The Morning Download: Learning Beats Knowing in the Age of AI

What's up: Highlights from WSJ Tech Live California; IBM to lay off thousands of employees; Aaron Paul of “Breaking Bad” is a fan of less tech.

Good morning. Business is changing at a furious pace, given the pressure of AI. Roles, process, business models, customer experience and more are evolving faster than leaders can keep up. What are they supposed to do?

Don’t fake it. Admit what you don’t know and your teams will be okay with it. That principle came up repeatedly last night as the WSJ Tech Live California got underway last night in Napa Valley.

Assaf Rappaport said he learned that lesson about 10 years ago from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Microsoft had just acquired cybersecurity startup Adallom from Rappaport and his co-founders for $320 million. Rappaport didn’t expect to stay long, even agreeing to a lower price to maintain more flexibility, he said during a panel discussion with the WSJ Leadership Institute’s Ben Ashwell.

Rappaport went into his first meeting with Nadella and he said, “I fell in love.”

Nadella told him “‘I want to be very clear. I’m here to set the rules. You’re here to break the rules.’ And I’m like ‘whoa,’” Rappaport recalled.

He was impressed with the learning culture that Nadella instilled. “From ‘we know it all’ to ‘we learn it all’, it’s something that I'm trying to implement every day at Wiz,” Rappaport said. He left Microsoft after five years to co-found Wiz, which Google is in the process of acquiring for $32 billion.

Lumen Technologies CEO Kate Johnson embraced a similar emphasis on learning when she joined the company three years ago and implemented a turnaround at the global telecommunications services provider. “Your learning skills that are directly applicable to being successful in life, that builds a following of people,” she said.

The company restructured borrowings and landed billions in contracts for AI-related services.

She brought in author and researcher Brené Brown to help her rebuild the company’s culture. Brown and Johnson spoke about the experience last night during a conversation with WSJ Leadership Institute President Alan Murray.

“We're trying to help people understand that if your success depends on certainty, you lose,” Brown said. “Lumen is winning right now … because there was a critical shift of top leaders who understood that the value was no longer in being a knower,  but being a learner. No longer was there value in having the right answers, but in asking exquisite questions,” Brown said.

More Tuesday highlights from WSJ Tech Live California below.

See below for one answer to that question. 

The WSJ reports that Nvidia and Deutsche Telekom plan to renovate an existing data center in Munich, powering it with some 10,000 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs, as part of a $1.15 billion partnership. 

Deutsche Telekom said the facility would bolster AI computing power in Germany by around 50%.

Separately the European Union last month outlined two AI strategies aimed in part at weaning the bloc off of its dependence on foreign technologies and know-how: An Apply AI Strategy that sets out how to speed up the use of AI in key European industries and the public sector, and an AI in Science Strategy aimed at boosting AI-driven research.

“The idea that chips and ontology is what you want to short is bats--- crazy,” Karp said.

Burry, made famous in the book and film “Big Short” as one of the investors who bet against the U.S. housing market, declined to comment, according to CNBC. 

The FT reports that Burry has disclosed a $912 million position against Palantir and a bet against Nvidia.

International Business Machines is cutting thousands of jobs this quarter, the latest company to shed workers as it seeks to reposition its business in the age of artificial intelligence, WSJ reports.

IBM in October posted higher revenue in the third quarter, boosted by higher-than-expected growth in its consulting business, results the company linked to customers starting to scale AI. 

AMD on Tuesday posted a profit of $1.96 billion, compared with $1.5 billion a year earlier, WSJ reports. Data center revenue rose 22% to $4.3 billion. Investors had been expecting better from the chip maker which wants to be a major player in the AI race.

Data center operating income was $1.07 billion, or 14% lower than what analysts estimated. Data center profit margins fell to 25%, from 29% in the year-earlier quarter.

Sequoia Capital leader Roelof Botha was asked to step aside after some partners raised concerns about his leadership style, WSJ reports. In a letter posted online Tuesday, Botha said he was handing the reins to longtime Sequoia investors Alfred Lin and Pat Grady. Since Botha took over in 2022, the firm lost its China a