Google co-founder Sergey Brin, in a rare public appearance over the weekend, told a group of artificial intelligence enthusiasts that he came out of retirement “because the trajectory of AI is so exciting.”

Brin, 50, spoke to entrepreneurs on Saturday at the “AGI House” in Hillsborough, California, just south of San Francisco, where developers and founders were testing Google’s Gemini model. AGI stands for artificial general intelligence and refers to a form of AI that can complete tasks to the same level, or a step above, humans.

In taking questions from the crowd, Brin discussed AI’s impact on search and how Google can maintain its leadership position in its core market as AI continues to grow. He also commented on the flawed launch last month of Google’s image generator, which the company pulled after users discovered historical inaccuracies and questionable responses.

“We definitely messed up on the image generation,” Brin said Saturday. “I think it was mostly due to just not thorough testing. It definitely, for good reasons, upset a lot of people.”

Google said last week that it plans to relaunch the image generation feature soon.

Brin co-founded Google with Larry Page in 1998, but stepped down as president of Alphabet in 2019. He remains a board member and a principal shareholder, with a stake in the company worth about $100 billion. He’s returned to work at the company as part of an effort to help ramp up Google’s position in the hypercompetitive AI market.

In some cases on Saturday, Brin said he was giving “personal” answers, as opposed to representing the company.

“Seeing what these models can do year after year is astonishing,” he said at the event, a recording of which was viewed by CNBC.

Regarding the recent challenges with Gemini that led to flawed image results, Brin said the company isn’t quite sure why responses have a leftward tilt, in the political sense.

“We haven’t fully understood why it leans left in many cases” but “that’s not our intention,” he said. The company has recently made accuracy improvements by as much as 80% on certain internal tests, Brin added.

Brin’s comments represent the first time a company executive has spoken on the Gemini matter in a live setting. The company previously sent prepared statements from Prabhakar Raghavan, Google’s head of search, and CEO Sundar Pichai in response to the controversial rollout.

Here’s what Raghavan said in a blog post on Feb. 23:

“So what went wrong? In short, two things. First, our tuning to ensure that Gemini showed a range of people failed to account for cases that should clearly not show a range. And second, over time, the model became way more cautious than we intended and refused to answer certain prompts entirely — wrongly interpreting some very anodyne prompts as sensitive. These two things led the model to overcompensate in some cases, and be over-conservative in others, leading to images that were embarrassing and wrong.”

Google declined to comment for this story. Brin didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. 

Brin said Google is far from alone in its struggles to produce accurate results with AI. He cited OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Elon Musk’s Grok services as AI tools that, “say some pretty weird things that are out there that definitely feel far left, for example.”

Hallucinations, or false responses to a user’s prompt, are still “a big problem right now,” he said. “No question about it.”

“We have made them hallucinate less and less over time, but I’d definitely be excited to see a breakthrough that’s near-zero,” Brin said. “But you can’t just like — count on breakthroughs so I think we’re just going to keep doing the incremental things we do to bring it down, down, down over time.”

When asked by an attendee if he wants to build AGI, Brin answered in the affirmative, citing the ability for AI to help with “reasoning.”

Brin was also asked how online advertising will be disrupted considering ad revenue is core to Google’s business. The company has reported slowing ad growth in the last few years.

“I of all people am not too terribly concerned about business model shifts,” Brin said. “I think it’s wonderful that we’ve been now for 25 years, or whatever, able to give just world-class information search for free to everyone and that’s supported by advertising, which in my mind is great for the world.”

He did acknowledge that the business is likely to change.

“I expect business models are going to evolve over time,” he said. “And maybe it will still be advertising because advertising could work better, the AI is able to better tailor it.”

Brin is confident in Google’s position.

“I personally feel as long as there’s huge value being generated, we’ll figure out the business models,” he said.

Beyond AI, Brin was asked about Google’s difficulties in hardware given recent advancements in virtual reality. Google was notoriously early to the augmented reality market with the now-defunct Google Glass.

“I feel like I made some bad decisions,” he said, referring to Google Glass. If he were doing it differently, Brin said, he would have the treated Google Glass as a prototype instead of a product. “But, I’m still a fan of the lightweight” form, he said.

