This is an audio transcript of the Tech Tonic podcast episode:‘Tech in 2026 — Silicon Valley’s power plays and players’

Murad Ahmed Was there anything specific that stuck out for you in 2025 that you thought, oh geez, this is going in a worrying new direction.

**Stephen Morris **Well, one of the stories Hannah and I did about xAI, somebody told us, well, if you want to know the direction of the company, they’ve installed a hologram of Ani, which is a sort of very flirtatious anime sex bot that they’ve put into Grok.

There’s now a hologram of it in the xAI headquarters. It’s like the first thing employees see when they walk in every day. That’s them setting out their stall.

**Hannah Murphy **So once you’ve spoken to Ani and interacted with her, you will get notifications if they’re turned on, where she will try to say, hey, come back and chat with me. I miss you. Do you want to do X, Y, Z? So it will remember you and try to bombard you to get you to return and interact in this racy style.

**Stephen Morris **Yeah. The more you talk to her, you unlock nude levels, and the levels basically seem to be able to put her in increasingly fewer items of clothing. But you can also say, explain a black hole to me, Ani, and she’ll do it in this like bizarrely seductive way.

**Hannah Murphy **Yes. Even those who’ve signed on to Elon Musk and his hardcore working practices have been somewhat astounded and backed away after this pursuit of the very racy sex sells, sexy AI that Musk has gone after. So we’ve spoken to folks who, you know, the instant they heard and learned about Ani and the character behind it, decided that sort of that was it, and they were out.

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**Murad Ahmed **What does Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot and the likes of Ani really tell us about his pursuit of artificial superintelligence? And has the implosion of his relationship with Donald Trump hurt his chances of winning the AI race? I’m Murad Ahmed, the FT’s technology news editor, directing the work of our tech correspondents in San Francisco, London, Beijing and beyond.

And in this mini-series of Tech Tonic, we’re looking at some of the biggest questions facing the tech industry this year. In today’s episode, tech and power. How will Silicon Valley’s biggest figures, the likes of Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman, respond to the shifting political pressures?

I’m joined by Hannah Murphy, San Francisco correspondent, who you heard just now talking about Musk’s latest female friend, Ani. Hi, Hannah.

**Hannah Murphy **Hello. Hello.

**Murad Ahmed **As well as Stephen Morris, our San Francisco bureau chief. Hi, Stephen.

**Stephen Morris **Hello from San Francisco.

Murad Ahmed: And Elaine Moore, our tech comment editor.

**Elaine Moore **Hello.

**Murad Ahmed **OK, so Stephen, let’s kick off with you. Almost exactly this time last year, we saw the tech bros, people like Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook and others line up to support President Trump at his inauguration. How’s that played out so far in his first year back in office?

**Stephen Morris **Well, when Trump got reelected for the second time, most of the leaders of top tech companies had a lot of making up to do. You know, whether it’s Elon Musk over electric vehicles, Jeff Bezos over the coverage of Trump in the Washington Post. Google had banned Trump from YouTube and he always accused them of suppressing positive stories about him and promoting negative ones. He wanted to put Mark Zuckerberg in prison. Sam Altman has said the first election was the worst day of his life. So Trump’s kind of revenge tour of his second administration.

They all had to genuflect pretty quickly, right? They all got down to Mar-a-Lago or Washington. They all donated millions personally, or through their companies to his inauguration fund, to get back into his good books. Both from, you know, a sense of personal protection, but also I suppose seeing an opportunity.

Trump is a dealmaker. You can flatter him and you can get him to move in your direction, and there were a lot of very scary things on the horizon for them — tariffs, antitrust action. And I think I would say it’s been a mixed result for them. But if you look at the performance of the stocks, if you look at the various carve-outs they’ve managed to secure from his various policies and just the way that he speaks about the tech industry, I think you could say it’s probably been a pretty successful relationship they’ve managed to develop with him.

**Murad Ahmed **Elaine, you are the tech comment editor here in London, but you spent many years living in San Francisco and reporting about the companies. Have you been surprised at how quickly the tech bros, for want of a better term, got into bed with Trump and how tight they are staying with him?

**Elaine Moore **Not necessarily surprised. But the speed was really remarkable. So I got out to San Francisco in 2018, and this was in the kind of pretty wishy-washy, but still very liberal era of San Francisco, DEI in employment and giving money to Democrats. The thing that I’ve been kind of surprised by is that some of the backing does seem quite ideological.

