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Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google
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Several hundred Google employees have signed and circulated a manifesto opposing the company’s vaccine mandate, posing the latest challenge for leadership as it approaches key deadlines for returning workers to offices in person.

The Biden administration has ordered U.S. companies with 100 or more workers to ensure their employees are fully vaccinated or regularly tested for Covid-19 by Jan. 4. In response, Google has asked its more than 150,000 employees to upload their vaccination status to its internal systems by Dec. 3, whether they plan on coming into the office or not, according to internal documents viewed by CNBC. The company has also said that all employees who work directly or indirectly with government contracts must be vaccinated — even if they are working from home.

“Vaccines are key to our ability to enable a safe return to office for everyone and minimize the spread of Covid-19 in our communities, wrote Chris Rackow, Google VP of security, in an email sent near the end of October.

Rackow stated the company was already implementing requirements, so the changes from Biden’s executive order were “minimal.” His email gave a deadline of Nov. 12 for employees to request exemptions for reasons such as religious beliefs or medical conditions, and said that cases would be decided on a case-by-case basis.

The manifesto within Google, which has been signed by at least 600 Google employees, asks company leaders to retract the vaccine mandate and create a new one that is “inclusive of all Googlers,” arguing leadership’s decision will have outsized influence in corporate America. It also calls on employees to “oppose the mandate as a matter of principle” and tells employees to not let the policy alter their decision if they’ve already chosen not to receive the Covid-19 shot.

The manifesto comes as most of the Google workforce approaches a deadline to return to physical offices three days a week starting Jan. 10. The company’s notably outspoken employees have previously debated everything from government contracts to cafeteria food changes. 

A spokesperson for Google said the company stands behind its policy. “As we’ve stated to all our employees and the author of this document, our vaccination requirements are one of the most important ways we can keep our workforce safe and keep our services running. We firmly stand behind our vaccination policy.”

The mandate dilemma

Vaccination is a dilemma not only for Google, but for corporate America in general. The Covid-19 virus has contributed to 772,570 deaths in the U.S., according to Johns Hopkins data. Despite proven effectiveness in providing a high level of protection against hospitalization and death, the country is struggling to persuade millions of people to get their first dose, as more than 60 million Americans remain unvaccinated.

In July, CEO Sundar Pichai announced the company would require vaccinations for those returning to offices. In October, Pichai said that the San Francisco Bay Area offices, near its headquarters, are up to 30% filled while New York is seeing nearly half of its employees back. He added at that time that employees who don’t want to get vaccinated would be able to continue working remotely. 

The company has taken other steps to convince employees to get vaccinated as well. For instance, Joe Kava, vice president of data centers at Google, announced a $5,000 vaccination incentive spot bonus for U.S. data center employees, according to the manifesto.

In an email cited in the manifesto and viewed by CNBC, Google VP of global security Chris Rackow said that because of the company’s work with the federal government, which “today encompasses products and services spanning Ads, Cloud Maps, Workspace and more,” all employees working directly or indirectly with government contracts will require vaccinations — even if they are working from home. Frequent testing is “not a valid alternative,” he added.

The authors of the manifesto strongly disagree.

“I believe that Sundar’s Vaccine Mandate is deeply flawed,” the manifesto states, calling company leadership “coercive,” and “the antithesis of inclusion.” 

In a subhead titled “Respect the User,” the authors write that the mandate of “barring unvaccinated Googlers from the office publicly and possibly embarrassingly exposes a private choice as it would be difficult for the Googler not to reveal why they cannot return.”

The author also argues the mandate violates the company’s principles of inclusiveness.

“Such Googlers may never feel comfortable expressing their true sentiments about a company health policy and other, unrelated sensitive topics. This results in silenced perspective and exacerbates the internal ideological ‘echo chamber’ which folks both inside and outside of Google have observed for years.”

The manifesto also opposes Google having a record of employees’ vaccination status.

“I do not believe Google should be privy to the health and medical history of Googlers and the vaccination status is no exception.” Google has asked employees to upload their vaccination proof to Google’s “environmental health and safety” team even if they already uploaded it to One Medical, one of Google’s benefits providers, according to internal documentation.

The author then tries to argue the vaccine mandate may be the start of a slippery slope, paving the way for other intrusive measures — a common line of argument among people opposed to the mandates.

“It normalizes medical intervention compulsion not only for Covid-19 vaccination but for future vaccines and possibly even non-vaccine interventions by extension. It justifies the principle of division and unequal treatment of Googlers based on their personal beliefs and decisions. The implications are chilling. Due to its presence as an industry leader, Google’s mandate will influence companies around the world to consider these as acceptable tradeoffs.”

The group has sent these concerns in an open letter to Google’s chief health officer Karen DeSalvo, the document states.

In Google’s most recent all-hands meeting, called TGIF, some employees attempted to bring more attention to the vaccine question by getting fellow employees “downvote” other questions in an internal system called Dory, according to an internal email chain viewed by CNBC. The goal was to ensure their questions would gain enough votes to qualify for executives to address them.

