Dave Blundin, James Currier, Rudina Seseri, Mark Gorenberg, and Mark MachinJohn Werner Engineers and entrepreneurs have a certain outlook on AI, but what about investors? These are the people who really have to gauge the marketability of projects and companies, against a very vibrant tapestry of quickly changing business realities. Everything is happening so quickly – new models and designs are outcompeting one another constantly. The big companies are coming up with dynamic applications and releases with big use cases. The kids are going to school to be innovators – or investors. And everyone else is looking on, trying to figure out what the world is going to look like in a couple of years. In that context, it makes sense to think about how the investors work, and what has changed in the last few years (because again, everything is changing at warp speed.) Venture Capital: Some Guidelines As I was researching the role of the VC in artificial intelligence investing, Microsoft copilot offered a few tips. The first is embracing AI for investment and operations – for things like portfolio management and analyzing colossal data sets. Another is to create a transparent and equitable ecosystem – promoting those principles of ethics and transparency that build trust. So – use cases plus trust. But VCs also have to strike fast, while the iron is hot. I could make an annealing joke, but in reality, that is another big principle of making sure that you’re succeeding in your game plan. The Regulatory Environment Then there’s also the compliance aspect of AI project and activities. “The SEC has introduced new rules aimed at increasing transparency and fairness in the VC ecosystem,” wrote Luis Sanchez last year, in a piece eventually published on LinkedIn. “These regulations require VC firms to disclose more information about their fees, expenses, and preferential terms offered to certain investors. While these changes are designed to protect investors, they also impose additional compliance burdens on VC firms, potentially complicating fundraising efforts and operational practices.” Sanchez clarifies: “One significant aspect of the new SEC rules is the emphasis on fair treatment of all investors, which could limit VC firms’ flexibility in offering preferential terms to anchor investors. This shift may level the playing field for smaller investors but could also deter large institutional investors, affecting the overall fundraising landscape. Furthermore, the new regulations will incentivize 409a valuations, ensuring that employees have a clearer understanding of the value of their option packages and preventing unethical accounting tricks that some VCs have employed in the past.” So all of this is critically important as well. Getting to the Growth Stage In a recent panel discussion on this exact topic, Dave Blundin Founder and General Partner at Link Ventures, interviewed a number of experts with their own significant experience in the AI world. The group talked about open source and community work, the need for VC to bet earlier and move faster, and on achieving the growth stage. “If companies scale that quickly, then they don't need the growth capital, because they're already becoming cash flow positive,” said James Currier, a founder of NFX and investor in projects like Lyft. Currier suggested VCs can look for a “slow burn” to get in on the action.Dave Blundin, James Currier and Rudina Seseri on the panelJohn Werner Rudina Seseri Founding and Managing Partner of Glasswing Ventures called the VC environment an “embarrassment of riches,” pointing to some of the saturation that exists in the markets, and discussed the work that model companies are doing with hyperscalers. “It’s no accident that Anthropic and AWS are together, that OpenAI and Microsoft are together, and yet differentiation is a challenge,” she said. The 10X Question I wanted to include this part, because it was very interesting as an anecdotal look at investing: Blundin asked: “A lot of people at CSAIL, here at MIT, are working on foundation model level innovation. If somebody comes to you and says, ‘I've got a breakthrough, it's a 10x - I can literally 10x what the transformers are doing at Anthropic, OpenAI, DeepSeek.’ Do you say, ‘Well, look, they just raised money (on a) $300 billion valuation. I don't care about your 10x - go work for them.’ Or do you say, ‘Wow, this is a 10x… could bypass all of that. could make the transformer irrelevant, we need (it.)?’” Seseri answered: “I don't invest in tech for the sake of tech,” she said. “What does your 10x do for which use case, or set of use cases … by vertical, by function, by industry? Let's talk about the impact. I came from Microsoft. If I were worried that Microsoft would own the world, I would never touch any facet, because at one point we were going to do everything.” More on Changes Mark Gorenberg, Managing Director of Zetta Venture Partners and Chair of the MIT Corporation, talked about the outcomes in the business world, in terms of new model advances. “This inference change is going to change two things. One, it's going to make real time applications and edge devices viable. So now I can run all this down at the edge. I can do applications that I could never do before, I can move to real robotics. So I'm opening up whole new markets with these inference changes.” The other contemplates the difference between building pre-2021, and building now. “This will become the decade of AI-native science,” he said.Mark Gorenberg on the panel Mark Gorenberg Mark Machin, formerly Vice Chair and the Head of Investment Banking for Asia Pacific for Goldman Sachs and while at CPPIB, Mark chaired its investment committees and oversaw more than $500B of investment, and founded