I think Stephen’s right that some of it was some self-interest in there, and that has gone fantastically well for them because basically M&A is back and this is gonna be the year of mega deals. And who cares about regulators anymore? Trump is just, he’s all in on tech and particularly AI. So that’s worked out very well for them, but it’s this ideological question.

It’s Musk and whether his backing has paid off. In some ways, it has, but then in some ways it hasn’t because he lost the EV credits. Tesla sales are down. I guess he got his trillion-dollar payout, and he’s got the White House tweeting in his support. I don’t know, he felt like a more pure backer of what Trump was going for, and he hasn’t really necessarily reaped the most benefits like some of the others have.

**Murad Ahmed **Some of that is just the transactional nature of the Trump administration, right? Trump actually needs the tech companies, and particularly in AI. If there’s one area that they can point to as powering growth in the US economy, it’s this AI boom. God knows, there’s already like a, the consumer living crisis in the US, it’d be so much worse if the stock market wasn’t booming at the same time. How much does Trump need these tech guys as well? They’re the one part of the US economy that he can point to as a huge success.

**Elaine Moore **That’s true. But he is notoriously thin-skinned and some of them are quite outspoken and have a dismissive attitude towards him. But you are right. It works out well on both sides. And so that’s why you’ve also seen the political support continue. So, Hannah, I’m sure we’ll talk about this, but the recent election of a Trump supporter as president of Meta’s board is really startling. To have the president tweeting about the election of someone on to a public company board is just, it is so extraordinary and we wouldn’t have seen that in the past administration.

But yes, I think you’re right that this is a quid pro quo situation.

**Murad Ahmed **Hannah, coming to you. You cover Meta, the social media giant that owns Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and its chief executive and founder Mark Zuckerberg has shown the greatest willingness, it seems to me anyway, to get close to the Trump administration.

They’ve removed external fact-checking from Meta’s platform, and as Elaine was saying, they’ve hired senior Republicans to big positions within Meta. What, if anything, has the company got from pledging fealty to the president?

**Hannah Murphy **I mean, first off, Mark Zuckerberg is not in jail as the president has threatened. Who knows if that was a serious threat, but it was made repeatedly during Trump’s campaign.

**Murad Ahmed **Regularly invited to the White House instead. Right?

**Hannah Murphy **Exactly. Exactly. I mean, more than that. He was the person sat at Trump’s right hand at a tech dinner with all the Silicon Valley CEOs towards the end of last year.

And you saw Trump going as far as to promote Zuckerberg’s sort of big ambitions in AI, his big infrastructure spending, casting this as an example of American exceptionalism in this race to beat China to be the world leader on AI.

But I think, yeah, Zuckerberg has pulled off a blinder, you see, particularly in the areas where he’s focused which is huge infrastructure spending. You’ve seen the government accelerate giving permits for some of these costly data centres and allowing Zuckerberg and promoting Zuckerberg’s plans there. You’ve seen them be an ally insofar as pushing back against EU regulations, so the Digital Markets Act, Digital Services Act, areas like taxes.

Trump has been on side and been personally alongside JD Vance, criticising quite strongly and sharply the Europeans there. That said, it’s not quite the first buddy relationship that Elon and Trump once enjoyed. There’s some scepticism in the White House, as far as I’m aware, speaking to insiders there. Some don’t take him seriously, don’t see it as quite as genuine as the Elon push and the antitrust space as well. Trump didn’t help kill the case, although it did come to a natural end in Meta’s favour.

**Murad Ahmed **You mentioned this antitrust case, Meta and also Google had these pretty serious threats against them. These cases seem like they’re falling away under the Trump administration. Explain the cases and why they might be going away.

**Hannah Murphy **Stephen, Google was first.

**Stephen Morris **Yeah. Well, so Google faced three separate antitrust cases in the US but it also faces similar ones in the EU and the UK, which are still being resolved.

And they were attacking three of the main legs of its business. Its search and advertising, its ad tech business, kinda the online micro auctions that happen every second when you open a webpage, and also its Android Play Store, like the equivalent of the App store and iPhone. Trump has shown an extraordinary willingness to meddle in supposedly independent American institutions. The Fed being the latest one. Whilst Hannah’s right, he didn’t directly intervene in these cases and say, oh, I don’t wanna see an unfavourable judgment to Google, which could have seen the company broken up and forced to sell really important parts of its distribution and advertising empire, like selling the Chrome browser or the Android operating system, for example, opening up its play store to rivals, or selling parts of its ad exchange business.

