Happy Valentine’s Day. I’m sending this from the NBA All-Star Technology Summit in San Francisco, where I’ve never seen so many major streaming competitors onstage at once.
This week, I go inside TikTok, Google, and Meta. Keep reading for what Elon Musk really wants with his bid for OpenAI…
TikTok turns up the heat — and scores a win
On Wednesday night, ByteDance employees tuned in to their company all-hands meeting with senior leaders from across the company, including TikTok chief Shou Chew. The elephant in the room was, of course, the fate of the app in the United States.
During the meeting, Chew said, “We remain confident that we can make a lot of progress to stabilize the situation hopefully soon,” according to a transcript of his remarks I’ve seen. The next day, Apple and Google suddenly returned TikTok to their US app stores after receiving private, written assurance from newly confirmed Attorney General Pam Bondi that they wouldn’t be fined for breaking the law. (Bondi’s letter has yet to be made public, and all parties involved are refusing to comment on it.)
During the all-hands meeting, Chew alluded to the years of political miscalculations that led TikTok to this point. “With this road to trust building, if you look back over the years, we actually have made a lot of progress,” said Chew. “Even though the road has been a little bit too steep and windy, we’ve gotten stronger and we’ve survived.”
He assured employees that TikTok’s advertising business had stabilized since the brief period when the app was completely offline in the US and that the company is exceeding its user engagement goal. The US is not TikTok’s top market by users or revenue, but it’s by far the most influential. As the weeks went on without the app being in US stores, TikTok’s leaders quietly mounted a pressure campaign around the issue.
Key execs, including policy chief Michael Beckerman, held off-the-record Q&A sessions with TikTok creators in recent days to stress that Apple and Google have the legal assurances they need to host the app and not face earth-shattering fines, according to creators who attended the Zoom calls. (Some who attended these closed-door sessions have posted this takeaway publicly.)
In these Q&As, TikTok’s representatives acknowledged that the app was suffering from glitches due to some US service providers still not working with the company. “They explained that there was some kind of issue reloading coins, which are used to send creators gifts,” one creator who attended a Q&A session told me. “Live content and coin purchases in-app are affected,” another recalled TikTok’s leaders saying. It’s unclear if these kinds of glitches are fixed now that Apple and Google are hosting the app again.
While I’m sure that some TikTok employees are celebrating its return to app stores, the app’s fate is far from certain. President Donald Trump and China still have to work out a deal that could see TikTok become at least partially owned by some kind of US sovereign wealth fund. Trump has made clear that he has the leverage and wants to use TikTok as a bargaining chip with China. In the US, TikTok is not in control of its destiny.
Many TikTok employees are also buzzing about the ominous warning Chew gave during the all-hands meeting about future layoffs. “We just have to make sure that the organization is in the right shape at this point in time,” he said, adding that “certain teams” had become “bloated” and “clunky.”
“I think we can remove a lot of this overlap of roles and responsibilities,” he continued, “And through that, we can probably offer better job security for everyone because then your work actually has real value and you’re not just part of a meaningless process.”
Google execs dodge questions on DEI, AI weapons
Google’s semi-regular “TGIF” all-hands meetings have been heavily scripted for quite some time. Even still, employees attended this week’s TGIF hoping to better understand why the company is ending its DEI programs and starting to allow its AI to be used for weapons.
On the topic of DEI, CEO Sundar Pichai had nothing revelatory to say. “We’ve always deeply cared about hiring the best people around the world and creating opportunities for all,” he said while dialed in from Paris, according to multiple employees who attended the meeting. “Our values are enduring but we have to comply with legal directions depending on how they evolve.”
After stressing that Google’s employee resource groups aren’t going away, Melonie Parker, Google’s former head of diversity, who (like her counterpart at Meta) has had her title changed to head of “engagement,” again cited the company’s status as a “federal contractor” as contributing to the changes. She said Google will “depreciate a number of our training programs that are focused on DEI” and update others to remove related language.
Google’s top lawyer, Kent Walker, somehow managed to say even less when answering employee questions about the decision to quietly remove the company’s public commitment to keep its AI out of weapons. He said it was good for society for Google to be in the mix on these kinds of government contracts and suggested the company still had red lines for how its technology could be used but didn’t spell them out.
It’s not just military applications of AI that Google employees have taken issue with. I’m told that some complained about how Google has been using AI to aggregate and summarize pre-submitted employee questions in these TGIF meetings.
- Meta’s rough week: Though you wouldn’t be able to tell from the continually climbing stock price, it has been a rough week for a lot of people at Meta. LinkedIn, Signal, Discord, and Blind are full of employees saying they were hit by Mark Zuckerberg’s “low-performer” layoffs, despite receiving “Meets All” ratings or better in recent performance reviews. The stories of those who were cut while on leave (medical, parental, etc.) are particularly rough. The way this layoff was framed to the world and then implemented has caused a lot of frustration and even whispers of lawsuits.
- Musk vs. Altman drama: Company mission statements can be used to justify a lot of things. In the case of OpenAI, the mission of building AGI that “benefits all of humanity” is apparently at odds with Elon Musk’s all-cash offer to buy the controlling nonprofit for $97.4 billion. You can read Musk’s letter of intent to buy OpenAI for yourself. Unlike Project Stargate, he does appear to actually have the money, though the idea that OpenAI would say yes to any offer from Musk is, of course, ridiculous. The point is not to buy OpenAI. The point is to make it a lot more messy and expensive for OpenAI to convert from a nonprofit to a for-profit company. In that respect, Musk has probably already succeeded, whether OpenAI wants to admit it or not.
- Chip watch: Meta is reportedly looking to buy an inference chip startup out of South Korea and is rumored to be a customer of Arm’s first in-house chip… OpenAI is reportedly making progress on its custom chip with TSMC… Jensen Huang autographed laptops at Stanford.
- Other headlines: Musk gutted the financial regulator overseeing his push into payments on X… Apple’s iPhone SE event is set for February 19th… Google I/O is scheduled for May 20th… Anduril is taking over Microsoft’s massive AR goggle contract with the US military… Blue Origin laid off 10 percent of employees.
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