• Aditya Challapally teaches a Stanford Online course on generative AI for tech-adjacent professionals.
• Challapally explained how individuals can skill up technically or become an AI domain expert.
• He also said using tools like ChatGPT or Claude can help people understand AI better.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Aditya Challapally, a 30-year-old Microsoft employee who teaches a course for Stanford Online about generative AI. This story has been edited for length and clarity.

I started working in AI about a decade ago. I started as a data science intern at Uber, then did AI consulting at McKinsey, and later joined Microsoft, where I now work on Copilot.

I started guest teaching at Stanford four years ago and recently co-created a course called Mastering Generative AI for Product Innovation, which launched on Stanford Online in August 2024. It's an online, self-paced course that runs throughout the year. All of the research comes from talking to 300-plus users and 50-plus executives.

A lot of the people who take the class are tech adjacent, such as customer support representatives for a technical product, or product managers for a software or hardware product. They'll often be working on somewhat of a technical product and the course helps them understand gen AI a little bit more.

We teach three modules in this course. The first module explains what Gen AI is and where the biggest opportunities are. In the second module, we talk about what great Gen AI products look like.

The third module talks about how great Gen AI products are built and what individuals can do to set themselves up to be more influential, relevant, and useful when building Gen AI products.

These are the two main pathways you can take to do so.

Track 1: Skill up technically

When I go out and talk to Fortune 500 leaders, they say that their most burning need is for professionals who bridge both worlds — those who understand the business requirements but also understand the technical requirements.

This doesn't necessarily mean that you have to learn how to code, but you at least need to have enough technical literacy that you can translate product visions into technical requirements.

The beginner version is just getting really good at prompt engineering. This sounds like it would be quite basic, but understanding the exact limitations of prompts and all of the different tools across text, audio, and image makes you already very valuable in a business setting because you can help generate ideas even before they get to the technical team.

At an intermediate stage you also should start to understand a little bit about how gen AI systems work in systems design, like how gen AI models can be called within your data boundary.

Companies have data boundaries for which they have an agreement with their customers that their data can't go beyond. So if you're a bank, you may have an agreement with your customers that only the bank will use their information. If you send that in some sort of chat to OpenAI, that would be breaking the company data boundary. So something as simple as knowing that is already really helpful.

In the advanced stage of this track, there are two options.

Some people who don't work in big companies go deeper into understanding coding a little more. People who work in Big Tech companies usually dive deeper into system architecture. So they'll understand things like data boundaries and data flow diagrams in a lot more detail.

Track 2: Become an AI expert for your industry

The domain expertise track is where business people automatically lean toward and have an advantage. This is not necessarily knowing more about the industry, but knowing how gen AI can apply to the domain in more detail.

For example, in finance, you have to know things like what data you can use to train a specific model. You also have to know things like what types of privacy and security regulations you have to go through to get an app approved or release a gen AI-related app.

This skillset is so valuable that companies pay large amounts to consultants that have this specialized expertise. I know this guy who used to work as an operations manager at a bank and he figured out where gen AI was the most valuable. Now, companies will just call him to figure out where to launch their gen AI product.

Use the tools and learn their limitations to improve your prompts

The best thing I see people do is try to automate a lot of their lives with gen AI. They use ChatGPT or Claude for everything and that helps them understand the limitations of AI really well and how to prompt it.

When beginners start to use gen AI, they're not used to what I call the abundance of intelligence. They'll say "Can you give me a response to this text message?"

Experts who use gen AI a lot will say something like, "Can you give me 20 responses to this text message?" And then they'll go and use their taste to pick one.

Outside of work, I use it in many ways to think through a lot of plans. It's really helpful as a thought partner for me, even if for communication, for general planning, or for something even as banal as trip planning.

Instead of asking a friend for advice you should think about asking an LLM or a chatbot for advice. That's when you really start to understand how it's useful.

• Staff at major companies have asked their leaders if there are plans to follow Amazon's full return to office.
• Firms like Meta, Google, and Microsoft have a hybrid setup — however, execs say they're eyeing productivity.
• Research findings on the subject are varied, and the debate will likely continue in 2025.

Executives at major companies are referencing a specific term to hedge when asked by employees if they plan to follow in Amazon's footsteps and implement a return to 5 days a week in the office.

That word? Productivity.

While Amazon has been the most high-profile example this year of a full return to office policy, set to go into effect in January, telecom giant AT&T has also elected to double down on in-person work with a similar 5-day policy, Business Insider first reported.