In regard to the Apple Vision Pro and Meta’s Quest headsets, Brin said, “They’re very impressive.”

When asked about how he sees Gemini impacting spatial computing or products like Google Maps or Street view, Brin responded with as much curiosity as anything.

“To be honest, I haven’t thought about it, but now that you say it, yeah there’s no reason we couldn’t put in more 3D data,” Brin said, to laughs from the crowd. “Maybe somebody’s doing it at Gemini — I don’t know.”

WATCH: Google vs. Google

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Nvidia shares jumped more than 14% in premarket trade on Thursday after the chip giant posted bumper earnings that beat Wall Street estimates.

The U.S. tech giant posted revenue of $22.10 billion for its fiscal fourth quarter, a rise of 265% year-on-year, while net income surged by 769%, as the company continues to see a boost from excitement over artificial intelligence.

Nvidia chips are used to train the huge AI models such as those developed by Microsoft and Meta.

Nvidia sees no signs of slowing. The company forecast its revenue in the current quarter will hit $24 billion, way ahead of estimates.

“Fundamentally, the conditions are excellent for continued growth” in 2025 and beyond, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told analysts on Wednesday, adding to the bullish sentiment around the stock.

Nvidia’s Data Center business, which includes the company’s H100 graphics cards that are used for AI training, posted sales of $18.4 billion in the fourth quarter, representing 409% year-on-year growth.

The positive outlook from Nvidia prompted a round of broker upgrades on Thursday. JPMorgan raised its price target on Nvidia’s stock from $650 to $850, while Bank of America Global Research hiked its target from $800 to $925.

Nvidia’s stock closed at $674.72 on Thursday. Shares were under pressure ahead of the earnings report as traders took profit and investors were concerned that Nvidia might not be able to hit lofty expectations.

But its market-beating numbers dispelled those fears and also pulled other global chip stocks higher.

Shares of Facebook parent company Meta surged Friday, after the firm reported a threefold jump in fourth-quarter profit and issued its first-ever dividend.

As of around 6 a.m. ET, the stock price of Meta was up roughly 17% in U.S. premarket trading.

Revenue jumped 25% in the fourth quarter for Meta, from $32.2 billion a year earlier. That’s the fastest rate of growth for any period since mid-2021, and comes amid a rebound in the online ad market. Meta’s net income more than tripled, to $14 billion from $4.65 billion a year earlier.

Meta said it would pay investors a dividend of 50 cents a share on March 26, in the company’s first-ever cash dividend. That comes after cash and equivalents swelled to $65.4 billion at the end of 2023, from $40.7 billion a year earlier.

Meta also announced a $50 billion share buyback.

Investors praised the dividend announcement.

Ben Barringer, technology analyst at Quilter Cheviot, said this represented a “symbolic moment and indicates what a turnaround story Meta has been on since its struggles in 2022.”

“Mark Zuckerberg is showing that he wants to bring shareholders along with him and is highlighting that Meta is now a mature, grown-up business,” Barringer said in emailed comments.

Investors have also been focusing on Meta’s moves in the artificial intelligence space. The company has a stake in the ground in AI with its LLaMA large language model, a competitor to Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s GPT-4.

Barringer called Meta a “closet AI winner” and said the company’s AI, while not out in show, “will be better servicing advertisers and making the ads themselves more relevant for users.”

Cash dividends are a rare step for technology companies, which tend to be valued by investors on their ability to achieve high growth rates that requires cash investments back into the business.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg made a big push for 2023 to be a “year of efficiency” for the company.

Several investors had questioned its ventures in 2022 into areas like virtual reality and the metaverse, which was an incredibly costly initiative for the company.

Meta has been deep in cost-cutting mode over the last year or so, in response to the changing tide of sentiment around formerly much-loved technology stocks.

Those cost-cutting steps appear to have paid off. Meta reported a doubling of its operating margin, to 41%.

Meanwhile, the company’s expenses decreased 8% year over year to $23.73 billion. That’s as Meta slashed headcount dramatically, laying off 20,000 people during 2023.

Sales in Meta’s Reality Labs unit passed $1 billion in the fourth quarter, Meta said, though the virtual reality unit recorded $4.65 billion in losses.

