Richard Branson believes the environmental costs of space travel will “come down even further.”
Patrick T. Fallon | AFP | Getty Images
Dozens of high-profile figures in business and politics are calling on world leaders to address the existential risks of artificial intelligence and the climate crisis.
Virgin Group founder Richard Branson, along with former United Nations General Secretary Ban Ki-moon, and Charles Oppenheimer — the grandson of American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer — signed an open letter urging action against the escalating dangers of the climate crisis, pandemics, nuclear weapons, and ungoverned AI.
The message asks world leaders to embrace long-view strategy and a “determination to resolve intractable problems, not just manage them, the wisdom to make decisions based on scientific evidence and reason, and the humility to listen to all those affected.”
Signatories called for urgent multilateral action, including through financing the transition away from fossil fuels, signing an equitable pandemic treaty, restarting nuclear arms talks, and building global governance needed to make AI a force for good.
The letter was released on Thursday by The Elders, a nongovernmental organization that was launched by former South African President Nelson Mandela and Branson to address global human rights issues and advocate for world peace.
The message is also backed by the Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit organization set up by MIT cosmologist Max Tegmark and Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn, which aims to steer transformative technology like AI towards benefiting life and away from large-scale risks.
Tegmark said that The Elders and his organization wanted to convey that, while not in and of itself “evil,” the technology remains a “tool” that could lead to some dire consequences, if it is left to advance rapidly in the hands of the wrong people.
“The old strategy for steering toward good uses [when it comes to new technology] has always been learning from mistakes,” Tegmark told CNBC in an interview. “We invented fire, then later we invented the fire extinguisher. We invented the car, then we learned from our mistakes and invented the seatbelt and the traffic lights and speed limits.”
‘Safety engineering’
“But when the thing already crosses the threshold and power, that learning from mistakes strategy becomes … well, the mistakes would be awful,” Tegmark added.
“As a nerd myself, I think of it as safety engineering. We send people to the moon, we very carefully thought through all the things that could go wrong when you put people in explosive fuel tanks and send them somewhere where no one can help them. And that’s why it ultimately went well.”
He went on to say, “That wasn’t ‘doomerism.’ That was safety engineering. And we need this kind of safety engineering for our future also, with nuclear weapons, with synthetic biology, with ever more powerful AI.”
The letter was issued ahead of the Munich Security Conference, where government officials, military leaders and diplomats will discuss international security amid escalating global armed conflicts, including the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Hamas wars. Tegmark will be attending the event to advocate the message of the letter.
The Future of Life Institute last year also released an open letter backed by leading figures including Tesla boss Elon Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, which called on AI labs like OpenAI to pause work on training AI models that are more powerful than GPT-4 — currently the most advanced AI model from Sam Altman’s OpenAI.
The technologists called for such a pause in AI development to avoid a “loss of control” of civilization, which might result in a mass wipe-out of jobs and an outsmarting of humans by computers.
The launch of an Instagram feature that details users’ geolocation data illicited backlash from social media users on Thursday.
Meta debuted the Instagram Map tool on Wednesday, pitching the feature as way to “stay up-to-date with friends” by letting users share their “last active location.” The tool is akin to Snapchat’s Snap Map feature that lets people see where their friends are posting from.
Although Meta said in a blog post that the feature’s “location sharing is off unless you opt in,” several social media users said in posts that they were worried that was not the case.
“I can’t believe Instagram launched a map feature that exposes everyone’s location without any warning,” said one user who posted on Threads, Meta’s micro-blogging service.
Another Threads user said they were concerned that bad actors could exploit the map feature by spying on others.
“Instagram randomly updating their app to include a maps feature without actually alerting people is so incredibly dangerous to anyone who has a restraining order and actively making sure their abuser can’t stalk their location online…Why,” said the user in a Threads post.
Instagram chief Adam Mosseri responded to the complaints on Threads, disputing the notion that the map feature is exposing people’s locations against their will.
“We’re double checking everything, but so far it looks mostly like people are confused and assume that, because they can see themselves on the map when they open, other people can see them too,” Mosseri wrote on Thursday. “We’re still checking everything though to make sure nobody shares location without explicitly deciding to do so, which, by the way, requires a double consent by design (we ask you to confirm after you say you want to share).”
