What's up: It's official. Meta announces its “Superintelligence Labs” unit; Canada drops digital-service tax; Steven Rosenbush on why Corporate America didn’t hesitate to go all-in on AI.

Good morning. Paychecks for top technology leaders at U.S. companies are increasing faster than the number of letters in their titles, a reflection of expanding responsibilities in the age of AI.

“Technology leaders have wised up,” Alyse Egol, a senior client partner of Korn Ferry’s digital, technology and security officers practice, tells the WSJ’s Belle Lin. “They’re saying, ‘My value is above and beyond just keeping the machine running.’”

Consider: The median pay for CTOs rose 30.81% in 2024 from the previous year, to roughly $2.4 million, according to data from C-Suite Comp, an executive and board pay analytics firm. The base compensation for CIOs, meanwhile, is growing by roughly 20% to 30%, said Martha Heller, chief executive of IT executive recruiting firm Heller Search Associates.

For the CIOs taking home the biggest paychecks, that comes with an increase in the number of titles they hold. Seven of the 10 top-paid CIOs have more than one title, with six holding the dual titles of CIO and chief digital officer. Two of the top-paid CIOs also hold the title chief transformation officer.

“From a budget perspective, it’s two functional leaderships for the price of one,” said Heller. “When somebody reports to a CEO and they have a bunch of different titles, it means the CEO is considering them to be a partner.” Read the story. 

It’s official. Mark Zuckerberg announced a new “Superintelligence” division within Meta Platforms, WSJ reports. Former Scale CEO Alexandr Wang will lead the team as chief AI officer, and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman will lead the company’s work on AI products, according to an internal memo.

The new organization, called Meta Superintelligence Labs, will house Meta’s fundamental AI research team, its Llama team, and the team that develops Meta’s AI products—as well as a new lab focused on “developing the next generation of our models.”

Zuckerberg also announced 11 new hires for the team—several from OpenAI, two from Google DeepMind and one from Anthropic. Meta has also hired three additional OpenAI employees from its Zurich office, the Journal previously reported.

Canada’s finance department was set to collect billions of dollars from U.S. tech companies when payments were due under a digital-services tax that Canada’s Liberal government implemented last year. On Sunday, the government did an about-face, two days after President Trump announced that he had terminated trade talks with Canada over the “egregious” tax, WSJ reports.

👉 Implemented last year, the 3% tax on technology companies’ revenue from providing digital services to Canadian users or sales of Canadian user data had fueled opposition from America’s biggest tech companies, lobby groups and senior congressional leaders and officials in both administrations.

Apple said it will delay offering some planned new features to users in the European Union when it releases its iOS 26 software update this year because regulations are making it harder to bring them to market in the region.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

WSJ: Is there any one sector you are leaning into?

Vibhor Rastogi: We are strategic investors, so ultimately we want to invest on behalf of Citi. We want to make sure that Citi benefits from our investments. In certain areas, we want to partner rather than make an investment. Foundation models are one of those areas.

It’s in the other areas where we think that venture capital will help catalyze that ecosystem.  

Most of the time it's applications. We want to invest in companies where Citi can start using the product. So this would be companies like [enterprise AI search company] Glean. We invested in a company called Poolside, which is in the software coding and development space. And also invested in a company AlphaSense, which is used by research analysts to analyze public filings and do sentimental public filings.

So it's examples like those where AI innovation can be used either to drive more revenue or lower operational costs.

WSJ: What about those startups that could disrupt the banking technology stack?

Rastogi: We call them “eyes and ears investments.” And it is very much part of our mandate. If an AI-first bank started and somehow they were doing it way better than a traditional bank, it would absolutely be something we would look at.

But having said, what we have seen is that financial institutions are embracing AI. It's one of the technologies where they have jumped in, probably much faster than some other technologies.

WSJ: We are hearing a lot these days about AI superintelligence. What's your take?

Rastogi: Very bullish. There are many fundamental factors that just make me much more optimistic about supintelligence. All the data that we have out there, both corporate data and public data, all the compute infrastructure that's out there, the fact that you can do it in the cloud, which means that I don't have to own supercomputers to do this. The cost of inferencing has come down by a factor of a thousand…Cost…data…models, I think all the right ingredients are there for us to be able to at least aspire towards superintelligence.

WSJ: Do you work with AI agents?

Rastogi: As a VC? Yes. No, VCs cannot be automated! [laughs]. You always think that you are sort of somehow insulated from any disruption. The investment decision, because of some of the judgment factors like we were discussing, the, you know, the founder sitting across the table, right? You may be able to have an agent give you guidance. But when you're committing tens of millions of dollars, you probably still will have the last step still be human-driven.

But a lot of the quantitative work is already getting automated.

At some point, maybe you have two humans and two AI agents and they're all voting on the investment memo. So that could also happen.

Amazon on the cusp of using more robots than humans in its warehouses. The e-commerce giant has now deployed more than one million robots in those workplaces, the most it has ever had and near the count of human workers at the facilities, WSJ exclusively reports. 

Hollywood pushes back on AI companies using copyrighted work without permission. With the White House about to issue its artificial-intelligence action plan, America’s creators are mounting a campaign to push back on any use of their work without permission or compensation, WSJ reports. 

The small companies that manufacture Nvidia chips may be a better bet for investors. Nvidia has reached a nearly $4 trillion valuation by designing and selling AI chips. Yet investors haven’t given chip-equipment makers, like Applied Materials and Lam Research, the plaudits they have showered on AI chip designers, WSJ's Asa Fitch writes. 

Senate Republicans trudged through a marathon session that stretched from Monday morning into early Tuesday, struggling to corral enough votes to pass the party’s “big, beautiful bill” and move the legislation one step further toward President Trump’s desk ahead of lawmakers’ self-imposed July 4 deadline. (WSJ)

California lawmakers on Monday night rolled back one of the most stringent environmental laws in the country, after Gov. Gavin Newsom muscled through the effort in a dramatic move to combat the state’s affordability crisis. (WSJ) 

Kim Jong Un held the first public commemoration for North Korean troops who died fighting in support of Russia’s war with Ukraine, in a ceremony likely aimed at preparing the population for further such deployments. (WSJ)

Israel’s military said it would reorganize the way it operates around newly established aid-distribution sites, after a series of incidents in which troops fired toward desperate crowds that they say posed a threat to soldiers left hundreds of Palestinians dead, according to local health authorities. (WSJ)

The WSJ CIO Journal Team is Steven Rosenbush, Isabelle Bousquette and Belle Lin.

The editor, Tom Loftus, can be reached at thomas.loftus@wsj.com.