– CNBC’s Jonathan Vanian contributed to this report

It’s night. I’m at a lake near Oregon’s Mount Hood, sitting on the beach. Jazz music is playing as I write. I’m not in the real world.

Well, I sort of am. 

I’m wearing Apple’s new Vision Pro headset, which looks like a fancy pair of glowing ski goggles.

Apple’s long-awaited headset, which starts at $3,500, launches in the U.S. on Friday. It’s the company’s first major new gadget to hit the market since the Apple Watch debuted in April 2015. I’ve been testing it for nearly a week. While it has some shortcomings, it’s easily the most fun new product I’ve tried out in years.

Analysts don’t expect the Vision Pro to drive massive amounts of revenue initially. UBS anticipates Apple will ship about 400,000 headsets, leading to a “relatively immaterial” $1.4 billion in revenue this year. However, I’m convinced that if Apple eventually sells cheaper versions, we’ll see millions of people using them in the coming years.

The Vision Pro offers a new kind of experience that Apple calls “spatial computing.” You sit in your world while looking at a digital one, and then plop different apps around you. You can work, play games, watch movies or surf the web.

Thanks to very sharp displays, and a full M2 processor that’s usually found in Macs, the Vision Pro has the power to do a lot of what you’d expect from an Apple device. There’s a dedicated App Store for Vision Pro apps, but you can also install more than a million iPhone or iPad apps. Or pair it with your Mac and work while looking at a 4K display inside the goggles.

I’m only scratching the surface of the capabilities, but here’s the gist: This is an entirely new type of computing, providing a whole new world of experiences. It feels like the future.

Here’s what you need to know:

I was skeptical when I first met with Apple to see the Vision Pro. Companies have been trying to do virtual reality and augmented reality and mixed reality or gobbledygook reality for years.

Sometimes it’s cool, but most of the time I’m done after an hour or so.

With the Vision Pro, there are three key parts that come into play. It has super sharp and colorful screens, it allows you to see the world around you by default using “passthrough” technology, and it has a fast processor.

The displays help remove the “screendoor” effect that’s common in lower-cost headsets like the Meta Quest 3. That’s where you can see the pixels as you look through a headset. You can easily read text on a website or a book on the Vision Pro. And I was able to watch movies, including in 3D, on screens bigger and nicer than any TV in my house.

The Quest 3 and other headsets also have passthrough. But Apple’s works better. It’s clearer and sharper, enough so that I can comfortably see the room around me in full color and without any lag, though I still can’t read my phone. And I love how you can turn the small digital crown, just like on the Apple Watch or AirPods Max, to adjust the volume or transport yourself into a fully 3D landscape.

Virtual travel is a nice touch. You can work or watch movies in Hawaii, by a lake, in White Sands or at Joshua Tree. They’re all relaxing environments with calming sounds and slow animations – like clouds moving across the sky — that help you feel like you’re almost there.

Navigation is easy once you get the hang of it. This reminds me a bit of the iPhone moment, when Apple launched its multitouch display that changed how we interact with phones that had largely been navigated with a stylus, touchpad or keyboard. There aren’t any controllers here. The headset uses sensors to track your eyes (and even verify when you’re making purchases online or in the App Store.) Apple has a quick setup process that aligns the headset to your eyes and then has you look at a series of dots, pinching your fingers as you go so you can calibrate. If you wear glasses, Apple also sells inserts that pop into the headset.

It’s incredibly accurate. You just look where you want to go and then tap your thumb and index finger to select a button or app. There’s a white bar at the bottom of every app, for example, that you can grab to pull and push around. You can adjust the size of any app by looking at the corner and then dragging it out or in at a diagonal angle. And you can swipe through photos or scroll websites by holding your index finger and thumb together while pulling up or down.

Likewise, you zoom in and out by holding those fingers on both hands and pulling outward or inward. You don’t have to flail your hands in front of you. The headset’s external cameras can detect your fingers down in your lap. You can be subtle.

It packs a punch.

I launched more than a dozen apps around me. There’s no point in doing more, because you can’t see it all. I loved setting it up with a browser in front of me, music next to me and a TV screen above it all. But the world is yours to customize. You can open mail and a browser or leave Slack open next to a Word document with your calendar on the other side. Put your text messages on the ceiling if you want. It’s a completely new way to multitask.