Intrepid Growth Partners, agreed with some of the principles put forward by other panelists in evaluating how VC funding works right now. “You invest in a business, not a technology,”he said. “So it's a little bit easier (of a) question, because … it's got to have a business application. And what we're very focused on is, what are the unit economics of that? How is it actually creating value? We call it ROI, but … what's the prediction? What's it doing? How is it actually creating value for end customers? ... So if it's just a new model … new algorithmic improvement or architecture, that's fantastic for the world and many business applications, someone's going to turn it into a business.” Informal Talk on Investing Ecosystem Later, panelists talked freely about how some of the big players throw around big amounts of money, how big money “skews the brains” of young investors, and how to keep your eye on the ball. They talked about the big move from AI-enabled design to AI-native design: and that’s something that all of us are seeing right now. Other insights? Funds were small; now they’re very large. Everything’s hypercompetitive. And, on a different note: VC investing can be an attractive role. “It's a high-status job,” Currier noted. “It's pretty fun. You get to be the decider. You can’t tell if you're bad at it for about 14 years, there's not a lot of feedback…I think in 2022, like 8% of the HBS graduates went and took a job in venture capital, and that was unimaginable years ago … It's fun. Anybody can jump in. I think you're going to have corporations, they're going to want to have VCs. You're going to have towns, they're going to want to have VCs, because it's the responsible thing to do for economic growth and development. And so you can have a lot of people running around, taking salaries, doing what we’re doing - more and more.” Seseri, on the other hand, asked if VC is really a “misnomer” now. “I wish we had different labeling,” she said. Open Source or Closed Source? Toward the end of the panel, the group covered differences between open source and closed source models. This is a debate that is going on all over the tech world, with some concerned about the ramifications of releasing high-powered models to bad actors, and others wary of monolithic corporate dominance of new tech. “We’re clearly investing in both, but we've had huge success with open source,” Gorenberg said. “I mean, it just scales very quickly, it tends to match the times, and we've particularly been interested in companies that focus on the open source core, and don't try to create a commercial equivalent of that, and then build commercial products around it, because they can, they can own a huge community, and they can own it very quickly.” “Linux Red Hat,” Seseri added, quickly, and then the time was up. As I pointed out in the intro, part of the reason that these are big questions is that young people are deciding what they want to do now. In some ways, the world is their oyster. In other ways, the competitive aspect is so daunting. But looking at the investing environment should always give a young career pro a leg up.

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What just happened? Intel has released a new overclocking tool called "200S Boost" that can increase performance on select Intel systems without voiding the warranty. The utility is specifically designed for Core Ultra 200S series processors, which received a mixed response from reviewers following their launch late last year. The new feature offers a simple overclocking option for systems powered by unlocked Arrow Lake chips when paired with compatible Z890 motherboards and supported memory modules. It will be available via a BIOS update on motherboards from Asrock, Asus, MSI, Gigabyte, and other major vendors. 200S Boost will reportedly allow users to achieve higher fabric, die-to-die, and memory frequencies, resulting in performance gains for low-latency workloads such as gaming. Intel claims the feature can increase inter-die fabric frequencies on 200S-series processors from 2.6GHz to 3.2GHz (VccSA ≤ 1.2V), and die-to-die frequencies from 2.1GHz to 3.2GHz (VccSA ≤ 1.20V). It can also help overclock DDR5 memory from 6,400 MT/s to 8,000 MT/s. The best part about 200S Boost is that using it to tune your PC won't void your warranty if something goes wrong with the CPU. That's because Intel continues to offer its standard three-year limited warranty on processors, regardless of whether they've been overclocked using this feature or run at default settings without any modifications. Supported CPUs include: Intel Core Ultra 9 285K Intel Core Ultra 7 265K Intel Core Ultra 7 265KF Intel Core Ultra 5 245K Intel Core Ultra 5 245KF Tom's Hardware tested the new tool and found that it delivers an average performance boost of around 7.5%. Their test system featured a Core Ultra 9 285K CPU, an MSI MEG Z890 ACE motherboard, and an RTX 5090 Founders Edition graphics card. // Related Stories On the memory side, six configurations and three memory speeds were tested across 16 games at 1080p. Moving from 6400 MT/s to 8000 MT/s, Baldur's Gate 3 saw the largest performance gain at 11.6 percent, while A Plague Tale: Requiem showed a more modest 3.7 percent improvement. Tom's also noted that relatively affordable DDR5-7200 memory kits delivered nearly the same performance in most games and applications, potentially making them a better choice for improved system stability. The publication additionally benchmarked several productivity applications to evaluate the impact of the new overclocking tool. It found that software known to benefit from overclocked hardware saw slight performance gains, while other applications remained largely unaffected.