Certainly, Trump didn’t put his foot on the accelerator and say, I think Google’s a problem. I think it should be broken up. And I think that was in no small part due to, you know, the overtures that were made by the company. The most recent one, actually, Google settled a lawsuit, a censorship lawsuit that Trump brought against YouTube for banning him in 2021 after the Capitol riots by paying $22mn in a kind of, not a fine, but a payment to the White House Ballroom Project. I think they were the largest individual donor, and that was enough to get that lawsuit off their backs. And when judges in these various antitrust cases basically came down like not in Google’s favour, they were still found guilty of being a monopolist but not pursuing the most harsh remedies, these sales. Trump kinda let that happen, you know? And obviously, he’s put people that he wants in charge of the DoJ and the FTC, which kind of oversee mergers. And we’re seeing a lot more of these go through now than we did under the Biden administration in particular. So you can, whilst Trump, I don’t think, has intervened on behalf of the tech companies, definitely set the tone.

He’s gonna allow these Big Tech monopolies in social media, in search, in advertising, in hardware to perpetuate. And he thinks that’s good for America. And so I think having Trump, at least not as an antagonist in this thing, has been very valuable to them.

**Hannah Murphy **Right. Meta’s made similar donations, settled similar case against it. I would add, however, that the meta case, which was about the acquisitions of WhatsApp and Instagram didn’t quite meet the bar to most observers. So perhaps that would have happened without Trump’s support.

**Stephen Morris **But it is interesting that Trump does try and meddle a lot. I mean, Elaine said it was extraordinary having him comment on the appointees to the board. Like you put some Trump fans, you hire some Republican people that can communicate with the organisation.

The company that’s kind of stuck out as a bit of an outlier here is Microsoft. When Trump found out that they had hired within their public affairs and legal division somebody from a regulator that he didn’t like, he started Truth Social-ing about it, trying to get the hire reversed, you know, with kind of all these kind of implicit threats to Microsoft. But Microsoft is a very big old for tech company, 50 years plus. They just kind of ignored it and it went away. But they’re really the only ones that I can see who are not like directly responding to this pressure. And they’ve seen a lot of different administrations with a lot of different priorities.

**Hannah Murphy **And now that you also have the David Sachses of this world, who are VCs, now part of the administration, you are seeing David and others tweet directly about companies they do, and in some cases do not like, from the AI side, in a way that we’ve never seen before. Right? Because we haven’t had this mind meld of Silicon Valley and DC in such a way.

**Murad Ahmed **The one thing we’re not talking about anymore is a break-up of Big Tech. I remember doing a little bit of a speech to all of you guys about how we have to be prepared for this seminal moment a few months ago. And when these judgments came down, and in that sense, there were damp squibbs, there were stories that we needed to cover, but they weren’t the big change to the tech industry.

**Hannah Murphy **I recall when Elizabeth Warren said she was gonna break up Facebook and Mark famously said, I will go to the mat and fight, but it has not . . .

**Murad Ahmed **Now he is constantly going to the mat to fight.

**Hannah Murphy **He is now, since has become part of his personality.

**Stephen Morris **Also, JD Vance is no fan of Google and said multiple times on the campaign trail and afterwards that he thinks Google is too big, too liberal, too powerful, and that he would like to see them broken up. But that hasn’t come to pass either.

**Hannah Murphy **Right? The Lina Khan era is done and dusted. It would seem, it’s now, it’s been replaced by actually, we need big infrastructure deals and somehow to partner in order to beat China on AI.

**Stephen Morris **They’ve draped themselves in the flag, and they’ve said, if you break us up, we won’t be able to compete with Huawei and all of these big . . .

**Hannah Murphy **Which was the argument a few years back but it wasn’t so pressing, given the way that the AI race has escalated.

**Stephen Morris **But I also think it’s . . . they’ve been helped by the emergence of new big tech companies, right? They can point to the emergence of OpenAI’s and Anthropic and a whole host of other ones saying that they are shaking up the tech space, social media, online search. They’re building their own data centres.

And that did play a role in particular in the Google antitrust cases. They were like, look, the landscape has changed, like Google does have new competitors. But of course, if the Big Tech companies have had their way, I’m sure they would’ve tried to buy or quash OpenAI and Anthropic before they were allowed to grow, but the atmosphere of the Biden administration meant that they didn’t even really try it.

