The Justice Department said Monday it seized $3.4 billion worth of bitcoin stolen in the 2012 hack of the Silk Road dark web marketplace.

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The DOJ said it recovered more than 50,676 bitcoin from the home of James Zhong who pleaded guilty to wire fraud charges following what the agency described as the largest cryptocurrency seizure in its history.

The DOJ recovered the stolen bitcoin in a November 2021 search of Zhong’s home in Gainesville, Georgia. The department said agents found the keys to the tokens in an underground floor safe and on a “single-board computer that was submerged under blankets in a popcorn tin stored in a bathroom closet.”

Zhong “executed a sophisticated scheme designed to steal bitcoin from the notorious Silk Road Marketplace” and “attempted to hide his spoils through a series of complex transactions,” Tyler Hatcher, a special agent with the IRS criminal investigation team, said in a statement.

Silk Road was a notorious online marketplace used by drug cartels and other criminal organizations that used cryptocurrencies, mainly bitcoin, for illicit transactions. The marketplace was effectively shut down by federal authorities in 2015.

The DOJ said Zhong managed to steal bitcoin from the marketplace by creating about nine fraud accounts and “triggering over 140 transactions in rapid succession in order to trick Silk Road’s withdrawal-processing system.” He then transferred the stolen bitcoin to separate addresses under his control.

The DOJ said agents recovered other items from Zhong’s home, including $661,900 in cash, 25 Casascius coins, also known as physical bitcoins with roughly 174 bitcoin in value, and four one-ounce silver-colored bars and one gold-colored coin.

Despite investor worries about growth that sank its stock late last week, Cloudflare already has all the pieces it needs to achieve major acceleration in its revenue growth in coming years, according to co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince.

The company is poised to reach an annual revenue run rate of $5 billion within five years on the strength of its existing products and services, Prince said during the company’s recent quarterly call. Cloudflare, which now offers products and services across web performance, cybersecurity, and infrastructure, just hit the $1 billion annual revenue run rate during the last quarter. The projection would put Cloudflare at a $5 billion run rate by the end of 2027.

Reaching $1 billion in annualized revenue was a feat that took Cloudflare 13 years to accomplish, but the new forecast — which factors in promising emerging opportunities such as its R2 object storage service and zero-trust security portfolio — implies that it may not be long before Cloudflare is adding that much revenue in a single year.

Cloudflare is "on track" to pull off that feat, wrote Shaul Eyal, managing director at Cowen, in a note to investors following Cloudflare’s third-quarter report last Thursday.

"The company is executing well, in our view, and believes it has penetrated less than 1% of a $115B market for its existing portfolio," Eyal wrote. Nonetheless, Cloudflare’s stock price plunged 18% following the quarterly report, closing at $41.09 on Friday, in part due to concerns about the impact of the economic slowdown.

Regardless of the current economic conditions, “we can get to $5 billion of revenue in the next five years with the products that are in-market today," Prince said. The projection doesn't take into account any future acquisitions or new product introductions, he said.

Crucially, this growth is also not dependent on taking significant share from the cloud hyperscalers such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, he said during the call on Thursday.

"Our strategy is not to completely recreate every single thing that the hyperscalers do," Prince said. Instead, the company is looking to pick areas where it makes sense to compete in terms of developer services, like on object storage with the Cloudflare R2 service. "The hyperscalers don't have to fail for us to succeed,” he said.

Object storage is a sensible area for Cloudflare, Prince said, because the company can leverage its global network to offer low-latency storage for applications at a cheaper price than the competition. For certain applications, an organization might want to make certain parts of the application "as fast and as scalable and as reliable as possible. And so those parts can live inside of Cloudflare," he said.

While the primary goal is "to be the best network" that's available to customers, "there will be places at the margins where we absolutely will compete with [the hyperscale cloud platforms]," Prince said.

The hyperscalers don't have to fail for us to succeed.

"I think increasingly we're seeing that companies are able to build entire applications using the Cloudflare stack in a way which is much more modern and much more reliable," he said. "But we're never going to be the place that you can lift-and-shift SAP HANA — that's just not what we're building."

R2, which became generally available in late September, aims to stand out from other cloud storage services such as Amazon S3 in part by not charging data-egress fees. Cloudflare’s storage services also include a serverless option (Workers KV) and a storage service aimed at collaborative applications (Durable Objects).

