The long and short of IT - the week in digibytes

Too many Cooks?

The big tech exec story of the week was, of course, the announcement from Tim Cook that he will be standing down as Apple CEO, becoming executive chairman, while John Ternus takes over the command seat from 1 September.

That will bring an end to a 15 year reign for ‘the guy who took over from Steve Jobs’, a job description that Ternus will at least be spared. Ternus is an Apple guy to his core, 25 years with the firm, so pitching him as a continuity candidate is not unfair.

Where he differs from Cook is that his background is very heavily in product, hardware in particular, so we perhaps expect something of a pivot back to the central devices Apple is best known for, as well as, hopefully, some course corrections for some others - hi, Vision Pro, we see you!

So why now for the handover? Well, Cook took the chance at a company town hall meeting to shoot down the inevitable Silicon Valley scuttlebutt that he was unwell, declaring:

I am healthy. My energy is high, and I plan to be in this new role [executive chairman] for a long time.”

He said the timing of the announcement was scheduled to allow for the “best-ever transition”, with three key elements aligned - Apple’s product roadmap needed to “be incredible”; Apple’s financials needed to be “doing great”, and Ternus had to be “ready for the role”.

For his part, and with that continuity cap firmly on, Ternus told staffers that he wasn’t about to start making radical changes of direction:

We’re going to keep focusing on design, because design is core to what we do at Apple. Apple’s brought truly incredible design to more people than any company in history...tThere are some things that can never change and won’t change.

My take - Cook had one of the toughest - if not the toughest - succession gigs in the tech sector and, for the most part - we’ll pass over Apple Maps launch discretely here - he’s delivered. He’s also managed to play his cards very carefully with the current Trump 2.0 administration where many of his peers have cravenly cast aside their principles, bent the knee, and broken open the company check book to keep in favor.

Onwards!

Now you know how it feels

Oh, it’s enough to bring a tear to a glass eye! Meta is reported to be putting tracking software on US staffers computers to train up its AI models based on data around how human employees do their daily work! So, you’re sat at your desk, going about your business, and there’s a piece of tech undermining your personal privacy, exploiting data about you, and basically training up a bot to take over your job!

The phrase, ‘the biter it bit’ springs to mind for some reason...

According to internal memos leaked to Reuters, Meta employees have been told that this is all for the greater good of the Zuckerberg empire:

This is where all Meta employees can help our models get better simply by doing their daily work.

Lucky, lucky Meta employees! Mind you, at least they know their work is being monitored and collected for AI training. That's more foreknowledge than most of us got about the rise of gen AI, isn't it....?

But who ends up doing that daily work? In a second memo shared with Reuters,  Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth admitted:

The vision we are building towards is one where our agents primarily do the work and our role is to direct, review and help them improve"

My take - The firm has promised that data gathered during this exercise will not be used for performance assessments or reviews or any other purposes than AI model training. So that’s OK, as Meta has an impeccable track record when it comes to ethics, commitments, and societal wellbeing, as we all know.

In a totally unrelated Meta happening, the firm is planning to lay off 10% of its workforce globally starting on 20 May.

Just thought it might be worth a mention...

War is over?

I don’t know about you, but I’ve lost track of how many wars it is that President Donald Trump has now ended. The figure seems to vary on a day-by-day basis, depending perhaps on the status of the Strait of Hormuz - open, closed, or ‘just popped out for lunch, back in 20 minutes’?

But now the winner of the prestigious FIFA Peace Prize may be about to broker peace in a war he helped to enflame only a few short weeks ago. No, not Iran! The battle between the US Department of War and ‘overnight threat to national security’, Anthropic. You’ll recall that Anthropic had some red lines in its contract terms, terms that were signed up to by the US Government, around not using its tech to spy on US citizens and not letting bots do a re-make of Wargames and launch their own missiles on the battlefield.

That was too much for the current Administration which demanded the right to do what it wanted with its tech toys. When told ‘no’, not a common utterance from the tech community to Trump 2.0, the end result was Anthropic being dubbed an enemy of the state, run by left-wingers on a power trip, and banned from Federal Government work.

