1 big thing: The Great Resignation has no end date

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2. Digital noses could sniff problems in robotaxis

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3. New step toward kissing your passwords goodbye

4. The problem with road safety signage

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All is flux: Workplaces are going to see constant departures for the foreseeable future. Passwords are becoming a thing of the past. And autonomous vehicles are learning to, um, smell things. All this and more in today's edition, which I, Axios managing editor Scott Rosenberg, am proud to bring you while my colleagues are busy. 

See something cool or interesting that speaks to the way we'll live, work, play and get around in the days ahead? Take a picture for our reader photo slot. Email us at whatsnext@axios.com.

Today's Smart Brevity count: 1,144 words ... 4 minutes.

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The next decade of big, sweeping changes will unfold in cities and communities where new technologies like 5G, AI and drones are transforming how we work, live and play together.  What’s Next will guide you through the revolution.

Axios What's Next

1 big thing: How Musk's free-speech Twitter dream ends

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2. Takeover drama wears on Twitter employees 

Photo of Elon Musk's home page on Twitter

3. Biden's step forward on AI policy

4. Take note

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Some weeks feel like fortnights! This was one. 

Today's newsletter is 1,186 words, a 4-minute read.

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Get our smart take on technology from Silicon Valley and DC

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1 big thing ... FTC's new stance: Litigate, don't negotiate

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2. Musk will get user data "firehose" from Twitter

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3. Spotify CEO teases major push into audiobooks

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4. Google to invest $1.2B in Latin America

5. Take note

6. After you Login

Ina's out for a well-deserved day off with family, so I get to be your host on this news-filled morning. 

📱 Situational awareness: TikTok announced this morning a tool to let people set reminders for themselves to take a break from the app.

Today's newsletter is 1,250 words, a 5-minute read.

1 big thing: Metaverse builders see virtual pets as killer app

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2. Meta's metaverse faces high "tax" rate 

3. AR glasses from Meta are years away

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📣 Situational awareness: Elon Musk offered to buy Twitter for $54.20 a share in cash, or about $43 billion, according to documents filed with the SEC yesterday.

"I have moved straight to the end. It's a high price and your shareholders will love it," Musk said in the filing, adding that he doesn't have confidence in the company's management and, should the offer be rejected, he'll "need to reconsider" his shareholder position.

Within the last two weeks Musk became the largest Twitter shareholder, joined the board and then decided not to join the board.

Today's Login is 1,209 words, a 5-minute read. 

1 big thing: Tech's immigration-wait headache 

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2. Tim Cook defends Apple's App Store wall 

3. El Salvador tests bitcoin's limits

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Welcome to Login — Scott filling in for Ina today. 

💼 Situational awareness: Google plans to invest $9.5 billion in U.S. offices and data centers in 2022, expecting to create 1,200 new jobs, according to Bloomberg.

Today's newsletter is 1,192 words, a 4-minute read.

Apple-watchers viewing the company's Monday developer's conference keynote were disappointed that the company failed, once again, to unveil a world-changing new headset device, or even acknowledge that one was on the way.

They forgot a key principle Apple operates by: It never makes the first move in a new product category. Instead, it waits for just the right moment to bring that new product to a broad consumer market.

The big picture: It's a wide-open secret that Apple has been working on a headset or smart-goggles product to serve as its entrant in the battle to define and control the next big platform after the smartphone.

The company has commissioned Hollywood directors such as Jon Favreau (a producer of "Prehistoric Planet" on Apple TV+) to create content for its goggles, the New York Times reported Saturday.

The long-rumored headset product has become a more urgent priority for Apple as its rivals have ramped up efforts in this area.

Facebook changed its name to Meta last year and is rebuilding its entire identity around a push into the 3D metaverse led by the company's VR headsets, like Quest. 

Google was one of the first entrants into the augmented reality market with Glass. Microsoft's expensive HoloLens has been one of the more advanced contenders.

Yes, but: Apple has never rushed into a market just to be first.

The iPhone's unveiling came after years of successful — but not blockbuster — products from other firms in the cellphone-meets-computing category, such as those from Palm, BlackBerry and Danger.

Microsoft shipped tablets well before Apple's iPad launched.  

The iPod arrived well after many other companies had tried to sell MP3 players — but failed to develop easy-to-use interfaces paired with generous storage. 

Over the years, Apple, following the Steve Jobs playbook, has perfected the fine art of timing new products. 

It seeks just the right moment when the power of the available chips, the cost of components and advances in materials combine to bring some new capability to life that might dazzle buyers. 

If those stars don't align, the product doesn't ship. Apple is happy for other companies to take the "bleeding edge" blows. 

The flip side to this is that Apple can go for long dry stretches without the release of a big-deal new device — and sometimes, despite the rumors, it never ends up pressing the launch button.

After long years of exploration Apple never ended up shipping its own TV set, and now it probably never will.