Meanwhile, Cloudflare's first database product, D1, is expected to become available in open beta by the end of the current quarter.

In cybersecurity, where Cloudflare has been positioning itself to become a central player in enterprise network security with a focus on enabling zero trust, the company has been continuing to see "very strong" win rates against competitors such as Zscaler and Palo Alto Networks, Prince said on Thursday.

"The challenge, and the thing that I think we are continuing to work on, is just [getting] increased awareness in the market," he said.

While many customers know Cloudflare for its web security services, such as distributed denial-of-service mitigation and web application firewalls, zero-trust services are a newer area for the company. The promise of zero trust is to ensure that only legitimate users are able to access corporate applications and data, a growing priority for enterprises that realize traditional network security tools such as firewalls aren't sufficient in the era of distributed workforces.

Cloudflare’s portfolio of zero-trust services include secure application access, also known as zero-trust network access, as well as browser isolation and secure web gateway.

A major new executive hire should be helpful when it comes to raising awareness about Cloudflare's zero-trust security services, Prince said. The company announced Thursday that Marc Boroditsky, formerly the chief revenue officer at Twilio, has joined Cloudflare as president of revenue. Boroditsky succeeds Cloudflare CRO Chris Merritt, who has stepped down.

At Twilio, Boroditsky initially served as vice president for authentication, and before that he held the role of vice president of identity management at Oracle. With this background in identity and access management, Boroditsky “really understands that market, and I think he's going to help us increase the awareness [on zero trust]," Prince said.

All in all, Boroditsky is "uniquely qualified to take us to our next milestone," Prince said, pointing to Boroditsky's track record of growth at Twilio. Boroditsky was named CRO at Twilio in July 2020, and during his two years in the role, Twilio's quarterly revenue more than doubled to $983 million from $448 million.

Going forward, Cloudflare will continue to focus on using its broad portfolio of products to its advantage, Prince said, with its "land and expand" strategy of getting a foothold into an enterprise with one product and then expanding over time.

Cloudflare now counts 32% of Fortune 500 enterprises as customers, and "I see a clear path to nearly every Fortune 500 company using us for something in the next five years," Prince said. "A big part of Marc and the team's job, then, is to expand those relationships, and then get them to use us for everything."

Contributing to a $6 million investment in a fledgling AI startup may not be a headline-grabbing move for Sinovation Ventures, the Chinese venture capital firm led by legendary AI technologist Kai-Fu Lee.

But those 2021 and 2022 investments in U.S.-based HPC-AI Tech could serve a greater purpose for the celebrity AI researcher and longtime investor in AI developed in China. They could help Lee maintain a decades-long cross-border bond with the U.S. that is slowly eroding.

Lee had years of firsthand experience learning how the U.S. and China worked together to advance AI before launching Sinovation Ventures in 2009. Since 2013, the venture capital firm has participated in investment rounds totalling at least $1.06 billion in AI companies around the world, according to data provided by CB Insights and analyzed by Protocol.

Before becoming an investor, Lee led AI research in China for U.S. tech giants Microsoft and Google, watching his groundbreaking speech recognition and natural language processing technologies come to fruition in search, mobile, and conversational AI products that touched people’s lives in both countries and across the globe. Along the way, he seemed to harvest gems of wisdom from both tech cultures.

Lee’s cross-border philosophy of absorbing knowledge from one country and applying it in the other is evident in his investment approach. Sinovation, which has a presence in Beijing, Shanghai, and other cities in mainland China, focuses its investments on Chinese companies.

However, over the years the VC firm has also funded U.S. companies to gather knowledge, as is the case with HPC-AI Tech. The company, whose chief technology officer is based in China, aims to sell its AI optimizing software to the U.S. market, its founder Yang You told Protocol in September.

Lee has admonished Americans, urging them to pay attention to China’s AI accomplishments. “They’re under a disadvantage because Chinese companies are studying Chinese companies and American companies, but American companies don’t study Chinese companies, so American companies have only half the knowledge that Chinese companies have, and that’s a big problem,” Lee said at a 2016 TechCrunch conference in Beijing.

It was a concept he tried to get across with his bestselling 2018 book, “AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order.”

