Bret Taylor recently held two of the most prominent roles in technology. Along with Marc Benioff, he worked as Twitter’s board chairman in one of the most well-known mergers in Silicon Valley history. He was not only Salesforce’s co-CEO.
Taylor and Elon Musk managed to negotiate the $44 billion sale of Twitter, and when Elon attempted to pull out, Taylor was taken to court to uphold the terms of the deal.
The firm disbanded its board and Taylor quit once the sale was ultimately finalized in late October. Taylor subsequently departed Salesforce.
At that moment, he declared his decision to go back to his “entrepreneurial roots.” And it seems that he is already doing it.
Taylor said on February 8 that his upcoming project would be joining the highly popular artificial intelligence bandwagon. Taylor’s resume also comprises co-creating Google Maps and having the role of chief technology officer at Facebook.
“Rarely do you encounter a new technology so powerful that it feels inevitable that it will change the course of every industry. I remember feeling that way when I first used a web browser in high school, and then again when I first saw Steve Jobs demonstrate the iPhone in 2007,” Taylor wrote in his announcement on LinkedIn.
“I have that same sense of excitement and inevitability about modern AI, especially given recent advances in large language models.”
Clay Bavor, the current vice president of Google Labs, the firm’s experimental section, is cooperating with Taylor. Bavor revealed on LinkedIn that he would quit Google in March to start working with Taylor.
After interest in the metaverse and web3 based on cryptocurrency declined over the previous year, Silicon Valley executives and funders focused on AI instead.
The firm OpenAI, whose ChatGPT chatbot and DALL-E photo generator have popularised so-called “generative AI” technologies, played an important role in this breakthrough.
Microsoft disclosed ambitions to combine OpenAI with the search engine Bing and a $10 billion investment in that company. In the meantime, Google and Facebook have revealed their respective generative AI bets in a growing arms race.
