| There was an interesting moment last night in Elon Musk's interview with Fox News. Just the one. The rest of it was largely a rundown of Musk's greatest hits: The dangers of artificial intelligence, how Twitter had become consumed by bots and so on. But the comments about another tech executive who's the yin to his yang stood out. To my mind, the most engaging part was when he talked about Larry Page. You know, the Google co-founder? If you don't know him, that partly explains why I found it revealing.  Larry Page in 2015. Photographer: David Paul Morris In Musk's telling, not only was OpenAI essentially his idea, but it also was intended as a counterpoint to Google. Here's what Musk said: The reason OpenAI exists at all is that Larry Page and I used to be close friends and I would stay at his house in Palo Alto. And I would talk to him late in the night about AI safety. My perception was that Larry was not taking AI safety seriously enough. … At the time Google had acquired DeepMind, and Google and DeepMind together had about three-quarters of all the AI talents in the world. They obviously had a tremendous amount of money and more computers than anyone else so I'm like we're in a unipolar world where one company has close to all the talent and computers.
Why was this so fascinating? They used to be bros back in 2015, when my colleague Ashlee Vance first reported Musk and Page's sleepovers. But it was interesting because we don't hear all that much about private conversations with Page. He's something of a cipher. When he was still CEO of Google (or, at least, of parent company Alphabet), it became a running plea: "Where in the world is Larry Page?" There was the Businessweek cover story of 2018. A column in the Wall Street Journal. Bloomberg Opinion's Shira Ovide a year later. Not long after, he stepped down as CEO and helped install Sundar Pichai as the company's public face. In a sense, Page is the anti-Musk. The world's sometime richest man controls, in Twitter, the world's largest bullhorn, whose engineers he instructs to amplify his tweets, according to Platformer. This week Fox News is running a two-part interview with Musk, in which he confirmed that he plans to enter the AI race, too. Last week was an hourlong interview with the BBC. Even as his companies remain bereft of a PR department, he's been remarkably accessible to journalists—he drops into Twitter Spaces on a whim, tweets incessantly and occasionally responds to emails and texts from hacks. Musk's constant communication has long been a boon to Musk's companies. For instance, Tesla boasts in its annual regulatory filings that: Historically, we have been able to generate significant media coverage of our company and our products. Such media coverage and word of mouth are the current primary drivers of our sales leads and have helped us achieve sales without traditional advertising and at relatively low marketing costs.
To paraphrase, Tesla reckons that Musk's antics drive vehicle sales. The tide may be turning on that front, as Bloomberg News reported last year, but at least it used to think that was the case. The pair of billionaires, so often finding themselves as funhouse mirrors of each other, converged on TV this week. The Fox News interview aired a day after CBS's 60 Minutes broadcast a feature on Google's efforts in AI, which benefited from an unusual amount of access to the company's employees and workings. You can understand this PR decision in part because Google has, at least from a public perception standpoint, ceded ground to OpenAI and, by extension, Microsoft—which is OpenAI's biggest investor. In a sense, Google suffered from not talking publicly about what it was up to in artificial intelligence. At the same time, Page and his Google co-founder Sergey Brin are seemingly accountable to no one, even as they control a company that owns YouTube, dominates web search, much of the online advertising market, mobile operating systems and plenty more besides. They might be the most influential men whose voices you seldom hear: Page hasn't spoken publicly since 2015. While Google is suffering from its reticence when it comes to talking about AI, Musk is taking increasing amounts of flak for being over-communicative. His MAGA-friendly stream of consciousness on Twitter does little to endear him to the environmentally conscious electric-car buyers to which Tesla wants to appeal. Perhaps Page and Musk could both learn from each other. Musk, as ever, can afford to be a little more taciturn. And Page and Brin could afford a little more public visibility. —Alex Webb, correspondent for Bloomberg Quicktake | 
No comments:
Post a Comment