Good morning. I’ve been thinking a lot about the exchanges I had at this year’s Montgomery Summit, the annual Los Angeles gathering put on by March Capital and frequented by an array of tech investors.
In a coffee conversation about (what else?) artificial intelligence, one venture capitalist told me he thinks AI would replace something like 90% of “low-level white collar workers.” That’s an astonishing prediction, I replied—there aren’t many high-level white collar workers who didn’t start at a lower rung on that ladder.
What will happen to those workers? Who will clean up that mess? “I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head. It was too big and complicated of a question. Just the kind of thing, come to think of it, that AI reasoning models are built to consider. —Andrew Nusca
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In a win for Silicon Valley, U.S. lawmakers vote to overturn key payments regulations
The Senate has voted to overturn key regulations that granted the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau supervision over payment services operated by platforms such as PayPal, Google, and Apple.
The largely party-line 51-47 vote on Wednesday is part of a broader campaign by the Trump administration to defang the CFPB, an agency created through the landmark Dodd-Frank financial reform of 2010 and championed by progressives.
While other financial regulators have broad mandates to oversee complex markets like securities and commodities, Congress created the CFPB after the financial crisis to focus on consumer protection.
Its mission includes combating fraud and misbehavior by financial institutions and it has brought a number of lawsuits against digital payments operations, including Block and Zelle.
While the legislation must still go through the House for a vote, its passage in the Senate is a key step towards reversing the Biden-era rule, which was finalized in November.
It’s a key win for trade groups representing Silicon Valley, which have long criticized the CFPB, alleging the agency had overstepped by establishing its own regulatory authority over digital payment apps like Venmo and Apple Pay.
Consumer protection advocates have raised concerns about a major conflict of interest involving any rollback. Elon Musk’s social media platform X plans to enter the payments space later this year with “X Money,” while Musk, through the Department of Government Efficiency, is overseeing the campaign to gut the CFPB. —Jessica Mathews and Leo Schwartz
Blue Origin brings in Amazon alums to establish a hard-charging culture
After years of delays in space launches and lagging behind its main competitor SpaceX, Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos is returning to the playbook that led Amazon to becoming one of the world’s biggest companies: a culture maniacally focused on results.
To enact his plan, Bezos has brought in a slew of former Amazon executives including Amazon’s former head of devices Dave Limp (as CEO in December 2023), head of supply chain Tim Collins, chief financial officer Allen Parker, and chief information officer Josh Koppleman.
“Dave doesn’t have much respect for work-life balance,” one former Blue Origin executive told the Financial Times, which first reported the story.
The management shake-up and culture overhaul come at a time when Blue Origin lags behind Elon Musk’s SpaceX, far and away the leader in private space exploration.
Both companies compete for the private launches of satellites and have longer-term ambitions of commercial space travel. However, SpaceX has had considerably more success thus far. SpaceX has achieved orbit 450 times compared to just once from Blue Origin.
Both companies also offer satellite constellations intended for broadband services around the world. Here, too, SpaceX, with its Starlink satellites, has a leg up on Blue Origin’s comparable Kuiper System. Starlink is used in over 100 countries; Kuiper has yet to go to space.
In February, Blue Origin announced that it would lay off 10% of its 10,000-person staff. —Paolo Confino
Digg (yes, that one) promises to rise from the dead
Remember Digg, the once-mighty news aggregator that helped new websites and content take off?
The onetime “homepage of the internet” been bought back (from ad firm BuySellAds) by founder Kevin Rose, and is set to return with the perhaps unlikely aid of Alexis Ohanian, the cofounder of Reddit—once Digg’s fiercest rival, and certainly the long-run winner of that rivalry.
Both Rose and Ohanian (who is these days a VC and probably best known as Serena Williams’ husband) are motivated by how downright crappy social media has become, thanks to misinformation, spam and general terrible vibes. According to Rose, dealing with these problems is now possible thanks to the magic of AI.
“Just recently we've hit an inflection point where AI can become a helpful copilot to users and moderators, not replacing human conversation, but rather augmenting it, allowing users to dig deeper, while at the same time removing a lot of the repetitive burden for community moderators,” he said. “With Alexis on board, we bring a shared history, a deep respect for online communities, and a new perspective on what the internet needs today.”
The revived Digg is backed by Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six and by True Ventures. Former Yuga Labs creative director Justin Mezzell assumes the CEO position.
Interestingly, when you go to sign up for an invite, the new Digg website calls itself “the front page of the internet, now with superpowers.” Not to be confused with that “homepage” tagline, “front page of the internet” was once the slogan of…Reddit. —David Meyer
More data
—Amazon tests “AI-aided dubbing.” A Prime Video pilot for English and Latin American Spanish.
—Apple revamps Macbook Air. Better chips and a sky blue color option. A 13-inch model starts at $999; a 15-inch model starts at $1,199. Available from March 12.
—Broadcom fixes three major VMware bugs. Attackers with administrator privileges could link the flaws to escape the virtual machine and gain control of the host system.
—Discord in talks for IPO as early as this year. The chat app was last valued by investors in 2021 at about $15 billion.
—Hyundai, Avride partner on robotaxis. The Yandex spinoff wants to deploy 100 fully autonomous Ioniq 5 vehicles this year.
—Microsoft-CoreWeave friction. Redmond reportedly canceled agreements over delivery issues and missed deadlines; Microsoft was the majority of CoreWeave’s 2024 sales.
—OpenAI agent costs revealed: A reported $2,000 monthly for knowledge work, $10,000 for coding, $20,000 for doctoral-level research.
—Scale AI, Pentagon strike a deal. A contract to prototype the use of AI agents for U.S. military planning and operations.
—U.S. charges 12 Chinese nationals with espionage. An alleged campaign to steal and sell data from state and federal agencies.
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