The situation is rumbling through the courts - victories on both sides so far - but Trump appeared to suggest mid-week that things could be resolved as he thought that Anthropic was “shaping up”, which presumably means he thinks the firm is ready to bend the knee? In an interview, he said:

They came to the White House a few days ago, and we had some very good talks with them, and I think they're shaping up. They're very smart, and I think they can be of great use. I like smart people ... I think we'll get along with them just fine.

Hmmmm....

My take - in the same conversation Trump also described Anthropic’s employees as “the radical left”. We may not have travelled quite as far down the route to peace as might initially have looked possible...

He said what?

In general, we expect gen AI to help make content better and better. Better tools, better processes. And I think Netflix is going to remain at the forefront in the exploration and the innovation of AI in the creative process. Given our technology DNA, we have a significant and unique data assets here. We have tremendous scale...So I think AI is going to deliver benefits for our members, for creators and for our employees. So on the content side, specifically to your question, it takes a great artist to make great art and AI won't change that. But AI will give those artists better tools to bring those visions to life in ways that we're just scratching the surface on. 

                   Words to ‘comfort’ creatives from Ted Sarandos, co-CEO, Netflix.

No, Minister!

In recent months, the UK has laid out enormously ambitious ambitions to become a global AI powerhouse with the government under Prime Minister Keir Starmer - as of time of writing, he’s still PM! - boasting about business and economic transformation just around the corner.

Someone needs to tell the Minister in charge of AI this narrative. Liz Kendall, the Minister in charge of AI, cheerily announced in an interview this week that she does not use AI in her working life, despite being one of those most charged with getting UK businesses to get their AI acts together! Do as I say, not as I do, it seems...again.

Speaking out in the tamest of photo opp press interviews, being ferried around in a Waymo AI-powered driverless car, the hapless Kendall blurted out that she only uses the technology in her private life, for really important stuff like researching face cream skin reactions:

Well, I use AI personally rather than at work, I've got to be honest. I'm much more likely to use it in my personal life. Do you want to know the last thing I used it for?... I can't believe I'm about to say this... I got an allergic reaction to something. I'd put on some probably expensive and pointless potion I had to pay to put on my face.

I got AI to go through the ingredients of all the products. Because you know there's so many of them really, to identify was there one that was common between the three, and to suggest something I could put on to stop this eczema that had come up. I checked the sources, it came from the National Eczema Society, I went to the pharmacist, I asked her for her best cream, she named the same one, I bought it, it worked.

My take - I’d like to say this is just beyond belief, but sadly it’s totally on form when it comes to UK politicians and their obsessive desire to pose precariously on the bleeding edge of modernity without having to go through the whole tedious process of learning about tech and, er, knowing what they’re talking about.

Meanwhile the UK Government’s latest wheeze to prove it’s leading the global AI arms race is to designate Barnsley, a town of 250,000 people in Yorkshire, best known for brass bands, closed down coal mines, and a local culinary delight known as the Barnsley Chop, as a “Tech Town”. To back this up, it’s tapped into some free services from Adobe, Google, Cisco and Microsoft, and chucked £500k into the pot. £500k!!! That’s show Silicon Valley who’s really running the show, eh?

Musical Coda

Following on from Chris Middleton’s reports from the Westminster Media Forum on Music Policy, a quick coda with yet more problems brewing, according to composer, technologist, and artists’ rights champion Ed Newton-Rex. Writing on LinkedIn on 17 April, he alleged that the portfolio of the UK’s £500 million Sovereign AI Fund, which was launched last week, includes vendors that train their AIs on copyrighted work without a licence:

That would mean UK taxpayer money is being diverted to AI companies exploiting creatives' work without permission. […] It is hard to avoid the conclusion that there is a 'don't ask, don't tell' approach being taken to copyright at the Sovereign AI Fund. Given that training commercial AI models on copyrighted work without a licence is illegal in the UK, I think it is important this is corrected early.

My take - more wrong notes.

He said what?

People think we have our back against the wall when in fact the opportunity has never been greater.

                            Salesforce’s Marc Benioff dismisses the ‘SaaSpocalypse’ drivel...one more time for luck!