Still, some Instagram users claimed that that their locations were being shared despite not opting in to using the map feature.
“Mine was set to on and shared with everyone in the app,” said a user in a Threads post. “My location settings on my phone for IG were set to never. So it was not automatically turned off for me.
A Meta spokesperson reiterated Mosseri’s comments in a statement and said “Instagram Map is off by default, and your live location is never shared unless you choose to turn it on.”
“If you do, only people you follow back — or a private, custom list you select — can see your location,” the spokesperson said.
Tesla’s vice president of hardware design engineering, Pete Bannon, is leaving the company after first joining in 2016 from Apple, CNBC has confirmed.
Bannon was leading the development of Tesla’s Dojo supercomputer and reported directly to Musk. Bloomberg first reported on Bannon’s departure, and added that Musk ordered his team to shut down, with engineers in the group getting reassigned to other initiatives.
Tesla didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Since early last year, Musk has been trying to convince shareholders that Tesla, his only publicly traded business, is poised to become an an artificial intelligence and robotics powerhouse, and not just an electric vehicle company.
A centerpiece of the transformation was Dojo, a custom-built supercomputer designed to process and train AI models drawing on the large amounts of video and other data captured by Tesla vehicles.
Tesla’s focus on Dojo and another computing cluster called Cortex were meant to improve the company’s advanced driver assistance systems, and to enable Musk to finally deliver on his promise to turn existing Teslas into robotaxis.
On Tesla’s earnings call in July, Musk said the company expected its newest version of Dojo to be “operating at scale sometime next year, with scale being somewhere around 100,000 H-100 equivalents,” referring to a supercomputer built using Nvidia’s state of the art chips.
Tesla recently struck a $16.5 billion deal with Samsung to produce more of its own A16 chips with the company domestically.
Tesla is running a test Robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, and a related car service in San Francisco. In Austin, the company’s vehicles require a human safety supervisor in the front passenger seat ready to intervene if necessary. In San Francisco, the car service is operated by human drivers, though invited users can hail a ride through a “Tesla Robotaxi” app.
On the earnings call, Musk faced questions about how he sees Tesla and his AI company, xAI, keeping their distance given that they could be competing against one another for AI talent.
Musk said the companies “are doing different things.” He said, “xAI is doing like terabyte scale models and multi-terabyte scale models.” Tesla uses “100x smaller models,” he said, with the automaker focused on “real-world AI,” for its cars and robots and xAI focused on developing software that strives for “artificial super intelligence.”
Musk also said that some engineers wouldn’t join Tesla because “they wanted to work on AGI,” one reason he said he formed a new company.
Tesla has experienced an exodus of top talent this year due to a combination of job terminations and resignations. Milan Kovac, who was Tesla’s head of Optimus robotics engineering, departed, as did David Lau, a vice president of software engineering, and Omead Afshar, Musk’s former chief of staff.
Here’s how the company did based on average analysts’ estimates compiled by LSEG:
Loss: Loss per share of 24 cents.
Revenue: $61 million vs. $55.2 million expected
The virtual care company’s revenue increased 49% in its second quarter from $41.21 million a year earlier. The company reported a net loss of $5.31 million, or a 24-cent loss per share, compared to a net loss of $10.69 million, or $1.40 loss per share, during the same period last year.
“We believe our Q2 performance reflects Omada’s ability to capture tailwinds in cardiometabolic care, to effectively commercialize our GLP-1 Care Track, and to leverage advances in artificial intelligence for the benefit of our members,” Omada CEO Sean Duffy said in a release.
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For its full year, Omada expects to report revenue between $235 million to $241 million, while analysts were expecting $222 million. The company said it expects to report an adjusted EBITDA loss of $9 million to $5 million for the full year, while analysts polled by FactSet expected a wider loss of $20.2 million.
Omada, founded in 2012, offers virtual care programs to support patients with chronic conditions like prediabetes, diabetes and hypertension. The company describes its approach as a “between-visit care model” that is complementary to the broader health-care ecosystem.
The stock opened at $23 in its debut on the Nasdaq in June. At market close on Thursday, shares closed at $19.46.
Omada said it finished its second quarter with 752,000 total members, up 52% year over year.
The company will discuss the results during its quarterly call with investors at 4:30 p.m. ET.