A note: My screenshots show apps askew. But, in the headset, they’re all perfectly level.

I didn’t run into any slowdowns during my time with the Vision Pro. Part of that is due to how Apple renders content. It’s technically only sharpening the areas of the screen where you’re focusing, leaving the other areas blurry. That’s why some of the screenshots here look out of focus around the sides. Inside the headset, it’s all super crisp. It’s called foveated rendering, and it allows for optimized processing.

I loved watching movies with the headset. I lounged on my couch and put up a huge screen across the wall of my living room and watched an hour of “Barbie,” and the two first episodes of “Masters of the Air” before the battery was at about 5%. Another night I watched “Greyhound.” I used the NBA app, which was updated to work on the Vision Pro, to stream four games at once, with the main game in the middle and others pinned to the sides. It’s wild.

Apple also has some specially recorded content that’s so sharp you feel like you’re standing right there next to a rendered dinosaur or a video of a rhinoceros. There’s a slightly terrifying clip with a woman walking on a tightrope between cliffs. Don’t watch if you’re afraid of heights. The clips show the type of content third parties will eventually be able record and publish to the headset. I imagine sports highlights or even sitting courtside at a live game.  

The Disney+ app is fun. You can watch movies in one of about four different 3D landscapes. I sat in a racer on Tatooine and watched a bit of a Star Wars movie, but then switched over to watch “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse” in 3D. Unlike 3D TVs and movies, which generally flopped, the effects work well in the headset. It’s neat, but I still prefer watching movies in 2D. It feels more natural to me.

FaceTime works well. You see a clear video of the person you’re calling on a screen in front of you. But they don’t see you. Or, not the real you. They see a 3D-rendered version of you called a digital Persona. It’s still in beta, and mine looked like a much older version of me. My colleague thought I looked like an 80-year-old man. My wife laughed.

You create a Persona by selecting an option in the settings menu and then removing the headset and following screens on the external display. It asks you to look up, look down, look left, look right, smile, smile with teeth, and close your eyes. Then, in seconds, it creates a 3D Persona.

It looks more human than cartoony like with other headsets. I spoke with people over FaceTime also using Personas, and it’s much easier to hold a conversation without feeling like you’re two goofy avatars trying to talk. You can hold a real meeting if necessary in your pajamas while your Persona is in work attire. Personas also carry over to other apps like WebEx.

Your Persona’s eyes can appear on the outside display. Someone will see glowing effects on the outside of the headset if you have screens up in front of you. If they begin talking to you and you’re in an immersive view – like one of the landscapes I mentioned earlier – they’ll start to fade into focus so you can see them. As you look at them, the eyes of your digital Persona become visible on the outside of the headset. It looks like you’re wearing a snorkeling mask.

In real life, I just removed the headset face when my wife came in to chat.

The built-in speakers are great. They get nice and loud and support spatial audio, so if you turn your head away from the movie in front of you, the sound stays in the same place, much like if you were watching a real TV. Music and movies sounded fantastic, with full surround sound. People can hear the audio coming out of the headset, though, so you’ll want to use AirPods in public.

I love the “spatial photos” you can capture using the cameras on the outside of the Vision Pro or with the latest iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max. The camera creates a 3D version of a photo or video. I filmed my 4-month-old daughter eating and my dog’s 9th birthday, for example, in hopes that I’ll be able to come back and relive some of those moments. I wish I had recorded some of these videos when my stepfather was alive because it’d feel like he was in the room with me. Some people might see it as a gimmick, but I found it moving.

Lastly, the build quality is superb. Apple used top-of-the-line glass, screens and metals. It feels like a premium headset and it’s comfortable to wear. My only complaint is that I had to be deliberate to hold it by the metal frame. The padded inserts pop off their magnets if you try to grab them. Those could be stronger, but they were designed to be easily removed so people could share the headset by popping in their own inserts.

Apple’s apps work well. You’ll find Notes, Music, Safari, Podcasts, Photos, Apple TV+, Maps and more. Other apps include SkyGuide and Disney+ and there are Apple Arcade games. Many more are coming, as most apps haven’t yet been built specifically for Vision Pro.

