Apple wants Answers. Literally. The AI researcher who turned down a billion and a half dollars. How the vibe seems to have definitively shifted in Silicon Valley. And will rollable laptop screens become mainstream?
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- [00:05]
Brian McCullough
Welcome to the Tech Brew Ride home for Monday, August 4th, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough. Today Robo Taxis are coming to Europe Apple wants answers, Literally the AI researcher who turned down a billion and a half dollars. How the vibe seems to have definitively shifted in Silicon Valley and will rollable laptop screens become mainstream? Here's what you missed today in the world of tech Foreign it's not just the US and China, y'. All. Lyft has announced a partnership with Baidu to launch autonomous vehicles in Germany and the UK in 2026, pending regulatory approval. Quoting Bloomberg. Under the arrangement, Lyft will deploy the sixth generation of Baidu's robotaxis, with the fleet scaling to thousands of vehicles across Europe in the following years, they added. The announcement follows Lyft's acquisition of freenow, one of Europe' largest taxi apps, marking its entry into nine new countries in the region. Last month, Uber announced a similar deal with Baidu to have its driverless cars on the Uber app, but the initial deployment later this year is planned for Asia and the Middle east, not Europe. But the Lyft deal is not exclusive, meaning it won't preclude Uber from rolling out Baidu robotaxis in the same markets in the future. Lyft is working toward offering its first driverless rides in Atlanta later this year with May Mobility. Separately, it's planning U.S. deployments in 2026 with intel back Mobileye Global and Benteler Group. Meanwhile, Uber already offers driverless rides in Phoenix, Austin and Atlanta in partnership with Alphabet's Waymo, as well as in Abu Dhabi with WeRide for Baidu, which runs one of the largest fleets of robotaxis in China. Working with different mobility service providers, local taxi companies and third party fleet operators will help it expand the global footprint of its driverless service Apollo Go. It has so far racked up more than 11 million rides and is seeking to expand in Switzerland, Singapore and Malaysia. End quote. Apple has apparently formed an Answers Knowledge and information team for creating a chatgpt like search experience. Quoting Mark Gurman. Despite philosophical reservations among some Apple leaders, the company is clearly heading in the direction of AI based search. Earlier this year, Apple quietly formed a new team called Answers Knowledge and Information, or aki. This group, I'm told, is exploring a number of in house AI services with the goal of creating a new chatgpt like search experience. The AKI team is led by Robbie Walker, a senior director, reporting to AI chief John Giannandrea. Walker previously oversaw Siri but lost control of it after engineering delays following that shakeup, he was assigned the New Answers initiative and has brought along several key team members from his Siri. While still in early stages, the team is building what it calls an answer engine, a system capable of crawling the web to respond to general knowledge questions. A standalone app is currently under exploration alongside new backend infrastructure meant to power search capabilities in future versions of Siri, Spotlight and Safari. Apple has recently begun advertising job openings for the team on its Careers site, stating, our work fuels intuitive information experiences across some of Apple's most iconic products, including Siri, Spotlight, Safari, Messages, lookup and more. Join us in shaping the future of how the world connects with information. Several listings specifically mention experience with search algorithms and engine development. A finished product may still be far off, but the direction is now unmistakable, something akin to a stripped down Apple built approach to ChatGPT like search is coming, end quote. I mentioned her sort of jokingly the other day, but Lina Khan herself is citing figma's recent IPO as vindication of M and a scrutiny, saying letting startups grow independently rather than being acquired can generate enormous value. Quoting TechCrunch, Khan was alluding to a $20 billion deal for Adobe to acquire Figma that fell through back in 2023. While Adobe cited the lack of a clear path to approval from the European Commission and the UK Competition and markets, the acquisition also faced regulatory scrutiny in the United States over concerns that it could prevent Figma from being an effective competitor to Adobe. Khan was FTC chair at the time, leading the agency to challenge big tech on fronts, including startup acquisitions, to the point that companies tried to avoid this scrutiny with reverse acqui hires, in which they hired key team members and licensed technology rather than acquiring startups outright. The practice seems to be continuing despite Khan's departure from the ftc. While her aggressive stance led to intense criticism from corners of the tech industry, she defended her approach by saying that only a tiny percentage of deals received a second look and arguing that founders would ultimately benefit from