Business & Tech NYT: Trump’s Silicon Valley ‘AI and Crypto Czar’ David Sacks Apparently Enriching Himself and Friends In White House Role SF’s own right-wing VC billionaire David Sacks was named the Trump administration’s ‘AI and Crypto Czar’ last year, and a New York Times analysis says that since then, his investments have hit the jackpot over policies he helped craft.
SF News AI Companies Now ‘Disrupting’ SF Rental Market By Giving People Free Apartments, Rent Stipends It will make renters sick that they have to compete with AI sector workers whose cash-flush companies pay their rent for them. It will make renters even sicker to hear those AI companies do this to make their workplaces like “a frat house.”
Business & Tech Can’t Imagine Why, But Elon Musk’s AI Chatbot Was 'Glitching' About ‘White Genocide’ In South Africa Elon Musk’s AI tool Grok has gone a on a bizarre bender where it’s spewing answers about fictional South African “white genocide” to completely unrelated queries, raising questions of whether Musk’s crackpot racism is baked into the product.
Business & Tech Mark Zuckerberg Gets Roasted for Saying the Average American Has 'Fewer Than Three Friends’ While Pushing AI Chatbots Is Mark Zuckerberg okay? The internet is certainly questioning his grip on reality over his comment on a new podcast, while he was hyping Facebook’s AI chatbots, when he said that the average American has “fewer than three friends.”
Business & Tech SF AI Startup Founder Dethrones Taylor Swift as World’s Youngest Self-Made Female Billionaire You may not have heard of Scale AI co-founder Lucy Guo, but she just passed Taylor Swift as the youngest self-made billionaire woman, though that’s all based on her ownership stake in a company she no longer works for, and might not even be profitable.
Business & Tech AI Company Databricks Declares It Will ‘Invest Over $1 Billion’ in Downtown SF With Big Conference, New HQ Flush with their latest $10 billion fundraising round, the cloud-based AI platform firm Databricks recently signed a 150,000 square-foot lease at One Sansome, and is now committing to keeping their annual conference in SF for five more years.
SF Restaurants, Food & Drink Keep An Eye Out For Hog Island Oyster Co. During Tomorrow's Super Bowl Hog Island Oyster Co. will be featured in Google’s Super Bowl ad, showcasing their mix of sustainable farming and AI-powered tools for streamlining operations and enhancing customer service.
SF News Family of OpenAI Whistleblower Sues SFPD, Demands Access to Investigation Records While the SFPD ruled that the November death of SF engineer and OpenAI whistleblower Suchir Balaji was a suicide, his family has their doubts. And now they’re suing the SFPD for the release of the case’s investigative records.
Business & Tech Elon Musk Fumes as $500 Billion AI Data Center Investment Comes From Sam Altman and Not Him The completely unproven and unreliable AI sector says it’s going to build $500 billion worth of data centers with Trump’s blessing, and with AI safeguards now repealed, that’s a lot of deepfake porn to produce. But Elon Musk is mad that he’s not in on the action.
Business & Tech AI Flub May Be Behind Mattel’s ‘Wicked’ Dolls Promoting Porn Website on Packaging Something bad happened that made Mattel’s new line of dolls for the upcoming film “Wicked” accidentally promote a link to a porn website. Funny, this happened just months after Mattel started designing its packaging with an AI tool from San Jose-based Adobe.
Business & Tech OpenAI Raises All-Time Record Largest VC Round Ever, But Still Hemorrhaging Money Like Mad Is it a “success” when your company rakes in an all-time record $6.6 billion venture capital round, but expects to lose nearly that same amount of money this year? Welcome to SF’s new AI economy, where OpenAI just raised the largest VC round of all time.
SF News After SF Supes Banned It Locally, Rent Price Software RealPage Gets Sued by US Justice Department Less than a month after the SF Board of Supervisors banned a rental price algorithm tool from being used here, the company called RealPage that makes that tool was just sued by the US Department of Justice for illegal price-fixing.
