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.”
Business & Tech Meta Launches Standalone AI App, Hopes It Will Compete With ChatGPT If the Meta brand weren't so tarnished, one could see its standalone AI app doing fairly well. But will anyone actually care or use this thing?
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 News Boyfriend Allegedly Talked of AI Fears, Appeared to Have Mental Break In Days Before Kimberly Wong Murder More than a year after 30-year-old Scott Fisher was arraigned on charges of murdering the girlfriend he lived with in Presidio Heights, we are finally hearing many of the details of the investigation via a preliminary hearing.
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.
SF News Day Around the Bay: OpenAI Says DeepSeek May Have Used Their Tech to Build Their AI Model OpenAI says DeepSeek may have improperly harvested data from their tech; a San Mateo man has filed suit against Amazon for secretly tracking customers; and the brother of Oakland rapper Too Short was killed in a shooting this morning.
Business & Tech DeepSeek R1 Model Shows China Flexing Its Muscles In AI Race, Causing Silicon Valley Stocks to Slide A new AI model released by Chinese startup DeepSeek has caused a great flurry of buzz and consternation in the American tech world, and that was reflected in a bunch of Silicon Valley companies' stock prices Monday morning.
SF News Fraud, Fake Identities, and a Tesla: GameOn Founders Face Federal Charges San Francisco AI startup founders accused of years-long scheme involving falsified financials, forged emails, and a $4.2M home—all while failing to pay employees.
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 Apple Pulls Its AI News-Summary Tool After Major Errors Apple is yanking one of its first Apple Intelligence features to roll out, the one that summarizes news headlines from various sources to turn them into push notifications, which have turned out to be sometimes wildly false.
Business & Tech Parents of OpenAI Whistleblower Don't Believe He Died By Suicide, Order Second Autopsy There is a bit more intrigue around the tragic death late last month of former OpenAI researcher Suchir Balaji, who was found dead in his Lower Haight apartment of an apparent suicide.
Business & Tech OpenAI Whistleblower Found Dead In His SF Apartment Three months after publicly accusing his former employer, OpenAI, of infringing on copyrights when training its AI chatbot, 26-year-old Suchir Balaji was found dead in his Lower Haight apartment.
Business & Tech Google DeepMind Says They Have an AI Weather Model That Outperforms All Existing Models at 15-Day Forecasts Reliably predicting the weather more than a week out has been something of a Holy Grail in the meteorology industry for half a century.
Business & Tech Viral 84-Hour Workweek Guy Calls Himself 'San Franciscan,' Has Lived Here a Year and a Half You may have seen a story about a San Francisco AI startup founder who posted to X — where else? — about how he tells prospective hires that his company expects "no work-life-balance" and 84-hour workweeks, in order to weed out the less motivated.
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.
Business & Tech Meta Actually Paying Celebrities Like Judi Dench and Awkwafina to Use Their Voices For Its AI Tool Unlike OpenAI, which just went and hired an actress who sounded like Scarlett Johansson after ScarJo declined to voice an AI model for them, Meta appears to be actually paying some big-name celebrities to lend their voices for its new AI voice tool.