In the wake of Amazon's announcement, executives at both Google and Microsoft, which require employees to be in the office at least 3 days a week, have fielded questions from staff wondering if the days of hybrid work are numbered.

Microsoft's executive vice president of cloud and AI, Scott Guthrie, said the company wouldn't change the hybrid work policy unless it noticed a drop in productivity, BI reported in September.

In October, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the company had no plans to order employees back to the office, so long as employees remain productive during their at-home work days, BI previously reported.

Over at Meta, Mark Zuckerberg said last year that "early analysis of performance data," indicated productivity increases for early-career engineers in the office at least 3 days a week. A few months later, the company announced it was requiring employees to return to the office 3 days a week.

Executives at Dell called the company's sales team back to the office 5 days a week starting at the end of September, writing in a memo, "Our data shows that sales teams are more productive when onsite."

Though Amazon did not explicitly name productivity as a reason for its full return to the office, CEO Andy Jassy emphasized a similar term: effectiveness.

Being back in person 5 days a week makes it "easier for our teammates to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture; collaborating, brainstorming, and inventing are simpler and more effective; teaching and learning from one another are more seamless; and, teams tend to be better connected to one another," he wrote at the time.

For those committing to a full return to office, preparing campuses for the influx of employees in the new year is its own challenge. Amazon has since delayed the announced January 2 effective date of the new mandate for some employees because it doesn't have enough office space in some locations, BI reported earlier this month.

As CEOs and company leaders keep an eye on how employees in remote or hybrid setups perform, various studies since the onset of the pandemic have attempted to measure and compare the productivity of employees who work at home and in-office. Research studies have produced conflicting results, further complicated by the matter of how best to define or measure productivity.

Goldman Sachs, which has a 5-day-in-office policy, reviewed several analyses that used different ways of evaluating changes in work-from-home productivity, from call-center workers who were randomly chosen to work from home to comparing the productivity of randomly assigned remote workers with their in-office peers.

In short, it's hard to say for sure, and executives are deciding what their long-term setup will be after a year in which some of the world's biggest companies put a renewed focus on being "lean" and "efficient."

Meanwhile, some employees have returned to commuting in (sometimes "coffee-badging" in and returning home), others have relocated to comply with a policy change, and some have resigned to pursue a hybrid or fully remote opportunity. As companies tighten their belts and conduct layoffs, other workers have taken to workplace forums to wonder if some of the RTO mandates have been a possible "quiet layoffs" tactic.

As more major global companies revisit their policies and make changes, CEOs are likely to face more questions on the topic going into the new year.

For some, the answer is simple: Stay productive and we'll stay flexible.

Microsoft bought more than twice as many Nvidia Hopper chips this year than any of its biggest rivals. The tech giant bought 485,000 Nvidia Hopper chips across 2024 according to reporting from the Financial Times, which cited data from tech consultancy Omdia. To compare, Meta bought 224,000 of the same flagship Nvidia chip this year. […]

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• It's not new for rich people and big companies to donate to presidential inaugurations.
• Something about watching tech titans like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos do it seems different.
• That's at least in part because it's so public — the money is less important than the message.

First, Mark Zuckerberg. Then, Jeff Bezos. Now, Sam Altman. They're all donating $1 million to Donald Trump's inauguration fund.

Expect more tech titans to follow. Google CEO Sundar Pichai was reportedly flying to Mar-a-Lago to meet with Trump this week. I wouldn't be shocked to see a $1 million pledge coming shortly after. (Google declined to comment about any of the above.)

You can see it playing out in real time. Zuckerberg's initial donation was news; each subsequent one just confirms it as the cost of doing business. At some point, the news will be when you hear that some tech giant is not forking over $1 million to help fund Trump's multiday party next month.

Quick context: It is not unusual for big companies and very rich people to donate lots of money to presidential inaugurations, whether via cash, in-kind contributions, or both.

While US elections themselves have (some) rules about the amount of money people and companies can spend on candidates, there's no cap on what they can spend on inaugural committees. The only restrictions are that the money can't come from foreign nationals and that the donations eventually have to be disclosed.

Which is why we can see it's also not unheard of for Big Tech companies to make inaugural donations. Microsoft kicked in $500,000 for Trump's first inauguration in 2017; Google spent $285,000. Those two companies also contributed to Joe Biden's 2021 inauguration, along with Uber, which spent $1 million.