The big picture: If Google really is forced to sell Chrome – as proposed by the DOJ after the company was ruled a monopoly in its antitrust trial – OpenAI could emerge as a potential buyer. The ChatGPT maker has admitted it's interested in acquiring the world's most popular browser and turning it into an "AI-first" experience. Following Judge Amit Mehta's ruling that Google was a monopolist in online search last year, the Justice Department pushed for the immediate sale of Chrome. The remedies phase of the trial began this week in Washington. Nick Turley, head of product for ChatGPT at OpenAI, was one of the DOJ's witnesses on Tuesday. He testified that OpenAI had contacted Google last year about a partnership that would improve ChatGPT. The chatbot already uses Bing's search data, but Turley mentioned there had been "significant quality issues" with a company referred to as "Provider No. 1," which was likely a reference to Microsoft. "We believe having multiple partners, and in particular Google's API, would enable us to provide a better product to users," OpenAI told Google in an email that was revealed during the trial. Google turned down the offer as it believed the deal could harm the company's lead in search. Turley added that OpenAI doesn't have any partnership with Google today. Turley was also asked if OpenAI would be interested in purchasing Chrome if Google is forced to sell its browser. "Yes, we would, as would many other parties," he replied. // Related Stories In November 2024, reports claimed OpenAI was considering releasing a Chromium-based web browser with ChatGPT integration that could compete with Chrome. The company hired two key Chrome developers last year, Ben Goodger and Darin Fisher, founding members of the Chrome team. Chrome has dominated the global browser market since its user share passed Internet Explorer in 2012. Today, it has a 66% overall share and 4 billion users. Second-place Safari has an 18% share. If OpenAI were to buy Chrome, Turley predicted that it would become an "AI-first" experience. That means tight integration with ChatGPT and other OpenAI products, while data from those billions of users could be used to train its AI systems. Another judge this month ruled that Google built and maintained an illegal monopoly in key segments of the online display advertising industry. The decision could lead to the government breaking up Google's advertising operations.

This week sees a very special day for one of the most beloved science instruments on the planet, as the Hubble Space Telescope is celebrating its 35th birthday. Launched on April 24, 1990, the telescope revolutionized our understanding of cosmology through its measurements of the expansion of the universe, and continues to collect invaluable science data and beautiful images to this day. In celebration of 35 years spent in orbit around Earth, the Hubble team has released a set of four new images showing the many types of objects that Hubble can investigate, from planets to nebulae to galaxies. Thanks to a bunch of servicing missions over the years which upgraded the telescope’s instruments, it has continued to provide cutting edge data even as technology has advanced. Recommended Videos According to the European Space Agency, over the years Hubble has made an incredible 1.7 million observations of 55,000 targets, and all of those observations have resulted in 22,000 scientific papers and over 400 terabytes of data. Even now, time on Hubble remains precious and highly in demand, with six times as many science projects requesting time on the telescope than can be provided. Mars (December 2024) NASA, ESA, STScI The first image shows our planetary neighbor Mars, as observed in December last year. You get a great view of the icy cap which covers the northern pole of the planet, as well as the clouds which are gathering in the east on the right hand image. Planetary nebula NGC 2899 NASA, ESA, STScI This stunning object is a planetary nebula, created by strong stellar winds from an epic white dwarf right in its center. With a temperature of nearly 22,000 degree Celsius, this core of a dying star still gives off enough radiation to sculpt the dust and gas around it into the beautiful shapes. Rosette Nebula NASA, ESA, STScI This is another nebula, though a different type as it is composed of gas that has been ionized by many newly born stars. As these stars give off radiation they ionize the hydrogen around them, causing the gas to glow. This star-forming region sees the birth of many new massive stars, some of which give out jets of plasma in impressive displays. Barred Spiral Galaxy NGC 5335 NASA, ESA, STScI This striking galaxy has a similar structure to our Milky Way, with its spiral arms and bright bar of stars along the center. Though the spiral arms of our galaxy are clear and well defined, in NGC 5335 the arms are more diffuse, as they are patchy with some areas brightly lit by new star formation which other regions are more empty. Much of the star formation in this galaxy is happening within the bar, which is particularly bright and clear. Editors’ Recommendations

