British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak pitches UK as home of A.I. safety regulation as London bids to be next Silicon Valley
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak speaks to the media during London Tech Week at the QEII centre on June 12, 2023.
Ian Vogler | Wpa Pool | Getty Images
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak made a big pitch to the tech community Monday, casting the U.K. as a global center for artificial intelligence and regulation of the technology.
“We must act and act quickly if we want not only to retain our position as one of the world’s tech capitals, but to go even further and make this the best country in the world to start grow and invest in tech businesses,” Sunak said, addressing a crowded tech conference in London Monday.
“I feel a sense of urgency and responsibility to make sure that we see things because one of my five priorities is to grow our economy. And the more we innovate, the more we grow.”
“I want to make the U.K. not just the intellectual home but the geographical home of global AI safety regulation,” Sunak added.
The U.K. is trying to compete with global giants in the arena of AI, one of the most hyped areas of tech currently in the advent of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other generative AI tools.
Separately, the country is also pitching itself as the “next Silicon Valley,” with Finance Minister Jeremy Hunt making several reforms to the country’s financial regulations to encourage more venture capital investment and listings from high-growth technology firms.
Much of the most commercially advanced work around the technology is originating from the U.S., with major companies such as Microsoft-backed OpenAI, and other tech giants, such as Google (which bought U.K.-based AI company DeepMind in 2014) and Meta, making huge investments in generative AI in particular.
However, the U.K. is trying to make measures of its own to be more of a leader in the world of AI. The government in March published a white paper detailing its plan for AI regulation, which sought to take a principles-based approach to the technology rather than proposing new tailored regulations.
Sunak last week announced the first global AI safety summit in the U.K. later this year, looking to make a bold commitment on Britain’s position in the global regulatory discourse surrounding the technology as officials in the U.S., European Union and beyond seek to get a handle on AI.
Last month, the CEOs of OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Anthropic made a visit to the U.K., speaking with the prime minister about their approach to ensuring safe development of AI. AI leaders are trying to convince officials that they are keeping safety in mind when creating advanced AI models, as
There is currently no concrete regulation for AI in any major developed nation. The European Union is seeking to change that with the EU AI Act, which lawmakers are due to vote on in Parliament later this week. But these are laws that are unlikely to come into force until well into the future.
The U.K. has seen some of its most decorated tech firms sour on the country as a place to begin a tech business, with the critical Cambridge-based chip design firm Arm opting to list in New York in favor of London earlier this year, and the CEO of Revolut saying he would “never list” in London citing an unfavorable tax regime and bureaucratic regulation.
Sunak defied naysayers about the U.K. technology prospects on Monday. In conversation with the CEO of Google DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Sunak said that Britain is “already a great place to scale up a tech business.”
“Over the last decade, [there have been] more unicorns in this country than anywhere other than the U.S. and China. I think that’s a pretty good record and a good base for us to start from, but obviously we need to keep doing well, we need to keep pushing ourselves.”
“Something like half of all of our fastest-growing innovation businesses have a foreign-born founder, so that tells you you need a visa system that attracts the best and the brightest to the U.K. And I think we’ve got one.”
Hassabis, who recently was promoted to lead Google’s AI research efforts, said he has seen the culture around fostering entrepreneurship in the U.K. change over the years.
“When we started DeepMind back in 2010, things were very different then. I remember our first investors, who were U.S.-based, and we had to go to the U.S. to get our first investment, sort of suspicious of if you could build huge deep tech companies anywhere other than Silicon Valley.
“I think it is a lot easier to start and grow very difficult and very meaningful, the tech companies. So you know, it’s been it’s been great to see that I think there’s a huge opportunity to come here.”
WATCH: Can China’s ChatGPT clones give it an edge over the U.S. in an A.I. arms race?
Rafael Henrique | SOPA Images | AP
After posting almost 200 videos, amassing hundreds of thousands of followers and racking up millions of views, Carla Lalli Music is quitting YouTube. Substack is her new focus.
Music is a cookbook author and food content creator, and she is shifting her focus to Substack, a subscription platform that lets creators charge users subscriptions for access to their content. Music told CNBC she came to that decision after earning more in one year of using Substack, nearly $200,000 in revenue, than she did by posting videos on YouTube since 2021.
