Karen Hao: Silicon Valley has imperial ambitions!

Credit…Sam Whitney/The New York Times

Dear Commons Community,

Karen Hao, author of Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI, had an opinion essay yesterday entitled, “Silicon Valley Is at an Inflection Point”, that originally was entitled, “Silicon Valley has imperial ambitions”

She comments that:

“The leading A.I. giants are no longer merely multinational corporations; they are growing into modern-day empires. With the full support of the federal government, soon they will be able to reshape most spheres of society as they please, from the political to the economic to the production of science.”…

“These companies are at an inflection point. With Mr. Trump’s election, Silicon Valley’s power will reach new heights. The president named David Sacks, a billionaire venture capitalist and A.I. investor, as his A.I. czar and …..brought a cadre of tech executives with him on his recent trip to Saudi Arabia. If Senate Republicans now vote to prohibit states from regulating A.I. for 10 years, Silicon Valley’s impunity will be enshrined in law, cementing these companies’ empire status.

Their influence now extends well beyond the realm of business. We are now closer than ever to a world in which tech companies can seize land, operate their own currencies, reorder the economy and remake our politics with little consequence. That comes at a cost — when companies rule supreme, people lose their ability to assert their voice in the political process and democracy cannot hold.”

So true!

Below is the entire essay.

Tony

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The New York Times

Silicon Valley Is at an Inflection Point

May 30, 2025

By Karen Hao

On his second day in office this year, President Trump underscored his unequivocal support for the tech industry. Standing at a lectern next to tech leaders, he announced the Stargate Project, a plan to pump $500 billion in private investment over four years into artificial intelligence infrastructure. For comparison: The Apollo mission, which sent the first men to the moon, spent around $300 billion in today’s dollars over 13 years. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, played down the investment. “It sounds crazy big now,” he said. “I bet it won’t sound that big in a few years.”

In the decade that I have observed Silicon Valley — first as an engineer, then as a journalist — I’ve watched the industry shift to a new paradigm. Tech companies have long reaped the benefits of a friendly U.S. government, but the Trump administration has made clear that it will now grant new firepower to the industry’s ambitions. The Stargate announcement was just one signal. Another was the Republican tax bill that the House passed last week, which would prohibit states from regulating A.I. for the next 10 years.

The leading A.I. giants are no longer merely multinational corporations; they are growing into modern-day empires. With the full support of the federal government, soon they will be able to reshape most spheres of society as they please, from the political to the economic to the production of science.

When I took my first job in Silicon Valley 10 years ago, the industry’s wealth and influence were already expanding. The tech giants had grandiose missions — take Google’s, to “organize the world’s information” — which they used to attract young workers and capital investment. But with the promise of developing artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., those grandiose missions have turned into civilizing ones. Companies claim they will bring humanity into a new, enlightened age — that they alone have the scientific and moral clarity to control a technology that, in their telling, will usher us to hell if China develops it first. “A.I. companies in the U.S. and other democracies must have better models than those in China if we want to prevail,” said Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic, an A.I. start-up.

This language is as far-fetched as it sounds, and Silicon Valley has a long history of making promises that never materialize. Yet the narrative that A.G.I. is just around the corner and will usher in “massive prosperity,” as Mr. Altman has written, is already leading companies to accrue large amounts of capital, lay claim to data and electricity and build enormous data centers that are accelerating the climate crisis. These gains will fortify tech companies’ power and erode human rights long after the shine of the industry’s promises wears off.

The quest for A.G.I. is giving companies cover to vacuum up more data than ever before, with profound implications for people’s privacy and intellectual property rights. Before investing heavily in generative A.I., Meta had amassed data from nearly four billion accounts, but it no longer considers that enough. To train its generative A.I. models, the company has scraped the web with little regard for copyright and even considered buying up Simon & Schuster to meet the new data imperative.

These developments are also persuading companies to escalate their consumption of natural resources. Early drafts of the Stargate Project estimated that its A.I. supercomputer could need about as much power as three million homes. And McKinsey & Company now projects that by 2030, the global grid will need to add around two to six times the energy capacity it took to power California in 2022 to sustain the current rate of Silicon Valley’s expansion. “In any scenario, these are staggering investment numbers,” McKinsey wrote. One OpenAI employee told me that the company is running out of land and electricity.

Meanwhile, there are fewer independent A.I. experts to hold Silicon Valley to account. In 2004, only 21 percent of people graduating from Ph.D. programs in artificial intelligence joined the private sector. In 2020, nearly 70 percent did, one study found. They’ve been won over by the promise of compensation packages that can easily rise above $1 million. This means that companies like OpenAI can lock down the researchers who might otherwise be asking tough questions about their products and publishing their findings publicly for all to read. Based on my conversations with professors and scientists, ChatGPT’s release has exacerbated that trend — with even more researchers joining companies like OpenAI.

