Day: July 28, 2025

Popular online influencers in the right-wing sphere have followed the Epstein case for years and are incensed that President Trump has told them to move on from the issue. Staff writer at The Atlantic Mark Leibovich, MSNBC political analyst Alexi McCammond, and former Michigan U.S. attorney and MSNBC legal analyst Barbara McQuade join Alex Witt to share their insights.

• Paying top dollar for AI talent isn’t necessary for true innovation, said Alibaba Cloud’s founder.
• “The only thing you need to do is to get the right person,” Wang Jian said in an interview with Bloomberg.
• “What happened in Silicon Valley is not the winning formula,” he added.

True innovation doesn’t come from highly paid engineers, but from finding the right people to build the unknown, said the founder of Alibaba’s cloud and AI unit.

“The only thing you need to do is to get the right person,” Wang Jian said in an interview with Bloomberg published Monday. “Not really the expensive person because if it’s a new business, if it’s true innovation, that basically means talent,” he added.

Wang, who built Alibaba Cloud in 2009, said American tech giants are “very much focused on the existing success of the business.”

“And existing — it’s average of technology,” the computer scientist said. “We have a tremendous opportunity to look at technology nobody knows today.”

“What happened in Silicon Valley is not the winning formula,” Wang said.

Wang’s comments come after Big Tech companies are paying top dollar to recruit elite AI talent, a trend that’s likened to sports franchises competing for superstar athletes like Cristiano Ronaldo.

The competition reached another level when Meta recruited Scale’s CEO, Alexandr Wang, last month as part of a $14.3 billion deal to take a 49% stake in his company. Then, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, said Meta had tried to poach his best employees with $100 million signing bonuses.

Just weeks ago, Google paid $2.4 billion to hire the CEO and top talent of AI startup Windsurf and license its intellectual property. OpenAI had planned to buy Windsurf for $3 billion, but the deal fell apart.

“It’s a typical way of doing things,” Wang Jian said of Big Tech’s hiring strategy. Chasing the same pool of in-demand talent isn’t always a winning move, he added.

“Whenever everybody knows that these are talents,” Wang said, “it’s better for you not to get it.”

“It’s really about the vision, you know, where you want to go.”

Wang and Alibaba did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

China’s AI race is ‘very healthy’ competition

Wang also said that the rivalry among Chinese AI firms is not cutthroat.

No single person or company can sprint forever, he said. But collectively, the ecosystem can still move fast.

He pointed to a pattern he’s observed: One company surges ahead, then slows. Then another takes the lead. Over time, the first catches up again.

“You can have the very fast iteration of the technology because of this competition,” he said.

“I don’t think it’s brutal, but I think it’s very healthy,” he added.

China’s biggest tech players have focused on open-source AI models, which have code and architecture that are publicly available for anyone to use, modify, or build on.

One analyst told Business Insider previously that Chinese firms are prioritizing consolidation to stay competitive. For instance, Tencent has deployed its Hunyuan model and DeepSeek R1 across its massive ecosystem, including WeChat. Baidu has also integrated DeepSeek R1 into its search engine.

The country is closing the gap with the US in the AI race.

In a Stratechery interview earlier this year, Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang, said that China is doing “fantastic” in the AI market, with homegrown models like DeepSeek and Manus emerging as credible challengers to US-built systems.

He said China’s AI researchers are some of the best in the world, and it’s no surprise that US companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are hiring them.

“Our competition in China is really intense,” Huang said in May at the Computex Taipei tech conference in Taiwan.

Huang has also said that the US and China are neck and neck in the AI chip race. “China is right behind us. We’re very, very close.”

A timelapse video filmed by an eyewitness shows an imposing dark cloud approaching the city of Zhuhai as Typhoon Wipha rolls in.

• Cindy Crawford says she starts her mornings offline and outdoors to set a positive tone for her day.
• She wakes up 20 minutes before her kids, listens to a Bible podcast, and gets her feet in the grass.
• “I don’t look at my messages or emails until I’ve taken that time for myself,” she said.

Cindy Crawford, 59, says she starts her mornings offline.

During an appearance on the “Reclaiming with Monica Lewinsky” podcast, the supermodel spoke about her morning ritual and how it sets the tone for her day.

Crawford told podcast host Monica Lewinsky that she gets up 20 minutes before her kids so she has time for herself in the mornings.

“I didn’t want to wake up to ‘Mommy, I need this,'” Crawford said, adding that she had to take care of herself first so she has “a better chance” of being her best self for the day.

In recent years, Crawford says she’s made it a habit to avoid checking emails or messages first thing in the morning.

“I probably heard it on a podcast, but it was like ‘Think about it. What is the first input you want?'” Crawford said.

