Długofalowy plan uratowania TikToka przed zakazem w USA

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So far, ByteDance has shown zero willingness to spin off TikTok in the US. The Chinese parent company seems to be banking on the ultimate Court or President-elect Donald Trump rescuing the app before it’s banned next month.

The apparent names that would would buy TikTok if they could — Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle, etc. — are sitting on the sidelines and waiting to see what happens in the coming weeks. The clock is ticking. legislature just sent letters to Sundar Pichai and Tim Cook reminding them that they will be legally liable for continuing to host TikTok in their app stores after January 19th.

Then there’s Frank McCourt, the real property billionaire and erstwhile owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers. For months, McCourt has been very public about his desire to buy TikTok. He has ramped up his drumbeat since ByteDance late lost its legal fight on appeal. This week, he pitched more investors on his task Liberty plan to buy the app’s US operations.

When I spoke with McCourt over Zoom in between those investor meetings, he told me he presently has about $20 billion behind him for a bid. He has asked Kevin Mayer, who was briefly TikTok’s CEO the last time it was almost banned from the US, to be involved, though Mayer hasn’t signed on. McCourt told me his squad has talked to “most” of ByteDance’s biggest American investors and that they’re “very interested” in his plan. (Spokespeople for these firms either declined to comment or didn’t respond to my pings, and Mayer didn’t have a comment.)

There are respective reasons McCourt’s effort to buy TikTok is simply a long-shot, the biggest being that, even if ByteDance wanted to sell, the Chinese government may not let it. Then there are the method details of his proposal, which would see TikTok put on a decentralized protocol that is funded by McCourt and untested with a platform of TikTok’s size. For me, the biggest red flag of all is that there’s a cryptocurrency called Frequency tied to the project.

McCourt has high-minded ambitions for how the net should work that are in line with the emergence of federated platforms like ActivityPub and Bluesky. He imagines TikTok offering a marketplace of user-created algorithms, much like Bluesky does today, and users having the ability to own their profiles. Keep reading for more from our conversation this week…

The following Q&A has been edited for dimension and clarity.

My knowing is there are multiple pieces of task Liberty. You’ve got the Decentralized Social Networking Protocol (DSNP) and then the TikTok bid, and they’re connected. It all seems a small bit afield from what you have historically done.

Having seen the harms of social media and where the net was going as it became highly centralized, I dedicated any resources to start a public policy school at my alma mater, Georgetown. I was possibly naive in retrospect, but I thought that we could get the policymaking apparatus out in front of the problem and steer things in a better direction out of that school.

Then I realized that the public policy making apparatus is no match for large Tech, so I began to go back to my roots. My household has been building infrastructure for 131 years, so this actually isn’t very far afield from our core competency erstwhile you think about this not as software at the app layer, but as infrastructure at the base layer. I talked to a fewer superb computer scientists that we have in the company and put the task to them of solving this from an engineering position if you had no limitations. The answer came back that you would go ahead and make another protocol that would connect us, just like TCP/IP connects devices and HTTP connects data.

Our goal here is bigger than buying TikTok. It’s reimagining how the net works. Purchasing TikTok and moving 170 million people to a reimagined, upgraded net would catalyze that alternate and compress time.

Is this a financial endeavor or is this philanthropy for you? Do you see a return on investment here?

I see it as both and we’ve been very careful to separate the two. task Liberty has an institute, a 501(c)(3), that’s purely not-for-profit. DSNP has been talented to the world. That is being supported by the institute.

The layer-one blockchain, Frequency, is tokenized. The community will own the majority of the tokens but that will be a commercial endeavor. TikTok, erstwhile we buy it, will be a commercial endeavor.

If you were given the chance to buy it but a condition was that you couldn’t do it on this protocol you built, would you inactive do it?

Probably not due to the fact that I don’t know how you would accomplish the objectives we want to achieve, which is to be able to run the platform without the algorithm and give people ownership and control of their relationships. You request an implementation device to usage DSNP.

