Business & Tech Trump Administration Still Used Anthropic's Claude In Iran Strikes, Hours After Trump Banned Anthropic Despite Trump calling SF’s Anthropic a “Radical Left AI company run by people who have no idea what the real World is all about” and banning government use of their AI tool Claude, the administration still had to use Claude in its Iran attacks.
Business & Tech Pentagon Trying to Force SF-Based Anthropic to Weaken AI Security for Killing Purposes, Anthropic Not Backing Down Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth complains that it’s “woke AI” that SF’s own Anthropic won’t give him AI-controlled weapons and massive domestic surveillance, and is now threatening to blacklist the company.
Business & Tech Elon Musk Looking to Merge Highly Profitable SpaceX With Money-Losing xAI Recurring Epstein files character Elon Musk may merge one of his most successful ventures with one of his least, and is reportedly on the verge of combining rocket company SpaceX with Bay Area-based xAI.
Business & Tech Giant Holographic Schlong on Muni Is Actually an AI Ad, Muni Yanks It From Circulation A real cock-up in the annals of Muni advertising, as users noted what appeared to be a holographic penis on the side of a bus, though it’s just an AI company ad that may have been approved willy-nilly.
Business & Tech SF-Based Instacart Dumps Its ‘AI Price-Adjusting’ Tool That Charged Some Customers 23% More for the Same Items After a report that found Instacart was using an AI tool that charged some customers as much as 23% more for the exact same items, the shopping platform now says they’re abandoning that tool following some serious blowback.
Business & Tech SF-Based Instacart Now Under Scrutiny Over Their AI Price-Adjusting Tool A recent study found Instacart was charging some shoppers up to 23% more for the same items from the same stores in an AI experiment, and now the Federal Trade Commission is looking into the matter.
Business & Tech Report: SF-Based Instacart Charging Some Customers as Much as 23% More for the Same Items, Thanks to AI Pricing People buying the exact same item from the exact same store are sometimes paying a price as much as 23% higher on the platform Instacart, thanks to AI algorithms that show buyers different prices.
Business & Tech SF-Based Catering Website Swaps Restaurants’ Real Food Pictures With AI Pictures, Restaurants Get Pissed These bagels claim to be Boichik Bagels on the catering website Forkable, but they are fake AI-generated bagels, as perhaps evidenced by the oddly uniform size of the bagel slices, all slightly larger than a normal bagel half. Now restaurants listed on the website are furious.
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.
