Tech's political moment, my birthday, and the Internet turns against AI crawling
Tech's political moment, my birthday, and the Internet turns against AI crawling
Welcome to Cautious Optimism, a newsletter on tech, business, and power. Modestly upbeat!
The Rundown
📈 Trending Up: tech unions … hard data on genAI productivity gains … making it ‘FEC official’ … Spanish AI? … conscription … massive new AI rounds [BG] … coconuts …
📉 Trending Down: 8.5 million Windows PCs … interest rates in China … airline demand? … 80% [FT] … power availability in Egypt … cybersescurity trust … Indian GDP growth …
🤔 What Else?
It’s my birthday. I’m 35 today. For the next few months, until my spouse matches my age, I shall be known as the Old Man of Providence.
Jokes aside, in honor of my not dying for yet another year, you can support CO and save 35% today.
Look Ma, I’m marketing!
📊 Upcoming earnings: SAP, Verizon, and NXP Monday. Google, Tesla, Visa, Texas Instruments, Comcast, Spotify, Seagate, and Tenable Tuesday. IBM, ServiceNow, AT&T, and eBay on Wednesday. VeriSign, Roku, and Yandex Thursday.
Tech’s political moment
Tired of politics in your technology coverage? Bad news! It’s only going to get worse. With President Biden announcing his choice not to pursue a second term, the Democratic party is racing to coalesce around Vice President Kamala Harris as their candidate. That’s the leading story everywhere this morning, even in tech circles.
It’s been an insane few weeks. Democratic politics were sent into a frenzy after Biden’s widely panned debate performance and resulting expectations that he would bow out. Then there was an attempt on former President Trump’s life, his selection of Senator Vance as running mate, a political convention, and, now, a former California Senator likely challenging the American right.
So much for this newsletter having a sparkling time covering a wave of IPOs amidst anticipated rate cuts. No, with technology leaders publicly arguing over who to support in the coming election and huge checks flying in opposing directions, what we see today is likely what we will get through November and beyond.
I won’t drag you through all the latest — many high-profile technology folks aligned with the Democratic party have endorsed Harris, Khosla refuses to flip to Trump, Lux’s Josh Wolfe is similarly not budging while tech’s Trump/Vance supporters are already shouting about the new candidate — but I do think that we’re seeing a temporary crackup of the technology industry.
There are several conflicting trends inside the technology industry’s political support. One is education; tech workers tend to be well-educated, which correlates to more liberal politics. Recall that Microsoft was very early to supporting gay marriage in its home state of Washington. But there’s also tech’s libertarian bent — discussed here — in which tinkerers and developers and dreamers want to be largely left alone to do their thing and make lots of money. Those sides are partially in tension at the moment, with a third group of tech social conservatives fomenting against our trans brothers and sisters also making a lot of noise.
In time, the profit motive will heal Silicon Valley’s political fractures.
For now, tech companies’ leaders are taking very public stances on political issues, putting their wealth to work in the process. The explanation for folks changing their party support is often down to a putatively highly focused approach—Coinbase and crypto, a16z and its ‘Little Tech’ thesis. But you can’t vote for a candidate or party based on a single issue and not get all their views. You buy the whole hog.
I don’t know who is going to win. Hell, we don’t even know who Harris’s VP pick will be. But some leaders in tech are trying their businesses to their personal politics, thus putting their companies directly into the culture wars from the other side of the divide. I wonder if that will prove smart over a multi-year time horizon.
And then there’s AI
Closing on something purely tech-related, a new research paper did yeoman’s work to parse thousands of URLs used in common data crawl datasets, finding that crawler restrictions are accelerating. For AI model companies hungry for more and newer data, this is a real concern.
Here are the critical charts:
New restrictions on AI companies hoovering online data are not falling equally. Here’s a critical passage from the paper:
I, for one, cannot wait until all LLMs are AmazonGPTs. Kidding, but we’re approaching the following fork in the digital road:
Robots.txt is respected, and AI model companies and similar are forced to pay for access to news, bolstering the news ecosystem;
Robots.txt is not respected, and AI model companies and similar dodge paying for needed access to news, harming the news ecosystem.
We’re already seeing some AI execs argue that Robots.txt and the entire REP is nothing more than good manners. Good manners that are not required. If that’s the direction that AI folks go, it will be a fight. We’ll see, but the folks who make the grist for the AI mill are increasingly opting out of offering free access. Call it a slowly closing door.