Check Out Highlights From WIRED's Big Interview Event On December 4, WIRED sat down with some of the biggest names in tech, culture, business, and science for a day full of in-depth interviews. In 2024, we brought those talks to a stage in San Francisco for the very first time. This year, we did it again, bringing together AMD CEO Lisa Su, director Jon M. Chu, Anthropic cofounder Daniela Amodei, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, and many more. The Big Interview, a one-day, in-person event held at The Midway in San Francisco on December 4, featured a series of in-depth, illuminating Q&As with some of the biggest names in innovation today, each led by a WIRED journalist. We also hosted our take on a modern-day science fair, complete with hands-on demos and other fun experiences.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan accused the Federal Trade Commissions Lina Khan of "harassing" Twitter since Elon Musks takeover. A Biden administration agency has quietly leaned on a web of technology and antitrust advocacy groups funded by George Soros and other progressive billionaires for critical policy and enforcement roles, Fox News Digital has learned. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC), tasked with protecting consumers, has previously faced criticism over its "revolving door" with regulated industries. Now, it has not only relied on a handful of groups for their expertise but has pulled individuals from a network funded by the same small collection of affluent Democrat donors for crucial government positions. It's the latest illustration of how the Biden administration has counted on outside organizations that receive considerable funding from progressive benefactors.

The digital revolution is here, but not everyone is benefiting equitably from it. And as Silicon Valley's ethos of "move fast and break things" spreads around the world, now is the time to pause and consider who is being left out and how we can better distribute the benefits of our new data economy. "Data is the main resource of a new digital economy," says Parminder Singh, executive director at nonprofit organization IT for Change. Global society will benefit because the economy will benefit, argues Singh, on decentralization of data and distributed digital models. Data commons--or open data sources--are vital to help build an equitable digital economy, but with that comes the challenge of data governance. "Not everybody is sharing data," says Singh. Big tech companies are holding onto the data, which stymies the growth of an open data economy, but also the growth of society, education, science, in other words, everything. According to Singh, "Data is a non-rival resource. It's not a material resource that if one uses it, other can't use it." Singh continues, "If all people can use the resource of data, obviously people can build value over it and the overall value available to the world, to a country, increases manifold because the same asset is available to everyone." One doesn't have to look very far to understand the value of non-personal data collected to help the public, consider GIS data from government satellites. Innovation plus the open access to geographic data helped not only create the Internet we know today, but those same tech companies.

In 2018, Silicon Valley, like Hamlet's engineer, was hoist with its own petard. Citizens were panicking about data privacy, researchers were sounding alarms about artificial intelligence, and even industry stakeholders rebelled against app addiction. Policymakers, meanwhile, seemed to take a renewed interest in breaking up big tech, as a string of congressional hearings put CEOs in the hot seat over the products they made. Everywhere, techies were grasping for answers to the unintended consequences of their own creations. So the Omidyar Network--a "philanthropic investment firm" created by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar--set out to provide them.

You may not think the number of words in an email subject line says anything about you, but at least one company is betting that the metric can help determine your likelihood of paying back a loan. LenddoEFL, based in Singapore, is one of a handful of startups using alternative data points for credit scoring. Those companies review behavioral traits and smartphone habits to build models of creditworthiness for consumers in emerging markets, where standard credit reporting barely exists. In addition to analyzing financial-transaction data, Lenddo's algorithm takes into consideration things such as whether you avoid one-word subject lines (meaning you care about details) and regularly use financial apps on your smartphone (meaning you take your finances seriously). Lenddo also looks at the ratio of smartphone photos in your library that were taken with a front-facing camera, since selfies indicate youth, helping the company divide people into customer segments.

Amid a mounting tide of concerns over the implications of AI (artificial intelligence) on society, a new fund backed by well-known tech industry figures along with Harvard and MIT has been formed. The Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence fund will start out with $27 million to fund work that "advances the development of ethical AI in the public interest." Machine learning, task automation and robotics are already widely used in business. These and other AI technologies are about to multiply, and we look at how organizations can best take advantage of them. EBay founder Pierre Omidyar's charitable foundation Omidyar Network, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, the Knight Foundation and others are contributors to the fund.

Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, and the Omidyar Network, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar's nonprofit, have each committed $10 million to fund academic research and development aimed at keeping artificial intelligence systems ethical and prevent building AI that may harm society. The fund received an additional $5 million from the Knight Foundation and two other $1 million donations from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and Jim Pallotta, founder of the Raptor Group. The $27 million reserve is being anchored by MIT's Media Lab and Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. The Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence Fund, the name of the fund, expects to grow as new funders continue to come on board. While AI has obvious benefits -- it can be used to scan through troves of data to detect cancer and automate driving to reduce fatalities -- a lot of very smart people, including the White House and Elon Musk's nonprofit Open AI, have warned how artificially intelligent systems can go awry.

LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, Omidyar Network, and John S. and the James L. Knight Foundation have today joined forces to create the Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence Fund. The research fund will focus on AI for the public good and will bring a more diverse range of voices, like faith leaders and policymakers, to AI research and development. Issues the fund may address include ethical design, potential harmful and beneficial impacts of AI, and AI that works in the public interest. "Artificial intelligence and complex algorithms, fueled by big data and deep-learning systems, are quickly changing how we live and work -- from the news stories we see, to the loans for which we qualify, to the jobs we perform," the group said in a statement provided to VentureBeat. "Because of this pervasive but often concealed impact, it is imperative that AI research and development be shaped by a broad range of voices -- not only by engineers and corporations, but also by social scientists, ethicists, philosophers, faith leaders, economists, lawyers and policymakers."