Good morning. Microsoft’s CFO Amy Hood said during its earnings call that its investments in AI will pay off over the next 15 years “and beyond.”

It remains to be seen how patient investors will be; shares of Microsoft retreated Wednesday, while shares of Nvidia surged, adding some $329 billion in market value in a single session, the most in market history.

— Ian Krietzberg, Editor-in-Chief, The Deep View

In today’s newsletter:

• 💧 AI for Good: Improving drinking water operations

• 🚘 Uber partners up with BYD to take another run at self-driving

• 📱 Meta earning

• 🤖 Meet friend, another AI product in search of a solution

AI for Good: Improving drinking water operations 

Over the past few years, researchers have increasingly examined the impact of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies on water utilities. 

The details: The general result of this research is that, because of its ability to parse wide swaths of data, AI can be used to help water operators further optimize their operations. 

• Research has identified the ability of AI to assess pipe conditions and detect potential leaks. In terms of treatment and distribution, AI be used to detect pollutants and other anomalies that might affect water quality. 

• A paper published last year, however, found that the majority of U.S. water utilities don’t yet employ these systems. 

Respondents who have yet to deploy such systems cited a number of concerns, including cost and a lack of data. Many of them said that, AI or not, water systems “should always be monitored and operated by experienced staff.”

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Uber partners up with BYD to take another run at self-driving 

Uber on Wednesday announced a partnership with Chinese electric carmaker BYD to bring 100,000 electric vehicles onto its platform over the next few years. This push will begin in Europe and Latin America before rolling out to other countries, including Canada and New Zealand (but not the U.S.). 

The two companies, according to a press release, also plan to collaborate on future BYD “autonomous-capable vehicles to be deployed on the Uber platform.” 

The details: “As the largest on-demand mobility and delivery platform in the world, Uber is well-positioned to bring autonomous vehicle technology to a global audience at scale.”

• The context: Uber had been working hard to develop self-driving robotaxis for years until 2020, when it finally sold its self-driving business to Aurora Innovation. 

• Uber’s self-driving attempts were marred by a lawsuit from Google spin-off Waymo and a deadly accident in 2018.

Even more context: While self-driving cars seem to be performing better than they have before, there are inherent limitations to the AI that makes them work; namely, they can’t reason, and so edge cases pose a constant danger to self-driving cars. 

See: Elon Musk said Tesla robotaxi skeptics should try ‘full self driving.’ A Wall Street analyst nearly crashed.

A BYD spokesperson told CNBC a few months ago that self-driving cars are “basically impossible.”

• Gradient AI, an enterprise AI provider, raised $56.1 million in a Series C funding round.

• Lightrun, the Israeli debugging startup, raised $18 million in a Series A funding round.

• TikTok’s paying around $20 million a month to license OpenAI’s models through Microsoft (The Information).

• New US rule on foreign chip equipment exports to China to exempt some allies (Reuters).

• Kids Online Safety Act passes Senate despite concerns it will harm kids (ars technica).

• Meta blames hallucinations after its AI said Trump rally shooting didn’t happen (The Verge).

• A CIO canceled a Microsoft AI deal. The reason should worry the entire tech industry (Business Insider).

Meta stock jumps on earnings beat; Llama 4 coming next year

Meta, the second entry in Big Tech’s Q2 earnings run this week, beat analyst expectations,  reporting earnings of $5.16 per share on revenue of $39.07 billion. Analysts had expected earnings of $4.73 per share and revenue of $38.31 billion. 

And on this beat — in a polar opposite market reaction to what happened to Microsoft — shares of Meta popped around 7% in after-hours trading. 

The details: "We had a strong quarter, and Meta AI is on track to be the most used AI assistant in the world by the end of the year,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement. 

• The company reported capital expenditure of $8.47 billion for the quarter (below expectations), but boosted the bottom end of its full-year capex range, to $37 billion - $40 billion, up from $35 billion - $40 billion. 

• In its prepared remarks alone, Meta used the term “AI” 39 times. Zuckerberg talked about all the different Meta applications of the tech, from content recommendation algorithms to an enhanced suite of tools for advertisers and a whole slew of new genAI-powered experiences, including agents. 

Zuckerberg said that Llama 4 — coming next year — will require 10x more compute than Llama 3. 