The Vision Pro supports more than a million iPhone and iPad apps. But you need to search for each app individually and some of them aren’t available. Netflix and Spotify haven’t been shy about not supporting the Vision Pro, though you can easily access either using the browser. Still, there are lots of others that I couldn’t find: 1Password isn’t there, which made logging into some apps a bit of a pain. You won’t find Uber, DoorDash (but there’s GrubHub!) or Amazon. None of Google’s apps are here, including YouTube TV, though it works fine in the browser.

Popular games like Diablo Immortal and Genshin Impact aren’t available. Facebook’s apps aren’t here, so no Instagram. These are just a few I noticed.

Some work well, though. I didn’t have any issues with the X iPad app, for example. CNBC’s app worked fine. Others, like Amazon Prime Video, exist but weren’t great during initial tests. A bug showed a big box in the middle of the screen when I was watching a movie. That bug has since been fixed.

For some apps that aren’t yet available, developers are working to optimize them and eliminate bugs.

Apple Keychain was sometimes buggy in iPad apps. This is Apple’s version of 1Password, and I rely on it to enter my username and passwords. It generally works fine. But if you have two usernames for apps, like my wife and I do for Amazon Prime Video or Peacock, the app locks up when you try to select a different login. I informed Apple of the bug.

The floating keyboard is useful for search or typing quick messages, but you won’t be able to type very fast at first. You look at each letter on a digital keyboard and select it, or reach out and tap the digital keyboard. I got faster during my time with the Vision Pro, but nowhere near as quick as I am on my iPhone or a real keyboard. You can just use Siri voice-to-text to respond to iMessages or enter URLs in the browser (and launch apps). Still, you’re going to want to use a keyboard if you have to do a lot of typing.

There’s also the battery pack that plugs into the headset with a proprietary plug that you twist in. I don’t mind it. I thought the pack worked fine, but it would be a lot easier if it was just embedded into the headset, though that would add weight.

I’d buy the Vision Pro right now if I had an extra $3,500. I’d even consider trading in my iPad Pro and MacBook Pro to offset the cost since the headset gives me a lot of the same capabilities. But that’s not an option.

You’ll definitely love it for movies. I think a lot of people will also really enjoy being able to read the news and browse the web while having a huge TV screen open and lounging on their couch. Some may find they can work in it. I did. It’s fun.

Apple’s real opportunity will materialize when it finds a way to mass produce the Vision Pro at closer to $2,000, or less. Until then, it may be a niche product. But the experience blows everything else out of the water. It’s Apple’s most exciting product in years and it’s the best example yet that this will become a new way of computing.

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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg just had surgery as a result of an injury to his ACL that occurred during mixed-martial arts training.

The Facebook co-founder revealed his injury on Friday via an Instagram post in which he said that he “tore my ACL sparring and just got out of surgery to replace it.”

“I was training for a competitive MMA fight early next year, but now that’s delayed a bit,” Zuckerberg said. “Still looking forward to doing it after I recover.”

“Thanks to everyone for the love and support,” he added.

Zuckerberg included several photos of himself at an undisclosed hospital that shows the executive prior to his surgery and then after the procedure with his wife Priscilla Chan comforting him during his recovery.

The Meta CEO has taken an interest in MMA and competitive fighting in recent years and has been training in a variety of martial arts, including Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.

In May, he revealed in a Facebook post that competed in his first jiu-jitsu tournament in which he won a gold and silver medal.

Zuckerberg’s recent injury to his ACL comes after a brief verbal exchange between the Meta executive and Tesla chief Elon Musk who were floating a possible cage match.

The fight never took place, however, with Zuckerberg saying during the summer via a post on Threads that “we can all agree Elon isn’t serious and it’s time to move on.”

Zuckerberg said that while Ultimate Fighting Championship President Dana White offered to make the match between the two executives “a legit competition for charity,” Musk never confirmed a date.

“If Elon ever gets serious about a real date and official event, he knows how to reach me,” Zuckerberg said at the time. “Otherwise, time to move on. I’m going to focus on competing with people who take the sport seriously.”

Watch: Jim Cramer says this beer stock can go higher after the company’s promising Investor Day

For the first time in nearly two decades running JPMorgan Chase, CEO Jamie Dimon will voluntarily sell stock in the bank.