Google’s health ambitions

The pushback against vaccine mandates poses a new challenge for Google’s leadership at a time when it is trying to target the healthcare industry among its growing business ambitions — particularly for its cloud unit. 

In August, Google disbanded its health unit as a formalized business unit for the health-care sector and Dr. David Feinberg, who spent the past two years leading the search giant’s health care unit, left the company. Nonetheless, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian has routinely mentioned healthcare sector as a key focus area and DeSalvo, an ex-Obama administrator whom Google hired as its first health chief in 2019, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” last month the tech giant is “still all in on health.”

The company has tried to capitalize on the broader fight against Covid in several ways. In the first half of 2021, the company spent nearly $30 million on at-home Covid tests for employees from Cue Health, which went public in September at a $3 billion valuation. Shortly after, the company announced a separate partnership with Google’s cloud unit to collect and analyze Covid-19 data with hopes of predicting future variants. Google also teamed up with Apple for an opt-in contract tracing software in hopes of tracking Covid-19.

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Web giant Cloudflare to block AI bots from scraping content by default

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Web giant Cloudflare to block AI bots from scraping content by default

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Internet firm Cloudflare will start blocking artificial intelligence crawlers from accessing content without website owners’ permission or compensation by default, in a move that could significantly impact AI developers’ ability to train their models.

Starting Tuesday, every new web domain that signs up to Cloudflare will be asked if they want to allow AI crawlers, effectively giving them the ability to prevent bots from scraping data from their websites.

Cloudflare is what’s called a content delivery network, or CDN. It helps businesses deliver online content and applications faster by caching the data closer to end-users. They play a significant role in making sure people can access web content seamlessly every day.

Roughly 16% of global internet traffic goes directly through Cloudflare’s CDN, the firm estimated in a 2023 report.

“AI crawlers have been scraping content without limits. Our goal is to put the power back in the hands of creators, while still helping AI companies innovate,” said Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, in a statement Tuesday.

“This is about safeguarding the future of a free and vibrant Internet with a new model that works for everyone,” he added.

What are AI crawlers?

AI crawlers are automated bots designed to extract large quantities of data from websites, databases and other sources of information to train large language models from the likes of OpenAI and Google.

Whereas the internet previously rewarded creators by directing users to original websites, according to Cloudflare, today AI crawlers are breaking that model by collecting text, articles and images to generate responses to queries in a way that users don’t need to visit the original source.

This, the company adds, is depriving publishers of vital traffic and, in turn, revenue from online advertising.

Read more CNBC tech news

Tuesday’s move builds on a tool Cloudflare launched in September last year that gave publishers the ability to block AI crawlers with a single click. Now, the company is going a step further by making this the default for all websites it provides services for.

OpenAI says it declined to participate when Cloudflare previewed its plan to block AI crawlers by default on the grounds that the content delivery network is adding a middleman to the system.

The Microsoft-backed AI lab stressed its role as a pioneer of using robots.txt, a set of code that prevents automated scraping of web data, and said its crawlers respect publisher preferences.

“AI crawlers are typically seen as more invasive and selective when it comes to the data they consumer. They have been accused of overwhelming websites and significantly impacting user experience,” Matthew Holman, a partner at U.K. law firm Cripps, told CNBC.

“If effective, the development would hinder AI chatbots’ ability to harvest data for training and search purposes,” he added. “This is likely to lead to a short term impact on AI model training and could, over the long term, affect the viability of models.”

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Elon Musk’s xAI raises $10 billion in debt and equity as it steps up challenge to OpenAI

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Elon Musk's xAI raises  billion in debt and equity as it steps up challenge to OpenAI

Elon Musk announced his new company xAI, which he says has the goal to understand the true nature of the universe.

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XAI, the artificial intelligence startup run by Elon Musk, raised a combined $10 billion in debt and equity, Morgan Stanley said.

Half of that sum was clinched through secured notes and term loans, while a separate $5 billion was secured through strategic equity investment, the bank said on Monday.

The funding gives xAI more firepower to build out infrastructure and develop its Grok AI chatbot as it looks to compete with bitter rival OpenAI, as well as with a swathe of other players including Amazon-backed Anthropic.

In May, Musk told CNBC that xAI has already installed 200,000 graphics processing units (GPUs) at its Colossus facility in Memphis, Tennessee. Colossus is xAI’s supercomputer that trains the firm’s AI. Musk at the time said that his company will continue buying chips from semiconductor giants Nvidia and AMD and that xAI is planning a 1-million-GPU facility outside of Memphis.

Addressing the latest funds raised by the company, Morgan Stanley that “the proceeds will support xAI’s continued development of cutting-edge AI solutions, including one of the world’s largest data center and its flagship Grok platform.”

xAI continues to release updates to Grok and unveiled the Grok 3 AI model in February. Musk has sought to boost the use of Grok by integrating the AI model with the X social media platform, formerly known as Twitter. In March, xAI acquired X in a deal that valued the site at $33 billion and the AI firm at $80 billion. It’s unclear if the new equity raise has changed that valuation.

xAI was not immediately available for comment.

