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.
Here’s what Eric Schmidt, who was Google’s CEO from 2004 to 2011 and then chairman until 2015, had to say recently during a talk at Stanford:
Google decided that work-life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning. And the reason startups work is because people work like hell.
Update, August 14th: It appears that Schmidt didn’t intend for his comments to make headlines! Stanford has taken the video of his talk down, so here’s a clip that is still online:
For more of the backstory and ambition behind Worldcoin, the eyeball-scanning-for-cryptocurrency startup that Sam Altman thinks could one day save us all from an AI-controlled world, check out this piece from Bloomberg’s Ashley Vance:
Blania and Altman, who formally outlined their Worldcoin master plan a year ago, have since received feedback that might be generously described as mixed. On one hand, they’ve already persuaded more than 6 million people to go before an Orb and sign up for a World ID, and the sign-up rate has been surging this year. The total value of the digital currency (WLD) is more than $550 million. At a factory in Germany, Orbs are heading toward mass production and will soon be dispersed around the globe in a bid to push these numbers even higher.
John Schulman is leaving to work on alignment at Anthropic, OpenAI’s chief rival. In a reply post on X, CEO Sam Altman thanked Schulman and said he “laid out a significant fraction of what became OpenAI’s initial strategy.”
In his new job, Schulman will work closely with Jan Leike, another senior leader who recently left OpenAI for Anthropic due to concerns that safety had taken a backseat to business priorities.
X is moving out from the building Elon Musk famously walked into while carrying a kitchen sink, per an internal memo I’ve seen.
In the email to employees, X CEO Linda Yaccarino says the company will “transition to our new primary locations in the Bay Area,” including an office in San Jose and a “shared space” with Musk’s xAI in Palo Alto.
CNBC spotted the update this week in Microsoft’s risk factors with the SEC. These are managed by lawyers to help shield companies from shareholders lawsuits and generally pretty conservative. Still, the change feels like a sign of how OpenAI and its largest investor are drifting apart.
Relatedly, I couldn’t help but notice the number of times Microsoft execs mentioned OpenAI during their earnings call this week: zero.
