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Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies before the House Financial Services Committee in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill October 23, 2019 in Washington, DC. Zuckerberg testified about Facebook’s proposed cryptocurrency Libra, how his company will handle false and misleading information by political leaders during the 2020 campaign and how it handles its users’ data and privacy.
Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images News | Getty Images

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg came out swinging at the start of the company’s third-quarter earnings call Monday, defending its research on how its services affect users, following numerous press reports Monday based on documents leaked by a former employee.

“Good faith criticism helps us get better,” Zuckerberg said. “But my view is that what we are seeing is a coordinated effort to selectively use leaked documents to paint a false picture of our company. The reality is that we have an open culture, where we encourage discussion and research about our work so we can make progress on many complex issues that are not specific to just us.”

Zuckerberg said Facebook does this work “because we care about getting this right.”

The reports came from a consortium of 17 news outlets in the U.S. that were provided internal research by Frances Haugen, a former employee who also provided the documents to Congress and the Securities and Exchange Commission, seeking whistleblower status. They follow an earlier series based on the same documents by The Wall Street Journal, which prompted hearings in Congress and abroad.

The reports revealed that Facebook had been aware of the ways its own services could negatively impact some users’ mental health, push polarized recommendations to users and spread potentially dangerous misinformation. While Facebook has taken steps to make its platform safer on all of these counts, the company’s detractors say it hasn’t acted boldly or quickly enough.

A theme in Zuckerberg’s argument was that the problems Facebook experiences are a reflection of society.

“These issues aren’t primarily about social media,” Zuckerberg said. “That means that no matter what Facebook does, we’re never going to solve them on our own.”

He said polarization began rising in the U.S. “before I was born” while pointing to unspecified research finding that countries with similar social media use have seen stagnant or declining polarization.

He said Facebook often needs to choose between a host of trade-offs, such as providing encryption versus supporting law enforcement investigations.

“It makes a good sound bite to say that we don’t solve these impossible trade-offs because we’re just focused on making money, but the reality is these questions are not primarily about our business, but about balancing different difficult social values,” he said.

Zuckerberg said he has called for regulation so that companies like Facebook aren’t the ones that have to choose between those trade-offs.

He said he’s proud of the research Facebook has done and emphasized the company’s investments in safety and security measures.

But, he said, he worries the response to Facebook’s research could create negative incentives for other businesses to do similar work.

“I worry about the incentives that we are creating for other companies to be as introspective as we have been,” he said. “But I am committed to continuing this work because I believe it will be better for our community and our business over the long term.”

A new ‘North Star’

Toward the end of his opening statement, Zuckerberg announced a new strategic vision for the future of the platform. He said that rather than make Facebook a place that caters to the greatest number of people, it will now place a greater focus on young adults, ages 18-29.

“We are retooling our teams to make serving young adults their North Star, rather than optimizing for the larger number of older people,” Zuckerberg said. “Like everything, this will involve trade-offs in our product, and it will likely mean the rest of our community will grow more slowly than it otherwise would have. But it should also mean that our services become stronger for young adults.”

Zuckerberg said the shift would take “years, not months.”

That change and others Zuckerberg mentioned, including refreshing Facebook and Instagram to put an emphasis on video and leaning into its Reels short video product, would make the platform more similar to TikTok and go after an important part of its user base. Zuckerberg pointed to TikTok as one of the most formidable competitors it’s seen.

Facebook often brings up TikTok’s rapid growth when faced with questions about its own vast power, which is the subject of an antitrust complaint brought by the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC has accused Facebook of illegally maintaining a monopoly in the personal social networking space, in part through its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp.

Several reports from the leaked documents showed Facebook has increasingly worried about the lack of engagement on its main platform among younger users, which would create an existential threat to its future. Still, the focus on young adults, rather than teens under 18, could ease pressure from lawmakers and others who have warned Facebook against making a version of its products for kids.

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No ‘woke AI’ in Washington, Trump says as he launches American AI action plan

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No ‘woke AI’ in Washington, Trump says as he launches American AI action plan

U.S. President Donald Trump holds an executive order related to AI after signing it during the “Winning the AI Race” Summit in Washington D.C., U.S., July 23, 2025.

