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AI sector says it’s going to build $500 billion worth of data centers with Trump’s blessing, and with AI safeguards now repealed, that’s a lot of deepfake porn to produce.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.
Business & Tech Tech Bigwigs Zuckerberg, Musk, Altman and Others Hold Private Meeting With Congress on Regulating AI In what seems like inviting the foxes to a forum on henhouse safety, the biggest names in AI held a secret meeting in Washington, D.C. yesterday to advise Senate leaders on how to regulate the fast-growing AI industry.
Business & Tech Dreamforce Arrives Tuesday, Bringing Celebrities, Street Closures, Traffic, and Breathless AI Hype Some 43,000 corporate types will converge on South of Market for SF’s biggest conference Dreamforce, which starts Tuesday, making a mess of traffic, but hopefully also a mess of money for the local hospitality biz.
SF Politics Biden's In Town to Debate AI's Future With Tech Leaders; Meanwhile, AI Biden and AI Trump Are Debating on Twitch It's strange days, indeed! President Joe Biden is in San Francisco today, attending fundraisers for his re-election campaign and convening a forum with tech people to talk about the future of artificial intelligence. And meanwhile, someone has set up a video AI on Twitch with a chatbot Biden.
SF News Car Wars: Mercedes Driver Slams Into San Francisco Tesla Dealership Mercedes SLK300 just crashed into Van Ness Tesla Store. pic.twitter.com/3D7n2PQ3V2— Pavel Uvarov (@puvar) September 4, 2017 It was fancy car v fancy car on Van Ness Avenue Monday afternoon, when
Arts & Entertainment Amazon Put Alexa Inside A Camera So She Can Give You Fashion Advice (And Maybe Spy On You) Behold the Amazon Echo Look, which the company is billing as a "hands-free camera style assistant," but which could, before you know it, end up being a creepy talking robot that watches your