Table of Contents Table of Contents The Four Seasons (May 1) Poker Face season 2 (May 8) Long Way Home season 2 (May 9) Love, Death & Robots season 4 (May 15) Murderbot (May 16) You have probably filled up your TV time of late with the latest episodes of The Last of Us and already binged your way through all six episodes of the seventh season of Black Mirror. What now? There are plenty of great new and returning shows coming this month. If you’re looking for guidance, we have rounded up five great TV shows you need to watch in May 2025. They’re available on three top streamers, feature fabulous casts, and, when it comes to the returning shows, it has been years since we’ve seen a new season. So, saddle up and check these out.  Recommended Videos Need more recommendations? Then check out the best new shows to stream this week, as well as the best shows on Netflix, the best shows on Hulu, the best shows on Amazon Prime Video, the best shows on Max, and best shows on Disney+.  Related The Four Seasons (May 1) Jon Pack / Netflix Tina Fey is back on the small screen in this comedy miniseries adapted from the 1981 movie of the same name. She stars in The Four Seasons alongside an equally talented cast that includes Steve Carell, Colman Domingo, and Will Forte. They are among six friends who travel for a weekend getaway only to learn that one of the couples is splitting up. Now in an awkward situation, these decades-long friends realize that no one is perfect, and having one another in their lives helps get them through. The cast alone is reason enough to check out this eight-episode series, which Fey says she hopes makes audiences feel like “they are inside a big sweater with us.” It might not make the cut among the best comedy shows of all time, but The Four Seasons could be one of the best feel-good series of the year. Stream The Four Seasons on Netflix.  Poker Face season 2 (May 8) Peacock It has been more than a two-year wait, but the second season of Poker Face is finally here this month. Natasha Lyonne stars in this Rian Johnson crime comedy-drama that plays like modern-day version of Columbo with a twist. Charlie (Lyonne) has an incredible gift: she can simply look someone in the eye and tell if they’re lying. While it served her well at the casino, Charlie finds herself on the run from bad guys. As she travels across the U.S., Charlie meets new people and gets caught up in a different murder case that she helps solve. Employing the same inverted detective story format that was popular with Columbo, Poker Face’s first season featured episodes with differing themes and an incredible guest cast list and blurred genre lines, from comedy to horror. We expect nothing less of season two, which will feature guest actors like Cliff “Method Man” Smith, Cynthia Erivo, Jason Ritter, Melanie Lynskey, and Giancarlo Esposito. Stream Poker Face on Peacock.  Long Way Home season 2 (May 9) Apple TV+ As one of the best series on Apple TV+, Long Way Up follows actor Ewan McGregor on motorcycle adventures. If you loved the adventure show, you’ll be pleased to know that a second season called Long Way Home is finally coming this month. Charley Boorman joins McGregor as the pair travels from Scotland to England on their refurbished vintage motorbikes. Purposely taking the long way, they travel through mesmerizing spots like the North Sea and Arctic Circle.  A journey that spans 15 countries and two months, Long Way Home sees the duo explore different cultures along the way. Live vicariously through them as they navigate the streets at top speeds, stopping to meet locals, participate in activities, and dine on delectable eats.  Stream Long Way Home on Apple TV+.  Love, Death & Robots season 4 (May 15) Netflix You might have thought that Love, Death & Robots was cancelled. Nope. The adult animated anthology series just took an extra-long hiatus, three years to be exact. The fourth season has finally arrived, continuing with the format of a collection of short films, each produced by a different team and featuring a different cast. The series, a reimagining of 1981’s sci-fi movie Heavy Metal, explores different themes in each episode, from sci-fi to horror and even comedy.  The stories from the first three seasons included everything from electronic gladiator beast battles to robots exploring a post-apocalyptic Earth to learn how humans once lived. In season four, expect to see alien invasions, mischievous cats, and even vicious dinosaurs at the center of the fantastical stories. Stream Love, Death & Robots on Netflix.  Murderbot (May 16) Apple TV+ Gear up for sci-fi and action with Murderbot, which is based on the Martha Wells book series The Murderbot Diaries and stars Alexander Skarsgård as the title character. He’s a security robot that learned to hack, well, himself, to get the capacity for free will. But humans don’t know that. As he embarks on dangerous assignments, Murderbot finds himself fascinated with humans and both their weaknesses and strengths but has to hide his feelings from these creatures. Written, directed, and produced by Chris and Paul Weitz (About a Boy), Murderbot, an action comedy, also involves Wells as a consulting producer. Will it be as great as Severance? Probably not. But Murderbot sounds like a downright bloody good time.  Stream Murderbot on Apple TV+.  Editors’ Recommendations

It’s as transformative as the internet itself. Here are the key players in the generative-AI battle, and where they stand right now.