Kent Nishimura | Reuters

U.S. President Donald Trump has vowed to keep “woke AI” models out of Washington and to turn the country into an “AI export powerhouse” through the signing of three artificial intelligence-focused executive orders on Wednesday. 

The phasing out of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives — an umbrella term encompassing various practices, policies, and strategies aimed at fostering a more inclusive and equitable culture — has been a major focus of the second Trump administration. Now, the White House is bringing the battle to AI. 

The “PREVENTING WOKE AI IN THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT” order states that the federal government “has the obligation not to procure models that sacrifice truthfulness and accuracy to ideological agendas.”

The executive order identifies DEI as one of the “most pervasive and destructive” of these ideologies to be kept out of AI models used by the government. 

“LLMs shall be neutral, nonpartisan tools that do not manipulate responses in favor of ideological dogmas such as DEI,” the order said, adding that developers should not intentionally encode partisan or ideological judgments into an LLM’s outputs unless those judgments are prompted by users. 

As acknowledged by the order, the use of AI is increasingly prevalent across Americans’ daily lives and is expected to play a critical role in the way they learn and consume information — making “reliable outputs” necessary.

In the eyes of the Trump administration, DEI in AI can lead to discriminatory outcomes; distort and manipulate AI model outputs in regard to race and sex; and incorporate concepts like critical race theory, transgenderism, unconscious bias, intersectionality and systemic racism. 

“DEI displaces the commitment to truth in favor of preferred outcomes and, as recent history illustrates, poses an existential threat to reliable AI,” the anti-woke order reads. 

Without giving specifics, the order refers to past examples of this, including a major AI model that changed the race or sex of historical figures such as the pope and Founding Fathers when prompted for images.  

In response to backlash last year, Google had pulled its Gemini AI image generation feature, saying it offered “inaccuracies” in historical pictures. Months later, the company rolled out an improved version. 

Instead of “woke AI”, the government should procure “truth-seeking” AI models that “prioritize historical accuracy, scientific inquiry, and objectivity, and shall acknowledge uncertainty where reliable information is incomplete or contradictory,” the order stated. 

However, it adds that the federal government “should be hesitant” to regulate the functionality of AI models in the private marketplace.

In other AI developments on Wednesday, the Trump administration signed an order to spur innovation in the technology by removing what it called “onerous Federal regulations that hinder AI development and deployment.”

Another order aims to establish and implement an “American AI Exports Program” to support the development and deployment of the U.S. AI technology stack abroad. 

The moves are part of the administration’s “Winning the AI Race: America’s AI Action Plan,” which it says identifies 90 federal policy actions across three pillars: the acceleration of innovation, building of AI infrastructure, and leadership in international diplomacy and security.

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Estonia’s tech elite are getting behind a European challenger to Robinhood

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Estonia's tech elite are getting behind a European challenger to Robinhood

The Lightyear app.

Lightyear

Some of the biggest names of Estonia’s tech scene are backing Lightyear, a startup looking to become Europe’s answer to commission-free trading pioneer Robinhood.

Based in London, Lightyear develops an app that lets users invest in a range of over 5,000 stocks, exchange-traded funds and money market funds. It was founded by two former Wise employees, Martin Sokk and Mihkel Aamer, in 2021.

The company is set to announce later on Thursday that it has raised $23 million in a new round of funding led by NordicNinja, a Japanese-backed venture capital fund based in Europe. Estonian tech entrepreneur Markus Villig, who co-founded ride-hailing unicorn Bolt has also invested.

Lightyear CEO Sokk told CNBC that the firm didn’t necessarily need to raise more cash for the business but chose to do so because of the caliber of investors involved.

“People like Markus have been building massive companies in many, many markets, and this is something that’s really exciting for us because it’s so hard to go into all the markets and understand their local dynamics and what people need,” he said.

Lightyear currently operates in 25 countries. However, with help from angel investors like Bolt’s Villig, the firm will be able to launch in another five markets “pretty quickly,” Sokk said.

