Up until very recently, tech giants seemed to be playing it safe with A.I. Facebook, for instance, has been experimenting with A.I. and chatbots for years, but the massive size and bureaucracy of the sectors biggest companies have also been criticized for stifling rapid innovation leaps in deep science fields, such as artificial intelligence.

That all changed in November, when San Francisco-based startup OpenAI, which has around 500 employees launched ChatGPT, the advanced chatbot and large language model that put every tech giant on red alert.

In a few short months, OpenAIs ChatGPT has quickly become one of the worlds most widely-used apps. The chatbot surged past 100 million monthly active users in January and is now the fastest-growing consumer app in history, according to a Wednesday research note by Swiss investment bank UBS. Although not without its informational shortcomings, ChatGPTs popularity looks unlikely to wane anytime soon, given how it continues to wow audiences worldwide.

Tech giants were sure to take notice, especially after rival Microsoft announced a $10 billion investment that effectively puts it in charge of the artificial intelligence startup for the next few years. And they confirmed as much during their investor calls this week. Although some are still reeling from sagging sales and thousands of layoffs, many tech leaders are signaling that A.I. is set to play a much bigger role moving forward.

Unlocking the incredible opportunities A.I. enables for consumers, our partners and for our business is one of Google parent Alphabets biggest priorities in 2023, CEO Sundar Pichai said in his opening remarks during Alphabets earnings call with investors Thursday.

A.I. is the most profound technology we are working on today, he added.

Big Tech piles into A.I.

Google has a vested interest in staying competitive with OpenAI and Microsoft, as ChatGPT poses a direct threat and reportedly sparked a code red for the former companys long-standing search engine hegemony. 

Pichai said during the call that Alphabet will imminently incorporate its own A.I., known as LaMDA, into its search engine.

Very soon, people will be able to interact directly with our newest, most powerful language model as a companion to Search, in experimental and innovative ways. Stay tuned, he said.

Weve been preparing for this moment since early last year, and youre going to see a lot from us in the coming few months, he added of the companys planned rollout of different A.I. products, which include PaLM, another large language model.

But Google isnt the only Big Tech company targeting a bigger A.I. presence to counter OpenAIs rise. During Apples earnings call on Thursday, CEO Tim Cook said A.I. is a major focus at the company, adding that its applications have the potential to affect every product and every service that we have.

Facebook parent Meta has also been spending more on its A.I. programs in recent months to sustain its metaverse ambitions and has reworked its data center design plans to ensure A.I. workloads can be supported. 

Company leaders emphasized these points during Metas earnings call Wednesday: The two major technological waves driving our roadmap are AI today and over the longer term the metaverse, CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg said. CFO Susan Li added the company is investing heavily in AI over the long term to enhance its privacy features.

Meta has also signaled a greater focus on A.I. in the months ahead as the company seeks to optimize the performance of Reels, its short-form video feature on Facebook and Instagram, which has so far failed to emulate the success of similar offerings from competitor apps like TikTok.

The startup threat

But the big tech companies coming up against OpenAI and the many other startups working on artificial intelligence and its growing list of applications may come up against an inherent disadvantage: Big Tech might be just too big.

Disruptive technological developments such as big advances in A.I. tend to come a lot easier to more nimble startups than large companies weighted down by bureaucracy, according to Clayton Christensen, the late Harvard economist and business consultant who quite literally wrote the book on disruptive innovation more than once. Christensen argued in his work that big companies tend to be less successful at innovating given the pressures of preserving their established business.

One of the bittersweet results of success, in fact, is that as companies become large, they lose the ability to enter small, emerging markets, Christensen wrote in a 2000 article for Harvard Business Review. The reason, therefore, that large companies often surrender emerging growth markets is that smaller, disruptive companies are actually more capable of pursuing them.

For companies like Alphabet and Meta, the disruptive force of A.I. might present the same challenge. From a technological standpoint, Googles language models and ChatGPT have a lot more thats similar than different, UBS researchers wrote in this weeks report. But that doesnt mean Google can rid itself of bureaucratic obstacles as easily.

Last month, Google released an update on its A.I. work that reiterated its commitment to advancing the technology, but while the UBS report praised the companys work, it warned Google against getting in its own way.

Reading this post, it feels like a company that is fighting a lot of institutional roadblocks, and at a time when there might be tectonic shifts underway in technology, researchers wrote.

