Deputy Editor
Alex Heath is Deputy Editor for The Verge and the author of Command Line, a newsletter about the tech industry’s inside conversation. Since joining The Verge in 2021, he has broken agenda-setting scoops like Facebook’s rebrand to Meta and been at the forefront of tech’s biggest storylines, from Elon Musk’s chaotic takeover of Twitter to the failed boardroom coup at OpenAI.
Heath has been covering tech for more than a decade in previous roles at The Information, Business Insider, and other outlets. His work has been cited in congressional hearings and been recognized by the Livingston Awards and the Society of American Business Editors and Writers. He has appeared onstage at events like the Code Conference, SXSW, and Web Summit. He regularly appears as an expert voice on programs like CNBC, NPR, BBC, and CNN. He lives with his wife and two dogs in Los Angeles, where he likes to play ultimate frisbee and poker in his free time.
Meta’s CEO got a little heated while talking with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at the SIGGRAPH conference today in Denver.
The topic turned to Meta’s approach to AI with Llama. Zuckerberg made clear that investing so much in foundational models is strongly influenced by not wanting to relive his history with Apple and the App Store:
“One of my things for the next 10 or 15 years is I just want to make sure we can build the fundamental technology that we’re going to be building social experiences on. Because there have just been too many things that I’ve tried to build and then have just been told, ‘Nah, you can’t really build that,’ by the platform provider that, at some level, I’m just like, ‘Nah, fuck that.’”
The AI race’s biggest shift yet
With open source driving the cost of AI models down, attention is turning to the products they power.
The trend of hallucinations showing up in public AI demos continues. As noted by a couple of reporters already, OpenAI’s demo of its new SearchGPT engine shows results that are mostly either wrong or not helpful.
From The Atlantic’s Matteo Wong:
In a prerecorded demonstration video accompanying the announcement, a mock user types music festivals in boone north carolina in august into the SearchGPT interface. The tool then pulls up a list of festivals that it states are taking place in Boone this August, the first being An Appalachian Summer Festival, which according to the tool is hosting a series of arts events from July 29 to August 16 of this year. Someone in Boone hoping to buy tickets to one of those concerts, however, would run into trouble. In fact, the festival started on June 29 and will have its final concert on July 27. Instead, July 29–August 16 are the dates for which the festival’s box office will be officially closed. (I confirmed these dates with the festival’s box office.)
Musk famously challenged the Meta CEO to a cage match last year that Zuckerberg agreed to but never happened.
Now, more than a year later, a reporter from Fox News got Musk to say today that he’s again open to fighting — this time on Zuckerberg’s terms.
Update, July 24th: Zuckerberg’s response on Threads: “Are we really doing this again?”