It's also worth noting that the sums we are talking about here don't even qualify as rounding errors for companies this size. Zuckerberg's Meta makes about $174 million in profit every day. Amazon does about $110 million. A million bucks just doesn't register. (The Amazon and Meta donations are coming directly from the companies, not their founders; Altman, who has a reported net worth of $1.1 billion, has said he's making his donation personally.)

So what makes this round of donations newsworthy?

Yes, in some cases, Trump has tangled with the companies or the leaders in question — he famously threatened to jail Zuckerberg earlier this year for theoretical election interference, and he's long railed about Amazon's founder, Bezos, as well as the Bezos-owned Washington Post.

There's also the fact that while Trump and his allies continue to insist that they want to cut regulations, they also insist that they'll be cracking down on Big Tech. That context makes the donations seem even more transactional than other rich person/corporate donations.

But the main reason this is news is … because it's news. News that's out in public, that is.

In the past, these donations would eventually be disclosed in filings, but this time around, the contributors seem eager to let the world know they're doing it.

That's the telling part. The part that tells you that this time around, more tech leaders have decided that the best way to deal with Donald Trump is to say nice things about him in public, and to do nice things for him — in public. And then, they hope, they can get things from him privately.

That is, they are taking cues from Apple CEO Tim Cook, who navigated the first Trump presidency very effectively. As I've noted before: "Cook became an expert Trump manager during Trump 1.0 by letting the president do what he wanted in public, like take credit for things he didn't do, while prevailing on him privately to do things Cook wanted Trump to do — namely, exempting Apple products from tariffs." I'm assuming that will also include a $1 million donation from Apple that will get announced very shortly.

• Microsoft's CEO has said OpenAI's two-year lead in the AI race gave it "escape velocity" to build out ChatGPT.
• Satya Nadella told a podcast this gave OpenAI "two years of runway" to work "pretty much uncontested."
• Microsoft stepped up investing in the startup after ChatGPT's launch in November 2022.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has said OpenAI has benefited from a two-year lead in the AI race to work "pretty much uncontested."

The startup, in which Microsoft has been investing since 2019, prompted an AI arms race when it released ChatGPT in November 2022, which Nadella said gave it an "escape velocity."

The launch left rival companies such as Google battling claims they had been caught off guard by the chatbot's launch.

"The advantage we have had, and OpenAI has had, which is we've had two years of runway — pretty much uncontested," Nadella said on an episode of the "BG2Pod with Brad Gerstner and Bill Gurley" released on Thursday.

"I don't think they'll be ever again, maybe, be a two-year lead like this," Nadella said. "I think it's unlikely that that type of lead could be established with some foundation model, but we have that advantage, that was the great advantage we've had with OpenAI."

After ChatGPT's launch, Microsoft capitalized on its 2019 investment to build a closer partnership with OpenAI and began incorporating the company's tech into its Office apps, the Bing search engine, and Edge — beating its biggest rivals to market.

In return, Microsoft has provided OpenAI with massive cloud-computing resources.

Microsoft was an early investor in OpenAI, investing $1 billion in 2019. The tech giant has invested a total of $13 billion in the company, according to its latest Securities and Exchange Commission filings.

In the same filing, Microsoft described its relationship with OpenAI as an equity investment rather than a partnership, as it had previously done.

In its July SEC filing, it listed OpenAI alongside Anthropic and Meta as "emerging competitors."

Microsoft has revealed the newest addition to its Phi family of generative AI models. Called Phi-4, the model improves in several areas over its predecessors, Microsoft claims, particularly in solving math problems. That’s partly the result of better training data quality. Phi-4 is available in very limited access as of Thursday night only on Microsoft’s […]

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The coalition, which is organized by Acadia, is seeking to invest $9 billion to build 5 gigawatts worth of renewable power.

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While the number of subscriptions and services out there now may seem daunting, that can come in handy this time of year. These can be life-saver gifts for the most hard-to-shop-for folks on your holiday list. Whether you have a loved one who’s constantly looking for a new TV show to dive into, a voracious reader or a lifelong learner, there are dozens of subscriptions out there to consider gifting them this year. We’ve pulled together some of our favorites from MasterClass to Disney+ to Gaia Fitness in the hopes that some of them will fit the bill for those you still need to buy gifts for.

Gaming subscriptions

Game consoles are certainly among the most popular gift ideas this time of year. If you know someone who’s been so good that they’re getting a new Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X/S, one of these subscriptions will make their shiny toy immediately playable out of the box.

