After what started as a hopeful year for tech policy, the 117th Congress is about to close out its term with many key efforts tabled.
Despite bipartisan support for antitrust reform targeting digital tech giants, a digital privacy framework and new guardrails for kids on the internet, lawmakers headed home without passing the hallmark bills of those issues. And the Senate has yet to vote to confirm the final nominee to fill out the Federal Communications Commission, leaving that agency incomplete for the entirety of the Biden administration so far.
Congress did pass the CHIPS and Science Act, which incentivizes domestic semiconductor manufacturing after shortages highlighted the risks of overseas production. It also included in the year-end spending package a bill that will raise funds for the antitrust agencies by raising merger filing fees on large deals, as well as a measure banning TikTok on government devices in light of national security concerns due to its ownership by a Chinese company.
And even when it comes to many of the bills that remain in limbo, progress this year shows significant headway. That’s the case with privacy legislation, where a bill proposed this year gained bipartisan support, passing out of a House committee with a near-unanimous vote. Still, it lacks the backing of the Senate Commerce Committee’s Democratic chair, Maria Cantwell of Washington, which is seen as critical to passing the legislation.
“Any privacy legislation has to be bipartisan,” said Craig Albright, vice president of U.S. government relations for enterprise software industry group BSA. “Senator Cantwell has to be part of the process. There’s no going around her, she will be one of the key leaders. But I think if the House can demonstrate continued progress, I think that that will create more of an environment for the Senate to be able to act.”
Albright added that the House committee leaders who championed the bill, Energy and Commerce Chair Frank Pallone, D-N.J., and Ranking Member Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., expected to become chair next year under Republican House control, proved with the panel vote “that substantively, you can come up with a bill that has broad bipartisan support.”
“I think that puts this next Congress in a stronger starting position than we’ve had before,” Albright said.
Lawmakers face a tougher landscape next year if they hope to pick up where they left off on tech reform. With Democratic control of the Senate and Republican control of the House in 2023, policy watchers stress that bipartisanship will be essential to make bills into law.
While that might dash hopes for most antitrust reforms, which though bipartisan are not generally supported by Republicans expected to lead the House and key committees, it could mean there’s still a chance for legislation on digital privacy, where both parties have stressed urgency despite years of failing to compromise on areas of disagreement.
Still, lawmakers who led aggressive antitrust proposals and other tech reforms have signaled they’ll continue to fight for those measures next year.
“This is clearly the beginning of this fight and not the end,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., whose bill barring online platforms from favoring their own services on their marketplaces failed to make it into year-end must-pass bills, said in a statement following the release of the spending package text. “I will continue to work across the aisle to protect consumers and strengthen competition.”
Sens. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., and Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., said in a statement that while their Kids Online Safety Act, setting new guardrails for sites likely to be accessed by kids, and Open App Markets Act, imposing new regulations on app stores run by Apple and Google, did not make it into the spending bill, they are “resolved to reintroduce and pass this legislation in the next Congress.” The pair blamed the bills’ failure to advance on intense lobbying efforts by the tech industry against them.
A survey of congressional staffers by Punchbowl News found that while a majority of Capitol Hill respondents expect a less productive session in terms of passing meaningful legislation, the tech agenda is high up on the expected list of priorities. Punchbowl said that 56% of respondents anticipated action on bills targeting Big Tech, a percentage that was second only to those who expect to see action targeting inflation.
Tech regulation is Democrats’ top priority, according to Punchbowl, with 59% of respondents choosing it as one of their chief issues. Among lobbyists and business executives surveyed by Punchbowl, 55% predicted lawmakers could crack down on a major tech company, with TikTok coming out as the most likely target, followed by Facebook parent Meta.
And while it’s unlikely to result in new laws, House Republicans have signaled they’ll use their majority to focus on tech issues that have taken a backseat while Democrats held the gavels in both chambers. Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, who’s expected to lead the House Judiciary Committee, signaled he’ll likely use that power to focus on tech companies’ relationships with Democratic politicians and allegations of bias and censorship by social media platforms.
Earlier this month he wrote to the CEOs of Apple, Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft, demanding information about what he called “the nature and extent of your companies’ collusion with the Biden Administration.” He said the letters should serve as a formal request to preserve records related to the request.
Lawmakers are also likely to spend more time looking at crypto regulation, after the downfall of exchange FTX alleged fraud of its founder Sam Bankman-Fried thrust the industry into the limelight before Congress. Legislators have already considered some legislation targeting the industry, and incoming House Financial Services Chair Patrick McHenry, R-N.C., has indicated that making a clearer regulatory framework for crypto is a priority.
One of the key questions lawmakers have wrestled with is who should be the agency in charge of overseeing the industry. That question has so far gone unanswered, with many industry players advocating for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission while some consumer advocates preferring the Securities and Exchange Commission, which is larger and better resourced. One prominent bipartisan bill in the Senate would put the CFTC in charge.
Just like in 2022, next year’s tech policy agenda will be subject to the whims of Congress, and could be especially susceptible if the country sees some level of economic downturn as many experts expect.
