Good morning.
The conversations at Fortune Brainstorm AI this week felt a bit like bungee jumping: extraordinary highs followed by deep lows. Speakers gave remarkable examples of how the technology could lead to a surge in business productivity, supercharge drug discovery, alleviate loneliness, and enable Hollywood actors to achieve agelessness. But at the same time, they also highlighted the problems and risks, including biased training data, poorly protected intellectual property, troublesome hallucinations and a corrupted information ecosystem. I left with a clear sense that we are at the dawn of an extraordinary new era…but an era with great potential for good and ill.
A few excerpts from the day:
“Everyone is going to have their own personal intelligence. It will be for you. And your thing might be ‘I’m a new mom, and I need help navigating this.’ Your thing might be, ‘I have this problem at work,’ or your thing might be, ‘How do I fix this toaster,’ or your thing might be, ‘I want to have a philosophical conversation.’ Whatever that might be for you, and that will be different for each of us.”
—Reid Hoffman, partner, Greylock
“Every new technology has its pros and cons. There’s huge upside with AI, and then there are some disadvantages…But by far—orders of magnitude—the higher risk to worry about is China, not sentient AI killing us.”
—Vinod Khosla, founder, Khosla Ventures
“The first piece of advice [for businesses] I’d start with is: Invest more in the people than the technology. Those that really focus on the people are going to be successful…And focus on responsible AI. Ninety-five percent of executives say they believe in responsible AI. Only 6% have responsible AI programs in place in the company. So there’s a big gap.”
—Paul Daugherty, Chief Technology and Innovation Officer, Accenture
At Fortune, we’re committed to continuing this conversation. We believe there’s good that comes from convening business leaders to share ideas and focus on both the possibilities and the risks. We announced yesterday that we will be expanding the Brainstorm AI franchise, in partnership with Accenture, to events next year in London (April 15-16), Singapore (July 30-31) and again here in San Francisco (Dec. 9-10). If you’re interested, get in touch: BrainstormAI@fortune.com.
More news below.
Alan Murray
@alansmurray
alan.murray@fortune.com
TOP NEWS
Netflix’s viewing numbers
Streaming platform Netflix is releasing viewer numbers for the first time, finally giving outsiders insight into what people are watching. The company is promising to release new information every six months. Hollywood labor unions demanded greater transparency into streaming numbers as part of negotiations with studios earlier this year. Fortune
Don’t worry, be happy
Chinese censors are targeting social media videos that promote “pessimism and extremism” and “the wrong career values.” China’s economy is struggling with low consumer confidence, high youth joblessness and a years-long property debt crisis. Chinese regulators have conducted annual campaigns to clean up the country’s social media since 2020. Fortune
Staying neutral
Microsoft is promising to stay neutral if its U.S. workers want to unionize, making it easier for roughly 100,000 of the tech company’s employees to organize. Microsoft made the announcement after negotiations with the AFL-CIO and its president, Liz Shuler. The two organizations also agreed to work together to resolve issues involving AI in the workplace. The New York Times
AROUND THE WATERCOOLER
White House tech policy director says every U.S. citizen must have the ability to tell if images and videos released by the government are ‘authentic material’ by Alexandra Sternlicht
'Cold War II’ might be coming, IMF deputy says, and it could wipe trillions of dollars from the global economy by Ryan Hogg
Sports Illustrated publisher fires its CEO, fourth executive to leave amid fallout from AI-generated articles by Chris Morris
Climate activist Al Gore blasts COP28 outcome as biggest failure in history—it ‘reads as if OPEC dictated it word for word’ by Christiaan Hetzner
Google’s Epic loss has implications for the whole tech world by David Meyer
Delta CEO says fears business travel has died are greatly overstated—hybrid workers are just shifting the data by Orianna Rosa Royle
This edition of CEO Daily was curated by Nicholas Gordon.
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