The book depicted the U.S. and China traveling on parallel tracks, helping advance an important category of tech that could benefit everyone. Lee believed the U.S. could benefit from knowing more about the rapid advancements China had made in areas like machine learning for ecommerce and social media, and deep learning and computer vision for autonomous vehicles.

Instead of grasping the book’s nuanced takeaway, many misconstrued its narrative, calling it a shallow story portraying a winner-take-all AI fight.

Ironically, what may have seemed to Lee like a win-win way to share knowledge — while conveniently attracting investment for the Chinese AI startups Sinovation Ventures funded — had the opposite effect, serving up red meat for national security hawks and ripe fodder for hyperbolic headlines amplifying the so-called AI race between the U.S. and China.

The media mischaracterization has helped fuel extreme reactions from U.S. policymakers, stymying cross-border tech business partnerships, blocking China from AI supplies built in the U.S. like powerful chips used to train machine learning models, and potentially clogging the flow of U.S. dollars toward the very Chinese AI companies Lee bets on.

Now after years of playing an increasingly influential role as a technologist and businessman trying to bind AI businesses in the U.S and China, Lee is struggling to keep a grip on the two tech power spheres as geopolitical pressure rips them apart. He’s still holding on, investing in AI companies straddling both worlds — including HPC-AI Tech; AI drug discovery company Insilico Medicine, which has operations in the U.S., China, the U.K., and elsewhere; and China’s WeRide, which has a license to test its autonomous vehicles in San Jose.

Years after his book came out, the distorted, oversimplified version of Lee’s message was still repeated. In November 2021, a Bloomberg reporter asked him, “In the AI race between the U.S. and China, who will win in decades to come?”

When a weary-looking Lee looked into his laptop camera to answer the reporter’s question, he patiently explained that there was no head-on AI fight happening between the two countries. Rather, he said each had its own strengths in AI — the U.S. in areas such as enterprise AI software, and China in things like robotics for manufacturing. Both did well in AI for autonomous vehicles and consumer internet platforms, he told the reporter.

“I hope AI will end up making companies in both countries winners,” Lee said.

But hope may not be enough for Lee’s knowledge-sharing philosophy to function much longer. He could be forced to live by a new credo.

Sinovation Ventures did not respond to multiple requests to interview Lee for this story.

A tech celeb emerges

Thirty years ago, Lee stood under bright lights on the set of one of the top morning shows in the U.S.

Joan Lunden, longtime host of “Good Morning America,” looked at Lee quizzically. She needed an explanation for the outlandish number he had just uttered.

“A trillion different sentences?” marveled Lunden.

Lee’s eyes widened and he allowed a wry yet sweet smirk to appear across his face.

“Yes,” he responded, explaining that the futuristic technology he helped build, now at work in the Macintosh desktop computer at their side, could recognize human speech because it had been trained using a trillion sentences.

It was 1992. Moms dishing out instant oatmeal for the kids or getting ready for work may have wondered why Lee — then age 30 but looking all of 18 — was peering out from their TV screens. One day this youthful computer nerd with the twinkle in his eye would amass huge global followings on yet-to-be invented social media platforms favored both in the U.S. and China, and even spark a turf war between rivals Microsoft and Google.

“There are two breakthroughs here,” Lee told Lunden, explaining the significance of voice recognition research he’d conducted for Apple that would later form a foundation for work he’d do while running AI labs for Microsoft and Google in China.

The voice recognition technology Lee demoed that day was baked into an Apple product called Casper. Lunden and Apple CEO John Sculley took turns giving Casper pre-scripted voice commands to direct the computer to open a calendar application to schedule an appointment and automatically write a check to pay a phone bill.

As Lee stood there, the glitz of the “GMA” set may have seemed fitting. He clearly had exhibited enough confidence for Apple to make the atypical decision to have its young research scientist play sidekick to the company’s more seasoned CEO in front of a TV audience of millions. Already Lee had made a name for himself through highly regarded Ph.D. research he conducted while in the computer science department at Carnegie Mellon University.

Lee’s CMU work used mathematical learning to enable continuous speech recognition. While it did not involve entirely new concepts, Rashid said it was a risky approach that earned Lee a reputation for making bold yet smart moves that would help actualize AI.

“That’s something people weren’t necessarily expecting was going to work. A lot of the orthodoxy during that period of time was that the way to solve these problems was to do more rule-based systems — systems where you were basically taking the expertise of an individual and trying to codify that in some fashion,” Rashid said.