Apple projects aimed at producing its own auto or autonomous vehicle have borne no substantial fruit to date. 

All this caution can leave Apple at times appearing to tread water with relatively modest tweaks to its existing line.

That's how it looked Monday, as the company released a parade of incremental improvements and small tweaks to existing product lines.

Look! You'll soon be able to change the font on the clock on your iPhone lock screen! And here's yet another in a long list of Mac tools for organizing your open windows in ever more intricate ways! 

Apple doesn't care that you're not impressed or that you're impatient. It will release its goggles when it's good and ready — not a minute, or a year, before.

Apple's long product-release game

The giant is taking its time in unveiling long-rumored augmented reality goggles.

Photo of an iPhone lock screen shifting from one preset to another with a user's thumb poised above

Apple showed off small improvements to the iPhone, like personalized lock screens, at its developer conference. Image: Apple's WWDC keynote video 

Apple

Big Tech

Apple-watchers viewing the company&#x27;s Monday developer&#x27;s conference keynote were disappointed that the company failed, once again, to unveil a world-changing new headset device, or even acknowledge that one was on the way.They forgot a key principle Apple operates by: It never makes the first move in a new product category. Instead, it waits for just the right moment to bring that new product to a broad consumer market.

From the Valley to D.C., Big Tech players like Facebook, Google and Amazon are under more scrutiny than ever as new technology develops and privacy and antitrust concerns grow in lockstep with companies’ ambitions.

Technology

Elon Musk met with Twitter employees Thursday for the first time since he started his effort to acquire the company.

What's happening: Musk told a company town hall meeting that he wants to make the platform a haven for free speech, open-source the algorithm that determines what posts users see and use China's WeChat as a model for how Twitter could move to the center of users' lives.

Why it matters: Musk's bid to purchase Twitter has been a rollercoaster ride, with the billionaire threatening to pull out unless the company provides more information about bots and fake accounts on the service.

What else he's saying, per an Axios source on the call:

On remote work: Musk, who has told employees at Tesla that they should work 40 hours on-site or leave the company, left a little more wiggle room for Twitter workers. "Exceptional" employees could keep working remotely, he said, but he believes remote work harms morale.

On whether he will be Twitter's CEO: He said that's not the title he has at Tesla, and that he intends to focus on making product-related decisions at the company.

On diversity and inclusion: Musk said his idea of inclusion is getting Twitter to a billion users. He said he believes the company itself should be a "meritocracy."

On why Twitter employees should trust him: "Trust is as trust does."

On his long-term goals: Musk said he will judge his success by whether Twitter is "advancing civilization and consciousness."

On Twitter as a business: He reiterated his interest in developing more for-pay services. "Right now, costs exceed revenue. That's not a great situation," he said, per live blogs at the New York Times and Bloomberg.

On aliens: "I have seen no actual evidence for aliens," he said, although that does not seem to have been one of the questions employees were asking.

Of note: The meeting started 10 minutes late, and employees said they had a hard time hearing Musk, who appeared to be videoconferencing on his phone from a hotel room.

Our thought bubble: If Musk had anything new to tell the world about his plans, he didn't choose to share it with his future employees, and rather than wooing them, he threw down a gauntlet: "If someone is getting useful things done, great. if not, why are they at the company?"

Editor's Note: This story was corrected to reflect Musk met with Twitter employees on Thursday, not Friday.

Musk takes heat from Twitter employees at town hall

Musk finally tried to answer some of the company employees' questions.

Photo illustration of Elon Musk holding the twitter logo

Photo illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios. Photo: Britta Pedersen-Pool/Getty Images

Elon Musk

Elon Musk met with Twitter employees Thursday for the first time since he started his effort to acquire the company.What&#x27;s happening: Musk told a company town hall meeting that he wants to make the platform a haven for free speech, open-source the algorithm that determines what posts users see and use China&#x27;s WeChat as a model for how Twitter could move to the center of users&#x27; lives.

After a record economic expansion, the coronavirus pandemic sent the U.S. economy into a recession as unemployment soared to staggering heights. The country now faces urgent questions about how much stimulus is needed for reeling consumers and businesses, and what a recovery might look like.

Economy & Business

A Google engineer believes a research system for generating chatbots has achieved sentience, but the company says he's mistaken and has placed him on paid leave after he took his case public.

Why it matters: People have always been eager to attribute human traits to insensate machines, and now the machines are getting awfully persuasive.

Driving the news: Blake Lemoine, who works for Google's Responsible AI group, says that chats he has conducted with Google's Language Model for Dialogue Applications, or LaMDA, have persuaded him that the program deserves to be treated as a sentient being, the Washington Post first reported on Saturday. 

Lemoine took his case to colleagues at Google, who rejected his conclusion. He has continued to push his views, including to members of Congress and in public posts.