The disclosure, in a securities filing Friday, detailed next year’s planned sales — pressuring JPMorgan (JPM) shares and the Dow Jones Industrial Average and highlighting why tracking trades made by executives involving the companies they lead should be an important part of every investor’s homework.

Dimon is setting up the trades through a predetermined plan that executives at publicly traded companies use to protect against insider trading accusations. It will mark the first time that the 67-year-old CEO has offloaded shares of JPMorgan for non-technical reasons, such as exercising options.  

The planned sales – amounting to roughly 12% of the JPMorgan stock owned by Dimon and his family – are being done for tax planning and personal wealth diversification reasons, the bank said. Both are common reasons for executives to sell stock in their firms. The bank also said Dimon continues to believe JPMorgan’s prospects are “very strong,” and his planned trades are not related in any way to succession. Such sales are often seen when CEOs get close to retirement.

As you can see, making sense of insider transactions can sometimes be a tall task.

When they buy, it’s generally seen as an encouraging sign by Wall Street — and there is, perhaps, no better example of this than another move by Dimon in 2016, when he purchased JPMorgan stock.

Fears of a weakening global economy sent stocks into a tailspin in early 2016, driving shares of JPMorgan down nearly 20% and the S&P 500 down more than 10% at their lows.

But that weakness didn’t last long.

The trajectory of the market changed just six weeks into the new year. That’s when Dimon disclosed — after the closing bell on Feb. 11, 2016 — that he bought 500,000 shares of the bank, worth about $26 million at the time.

Dimon’s stock purchase, intended to show confidence in the financial sector, has become legendary on Wall Street. It ultimately coincided with — or perhaps was the reason for — the closing lows for not only shares of JPMorgan in 2016 but also the S&P 500 overall.

Jim Cramer has since dubbed Feb. 11, 2016: “The Jamie Dimon Bottom.” JPMorgan finished up 30% that year, while the S&P 500 ended more than 9% higher — both huge turnarounds.

While executive stock sales — such as Dimon’s planned transactions next year — are not universally red flags, they can get complicated.

X, the social media service formerly known as Twitter, will launch two new tiers of subscriptions for users, its owner Elon Musk said on Friday.

One tier will be “lower cost with all features, but no reduction in ads,” while the other is “more expensive, but has no ads,” Musk said.

This week, X announced it will begin a test that charges users $1 per year in New Zealand and the Philippines in order to “post & interact with other posts.” X said it is part of a program designed to fight spam and bot activity. Those who opt out will only be able to read posts.

It’s unclear if the $1 annual subscription is one of the two new subscription tiers that Musk is referencing.

The social media company already has a $8 per month subscription service called X Premium. Users who signed up to this can get the blue checkmark on their account as well as other features, such as the ability to edit a post.

Since taking over Twitter in October 2022 and rebranding to X, Musk has made sweeping changes, including making cuts to trust and safety teams and removing the blue checkmark from non-paying accounts. The blue checkmark helped users identify authentic accounts belonging to public figures. Musk has also reinstated previously banned accounts on the platform.

Those changes have scared off advertisers. In July, Musk said X’s cash flow remains negative because of a nearly 50% drop in advertising revenue coupled with “heavy debt.”

New subscriptions could be a bid to improve the company’s finances and open new revenue streams.

X is facing challenges from less mature players such as Meta’s Threads and Bluesky.

This report is from today’s CNBC Daily Open, our new, international markets newsletter. CNBC Daily Open brings investors up to speed on everything they need to know, no matter where they are. Like what you see? You can subscribe here.

Earnings excitementMajor U.S. indexes rallied Monday as investors grew optimistic over strong earnings reports thus far. Asia-Pacific markets traded higher Tuesday as South Korean indexes led gains in the region. Meanwhile, New Zealand reported two-year low inflation readings: Consumer prices in the third quarter rose 5.6% year on year, less than the second quarter’s 6% increase.

China’s renewed reboundChina’s economic growth will return next year, Mark Makepeace, former head of benchmark giant FTSE Russell told CNBC. “In the short term, China does have some issues … but the potential is there,” Makepeace said. One such issue: The country’s property sector is still struggling. If Country Garden fails to make a $15 million coupon payment today, all of its offshore debt could be in default.