There was even a glimmer of catchy branding in Lee’s wonky research. Rather than calling it something academic and complicated, it had a snappy, memorable name: Sphinx.

The creature’s lion body represented a large database, its human head the system’s knowledge, and the bird wings its speed, Lee would later explain in his 2011 book, “Making a World of Difference.” Sphinx got attention and was even covered in a 1988 New York Times article.

“It was one of the things that he became well known for. It was a surprise. In some sense it helped launch his career,” Rashid said.

As Lee moved up the professional ladder, his self-assurance would prove to be immensely valuable. While launching the new Microsoft Research, or MSR, lab in Beijing in 1998, Lee would have to foster relationships with universities to recruit talent and even schmooze with local government officials in the hopes that they’d support the lab.

He also had the skills to get the attention of decision-makers at Microsoft. Having moved to the U.S. in the early 1960s at age 11 from his birthplace of Taiwan, Lee was immersed in American culture and the English language at a young age.

“He could articulate what his plans were about his software,” said Nathan Myhrvold, founder of tech startup investment business Intellectual Ventures, who, along with Rashid, hired Lee for the pivotal role guiding the creation of Microsoft’s China lab. “An articulate researcher can sell you on his or her plan better than an inarticulate researcher,” Myhrvold said.

Lee helped the lab garner a good reputation inside China. “Within just a few years MSR China was famous within China as a super cool place to work, where you could do really, really interesting stuff,” Myhrvold said.

Google wanted in on the action. The company, which had ambitious plans to upend Microsoft’s dominance through search and email in the early 2000s, managed to poach Lee in 2005 to help it establish its own China operation.

An articulate researcher can sell you on his or her plan better than an inarticulate researcher.”

Microsoft was not happy. That July, it sued Google arguing Google had violated Microsoft’s noncompetition agreement with Lee. The companies settled the suit a few months later.

Lee’s networking and leadership acumen and his strengths in groundbreaking speech recognition were no match for the geopolitical and business headwinds Google faced in China. Lee quit the company in 2009; by the following year, Google began shuttering or moving products and services away from the country that Lee helped nurture for the China market.

Lee took what he’d learned and parlayed it into his next endeavor.

“[W]e could see the progress Android was making. And we knew that would be the answer in China,” he told Wired in 2018. “So when I left Google … I started an investment company specifically for mobile internet, mostly Android-based. This was Sinovation Ventures. We invested in social networks, education, entertainment. We got very good in these areas before AI,” he said.

‘Learn what’s so great in America, and then move to China’

At an “AI Superpowers” book tour event held in 2018 at the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business, a business student from China studying in California had a question for Lee.

“You mentioned that the AI development in China and the U.S. are two parallel universes. So what kind of advice would you give for future entrepreneurs who want to work between these two countries?” the student asked.

Lee was blunt. “I think cross-border will be very difficult,” he said. “I wouldn’t advise you to work for an American company trying to do business in China, or a Chinese company trying to do business in America — tech company anyway.”

What Lee said next prompted nervous laughter from the crowd of wannabe Silicon Valley startup execs: “Learn what’s so great in America, and then move to China and use that knowledge,” Lee said. As the crowd gasped, he paused for a beat. Then he added, “Or the reverse.”

Startling, but revealing, there in a nutshell was Lee’s guiding philosophy of cross-border learning, adjusted for a new geopolitical reality.

Learn what’s so great in America, and then move to China and use that knowledge”

During the time Lee gave his talk at Berkeley, HPC-AI Tech’s You was a researcher studying ways to streamline training of deep neural networks at UC Berkeley’s Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, a half-mile down Gayley Road from the business school.

Like so many aspiring AI entrepreneurs, You looks to Lee for advice. In fact, like some of Lee’s 48.6 million fans on China’s Twitter-like platform Weibo, You uses a term of respect and endearment for him.

“I call Kai-Fu ‘Professor Lee.’ Kai-Fu Lee is not a professor, but [it is] to respect him,” You told Protocol during an interview in September, a day before he had plans to meet with Lee for dinner in Singapore.

“I hope I can get some suggestions from him for my company on how to build the product, and also how can [I] make the company attract more VCs in the future,” You said.

