Good morning. I had the pleasure of hosting more than a dozen executives yesterday in a Fortune CEO roundtable discussion about how their strategies are shifting amid economic uncertainty and global complexity.
We kicked things off with former Atlanta Fed president Dennis Lockhart, who outlined the state of the economy and memorably said that it wasn’t “frog choking” conditions he was most worried about, but “frog boiling”—in his words, “the creeping, long-term changes where you can’t point to a particular event, necessarily, but over time you wake up and find you’re in a different world.”
So how did the CEOs say they’re managing change?
For one software firm, it’s a “go all in” on AI with the ability to “answer the ROI question in about 24 months.” For another, it’s “hold on to your best developers” and “train up” everyone to leverage new tech. For an auto supplier, it’s diversifying your supply chain to deal with evolving relationships on the global stage; for a robotics company, it’s “robots building robots” in the U.S. where tariffs won’t wreck the balance sheet. And, of course, it’s seizing fresh opportunities amid the tumult.
Drawing from the latest annual CEO survey conducted with Fortune, Deloitte CEO Jason Girzadas highlighted the importance of a “growth mindset” and “emotional intelligence” as top skills to ride the wave.
“At the highest levels of interest of CEOs,” he said, “in terms of their workforce’s ability to assimilate and adapt.” He added: “Very human skills.”
Many thanks to sponsor, Deloitte, for helping to make the conversation happen.
Today’s tech news below. —Andrew Nusca
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China blames U.S. for 2020 theft of $13 billion in Bitcoin
China has accused the U.S. government of stealing 127,272 Bitcoin, which is today worth about $13 billion.
In a report published last week, the Chinese National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center—just rolls off the tongue, really—described the maneuver as a “state-level hacker operation” because of its quiet and slow execution, versus the smash-and-grab approach of a conventional crypto criminal.
The tokens were pilfered from the LuBian Bitcoin mining pool in December 2020. The theft is considered one of the largest crypto heists in history.
The Chinese report connects the stolen LuBian tokens to crypto confiscated by the U.S. government from Chen Zhi, the chairman of Cambodia’s allegedly “pig-butchering” Prince Group, who was charged with fraud and money laundering in October.
U.S. officials did not elaborate on how the Chen Zhi tokens were obtained.
“This is a classic ‘black eats black’ operation,” the report says, referring to one malicious actor hacking another.
This is hardly the first time the Chinese government has accused Washington of orchestrating hacking schemes. Just last month, for example, Beijing said it had “irrefutable evidence” of a U.S. attack on China’s National Time Service Center. —AN
SoftBank sold its entire Nvidia stake in October for $5.8 billion
Japan’s SoftBank has its hands in a lot of pots—but the world’s most valuable company is no longer one of them.
The Masayoshi Son-led conglomerate said this week that it sold its entire stake in leading AI chipmaker Nvidia for $5.83 billion to help pay for (what else?) AI investments.
Son is no stranger to running a highly leveraged operation. As he maneuvers to catch up to the AI boom by splashing out on a number of costly projects—Stargate data centers, chipmaker acquisitions, and a stake in OpenAI, among others—the CEO has been unwinding a number of its previous investments.
(Among them: Part of its stake in T-Mobile, sold for $9.17 billion.)
The undercurrent to all of this is continued investor skepticism that heavy AI spending will find returns on the other side. SoftBank is hardly alone in weathering such criticism, given the eye-popping capital expenditure predictions from Alphabet, Meta, and others.
SoftBank shares fell more than 10% in Tokyo on Wednesday in the wake of the news. —AN
Yann LeCun is planning to leave Meta
The AI pioneer who led Meta’s efforts in the area for years is reportedly thinking about jumping ship.
According to various news reports, Yann LeCun has recruited colleagues and spoken to investors about launching a startup that would focus on developing “world models,” a different area of AI than the large language models (LLMs) that fill today’s news headlines.
It’s hardly a done deal; LeCun could still remain at Meta. But in many ways, it wasn’t a matter of if, but when.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg hired LeCun from New York University to lead the company’s fledgling AI group in 2013, back when tech types were excitedly talking about “deep learning.”
Fast forward to today, and AI is by far the greatest priority for Meta. (So long, metaverse.) But when Zuckerberg radically reorganized the now-sprawling group this summer—and put former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang, 28, in charge—LeCun found himself sitting in a shrinking AI research division.
It certainly didn’t help that the famously outspoken LeCun was skeptical of the future of LLMs as a path to superintelligence, Meta’s stated goal.
If LeCun starts his own world models startup, he’ll be in good company. AI luminary Fei-Fei Li founded World Labs last year, and several companies—Decart, Runway, and Waabi, not to mention Google DeepMind and Microsoft—are working in the area. —AN
More tech
—CoreWeave shares dropped 16% after it disclosed delays at a data center developer.
—AMD predicts 35% annual revenue growth over the next three to five years thanks to all those new data centers.
—Beijing influencing SMIC chip output. Reported orders to prioritize Huawei over U.S. firms.
—Apple’s iPhone Air may get a second camera lens after all.
—Coinbase calls off $2 billion BVNK deal. One of the largest deals ever for a stablecoin startup is not to be.
—Samsung’s latest TVs get conversational AI in 10 languages.
—SoFi Crypto: The first nationally chartered bank in the U.S. to offer crypto trading to consumers, the company says.