Villig told CNBC that it can be “challenging to scale a business across multiple countries in a heavily regulated sector,” adding that Europe’s less developed retail investing market provides ample opportunities for disruption.

Other Estonian angel investors who have previously backed Lightyear also participated in the funding round, including Wise co-founder Taavet Hinrikus, Checkout.com’s former Chief Technology Officer Ott Kaukver and Skype founding engineer Jaan Tallinn.

Estonia is widely considered a prominent tech hub in Europe. The country is home to the highest number of unicorns per capita in Europe, according to the Estonian Investment Agency. Meanwhile, Estonia’s e-residency scheme has also enabled foreigners to become digital residents and launch their companies in the country.

The new round values five-year-old Lightyear at between $200 million and $300 million, significantly higher than its valuation in 2022 when it raised $25 million, according to two people familiar with the matter who preferred to remain anonymous as the information has not been made public.

Pushing into AI, crypto

Alongside the additional funding, Lightyear is also launching new artificial intelligence features. AI has been a hot area of investment for startups following the explosive popularity of generative AI services like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

One of the features, called “Why Did It Move,” allows users to select a point in time on a stock chart and see what happened that day to cause a jump or fall in a company’s share price. The firm is also using AI to provide “bull” and “bear” theses on stocks as well as short updates on assets in their own portfolios.

“In the end, you’re going to have two models” when it comes to investing, according to Sokk: “Self-driving money,” where you ask an AI to achieve certain investment goals, and a “manual gearbox” approach of figuring out different strategies and approaches on your own.

Still, the market for online investment products is heavily competitive. Lightyear faces some hefty competition from both incumbent brokerage services as well as more modern tech players such as Robinhood, Revolut and Trade Republic.

However, Sokk insists Lightyear is building a differentiated enough product to stand out from the crowd. While competitors like Robinhood profit from offering risky products like crypto and margin trading, Lightyear is focused on serving long-term investors, he told CNBC.

To that end, Sokk said Lightyear is planning on rolling out a crypto product of its own in two months’ time — one that’s “more focused on a long-term view.”

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Google’s $85 billion capital spend spurred by cloud, AI demand

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Google's  billion capital spend spurred by cloud, AI demand

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet Inc., during Stanford’s 2024 Business, Government, and Society forum in Stanford, California, April 3, 2024.

Justin Sullivan | Getty Images

Google is going to spend $10 billion more this year than it previously expected due to the growing demand for cloud services, which has created a backlog, executives said Wednesday.

As part of its second quarter earnings, the company increased its forecast for capital expenditures in 2025 to $85 billion due to “strong and growing demand for our Cloud products and services” as it continues to expand infrastructure to power more AI services that use its cloud technology. That’s up from the $75 billion projection that Google provided in February, which was already above the $58.84 billion that Wall Street expected at the time.

The increased forecast comes as demand for cloud services surges across the tech industry as AI services increase in popularity. As a result, companies are doubling down on infrastructure to keep pace with demand and are planning multi‑year buildouts of data centers.

In its second quarter earnings, Google reported that cloud revenues increased by 32% to $13.6 billion in the period. The demand is so high for Google’s cloud services that it now amounts to a $106 billion backlog, Alphabet finance chief Anat Ashkenazi said during the company’s post-earnings conference call.

“It’s a tight supply environment,” she said.

The vast majority of Alphabet’s capital spend was invested in technical infrastructure during the second quarter, with approximately two-thirds of investments going to servers and one-third in data center and networking equipment, Ashkenazi said.

She added that the updated outlook reflects additional investment in servers, the timing of delivery of servers and “an acceleration in the pace of data center construction, primarily to meet Cloud customer demand.”

Ashkenazi said that despite the company’s “improved” pace of getting servers up and running, investors should expect further increase in capital spend in 2026 “due to the demand as well as growth opportunities across the company.” She didn’t specify what those opportunities are but said the company will provide more details on a future earnings call.

“We’re increasing capacity with every quarter that goes by,” Ashkenazi said. 

Due to the increased spend, Google will have to record more expenses over time, which will make profits look smaller, she said.

“Obviously, we’re working hard to bring more capacity online,” Ashkenazi said.

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