This talent monopoly has reoriented the kind of research that’s done in this field. Imagine what would happen if most climate science were done by researchers who worked in fossil fuel companies. That’s what’s happening with artificial intelligence. Already, A.I. companies could be censoring critical research into the flaws and risks of their tools. Four years ago, the leaders of Google’s Ethical A.I. team said they were ousted after they wrote a paper raising questions about the industry’s growing focus on large language models, the technology that underpins ChatGPT and other generative A.I. products.

These companies are at an inflection point. With Mr. Trump’s election, Silicon Valley’s power will reach new heights. The president named David Sacks, a billionaire venture capitalist and A.I. investor, as his A.I. czar and empowered another tech billionaire, Elon Musk, to slash through the government. Mr. Trump brought a cadre of tech executives with him on his recent trip to Saudi Arabia. If Senate Republicans now vote to prohibit states from regulating A.I. for 10 years, Silicon Valley’s impunity will be enshrined in law, cementing these companies’ empire status.

Their influence now extends well beyond the realm of business. We are now closer than ever to a world in which tech companies can seize land, operate their own currencies, reorder the economy and remake our politics with little consequence. That comes at a cost — when companies rule supreme, people lose their ability to assert their voice in the political process and democracy cannot hold.

Technological progress does not require businesses to operate like empires. Some of the most impactful A.I. advancements came not from tech behemoths racing to recreate human levels of intelligence, but from the development of relatively inexpensive, energy-efficient models to tackle specific tasks such as weather forecasting. DeepMind’s AlphaFold built a nongenerative A.I. model that predicts protein structures from their sequences — a function critical to drug discovery and understanding disease. Its creators were awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

A.I. tools that help everyone cannot arise from a vision of development that demands the capitulation of a majority to the self-serving agenda of the few. Transitioning to a more equitable and sustainable A.I. future won’t be easy: It will require everyone — journalists, civil society, researchers, policymakers, citizens — to push back against the tech giants, produce thoughtful government regulation wherever possible and invest more in smaller-scale A.I. technologies. When people rise, empires fall.

 

Maureen Dowd:  Elon Musk Had to Go!

Credit…Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

Dear Commons Community,

Maureen Dowd had column yesterday entitled, Tech Bro Had to Go, commenting on the split up of the Trump and Elon Musk “partnership” in shrinking the federal government. Here is her introduction.

“Elon Musk came to Washington with a chain saw and left with a black eye.

Shrinking government is hard, particularly when you do it callously and carelessly — and apparently on hallucinogens.

As with President Trump’s tariffs, DOGE has created more volatility than value.

A guy who went bankrupt six times doesn’t really care about spending. And Trump certainly didn’t want to see the headline, “Trump Cuts Social Security.”

He just wanted to get revenge on “the bureaucracy” by deputizing Musk to force out a lot of federal employees and give the impression they were cutting all the waste.”

Dowd concludes:

“Trump gave Musk a golden ceremonial White House key, the kind of thing small-town mayors give out, and proclaimed: “Elon’s really not leaving. He’s going to be back and forth, I think.” Trump said that the father of (at least) 14 would never desert DOGE completely because “It’s his baby.”

Musk brought the Silicon Valley mantra “Move fast and break things” to D.C. But the main thing he broke was his own reputation.”

The entire column is below.

Tony

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The New York Times

Tech Bro Had to Go

May 31, 2025

By Maureen Dowd

Opinion Columnist, reporting from Washington

Elon Musk came to Washington with a chain saw and left with a black eye.

Shrinking government is hard, particularly when you do it callously and carelessly — and apparently on hallucinogens.

As with President Trump’s tariffs, DOGE has created more volatility than value.

A guy who went bankrupt six times doesn’t really care about spending. And Trump certainly didn’t want to see the headline, “Trump Cuts Social Security.”

He just wanted to get revenge on “the bureaucracy” by deputizing Musk to force out a lot of federal employees and give the impression they were cutting all the waste.

As always with Trump, the former reality star, the impression matters more than the reality, especially the reality of his own sins. This past week, Trump tried to recast the very nature of crime.

As The Times’s Glenn Thrush wrote: “President Trump is employing the vast power of his office to redefine criminality to suit his needs — using pardons to inoculate criminals he happens to like, downplaying corruption and fraud as crimes, and seeking to stigmatize political opponents by labeling them criminals.”

It is sickening that the Justice Department is considering settling a wrongful-death lawsuit by giving $5 million to the family of Ashli Babbitt — who was shot on Jan. 6, 2021, by a Capitol police officer when she ignored his warnings and tried to climb through a smashed window into the Speaker’s Lobby in the Capitol.