a world in which you have six or seven or eight potential suitors rather than just one or two. And although Khan, who'd been appointed by President Joe Biden, resigned at the start of the second Trump administration, her comments Friday paint the figma IPO as a vindication for her approach, calling the IPO a win for employees, investors, innovation and the public. Of course, Khan's critics are more likely to see figma's success as coming despite regulatory scrutiny, not because of it. For example, Wedbush securities analyst Dan Ives told Business Insider, figma is a massive success, but it's because of the company's innovative growth and not due to the FTC and Khan, end quote. The Wall Street Journal Sundays one particular AI researcher declined an offer from Mark Zuckerberg of a pay package totaling more than $1.5 billion over six years. As Mark Zuckerberg sought to play catch up in the generative AI race, he reached out a few months ago to OpenAI's former chief technology officer Mira Muradi and offered to buy her fledgling startup, Thinking Machines Lab. When she said no, the Matta chief executive responded by launching a full scale raid. In the following weeks, he approached more than a dozen of Marathi's RO50 employees to sound them out about jumping ship. His chief target, Andrew Tulloch, a leading researcher and co founder at the startup. To peel him off, Zuckerberg dangled a billion dollar package that could, with top bonuses and extraordinary stock performance, have been worth as much as 1 1/2 billion dollars over at least six years, according to people familiar with the matter. Tolik said no, none of his colleagues left either. Meta spokesman Andy Stone called the description of the offer inaccurate and ridiculous, and said that the size of any compensation pack predicated on a stock rising. He added that Meta is not interested in acquiring thinking machines. Even in Silicon Valley, where star engineers have long wielded outsized economic power, turning down nine figure pay packages is rare. But as the battle royale for AI talent escalates, the companies with the biggest war chests are finding the cash cannon only gets them so far. While some AI researchers act like free agents bouncing between labs in pursuit of more pay and power, quite a few display an unwavering allegiance to their chosen leaders. Larger than life figures who in the tech industry carry the single name cache of rock stars, the idiosyncratic cultures of the different startups bind employees to one another. Meanwhile, after years of poaching and round, the companies involved are getting savvier about playing defense. End quote. A study has found that AI trading bots can collude and fix prices in simulated markets without explicit instruction to do so, thereby posing challenges to regulators. Quoting Bloomberg It's a regulator's nightmare. Hedge funds unleash AI bots on stock and bond exchanges, but they don't just compete, they collude. Instead of battling for returns, they fix prices, hoard profits and sideline human traders. Now, a trio of researchers say that scenario is far from science fiction. In simulations designed to mimic real world markets, trading agents powered by artificial intelligence formed price fixing cartels without explicit instruction Even with relatively simple programming, the bots chose to collude when left to their own devices, raising fresh alarms for market watchdogs. Put another way, AI bots don't need to be evil or even particularly smart to rig the market. Left alone, they'll learn it themselves. The latest study, conducted by ITE Goldstein and Wharton colleague Winston Dow and Yan Ji from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, has already drawn attention from both regulators and asset managers. The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority invited the researchers to present their findings at a seminar. Some quant firms, unnamed by Dow, have expressed interest in clear regulatory guidelines and rules on AI powered algorithmic trading execution. They worry that it's not their intention, dow said, but regulators can come to them and say you're doing something wrong. In several of the simulated markets, the AI agents began cooperating rather than competing effectively, forming cartels that shared profits and discouraged defection. When prices reflected clear, fundamental information, the bots kept a low profile, avoiding moves that might disrupt the collective gain in noisier markets. They settled into the same cooperative routines and stopped searching for better strategies. The researchers called this effect artificial stupidity, a tendency for the bots to quit trying new ideas, locking into profit sharing patterns simply because they worked well enough for humans. It's hard to coordinate on being dumb because we have egos, said Dao. But machines are like as long as the figures are profitable, we can choose to coordinate on being dumb. Academic research is increasingly probing how generative AI and reinforcement learning might reshape Wall street, often in ways few anticipated. A recent Coalition Greenwich survey showed that 15% of buy side traders already use AI in their execution workflows, with another quarter planning to follow in the next end quote.