‘Professor Lee’ rides the decoupling wave

Whether a startup like HPC-AI Tech will adjust its sales strategy as U.S.-China trade tensions grow is anyone’s guess. But as the Biden administration signals restrictions on cross-border investments that could affect national security, Lee seems determined to find windows of opportunity.

“Decoupling will create challenges for many companies. They’ll lose sales, but they’ll also create opportunities for ones that can straddle and take advantage of the decouple,” Lee said in April during a Bloomberg event.

“I don’t worry about a worst case because any extreme measure in decoupling will end up in a very severe lose-lose,” Lee said.

Until recently, Lee’s philosophy of applying cross-border experience has served him well. Sinovation actively coaxed U.S. investors to help fund the Chinese AI startups in its portfolio as AI became more viable in China — in part as a result of the massive data influx generated by mobile device use he recognized as so important while at Google. By 2016, the company had raised the equivalent of $675 million for its Chinese and American funds.

Lee’s AI investment activity fluctuated over the years, but CB Insights data shows that 2021 was an especially big one. He participated in eight funding rounds in AI companies in 2021 worth at least $380.6 million. In contrast, he joined seven funding rounds in the first three quarters of 2022 worth around a third of that amount — at least $130.7 million. The full amounts of Sinovation’s AI-related funding rounds evaluated for this story were not disclosed publicly.

Sinovation has found it more difficult to attract U.S. investors as U.S. tariffs and export controls darken prospects for AI business collaboration between the two countries. The company reportedly closed its Silicon Valley office in 2019. Then, this August, The Wall Street Journal reported that the investment firm first closed its latest China-based fund after raising $200 million, approaching the midway of the $500 million it had hoped to attract as funds raised by China-focused general partners had dropped to multiyear lows, according to the report.

Still, ongoing investments in two of Lee’s largest AI bets — China’s autonomous vehicle company WeRide and Insilico Medicine, which both operate in the U.S. and China — indicate that he has not entirely given up on transcontinental AI deals. Sinovation joined investment rounds in WeRide totaling $167 million in 2017 and as late as 2021. In 2019 and 2021, CB Insights reported that Sinovation contributed to funding rounds totaling $292 million. And between the first quarter of 2017 and Q2 2022, CB Insights data shows WeRide raised $767 million in investment rounds involving U.S.-based venture capital firms.

Despite what seems like eternal optimism for cross-border AI collaboration between the U.S. and China, Lee has felt the pang of disappointment from lost opportunity for years. In “Making a World of Difference,” he cited a Chinese proverb about finding common ground and accepting differences: “yi zhong qiu tong.”

“Over the years,” he wrote, “I have learned that if each country could understand the other’s history, culture, and viewpoint, and accept that there are some issues that the two countries will ‘agree to disagree,’ there would be tremendous progress.”

Protocol data researcher AJ Caughey assisted with data analysis on this story. This story was updated to clarify the nature and timing of Sinnovation Ventures' U.S. investment funds.

Electric vehicles are essentially batteries on wheels. Figuring out not only how to charge them for mobility but also use them to put power back on the grid will be one of the challenges of the next decade.

But doing so, much less scaling it for the masses, is more complicated than it seems. The technology — known as bidirectional charging — will depend on policymakers and utilities coordinating, as well as the help of automakers. If they can get their collective act together, bidirectional charging could entice would-be EV customers, who stand to benefit in terms of both finances and peace of mind.

What is bidirectional charging?

To charge an EV, the charger or the car must have a converter that takes alternating current (AC) power from the grid and flips it to direct current (DC) power that the car’s battery can store. Bidirectional charging technology — again, located either in the car itself or in an external charger — can convert that DC power to AC power to feed it back to the grid.

Despite the apparent ease, the technology is still very much in the pilot phase, in part because making use of the power stored in an EV’s battery involves getting utilities on board to feed power back onto the grid. California utility PG&E launched several projects last summer to explore the use of bidirectional charging in different contexts to gauge how cost-effective the technology is.

Why would we want to use EVs to power homes or the grid? Is that even a good idea?

There are a slew of reasons for using bidirectional charging, but they largely fall into two buckets: keeping the lights on and making money. Both are pretty good ideas!