Big Tech might win from the HouseIf Republican Rep. Jim Jordan is elected speaker of the U.S. House, technology giants like Google, Apple and Amazon stand to benefit because Jordan’s against using antitrust regulations to break up companies. He’s “aimed most of his ire at the Biden administration’s pressure on companies — not the companies themselves,” said Adam Kovacevich, CEO of lobbying group Chamber of Progress.

Biden to visit IsraelU.S. President Joe Biden will travel to Israel on Wednesday “to stand in solidarity in the face of Hamas’s brutal terrorist attack,” he said on social media platform X. While there, Biden will try to mitigate an expansion of the war between Israel and Hamas, and work to establish the safe passage of critical humanitarian aid to Gaza, said Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

[PRO] Rising oil prices could boost non-energy stocksExogenous shocks, like supply cuts and the Israel-Hamas war, have forced oil prices upward. That’s good news for energy stocks — but these non-energy, European stocks also stand to benefit when oil and gas prices rise, according to Bank of America.

Despite U.S. Treasury yields rising and the Israel-Hamas war becoming increasingly volatile, major indexes in the U.S. closed in the green. Investors’ excitement over third-quarter earnings season, it appears, powered Monday’s rally in equities.

Companies that have already reported have mostly beat Wall Street estimates, giving their shares a boost. Charles Schwab climbed 4.66% after beating earnings expectations, and on Friday, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo rose following their earnings reports.

Investors are hoping this positive start will follow through for the week, during which 53 companies in the S&P 500 — around 11% of its constituents — will report results. (In fact, RBC Capital Markets’ so optimistic about earnings that it’s raised its forecast for 2023 and 2024 earnings per share. The bank’s new numbers “imply that the S&P 500 could surpass 4,700 by year-end 2023,” said Lori Calvasina, head of U.S. rates strategy at RBC.)

If stocks continue rising at the brisk pace they did Monday, that’s certainly a possibility. The S&P 500 added 1.06% to close at 4,373 and the Nasdaq Composite rose 1.2%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average increased 0.93% for its best day in a month, putting it less than 5% from its 52-week high.

“I really see a relief rally going on,” said Lisa Erickson, senior vice president at U.S. Bank Wealth Management. “Sentiment has just turned relatively more positive.”

Indeed, even the small-cap Russell 2000 rallied 1.59%. “This market is starting to broaden out a little bit,” Richard Bernstein, CEO of Richard Bernstein Advisors, told CNBC.

The Russell 2000 has lagged behind major indexes this year because gains were concentrated in the “Magnificent Seven” mega-cap stocks. But “if the economy is going to re-accelerate, which it is doing, and if profits growth is going to re-accelerate, which it is doing, then small caps should lead the way,” added Bernstein. “That’s what history says.”

With the Russell 2000’s best session since July, it’s no wonder investors are growing excited.

Imran Ahmed refuses to be intimidated by Elon Musk. And he’s insisting that researchers at his nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate remain equally unafraid.

Earlier this week, the company formerly known as Twitter filed a lawsuit in federal court against the CCDH, after the organization in June published research that Musk didn’t like. The group found a rise in hate speech on Twitter since Musk purchased the company last year, and said X, as it’s now known, fails to take action against paying subscribers who post racist, homophobic, conspiratorial and other inflammatory content.

In an interview with CNBC, Ahmed said the CCDH has no plans to suspend its research into the spread of hateful content and other emerging problems it finds on the social media platform. Rather, Ahmed told staffers in a meeting after he heard about the lawsuit that they should “double down” on probing X.

“I’ve never, ever, ever walked away from a fight,” Ahmed said.

Ahmed, 44, lives in Washington, D.C., though he studied in the U.K. at the University of Cambridge. He founded the CCDH in 2018 after the death of Jo Cox, a U.K. Labour Party colleague and member of parliament, by a white supremist who was reportedly “a loner obsessed with Nazis.”

Lawyers representing X alleged in this week’s lawsuit that the CCDH improperly obtained access to social media analysis tool Brandwatch and also illegally scraped data from Twitter using other methods. The attorneys claimed the CCDH has used “flawed methodologies to advance incorrect, misleading narratives” that have driven away X’s advertisers, damaging its business.