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Brian McCullough
Last week about whether or not the boom times for tech IPOs is coming back. But according to Mike Isaac in the New York Times, Silicon Valley is already back, baby, in all the important ways. Quote Today, the tech has become harder, the perks are fewer, and the mood has turned more serious. The nation's tech capital has shifted into its artificial intelligence age. Some call it the hard tech era, and the signs are everywhere in office conference rooms, hacker houses, third wave coffee houses or over zoom meetings. Knowledge of terms like neural network, large language model and graphical processing unit have become mandatory, stacked up against ChatGPT's ability to instantly transform any image into a studio Ghibli cartoon. Instagram's photo filters are practically Paleolithic, and the chatter is about not how you built your app with the HTML5 coding language, but how many H100 graphics cards, the highly coveted hardware for running AI programs you can get your hands on. The tech epicenter has moved from the traditional cradle of Silicon Valley, the towns of San Jose, Mountain View, Menlo park and Palo Alto 40 miles north to San Francisco, the home of the AI startups OpenAI and Anthropic. Tech giants like Google are no longer hiring in droves as they once did, and those with jobs at the Behemoth are met by the watchful eyes of managers looking to cut dead weight rather than coddle employees. If Silicon Valley's Web 2.0 era was defined by founders playing God on their computers by creating social networks and other services, the new era is about founders angling to create super intelligent computers that may one day surpass humans and become a kind of God in the machine. The low hanging fruit era of tech where earlier consumer facing software businesses were easier to build and printing money, it just feels over, said Shield Monat, a general partner at the venture capital firm Better Tomorrow Ventures in San Francisco. Meta, Google and others have joined the AI rush, shedding softer skilled employees for harder ones. Digital profits whose jobs amounted to being full time TED Talk deliverers were out. Deep learning and neural network specialists were in. Venture capitalists, undaunted by failed investments in crypto and Metaverse startups, threw their money at any entrepreneur with AI or machine learning in the pitch deck. As OpenAI, Anthropic and other AI startups gained prominence in San Francisco, entrepreneurs abandoned building a Silicon beach in Miami or as Silicon Hills in Austin. They returned to the Bay Area for something. So up in the cloud, AI is a very in person industry, said Jasmine Sun, a former employee at Substack who is a culture writer in San Francisco covering tech and AI trends. People are going to parties, hacker houses, happy hours. It's where they all mingle and exchange information. The AI influx has remade parts of San Francisco. The space between the city's Mission District and Potrero Hill neighborhood is now called the Arena. After startups like Notion and Chroma moved in along with OpenAI like Russell Crowe and Gladiator founders in the arena are fighting one another for AI supremacy, though on the battlefield of free market capitalism, not in the Colosseum. Hayes Valley, an edgy neighborhood that has gentrified, is called Cerebral Valley, a hotspot for AI engineers to meet over warm lamb and harissa salads at Suvla nearer the water. The Ferry Building on the Embarcadero is home to Shack 15, a private co working space filled with startup workers eager to network in between Vibe coding sessions. As a more right leaning crowd of tech elite and terminally online Gen Z founders emerged, they turned against politics in the workplace and globalism. Sharing technology globally had put Silicon Valley's tech leadership at risk of being overtaken by China. Some said new startups reflected the evolution. Instead of tap to pay apps of a decade ago like Clinkle and Bump, young companies making unmanned aerial drones stocked with AI guided Barracuda cruise missiles appeared. Think of the change as less HBO's Silicon Valley and more HBO's Mountainhead. Finally today, say hello to the Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 6, a unique 3300 doll laptop with a rollable 120Hz OLED display that can expand from 14 to 16.7 inches. Quoting the Verge when you first open the ThinkBook plus, you'll see a squarish 14 inch OLED display with a 120Hz refresh rate and a 2000 by 1600 resolution. But press a button and the screen unrolls to a taller 16.7 inches and 2000 by 2350 resolution. I affectionately call it the Tall Boy with the screen extended, it's like working with two stacked 12.4-inch 16x9 displays. It's some of the best single monitor multitasking I've experienced. The extra vertical space is great for going full screen in a document code editor or spreadsheet, or for split screening apps without cutting off the sides of the windows. You can get the benefits of a vertical display anywhere, not just in a multi monitor desktop setup, and the ThinkBook itself makes a great vertical sidecar to a big monitor. Tall Boy mode even makes video calls more pleasant since it brings the webcam much closer to eye level. Having the top of the screen higher has also helped relieve a bit of neck pain from staring down at laptops all day. I get improved ergonomics whether I'm working at my desk, a table or in Goblin mode on my floor. I've been using the new ThinkBook plus full time for about a week and I've kept it in 16.7 inch mode, but almost the entire time, because that's the whole point of this thing. I never get sick of looking at this giant OLED with its punchy colors and strong contrast. It's plastic instead of glass for the sake of flexibility, and it lacks touch support, though that also means less chance of scratching its softer surface with a fingernail or accidentally knocking it over with a tap. But I don't mind any of that, because having so much screen real estate in a laptop this compact and portable was unreal up until now. The thinkbook plus Rollable is a genuinely cool idea and a great laptop. I hope the display tech continues to evolve and we see more wild ideas like this become a reality. Or if Lenovo delivers on its other recent concept laptop idea, the thinkbook Flip, maybe we can get a similar tall monitor experience without the added heft and cost of motors. This could be the start of a rolling screen revolution, or it could just be a niche product for deep pocketed folks who want to feel like they're living in the future. Sadly, one of those realities is much more likely. For now, the tech gets cheap enough to trickle down to mainstream laptops, but damn am I happy this thing is out in the real world, even if spotting one at a random cafe will feel like a unicorn sighting. Lenovo is one of the only laptop manufacturers that turns its weird concepts into actual products, and I hope it keeps pushing, getting cheaper, quirkier, or ideally both. End Quote Took my boy to the new Naked Gun movie over the weekend. He liked it okay, but I showed him the original Naked Gun first to get him ready. And man, old comedies just do not play for gen alpha kids. Same thing happened when I tried to show him Dumb and Dumber. Yawn. But anyway, I thought the new movie was great. The new Naked Gun. I mean the one with Liam Neeson would recommend end if you're over the age of 10, I guess. Talk to you tomorrow.