The World From The Blue Owl Perch: One Year On
This month marks the one-year anniversary of The Blue Owl Group, a global advisory firm founded by a group of senior advisors, all of whom are talented, battle-tested former members of the Twitter public policy and communications teams.
We want to express our heartfelt gratitude to our exceptional clients and partners. Your trust and support have been instrumental in our success over the past year. We are truly thankful for the opportunity to collaborate with such innovative and forward-thinking individuals and organizations.
Over the past year, we have leveraged our unique expertise to help partners navigate the complex interactions between new technologies and older institutions, and their mutual impact on our world. As we look back and mark this milestone, we wanted to take the opportunity to offer some reflections from our time together and what lies ahead.
Competition and Collaboration in AI Development Must Be Advanced
We believe in the power of transparency, collaboration, and the decentralization of technologies that can drive positive systemic change. As democracies face new and confounding challenges, the power of corporate monopolies and autocratic political tendencies loom large. In line with our commitment to "reclaim the Internet's potential and redefine its story," we strongly support competitive, open source AI development.
Open source AI aligns with our vision of a more competitive, equitable, and innovative technological landscape, where knowledge and advancements are shared for the collective benefit of society. By promoting open source AI, we can foster a more diverse and inclusive community of developers, researchers, and users, leading to more ethical and transparent AI systems. We believe this approach not only accelerates innovation but also protects competition, and ensures greater scrutiny and accountability. Open source approaches also address critical — and widely held — concerns about AI bias, safety, and societal impact.
As the global conversation around cybersecurity progresses, open source, too, presents an opportunity for participatory red teaming exercises, adapting public-interest code faster and more cheaply, and ensures that top technical talent — including those outside the gates of elite institutions — have a seat at the table. Supporting open source AI development is a concrete step towards realizing our goal of harnessing technology to enrich the human experience and create a more open, meaningful, and inclusive Internet that serves as a uniquely transformational public good. How to effectively craft a public policy framework for AI that advances its best uses, while putting in place appropriate guardrails for risks, will likely be one of the most significant debates of our era. It’s a debate we are keen to play a leading role in.
Climate Tech Is Primed For A Breakout
As the urgency to tackle climate change garners increasing support from people across different political landscapes globally, it's clear that addressing its risks and consequences will be a top priority on global policy agendas in the coming decade. Our team wrote previously about this emerging phenomenon, called The Climate Bloc.
Given the significant environmental and economic impacts of climate change, turning to innovative technology to assist us in addressing it means that climate tech is on the brink of explosive growth. Where climate tech innovation could have its greatest positive impact for our communities and quality of life is in the energy sector. A revolution in innovation, investment, and job creation is underway. As consensus builds globally across various political spectrums that this energy revolution must be ever more renewable and sustainable, we anticipate that over the next five years that this dynamic will result in a once-in-a-generation moment of economic, technological, and political opportunity.
Specifically, we believe this diverse movement is primed to transcend its historically slow gains, driven by urgent necessity and technological breakthroughs. There is a lot of resourcing flushing around the system, too, as a result of the bipartisan, landmark Inflation Reduction Act, and clear mandates from the EU that drive stability and continuity for investors. From increased data center demand and the explosion in domestic solar use, to battery storage and the prospect of fusion, new, emerging technologies spawned by these public policy actions and investments are poised to permeate every pillar of our economy — becoming as commonplace and transformative as the digital revolution.
We believe that supporting these firms now is not just an environmental imperative, but a strategic opportunity to be at the forefront of the next major economic, technological, and political tipping point. By leveraging our expertise in building coalitions, working across aisles and borders, navigating complex policy landscapes, and driving impactful campaigns, we are uniquely positioned to help tech innovators scale their solutions — and create lasting, positive change for our planet and global economy.
Disinformation in the Age of AI is a Rising Threat
Drawing from our collective experience at Twitter, we at The Blue Owl Group have witnessed firsthand the rapid evolution of disinformation — and the complex dynamics of how we collectively and effectively manage it. What once manifested as isolated incidents, or stemming from state actors like Russia, China, or Iran, has morphed into a pervasive force, with tangible real-world consequences posing a threat to the health of the information ecosystem in many democracies. From incitement of violence to eroding trust in our democratic institutions, and fragmenting our public sphere into competing realities, the quality and veracity of the information we consume is reshaping public life. As our 2024 global report series has shown, while AI is not yet the primary vector for disinformation, it introduces novel threats that demand vigilant attention. The emergence of the "disinformation industrial complex" — a network of state and non-state actors, technologies, and methodologies designed to spread false narratives and sow societal discord — poses a growing geopolitical and domestic challenge.