A $20/month Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription offers hundreds of games from all periods of Xbox history that can be played on the Xbox or PC; many of them can be streamed to phones and tablets as well. It also includes EA Play, which opens up access to even more games. Perhaps the best part of Xbox Game Pass, though, is that it offers access to first-party Xbox Game Studios titles the day they're released, like Starfield, Forza Motorsport and the just-released Call of Duty: Black Ops 6.

Nintendo has two tiers of its Switch Online plan. The basic $20 / year plan unlocks online play, more than 100 Game Boy, NES and Super NES games and cloud backups of your saved games as well as the occasional special offers. The $50 “expansion pack” adds a collection of N64, Game Boy Advance and Sega Genesis games as well as some DLC for games like Mario Kart 8, Animal Crossing: New Horizons and Splatoon 2.

Finally, Sony’s PlayStation Plus plan comes in three tiers, but the middle “Extra” plan ($135/year) is probably best for most gamers. In addition to cloud storage for saves, online multiplayer support and a couple of free games for your library every month, you get access to the PlayStation Plus catalog, which includes more than 400 PS4 and PS5 games. There are a number of heavy hitters here, including The Last of Us Part I, Ghost of Tsushima, Death Stranding, Resident Evil 3 Spider-Man: Miles Morales and Returnal as well as lower-profile hits and indie games like Dave the Diver, Animal Well, Return to Monkey Island and Humanity. If you know someone who loves older games though, the “Premium” tier ($160 / year) adds a bunch of titles from the PS1, PS2 and PS3 catalogs as well as perks like game trials and PS5 game streaming from the cloud.

Check out the rest of our gift ideas here.

Bad news for anyone out there who still uses Skype: the Microsoft-owned phone and messaging platform has quietly stopped letting users top-up accounts with credit and buy Skype phone numbers. Instead, Skype is locking into SaaS mode: it’s pushing users to take monthly subscriptions for regional and global Skype-to-phone plans, for a set monthly fee, […]

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GM’s decision to shut down its Cruise robotaxi program continues to ripple through the market, extending to the self-driving car company’s minority investors. Microsoft, which in 2021 made an investment into Cruise, will take $800 million impairment charge as a result of GM’s actions, according to a regulatory filing. Microsoft said the charge will be […]

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Microsoft announced on Wednesday that it’s starting to roll out a way for users to share files between their iPhone and Windows 11 or Windows 10 PCs via the company’s Phone Link app and Link to Windows app. The capability is rolling out now to Windows Insiders. Windows Insiders can now download the latest Phone […]

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Google reportedly wants the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to end Microsoft's exclusive cloud deal with OpenAI that requires anyone wanting access to OpenAI's models to go through Microsoft's servers.

Someone "directly involved" in Google's effort told The Information that Google's request came after the FTC began broadly probing how Microsoft's cloud computing business practices may be harming competition.

As part of the FTC's investigation, the agency apparently asked Microsoft's biggest rivals if the exclusive OpenAI deal was "preventing them from competing in the burgeoning artificial intelligence market," multiple sources told The Information. Google reportedly was among those arguing that the deal harms competition by saddling rivals with extra costs and blocking them from hosting OpenAI's latest models themselves.

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Researchers say a hacking group linked to the FSB used tools developed by a cybercrime group to target Ukraine's Army and Border Guard.

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• Many executives say they've learned valuable lessons on business from books.
• Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Bill Gates are no exception.
• Here are 20 books they've said taught them a lot about business, leadership, and the forces shaping our world.

You learn by doing — but you can also learn a lot by reading.

Many influential business figures, including Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Amazon cofounder Jeff Bezos, and Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates say they've learned some of the most important lessons in their lives from books.

They've recommended countless books over the years that they credit with strengthening their business acumen and shaping their worldviews.

Here are 20 books recommended by Musk, Bezos, and Gates to add to your reading list:

Jeff Bezos

Some of Bezos' favorite books were instrumental to the creation of products and services like the Kindle and Amazon Web Services.

"The Innovator's Solution"

This book on innovation explains how companies can become disruptors. It's one of three books Bezos made his top executives read one summer to map out Amazon's trajectory.

"The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement"

Also on that list was "The Goal," in which Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox examine the theory of constraints from a management perspective.

Buy it here >>

"The Effective Executive"

The final book on Bezos' reading list for senior managers, "The Effective Executive" lays out habits of successful executives, like time management and effective decision-making.

"Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies"

This book draws on six years of research from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business that looks into what separates exceptional companies from their competitors. Bezos has said it's his "favorite business book."

Buy it here >>

"The Remains of the Day"

This Kazuo Ishiguro novel tells of an English butler in wartime England who begins to question his lifelong loyalty to his employer while on a vacation.

Bezos has said of the book, "Before reading it, I didn't think a perfect novel was possible."

Buy it here >>

"Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation"

This book imparts lessons about improving efficiency based on case studies of lean companies across various industries.

Buy it here >>

Elon Musk

The Tesla CEO has recommended several AI books, sci-fi novels, and biographies over the years.

"What We Owe the Future"

One of Musk's most recent picks, this book tackles longtermism, which its author defines as "the view that positively affecting the long-run future is a key moral priority of our time." Musk says the book is a "close match" for his philosophy.

"Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies"

Musk has also recommended several books on artificial intelligence, including this one, which considers questions about the future of intelligent life in a world where machines might become smarter than people.

Buy it here >>

"Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era"

On the subject of AI, Musk said in a 2014 tweet that this book, which examines its risks and potential, is also "worth reading."

Buy it here >>

"Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence"

In this book, MIT professor Max Tegmark writes about ensuring artificial intelligence and technological progress remain beneficial for human life in the future.

"Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future"

Peter Thiel shares lessons he learned founding companies like PayPal and Palantir in this book.

Musk has said of the book, "Thiel has built multiple breakthrough companies, and Zero to One shows how."

Buy it here >>

"Einstein: His Life and Universe"

Musk's reading list isn't without biographies, including this Walter Isaacson book on Albert Einstein as well as Isaacon's biography of Benjamin Franklin. Isaacson more recently published a biography of Musk himself.

Buy it here >>

Bill Gates

The Microsoft cofounder usually publishes two lists each year, one in the summer and one at year's end, of his book recommendations.

"How the World Really Works"

In his 2022 summer reading list, Gates highlighted this work by Vaclav Smil that explores the fundamental forces underlying today's world, including matters like energy production and globalization.

"If you want a brief but thorough education in numeric thinking about many of the fundamental forces that shape human life, this is the book to read," Gates said of the book.

"Why We're Polarized"

Ezra Klein argues that the American political system has became polarized around identity to dangerous effect in this book, also on Gates' summer reading list in 2022, that Gates calls "a fascinating look at human psychology."

"Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street"

Gates has said this is "the best business book I've ever read." It compiles 12 articles that originally appeared in The New Yorker about moments of success and failure at companies like General Electric and Xerox.

Buy it here >>

"Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think"

This book investigates the thinking patterns and tendencies that distort people's perceptions of the world. Gates has called it "one of the most educational books I've ever read."

Buy it here >>

"Origin Story: A Big History of Everything"

David Christian takes on the history of our universe, from the Big Bang to mass globalization, in this book.

Buy it here >>

"The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History"

Elizabeth Kolbert plumbs the history of Earth's mass extinctions in this book, including a sixth extinction, which some scientists warn is already underway.

Buy it here >>

"The Myth of the Strong Leader: Political Leadership in the Modern Age"

This Archie Brown book examines political leadership throughout the 20th century.

Buy it here >>

"The Coming Wave"

One of Gates' most recent book picks comes from the head of Microsoft AI.

Mustafa Suleyman's "The Coming Wave" explores the opportunities and risks posed by scientific breakthroughs like AI and gene editing.

"If you want to understand the rise of AI, this is the best book to read," Gates wrote of the book.

• Oracle and xAI love to flex the size of their GPU clusters.
• It's getting hard to tell who has the most supercomputing power as more firms claim the top spot.
• The real numbers are competitive intel and cluster size isn't everything, experts told BI.

In high school, as in tech, superlatives are important. Or maybe they just feel important in the moment. With the breakneck pace of the AI computing infrastructure buildout, it's becoming increasingly difficult to keep track of who has the biggest, fastest, or most powerful supercomputer — especially when multiple companies claim the title at once.

"We delivered the world's largest and fastest AI supercomputer, scaling up to 65,000 Nvidia H200 GPUs," Oracle CEO Safra Catz and Chairman, CTO, echoed by Founder Larry Ellison on the company's Monday earnings call.

