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Toyota announced plans to restructure its board on Tuesday in what it described as an attempt to bring in more diverse views and give a larger roles to auditors.Among six appointments is Christopher Reynolds, now an executive in the automaker’s North American operations. As a lawyer, and son of a Ford worker, he brings experience in human resources and risk management, according to Toyota.The number of women on the 10-person board will grow from one to two with the appointments of Kumi Fujisawa, an independent outsider and entrepreneur, and Hiromi Osada, previously a Toyota auditor. George Olcott, previously an auditor, will also join the board.The number of outside members will rise from four to five.Takanori Azuma, a Toyota Human Resources official, said the new board includes auditors for the first time.The company’s internal controls have come under scrutiny since it admitted to cheating on certification tests for seven vehicle models last year.Azuma said the additions are designed to bring diverse views to its leadership as “weapons for survival” in a changing environment.“It would be a mistake to assume that what we think up internally will be what our customers and people around the world can empathize with,” he said.The maker of the Camry sedan and Lexus luxury models has been trying to transform itself into what it calls “a mobility company” as the auto industry undergoes drastic changes including the arrival of powerful relative newcomers like Tesla and BYD.Chairman Akio Toyoda, from the company’s founding family, and Chief Executive Koji Sato’s positions will remain unchanged.The company will seek approval for the new board at a general shareholders’ meeting later this year. Yuri Kageyama is on Threads: https://www.threads.net/@yurikageyama Yuri Kageyama, AP Business Writer
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On Monday morning, anonymous hackers played a video on screens throughout the Department of Housing and Urban Development HQ in Washington, D.C. The AI-generated video jankily portrayed President Trump kissing Elon Musks feet, with an overlaid caption reading: Long live the real king. It reportedly played on a loop for five minutes before the baffled building staff eventually scrambled to each floor and turned off the TVs manually. As amusing as it may have been for some to see a high-tech protest depicting a low-status Trump, amusement is all this protest has to offer. Those looking for, or trying to manifest, cracks in the presidents relationship with the worlds richest man still have their work cut out for them. Despite Trumps historically mercurial affinities, and a distaste for being overshadowed, his alliance with Musk appears a lot sturdier than many predicted. The AI-generated video that played at HUD is hardly the first public attempt to drive a wedge between the president and the tech oligarch. Media figures such as Rachel Maddow, politicians including Senator Bernie Sanders, and random social media users have all been part of a sprawling concerted effort to turn Trump against President Musk. Rolling Stone even reported in December on conversations taking place within the Democratic National Committee about party leaders describing Trump as subservient to Musk, in order to activate Trumps ego. Its easy to see why they might have thought this strategy would succeed. During Trumps first term, he quickly soured on the people in his orbit. In 2017 alone, 34% of his top aides either resigned, were fired, or transitioned to different positions; a record amount of turnover for a president in his first year. By the end of that term, among the most influential positions within his administration, the rate of turnover reportedly reached 92%. Beyond past precedent, there were other reasons to believe the relationship would quickly combust. Both men clearly enjoy being the main character of the internet; perhaps the world stage wouldnt be big enough to contain both egos. On top of that, their apparently tight bond got off to a rocky start. After his political pivot to the right, Musk initially threw his weight behind Governor Ron DeSantis in 2022, since Trump would be too old by the end of a second term. Trump, for his part, called Musk a bullshit artist around the same time. Any differences between the two, however, now seem confined to the past. During a joint appearance on Fox Newss Hannity last week, Sean Hannity asked Musk and Trump about the push to break up their partnership. In response, Trump confirmed hes aware of those efforts, saying: Elon called me. He said, You know theyre trying to drive us apart. I said, Absolutely. You know, they said, We have breaking news: Donald Trump has ceded control of the presidency to Elon Musk. President Musk will be attending a Cabinet meeting tonight at 8 oclock. And I sayits just so obvious. Theyre so bad at it. Perhaps it was a calculated move to present a unified front in the face of so much wishful thinking for a falling out. But there are plenty of reasons beyond the Hannity interview to suggest that a divorce wont be coming any time soon. Trump and Musk’s shared vision Trump and Musk appear to be on the same page about how the U.S. should be governed, for one thing. As Musks Department of Government Efficiency decimates headcount in federal offices around the country, he is on the brink of achieving what Trump set out to do in his first term. Soon after taking office in 2017, Trump signed an executive order placing a hiring freeze across the executive branch. It lasted 79 days, during which then-head of the Office of Management and Budget Mick Mulvaney developed a long-term plan for workforce reduction. Trump would go on to spend the rest of his term fuming about the rogue bureaucrats of the so-called Deep State who thwarted some of his plans. Now, Musk is as animated about taking a chainsaw to the federal bureaucracy as he was about doing so upon taking over Twitter. The