**Murad Ahmed **Elaine, how much do you think this is a debate that it’s dormant rather than dead? What I mean, I guess is, you know, you’ve written about the online, right? There seems to be factions in the Maga movement that still want to go after Big Tech. Maybe it’s not an argument that’s winning at the moment, but could it find its way back and in a way that Trump might take up their cause and go after these tech titans again?

**Elaine Moore **I don’t think so, and I don’t think that the odds of a Big Tech company being broken up, I think that’s pretty much dead. We ran a really interesting op-ed from the person who led the FTC’s case against Meta and lost, and his point was that cases take such a long time to come to court that by the time they get there, the market has completely changed.

So then a company can make the arguments, which Google Meta did that the landscape they’re operating in, the competition they’re facing is completely different to the one they were facing when they bought the companies that the case is being made against. And in this case, it’s AI and the AI has changed the world, and so therefore they can’t be judged in the same way that they would’ve been 10 years ago. And it worked.

So I think that the idea of using regulators to try and change the tech sector in this way is not gonna work. His point was that you need to come down on the deals when they happen. You need to stop them from happening. That is not happening right now, and I have not seen anything from the far right side of Maga or anyone online being particularly interest in Google buying Wiz.

There’s not been a huge sort of excitement about trying to stop that happening. That’s the moment in time where you would stop Big Tech from getting bigger, and there no interest.

**Murad Ahmed **If there was a big mega merger that emanated in the coming years.

**Elaine Moore **Or even just if there was sort of some pushback against the Meta-Manus deal.

**Murad Ahmed **Right. This Asian AI company that has . . .

**Elaine Moore **Exactly. Singaporean, I believe they say now.

**Murad Ahmed **Based in Singapore.

**Hannah Murphy **Founded in China, moved to Singapore.

**Elaine Moore **Made a very judicious decision about where they’re based . . .

**Hannah Murphy **Well that’s right. That would’ve never, I’m not sure that would’ve flown a few years ago.

**Elaine Moore **But I don’t think there’s anybody in Trump’s camp or even on the far, far right who are paying that much attention to these deals.

**Murad Ahmed **All right, so it looks like Big Tech’s here to stay and we’ll have to watch out for whether or not they get more aggressive in their M&A and whether or not the Trump administration will bite back.

So we’ll take a break here, but when we come back, we’ll talk more about Meta and Mark Zuckerberg’s fascinating corporate rebrand.

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Let’s go to Meta and Mark Zuckerberg then. Hannah, the big change in Meta last year was this really big push into AI. They offered superstar researchers enormous sums to join the company. They reshaped its AI team, but it’s been quite a rocky ride since then. What should we watch out for in Meta’s AI ambitions this year?

**Hannah Murphy **I would say that probably the year before last was when Mark Zuckerberg, in the wake of ChatGPT, started amping up his rhetoric and declaring that he wanted to be an AI leader. The start of last year, this was a top goal, but within months, Llama 4, their latest AI LLM model, fell behind, lagged rivals, was a bit of a laughing stock, and since then he’s been under huge pressure to catch up and you’ve got this two-pronged attack.

One is throwing money at . . . like real money at the infrastructure side, saying we have this balance sheet, we’re safe from a cash position, and therefore Meta announced this initiative called Meta Compute. Again, saying that over decades it would be building hundreds of gigawatts of AI infrastructure, which is unfathomable, would cost billions upon billions of dollars. And hiring Dina Powell McCormick, who Elaine mentioned earlier, as president, this Trump ally and financier, because for the first time, you’ve started to see Meta doing interesting and more complex financial manoeuvrings. An insider recently said to me, it used to be that the CFO role at Meta was the most vanilla role in the valley, just corporate earnings steady uptick in the ad revenue.

And now for the first time, it’s the opposite of vanilla. A very spicy, interesting role. At the same time, you’re seeing investors become a little skittish because of some of that big Capex spending and also because not quite clear on what the exact vision is at this point. And I think that’s in part because these companies are being very secretive and don’t want to reveal their hand too far.