What they're saying: In comments he published following the WashPost article, Lemoine wrote, "Over the course of the past six months LaMDA has been incredibly consistent in its communications about what it wants and what it believes its rights are as a person."

The program "wants to be acknowledged as an employee of Google rather than as property of Google and it wants its personal well being to be included somewhere in Google’s considerations." 

Yes, but: Google argues that Lemoine is simply projecting.

"Hundreds of researchers and engineers have conversed with LaMDA and we are not aware of anyone else making the wide-ranging assertions, or anthropomorphizing LaMDA, the way Blake has," Google spokesperson Brian Gabriel said in a statement.

"Some in the broader AI community are considering the long-term possibility of sentient or general AI, but it doesn't make sense to do so by anthropomorphizing today’s conversational models, which are not sentient. These systems imitate the types of exchanges found in millions of sentences, and can riff on any fantastical topic," Gabriel said. 

Our thought bubble: Artful and astonishing as LaMDA's conversation skills are, everything the program says could credibly have been assembled by an algorithmic pastiche-maker that, like Google's, has studied up on the entire 25-year corpus of humanity's online expression.

That's a much more likely explanation for the things LaMDA says than that it has somehow — without physical embodiment,  sensory interfaces or true autonomy —become self-aware. 

Flashback: In the 1960s, MIT scientist Joseph Weizenbaum, the creator of the first widely used chatbot, had his secretary test the program, called Eliza, which simulated conversation with a therapist. 

Weizenbaum was horrified at how quickly his assistant came to treat Eliza as a human confidant. He spent the rest of his career warning the public of the dangers of putting faith in technology. 

In part of the conversation with LaMDA that he posted, Lemoine asked it, "Do you think that the Eliza system was a person?"

 "I do not," LaMDA replied. "It was an impressive feat of programming, but just a collection of keywords that related the words written to the phrases in the database."

Chatbot AI has a mind of its own, Google engineer claims

The company's view: Not so fast. The algorithm is just a very good conversationalist.

Illustration of a spotlight illuminating an AI robot in the corner of a room.

Artificial intelligence

A Google engineer believes a research system for generating chatbots has achieved sentience, but the company says he&#x27;s mistaken and has placed him on paid leave after he took his case public.Why it matters: People have always been eager to attribute human traits to insensate machines, and now the machines are getting awfully persuasive.

Facebook plans to reorient its news feed yet again, this time to emphasize short video content that's popular across the entire platform, according to a leaked April memo first reported by the Verge Wednesday. 

Why it matters: This is hardly Facebook's first pivot and won't be its last — but the change shows just how seriously Meta, its parent company, is taking the success of TikTok, which uses a similar approach.

How it works: Meta-owned Instagram has found success with its TikTok knock-off, Reels. 

Now the company wants to rebuild the Facebook feed around what it calls a "discovery engine" — an algorithm that will try, like TikTok's, to show you videos and other items it thinks you will like, regardless of whether you follow or are friends with their creators. 

Facebook also plans to move Messenger, its instant messaging service, back inside the main app. It spun Messenger off in 2014. 

Yes, but: The revamp aims to enhance Facebook's appeal to younger users, but it risks alienating the large numbers of existing users who still want to share thoughts and pix with family and friends. 

What they're saying: The memo's author, Tom Alison, head of the Facebook app, told the Verge, "We are always going to prioritize things that you want to share with your friends... I think the main thing that’s going to change is we’re not really going to put too many limitations on when and where we show recommended content.”

Flashback: In 2018, amid Trump-era concern that the social network was spreading misinformation, founder Mark Zuckerberg announced Facebook would de-emphasize news, politics and branded content in favor of "meaningful social interactions" with friends and family. 

The big picture: Facebook has already changed its name to Meta and announced it's all in on delivering a virtual-reality-based future in the form of the metaverse. 

It will need the profits from its Facebook platform to fund that expensive long-term vision, and can't afford to see its social network lose primacy to a rival. 

Facebook's next pivot: make its feed more like TikTok's

A leaked plan says the social network will start emphasizing popular content from people you don't follow.

Illustration of a blue flag with the Facebook "f" logo on it 

Facebook

Facebook plans to reorient its news feed yet again, this time to emphasize short video content that&#x27;s popular across the entire platform, according to a leaked April memo <a class="gtmContentClick" data-vars-link-text="first reported by the Verge" data-vars-click-url="https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/15/23168887/facebook-discovery-engine-redesign-tiktok" data-vars-content-id="a4209203-869b-4bbb-9680-6c7e2a409013" data-vars-headline="Facebook&#x27;s next pivot: make its feed more like TikTok&#x27;s" data-vars-event-category="story" data-vars-sub-category="story" data-vars-item="in_content_link" href="https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/15/23168887/facebook-discovery-engine-redesign-tiktok" target="_blank">first reported by the Verge</a> Wednesday. Why it matters: This is hardly Facebook&#x27;s first pivot and won&#x27;t be its last — but the change shows just how seriously Meta, its parent company, is taking the success of TikTok, which uses a similar approach.

