| • The Big Read: Bret Taylor, the Salesforce heir apparent who went rogue |
| • The Top 5: The best Red Bull replacements |
| • Plus, our Recommendations: A jungle mystery; a Florida farce; and "Predator" catches the "Spider-Verse" bug |
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| As you might've heard, Mark Zuckerberg has lined up a new AI czar for himself: Alexandr Wang, the 28-year-old billionaire co-founder of Scale AI. |
| Wang's debut represents a sharp turn in Zuckerberg's AI strategy and reflects Zuckerberg's impatience with Meta Platforms' efforts to keep pace with rivals like OpenAI and Google. At the same time, the deal is a dramatic marker of the fierce competition for top AI talent and the vast sums of money needed to win over that talent. (Meta will pay more than $14 billion to get Wang and a 49% stake in Scale.) |
| In all the discussion of Wang's arrival this week, one name was noticeably absent: Yann LeCun, Meta's chief AI scientist who co-founded the company's first AI research lab more than a decade ago. He's part of a triumvirate—along with Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio—referred to as the godfathers of AI, and he has won a Turing Award, the Nobel Prize of computing. Suffice to say, he's a strikingly different figure from Wang, who graduated from high school around the time LeCun initially joined Meta. |
| LeCun and Wang might get on famously. After all, LeCun has insisted none of the current thinking in AI will produce the human-quality AI Zuckerberg is pursuing, and Wang isn't an obvious link to the old guard's thinking. (The simple fact is, Wang doesn't have the elite research background many in AI do.) So perhaps LeCun and Wang will shake things up, and Zuckerberg will finally get what he wants. |
| Yet with all the moving and shaking within AI, I wonder how much longer it'll be before LeCun moves on from Meta. I can see him doing what Ilya Sutskever and Mira Murati did at OpenAI: Depart, take the billions of dollars investors want to throw at AI, and go do his own thing. (Perhaps he might spend more time teaching computer science at New York University; currently, he splits his attention between the school and Meta.) |
| Put yourself in LeCun's position after all the reports about Zuckerberg's unhappiness with what Meta has developed so far. Would you want to stay—and possibly answer to someone a couple generations younger? Surely LeCun has pants that are older than Wang. |
| In a market that sees everyone as poachable, a discontented LeCun might be one of the top prizes out there. |
| WWDC? More Like W-T-F |
| I hope everyone has enjoyed this newsletter. Once Apple's Liquid Glass arrives, I suspect it'll be impossible to read anything at all. |
| Maybe China Will Win |
| After DeepSeek's low-cost, open-source AI model shocked the world a few months ago, one of the Chinese startup's big rivals at home, Alibaba, apparently went all out to try to catch up: The company's lead engineers asked their staff to cancel their vacations and plans for the Lunar New Year. |
| "Our engineering leads decided—they said, 'Cancel your Chinese New Year holiday. Everybody stay in the company. Sleep in the office. We are going to accelerate our development,'" Alibaba Chair Joe Tsai recalled at a conference in Paris on Wednesday. "Within a few weeks, we launched our version." He deemed their efforts "not bad." |
| Sure, Alibaba's approach sounds brutal. But also nigh unbeatable? Imagine Microsoft telling everyone to skip Christmas.—Abram Brown |
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| Not long ago, Marc Benioff seemed ready to hand over the reins at Salesforce to Bret Taylor, a mild-mannered, well-liked lieutenant whom Benioff had been grooming for years for the CEO role. For a time, he and Taylor even shared the CEO title, and Benioff's interests seemed increasingly to extend beyond Salesforce to philanthropy and new endeavors, like his purchase of Time magazine. |
| Then Taylor suddenly bounced. |
| Soon after, he decided to do another startup, Sierra, that would target the business of Benioff and Salesforce, setting up one of the most talked-about rivalries in Silicon Valley, our Jon Victor and Kevin McLaughlin report in Weekend's latest Big Read. For now, Sierra is small, and its competition against Salesforce is something of a David-versus-Goliath contest. As Taylor knows, the underdog in those matchups benefits from knowing how the bigger opponent moves, and few people know Salesforce better than Taylor. |
