SBF’s top lieutenant and ex-girlfriend testified that criminality, not carelessness, destroyed billions in value. So why is a different narrative circulating? — Recently, I went down to the Manhattan courthouse where the U.S. is prosecuting former FTX CEO Sam-Bankman Fried and left astonished. I watched as Caroline Ellison, SBF’s former top lieutenant and ex-girlfriend, calmly demolished any doubt (in my mind, at least) that the collapse was a mistake. Listening to Ellison…

Brian Chesky on all those fees, the crackdown in New York City, and how his company swears it’s changing. — Brian Chesky is on a mission. The Airbnb CEO says he’s undergoing a big new push to improve his popular — but sometimes infuriating — service where 4.5 million hosts offer an alternative to hotels. He’s reimagining everything from cleaning fees to search (now you can select for king beds!)…

“We completely overhauled how we develop product development at Airbnb,” Chesky says. — Hi Everyone, I just sat down with Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky and published the interview on the Big Technology Podcast feed. We talked about so much, including cleaning fees, building product, the difference between Amazon and Apple culture, and Airbnb’s restrictions in New York. You can listen on Apple Podcasts…

Artificial intelligence is often portrayed as a job killer. But companies are likely to use the technology to get more done with the same number of people. — It was so over. Remember? As soon as artificial intelligence began to read, write, and code, all manner of professions were supposed to automate — fast. Lawyers were toast. Entry-level engineers commodified. And journalists, well, it’s a small miracle we’re writing this story.

Hi everyone! It’s been quite a few weeks on the podcast recently and I thought I’d send a quick update. Bill McDermott, CEO of ServiceNow, joined Big Technology Podcast last Wednesday to discuss his unique career path, from owning a Long Island delicatessen to now managing a $113 billion, publicly-traded…

Mark Zuckerberg will have to overindex on openness, and hang in tightly, if he wants his big Metaverse bet to pay off. — Hi everyone, Apple’s Vision Pro announcement generated a lot of buzz last week; not all of it positive. And while we’re years away from learning whether the doubters or boosters were right, we can at least make some informed predictions. On Big Technology Podcast, I dig into the new device…

Hi everyone, I’m sharing a quick note this week as we get back in action following Memorial Day weekend. On Big Technology Podcast, Ranjan Roy and I spoke with New York Magazine contributing editor John Herrman about Temu and Shein, the fast-rising, China-based retailers that are threatening U.S. mainstays including…

For less than $1 per hour, workers in Nairobi, Kenya trained OpenAI’s GPT models. They walked away shaken. — This is an excerpt from my weekly newsletter, Big Technology, published on Substack. Check it out here and sign up to receive it each Friday. Richard Mathenge felt he’d landed the perfect role when he started training OpenAI’s GPT model in 2021. After years of working in customer service in…

Digging through a bunch of websites to find information is annoying, but we’re in trouble if the primary sources go away. — The demo was beautiful. At Google’s IO developer conference this week, the company showed an experimental version of its search engine handling an almost unimaginably difficult query. Asked whether a family with kids under three years old and a dog would prefer Arches National Park or Bryce Canyon, Google scoured…