In March, the CCHD published a study showing that since Musk took over Twitter, there’s been a 119% increase in tweets mentioning the grooming narrative, referring to a conspiracy theory that implies LGBTQ+ people are grooming children. The study was based on an analysis of 1.7 million tweets from the beginning of 2022 through February 2023. The CCDH said it obtained the tweets using a data-scraping tool and Twitter’s search function.

X said in its lawsuit that it’s seeking a jury trial, unspecified monetary damages, and wants to block CCDH and any of its collaborators or employees from accessing data provided by X to Brandwatch.

Ahmed declined to comment about the specifics of the case though he noted that X has not yet physically served him or the CCDH with a lawsuit.

He’s accustomed to the criticism.

Prior to the challenges from X, Meta and TikTok took issue with the CCDH’s research methodology after the group released reports alleging those platforms fostered misinformation and content that could harm the mental health of teenagers.

However, neither of those companies went so far as to sue the nonprofit or allege that it acted unlawfully.

The lawsuit from X follows a previous letter sent from another law firm representing the company, accusing the CCDH of false and misleading claims linked to a separate trademark-related law known as the Lanham Act.

Ahmed characterized Musk’s actions toward his organization as those of “a man who is desperately fishing around for ways to blame someone else.”

X did not respond to questions about the lawsuit or when it plans to serve CCDH with it. The company issued a statement to CNBC, reiterating prior comments and accusing the nonprofit of spreading false claims against X to stymie public discourse. Prior to the lawsuit, Musk referred to Ahmed as a “rat” and the nonprofit as “truly evil.”

Brandwatch and its parent company Cision didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Ahmed defended the CCDH against claims that it’s a “censorship organization,” and also shot down allegations in the complaint and from Musk that the group is covertly bankrolled by potential competitors or foreign governments.

“I made clear that we don’t take money from tech companies, social media companies, and we don’t take money from governments,” Ahmed said. “We take money from philanthropic trusts and the public. If people want to donate, they can donate to us here.”

The CCDH has provided evidence to the governments of the U.S. and U.K. on Internet harms, and advocated for the U.K.’s Online Safety Bill, which was designed to make social media companies more responsible for the safety of their users.

When it comes to Musk, Ahmed has a particular point to make: He doesn’t “understand how free speech truly works.”

He’s a “self-proclaimed champion of free speech,” Ahmed said, but he “doesn’t understand the marketplace of ideas.”

Ultimately, Ahmed’s conclusion is that, “Musk is behaving like a child who simply cannot take responsibility for the fact that he pooped in his own pants and it wasn’t someone else that did it for him.”

Earlier this week, three Democratic members of Congress sent a letter to Musk and X, accusing the world’s richest person of taking a “hostile stance” toward independent researchers. They said the studies have “raised legitimate and serious questions regarding X’s business practices since Mr. Musk’s acquisition.”

But Musk has his backers on the other side of the aisle.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, sent a letter to the CCDH and Ahmed as part of a broader “censorship investigation.” The letter, which the CCDH confirmed it received on Thursday, said the committee is seeking documents from the nonprofit that show its “interactions” with the federal government, including the Biden administration, and social media companies.

“The Committee on the Judiciary is conducting oversight of how and to what extent the Executive Branch has coerced and colluded with companies and other intermediaries to censor speech,” Jordan wrote. “Certain third parties, including organizations like yours, appear to have played a role in this censorship regime by advising the government and social media companies on so-called ‘misinformation’ and other types of content — sometimes with direct or indirect support or approval from the federal government.”

Ahmed said that in the days since the X lawsuit was made public, the CCDH has received “hundreds of donations” and “so many messages of support” from organizations including Amnesty International, the Anti-Defamation League, Friends of the Earth, and Planned Parenthood.

Other groups that have voiced support for CCDH include LGBTQ advocate GLAAD, the Molly Rose Foundation, the Free Press, Check My Ads and Coalition for Independent Tech Research.

Ahmed said these organizations recognize what’s at stake, especially as Musk shows his increasing willingness to use his wealth and power to inject his ideologies onto a major communications platform.

There are “all these other groups who are all coming out going, no no, our information ecosystem is valuable,” Ahmed said. “We have the right to comment on it, on the private companies who administer significant parts of it.”

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