Also: New JetBlue CEO, Carta scandal grows, uncensored AI sex bots.
Good morning.
This is Michal Lev-Ram, reporting from Las Vegas, where about 130,000 people are expected to attend this week’s Consumer Electronics Show. Yesterday evening, Fortune gathered a much smaller subset of techies for a dinner (sponsored by Deloitte, which also sponsors this newsletter) that was all about AI and the environment.
The first conversation of the night was with Rene Haas, the CEO of chip designer Arm Holdings, which became the biggest IPO of 2023 when it went public last September. Arm might seem like an unlikely company to talk about AI, but the transformative technology is already leading to a big growth opportunity for the firm: In its latest reported quarter, Arm said its licensing revenue was up more than 100% year-over-year “as the demand for AI has kicked off increased investment across all end markets.”
When asked if Arm was now an AI company, Haas ultimately said yes.
“70% of the world’s population uses Arm, so I think by definition you can’t really run AI without Arm,” he told the audience.
But with great opportunity come challenges: “One of the things that make the AI problem unique is the raw number of computers that you need to run these models and algorithms,” said Haas, whose company is increasingly licensing its chip designs to the data centers that power AI. Arm chips are known for their power efficiency, but Haas said the company is looking at other ways to work with the semiconductor ecosystem to achieve more efficiency, especially as demand for data storage and compute capabilities grow.
The next conversation at the Las Vegas dinner, part of a series of lead-up events to our Brainstorm Tech conference on July 15-17, hit the sustainability topic even more head-on.
“The underlying advancement that made ChatGPT possible, we can also apply to satellite imagery,” said Chelsey Walden-Schreiner, vice president of applied science at Vibrant Planet, which uses images (and AI) to assess wildfire risk. “We can look and see what’s here and automate a lot of things that have been incredibly challenging to observe and document and understand over time.”
Raj Kapoor, co-founder and managing partner of Climactic, an early-stage climate tech venture fund, agreed that there’s lots of unlocked opportunity for AI to help address the climate crisis. But he thinks that algorithms alone are not going to be a silver bullet for any company in the space.
“The question is, for a startup to be successful, is there private data or some other angle that you have?” Kapoor told the audience.
You can bet that AI will be a big topic all week here at CES. Hopefully, using the technology to address climate change will be too.
More news below.
Michal Lev-Ram
michal.levram@fortune.com
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JetBlue’s new CEO
JetBlue COO Joanna Geraghty will be the first woman to lead a major U.S. airline when she takes over from CEO Robin Hayes, who is stepping down in February. Hayes said he made his “bittersweet” decision to retire due to concerns about his health and well-being, given “the extraordinary challenges” of leading the airline. JetBlue is defending its $3.8 billion takeover of fellow airline Spirit Airlines against an antitrust challenge from the Department of Justice. The Associated Press
Carta’s self-dealing scandal
Equity management startup Carta is ending its business as a broker, following a self-dealing scandal that broke over the weekend. On Friday, a customer of the startup accused a company employee of accessing confidential information to facilitate a secondary market transaction. Despite blaming the incident on a rogue employee, Carta paused all its sales outreach “until further notice” in the wake of the scandal. Fortune
AI sex bots
The release of Meta’s open-source AI model Llama is spurring the creation of an uncensored AI economy. Developers are using Llama and OpenAI’s GPT models to create chatbots that act out sexually-explicit scenarios, at times involving child characters. The findings show “the urgent need for AI legislation,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said in a statement. Fortune
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Upskilling in Sustainability To help clients identify and build solutions in sustainability, climate and equity, Deloitte expanded collaborations with renowned academic institutions to create an integrated learning program for its professionals across the US. Read more.
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