Music is the exact kind of content creator that Substack is trying to lure to its platform as TikTok’s future in the U.S. remains in limbo.
San Francisco-based Substack launched in 2017 as a tool for newsletter writers to charge readers a monthly fee to read their content. The platform allows creators to connect to their followers directly without having to navigate algorithmic models that control when their content is shown, as is the case on TikTok, Google’s YouTube and other social platforms. Substack has raised about $100 million, most recently at a post-money valuation of more than $650 million, the company told CNBC.
This year, Substack has broadened its focus beyond newsletters, and on Thursday, it announced that creators can now post video content directly through the Substack app and monetize these videos.
“There’s going to be a world of people who are much more focused on videos,” Substack Co-founder Hamish McKenzie told CNBC. “That is a huge world that Substack is only starting to penetrate.”
Substack began this push after the social media landscape was thrown into flux as a result of the effective ban of TikTok in January that caused the popular Chinese-owned service to go offline for a few hours. TikTok was also removed from Apple and Google’s app stores for nearly a month.
The disruption to TikTok in January happened as a result of a law signed by former President Joe Biden to force a sale of the Chinese-owned app or have it effectively banned in the U.S. On his first day in office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order extending TikTok’s ability to operate in the U.S., but that order expires on April 5.
Days after TikTok went offline, Substack launched a $20 million fund to court creators to its platform.
“If TikTok gets banned for political reasons, there’s nothing to do with the work you’ve done, but it really affects your life,” McKenzie said. “The only and surefire guard against that is if you don’t place your audience in the hands of some other volatile system who doesn’t care about what happens to your livelihood.”
Moving beyond newsletters
McKenzie says that they are going after creators on competing social media platforms to start sharing their video content on Substack.
“Video-first creators, people who are mobile oriented, there’s a whole lot of new possibility waiting to be unlocked once they meet this model in the right place,” McKenzie said.
Already, Substack has more than 4 million paid subscriptions with over 50,000 creators who make money on the platform, the company said. Substack says that 82% of its top 250 revenue-generating creators have already integrated audio or video into their content, reflecting a growing emphasis on multimedia content.
Prior to the video announcements, Substack allowed creators to post videos on the app to Notes, which is the platform’s front-facing feed format. But the feature did not allow creators to publish video content behind Substack’s paywalls.
The update enables creators to put video content behind a paywall and it provides data on estimated revenue impact. It also allows them to track viewership and new subscribers.
Carla Lalli Music is a cookbook writer and food creator.
Carla Lalli Music
The push by Substack into video is a welcomed development for creators like Music, who was losing money from making videos for YouTube.
Music said each video costs her $3,500 to produce despite filming at home. If she published four videos a month on YouTube, she’d earn about $4,000 in revenue. Music was losing about $10,000 a month, she said.
“It’s really depressing to operate at a loss,” said Music.
Even with brand deals, which is an agreement where brands pay creators to post content that promotes their products, the earnings were barely enough to recoup the costs of posting on YouTube, Music said.
More than half of the $290 billion creator economy comes from direct-to-fan value. That includes ticket sales, courses, livestreams and paid memberships, according to a survey conducted by Patreon, a Substack competitor.
With her shift to Substack, Music said she’s now focused on writing another book, posting recipes behind the platform’s paywall and sprinkling in occasional videos.
“I have a lot more to benefit from focused attention on a smaller group of people than I ever did on throwing stuff and seeing what was going to stick with billions of potential audience members,” Music said. “It’s more sustainable.”
WATCH: Our base case for TikTok is that it gets banned in the U.S.: Lead Edge Capital’s Mitchell Green
Anne Wojcicki attends the WSJ Magazine Style & Tech Dinner in Atherton, California, on March 15, 2023.
Kelly Sullivan | Getty Images Entertainment | Getty Images
23andMe CEO Anne Wojcicki and New Mountain Capital have submitted a proposal to take the embattled genetic testing company private, according to a Friday filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Wojcicki and New Mountain have offered to acquire all of 23andMe’s outstanding shares in cash for $2.53 per share, or an equity value of approximately $74.7 million. The company’s stock closed at $2.42 on Friday with a market cap of about $65 million.
The offer comes after a turbulent year for 23andMe, with the stock losing more than 80% of its value in 2024. In January, the company announced plans to explore strategic alternatives, which could include a sale of the company or its assets, a restructuring or a business combination.
