As I write to you in front of a fireplace in Deer Valley, Utah (yes, I realize it’s July), Brainstorm Tech is wrapping up, and everyone is trickling out to catch their flights home.
It’s been a little bit of a whirlwind—exploring Park City and hearing from people like former Vice President Al Gore, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Arati Prabhakar, Flow’s Adam Neumann, and Meredith Whittaker, president of the Signal Foundation.
For those of you who couldn’t attend, here’s what you shouldn’t miss:
Founders Fund GP Keith Rabois is all-in on Ron DeSantis. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s sweeping anti-LGBTQ+ bill in May of this year has led some members of the state’s LGBTQ+ community to pack up and relocate to other parts of the country, but not Keith Rabois, who made clear on stage that he’s a definitive DeSantis fan. “I want to say very clearly that my husband and I are significant supporters of the governor and all his policies,” Rabois said. “We think what he’s doing in Florida is the recipe that should be copied in every state. Period, without exception.” Read more here.
People are actually using Bing now. And publishers are benefitting. The new and improved Bing, released earlier this year, incorporates OpenAI’s large language model to power a search bot function. Since then, total traffic to Bing’s suggested websites has grown, according to Jordi Ribas, the corporate vice president of Microsoft who oversees search and A.I. Ribas said that the new Bing chatbot is actually increasing the traffic sent to publisher websites, rather than reducing it, by instead suggesting original content. Read more here.
Lack of diversity is challenging Utah’s ambitions to become the next Silicon Valley. Utah has deep ties to the insular nature of Mormon culture, says Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, and will need to embrace a wider spectrum of perspectives, backgrounds, and skill sets.
“For this to be a true tech hub, we absolutely need to put in place the infrastructure that supports a more diverse community, and we do not have that,” Prince said. “With a more diverse tech leadership in Utah, I think we have an opportunity to help Utah evolve and advance in some of these areas.” Read more here.
A.I.’s 10% to 20% risk of going wrong. Anthropic cofounder and CEO Dario Amodei laid out a series of short- and long-term risks regarding A.I.—from things like bias and misinformation, which we’re already experiencing, to models becoming too autonomous, and becoming too hard to stop or control. When asked if he was optimistic or pessimistic about A.I., Amodei said: “My guess is that things will go really well. But there’s a risk, maybe 10% or 20%, that this will go wrong, and it’s incumbent on us to make sure that doesn’t happen.” Read more here.
More to come. See you tomorrow,
Jessica Mathews
Twitter: @jessicakmathews
Email: jessica.mathews@fortune.com
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