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AI sector says it’s going to build $500 billion worth of data centers with Trump’s blessing, and with AI safeguards now repealed, that’s a lot of deepfake porn to produce.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.
Business & Tech Some Upheaval at OpenAI as Company Announces Plan to Become a For-Profit Enterprise OpenAI CEO Sam Altman made some public comments at a conference in Italy on Thursday indicating that the company intends to restructure and let go of its nonprofit structure, but he said the departures of several key executives a day earlier were unrelated.
SF Politics President Biden to Host Global AI Safety Summit In San Francisco In November In late November, when, god willing, we will have a new president-elect whose name is not Trump, President Joe Biden will be gathering AI experts together in San Francisco for a global AI safety summit.
Arts & Entertainment Oprah Winfrey Hosting Prime Time Special on AI Featuring Sam Altman, Bill Gates Oprah is taking on the topic of artificial intelligence, and she'll be airing a prime-time special on ABC in September to ask the question "AI: What is it?" and other things your parents and grandparents have been asking.
Business & Tech Google Says It's Fixed Gemini People-Generating Feature, Also It's Releasing Customizable Chatbots Google's AI project Gemini hit a snag earlier this year when its image-generating feature was found to create wild historical inaccuracies in the interest of diversity. Google says it's been working on that, and the new and improved people-generator will made available to some paid users soon.
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 Day Around the Bay: Another OpenAI Co-Founder Has Taken Their Leave A cause of death has been revealed in the murder of a 25-year-old woman found in the Santa Cruz Mountains; Contra Costa County recommends masking up again; and one OpenAI co-founder has taken a leave of absence while another has decamped to a competitor.
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.