In late October, Nvidia proclaimed xAI's Colossus as the "World's Largest AI Supercomputer," after Elon Musk's firm reportedly built a computing cluster with 100,000 Nvidia graphics processing units in a matter of weeks. The plan is to expand to 1 million GPUs next, according to the Greater Memphis Chamber of Commerce (where the supercomputer is located.)

The good ole days of supercomputing are gone

It used to be simpler. "Supercomputers" were most commonly found in research settings. Naturally, there's an official list ranking supercomputers. Until recently the world's most powerful supercomputer was named El Capitan. Housed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California 11 million CPUs and GPUs from Nvidia-rival AMD add up to 1.742 Exaflops of computing capacity. (One exaflop is equal to one quintillion, or a billion billions, operations per second.)

"The biggest computers don't get put on the list," Dylan Patel, chief analyst at Semianalysis, told BI. "Your competitor shouldn't know exactly what you have," he continued. The 65,000-GPU supercluster Oracle executives were praising can reach up to 65 exaflops, according to the company.

It's safe to assume, Patel said, that Nvidia's largest customers, Meta, Microsoft, and xAI also have the largest, most powerful clusters. Nvidia CFO Colette Cress said 200 fresh exaflops of Nvidia computing would be online by the end of this year — across nine different supercomputers — on Nvidia's May earnings call.

Going forward, it's going to be harder to determine whose clusters are the biggest at any given moment — and even harder to tell whose are the most powerful — no matter how much CEOs may brag.

It's not the size of the cluster — it's how you use it

On Monday's call, Ellison was asked, if the size of these gigantic clusters is actually generating better model performance.

He said larger clusters and faster GPUs are elements that speed up model training. Another is networking it all together. "So the GPU clusters aren't sitting there waiting for the data," Ellison said Monday.

Thus, the number of GPUs in a cluster isn't the only factor in the computing power calculation. Networking and programming are important too. "Exaflops" are a result of the whole package so unless companies provide them, experts can only estimate.

What's certain is that more advanced models — the kind that consider their own thinking and check their work before answering queries — require more compute than their relatives of earlier generations. So training increasingly impressive models may indeed require an arms race of sorts.

But an enormous AI arsenal doesn't automatically lead to better or more useful tools.

Sri Ambati, CEO of open-source AI platform H2O.ai, said cloud providers may want to flex their cluster size for sales reasons, but given some (albeit slow) diversification of AI hardware and the rise of smaller, more efficient models, cluster size isn't the end all be all.

Power efficiency too, is a hugely important indicator for AI computing since energy is an enormous operational expense in AI. But it gets lost in the measuring contest.

Nvidia declined to comment. Oracle did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.

Have a tip or an insight to share? Contact Emma at [email protected] or use the secure messaging app Signal: 443-333-9088.

• LinkedIn has been gradually rolling out a TikTok-like video feed.
• Some creators say making videos has supercharged their engagement on the platform.
• LinkedIn is encouraging creators to post "short" and "snappy" videos.

LinkedIn is taking aim at TikTok — and creators are intrigued.

Since the spring, the Microsoft-owned platform has been gradually rolling out a TikTok-style vertical video feed that features career advice, industry news, and other creator content. A LinkedIn spokesperson said "most" users now have access to it. Videos can also appear in the app's main feed.

Meghana Dhar, a creator with 15,000 LinkedIn followers, said her LinkedIn "engagement has just exploded" since she started posting videos. She added that LinkedIn moving toward video "indicates that they're taking creators really seriously."

Several creators, including Dhar, told BI that they often see much more engagement and impressions on their video posts than on their text or photo ones. Engagement refers to interactions with a post, such as a like, while impressions are how many people view a piece of content.

Dhar said, for example, that a recent text post she shared on LinkedIn got about 10,000 impressions, while a video of her talking to the camera hit over 2 million impressions. Marketing strategist Caroline Giegerich found that her LinkedIn video posts reached three times as many people as her text posts did.

A LinkedIn spokesperson said video posts — including videos shared from individual profiles and pages — get 1.4 times as much engagement on average as other posts on LinkedIn.

While the concept of LinkedIn video might feel strange to some users, it could be a key for the platform to cement itself as a core platform for creators, unlock more ad revenue, and keep people checking their feeds regularly. The top platforms for creators, such as YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, are all heavily focused on video.

"I am on a personal mission to make LinkedIn a daily habit for people," Jamé Jackson, a LinkedIn community manager, told BI. "We are so much more than just a platform for job searching."

