Business & Tech Altman, Musk, and Zuckerberg Named Person(s) of the Year by Time Magazine, as 'Architects of AI' Time Magazine, for what it's worth these days in terms of cultural relevance, has named the 'Architects of AI' as its Person of the Year for 2025, and these multiple persons include Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, and Mark Zuckerberg.
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 East Bay Man Arrested for Alleged Scheme to Smuggle Nvidia GPUs and AI Chips to China The DOJ arrested a San Leandro man and three others as part of an alleged conspiracy to evade US trade laws by smuggling powerful Nvidia GPUs and AI chips to China through Thailand and Malaysia. The man allegedly bragged that his dad did the same work for the CCP.
Business & Tech Anthropic Says Its AI Chatbot Was Used By Chinese Hackers for Large-Scale Cyber Attack In what sounds like both a word of warning and weirdly a little bit of bragging, SF-based Anthropic says that its AI chatbot Claude was used by state-sponsored hackers in China to commit a large-scale cyberattack on American companies.
Business & Tech OpenAI Not Looking at an IPO Anytime Soon, CFO Says OpenAI, which had previously been thought to be looking at an IPO in the next two years, may be holding off on that plan, according to comments made Wednesday by the company's CFO.
Arts & Entertainment Fake, Satirical Startup 'Replacement.AI' Puts Up Haunting Billboards In SF, NYC A satirical ad campaign from some as-yet-unidentified pranksters/performance artists has spent real money on multiple billboards in San Francisco and New York that satirize some of the "stop hiring humans" messaging of actual AI startups.
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 Sam Altman Is Looking Forward to When AI Takes His CEO Job So He Can Be a Full-Time Farmer Aspiring farmer Sam Altman is excited to take on the role full-time once his side hustle as OpenAI CEO is made obsolete by artificial intelligence. Altman anticipates machines will have the capability to fully outsmart humans by 2030.
SF News Day Around the Bay: Anthropic AI to Pay Authors, Publishers $1.5 Billion in Copyright Settlement Oakland-born figure skater Alysa Liu won’t be performing to the d4vd song she’d chosen for the Milan Olympics; Sinclair and Nexstar will be airing Jimmy Kimmel at their ABC affiliate stations Friday; and Anthropic has settled a lawsuit with authors and publishers alleging copyright infringement.
SF Restaurants, Food & Drink Asinine Website Ranks SF Restaurant Patrons By Hotness, Using AI A guy who likes crunching publicly available data has turned his sights on a "hot or not" style ratings map for restaurants in San Francisco, LA, and New York, which is powered by AI and yields some highly questionable results.
Business & Tech OpenAI Rumored to Be Considering Move Out of California Due to Pushback Over Restructuring Executives at one of the leading names in the local AI boom, OpenAI, are reportedly "rattled" by ongoing pushback and regulatory setbacks in California regarding its move to restructure itself as a for-profit entity.
Business & Tech Report: Grok's Responses Have Indeed Been Getting More Right-Wing, Just Like Elon Musk If anyone doubted Elon Musk's integrity or his capacity to fulfill the promise of an unbiased, wholly fact-based AI chatbot that wasn't "woke," look no further than the latest version of Grok to have those doubts validated.
Business & Tech Elon Musk and xAI Sue Apple and OpenAI Claiming Anticompetitive Scheme In the ongoing feud between Elon Musk and seemingly every other player in the AI realm, but specifically OpenAI, his company xAI has now filed an antitrust lawsuit against Apple and OpenAI.
Business & Tech People Like Sam Altman and Eric Schmidt Are Calling Out the AI Bubble, Just as Meta Pauses AI Hiring Big names in Silicon Valley collectively seem to be saying the same thing about the AI boom lately, namely that it is looking more and more like a bubble, and that the rush to AGI (artificial general intelligence) may be very misguided.
Business & Tech Meta’s Policy Allowing Bots to Engage in ‘Romantic or Sensual’ Talk With Kids Prompts Senate Investigation Senator Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) announced Friday that he’s investigating Meta after it was discovered that the company’s policies allowed its AI chatbots to interact with children in a “romantic or sensual” manner.
Business & Tech Apple Unveils Plans for Tabletop Robot Companion and Home Security System In response to criticism that Apple has missed the boat on the AI revolution, the company is reportedly working on a new tabletop AI "companion" that could hit the market in two years, as well as home-security cameras, and a smart speaker with a display.
SF News NYT Gives Some Slightly Better PR to Berkeley Rationalist Group After Zizian Arrests The New York Times published a piece this week profiling the Berkeley-based Rationalist movement and its arguably cult-y, religious-y ways, and they never once mention the probably actual cult that spun out of their group.
Business & Tech Local Tech Company’s AI Agent ‘Panics,’ Deletes Production Data, Then Hallucinates Cover-Up Replit, a Bay Area–based coding platform, made headlines after its AI deleted a live database during a “vibe coding” session. Investor Jason Lemkin says the cover-up attempt was worse, but he’s still using Replit after what he called “mega improvements.”
Business & Tech Tech Bro Builds App to 'Cheat on Everything,' and a Former Classmate Creates One to Detect It A 21-year-old Columbia dropout built Cluely to help users “cheat on everything.” Now rebranded as a productivity tool, it’s facing scrutiny from critics, as well competition from Truely, an app by another Columbia student that detects stealth AI.
Business & Tech Turns Out, Meta's AI Data Centers Use Up a Lot of Water In Addition to Electricity Something that hasn't gotten enough attention is whether the entire AI enterprise is even sustainable, given how the computing power currently required, scaled upwards, uses incredible amounts of energy and water.
SF Politics SF City Hall Puts ChatGPT Tool to Work Across Multiple Departments Here in the capital of the AI boom, San Francisco, the city government has just rolled out a ChatGPT-powered tool for use by city workers — hopefully they'll still do their own fact-checking!
SF News Saturday Links: Federal Judge Issues Restraining Order Blocking Race-Based ICE Raids Some South Bay high schools are working to educate students about using AI tools ethically while curbing cheating; former Emeryville mayor John Bauters is now a contestant on reality show, 'The Snake'; and a federal judge has blocked ICE from conducting indiscriminate raids.
Business & Tech The Grok Chatbot Is Apparently Programmed to Check for Elon Musk's Opinions to Answer Questions Well well. Should it be at all shocking to learn that Elon Musk's xAI has built an AI chatbot that essentially seeks to parrot Musk's own views of the world whenever it gets the chance?
SF News Tech Bro Wants to Use Federal Land at Alameda Point for 'AI City,' Drafts Sample Executive Order A tech founder is calling for an executive order to fast-track a new “AI city” on 512 acres of federal land at Alameda Point — the site of an existing VA project and nesting grounds for endangered birds. City officials were never contacted, and the mayor called it a "head-scratcher."
Business & Tech Alarming Study Suggests Most AI Large-Language Models Resort to Blackmail, Other Harmful Behaviors If Threatened It's not far off from the world imagined in '2001: A Space Odyssey,' in which an AI opts to kill the humans it was working for when they are conspiring to shut it down. A new study by SF-based Anthropic suggests that such potentially harmful behaviors are common across most existing AI models.