If Babbitt was trying to help Trump claw back a “stolen” election by breaking into the Capitol, then breaking into the Capitol must be a good thing to do, and any police officer who tried to stop her and protect lawmakers cowering under desks must be in the wrong.

To abet Trump’s fake reality, the craven House Republicans refused to put up a plaque honoring the police officers and others who defended the Capitol that awful day.

I take it personally because my dad spent 20 years as the D.C. police inspector in charge of Senate security. He would run to the House whenever there was trouble. So if on Jan. 6 Mike Dowd had been preventing insurrectionists from assaulting lawmakers, he would now be, in Trump’s eyes, not a hero deserving of a plaque, but a blackguard who was thwarting “patriots,” as Trump calls the rioters he pardoned.

It is a disturbing bizarro world.

Trump was rewriting reality again on Friday afternoon as one of the most flamboyant, destructive bromances in government history petered out in the Oval Office.

It had peaked last winter when Musk posted on X, “I love @realDonaldTrump as much as a straight man can love another man,” and again when Trump tried to reciprocate by hawking Teslas in the White House driveway.

But on Friday, even these grand master salesmen couldn’t sell the spin that Elon had “delivered a colossal change.”

Musk has acknowledged recently that his dream of cutting $1 trillion had been a fantasy. He said changing D.C. was “an uphill battle” and complained that Trump’s “big, beautiful” budget bill, which could add over $3 trillion in debt, undercut his DOGE attempts to save money.

As Trump said, Musk got a lot of “the slings and the arrows.” His approval rating cratered and violence has been directed toward Tesla, a brand once loved by liberals and in China, which is now tarnished.

Musk cut off a reporter who tried to ask about a New York Times article asserting that he was a habitual user of ketamine and a dabbler in Ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms even after Trump had given him enormous control over the government.

That could explain the chain saw-wielding, the jumping up and down onstage, the manic baby-making and crusading for more spreading of sperm by smart people, and the ominous Nazi-style salutes.

When a reporter asked Musk why he had a black eye, he joked about the viral video of Brigitte Macron shoving her husband’s face. Then he explained that while “horsing around” with his 5-year-old, X, he suggested the child punch him in the face, “and he did.”

The president and the Tony Stark prototype tried to convey the idea that they would remain tight, even though Musk would no longer be getting into angry altercations with Scott Bessent outside the Oval, sleeping on the floor of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building and hanging around Mar-a-Lago. (Trump wants the $100 million Musk has pledged for his political operation.)

Musk, wearing a black “DOGE” cap and black “Dogefather” T-shirt, looked around the Oval, which Trump has tarted up to look like a Vegas gift shop, and gushed that it “finally has the majesty that it deserves, thanks to the president.”

Trump gave Musk a golden ceremonial White House key, the kind of thing small-town mayors give out, and proclaimed: “Elon’s really not leaving. He’s going to be back and forth, I think.” Trump said that the father of (at least) 14 would never desert DOGE completely because “It’s his baby.”

Musk brought the Silicon Valley mantra “Move fast and break things” to D.C. But the main thing he broke was his own reputation.

 

40% of Gen Z and millennial workers say they would take a pay cut to work from home!

Getty Images—Anchiy

Dear Commons Community,

Gen Z and millennial workers prioritize work flexibility—some so much so they’d take a pay cut in order to have hybrid or remote work, a recent LinkedIn survey shows. But these young workers still see the value in coming into the office to build relationships.

We’re five years past the start of the pandemic, which fundamentally changed how and where we work. While many companies still offer remote or hybrid work, there’s also been a major push from employers to get workers back in the office full time.

Workers of all generations have mixed feelings about return-to-office mandates, but many younger-generation workers would still prefer to work fully remote or on a hybrid schedule. Some even say they would take a pay cut in order to get the work flexibility they got during the pandemic.  As reported by Fortune and Linkedin.

In the LinkedIn survey of more than 4,000 U.S.-based workers, nearly 40% of Gen Z and millennial workers said they would take a pay cut in exchange for more flexibility about where they work. Across all generations, the share was 32%.

Other reasons Gen Z and millennial workers would take a pay cut is for a job with better upward mobility, a more reasonable workload, and a better relationship with their boss, according to the survey.

Laura Roman, a senior talent acquisition manager with London-based marketing firm Up World, wrote in an April LinkedIn post one of her candidates took a £7,000 pay cut—about $9,300—for a fully remote job. ,,“The founder was hesitant at first. She couldn’t wrap her head around it. Why would anyone willingly take less money?” Roman wrote. “But then it clicked. They were offering something just as valuable as a bigger salary (for that candidate): flexibility.”

“Not everyone can afford to trade money for flexibility, but for those who can, it’s becoming a no-brainer,” she added.

