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 JP Morgan Conference Goes Full Woke and DEI, Women Executives in Pink Suits Flash-Mob Union Square The JP Morgan Healthcare Conference is back in town, and while biotech executives are 80% men, a renegade group of women executives took over Union Square in so many pink pantsuits it would have made Mary Tyler Moore proud.
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.
SF News Vanderbilt University Is Indeed Opening an SF Campus, and It Will Be at Potrero Hill’s California College of the Arts Get ready for Vanderbilt University San Francisco, and part of it will be called “California College of the Arts Institute at Vanderbilt,” as Vanderbilt has basically bought up the dying husk of the California College of the Arts.
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 Uber Unveils Robotaxi Design at CES In Las Vegas Uber's line of robotaxis that are set to hit the road in San Francisco sometime later this year made their big public debut at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Monday.
Business & Tech Waymos Are Parking In One- and Two-Hour Spots Around SF, and Car Owners Are Bound to Start Fuming About This The next autonomous vehicle scandal likely to start causing some noise in the new year is this: idle Waymos parking in coveted curbside parking spaces while waiting to be hailed for their next ride.
Business & Tech Now We Know How Hackers Reprogrammed Peninsula Crosswalks With Fake Elon Musk and Zuckerberg Messages Palo Alto and Menlo Park crosswalks were hacked in April to play fake, satirical messages from Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. Hackers were able to do this because Caltrans just never changed the default factory passwords.
SF Politics Billionaires Going Berserk on Twitter Over Proposed California Billionaire Tax There’s a signature drive to put a 5% “billionaire tax” on the California ballot. It has not collected even one signature, but the billionaires are freaking out on Twitter with grand tantrums saying they will leave the state en masse.
Business & Tech Waymos Were Looking for Human Remote 'Confirmations' at Intersections During Blackout, Company Says It took a blackout across a huge swath of San Francisco for Waymo to figure out that its robot system for handling such situations has a key weakness, which caused huge traffic problems on Saturday.
Business & Tech Report: Elon Musk’s DOGE Did Not Decrease Government Spending, Actually Increased It A detailed new analysis finds that the federal government is spending more money than it did before Elon Musk’s “eliminating waste" DOGE program came to town, and that most of the supposed cost savings were simply just math errors.
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 Supervisor Mahmood Calls For Hearings Into Waymo After Last Weekend’s Mass-Stalling Shambles In the wake of what was surely Waymo’s greatest SF screw-up yet, SF Supervisor Bilal Mahmood (of all people!) is the first local elected official calling for a probe into how Waymos stalled out all over town Saturday.
Business & Tech SF-Based Instacart Now Under Scrutiny Over Their AI Price-Adjusting Tool A recent study found Instacart was charging some shoppers up to 23% more for the same items from the same stores in an AI experiment, and now the Federal Trade Commission is looking into the matter.
Business & Tech California Might Ban Tesla Sales for 30 Days Over Deceptive ‘Autopilot’ Marketing A state judge ruled that Tesla can’t sell or manufacture cars in California for 30 days over false advertising claims about their ‘full self-driving’ mode. But the California DMV cut Tesla some slack, giving them 60 days to fix the ads.
Business & Tech Sam Altman Posts Slutty AI Photo of Himself as Fireman to Promote ChatGPT Images 1.5 OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is now maybe taking a page out of Elon Musk's and Trump's playbook, and posting a cheeky AI-generated photo of himself as a sexy calendar firefighter to Xitter.
SF News Anheuser-Busch Closing 50-Year-Old Budweiser Plant in Fairfield Next Month There will be no more Clydesdales a’clopping in Fairfield, as the Budweiser plant that opened there in 1976 will fully close down in January, because parent company Anheuser-Busch is pulling a national downsizing on production.
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 Waymo Stowaway: Man Found Hiding In Waymo Trunk, Offers Little Explanation Why He Is There A Los Angeles woman made a curious discovery when trying to put her daughter in a Waymo, which was a man hiding in the vehicle’s trunk, bringing up serious questions about how easy it is to just hop inside a Waymo and hide there.
Arts & Entertainment South Bay Congressman Raises National Security Concerns About Paramount Hostile Takeover Bid of Warner Bros. The corporate drama gripping Hollywood right now could have national security implications, says South Bay Congressman Sam Liccardo in a new joint letter to the board of Warner Bros. Discovery.
Business & Tech Report: SF-Based Instacart Charging Some Customers as Much as 23% More for the Same Items, Thanks to AI Pricing People buying the exact same item from the exact same store are sometimes paying a price as much as 23% higher on the platform Instacart, thanks to AI algorithms that show buyers different prices.
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 Watch: Two Waymos Appear to Collide In SF, Then Cause Traffic Jam That Traps Residents on Street The latest Waymo dustup is a Saturday incident where two Waymos appear to have collided with one another, resulting in three Waymos just stopping in place, and blocking a dead-end street so residents could not drive out.
Business & Tech DMV Now Hammering Out Rules for Self-Driving Trucks to Come to California The next frontier of the self-driving car movement is likely to be self-driving commercial trucks, and the California DMV is creating the rules right now for the testing of autonomous semi trucks.
SF News Waymo Strikes Small Dog In Western Addition, Dog's Condition Not Known Weeks after one of its robotaxis struck and killed a beloved Mission District bodega cat, Waymo has confirmed that one of its cars also struck an unleashed dog.