For more than half a century, the desirability and reliability of U.S. dollars has been at the foundation of the world economy. Could its reign be coming to an end?

Selected by Sophie Madeline Dess, the author of the novel “What You Make of Me.”

Letting feelings get in the way? Zuckerberg stifled Instagram because he loves Facebook, Instagram founder says Before acquiring Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg swore Facebook had “no agenda.” Ashley Belanger – Apr 23, 2025 12:14 pm | 1 Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg listens to Kevin Systrom (not shown), Instagram CEO and co-founder, speak during a press event at Facebook headquarters where a video feature for Instagram was announced. Credit: San Francisco Chronicle/Hearst Newspapers / Contributor | Hearst Newspapers Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg listens to Kevin Systrom (not shown), Instagram CEO and co-founder, speak during a press event at Facebook headquarters where a video feature for Instagram was announced. Credit: San Francisco Chronicle/Hearst Newspapers / Contributor | Hearst Newspapers Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only   Learn more At the Meta monopoly trial, Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom accused Mark Zuckerberg of draining Instagram resources to stifle growth out of sheer jealousy. According to Systrom, Zuckerberg may have been directly involved in yanking resources after integrating Instagram and Facebook because "as the founder of Facebook, he felt a lot of emotion around which one was better—Instagram or Facebook," The Financial Times reported. In 2025, Instagram is projected to account for more than half of Meta's ad revenue, according to eMarketer's forecast. Since 2019, Instagram has generated more ad revenue per user than Facebook, eMarketer noted, and today makes Meta twice as much per user as the closest rival that Meta claims it fears most, TikTok. Seeming to back up Systrom's claim that Zuckerberg acted irrationally in suppressing Instagram was a 2018 email in which Zuckerberg considered selling off Instagram to "immediately stop artificially growing Instagram in a way that undermines the Facebook networks." That email came right at the moment when Instagram was overtaking Facebook's ad revenue per user, the data suggests, and Systrom testified that he felt Zuckerberg's strategy seemed so fishy that he left the company that year. "Every company needs to make trade-offs, but... [it] felt like something else was going on," Systrom testified. Some of Zuckerberg's interviews from 2012—the year that Facebook bought Instagram—suggest that Systrom may be onto something. In a talk with Y Combinator's Startup School, Zuckerberg passionately explained that Facebook's services are about "what makes humans human" and made a mission of expanding the social capacity of humanity beyond Dunbar's number, which claims that the human brain can only handle maintaining about 150 relationships. At that time, the average Facebook user had about 150 connections, Zuckerberg said, and he fervently wanted the service to essentially train human brains to manage even more social interactions than ever before. "There had to be a service that gave people the power to share the things they wanted and control it in the way they wanted, and Facebook did that," Zuckerberg said. And about his ambition to multiply Dunbar's number, he said, "it was fundamental for me. I felt this need really acutely; I really wanted this." Systrom testified that Zuckerberg favored Facebook so much that he began starving Instagram of resources, including denying any additional staffing to help build out Instagram's video tools in 2017. "We were given zero of 300 incremental video heads, which is an unacceptable and offensive outcome," Systrom testified. Systrom's testimony, the FT reported, "hit at the heart" of the Federal Trade Commission's case, as the FTC has alleged that Meta cut off Instagram's growth to avoid Facebook’s "network collapse." Antitrust lawyer, Brendan Benedict, who is monitoring the trial, wrote on X that Systrom was "a really effective witness" who appeared "justifiably upset with how Zuckerberg didn't seem to be keeping his end of their bargain." By 2018, Systrom testified that Meta viewed Instagram as a "threat" to Facebook's growth, The Verge reported. "If Instagram didn’t grow as quickly, Facebook wouldn’t shrink as quickly or plateau as quickly," Systrom testified. "I don’t think he [Zuckerberg] ever said it out loud that way, but that was the only reason we were having this discussion" about ending feature integrations between Facebook and Instagram—which was one of the primary ways Meta had fueled Instagram's growth. On Tuesday, Meta issued a statement following Systrom's testimony that maintained Meta's argument that the FTC is rehashing old deals that the agency long ago approved. "Out-of-context and years-old documents about acquisitions that were reviewed by the FTC more than a decade ago will not obscure the realities of the competition we face or overcome the FTC’s weak case," Meta said. “We have no agenda,” Zuckerberg said in 2012 Tensions between Zuckerberg and Instagram co-founders Systrom