But at the same time, it’s also because I think you’re seeing Mark throw spaghetti at the wall and see where it sticks. The other side of this approach has been, as you mentioned, that the talent piece for the first time, you’ve seen Mark open up his top management ranks, which were typically his besties who were there in the early days, who he knows well, and who he trusts to outsiders, to these AI researchers who are . . . they’re divas. They’ve got their own egos, their own fiefdoms and worlds, and he’s had to relax some of that tightness of his inner circle, letting new folks like Alex Wang, this 28-year-old billionaire founder of Scale AI, a data labelling group. The issue there is, you know, are there emerging tensions between himself and those newbies, and also between them and the old guard?

Do you want to be a researcher at a lab that is not on the frontier? That’s still playing catch-up. I mean, these guys don’t want to do that so that talent could go elsewhere if they aren’t seeming to be making progress and are moving ahead.

**Murad Ahmed **This big focus on AI has meant that there’s been consequently less focus on the Metaverse. This is a company that started as Facebook. They have this big corporate rebrand to Meta. We don’t really hear about the Metaverse. One way we do hear about it is through Meta’s VR, augmented reality glasses. Elaine, you own a pair of these. And you are willing to make willing to . . .

**Elaine Moore **Willing to back them?

**Murad Ahmed **Yeah. You’re willing to back your fashion choices. Explain.

**Hannah Murphy **Wait. The AI glasses or the VR, what are we talking about here?

**Elaine Moore **Well, I have AI, so I was just gonna say that actually the smart glasses have done amazingly well for Meta, unexpectedly well. And look great, I think. They are not really part of the Metaverse.

**Murad Ahmed **I haven’t seen you wear them yet, so I can’t comment. I’m sure you’ll look great.

**Elaine Moore **They look just like a thick pair of Ray-Bans. You will have noticed them on Mark Zuckerberg himself. Mark Zuckerberg’s own glow-up has included a pair of these glasses and they look cool.

They look good minus sunglasses, so I don’t wear them inside the office; that’s why I haven’t seen them. But the AI ones, I can access the AI chatbot. I can talk to it, and I can take videos and I can take pictures. But Meta now has a version with a screen. I don’t have those yet. They’re not available in the UK yet.

But these are not like the huge clunky VR headsets that Apple was selling, that Microsoft tried to sell, that were meant to be the future of our life, work, socialising. These are something lighter, different. They have less capabilities in some ways, but they’re much more practical. So, even here, is where Meta has just moved away from the Metaverse. Metaverse is over.

**Hannah Murphy **I’m not sure about them Elaine, I’m sorry. I wore them on Halloween . . .

**Elaine Moore **Hannah, such a hater.

**Hannah Murphy ** . . . to test them or what’s it like on a night out, and people are freaked out all around you if you mention what they are. If you take a video, if it’s, if there’s anything apart from perfect lighting, it’s just you can’t see a thing.

**Elaine Moore **But I think there’s an age, there’s an age cut-off in terms of how freaked out people are. So people who can remember the Google Glassholes.

**Hannah Murphy **You’re saying my friends are too old.

**Elaine Moore **I’m saying they’re all too old. No, but I’m also saying that they’re more aware of how they look, maybe. Whereas what I found is that anyone, maybe there’s a sort of 30 cut-off point. Under the age of 30, they’re so used to, they track one another on maps. They’re following each other constantly they can record. They’ve been recorded nearly all their lives, so they have, they just seem much less interested in the fact that these things can record them. There’s not the same kind of jokes about being a creep that I might get from older people.

**Murad Ahmed **Elaine saying that she had a cooler social circle than all of us that’s why we don’t understand why it’s so important. We’re gonna move on to a different tech titan, Elon Musk. Stephen, you laid out earlier, this up and down relationship that he had last year with Donald Trump in particular, 2026 has already been tumultuous for Elon Musk. His AI chatbot Grok was found to be producing sexualised images without consent of women and even children. The company appears to have backed down considerably to shut off the ability to do that. It seems to me that this kind of free speech absolutism that Musk has been promoting might be a bit on the wane when it hits reality like this. And I don’t know whether the panel thinks that Elon’s gonna be in for a rocky regulatory ride in particular this year?

**Stephen Morris **Yeah. Well, there are already investigations. You know, after all the war of words with the UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer. Musk appears to have backed down the X, or at least the generation on X wasn’t shut down completely in the UK and EU.

California has also launched an investigation to this. And these are serious things that it’s doing. There are laws against this type of thing, particularly whether it’s child sex materials. And it’s important to remember that Musk’s free speech absolutism doesn’t extend to X in Saudi Arabia or other parts of the Middle East, where he’s constantly going around raising billions for his AI projects.