I would be totally open, however, if individual else built an alternate to Frequency. We’re looking to decentralize, not further centralize.

Have you studied the fediverse: Mastodon, ActivityPub, and then besides what Bluesky is doing?

I admire all the people who are doing that due to the fact that they are trying to improve the net and respect individuals. A federated approach is very different than having a universal social graph that’s globally accessible.

We’re saying that something has to change fundamentally with the internet. What Jay Graber is doing with Bluesky is large but you inactive have a Bluesky identity. You’re inactive on Bluesky and your relationships are on Bluesky. Let’s stipulate that it’s better but you’re inactive there, right? At any point possibly Jay is not there.

Give me an update on the position of your investor pitch and how much money you have committed.

People are super excited about this and capital will not be an issue at all. The issue is going to be what ByteDance does. We’ve been saying for over six months that we felt the government was going to win the case.

I don’t think ByteDance’s appeal is going to be successful. This is going to be a shut-it-down or sale it scenario. Like President-elect Trump, I’d like to see it not banned. We’re not asking China for the algorithm. We’re not an antitrust threat. We’ll pass CFIUS vetting. We don’t request or want the algorithm. We have a clean stack where the user base can migrate.

We don’t know what ByteDance is going to decide. We surely hope they decide to sale and preserve any value for their shareholders. We’ll do it on terms that we think can be a win-win. China keeps the algorithm. US citizens are protected. The app stays alive.

Is $20 billion the amount that you inactive have committed?

That’s what we’ve got circled right now and that’s an order of magnitude what we think this is worth. Now, I say that with a immense caveat: we don’t know what ByteDance is selling. We think we have a very good thought of what the current numbers are, but it’s not like there’s a data area that ByteDance has set up and we’re inside of it. I think we have a good sense of what this would be worth if ByteDance keeps the algorithm and sells the user base and the content and the brand.

There are 3 categories of investors. 1 group is the existing American companies that have invested in ByteDance. We’ve talked to most of them. They’re very interested, assuming ByteDance agrees to sell. They would either put more capital in or keep their capital in.

A second category are people that are acquainted with the asset due to the fact that they’ve looked at it in the past. any are looking at it for the first time. These are the large balance sheets that deploy large amounts of capital and they’re curious in what we’re doing. The 3rd category is the bucket of cultural capital, people with influence who are curious in being a part of this and bringing their communities with them.

When will you share who your backers are?

We’ll be able to share erstwhile we know what ByteDance is doing. It makes no sense to be barking up the incorrect tree here.

You’ve had no conversations with ByteDance leadership, right?

That’s correct. I reached out before the decision. They were not curious in speaking at that time. We’ll effort it again. They know at this phase of the game that we exist, we’re interested, and we hope that there’s incoming at any point as well. But we respect their decision-making process. They’re going to decide what they think is best for their interests.

Have you spoken to Trump or his team?

We’re in the process of reaching out. I’ve heard President-elect Trump say he doesn’t want to see the app banned. I’m very curious in having that conversation erstwhile this gets sorted on the China side and they decide what they’re going to do.

Are you afraid about another large would-be acquirers, like an Amazon, besides circling TikTok?

I don’t see the large incumbents being bidders here for a couple of reasons. 1 is antitrust, obviously. Secondly, imagine you were a tobacco company and you built a large business and then people started to get worried due to the fact that people were getting sick and dying due to the addiction of cigarettes and carcinogens. If you bought a tobacco company after the surgeon general’s warning, then you were putting a mark on your back due to the fact that you were buying it with the awareness that your product kills people.

The growth of these platforms happened truly fast. Then we discovered that there are harms. Anybody buying TikTok and replicating the current design, which is to scrape peoples’ data, apply algorithms, and manipulate people, they’re buying this with their eyes wide open. So I don’t see quite a few bidders due to the fact that people realize they’re just putting a mark on their back.