This isn't LinkedIn's first attempt at video. In 2019, LinkedIn launched its live video product. In 2020, it launched a "Stories" feature, which lets users share disappearing videos (that shut down in 2021).

Still, there is some indication that this current, TikTok-like push might be what finally breaks through.

"Our investments in rich formats, like video, strengthen our leadership in B2B advertising and amplify the value we deliver to our customers," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said during the company's October earnings call. "Weekly immersive video views increased 6x quarter-over-quarter and total video viewership on LinkedIn is up 36% year-over-year."

LinkedIn's do's and don'ts for video

So, what makes a good LinkedIn video?

Jackson said to avoid creating content that "feels way too sales-y and promotional" and to keep the video to under two minutes: short, snappy, and actionable.

"The call to action is important because I always like to secretly tell people that the comments section is the liquid gold of LinkedIn," Jackson said. "The way you do that is by inviting people to the party, inviting them to the table after you've created that video, asking them to share in the comments things that they have learned."

LinkedIn has also seen an uptick in "faceless video content," where people aren't front and center, Jackson said, adding that it had generally performed well.

The platform has encouraged CEOs and executives to talk about breaking news as well, Jackson said.

Creators are using video to grow audiences but monetization lags

Creators generally say that compared to other platforms like TikTok and Instagram, LinkedIn is much less saturated — and that's an opportunity to build audiences.

"I've been posting on LinkedIn almost daily, certainly every weekday for a couple of years now," said Avi Gandhi, who has 23,000 LinkedIn followers.

Gandhi has recently focused on short-form video content, posting three to four times a week and often promoting his newsletter by calling out the name and including a link to subscribe at the end of the text post.

Career coach and creator Jahleane Dolne said she often uses LinkedIn to post podcast clips. While her largest following is on TikTok (about 34,000), Dolne said her podcast clips are a better fit for the LinkedIn audience.

Despite the audience growth for some creators, the ecosystem for making money on LinkedIn isn't yet fully developed. That may be changing, though. Three of the creators BI spoke with said they were either already working on LinkedIn-focused brand deals or actively reaching out to potential sponsors. And earlier this year, the marketing agency Creator Authority launched with a focus on LinkedIn.

However, the platform has not yet introduced a monetization program similar to those on Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube that directly pays creators.

"If LinkedIn launches monetization for videos where you could start making money from the videos that you post, that would be huge," Gandhi said. "That would be incredible and that would make it all worth it."

• Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman predicts AGI is more than two years away.
• His timeline contrasts with Sam Altman, who suggests AGI is achievable "with current hardware."
• Definitions of AGI vary, with Suleyman emphasizing a broad human-level learning system.

Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft's AI CEO, indicated that the timeline of AI advancement will be much longer than Sam Altman has predicted.

During an interview on The Verge's Decoder, Suleyman gave his take on when artificial general intelligence — AI with human-level proficiency at tasks — will become achievable. In October, Altman, cofounder and CEO of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, said that AGI is "achievable with current hardware." He spoke during an ask-me-anything session on Reddit.

Altman didn't clarify exactly what he meant by "current hardware," though Decoder host Nilay Patel defined it as within one to two generations of tech.

Suleyman agreed with that timeline but with some hefty caveats. He told Patel that AGI would be more plausible in the next two to five generations.

"I don't want to say I think it's a high probability that it's two years away, but I think within the next five to seven years, since each generation takes 18 to 24 months now," Suleyman said.

He added that five generations of tech, like new versions of Nvidia's GB200 chips, could be up to a decade away.

"The uncertainty around this is so high that any categorical declarations just feel sort of ungrounded to me and over the top," Suley said.

Weeks after his declaration on Reddit, Altman spoke at The New York Times DealBook Summit in early December. He said AGI will come sooner than expected but "will matter much less."

Suleyman says people have different definitions of AGI. He defines it as "a general-purpose learning system that can perform well across all human-level training environments" — including physical labor.

Meantime, OpenAI's website defines AGI as "a highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work."

"The challenge with AGI is that it's become so dramatized that we sort of end up not focusing on the specific capabilities of what the system can do," Suleyman said.

No matter how Altman defines AGI, OpenAI is reportedly working to remove a clause from its contract with Microsoft that's meant to prevent the misuse of AGI. Still, Suleyman says he's confident in Microsoft's multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI.

"Naturally, in any partnership, there are little tensions here and there, but fundamentally, we will win together," he told Patel.