Vehicle-to-home charging gives homeowners more control over their energy use, allowing them to do things such as power their home during a storm-induced blackout or draw on their EV battery for power when electricity prices — which fluctuate throughout the day — are at their highest. There’s a wide range to how much power a single EV battery holds, but a sedan like the Nissan Leaf has a capacity of 40 to 62 kilowatt-hours while a typical U.S. home uses roughly 30 kWh daily. That means keeping a house powered during a daylong outage is well within the realm of possibility.

Vehicle-to-grid charging involves more coordination with utilities. Storage will be increasingly important for ironing out the peaks and valleys of energy supply associated with renewables, and a parked EV represents a potentially valuable storage resource for power companies. Tapping that resource will require connecting each individual EV to the grid and then using software that can assess demand and communicate with utilities.

EV drivers who connect their vehicles to the grid could be in for a payday that could help offset the cost of the car itself. A 2021 National Grid pilot project saw a Nissan Leaf owner earn $4,200 over the course of a single summer by putting power back on the grid when demand shot up. Serving up power to the grid in times of need could be especially lucrative for fleet owners.

How far off is widespread bidirectional charging?

According to Katherine Stainken, vice president of policy at the Electrification Coalition, the biggest barrier to widespread adoption is the fact that utilities and the state-level commissions that regulate them are slow-moving and cautious about change. Even states like California that started looking into vehicle-to-grid charging several years ago are only now figuring out how to structure incentives for EV owners and what meter technology will be required. Stainken expects that in the next three to five years, these programs will be far more widespread.

Vehicle-to-home charging is closer to being ready for prime time, though the technology to integrate bidirectional charging into a home’s energy system is still not widely available. There are a handful of companies — including Emporia and Wallbox — coming out with the tech that could make it a more widespread reality within the next year.

There’s one caveat, though: using an EV to power either a home or the grid depends on getting the local utility’s say-so. An EV owner can’t sell power back to the grid if the utility doesn’t have a program in place to receive it, and supplying power to one’s own home is contingent on having a system in place that tells the utility to stem the flow of power from the grid.

It is possible utilities may actively stand in the way of vehicle-to-grid charging; they may not want to pay customers for the power they provide. Florida Power & Light has resisted allowing rooftop solar owners to sell their excess power back to the grid, which would entail a similar demand-response program.

Are there policies that could foster the technology’s use?

The current bidirectional charging policy landscape is fragmented, though state and federal lawmakers are beginning to push utility commissions to create plans for vehicle-to-grid charging. For instance, the California Public Utilities Commission laid out a vehicle-grid integration framework in 2020 after lawmakers required the agency to do so.

There is no federal law or regulation on the books governing bidirectional charging, though the bipartisan infrastructure law required states to consider how to electrify transportation and amend utility rates to “promote affordable and equitable EV charging.” Stainken said this could provide an opening for states to create more robust vehicle-to-grid policies, though the law does not come with a penalty for states that skip out on this process.

In collaboration with the energy security nonprofit SAFE, the Electrification Coalition recommended that federal lawmakers expand the charging infrastructure tax credit to cover vehicle-to-grid development and encourage the creation of national technical standards. The latter would require coordination with standard-setting bodies like UL or SAE to provide automakers with a road map for ensuring vehicles can handle bidirectional charging.

The Department of Energy, for its part, began to explore best practices for accelerating the use of these technologies earlier this year.

Good morning! What once was random is now chaotic, but that’s not a bad thing. Or is it? Let’s dig in.

Isn’t it chaotic?

Technology used to make sense. Software attracted those who sought rationality and order. Harlan Stenn, a coder who helps the world’s computers run on time, explained the attraction this way to The New Yorker: “I got very clear yes-or-no information about whether something was going to do the right thing, and to me that was very peaceful and enjoyable.” One of the worst things you could say at Microsoft when Bill Gates ran the shop was that a person or an idea was “random,” Protocol's Owen Thomas writes.

That was great for boomers who grew up watching Spock scold Captain Kirk for being “highly illogical.” But Gen Xers and their younger cohorts are having their revenge. “Random” as a nerd insult has given way to “chaotic” as a term of high praise.

Go ahead, roll the dice. That’s a key lesson of Dungeons & Dragons, a cultural touchstone for Gen Xers like Elon Musk.