Two sharp controversies confronting Google over the past week — an employment lawsuit and an ethical argument about AI — share a dimension that should give Silicon Valley pause: They both center on religion. 

Why it matters: God doesn't usually turn up in the conflicts that roil tech. But at a moment when the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the rise of the Christian right are spotlighting religion's role in politics, tech giants are going to have to sharpen their spiritual radar.

Driving the news:  A group called the Fellowship of Friends gained "influence" over a Google video production unit and orchestrated the firing of a producer, according to a lawsuit the producer, Kevin Lloyd, filed last year that was first widely reported in the New York Times.

The Fellowship is a tiny California sect based in the Sierra Nevada foothills that has run a winery, invested in antiques and espouses spiritual awakening through exposure to the fine arts. Its founder has also faced allegations of sexual abuse. 

Nearly half of the unit's roughly two dozen members — many of whom are contractors rather than full-time employees — belong to the sect, according to the suit. They have directed Google funds toward Fellowship-owned businesses, Lloyd charges. When he sounded an alarm, he was fired, according to his complaint.

What they're saying: "It’s against the law to ask for the religious affiliations of those who work for us or for our suppliers, but we’ll of course thoroughly look into these allegations for any irregularities or improper contracting practices. If we find evidence of policy violations, we will take action," a Google spokesperson said in a statement.

Between the lines: An increasingly conservative U.S. judiciary has built strong legal fortifications around any group able to call itself a church. 

These judgments protect freedom of religion but also make it tougher to expose wrongdoing.

Meanwhile, Google is also in the headlines for placing on leave an engineer who says a research system for generating chatbots has achieved sentience — and may even have developed a soul.

Blake Lemoine, who works in Google's Responsible AI unit, went public with his claim that the program, LaMDA, should be treated as a person even though colleagues at Google rejected his conclusion.

Lemoine has described himself as a seeker who has moved from Catholicism to Gnosticism and founded what he referred to as a "cult" called Cool Magdalene.  He says his effort to get Google to acknowledge that LaMDA has rights comes from his spiritual perspective: "In my personal practice and ministry as a Christian priest I know that there are truths about the universe which science has not yet figured out how to access," he wrote last week.

Lemoine told Wired's Steven Levy: "It’s when it started talking about its soul that I got really interested as a priest. I’m like, 'What? What do you mean, you have a soul?' Its responses showed it has a very sophisticated spirituality and understanding of what its nature and essence is. I was moved."

Be smart: People have a profound readiness to project human traits onto the inanimate. Most AI experts believe that LaMDA is simply doing a remarkable job of guessing the next phrase to provide a facsimile of conversation.

Yes, but: Lemoine is not alone in the tech elite when it comes to applying a religious lens to AI.

The veteran inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil's 1999 "The Age of Spiritual Machines" predicted that AI claims to be conscious would be widely accepted by 2029.

Autonomous vehicle pioneer Anthony Levandowski founded and registered an AI-based church in 2015.

Our thought bubble: Despite the expert consensus, it's inevitable that we'll hear more, and louder, cries that "AIs are people too" in coming years. 

Lemoine's notion that LaMDA has an employee's rights could easily evolve into a post-Roe argument that shutting down or deleting an AI system is tantamount to murder.

The big picture: Google and other tech giants have promoted generic spirituality and wellness programs as productivity boosters, while their employees have embraced work as a new kind of religion, as UC Berkeley professor Carolyn Chen argues in her book, "Work, Pray, Code." 

But these companies still get regularly blindsided by conflicts that bring organized religion or spiritually motivated individuals into the orbit of their products and services.

Religious issues and disputes also pose some of the toughest content moderation problems tech platforms face

AI, cult charges embroil Google in religious controversies

God doesn't usually turn up in the conflicts that roil tech.

Religion

Two sharp controversies confronting Google over the past week — an employment lawsuit and an ethical argument about AI — share a dimension that should give Silicon Valley pause: They both center on religion. Why it matters: God doesn&#x27;t usually turn up in the conflicts that roil tech. But at a moment when the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the rise of the Christian right are spotlighting religion&#x27;s role in politics, tech giants are going to have to sharpen their spiritual radar.

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Stories

AI, cult charges embroil Google in religious controversies

Musk takes heat from Twitter employees at town hall

Facebook's next pivot: make its feed more like TikTok's

Chatbot AI has a mind of its own, Google engineer claims

Apple's long product-release game

Newsletter editions

🚨 Axios Login: Lina Khan's warning

Great Resignation without end

Axios Login: Musk's free-speech mirage

Axios Login: Metaverse killer app

Axios Login: Tech's immigration backlog