Berkshire Hathaway Chairman Warren Buffett attends the Berkshire Hathaway Inc annual shareholders' meeting in Omaha, Nebraska.
Scott Morgan/Reuters
Warren Buffett made several jokes about his age during Saturday's annual shareholder meeting.
Buffett will be turning 94 this year and has already made plans for a successor.
"I shouldn't be taking on any four-year employment contracts," Buffett joked, per CNBC.
Warren Buffett is very aware that he won't be at the helm of Berkshire Hathaway forever.
The 93-year-old Berkshire Hathaway Chairman took the stage on Saturday at the company's annual shareholder meeting to reflect on how the company should operate when he no longer calls the shots.
Buffett, who took over the investment company in 1965, has long expressed the desire to keep making decisions at Berkshire Hathaway for as long as he can — he said during the meeting that "anybody that wants to retire at 65 would be disqualified from being CEO of Berkshire."
But the multi-billionaire acknowledged, humorously at times, that he does have his limits.
Buffett expressed thoughts about how the company will move forward without him — though the nonagenarian said he felt "fine" at his age.
"I know a little bit about actuarial tables and I would say this: I shouldn't be taking on any four-year employment contracts like several people are doing in this world," Buffett said, per CNBC.
Buffett said that Greg Abel, his hand-picked successor and former CEO of Berkshire Hathaway Energy, would take control of investing decisions when he passed.
"I would leave the capital allocation to Greg and he understands businesses extremely well," Buffett said during the meeting's Q&A portion, per CNBC. "If you understand businesses, you'll understand common stocks."
Beyond his own mortality, Buffett also reflected on the death of his longtime business partner and friend, Charlie Munger, who died in November of last year. During Saturday's presentation, the chairman accidentally referred to Abel, his new right-hand man, as Munger.
Abel took it in stride, calling it a "great honor" to be mistaken for Munger.
San Francisco's MUNI light rail in the city's Sunset District neighborhood.
Lloyd Lee/BI
Tesla tested its Full Self-Driving in San Francisco's Sunset District, The Information reported.
An ex-Tesla employee told the outlet that the car often hesitated to make a left turn in the area.
These are some of the roads in the neighborhood Tesla could have had to deal with.
Tesla's driver-assistance feature had a difficult time dealing with left turns in a large San Francisco neighborhood, prompting the company to deploy dozens of test drivers to try to fix the issue earlier this year, a former Tesla employee told The Information.
One of Elon Musk's major promises — autonomous taxis — hinges on Tesla's ability to improve its Full Self-Driving (FSD) technology, a driver-assistance feature that can change lanes, enter and exit highway ramps, recognize traffic lights and signs, and self-park under driver supervision.
FSD differs from the company's Autopilot feature, which is essentially an advanced cruise control mode that can also auto-steer within clearly marked lanes, according to Tesla's website.
The EV maker has encountered various technical and legal issues with the FSD system as it races to meet Musk's ever-shifting deadlines — the CEO announced on X last monththat he plans to unveil Tesla's robotaxi in August.
A former employee told The Information that one such technical problem Tesla recently encountered was driving its vehicles in San Francisco's Sunset District, a neighborhood bordered by Golden Gate Park to the north and the Pacific Ocean to the west.
As The Information noted in its report, some of Sunset's roads have dedicated lanes for public transportation — although that's not unique to the neighborhood.
Here's the city's Municipal Railway (MUNI) light rail bisecting Judah Street in the Sunset:
San Francisco Municipal Railway's light rail approaches a stop in the Sunset District.
Lloyd Lee/BI
This fixture of Sunset's streets also comes with turn restrictions. Drivers are forbidden in some intersections from making left turns, U-turns, and rights on red.
One major road that borders the north of Sunset, Lincoln Way, is divided by barriers or narrow medians. Drivers have intermittent opportunities on the road to make left turns — some protected and others unprotected — while other parts of Lincoln Way restrict drivers from making any left turns at all.
It's unclearif other aspects of Sunset's grid trip up Tesla's FSD more than other San Francisco neighborhoods. A Tesla spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
A Tesla makes an unprotected left turn on Lincoln Way, a major road in San Francisco's Sunset District.
