Business & Tech Forget the 'Crypto Bowl,' This Super Bowl Will Be Chock Full of AI Ads — Here Are Five of Them Expect all the big players in AI to be spending lavishly on ads during the Super Bowl this year, including rivals OpenAI and Anthropic — with the latter taking not one but two swings at its bigger competitor.
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 It Looks Like Elon Musk's Suit Against OpenAI Over Abandoned Nonprofit Mission Is Headed to Trial It had seemed earlier like Elon Musk's dogged, seemingly vengeful pursuit of OpenAI, which he co-founded, over its swerve toward being a for-profit enterprise, wasn't going anywhere. But a ruling from judge on Thursday points to the parties heading to a trial sometime this year.
Business & Tech California Now Investigating xAI Over Grok's Non-Consensual Deepfake Imagery Elon Musk is facing his umpteenth controversy this week as the worldwide outcry grows over the Grok chatbot's image-editing capability, which combined with X has created a tool for producing and spreading non-consensual, sexualized deepfakes and child sexual abuse material.
Business & Tech xAI's Grok Being Blocked, Investigated By Multiple Countries Over the Creation of Sexualized Deepfakes Elon Musk's no-holds-barred AI chatbot Grok is again having one of its holds barred as regulators across the globe are balking at its widespread production of sexualized images, based on real images posted to X.
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 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.