We believe that the convergence of societal challenges and technological advancements creates a challenging landscape for businesses, start-ups, and civil society leaders, many of whom are valiantly attempting to navigate an increasingly divided and contaminated information environment. Most importantly, democracies worldwide, too, face an unprecedented challenge: a fragmentation of our reality that threatens the foundations of social cohesion, electoral processes, and informed decision-making.
As these forces converge and mutate, the need for sophisticated, adaptive strategies to combat disinformation — particularly in the election sphere — has never been more critical. This year, more people than any other point in world history are taking part in that most intimate and consequential of acts: voting. We have had the opportunity over the last 12 months to examine and assess the evolution of disinformation as AI emerges in such civic exercises, and to tap our insights and experiences in supporting election integrity. As more elections loom in the second half of 2024, including the pivotal U.S. election, we expect this theme to remain front and center in global public policy formation.
Regulatory Upheaval Will Become the Norm
The global tech regulatory landscape is evolving — both fast and slow. At the core of this change is the intensification of a major power struggle — once fought behind closed doors, now in the open — between nation states, tech giants, and financiers of innovation. In the EU, the Digital Services Act (DSA), the Digital Markets Act, and AI Act are asserting government control over digital spaces, while India's tech boom is accompanied by stringent data localization laws, reflecting a push for digital sovereignty. As the specter of economic and geopolitical instability looms larger — not to mention divergent historical and cultural approaches to speech, safety, and data protection — expect the rate of laws pertaining to platforms to dramatically increase. More and more countries — from the UK and Australia to Mexico and Brazil — are keen to expand their jurisdictional latitude, and to use their power to bring online firms operating within their borders to heel.
The U.S., too, is ramping up antitrust efforts, challenging the dominance of Big Tech monopolies, all in the backdrop of rapid AI advancement fueled by many of these same big companies. These regulatory moves are increasingly intertwined with geopolitical strategies, as states vie for technological supremacy and data control. Naturally, these political dynamics are made all the more acute by worsening territorial conflict, economic instability, and great power rivalry.
Increasingly, major tech players are acting — either by choice or necessity — like quasi-sovereign entities in their engagements with governments internationally. And as countries like China and Russia assert their own models of Internet governance that better reflect their illiberal and domineering tendencies, the collision of the Internet and realpolitik will become ever more central to domestic and international policy. This creates a new dynamic in which “corporate diplomacy” is a core necessity for technology companies that operate on a global stage.
At The Blue Owl Group, we have spent our careers being the tech diplomats in these rooms and know well that predicting outcomes in this volatile environment is challenging. We believe that understanding these intersecting forces of state power, corporate influence, and geopolitical strategy will be crucial for navigating the evolving tech landscape.
The Perch Ahead
One of the original premises for founding Blue Owl Group was our belief that old school advisory services are dead. This perspective has been vindicated over the past 12 months. It’s clear to us that the world of work has dramatically changed. More people are operating fractionally, adopting a portfolio career that allows them to do lots of different things at the same time, and exercising agency over their work and impact. Even as culture swings like a pendulum from employee-centric to employer-centric — most clearly observable in tech — many still feel uniquely empowered and entrepreneurial.
What is clear is that systems of authority — at the corporate, state, and international level — are slowly attempting to catch up with the speed of our information age. We believe we have the right operating rhythm to meet this new normal, scaling up and down with ease, and deploying a uniquely well-connected global network. As we said at our launch: we aren’t burdened with hierarchy, excessive admin, or a physical office footprint. This allows for a frictionless operational approach and we are especially quick at standing up our services to meet the speed of today’s information environment.
We are grateful to our partners and supporters who have been with us on this journey. Our work together has been both fulfilling and enriching. As we embark on our second year, we look forward to continuing our mission: to advance technologies, services, and public policies that are central to responding to the biggest societal challenges facing humanity today.
For more information, please visit www.blueowlgrp.com