Another early 2025 study by Robert Half showed when the gap between a candidate’s salary expectation and an offer is too great, many employers are negotiating remote and hybrid work to get candidates to sign on the dotted line.

Theresa L. Fesinstine, founder of human resources advisory peoplepower.ai, previously told Fortune she’s seen some candidates accept 5% to 15% less pay in exchange for remote work.

“There’s this unspoken exchange rate between flexibility and comp, and for some candidates, it’s worth a significant tradeoff,” Fesinstine said. This is especially true “for those who value work-life balance or are saving on commute costs.”

Gen Z and millennials still want some in-office experience

Although Gen Z and millennial workers report they’d prefer flexibility, that doesn’t mean they don’t want to come into the office at all. In fact, many Gen Z workers have led the charge back to in-office work. They see the value in forming in-real-life connections with coworkers and think being in the office gives them a better chance at getting promoted.

Still, Gen Z and millennial workers tend to prefer a hybrid schedule that allows them to work from home sometimes. In fact, a late March report by property group JLL shared with Fortune shows workers under 24 years old are more likely to be in office than other generations and come in an average of 3 days a week.

“While many actively seek roles offering face-to-face engagement, they reject rigid office mandates, prioritizing flexibility in when and how they work,” Lauren Winans, CEO and principal HR consultant at HR consulting firm Next Level Benefits, told Fortune. Gen Z “blends digital fluency with an appreciation for traditional office benefits.”

For Spencer McLean, a Gen Z public relations manager, hybrid work has been the best of both worlds. She’s enjoyed forming friendships in the office, asking coworkers questions, and learning on the job, she told Fortune. But she doesn’t love going into the office every day.

“Hybrid work gives you a brain break where you don’t have to have conversations constantly and can sit down and focus—and it gives your skin a break from makeup,” McLean said. “I love the flexibility I have now and I believe it’s made a huge difference in my mental health.”

Flexibility and quality of life are key factors.

Tony

The New York Times: Elon Musk has a more serious drug problem than previously known

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times reported  on Friday that Elon Musk has been taking large quantities of drugs for quite some time. As per the Times, Musk takes ketamine, ecstasy, psychedelic mushrooms, Ambien, Adderall, and other drugs, and traveled with a daily medication box that held about 20 pills.  Furthermore, his drug use reportedly intensified as he donated $275m to Trump’s presidential campaign and later wielded significant power through his role spearheading the “department of government efficiency”, or Doge.  As reported.

The CEO of SpaceX and Tesla reportedly took so much Ketamine, a dissociative anesthetic known to induce schizophrenia-like symptoms, that it affected his bladder function.

The report is bolstered by a January 2024 Wall Street Journal investigation in which sources close to Musk said they’d witnessed or had direct knowledge of him using LSD, cocaine, ecstasy, mushrooms and ketamine.

Musk’s attorney Alex Spiro told the Journal at the time that his client is “regularly and randomly drug tested at SpaceX” and has “never failed a test.”

It’s unclear how, or whether, Musk’s consumption habits changed once he became a federal bureaucrat with an office in the White House complex. He didn’t address the claims directly at a Friday afternoon press conference in the Oval Office, instead attacking the credibility of The New York Times itself.

But he’s continued drawing attention for unusual antics, including a chainsawwielding appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference and a Nazi-like hand gesture at Trump’s inaugural rally.

In April, Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D-N.J.) introduced a bill that would require Musk and his hires at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency to undergo regular drug testing, though the bill has gone nowhere in the Republican-majority house.

Donald Trump has given billionaire Elon Musk the keys to our government, and with it, access to highly sensitive information — from Treasury and Social Security data to even our most guarded military plans,” Sherrill wrote in a press release. “Those with access to sensitive information must be thoroughly vetted, clear-eyed, and exercise good judgment.”

Asked Friday if he was concerned about drug use by Musk, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller was dismissive ― but notably didn’t rule it out.

“The drugs that we’re concerned about are the drugs running across the southern border,” he told reporters.

The eccentric billionaire has openly discussed his ketamine use in the past. In a 2024 interview with Don Lemon, he said he took “a small amount” every other week ― but got miffed when Lemon pushed him on it.

“If you’ve used too much ketamine, you can’t really get work done, and I have a lot of work,” he told the journalist at the time.

An Atlantic article describing the drug’s effects on the body found people build tolerance to it very quickly, requiring ever larger doses to achieve the same high and leading to long-term impaired cognition, including “delusional thinking, superstitious beliefs, and a sense of specialness and importance.”

Those would seem to strike a chord with Sam Harris, a public intellectual and former friend of Musk, who publicly broke with the world’s richest man in a post earlier this year.

“Any dispassionate observer of Elon’s behavior on Twitter/X can see that there is something seriously wrong with his moral compass, if not his perception of reality,” he wrote.

Musk should get help!

Tony