“Everybody has their desire to regulate tech. But I can’t help but wonder what that desire looks like, depending on the economic outlook of the United States in Q1 of 2023,” said James Czerniawski, senior policy analyst for technology and innovation at the Koch-backed advocacy group Americans for Prosperity, pointing to high interest rates and job cuts in the tech sector. “If we were to go and enter into a recession at some point in early next year, which isn’t out of the realm of possibility, that might go and rejigger priorities from Congress to more immediate things.”
Czerniawski said the push for regulation in tech seems to be based on an “assumption that tech is this thing that’s just immovable and going to be around for the test of time with these companies’ names attached to it. And, if anything, I think that the past year and change has shown that that’s not necessarily true.”
“I think that it’s pretty easy to beat up on Big Tech when they’re so successful and they’re pulling in record profits,” said Tom Romanoff, director of the technology project at the Bipartisan Policy Center think tank, which has received funding Amazon and Meta, according to recent donor disclosures. “It becomes a different equation when constituents and districts are upset because they got laid off in one of these very high paying jobs. And so I think if there is an economic downturn, the focus will shift to the economy.”
Romanoff added that certain global dynamics could also shift the focus away from increased tech regulation, such as if tensions escalate between China and Taiwan, where a large portion of semiconductors are currently produced. He said an event like that could cause a shift from an “internal focus of what these large companies mean for U.S. democracy, to kind of a national defense strategy — what does it mean in wartime to regulate an industry that is very much critical to any wartime industry.”
Still, Albright of BSA sees focus on the tech sector in Congress remaining high as concerns that have existed in the past are not going away.
“I think the economy will go up and down,” he said. “But the importance of tech policy issues will still be strong.”
A man walks past a logo of SK Hynix at the lobby of the company’s Bundang office in Seongnam on January 29, 2021.
Jung Yeon-Je | AFP | Getty Images
South Korea’s SK Hynix on Wednesday posted record quarterly revenue and profit, boosted by a strong demand for its high bandwidth memory used in generative AI chipsets.
Here are SK Hynix’s third-quarter results versus LSEG SmartEstimates, which are weighted toward forecasts from analysts who are more consistently accurate:
Revenue: 24.45 trillion won ($17.13 billion) vs. 24.73 trillion won
Operating profit: 11.38 trillion won vs. 11.39 trillion won
Revenue rose about 39% in the September quarter compared with the same period a year earlier, while operating profit surged 62%, year on year.
On a quarter-on-quarter basis, revenue was up 10%, while operating profit grew 24%.
SK Hynix makes memory chips that are used to store data and can be found in everything from servers to consumer devices such as smartphones and laptops.
The company has benefited from a boom in artificial intelligence as a key supplier of high-bandwidth memory or HBM chips used to power AI data center servers.
“As demand across the memory segment has soared due to customers’ expanding investments in AI infrastructure, SK Hynix once again surpassed the record-high performance of the previous quarter due to increased sales of high value-added products,” SK Hynix said in its earnings release.
HBM falls into the broader category of dynamic random access memory, or DRAM — a type of semiconductor memory used to store data and program code that can be found in PCs, workstations and servers.
SK Hynix has set itself apart in the DRAM market by getting an early lead in HBM and establishing itself as the main supplier to the world’s leading AI chip designer, Nvidia.
However, its main competitors, U.S.-based Micron and South Korean-based tech giant Samsung, have been working to catch up in the space.
“With the innovation of AI technology, the memory market has shifted to a new paradigm and demand has begun to spread to all product areas,” SK Hynix Chief Financial Officer Kim Woohyun said in the earnings release.
“We will continue to strengthen our AI memory leadership by responding to customer demand through market-leading products and differentiated technological capabilities,” he added.
The HBM market is expected to continue to boom over the next few years to around $43 billion by 2027, giving strong earnings leverage to memory manufacturers such as SK Hynix, MS Hwang, research director at Counterpoint Research, told CNBC.
“[F]or SK Hynix to continue generating profits, it’ll be important for the company to maintain and enhance its competitive edge,” he added.
A report from Counterpoint Research earlier this month showed that SK Hynix held a leading 38% share of the DRAM market by revenue in the second quarter of the year, increasing its shares after having overtaken Samsung in the first quarter.
The report added that the global HBM market grew 178% year over year in the second quarter, and SK Hynix dominated the space with a 64% share.
Celestica CEO Rob Mionis explained how his company designs and manufactures infrastructure that enables artificial intelligence in a Tuesday interview with CNBC’s Jim Cramer.
“If AI is a speeding freight train, we’re laying the tracks ahead of the freight train,” Mionis said.
He pushed back against the notion that the AI boom is a bubble, saying that the technology has gone from a “nice to have” to a “must have.”
Celestica reported earnings Monday after close, managing to beat estimates and raise its full-year outlook. The stock hit a 52-week high during Tuesday’s session and closed up more than 8%. Celestica has had a huge run over the past several months, and shares are currently up 253.68% year-to-date.