Lloyd Lee/BI
Tesla's team, however, found that drivers in the Sunset often had to intervene with the vehicle's FSD by taking control of the wheel, a former Tesla employee told The Information.
To address the problem, Tesla deployed dozens of test drivers and had engineers focus on providing software updates that could improve the FSD experience in the neighborhood, the source said.
The report didn't state whether those efforts vastly improved the feature in the area.
Tesla still dominates in San Francisco
San Francisco as a whole — with its dense population, restricted and one-way streets, as well as a vast artery of public transportation — can be a tricky city for novice drivers to navigate.
Another street that was once notoriously difficult for Tesla's FSD to work in was Lombard Street, a steep and windy road northwest of San Francisco. In 2021, one YouTuber, Tesla Raj, recorded himself constantly intervening with the system as the car veered toward the road's edges. The video also showed that the FSD system would, at one point, hallucinate objects around the street, quickly blinking images of a car or human figure on the screen.
San Francisco's famously winding Lombard Street
Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
John Bernal, a former Tesla employee who worked with the Autopilot team, told The Washington Post in 2023 that Tesla engineers coded invisible barriers into FSD specifically for Lombard Street instead of making broader changes to the software.
Still, the city is teeming with Teslas. Data from S&P Global Mobility showed that the brand made up nearly one-fourth of all new-car registrations in the city in March 2023.
A Business Insider reporter was immediately able to flag down a Tesla driver who was stopped at an intersection in the Sunset.
The driver said she enjoyed her first Tesla Model X so much that she purchased the second Tesla she was driving four months ago. When asked about using the FSD feature in the Sunset, she told BI that she had "no problems" with it.
"I like it," the driver told BI.
A Tesla parked in San Francisco's Sunset District, where company employees rigorously tested the car's Full Self-Driving technology, according to a report.
The CEO once said in 2022 that achieving self-driving technology is "really the difference between Tesla being worth a lot of money or worth basically zero."
Yet, seven years after FSD's release in late 2016, Tesla has yet to receive any regulatory approval to test autonomous cabs on public roads, and the term Full Self-Driving remains a bit of a misnomer since it requires an operator's supervision at all times.
The California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) accused the company in 2022 of false advertisement by using the term and claiming that the technology is autonomous in ads despite FSD's limitations. Tesla argued in defense that the DMV is violating its free speech rights and that the complaint has no legal standing because regulators took too long to make the allegations, The Los Angeles Times reported.
Tesla also still faces several lawsuits that blame the company's Autopilot, a less-advanced driver assistance technology, for fatal collisions.
In April, the company settled a lawsuit from the family of Walter Huang, who died in 2018 after his Tesla crashed into a concrete barrier while the vehicle was in Autopilot.
"What you really want," the OpenAI CEO told the MIT Technology Review, is a "super-competent colleague that knows absolutely everything about my whole life, every email, every conversation I've ever had, but doesn't feel like an extension."
And they're self-starters that don't need constant direction. They'll tackle some tasks, presumably simpler ones, instantly, Altman said. They'll make a first pass at more complex tasks, and come back to the user if they have questions.
The bottom line is that Altman wants AI to function as more than just a chatbot. It should help people accomplish things in the real world, he said.
That would be a massive step up from what OpenAI offers right now.
Altman reportedly referred to ChatGPT as "incredibly dumb" even though workers are already using it to accelerate their workflows, develop code, write emails, and more. So, there's no telling how much more productive we'll get once Altman's magical model colleague hits the market.
Altman didn't specify when this tool will be available and how advanced AI must be to support it. The company's other offerings, like the video generator, Sora, and image generator, DALL-E, still require considerable guidance to complete tasks. They also aren't designed to perceive information from the environment and use it to achieve specific goals.
But OpenAI's forthcoming language model, GPT-5, might be a step in that direction.
A source who's seen it previously told BI it was "materially better" than existing models. The source also said that OpenAI is developing a service where users could call an AI agent to perform tasks autonomously.
Sources have said GPT-5 might be out mid-year. Altman, however, isn't saying much.
"Yes," he simply told reporters this week at an event in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he was asked when OpenAI would release GPT-5.