and Mike Krieger started before the acquisition, Zuckerberg told attendees at the 2012 TechCrunch Disrupt conference. Explaining that then-Facebook was impressed by Instagram's use of its open graph to make sharing Instagram's appealing photos on Facebook easier, Zuckerberg said that the decision to acquire Instagram came after realizing that Facebook wasn't deriving value from supporting the popular camera app. "There's this question of, OK, well, we can help them grow," Zuckerberg said. "But without the value occurring to us," so I just brought up the idea to Kevin—hey, maybe we should just join and become one company." Listening to Zuckerberg at that time, it's easy to see why Systrom so defiantly pushed back on the stand against Meta's claims that its choices were made purely to fuel Instagram's growth. Zuckerberg insisted early on that Instagram wouldn't be forced to integrate with Facebook, which, of course, eventually happened. "We think Instagram is amazing, and we want to help it grow to hundreds of millions of users," Zuckerberg said in 2012. "We want to help them out with whatever we can, but we have no agenda in terms of making them go into our infrastructure or something. I know a lot of times companies force companies that they're integrating to do stuff like that. I think it's primarily a waste of time." Systrom testified that rather than support Instagram, Meta quickly pulled Facebook growth team staff off Instagram, crippling its growth, The Verge reported. Instagram's "first slowdown that we had was maybe a year into being at Facebook," Systrom testified, saying that "Meta had the 'best' growth team, 'if you could work with them,'" the FT reported. On X, Benedict reported that Meta's lawyer scored "some points" by getting Systrom to admit that Instagram pre-acquisition decided "not to compete" with Facebook and had no intentions of ever becoming a social network (seeing itself more as an interests-based app focused on sharing photography). That could undercut the FTC's argument that Facebook shut down a rival's growth. Court must determine who Meta’s real rivals are The FTC needs to convince the court that Meta holds a monopoly in a market for personal social networks after foreclosing competition, partly by acquiring Instagram. Meta is hoping to broaden the market definition to pull in other social media rivals, like TikTok, that would significantly reduce Meta's market share below monopoly levels. If the FTC wins, Instagram may be spun off from Meta's "family of apps," which the FTC believes would, for the first time ever, force Meta to face competition as a social media company focused on connecting friends and family. Some critics think that Meta has never really had rivals. Back in 2012, Zuckerberg claimed in his talk with the Startup School that Facebook had no beef with MySpace, for example, which crumpled in the face of Facebook's competition. Instead, he insisted that for Facebook, "it's not about winning and losing. It's about doing something that's valuable." But when Zuckerberg tried to claim that there was "more than one" social network in 2012, the Startup School interviewer abruptly interrupted him. "More than one social network? Not really," the interviewer joked, stirring loud laughter from the audience by pointing out the obvious. Rather than point to any Facebook rivals, Zuckerberg dodged by saying that Facebook's integration into a wide range of apps had made nearly everything people did online social. "My view of the world is almost every product and category is going to get transformed and reimagined to be social," Zuckerberg said, almost paving the way for Meta's argument today that it faces vast competition in every direction, including from video apps like YouTube or professional social networks like LinkedIn. Similarly, at the 2012 TechCrunch conference, Zuckerberg explained that Facebook isn't about dominating markets but is instead about fulfilling his vision of expanding the way that humans connect in the world. "We don't build services to make money," Zuckerberg said. "We make money to build better services." And that "really goes to the heart of the philosophy that we have in running the company," he said. "We exist and we wake up in the morning, and the thing that gets us excited is making a world more open and connected." Systrom alleged to the court that, in reality, Zuckerberg ran Facebook based on his personal desire to have his flagship product remain on top. When confronted with an email in which Systrom praised Instagram's seemingly inevitable integration with Facebook for driving growth, Systrom claimed "he was only emphasizing the benefit to appease Zuckerberg," The Verge reported, amid rising tensions between the founders. And when Meta's lawyer asked if that meant he was lying in the email, Systrom appeared to run out of patience for Meta's line of questioning, responding only with a terse "Sir." On X, Benedict joked that for everyone closely watching the testimony from one of the FTC's star witnesses, it was " the 'Sir' heard round the world." Ashley Belanger Senior Policy Reporter Ashley Belanger Senior Policy Reporter Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience. 1 Comments