It’s very much a selective free speech absolutism in certain countries and for certain points of view that he appears to support, I think if you look at the trajectory of Musk companies, I mean, we spoke about Tesla earlier, them losing various EV incentive programs, charging stations, the share price is up, right?

He’s more wealthy than ever due to his holding in stock. He won Delaware back down and gave him his initial 56bn pay package. Shareholders voted to give him potentially another trillion over the next 10 years if he hits various milestones. SpaceX is worth 800bn and barrelling towards potentially one of the biggest IPOs of all time.

And despite the divisiveness of Musk as a person and allegations of it being a toxic work environment, xAI doesn’t seem to be struggling to recruit top people or build massive data centres in Tennessee; just by sheer blunt force and money are putting him into the AI conversation, whereas the models and the usage are actually lagging.

I kind of feel like whatever regulatory attention or political attention the EU or California is bringing to Elon Musk, nothing really seems to be able to stop him. He is building this conglomerate of companies that seem to give him some of the monopolies, like SpaceX, for example, that are just giving him more and more wealth and power.

The only person who seemed minded to stop him was Trump, but we’ve seen them dining together again at Mar-a-Lago. Musk seems to have been forgiven for his extraordinary outburst over tariffs, which culminated in him saying the only reason the Epstein files aren’t being released is because Trump is in all of them.

The two men as sort of sometime allies, again, is a very interesting direction for it to go. I like to play a game of like, what would Musk have to do or say to lose the backing of his institutional investors in SpaceX or Tesla? What would he have to do to be permanently shut out from like Trump’s inner circle?

He seems to be consistently testing the bounds of what he can say or do in particular with his various theories about immigration and politics. It’s an extraordinary environment and very different too, I think, even three or four years ago.

**Hannah Murphy **It feels like he’s trying to thread the needle with making the most racy AI possible, embracing a kind of sex sells ethos with not crossing that line where it comes to child sexual exploitation material, which at the beginning of taking over Twitter, he promised he would get rid of.

Child safety is a sort of talking point for the right as well as the left but for the circles, he moves in. And it is straight up illegal in that xAI could be taken down from the Google or Apple App Store. So there’s a little bit of consciousness of that with his deciding, albeit fairly belatedly, a week later, a couple of weeks after there’s been a bit of a crisis around this to block the undressing of women and claim that he hasn’t seen not a single image of a child in that way.

**Murad Ahmed **And we should also say that Elon Musk has specifically said that anyone who uses Grok to create these images, that material is illegal, is criminal behaviour and it’s not something he, in any way, sanctions as well.

**Stephen Morris **But Hannah’s right saying he’s trying to tread to line, obviously they’re seeing the engagement data, they’re seeing why people sign up, why people spend time. And Musk has obviously decided that sex and porn and companionship are gonna be a huge use case of AI.

And we’ve seen some of the others, OpenAI are trying to introduce more companionship into their ChatGPT products, like this is, at least on the consumer side, one of the stickiest ways, sorry, probably a bad use of phrase there. So he does have a tight rope to walk in this, but they’re really leaning heavily into it.

**Hannah Murphy **A former insider told me, you know, the goal is not necessarily to get more engagement on X, but to get downloads of Grok up. It’s really about getting that chatbot app in the mainstream and competing then on a level with OpenAI’s ChatGPT

**Stephen Morris **And Gemini. Yeah. Elaine, I’d be curious to hear what you think about this because I’ve only been here like 19, 20 months and I was kind of aware that all of these, the bros, because they are largely men of Silicon Valley, were all super competitive. But I didn’t quite realise that like how personal. This was like, you know, Goldman and JPMorgan are competitive over deals, but it’s not like they’re not their companies, not the, they’re not the founders.

And I think a big part of what they’re all trying to do is that like Elon Musk wants to beat Sam Altman. It is a very personal thing. They want to do the biggest IPO, they want to have the most users, they almost want to have the bragging rights like has it always been like this, Elaine? Or is this like a new thing?

**Elaine Moore **I think it has. No, I think it has, and I think banking is a really good comparison because it, by comparison, it’s almost bloodless. The difference with tech is that they were all friends or they are friends, or they started companies together, or they knew each other, and then one of them had the idea for Twitter and went off and created it, and then someone else backed it and put the money in.

So the friendships that have developed over the past 20 years are the reason that now the rivalries are so bitter because they know each other so well, and the community is very small. So the hatreds run very deep. Obviously, Sam Altman and Elon Musk created OpenAI together.