“I listen to a Bible podcast or whatever. Every morning, they read a Bible verse, and then someone does a summary of it. That’s my first input while I’m doing my dry brushing and I’m putting body oil on. I don’t look at my messages or emails until I’ve taken that time for myself,” she said.

Dry brushing is a beauty technique that involves using a dry brush to exfoliate the skin. It is said to also encourage blood circulation.

But even spending those 20 minutes offline can be a challenge, since she has to turn on her phone to access her Bible app and inevitably sees messages come in.

“I’m controlling the first input because what if someone has sent you a stressful text or email, and that’s the first thing you wake up to?” Crawford said. “And now you’re in response mode, or like, adrenaline gets going, because someone said the wrong word in a text that you took the wrong way. I just don’t want that. I want to control my input for as long as I can.”

In addition to avoiding messages, Crawford says she likes to spend time outside in the mornings.

“We live in Malibu. I’ll go to the jacuzzi. I’m outside, I’m in nature, my feet are in the grass. I have this connection to nature, to source. All of that helps ground me,” she said.

“By the time I come in from that, I’m like, “OK, I can I can do whatever,” she added.

A representative for Crawford did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent by Business Insider outside regular hours.

Other high-profile individuals, such as Hollywood celebrities and business leaders, also have their own morning rituals.

Keke Palmer told BI in May that she usually gets up between 6 a.m. and 6.45 a.m. and practices Pilates in the morning.

“It’s the moment of my day that I get to myself, even if I’m in a class with other people. It’s just me, feeling it, existing in the world, and doing something for myself. It’s really meditative,” Palmer said.

Disney’s CEO, Bob Iger, said he gets up at 4:15 a.m. and avoids looking at his phone until after his morning workout because it helps him clear his head.

“I think it’s vital, in terms of the ability to run a pretty complicated company in a very, very fast-paced world, to have the energy but also to have spent the time to organize one’s thoughts,” he said.

• Mark Cuban says it should be illegal for AI models to include ads in their responses.
• The “Shark Tank” star said regulators should “have learned our lessons from algos in social media.”
• OpenAI and Anthropic have been hiring former executives from Facebook and Instagram.

“Shark Tank” star Mark Cuban said on Saturday that the White House should “make it illegal for AI models to offer advertising.”

Cuban said in an X post addressed to David Sacks, the White House’s AI and crypto czar, that the administration should “examine referral fees as well.”

“The last thing we need is to have algorithms designed to maximize revenue driving LLM output and interactions,” Cuban wrote.

“They are already recommending brands and we don’t know if they are getting paid for it. We need to have learned our lessons from algos in social media,” he added.

Cuban said in a subsequent post on Saturday that he would be willing to accept advertising on AI models if they are “identified as an ad” and kept “completely independent from the user generated chats.”

Cuban’s proposal comes just days after the Trump administration unveiled its 28-page “AI Action Plan” on Wednesday. Back in January, President Donald Trump had signed an executive order calling for “existing AI policies and directives that act as barriers to American AI innovation” to be revoked.

Trump has adopted a relatively light-touch approach toward AI regulation compared to his predecessor, President Joe Biden. In October 2023, Biden signed an executive order demanding greater transparency from companies developing AI tools.

Trump’s new “AI Action Plan” proposed withholding federal funding from states that want to impose “burdensome” AI regulations.

Cuban and the White House did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.

Social-media déjà vu

Cuban’s worries may not be unfounded. Major AI players such as have been deepening their leadership bench with former executives from social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram.

In May, OpenAI chief Sam Altman said he had hired Fidji Simo, the CEO and chair of Instacart, to serve as OpenAI’s new CEO of applications. Before she joined Instacart, Simo worked at Meta, where she oversaw Facebook’s app and advertising products.

Last year, OpenAI hired Kevin Weil as its chief product officer. Weil was previously vice president of product at Instagram and senior vice president of product at Twitter.

OpenAI’s rival, Anthropic, made a similar move in May 2024 when it hired Mike Krieger, cofounder and former CTO of Instagram, as its chief product officer.

Cuban has long warned about the risks and dangers that could come with AI tools like chatbots. He told comedian Jon Stewart in a podcast interview that aired in 2023 that online misinformation “is only going to get worse” with the proliferation of AI tools.

“Once these things start taking on a life of their own, it will be difficult for us to define why and how the machine makes the decisions it makes, and who controls the machine,” Cuban said.

Last week, Cuban wrote in an X post that he expects AI companies to hoard talent and intellectual property to stay ahead of their competitors.

“If you create valuable IP, encrypt and silo it. Let companies bid on it. Or just use it for your own behind a paywall model. IP is KING in an AI world,” Cuban wrote on July 20.