Companies like Alphabet and Meta may have more resources than OpenAI, but theres a good reason the startup was able to successfully launch its product to the public before any of the industry heavyweights, who now risk being left behind.

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Despite rising interest rates, high inflation, and consistent announcements of tech sector layoffs, the labor market as a whole has remained incredibly resilientand Becky Frankiewicz, president of ManpowerGroup, the third largest staffing firm in the world, thinks she knows why.

Pandemic paranoia has set in with employers who remember how hard it was to bring back workers, she told Fortune. So, it makes sense that despite what we are seeing in headlines regarding layoffs, they are still well below historical normswith fewer than 1% of the population laid off in December 2022 and an unemployment rate of 1.8% in tech.

After millions of workers lost their jobs during the initial stages of the pandemic in early 2020, stimulus checks and the rise of remote work helped spur consumer demand more than many economists had initially anticipated. 

That left employers scrambling to rehire lost talent throughout the pandemic, but it was easier said than done. Worker shortages persisted across the economy due to a growing skills gap  and quit rates that soared in a phenomenon now known as The Great Resignation.

By October of 2021, 73% of CEOs said that a labor and skills shortage was their companys biggest challenge, Fortune found in a survey done in collaboration with Deloitte. And in some sectors, labor shortages continue even nowthe metal fabrication industry, for example, expects a 400,000-worker shortage by next year. This lack of talent has helped keep the labor market running like a bullet train, Frankiewicz said.

From ManpowerGroups real time data, we know that employers are actively adding to their workforces, particularly for permanent in-demand skills like registered nurses, software developers, retail workers, and hospitality workers, she said, adding that many companies are also looking to entice boomerang workers who made sector switches during the pandemic to come back.  

Frankiewicz also argued that the historically low labor force participation (62.4%)which measures the percentage of the population that is working or actively looking for workhas exacerbated the worker shortage in the U.S., helping lower the unemployment rate.

We still have a participation problem in our country, she said. We are still in a jobs market where labor demand far outpaces supply, with 3 million fewer workers than before the pandemic.

And while the latest layoffs in the tech sector, which included over 70,000 lost jobs in the past year, have spooked some investors and captured headlines, Frankiewicz believes that they are simply pandemic hiring coming full circle.

During the pandemic, tech firms went on a hiring spree like never before. Between 2019 and 2022, Googles parent company Alphabet, for example, increased its headcount by 64%, while Amazon and Facebook-parent Meta both more than doubled theirs.

Julia Pollak, chief economist at ZipRecruiter, used the analogy of a war to explain the tech industries latest hiring patterns.

The pandemic was tech companies warthey were right on the frontlines. Everyone was stuck at home on a computer, and they suddenly saw this surge in demand for what they were offering. So they pulled up the reservists; they surged manpower, she told Fortune. Now that moments over and things are calming down, so they are just getting back to normal with these layoffsits the natural response to demand rising and demand falling.

As far as where the labor market goes from here, Pollak said that conflicting data makes it difficult to tell, but she sees two potential outcomes.

Year-to-date hiring plans are pretty dismal right now. So its possible that companies are very worried about recession and theyre going to be more conservative when it comes to hiring, she said. On the other hand, its possible that employer demand for workers is still very high, and that the main constraint is supply. The widening gap between job openings and hires could reflect that companies just cant hire enough right now, because so many people left the labor market.

As former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers put it in a Bloomberg interview on Friday:

Its a pretty confused pictureI think its as difficult an economy to read as I can remember.

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At the close of a three-week trial, attorney Alex Spiro delivered a spirited defense of his client, his voice thundering in the San Francisco courtroom at times as he described Musk suffering deep pain in childhood. Musk now deserves vindication after years of controversy over his 2018 tweet that he had funding secured to take the electric-car maker private, the lawyer said.

Lawyers for the investors who sued called Musk a rich liar, fire-breathing dragon, Spiro said. Anarchy! they yelled out in court. The testimony Musks adversaries presented during the trial was designed to make jurors think: Bad tweet, bad tweet, fraud tweet, Spiro said.

But that was all just an act, Spiro said, while urging jurors to believe Musk when he testified that his tweets were absolutely truthful.  

This isnt the bad tweeter trial, Spiro said.

Earlier, a lawyer for the investors told the jury that Musks out-of-the-blue tweets on Aug. 7, 2018, ran afoul of basic requirements that every public company communicate with the market truthfully and accurately.