Shane Guffogg said AI helped him "unlock the musicality" in his paintings.
Soni Mei Images
Shane Guffogg is a multi-media abstract artist with synesthesia, meaning he "hears color."
Guffogg worked with AI experts and musicians to compose music that corresponds to his paintings.
He believes AI is still a tool that "needs oversight" but it's enhanced his creative process.
This is an as-told-to conversation with Shane Guffogg, an American artist who launched "At the Still Point of the Turning World – Strangers of Time," an exhibition of 21 paintings at the Venice Biennale earlier this month. This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
So, what I'm listening to when I paint is important. I listen to Indian classical music, Gregorian chants, and some obscure composers such as György Ligeti, Leo Ornstein, and Terry Riley. The music sparks my creativity and allows me to be completely present and in that moment.
For years, I've been preoccupied with what my paintings might sound like. The AI revolution pushed me to search for experts who could help me. My first point of contact was Radhika Dirks, an AI and quantum computing expert. We had a couple of Zoom sessions, and she told me — to the best of her knowledge — that no AI program could help me. Instead, she suggested I create a visual alphabet that matched the musical chords I heard in my mind to colors.
I thought it could be a way to propel my creativity. It also built upon the idea of an unconscious alphabet that has informed my art throughout my career.
I met with musicians and AI experts to create a visual alphabet
I started by looking for musicians to collaborate with and met Anthony Cardella, a young, incredibly gifted pianist in Los Angeles. He's a Ph.D. student at USC and happened to know — and even play — many obscure composers I listen to when I paint.
We started collaborating. We would sit down and examine my paintings together. I would zoom in on a color in Photoshop, look at it, and sensorially feel the musical note. Then I would tell Anthony. I'd say, for example, I think that's the color of the note B. He'd hit the B, and I'd say, "No, that's not it; try a B sharp?" After a few trials, he'd suddenly hit the right notes. I would know because the colors would begin to vibrate for me. Together, we've charted chords that correspond to 40 colors.
Soon after, I met an AI researcher named Jonah Lynch through mutual contacts. He works at the intersection of the digital humanities and machine learning. I invited him over to my ranch in central California and explained the work I had been doing and how I created my paintings. We had long discussions about art, poetry, and creating an AI algorithm that could be fed the chords.
He developed a program to "read'' my paintings and convert them into music. I gave him the main colors I used in each painting and the chords I hear when I see those colors. Jonah watched videos of me painting, studied the movement of my hands, and wrote software that sampled images of the paintings, following my hand movements, and assigned each color sampled from the paintings to its corresponding chord. Then, he fed this sequence of chords into a neural network that has memorized most of the last 500 years of keyboard music. He prompted the network to "dream" of new sequences based on the color-chord sequences and the history of Western music to create pages of sheet music.
When I heard that music played back to me, it brought tears to my eyes. It was just a rough version of what I heard while painting, but I thought, "There it is."
I took the music back to Anthony, the pianist. Amazingly, I could point to the sheet music and tell him what compositions I was listening to while painting, and he'd say, "Yes, I can see it in the chords." The Indian ragas, the Gregorian chants, the Ligeti, and Ornstein — they were all there.
Still, the music was largely a series of chords at that stage. Anthony said we could have melodies if we rearranged it a bit.
AI is still a tool that needs human oversight.
Guffogg's piece, Only Through Time Time is Conquered, was the basis for the sonata Cardella played for guests at the Venice Biennale.
Shane Guffogg
We composed music for several paintings and have played it for audiences worldwide. We held a concert last month at the Forest Lawn Museum in Los Angeles, where I also had a few paintings in a show. The audience could look at the paintings while Anthony played, which was a profound experience. A couple of people cried.
At the launch of my latest exhibition during the opening week of the Venice Biennale, Anthony played the world premiere of a sonata he composed inspired by my painting, Only Through Time Time is Conquered, to a live audience. After the performance, I talked to several people, and they said they could see where the colors and the notes met on the painting. It was something they had never experienced.
I know many people are very afraid of AI, and I, too, see it as a tool that needs human oversight. It's not a means to an end. Still, it opened up many possibilities and enhanced my creative process. I don't know if I could have unlocked the musicality in my paintings in a real way without it.