Let’s take this problem and actually usage it to catalyze an upgraded internet. Then, quite a few the problems go away. quite a few the lawsuits go away. quite a few the harms go away. That’s task Liberty.

AI researchers want to party

Hundreds of the world’s top researchers gathered this week in Vancouver, Canada for NeuralPS, 1 of the world’s top academic gatherings in the field of AI. I asked The Verge’s Kylie Robison (who just published a fascinating deep dive on the past and future of ChatGPT) what it was like being there on the ground:

Are there any recurring themes you’ve been proceeding in conversations?

The “Is AI hitting a wall?” conversation came up sometimes, but this is not the place where people actually believe that. AI safety was something I wound up talking about a lot. A investigation subject that besides came up a lot was what Fei-Fei Li focuses on, which is helping AI realize the planet like we do in terms of physics and objects. That touches a bunch of cool things — robotics, agents, advanced reasoning.

Which laboratory does everyone want they worked at?

This conference was filled with students from Waterloo and University of Toronto who fundamentally want any AI job. (It was rather sweet sometimes watching those students corner an AI exec at a party.) If parties are any indicator, everyone wants to get as close to OpenAI as possible. This is simply a highly academic conference with lots of people just wanting to do good, deep research.

What was the hottest party?

The Midjourney organization was 4x oversubscribed and researchers kept sending me the RSVP link. Everyone was asking about the secret OpenAI parties, though.

Mustafa Suleyman.Illustration by William Joel / The Verge

“These conversational interactions are going to become the future of the web… This is the next browser; this is the next search engine.”

There are plenty of interesting takeaways from Mustafa Suleyman’s fresh Decoder interview with Nilay Patel. The Microsoft AI CEO doesn’t seem to agree with Sam Altman on the timing of AGI’s arrival, and he revealed that Microsoft won’t train its own frontier models erstwhile OpenAI is doing it for them anyway. He besides takes any shots at Google’s management culture versus Microsoft’s, which I’m certain will origin any eyes to rotation in Mountain View, given the way Suleyman excited.

As a follow-up to this conversation, I urge listening to Sayta Nadella’s interview this week with Brad Gurley and Brad Gerstner. Reading between the lines, it’s clear that there is ongoing tension between the level of compute Altman wants and what Nadella feels comfortable spending. For those closely following Nvidia’s stock price, Nadella besides mentions that Microsoft no longer feels GPU constrained but alternatively constrained by the power requirements for its data centers.

Elsewhere

Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Altman buy their inauguration tickets. There have been lots of headlines this week about these 3 tech CEOs donating $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund. That number just so happens to be the minimum request to receive “as many as a half-dozen tickets to 8 inaugural events,” including access to an “intimate dinner” with the Trumps. (And you thought Taylor Swift tickets were expensive!) I’m not amazed by Bezos or Altman making donations. This is simply a 180-turn for Zuckerberg, however, who told me just a couple of months ago that he was going to stay out of this political cycle.
Google’s large week of demos. Aside from a smaller version of its Gemini 2.0 model that appears to be rather good, Google’s blitz of product announcements this week — a quantum chip breakthrough, Android XR platform for headsets, a fistful of AI agents — were all about hyping stuff that’s coming any day or not publically accessible. I completely realize the desire to want to upstage OpenAI’s 12 days of “shipmas” but I am asking for a fresh Year’s resolution from tech companies: delight halt announcing so many things without a ship date.

Job board

A fewer notable occupation moves this week:

Rohan Anl, a DeepMind distinguished engineer and head of Gemini pretraining, joined Meta to aid lead training for Llama.
Zheng Gao, Tesla’s erstwhile head of hardware plan for Autopilot, joined Zoox as manager of hardware engineering.
Google’s chief lobbyist, Mark Isakowitz, left to be chief of staff for incoming Pennsylvania Republican Senator-elect Dave McCormick.