pair similarly see eye-to-eye on the classic conservative hobbyhorse of deregulation. While Musk has long lamented all the irksome government rules standing in the way of his business plans, Trump bragged in his 2021 farewell address that he had slashed more job-killing regulations than any administration ha[s] ever done before. On top of everything else, Musk and Trump seem equally credulous when it comes to fringe conspiracy theories. Even Musks own AI chatbot Grok admits the X head honcho spreads the most misinformation on that platformalthough it recently blocked some criticism of Musk and Trumpand farfetched concepts like Fort Knoxs supposed missing gold now tend to quickly spread from a Musk tweet to a Trump press conference. Considering both have also professed intense animosity toward legacy media and wokeness, one imagines the two would find plenty to talk about over deskside Diet Cokes in the Oval Office. The money factor Although Tesla stock has dropped 37% from its high in December amid backlash, Musk and his various companies stand to profit immensely from his new government adjacency. DOGE has already made cuts at agencies that oversee some of Musk’s products, for instance, among other potential conflicts of interest. But Trump may stand to benefit even more. Beyond the $277 million Musk contributed to his campaign efforts, what Trump has gained from this symbiotic relationship is a new cudgel against non-compliant members of his party. Back in December, Musk warned Republicans in the House and Senate that he would fund primary challengers against anyone who stood in the way of Trumps agenda. That threat lingered in the air throughout the confirmation hearings for Trumps cabinet, during which any objections to even the most controversial pickslike Robert Kennedy Jr., Pete Hegseth, and Tulsi Gabbardeventually vanished. Musks role in keeping party members in line is not something Trump would lightly sacrifice. Another headline sponge During his first term, Trumps wild-card unpredictability, social media proclivity, and authoritarian-like bearing brought him constant negative press coverage. With a jubilant Elon Musk testing the limits of his newfound power, though, Trump now has a spare lightning rod for bad headlines. Trumps critics and adversaries among the Democrats, opinion columnists, and random social media users now have a second Trumpian figurewith his own unique modus operandito focus their attention on, siphoning ire that might otherwise go solely to Trump. Still, that ire is very much real. Polls in recent weeks have shown Musks popularity plummeting, and Trumps slipping as well. Angry town halls seem to be making some Republicans nervous about how to defend Musk and DOGEs actions to their constituents, while conflicting advice about handling Musks recent ultimatum for federal workersthat they submit five bullets about what they accomplished the previous week or forfeit their jobssuggests fracturing support for DOGE within the administration. But the situation would likely have to deteriorate dramatically further before bringing about a divorceif for no other reason than spite. While the same vanity that allowed Kamala Harris to easily bait Trump into ranting about crowd sizes during their debate last fall does not seem as susceptible to the President Musk taunts, it just might help prolong the president in denying his detractors an outcome they so clearly desire.
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Many things remain uncertain about AIs future impact on our lives. One that isnt in doubt is that more and more of the worlds software will be written, at least in part, by software. Already, 25% of Googles code is generated by AI, CEO Sundar Pichai said last October. By 2028, projects research firm Gartner, 75% of enterprise developers will use AI tools in their work. This trend is reflected in programmers embrace of products such as GitHub Copilot and Cursor, which let them call on generative AI to fill in some of the specific code as they tackle a projectessentially a fancy form of autocomplete for software engineering. The next step beyond that is AI coding assistance thats more agenticcapable of handling at least certain tasks from start to finish without constant supervision. Thats what a San Francisco startup called Factory offers with its platform, which officially debuts today. Our mission, at a high level, is to bring autonomy to software engineering, says Factory CEO Matan Grinberg, who founded the company with CTO Eno Reyes. Its platform includes agentsFactory calls them Droidsthat automate tasks in the software development lifecycle, and in particular tasks that developers don’t want to dotesting, debugging, refactoring, migrations, all that ugly stuff, explains Grinberg. Factory aims to go beyond the code-autocomplete features offered by tools such as GitHub Copilot. Rather than replacing something like the GitHub Copilot, Factory aims to provide a new layer for software projects thats compatible with the processes and products a team already has in place. For those who use Copilot, it’s like, Okay, coolI brought this down from [Factory], says Grinberg. Now there’s some other things I want to do. I had a bit of an existential crisis Grinberg and Reyes were respectively 24 and 23 when they started Factory in 2023by all accounts, a whirlwind of an experience. It started when Grinberg, whod studied string theory at Princeton and was working on a PhD in physics at Berkeley, suddenly began questioning his trajectory in life. I realized that I had spent basically the last decade obsessed with physics, he says, and I was only doing it because it was hard, not because I actually loved it. Which is obviously a horrible reason to pursue a career path. So, I had a bit of an existential crisis. Grinberg found a new obsession in AI, a technology whose destiny had been permanently altered by the arrival of ChatGPT. He was particularly fascinated by program synthesis (later better known as code generation): the science of teaching software to write software. He became a regular at AI hackathons, including the one where he met Reyes, whod written his thesis on deep learning and worked on language models at Microsoft and Hugging Face. (The two had been at Princeton at the same time anddespite having overlapping circles of friends had somehow managed not to know each other.) At Hugging Face, I was working with Databricks, Bloomberg, Grammarlyeveryone wanted code gen, says Reyes. Hed already collaborated on an AI code generator for finance applications. Theres way more opportunity here, he remembers thinking. Factorys platform lets users select code and other data to incorporate into collections called Workflows. This is where a classic Silicon Valley element of serendipity kicked in. At almost the same moment Grinberg and Reyes connected, Grinberg had sent an unsolicited email to Shaun Maguire, a partner at venture capital titan Sequoia, seeking career advice. Its very rare that cold emails actually turn into something, says Maguire. But like Grinberg, Maguire had a background in high-energy physics theory. And when he learned that Grinberg had coauthored a paper with legendary physicist Juan Maldacena, the credential blew his socks off. In person, Maguire was even more impressed by Grinberg: I was shocked that not only does this guy like have the IQ to write a string theory paper with Juan Maldacena as an undergrad, but he also has charisma and sales ability and empathy. He immediately encouraged Grinberg to pivot from PhD student to startup foundera goal Grinberg now acknowledges hed already had in mind, though hed kept it to himself. A week later, Grinberg returned with the idea that became Factory. By then, the GitHub Copilot had shown that AI could produce lines of code usable in a production environment. But as the name Copilot indicates, it was doing so under the watchful eye of a human programmer. Grinberg was thinking ahead to AI that could perform some straightforward tasks more independentlyin other words, agentic AI, though nobody was bandying around the term at the time. His point was, Copilot is great, but soon we’re going to have junior developers in a box, remembers Maguire. And that’s what he wanted to work towards. Sequoia helped get Grinberg and Reyes on their way by leading Factorys $5 million seed round of funding. It followed up by leading a $15 million Series A round in 2024. Delegating away some tasks Grinberg emphasizes that Factory doesnt envision AI taking over coding in a sweeping fashion anytime soon. Instead, the exact nature of the human-computer collaboration will vary from area to area. Software developers of the future will be delegating away some tasks, he says. They will be pairing with AI on others. And they wil be more directly hands-on working on some things with suggestions from AI as they do it. In a demo, he showed me how the companys platform uses AI to let engineering teams create shareable, easily digestible collections of all the code and other data associated with a particular project. Known as Workflows, they dont just help humans keep tabs on whats where. Theyre also a starting point for the Droid agents, which can take on useful grunt work relating to the code encompassed by a Workflow. For example, many programmers use a system called Mermaid to create diagrams about works in progresssay, a chart documenting all the dependencies that various blocks of code might have on each other. Instead of personally writing the lines of JavaScript necessary to create a Mermaid diagram, a user might have a Droid do the job and then save the results as a code snippet for later use. Similarly, if a project has code that lacks commentsembedded explanations documenting what the software is doing and how it does ita Droid can add them. Among the software development tasks Factorys AI can assist with is one of the most basic of them all: debugging. Those are examples of tasks that many teams might happily offload to AI. But the whole point is that users can ask Droids to undertake assignments on the flysomething as spontaneous as Hey, can you generate me a customer usage dashboard? says Grinberg. Such a dashboard could draw on any relevant data the user added to the Workflow in question. And like everything Droids create, it would be reusable. Of course, theres nothing new about using dashboards to help wrangle complex projects. In the past, however, theyve been one-size-fits-all tools hard-coded by a platform provider. By using generative AI, Factory wants to pioneer a more fluid approach in which its customers can call on Droids to construct the functionality they want when they want it. Instead of being set in stone, says Reyes, a teams working environment can consist in part of LLM-generated, malleable pieces of content. That malleability includes the ability to choose the large language models that power Factorys AI: We support everything, basically, says Grinberg. Even freshly-minted, cutting-edge models are on the list, including xAIs Grok 3 (announced last week) and Anthropics Claude Sonnet 3.7 (announced on Monday). By riding atop all the major LLMs, Factory expects to get more powerful as they do, opening up scenarios where Droids grow competent at work thats presently beyond their skill set. Building for what’s going to be possible in a year or two is how we got here first, says Reyes. And we’re already building for what will be possible a year or two in the future. Which is not to say that Factory fully understands how its customers will use its platform. As with all things generative AI, nobody knows for sure what it can and cant do well until someone gives it a try. We just want a ton of people to see this new paradigm of interacting with software, says Grinberg. It’s just going to be so much fun to have all these people who have really strong opinions get their hands dirty.
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