**Murad Ahmed **Elaine, we’ve had a relatively narrow conversation about the men of Silicon Valley. I mean, in fact, there are just a few figures in the US, but we haven’t at all talked about the other big superpower in tech, China. You’ve commissioned a few interesting pieces that explain what’s happening in the scene there. What do we think about Chinese tech, Chinese AI in particular, and the ways that the Trump administration is acting as a proxy to Silicon Valley to try and keep China’s technological rise down?

**Elaine Moore **This is definitely another way in which the leaders of the tech sector have done so well in making their relationship with Trump so much better because they have Trump out there batting for them and making sure that the US-China rivalry stays the front of his mind and is seen as a sort of national emergency in the US for AI to beat Chinese AI.

The pieces that we’ve commissioned, we had the ex-president of Google China, and he made this very good point, which is that within China, of course, it’s open source, so the models are cheaper. The focus is on how you can make AI work right now. And there’s also, in his view, a much more enthusiastic take-up among the general population.

So there is an AI sort of button on a lot of things. You’re just using AI nonstop, working out every few months how you can improve something. And his view is that’s very different to the US side, where you have Neo Labs, the money is all being poured into cutting-edge models, or at least that’s the story from the companies, and that the focus is still what I’m guessing is still on super intelligence, Hannah and Stephen will have to tell us, but the idea is that the money is going towards this God-like AI. In China, no, that’s not where the focus is, they focus on how you use it as a productivity tool right now. And if I were the tech companies in the US who are trying to work out how to make AI pay for itself. I’d be watching what China was doing very carefully.

**Murad Ahmed **Can I present the ultra cynical view from someone who neither in San Francisco or Beijing. Like, yes, the US tech company, OpenAI and Anthropic and others talk about the need to get to super intelligence, but it’s almost like a pitch that you have to make to very talented and in-demand people to show that you’re moving forward.

And in reality, particularly the way that OpenAI has been behaving over the last 12 months, is all about trying to eke out ways to achieve realistic revenues very soon, get money in for something that companies will buy, that people will buy, people will use. So maybe they’re just as focused on the same things as the Chinese. And that helps explain why there’s so much pressure on a company like Nvidia to not do business in China. Export controls being put in place to stop these, like at this stage, relatively incremental technological advances in China as well. That’s my take.

**Elaine Moore **Maybe. I mean, well, what’s it all for in that case? Well, maybe Stephen and Hannah can tell us.

**Stephen Morris **Money, power, influence. You look at Google, like DeepMind was focused on winning Nobel Prizes, folding proteins, discovering new drugs. What have they been talking about for the last six months? Nano Banana. Look at this silly little six-second thing of a dog in a car with a surfboard, like, making a funny joke.

I mean, it’s an extraordinary turnaround from Demis Hassabis, from like Nobel Prize winner to like Schiller of like AI slop. But you know, that’s where the money is.

**Murad Ahmed **Hold on, hold on. I’ve presented the cynical view. Now I have to play devil’s advocate.

**Stephen Morris **OK. You can do both things at the same time, but I can’t believe Demis gets out of bed every morning and thinks I want to create a slightly better video generation model so we can create more advanced memes. That’s how you pay for it.

The search business is going to be disrupted. So you are seeing, very much seeing commercial realities bite at all of these labs. The only one that seems to like be not pursuing this and is like doggedly pursuing a better model, a better model, a better model of ignoring like the social aspects and just trying to sell it to companies is Anthropic, which is why they’ve had so much success with their latest products like Claude Code and things like that.

But you know, they’re a very peculiar company run by some, slightly wacky, out-there people. All of the bigger companies are trying to put AI into their products, and they’re trying to make money from it to justify the absolutely enormous, mind-bending, almost incomprehensible sums that they are spending to create data centres.

I mean, it feels like we’re only one bad earnings report of Microsoft Cloud or AWS from like a total market collapse. Like it feels like there’s a very fragile confidence around AI at the moment and any kind of softening in demand or you know, on behalf of the hyperscalers, could flick back. So they need to show revenue to compensate for their historic levels of spending.

**Murad Ahmed **Well, Stephen, you are neatly moving me on to the final question that I have for all of you, which is: what are your predictions for this year? What do you think is gonna happen to these tech titans and this battle for power and influence? Stephen, why don’t you go first?