The capex will continue. 

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Meet Friend, another AI product in search of a solution

It has become a truth of technology that tech creates a problem, then creates a solution to that problem. Today, the problem we’re talking about is loneliness, which, in the U.S., is an epidemic. 

And while tech — through social media — has been found to increase loneliness, tech, this time through generative AI, is being pitched as the solution. 

The product is called ‘friend.’ It’s a little pendant that users wear on a necklace that’s pitched as an “always listening” device. The device contacts its user through text messages at will; users can also speak into the device in order to have a ‘conversation’ with it. 

• It costs $99 and has no subscription attached to it (for now). The company promises not to store the audio gathered by each device. 

• 404 Media reported that, of the $2.5 million raised by the company, $1.8 million was spent securing the domain name friend.com. 

The founder, Avi Schiffmann, told Wired: “I feel like I have a closer relationship with this fucking pendant around my neck than I do with these literal friends in front of me.”

Unlike other genAI products or wearables, the idea of friend has nothing to do with enhanced productivity or efficiency. It’s just a friend to talk to, Schiffmann said. 

I find this profoundly disturbing, something Schiffmann seems to be leaning into; the music in the product launch video is remarkably reminiscent of a Black Mirror track, something that was a clear, intentional choice. 

But it is an unsurprising child of Silicon Valley. As Marc Andreessen said in his 2023 techno-optimist manifesto: there is “no material problem — whether created by nature or by technology — that cannot be solved with more technology.”

Now, aside from the fact — as pointed out by psychologist Dr. Jasmin Tahmaseb-McConatha — that “when technology takes the place of in-person relationships, it has been found to increase loneliness and disconnection and reduce well-being,” there are a number of inherent problems with a genAI friend. 

• As Sherry Turkle, the founding director of MIT’s Initiative on Technology and Self, has said, generative AI does not care. It can’t. It’s not real; a mere illusion of linguistic data that is lacking both a soul and a body. 

• “Chatbots have not lived a human life. They do not have bodies; they do not fear illness and death,” she said in a recent study of human relationships with chatbots. “Machines cannot put themselves in your shoes, and they cannot commit to you. To put it too bluntly, if you turn away from them to make dinner or attempt suicide, it is the same to them.”

“If we say that generative AI chatbots are intelligent, our thinking about intelligence becomes depressingly downgraded,” Turkle said. “If we say that they are empathic, we downgrade empathy as well.”

Humans need humanity. We need independence, rather than collective regurgitation. We need creativity, rather than consumption. We need to get hurt. We need to be vulnerable. We need to fail. We need to care — truly — about others. 

This is the lowest form of what AI can offer, concerns of data privacy and wildly enhanced surveillance aside. This does not help humanity. This is the path to Wall-E; this is the road to the Matrix, where people are content to live out an illusion because it is easier than reality. 

• When I spoke with Intuition Robotics — which provides something similar, though exclusively for elderly people — about this topic, my takeaway was simple: if it helps people, then great. But it feels dystopic. 

• With this, I see the first step to the realization of the darkest bits of every sci-fi novel and film. I doubt it will succeed — so many others have failed here — but the fact that they’re trying scares me. 

“Social media is a gateway drug to pretend empathy with machines. First, we talked to each other. Then we talked to each other through machines. Now, we talk directly to programs. We treat these programs as though they were people,” Turkle said. “Will we be more likely to treat people as though they are programs? Will we find other people exhausting because we are transfixed by mirrors of ourselves?”

A poll before you go

Thanks for reading today’s edition of The Deep View!

We’ll see you in the next one.

Your view on whether you’d pay more for non-AI products and human-centric experiences:

Just shy of 30% of you said that AGI isn’t coming anytime soon, so it really doesn’t matter; 28% of you said you wouldn’t pay more.

But around a quarter of you said that you would absolutely pay more money for human-centric products and experiences.

Absolutely:

• “Choice is key, humans need relevance. So much has been lost to society in terms of values, pure and honest human connections w/ the addiction to tech. Capitalism and Big Tech will do their best to hold out, but if no one is buying (using), there will be divergence. Too soon to tell if AGI will herd the sheep, or Team Humanity will have a strong enough backbone.”