Mionis described some of Celestica’s business strategies, including how the Canadian outfit chose to move away from commodity markets and into design and manufacturing. He told Cramer that choice “has paid off in spades” for his company.
Celestica’s focus on design and manufacturing enables the company to “consistently execute at scale,” he added.
He detailed Celestica’s data center work, saying the company makes high-speed networking and storage system for hyperscalers, digital native companies and other enterprise names.
Mionis praised the company’s partnership with semiconductor maker Broadcom, saying Celestica uses Broadcom’s silicon in a lot of its designs.
“What it means for us is when they launch a new piece of silicon — so the Tomahawk 6 is their 1.6 terabyte silicon — when they launch that into the marketplace, they’ll work with us to develop products, and those products end up in the major hyperscalers.”
Jim Cramer’s Guide to Investing
Sign up now for the CNBC Investing Club to follow Jim Cramer’s every move in the market.
Disclaimer The CNBC Investing Club Charitable Trust owns shares of Broadcom.
Elon Musk‘s Wikipedia rival Grokipedia got off to a “rocky start” in its public debut, but Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales didn’t even have to take a look at the AI’s output to know what he expected.
“I’m not optimistic he will create anything very useful right now,” Wales said at the CNBC Technology Executive Council Summit in New York City on Tuesday.
Wales had plenty of choice words for Musk, notably in response to allegations that there is “woke bias” on Wikipedia. “He is mistaken about that,” Wales said. “His complaints about Wiki are that we focus on mainstream sources and I am completely unapologetic about that. We don’t treat random crackpots the same as The New England Journal of Medicine and that doesn’t make us woke,” he said at the CNBC event. “It’s a paradox. We are so radical we quote The New York Times.”
“I haven’t had the time to really look at Grokipedia, and it will be interesting to see, but apparently it has a lot of praise about the genius of Elon Musk in it. So I’m sure that’s completely neutral,” he added.
Wales’ digs at Grokipedia — which has its own wiki page — were less about any ongoing spat with Musk and more about his significant concerns about the efforts by all large language models to create a trusted online source of information.
“The LLMs he is using to write it are going to make massive errors,” Wales said. “We know ChatGPT and all the other LLMs are not good enough to write wiki entries.”
Musk seems equally certain of the opposite outcome: “Grokipedia will exceed Wikipedia by several orders of magnitude in breadth, depth and accuracy,” he wrote in a post on Tuesday night.
Wales gave several real-world examples of why he doesn’t have faith in LLMs to recreate what Wikipedia’s global community has built over decades at a fraction of the cost — he estimated the organization’s hard technology costs as $175 million annually versus the tens of billions of dollars big tech companies are constantly pouring into AI efforts, and by one Wall Street estimate, a total of $550 billion in AI spending expected by the so-called hyperscalers next year.
One example Wales cited of LLM’s inaccuracy relates to his wife. Wales said he often asks new chatbot models to research obscure topics as a test of their abilities, and asking who his wife is, a “not famous but known” person, he said, who worked in British politics, always results in a “plausible but wrong” answer. Any time you ask an LLM to dig deep, Wales added, “it’s a mess.”
He also gave the example of a German Wiki community member who wrote a program to verify the ISBN numbers of books cited, and was able to trace notable mistakes to one person. That person ultimately confessed they had used ChatGPT to find citations for text references and the LLM “just very happily makes up books for you,” Wales said.
Wales did say the battles into which he has been drawn, by Musk and by AI, do reinforce a serious message for Wikipedia. “It’s really important for us and the Wiki community to respond to criticism like that by doubling down on being neutral and being really careful about sources,” he said. “We shouldn’t be ‘wokepedia.’ That’s not who we should be or what people want from us. It would undermine trust.”
Wales thinks the public and the media often give Wikipedia too much credit. In its early days, he says, the site was never as bad as the jokes made about it. But now, he says, “We are not as good as they think we are. Of course, we are a lot better than we used to be, but there is still so much work to do.”
And he expects the challenges from technology, and from misinformation, to get worse, with the ability to use LLMs to create fake websites with plausible text getting better and likely able to fool the public. But he says they will have a hard time fooling the Wiki community, which has spent 25 years studying and debating trusted information sources. “But it will fool a lot of people and that is a problem,” he said.
In some cases, this same new technology, which “makes stuff up that is completely useless,” may be useful to Wikipedia, he said. Wales has been doing some work on finding limited domains where AI can uncover additional information in existing sources that should be added to a wiki, a use of gen AI he described as currently being “kind of okay.”
“Maybe it helps us do our work faster,” he said. That feedback loop could be very useful for the site if it developed its own LLM that it could train, but the costs associated with that have led the site to hold off any formal effort while it continues to test the technology, he added.
“We are really happy Wiki is now part of the infrastructure of the world, which is a pretty heavy burden on us. So when people say we’ve gotten biased, we need to take that seriously and work on anything related to it,” Wales said.
But he couldn’t resist putting that another way, too: “We talk about errors that ChatGPT makes. Just imagine an AI solely trained on Twitter. That would be a mad, angry AI trained on nonsense,” Wales said.