Nick Fuentes, a far-right commentator, is set to return to X.
Elon Musk bought X in 2022, promoting free speech absolutism.
Musk has faced backlash and advertisers withdrawing from the platform since taking over.
Nick Fuentes, a controversial far-right political commentator and live streamer, is set to return to X.
Elon Musk, the platform's CEO since 2022, wrote, "it is better to have anti whatever out in the open to be rebutted than grow simmering in the darkness."
Very well, he will be reinstated, provided he does not violate the law, and let him be crushed by the comments and Community Notes.
It is better to have anti whatever out in the open to be rebutted than grow simmering in the darkness.
Fuentes's extremist past includes attending a 2017 white nationalist rally in Virginia, criticizing interracial marriage, and defending Jim Crow-era segregation.
The Anti-Defamation League describes Fuentes as a white supremacist, anti-semite, and 2020 election-denier "who seeks to forge a white nationalist alternative to the mainstream GOP."
Fuentes has denied the Holocaust and said "perfidious Jews" should be executed, the Times of Israel reports.
He has also praised Hitler, calling him "cool."
When Elon Musk bought X for $44 billion in October 2022, he set out to defend free speech absolutism on the platform.
Contentious figures including Donald Trump, Kanye West, Jordan Peterson, and Andrew Tate have had their accounts restored.
When Musk first took over the platform, the use of the N-word jumped by almost 500% as trolls tested the limits on free speech.
Nick Fuentes' flirting with hate-speech has meant he has had a rocky relationship with X and Twitter before it. He was first banned from Twitter in December 2021 for flouting moderation rules and was re-banned in October 2022 after creating a new account under Musk's leadership.
At the time, Musk said he didn't want the social media platform to become a "free-for-all hellscape."
Fuentes made a very brief comeback in January of 2023 when he was resuspended only after one day back on the platform, Reuters reports.
His final post before his reappearance this week was made on January 25, 2023, when he posted an antisemitic chart indicating which media figures have Jewish heritage. "Who controls your mind?" the image is titled.
Democrats are pressuring Warren Buffett to reopen his wallet for political donations.
The billionaire's influence could swing results in Omaha, clearing a victory path for Biden.
Meanwhile, conservatives are backing efforts to push Nebraska to a winner-take-all system.
The pressure is on for Warren Buffett to reengage in political donations — something he's avoided for the last five years.
Democrats are counting on the billionaire's political generosity to clinch key races in the 2024 election, Bloomberg reported.
"Anytime that the Buffetts get engaged, it signals to other donors that it's more important to give," Jane Kleep, the State Democratic Party chair, told Bloomberg.
In a scenario typical of American elections these days, the presidency could come down to Omaha's single electoral vote. Nebraska has five electoral votes in total up for grabs, but the state is just one of two that awards votes to the winners of each congressional district rather than a winner-takes-all system.
In what is expected to be a closely contested election, it will come down to several battleground states to determine whether President Joe Biden or Donald Trump triumphs. If Biden secures Omaha's vote and wins Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin (a trio he swept in the 2020 election), he will keep the White House.
Many are confident that Buffett's hometown, which some call "Joemaha," will go for the incumbent, who won the corresponding congressional district in 2020. But Trump won the district in 2016, leaving others anxious about Biden's chances, according to Bloomberg.
It could all depend on how much money Democrats have to spend in the district.
"I do hope they get more involved in this cycle in a visible way, because Buffett brings all the good luck," Kleep told Bloomberg.
"I am steadfast in my commitment to get winner-take-all over the finish line, thereby honoring our constitutional founding, unifying our state, and ending the three-decade-old mistake of allocating Nebraska's electoral votes differently than all but one other state," Republican Gov. Jim Pillen tweeted in April, committing to sign the bill if it makes it to his desk via a special legislative session.
Pro Israeli activists prepare to confront people at a pro-Palestinian encampment protesting the war in Gaza on the campus of the University of Chicago on May 03, 2024.
Scott Olson/Getty Images
Rep. Mike Collins appeared to praise University of Mississippi students for racist chants.
A video on X showed students engaging in racial taunts towards a Black war protester.
This isn't the first instance of controversial comments from Collins on social media.
