MONDAY TEN: MSFT's AI travel guide to the food bank, Iowa's AI book bans, Kalanick's fail up academy, Meta is a utility, ships use wind, and BM of the Week Lakshmi Mittal

Live from your CEO’s long-term equity plan, it’s yet another Manic Monday edition of Business Pants. Joined by the Lord of Analyst-Holes. In today’s broken record called August 21, 2023: Top 10 Crazy Monday Stories and BM of the Week!

Here’s the breakdown: 4 AI; 5 Crazy Bro-tech Dictators; 1 wind-powered cargo ship

DAMION1

1. Microsoft has pulled an AI-written travel guide, which told tourists to visit the Ottawa Food Bank if they are hungry

1. The now-deleted article — which was previously published on Microsoft Start — suggested attractions like "The Winterlude Festival, National War Memorial, and Ottawa Food Bank, and many more."

2. Microsoft says its editorial content on Microsoft Start — formerly known as MSN — is put together by "algorithms" and "human oversight."

3. The Ottawa Food Bank was the third attraction on the list and included a caption that said, "Life is already difficult enough. Consider going into it on an empty stomach."

2. A driverless Cruise car in San Francisco drove right into wet concrete and got stuck after seemingly mistaking it for a regular road: 'It ain't got a brain'

1. A driverless Cruise car with no passengers got stuck in wet concrete at a construction site in San Francisco

2. "It thinks it's a road and it ain't because it ain't got a brain and it can't tell that it's freshly poured concrete," a witness said.

3. Construction cones had been used to mark off the site and workers stood with flags at each end of the bloc

4. Self-driving car company Cruise agreed to reduce its driverless fleet by 50% after a spate of recent crashes. San Francisco officials previously pushed for a slower rollout of robotaxis.

3. The Iowa school superintendent who used ChatGPT to ban books explains why they did it: ‘We have more important things to do’

1. The Mason City Community School District in Iowa used ChatGPT to ban 19 library books.

2. One Iowa school district had a lightbulb moment when faced with the laborious task of paging through its entire library to comply with a new state law restricting the use of books with sexual content in schools.

3. School district leaders prompted the generative A.I. bot to filter its catalog with the question, “Does [book] contain a description or depiction of a sex act?” If the answer was yes, it was banned from libraries. 

4. In the words of a local official, it helped them observe the law, and wading through books was not at the top of the agenda.

5. “Frankly, we have more important things to do than spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to protect kids from books,” Bridgette Exman, Mason City’s assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction, told Popular Science in an email. “At the same time, we do have a legal and ethical obligation to comply with the law.”

6. Using ChatGPT, the Mason City Community School District removed 19 books, including Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner. 

4. Inside Otter University: How Travis Kalanick's sales boot camp for young techies went off the rails

1. Travis Kalanick's $15 billion foodtech startup promised to fast-track young recruits into tech. It delivered broken dreams and chaos, and few skills.

2. The software company was a key piece of Kalanick's expanding foodtech empire, which aimed to reinvent the restaurant business, just as he had once upended the taxi industry. 

3. Otter's sister company, CloudKitchens, allowed multiple restaurants to work from the same turnkey locations, while Otter gave restaurants a single platform to see orders from multiple apps, such as GrubHub, in one place. By creating this single dashboard, Otter also gained valuable insight into the data that passed through, like how many burgers one restaurant sold on Friday nights and at what price. Both companies were designed to save time and money for restaurants, from mom-and-pops to big brands. 

4. In 2021, their parent company, City Storage Systems, raised $850 million from backers including Microsoft. It's now valued at $15 billion.

5. But Kalanick apparently learned a lesson from Uber, where his tumultuous reign was voraciously chronicled by the press. To stay out of the crosshairs of the media, he insisted on secrecy. Job candidates and employees alike at Otter and CloudKitchens are asked to sign NDAs; they're also barred from listing the companies on their LinkedIn profiles.

6. Starting in early 2022, the company poured millions of dollars into an experimental sales boot camp called Otter University.

7. Internal documents obtained by Insider and interviews with 30 current and former employees, including OtterU managers, suggest the OtterU program was marred by chaos, an ever-changing curriculum and unreachable goals, and a toxic party culture. Half of OtterU's aspiring salespeople were fired or decided to leave before they could finish the two-month boot camp, according to Insider's analysis of a staff roster. The company's spokesperson said the program's graduation rate was 52%. 

8. While Otter University hired about 300 recruits from February 2022 to January, fewer than 20 remain at the company as of August

5. X suspends pro-Nazi account after two brands halt advertising

1. X will soon allow brands to block ads from appearing next to specific profiles.

2. According to CNN, the pharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences and NCTA-The Internet and Television Association "immediately paused their ad spending on X after CNN flagged their ads on the pro-Nazi account." This account—which was verified in April and has now been suspended—"shared content celebrating Hitler and the Nazi Party," with some posts garnering "hundreds of thousands of views," CNN reported.