23andMe has a special committee of independent directors in place to evaluate potential paths forward. The company appointed three new independent directors to its board in October after all seven of its previous directors abruptly resigned the prior month. The special committee has to approve Wojcicki and New Mountain’s proposal.
“We believe that our Proposal provides compelling value and immediate liquidity to the Company’s public stockholders,” Wojcicki and Matthew Holt, managing director and president of private equity at New Mountain, wrote in a letter to the special committee on Thursday.
Wojcicki previously submitted a proposal to take the company private for 40 cents per share in July, but it was rejected by the special committee, in part because the members said it lacked committed financing and did not provide a premium to the closing price at the time.
Wojcicki and New Mountain are willing to provide secured debt financing to fund 23andMe’s operations through the transaction’s closing, the filing said. New Mountain is based in New York and has $55 billion of assets under management, according to its website.
23andMe declined to comment.
WATCH: The rise and fall of 23andMe
Hims & Hers
Shares of Hims & Hers Health tumbled more than 23% on Friday after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced that the shortage of semaglutide injection products has been resolved.
Semaglutide is the active ingredient in Novo Nordisk‘s blockbuster weight loss drug Wegovy and diabetes treatment Ozempic. Those medications are part of a class of drugs called GLP-1s, and demand for the treatments has exploded in recent years. As a result, digital health companies such as Hims & Hers have been prescribing compounded semaglutide as an alternative for patients who are navigating volatile supply hurdles and insurance obstacles.
Compounded drugs are custom-made alternatives to brand-name drugs designed to meet a specific patient’s needs, and compounders are allowed to produce them when brand-name treatments are in shortage. The FDA doesn’t review the safety and efficacy of compounded products.
Hims & Hers began offering compounded semaglutide to patients in May, and it owns compounding pharmacies that produce the medications.
Compounded medications are typically much cheaper than their branded counterparts. Hims & Hers sells compounded semaglutide for less than $200 per month, while Ozempic and Wegovy both cost around $1,000 per month without insurance.
The FDA said Friday that it will start taking action against compounders for violations in the next 60 to 90 days, depending on the type of facility, in order to “avoid unnecessary disruption to patient treatment.”
“Now that the FDA has determined the drug shortage for semaglutide has been resolved, we will continue to offer access to personalized treatments as allowed by law to meet patient needs,” Hims & Hers CEO Andrew Dudum posted Friday on X. “We’re also closely monitoring potential future shortages, as Novo Nordisk stated two weeks ago that it would continue to have ‘capacity limitations’ and ‘expected continued periodic supply constraints and related drug shortage notifications.'”
Him & Hers’ weight loss offerings have been a massive hit with investors. Shares of the company climbed more than 200% last year, and the stock is already up more than 100% this year despite Friday’s move.
Even before it added compounded GLP-1s to its portfolio, the company said in its 2023 fourth-quarter earnings call that it expects its weight loss program to bring in more than $100 million in revenue by the end of 2025.
Despite the turbulent regulatory landscape, Hims & Hers has showed no signs of slowing down.
On Friday, the company announced it has acquired a U.S.-based peptide facility that will “further verticalize the company’s long-term ability to deliver personalized medications.” Hims & Hers will explore advances across metabolic optimization, recovery science, biological resistances, cognitive performance and preventative health through the acquisition, the company said.
That move comes just days after Hims & Hers also bought Trybe Labs, the New Jersey-based at-home lab testing facility. Trybe Labs will allow Hims & Hers to perform at-home blood draws and more comprehensive pretreatment testing.
Hims & Hers did not disclose the terms of either deal.
-
Sports2 years ago‘Storybook stuff’: Inside the night Bryce Harper sent the Phillies to the World Series
-
Sports11 months agoStory injured on diving stop, exits Red Sox game
-
Sports1 year agoGame 1 of WS least-watched in recorded history
-
Sports2 years agoMLB Rank 2023: Ranking baseball’s top 100 players
-
Sports3 years ago
Team Europe easily wins 4th straight Laver Cup
-
Environment2 years agoJapan and South Korea have a lot at stake in a free and open South China Sea
-
Environment2 years agoGame-changing Lectric XPedition launched as affordable electric cargo bike
-
Business2 years agoBank of England’s extraordinary response to government policy is almost unthinkable | Ed Conway