Republican Rep. Mike Collins appeared to praise a large group of University of Mississippi students who taut a Black student protesting the Israel-Hamas war.
"Ole Miss taking care of business," the congressman from Georgia posted on X on Friday, with a link to a video showing the racist chants.
In the video, the predominantly white male counter-protesters can be seen shouting at a Black woman standing opposite.
The footage shows the woman filming as dozens of protesters scream, "Lizzo" and "fuck you fat ass" at her.
The camera pans to show a man jumping up and down making monkey noises at her. Security guards attempt to insert themselves between the two sides, ordering her to return to her side of the demonstration.
University of Mississippi Chancellor Glenn Boyce said in a statement Friday seen by the Associated Press that the school had launched a "student conduct investigation" and that university leaders were "working to determine whether more cases are warranted."
"To be clear, people who say horrible things to people because of who they are will not find shelter or comfort on this campus," he said.
The protest was part of a larger wave of demonstrations across US college campuses in response to the Israel-Hamas war.
Business Insider has not yet received a reply from Collins' office to clarify what was meant by his post on X. The request was sent outside regular working hours.
In March, Collins was accused of antisemitism for remark about Jewish writer in response to a racist, antisemitic account on X, which appeared to suggest that a Washington Post reporter was Jewish.
Collins suggested in a follow-up post that because the account was called @GarbageHuman23, he simply agreed that the reporter was a "garbage human" because she'd written in a recent story that the US had been built on stolen land.
"I guess pointing out that a Washington Post journo excusing crime because she believes USA is on 'stolen land' makes her a garbage human is anti-Semitic? Y'all just see stuff that ain't there," Collins wrote.
Warren Buffett issued a grave warning about artificial intelligence.
The Berkshire Hathaway CEO predicted it would supercharge fraud by making scams far more convincing.
The investor likened AI to the atom bomb, saying the world has let the "genie out of the bottle."
Warren Buffett has raised the alarm on AI, warning it threatens to supercharge fraud by making scams more convincing than ever.
"Scamming has always been part of the American scene," the famed investor and Berkshire CEO said during his company's annual shareholder meeting on Saturday.
But Buffett said that images and videos created using artificial intelligence have become so convincing that it's virtually impossible to discern if they're real or not.
"When you think of the potential of scamming people … if I was interested in scamming, it's going to be the growth industry of all time," he said.
He recalled seeing a deepfake video of himself that a fraudster was using to ask strangers for cash.
"I practically would have sent money to myself over in some crazy country," he quipped.
Buffett also likened the advent of AI to the creation of the atom bomb, echoing comments he made at last year's Berkshire meeting.
"We let the genie out of the bottle when we developed nuclear weapons," he said. "That genie's been doing some terrible things lately. The power of the genie scares the hell out of me."
"AI is somewhat similar," Buffett added. "We may wish we'd never seen that genie."
The billionaire, who touted AI's enormous potential years before ChatGPT's release, emphasized he's no expert in the nascent tech.
"I don't know anything about AI, but that doesn't mean I deny its existence or importance or anything of the sort," he said.
Kim Jong Un, supreme leader of North Korea, pictured in Pyongyang in 2020.
API | Getty Images
Kim Jong Un's latest propaganda song, "Friendly Father," is trending on TikTok.
The song is part of North Korea's strategy to embed ideological messages in catchy pop tunes.
TikTok, a Chinese-owned platform, could soon be banned by the US.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un dropped his latest propaganda song a fortnight ago, and the synth-pop track is seemingly winning over TikTokers, BBC News reported.
With its upbeat tempo and catchy melody, "Friendly Father" is reminiscent of an ABBA track — but with a Soviet-sounding twist.
While experts say the song is a calculated attempt to feed state propaganda to the masses, TikTokers are just enjoying the tune. Posts about the song have garnered millions of likes.
"On Spotify when," one user wrote.
"This song is like the end of a movie where the whole town gathers together and sings in unity while spinning in a circle," says another of the upbeat video.
North Korean Central Television has released a music video for the song "Friendly Father" praising Kim Jong Un
But such catchy tunes are purposefully designed to be accessible and simple to sing, making them easy to repeat and ensuring their ideological messages can be spread to the masses.