• The internet changed the paradigm around technology to one of abundance. Suddenly there were more networks, more servers, and more code than any human could really grasp.
• Netscape taught us that everything could permanently be in beta. Bugs are illogical — but so is waiting until you’ve squashed all of them to release software into the world.
• The art of software development changed as it became networked. Instead of typing the exact lines of code printed in a computer magazine, you linked libraries and tapped into APIs you barely understood. “Move fast and break things,” Mark Zuckerberg said. So you brought the website down? No problem, just roll it back!
• TikTok is hurting Facebook and Instagram because it’s less logical. Instead of seeing things your friends (and brands you wish could be your friends) post, TikTok serves up … sheer randomness. Oh, sure, there’s an “algorithm.” But maybe the appeal is just seeing something unexpected. At least chaos makes you feel alive.

So chaotic is … good, maybe? That’s another discovery D&D players made: You could be lawful good, like a paladin. That’s basically a cop with shiny armor, though.

• The New York Times recently labeled Musk a “chaos agent.” His reaction: What, like that’s a bad thing?
• Musk, like other ’90s startup founders, saw the internet as a chance to fix the broken artifacts of an irrational business world, whether it was classified ads or online banking. He briefly trained as an engineer, but his approach through much of his career hasn’t been to restore order. It’s been to throw more chaos at the problem, because, hey, it can’t be worse than the mess the boomers left us, right?
• Now he’s playing chaos-agent-in-chief at Twitter. Imposing mass layoffs, demanding new features be programmed in a week, and making policy decisions on the fly in response to tweets may not be the most orderly approach to things. But it’s not like Jack Dorsey and the former Twitter board covered themselves in glory during their slightly less irrational stewardship of the company. (Side note: Former Twitter chairman Bret Taylor may be the closest thing we have to Spock, for whatever good that did him and the company.)

Chaos as a strategy may actually be a rational response to a world seemingly gone mad. Generation X has always seen the world from the lens of not having much to lose. “Chaos is what killed the dinosaurs, darling,” antihero J.D. told Veronica in “Heathers.” So let’s get chaotic. It’s the least bad alternative. Is that so random?

The best of Protocol

Microsoft helped build AI in China. Chinese AI helped build Microsoft. — Kate Kaye

• Through decades of support, Microsoft was an instrumental force helping China become the AI powerhouse it is today. Now as the very thought of a U.S. company partnering in tech projects in China draws scrutiny from lawmakers, national security hawks, and human rights advocates, Microsoft could be forced to grapple with tough decisions surrounding the thriving AI ecosystem it fostered there. Read more: Are the U.S. and China really in an AI race?

After the Figma deal, the only thing that can stop Adobe is itself — Aisha Counts

• Adobe still faces potential challenges in making the Figma acquisition a success, including Federal Trade Commission scrutiny, pushback from designers wary about its history, and a challenging macroeconomic environment. But if Adobe can succeed, it will only further entrench the company’s unrivaled dominance among creative professionals.

The 2022 midterms will be a major test for TikTok — Lizzy Lawrence

• As the midterm elections near, TikTok has faced unrelenting scrutiny about the role it plays in spreading misinformation and the way influencers skirt its advertising rules. But according to seven former employees from TikTok's trust and safety team, the company may have an even more basic problem inhibiting its efforts to secure the midterm election: high turnover among the employees who are supposed to carry out that work.

Crypto oracles are a blockchain vulnerability no one’s talking about — Tomio Geron

• Data oracles, the automated feeds that provide crucial price data to smart contracts and enable trading on blockchains, are drawing increasing scrutiny over their roles in recent hacks and the vulnerabilities the industry’s reliance on them creates. They’re also attracting more investment from VCs and larger crypto players who see an opportunity amid these fears.

Holoride wants you to use VR in your car — Janko Roettgers

• For generations, kids have longed for car rides to be shorter. Now Germany’s Holoride wants to break the curse of juvenile impatience with the help of VR headsets that turn car trips into immersive gaming sessions and theme park rides. The company’s Pioneer’s Pack includes a HTC Vive Flow VR headset, a game controller, and an additional safety strap, as well as one year of access to Holoride’s software catalog, for a total of 699 euros ($690).

Headhunters wonder, where are all the chief people officers? — Allison Levitsky

• Many of the extraordinary challenges of the last two and a half years have fallen on the shoulders of chief people officers. At the same time, executives and recruiters say there’s a shortage of strategic, business-oriented HR talent prepared to take over as the next generation of senior people leaders.

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