3. Before its suspension, other brands appeared in this account's feed, including The Athletic, MLB, the Atlanta Falcons, Sports Illustrated, USA Today, Amazon, and Office Depot, Media Matters reported.

4. Reacting to concerns over ad placements in the pro-Nazi feed, X emailed advertisers that the company is ramping up efforts to give advertisers more brand safety controls.

5. Recently, the company announced adjacency controls to stop ads from appearing next to posts containing certain keywords, as well as new sensitivity settings that allow brands to limit or maximize the reach of ads according to their brand's identity.

6. With sensitivity settings, brands can mark their accounts as "conservative"—avoiding ad placements next to "targeted hate speech, explicit sexual content, gratuitous gore, excessive profanity, obscenity, spam, drugs"—or "standard"—only avoiding placements next to "targeted hate speech, explicit sexual content, gratuitous gore, excessive profanity." Soon there will be a third tier, "relaxed," where brands can "show ads alongside some sensitive content to maximize reach" but still cannot monetize targeted hate speech or explicit sexual content.

6. Twitter, now X, to remove blocking feature

1. The blocking feature will be removed for users of X, formerly Twitter, Elon Musk has announced, claiming the feature "makes no sense".

2. The X boss said users will still be able to block people from directly messaging them, however.

3. But many people on social media said it will make it hard for people to remove abusive posts from their timeline.

4. Elon Musk was accused of unblocking himself from people's accounts after buying Twitter

7. Elon Musk admits X 'may fail, as so many have predicted'

1. "The sad truth is that there are no great 'social networks' right now," he said on X. "We may fail, as so many have predicted, but we will try our best to make there be at least one." 

8. A 77-year-old talks to an AI-companion robot called ElliQ over a dozen times daily to combat her loneliness: 'It really is like having somebody else in here'

1. Priscilla O'Kesson uses AI-powered robot ElliQ, an AI-powered robot made by Israeli startup Intuition Robotics, to combat her loneliness.

1. One team picture 33M/20F

2. Leadership: 6M 1F: VP Marketing

1. Advisors: 5M 1F: Maya Goldberg Psychologist and Behavioral Economics Expert

1. Of course she only graduated 4 years ago and also has an M.A in Economics, summa cum laude, Game Theory

3. No people of color detected

2. The 77-year-old is one of 257 New Yorkers who received the ElliQ at no cost through New York State.

3. The robot can check for well-being, suggest exercises, and take users on virtual trips.

4. According to July 2023 data from NYS Aging Office, 95% of the New Yorkers given an ElliQ as part of the program said they found the robot helpful in reducing their loneliness and improving overall wellbeing.

5. In March 2023, aging departments in California and Washington announced new programs with Intuition Robotics that aims to provide elders across select counties in each state with the ElliQ robot. Two months later, Florida launched a similar program.

9. Meta's news ban is preventing Canadians from sharing vital information about the wildfires ripping through western Canada

1. Meta banned Canadian users from viewing or sharing news content on its platforms August 1.

2. Now, residents say the ban has prevented people from sharing vital news as wildfires tear through western Canada.

3. Canada's Heritage Minister labeled the ban "reckless" and called on Meta to lift it immediately.

4. In June, Canadian lawmakers passed a bill that would require companies like Meta and Google to pay news outlets to share their content. In response, Meta banned users in Canada from viewing or sharing news content on its sites beginning August 1.

10. Pioneering wind-powered cargo ship sets sail

1. A cargo ship fitted with giant, rigid British-designed sails has set out on its maiden voyage.

2. Shipping firm Cargill, which has chartered the vessel, hopes the technology will help the industry chart a course towards a greener future.

3. The WindWings sails are designed to cut fuel consumption and therefore shipping's carbon footprint.

4. It is estimated the industry is responsible for about 2.1% of global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.

5. The Pyxis Ocean's maiden journey, from China to Brazil, will provide the first real-world test of the WindWings - and an opportunity to assess whether a return to the traditional way of propelling ships could be the way forward for moving cargo at sea.

6. Folded down when the ship is in port, the wings are opened out when it is in open water. They stand 123ft (37.5m) tall and are built of the same material as wind turbines, to make them durable.

7. Enabling a vessel to be blown along by the wind, rather than rely solely on its engine, could hopefully eventually reduce a cargo ship's lifetime emissions by 30%.

MATT1

BM of the Week

• Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon retains board and investor backing amid internal backlash

• Head of Governance Committee, which does “Talent development and succession planning”, a committee that includes… EVERY BOARD MEMBER EXCEPT DSOL… is Adebayo Ogunlesi, but he’s not the most influential person on his own committee

• That goes to our BM of the Week, Lakshmi Mittal!

• Mittal Steel, EC and former CEO of ArcelorMittal

• Director since 2008 - sweet timing

• 12% influence, bats 0.372 overall - average TSR, terrible controversies and low earnings

• Being on the Governance Committee might be an inside joke:

• Mittal is family run dictatorship

• Sits on Harvard’s Global Advisory Council with Adebayo Ogunlesi

• David Viniar also on the committee was a Goldman employee through 2013