"The idea is they want to motivate, to strive towards a common goal for the benefit of the nation. They don't tend to produce songs like ballads," Alexandra Leonzini, a University of Cambridge scholar who researches North Korean music, told BBC News.
"All artistic output in North Korea must serve the class education of citizens and more specifically educate them as to why they should feel a sense of gratitude, a sense of loyalty to the party," she added.
It seems that the state's latest song has a particular aim of boosting the profile of Kim Jong Un, presenting him as more of a "father figure" like his grandfather, Kim Il Sung, and his father, Kim Jong Il.
It is an attempt to "elevate his status and stature" to their level, as he has previously had to rely on their reputations to "indicate his legitimacy to be the successor," Peter Moody, a North Korea analyst at Sungkyunkwan University, told The Telegraph.
"The song has ABBA written all over it. It's upbeat, it could not be more catchy, and a rich set of orchestral-sounding sequences could not be more prominent," Moody told BBC News.
It comes as Chinese-owned short-video platform TikTok faces a ban in the US over data security concerns.
Last month, the US Senate passed a bill that could see TikTok banned in the US unless its parent company, ByteDance, divests itself of the business over the next nine months to a year.
Reuters reported in April that ByteDance would rather close down TikTok in the US than sell it if legal means to fight the proposed ban fail.
Biden addressing campus protests over Israel at the White House on Thursday.
Drew Angerer/AFP via Getty Images
Joe Biden has tried to stake out a middle ground as protests spread across college campuses.
Polling shows that the protests are unpopular.
At the same time, Biden needs to keep his coalition of voters intact to win reelection.
As protests against Israel's war in Gaza have popped up on college campuses nationwide — at times devolving into chaos and violence — it's not surprising that President Joe Biden hasn't publicly embraced them.
After denouncing some of the protests as being out-of-bounds on Thursday, Biden told reporters that the demonstrations haven't led him to reconsider his stance on the war. That's not just because of his long-standing support for Israel, but because he has historically been skeptical of protest movements in general.
Polling has shown that pro-Palestinian protests are unpopular in general, despite widespread concerns about Israel's conduct in the war. A recent Morning Consult poll found that 47% of voters supported banning "pro-Palestinian demonstrations on campuses," versus 30% who were opposed and 23% who were unsure.
Americans' views on the ongoing campus protests and how universities should respond to them, broken out by age group:
Polling continues to show Biden running neck-and-neck with former President Donald Trump ahead of their November rematch, and the president and his campaign are likely trying to mitigate as much possible electoral damage as they can. It's also worth noting that the college-aged students taking part in these protests are part of a demographic that usually struggles to turn out on Election Day.
The president is part of a generation of Democrats that viewed close ties to Israel as a bedrock part of American foreign policy. During the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, he also kept his distance from the progressive activists and lawmakers that now undergird much of the party's criticism of Israel.
Compared to President Barack Obama, Biden was far more circumspect about criticizing Israel during its 2014 war, according to an NBC News report — and that conflict pales in comparison to the current one.
Even Biden's roots come with a distance toward protest movements. Unlike other lawmakers of his generation, Biden largely stayed away from the Vietnam War protests that sparked upheaval on college campuses nationwide.
"I was in law school," Biden said of the Vietnam War protests, per The New York Times. "I wore sport coats."
It remains to be seen whether Biden will pay the price at the ballot box for his positioning. He was already facing a growing electoral challenge from the Uncommitted movement, with progressives, young voters, and Arab and Muslim American voters withholding their support for Biden over his support for Israel.
The race between Biden and Trump is so close that even the vocal minority of young voters staying home could be a big problem for the president.
However, Americans traditionally don't peg their votes to foreign policy issues. Both historic and current polling shows voters are far more concerned about the economy.
A recent CBS News-YouGov poll of Michigan likely voters found that of 10 potential issues, the war between Israel and Hamas was the least likely to be a major factor in which candidate a voter would support — the most important issues by far were the economy and inflation.
Even among young voters, the trend remains the same. A Harvard Youth Poll of 18-to-29-year-olds nationwide found that the war was far less important to voters than inflation or healthcare.