This case is about whether rules that are applied to everyone should also be applied to Elon Musk, said attorney Nicholas Porritt. Billionaires dont get to operate under a different set of rules.

The issue for the jury is whether Musks tweets amount to securities fraud, and whether he should be held liable for potentially billions of dollars in damages. Musk abandoned the take-private plan within a couple of weeks of tweeting about it but by then, investors allegedly had suffered big losses from fluctuations in Teslas stock price.

Investment banking witnesses previously testified that even a week after the tweets, they were still working to figure out how the deal would be structured, including who would pay for it.

Musks central defense is that he knew he could raise as much as $60 billion to take Tesla private based on a handshake deal with Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the governor of Saudi Arabias Public Investment Fund.

But Porritt told the jury that was a lie. 

The market understood funding secured to mean an actual commitment, he said. In reality, Porritt said, a text exchange between Al-Rumayyan and Musk days after the tweets shows that the commitment didnt exist and when the Saudi official said he needed more information, the Tesla CEO tried to bully him.

Confirm my lie or Ill never speak to you again, is how Porritt phrased the ultimatum he says Musk gave Al-Rumayyan.

The investors lawyer said the consequential harm the tweets did is beyond dispute, pointing the jurors to testimony they heard from expert witnesses that Musks pronouncements jolted the market. An economist testified this week that investors lost $12 billion over 10 days after the tweets a figure that applies to all Tesla investors, which is a larger group than those who are part of the class-action lawsuit.

The August 7 tweets are like an ice cube dropped in a glass of water, Porritt said. It immediately changes the temperature.

The CEO spent a little more than two days on the witness stand. He said that in addition to an unequivocal commitment by Saudi Arabia, he could have sold a stake in his rocket-ship company, SpaceX, to help finance the Tesla take-private transaction.

In re Tesla Inc. Securities Litigation, 18-cv-04865, US District Court, Northern District of California (San Francisco).

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Think of the wild price fluctuations of NFTs and the fly-by-night character of many drops. Then consider the outside role played by halfwit celebrities and paid-to-pay influencers, as well as that of outright scammers trying to trick people into clicking NFT-related phishing linksand you have, well, something like scams within scams.

The sometimes-absurd economic model of NFTs was unveiled in a sting operation today performed by Coffeezilla, an internet detective who has gained digital celebrity (i.e. 500,000 followers on Twitter and 2.5 million subscribers on YouTube) by exposing the worst corners of the crypto universe. 

In his latest operation, he allegedly tricked the mixed martial artist Dillon Danis into promoting a fake NFT project on his Twitter page. All Coffeezilla (aka Stephen Findeisen) had to do was pay Danis $1,000 to post the project. Danis, of course, did not disclose that he was being paid in his Twitter posta stipulation the Securities and Exchange Commission and Federal Trade Commission occasionally enforce.  

The knockout blow to the fighter, as Findeisen gleefully pointed out, was the name of the fake NFT project, SourzNFT Candies are Moundbound. Spelled out: 

S.P.A.M. 

Further hammering home Daniss take-the-money-no-questions-asked approach, the fake NFT link directs users to a website that reads Have you been scammed by Dillon Danis? 

The site includes receipts of various projects that Danis has promoted over the years, ostensibly for payment, while leaving his followers to hold the proverbial bag, from other NFTs to low-cap tokens. Adding insult to injury, Findeisen includes graphs to illustrate how many of the Danis-backed projects tank in value soon after he tweets about them.  

Presumably, Danis had an exit ramp and payment upfront for many of these ventures, although his willingness to shill a project for $1,000 either means that his living as an MMA fighter wasnt cutting it, or that he needs a new social media team.  

According to the MMA-focused website Sherdog, Daniswho apparently goes by El Jefeonly has two official fights under his belt, with the last one in 2019. 

Danis did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fortune. Findeisen said he would speak after his video reveal of the sting operation.

In a feat of staggering irony, Danis previously called out another notorious figure in the NFT and fighting-adjacent space, Logan Paul, for a questionable project that Coffeezilla had also exposed.  

Damn logan paul is a scumbag feel bad for everyone he scammed, Danis tweeted in December.  

Despite his frequent posting, Danis left his fake NFT tweet up for at least 20 minutes on Friday afternoon. It has since been deleted.  

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