**Stephen Morris **I’ve just been off on paternity leave for two months, and one of the interesting things that happened when I was off was that Google, which was perceived to have bungled the AI opportunity and fallen behind all of its rivals and allowed OpenAI to take the technology they incubated and make the first big hit consumer and enterprise product.

Google is now the second most valuable company in the world at 4.1tn. The share price, at least, is growing at a faster rate than Nvidia. And part of that is what we spoke about before than really upping their game on the technical side, building the best models, but also putting it into all of their products. I mean, they have incredibly good maps of our lives. They know where we go on Google Maps. They know what we buy, they know what we search for. They know what we send in emails. They know what we store in our Google Drive, you know, and that’s just for a start.

So they have this vast reservoir of consumer and user data that, if we choose to allow Gemini access to, can create this AI universal assistant that will actually be useful. And Google can obviously sell even more hyper-targeted ads off the back of that.

My sort of prediction is I would not be surprised over the next 12 months if Google continues on this pace and its rivals continue to stumble, I wouldn’t be surprised to see it be the most valuable company of the world and leapfrog Nvidia in particular, because everyone else is trying to make their chips now. Nvidia’s not gonna have a complete monopoly over the AI chip market. I don’t think Nvidia’s gonna stop growing, at least not in the short term.

**Murad Ahmed **No, no, no. Let’s have the bold prediction that we can hold you to in a year’s time.

**Stephen Morris **The sheer colossal amount of money that they have to throw at this. The gains that they’ve made versus their upstart rivals Anthropic and OpenAI leads me to believe that they are going to be, as many people said, even through the troubled times, the big winner in AI and potentially the biggest company in the world.

**Murad Ahmed **OK, Hannah.

**Hannah Murphy **I suppose for Meta, it falls on the success of the next model and also how Mark Zuckerberg articulates his vision for AI and communicates that, which I think he’s totally failed to do so far.

No one quite understands what personal superintelligence is. What is Meta Compute? What is he up to? So how he communicates that will have a knock-on effect on how he’s received by investors because there’s some teetering going on. At the same time, one thing we haven’t spoken about, but you’ve seen Instagram reels become so successful, and Instagram is now basically TikTok. So short-form video, it’s becoming increasingly able to monetise that. And so despite on the one hand all this vagueness and uncertainty around the AI side, there’s still a very strong and still evolving business there that I see as this TikTokification happens. So the trade-off of the twos will determine the year for Meta, I believe.

**Murad Ahmed **How depressing. Elaine?

**Elaine Moore **I’ll give a kind of a sweep, which is I think that data centre Nimbyism is going to absolutely kick off in US politics this year and maybe in the UK politics as well as people actually start to see what this looks like to have a data centre in your back garden or near your back garden.

I think that we’re gonna have the first big legal case against AI-generated work in a professional setting, and I think that’ll be fascinating to see who is culpable for that.

**Stephen Morris **What will the case be against, like misuse or like bias against peopl in insurance or something like that?

**Elaine Moore **Errors. I think it’ll be AI-generated work that has errors within it. And I think that you’ll then see customers blaming the company that produced the work and the company that produced the work, trying to blame the AI provider of the service that they’re paying for. I don’t think we’ve seen it yet, and there’s all sorts of interesting stories about insurance companies trying to divert away from it and just not covering AI-generated work.

It’s being used so much. And it’s wrong so frequently, how can it not turn into a case?

**Murad Ahmed **All right, I think there are a bunch of bold predictions in the midst of that. Elaine, Hannah and Stephen. Thank you very much.

**Stephen Morris **Thank you.

**Elaine Moore **Thank you.

**Hannah Murphy **Thank you.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

**Murad Ahmed **That’s it for this mini series about the tech trends to watch out for this year. You remember at the top of the episode, Hannah and Stephen talked about Elon Musk’s latest AI companion. Well, in a few weeks’ time, look out for the next series of Tech Tonic when Cristina Criddle, another of our San Francisco tech correspondents, speaks to the people whose lives have been transformed by an emotional connection with an AI chatbot for better and for worse, The first episode, all about love, drops on Wednesday, February the 11th, just in time for Valentine’s Day.

This episode of Tech Tonic is presented by me, Murad Ahmed. Our producer was Josh Gabert-Doyon. The executive producer is Flo Phillips. Mixing and engineering by Sam Giovinco and Breen Turner. Music by Metaphor Music. Cheryl Brumley is the FT’s global head of audio.