Hello.
FortuneThe Brainstorm AI conference kicked off yesterday in San Francisco, providing a dramatic testament to the advances in AI technology that have been made over the past year. (If you haven’t followed these advances, check out this article on Open AI’s new chatbot or play with its sibling, Dall-E, which creates images from text.)
Some excerpts from the conference:
“We think AI is the biggest platform shift since electricity and the internet. And we think it’s actually more dramatic than that…that it will drive innovation across the world. About four years ago we refreshed our strategy and we actually set AI as the core of that strategy… It’s not a side job.
—Sasan Goodarzi, CEO, Intuit
“I don’t think AI and machine learning are the solution to all the problems. It really gets to the heart of the question, “What is the business problem I’m trying to solve?” What product problem am I trying to solve? And be very clear on that.
—Yael Garten, Director of AI, Apple
“I think our whole company right now is having this conversation about stakeholder economics in addition to shareholder economics. And I think [A.I.] has to be part of the same conversation, because in this process of creating and deploying AI, it will impact all of our lives, and it’s really important that we include all stakeholders of this technology in the process of design.
—Fei-Fei Li, co-director, Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI
“This may surprise people, but I think you’ll find that many of us embrace regulation, because we’ll have to think about, “When is it appropriate to use these technologies?” How do we get them out into the world so that we don’t strangle them, but make sure we use them in the most useful, most appropriate way, with enough oversight and thought. »
—James Manyika, Senior Vice President, Technology and Society, Google
“There’s more AI in Snapchat on your phone than there is in the entire US DOD (Department of Defense) combined.”
—Brian Schimpf, CEO, Anduril Industries
“Today, we regularly train AI systems on 50 data points or 100 data points. Data-centric AI is a key technology that is starting to work on these much smaller data sets. It democratizes access to AI”
—Andrew Ng, CEO, Landing AI
You can watch today’s sessions at the conference here. More news below. And here’s your fun fact for the day: 16 former PepsiCo executives are now Fortune 500 CEOs. How did the snack company become a CEO talent factory? Phil Wahba dives here.
Alan Murray
@alansmurray
alan.murray@fortune.com
TOP NEWS
Soft CEO
In what he called a “strange coincidence”, Stewart Butterfield announced his resignation as CEO of Slack just days after Bret Taylor announced his departure as co-CEO of Salesforce, the parent company of Slack. Slack. Butterfield told staff members (in a Slack message, obviously) that he was “not going to do anything entrepreneurial.” He will be replaced by current VP Lidiane Jones. As FortuneKylie Robison writes, “The string of departures raises more questions about the Salesforce leadership team and its plans to groom a potential successor to founder and CEO Marc Benioff. Fortune
Neuralink Probe
Federal authorities are reportedly investigating Elon Musk’s Neuralink for possible animal welfare violations. The brain chip company has killed around 1,500 animals during its research and some staff have complained about rushed testing that put animals at unnecessary risk, Reuters reported. Reuters
Promotion of trains
The CEO of KLM airline has encouraged passengers to take the train rather than the plane, where it makes sense to do so due to low carbon emissions. Marjan Rintel was a rail boss before taking over as head of the Dutch national carrier in July. His suggestion comes in the context where several European countries, including the Netherlands, are preparing to discourage air travel for relatively short journeys. FinancialTimes
AROUND THE WATER COOLER
Elon Musk may have kicked Kanye West off Twitter, but the Anti-Defamation League says the CEO needs ‘clear policies, not personal intervention’, by Alena Botros
Photos on Twitter appear to show Caroline Ellison in New York, sparking speculation of an FTX-related plea deal, by Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez
America is so bad at vacationing that only one other country is worse, and that’s Micronesia, by Alena Botros
Starbucks has rolled out a new tipping system and customers are freaking out, by Prarthana Prakash
Biden crowned global energy czar as diplomacy triumphs over Putin’s tantrums, by Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and Steven Tian
This edition of Daily CEO was edited by David Meyer.
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