Last year, xAI raised $6 billion at a valuation of $50 billion, CNBC reported.

Morgan Stanley said the latest debt offering was “oversubscribed and included prominent global debt investors.”

Competition among American AI startups is intensifying, with companies raising huge amounts of funding to buy chips and build infrastructure.

OpenAI in March closed a $40 billion financing round that valued the ChatGPT developer at $300 billion. Its big investors include Microsoft and Japan’s SoftBank.

Anthropic, the developer of the Claude chatbot, closed a funding round in March that valued the firm at $61.5 billion. The company then received a five-year $2.5 billion revolving credit line in May.

Musk has called Grok a “maximally truth-seeking” AI that is also “anti-woke,” in a bid to set it apart from its rivals. But this has not come without its fair share of controversy. Earlier this year, Grok responded to user queries with unrelated comments about the controversial topic of “white genocide” and South Africa.

Musk has also clashed with fellow AI leaders, including OpenAI’s Sam Altman. Most famously, Musk claimed that OpenAI, which he co-founded, has deviated from its original mission of developing AI to benefit humanity as a nonprofit and is instead focused on commercial success. In February, Musk alongside a group of investors, put in a bid of $97.4 billion to buy control of OpenAI. Altman swiftly rejected the offer.

CNBC’s Lora Kolodny and Jonathan Vanian contributed to this report.

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China’s Huawei open-sources AI models as it seeks adoption across the global AI market

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China's Huawei open-sources AI models as it seeks adoption across the global AI market

In recent years, the company has transformed from a competent private sector telecommunications firm into a “muscular technology juggernaut straddling the entire AI hardware and software stack,” said Paul Triolo, partner and senior vice president for China at advisory firm DGA-Albright Stonebridge Group.

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Huawei has open-sourced two of its artificial intelligence models — a move tech experts say will help the U.S.-blacklisted firm continue to build its AI ecosystem and expand overseas. 

The Chinese tech giant announced on Monday the open-sourcing of the AI models under its Pangu series, as well as some of its model reasoning technology.

The moves are in line with other Chinese AI players that continue to push an open-source development strategy. Baidu also open-sourced its large language model series Ernie on Monday. 

Tech experts told CNBC that Huawei’s latest announcements not only highlight how it is solidifying itself as an open-source LLM player, but also how it is strengthening its position across the entire AI value chain as it works to overcome U.S.-led AI chip export restrictions.

In recent years, the company has transformed from a competent private sector telecommunications firm into a “muscular technology juggernaut straddling the entire AI hardware and software stack,” said Paul Triolo, partner and senior vice president for China at advisory firm DGA-Albright Stonebridge Group.

In its announcement Monday, Huawei called the open-source moves another key measure for Huawei’s “Ascend ecosystem strategy” that would help speed up the adoption of AI across “thousands of industries.”

The Ascend ecosystem refers to AI products built around the company’s Ascend AI chip series, which are widely considered to be China’s leading competitor to products from American chip giant Nvidia. Nvidia is restricted from selling its advanced products to China. 

A Google-like strategy?

Pangu being available in an open-source manner allows developers and businesses to test the models and customize them for their needs, said Lian Jye Su, chief analyst at Omdia. “The move is expected to incentivize the use of other Huawei products,” he added.

According to experts, the coupling of Huawei’s Pangu models with the company’s AI chips and related products gives the company a unique advantage, allowing it to optimize its AI solutions and applications. 

While competitors like Baidu have LLMs with broad capabilities, Huawei has focused on specialized AI models for sectors such as government, finance and manufacturing.

“Huawei is not as strong as companies like DeepSeek and Baidu at the overall software level – but it doesn’t need to be,” said Marc Einstein, research director at Counterpoint Research. 

“Its objective is to ultimately use open source products to drive hardware sales, which is a completely different model from others. It also collaborates with DeepSeek, Baidu and others and will continue to do so,” he added. 

Nvidia CEO: Huawei ‘has got China covered’ if the U.S. doesn’t participate

Ray Wang, principal analyst at Constellation Research, said the chip-to-model strategy is similar to that of Google, a company that is also developing AI chips and AI models like its open-source Gemma models.

Huawei’s announcement on Monday could also help with its international ambitions. Huawei, along with players like Zhipu AI, has been slowly making inroads into new overseas markets.

In its announcement Monday, Huawei invited developers, corporate partners and researchers around the world to download and use its new open-source products in order to gather feedback and improve them.

“Huawei’s open-source strategy will resonate well in developing countries where enterprises are more price-sensitive as is the case with [Huawei’s] other products,” Einstein said. 

As part of its global strategy, the company has also been looking to bring its latest AI data center solutions to new countries. 

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