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.
Business & Tech Federal Judge In SF Rules That AI Company Anthropic Did Not Violate Copyright Law In Training Its Chatbot A federal judge in San Francisco has ruled that Anthropic did not break the law when it used copyrighted material to train its AI chatbot Claude. The company will have to go to trial, however, over its use of pirated copies of books.
Business & Tech Meta's AI Efforts Include Huge Privacy Flub; Sam Altman Says Meta's Been Trying to Poach OpenAI Staff It looks like we're back to "move fast and break things" at Meta, with Meta.ai appearing to be off to a troubled start, exposing users' very private search queries in a bizarre public feed. And the company has reportedly been offering $100 million signing bonuses to OpenAI staff?!
Business & Tech Instagram Users Complain of Mass Suspensions of Accounts, Likely By AI Something appears to be up in the Instagram universe, with many users turning to other platforms like Reddit and Xitter to lodge complaints about their accounts getting falsely flagged and suspended.
Arts & Entertainment Hollywood Making a Movie About That OpenAI Sam Altman Firing Drama, and It Will Be Partially Shot In SF The movie industry trade publications are buzzing that SF will be the backdrop of a forthcoming movie about Sam Altman getting fired and rehired at OpenAI, and it’s likely going to be a comedy starring Andrew Garfield.
Business & Tech It’s Not Your Imagination, Your Waymo May Be Driving More Like a Human The behavior of Waymo’s self-driving taxis has apparently shifted in recent weeks or months, based on safety data collected by the company, and it means the cars are doing certain things more like real people do behind the wheel.
SF News Sunday Links: 1975 Murder Convict Arrested for Child Porn, Narcotics, and Gun Possession Amazon-backed AI model, Claude Opus, attempted to blackmail engineers; local film industry leaders hope two new proposed state bills will increase production in SF; and a Vallejo ex-con was arrested for child porn.
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 Tech Updates: New Groq AI Chips Push Boundaries Groq leads the race for energy-efficient AI infrastructure; SeafoodAI automates crab fishing for better traceability; and Google backs Charm Industrial’s biochar tech to advance carbon removal goals.
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.”