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| I had a real old-timey morning a couple days ago ahead of an early bike ride: I spooned some cottage cheese and blueberries into a bowl, turned on the Beach Boys—RIP Brian Wilson—and cracked open a Red Bull. |
| As funny as it may seem, it's my drink of choice that really ages me: Red Bull is so passé, as our Ann Gehan reports. The younger, cooler set is obsessed with energy drink brands like Rarebird Coffee, Magic Mind and Clean Simple Eats that promise to provide the same type of mental jolt as Red Bull or coffee through potions laden with putatively healthier ingredients such as ketones, paraxanthine and L-theanine. |
| Abram Brown, editor of The Information's Weekend section, has put his stablecoin stash toward a private bunker someplace tropical. Reach him at abe@theinformation.com. |
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| Listening: "Missing in the Amazon" (The Guardian) |
| The Javari Valley is an especially inhospitable part of the Amazon, a place teeming with dangerous wildlife: giant hornets, jaguars, poisonous snakes. Not to mention the drug traffickers, illegal gold miners and armed fishing gangs. |
| For the Indigenous people in the Javari, humans pose a far greater threat than any fauna. In 2022, The Guardian's Dom Phillips set out into the region to document how quickly these forces of modernizations were overturning—and endangering—the tribes who had made it their home for centuries, having almost zero contact with the outside world. (No other part of the planet has a greater concentration of uncontacted tribes.) Without warning, Phillips disappeared, troubling his Guardian colleague Tom Phillips (a longtime friend but no relation to Dom). In "Missing in the Amazon," Tom recounts his efforts to locate Dom, who had stumbled upon an incontrovertible truth: The Javari is "a battlefield disguised as a wilderness," as Tom himself concludes. |
| Reading: "Fever Beach" by Carl Hiaasen |
| Carl Hiaasen ranks as one of the nation's satirist laureates, and he's back with a doozy. |
| In "Fever Beach," the Strokers for Liberty suffer from many of the usual problems that beset a bootstrapped operation: unclear financing, feuding leaders and a funky app that requires, uh, three-factor authentication. Nonetheless, the Strokers' doltish founder, Dale Figgo, nurses the grand ambition of turning the outfit into the next white power supergroup, one capable of rivaling the Proud Boys, who have exiled him. |
| To begin, Figgo aims to help a Florida congressman secure reelection, but as the name of Figgo's group suggests it might, the scheme devolves into a farce. With the Strokers readying themselves, Twilly Spree, a noble-minded vigilante and a recurring Hiaasen character, decides to make stymieing the neo-Nazis his next mission. He's joined by love interest Viva Morales, who happens to be Figgo's reluctant housemate as well as an executive at the philanthropy that is funding the Strokers without her knowledge. |
| Oh, and I should mention the looming presence of an anonymous hit man with a checkered past, which someone presses him to reveal at one point. |
| "Twenty-one years on Wall Street," he answers. |
| "No shit?" |
| "Ever heard of BlackRock?" |
| Watching: "Predator: Killer of Killers" (Hulu) |
| Franchise fatigue kills, man. Fortunately for 20th Century Studios, director Dan Tractenberg has proven himself to be a reliable lifesaver—he debuted in 2016 with "10 Cloverfield Lane," a surprise hit sequel to "Cloverfield"—and has labored to resuscitate Fox's "Predator" series. His first effort, "Prey," was nice, pitting a group of the fanged space beasties against a Native American warrioress, who needed none of the bulging biceps that powered Ah-nold through the original "Predator" to prevail. Tractenberg's latest entry, "Predator: Killer of Killers," multiplies the concept threefold in an animated anthology film—with a Viking, a samurai and a World War II pilot all taking on a Predator before the inevitable intertwining of their stories. |
| The movie has real guts, a comment I mean quite literally: This isn't kiddie fare, and it's all the better for it. The gore comes splattering across the screen using the same stylized animation as in the "Spider-Verse" series, mimicking a comic book come to life. And like the "Spider-Verse" films, "Killer of Killers" shows how some of the most interesting entries from aging franchises are happening in animation, not live action.—Abram Brown |
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| Zuck, the one who knocks. |
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