SF News SF City Attorney Sues the Websites That Are Cranking Out AI Deepfake Pornography The first government lawsuit against websites and apps creating deepfake AI nude images of people is coming from right here in San Francisco, as City Attorney David Chiu is suing the top 16 purveyors of fake nude images created without the subjects' consent.
SF News AC Transit Says It Will Start Using ‘AI’ Cameras to Bust Cars Parked in Bus Lanes Starting today, the East Bay public transit agency AC Transit will use cameras that they claim are “equipped with artificial intelligence” to cite cars parked in bus lanes, though the agency won’t start issuing $110 citations until early October.
SF News SF Supervisors Ban AI Software Used to Set Rental Prices, Arguing the Technology is Price-Fixing and Collusion San Francisco is the first city in the nation to ban AI software used to set rent prices, as the Board of Supervisors unanimously approved banning algorithms used to maximize what landlords charge for rent.
Business & Tech Apple Announces Their Plunge Into Generative AI in WWDC Keynote Apple’s WWDC keynote showed the tech giant’s jump into AI is along the lines of a personal assistant with more privacy emphasis than its competitors, though many features are copycats of what Google and Facebook have already offered for years.
Business & Tech Nvidia Stock Rally Made the Company More Valuable Than Apple This Week, But Government Antitrust Probe Looming Santa Clara-based chipmaker Nvidia briefly toppled Apple as the second most-valuable company in the US after a market rally on Wednesday, but the feds may have Nvidia, Microsoft, and OpenAI in their sights for an antitrust investigation.
Business & Tech ChatGPT Reportedly Rolling Out a ‘Google Killer’ Search Engine, But Failed to Do So In Underwhelming Monday Demo There are reports that new tech industry darling OpenAI is working on an AI-powered search engine they hope will overtake Google, but the company’s ballyhooed Monday announcement did not show anything that will have Google shaking in their shoes.
Business & Tech Sure Enough, OpenAI Is Considering Allowing Its Tools to Generate Porn The artificial intelligence company OpenAI is considering allowing its tools to “responsibly” create AI-generated NSFW content, though it's hard to imagine users would have many goals other than to create a tidal wave of deepfake pornography.
Business & Tech Bay Area Man Arrested For Stealing AI Trade Secrets From Google, Shipping Them to Chinese Companies A Chinese national living in Newark was arrested by the feds for allegedly stealing AI technology from Google, and secretly sending the information to two Chinese companies he was working for on the sly.
Business & Tech Meta Oversight Board Rules Altered Biden Video Can Stay on Facebook, But Urges New Rules After the QAnon crowd widely shared an altered video clip of President Joe Biden last year, the Meta Oversight Board just ruled the video can remain on Facebook. But the board is also recommending a massive policy overhaul on manipulated content.
SF News San Rafael Couple Nearly Scammed Out of $15,000 by AI Fake of Their Son’s Voice We are in era where AI can recreate someone’s voice, and scammers are taking notice, with one San Rafael couple almost paying $15,000 to con artists who’d accurately mimicked their son’s voice in a panicked phone call.
Business & Tech OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Has Coyote Trouble at His $27 Million Russian Hill Mansion Even buying a $27 million home in a tony SF neighborhood will not keep the coyotes off your property, as artificial intelligence mogul Sam Altman admits in an interview with Time magazine that he’s got a coyote that refuses to leave his San Francisco yard.
Business & Tech Google Launches Updated AI Chatbot That They Say Is More Powerful Than ChatGPT Google’s new Gemini update to their so-called “ChatGPT killer” Bard claims to make it more powerful than its competitor, but says so in corporate-speak that makes little narrative sense, and in language that sounds like it was written by AI.
Business & Tech AI Engineers Convinced They Can Fix SF’s Problems at Hackathon This weekend saw more than a hundred AI programmers and engineers meet up to “build AI solutions to the most pressing challenges in San Francisco,” at a Fort Mason hackathon that hoped to move fast and break bureaucracy.
