Business & Tech Feds Probing Tesla ‘Full Self-Driving’ Mode After Pedestrian Killed, Plus Multiple Other Crashes Amidst several reports of Teslas in “Full Self-Driving” mode having crashes in low-visibility conditions, including one crash that killed someone, a federal road safety agency is now investigating whether the Tesla technology might be to blame.
Business & Tech Hilton Taking Over Mid-Market's Line Hotel After only two years as the boutique Line Hotel, the 12-story hotel portion of the building at 950 Market Street that also houses the Serif condo development is going to become a Hilton property as of December.
Business & Tech Now the Metreon Is Up For Sale Too, In Latest SF Real Estate Shocker Another signature San Francisco mall is up for sale in the Metreon, but in this case, the sale is not being forced by owners surrendering the property to a lender, and the place has a bustling 92% occupancy rate.
Business & Tech Walgreens Closing 1,200 More Stores Nationwide, So This Is Not Just a San Francisco Thing After years of finger-pointing at San Francisco over a small handful of local Walgreens closures, the company now admits it just has way too many stores, and will be closing 1,200 more of them across the US.
Business & Tech Shocker: California Leads the Nation in Cryptocurrency Fraud, According to FBI More than 20% of all cryptocurrency fraud happened right here in California last year, and the FBI San Francisco Field Office was kept busy, dealing with a staggering $260 million in crypto scams in 2023 alone.
Business & Tech California Joins 13 Other States in Suing TikTok for Alleged Harm It Causes to Teen Users A new lawsuit from 14 state attorneys general goes after TikTok for those “challenge” videos that have killed teens nationwide, and even alleges an economy of underage nude videos that have created a "virtual strip club" on the platform.
Business & Tech Tech Bros Try to Help Waymo Entangled With Muni Bus, Leave Behind Stalled Waymo A new viral video shows a stalled Waymo getting entangled with a Muni bus this weekend, and when a gaggle of tech bros coming from an industry party try to help, they seem to just make things worse.
Business & Tech SF-Based Weed Delivery Service Eaze, Once Valued at $700 Million, Shutting Down By Year’s End The company that called themselves “the Uber of Weed” is going up in smoke, having blown through $250 million in venture capital but now announcing they’ll likely cease operations on December 31.
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.
SF News SF Amazon Workers at Bayview Warehouse Vote to Unionize, Ball Now In Amazon’s Court More than 100 workers at Amazon’s Toland Street warehouse in SF’s Bayview District have voted to unionize, though the hard part will be getting Amazon to recognize or negotiate with the union.
Business & Tech Woman In Driverless Waymo Harassed By Bros Wanting Her Phone Number It’s the second incident in two weeks where misbehaving pedestrians effectively held someone hostage in an SF Waymo, as two bros stood in front of the self-driving car and persistently demanded the phone number of the woman riding it.
Business & Tech Feds Issue Consent Order to Cruise With $1.5 Million Penalty Stemming From Last October's Injury Crash Almost exactly one year after a high-profile crash on San Francisco's Market Street in which an automated Cruise vehicle dragged a woman for 20 feet before stopping, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has issued a fine and a consent order to the GM-backed company.
Business & Tech Of Course a Waymo Got In the Way of Kamala Harris's Motorcade on Nob Hill Friday Night You can't even get a (vice) presidential motorcade through the streets of San Francisco these days without tripping over a self-driving taxi.
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 Xitter Releases First Transparency Report Since 2021, Shows Far Fewer Actions With Regard to Hate Speech Because the EU requires companies to produce such reports, Elon Musk's X has sucked it up and produced a transparency report — the first since Musk took over the company formerly known as Twitter in 2022.
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 News Waymo Gets Tagged With Rider (and Little Dog) Still Inside in Mission District The latest SF anti-self-driving car shenanigans were captured on a now-viral video where a team of taggers gangs up on a Waymo and tags the bejesus out of the vehicle, while a passenger and a little dog are stuck nervously inside.
Business & Tech What's Up With Mark Zuckerberg Talking to Trump on the Phone Twice This Summer? The New York Times and Mark Zuckerberg would like us to think that Zuckerberg is "done with politics." But is he, though?
SF News 1,500 S.F. Hotel Workers Have Gone on Strike in Union Square Unite Here Local 2, the union chapter representing the workers, says they've been in contract negotiations with the Grand Hyatt San Francisco Union Square, Hilton San Francisco Union Square and Westin St. Francis hotels for months, to no avail.
Business & Tech Cruise Comes Crawling Back, Re-Launching Driverless Cars, With Drivers, On Peninsula Autonomous taxi company Cruise is slowly trying to reintroduce its robocars in the Bay Area, one year after the company went into freefall following a brutal collision in which one of the cars dragged an injured pedestrian.
Business & Tech Dreamforce Commits to Three More Years In SF (But Benioff Gives Himself a Loophole to Leave) Salesforce announced they will keep their Dreamforce conference here through 2027 in a windfall for the city’s tourism industry, but Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff gave himself an out, saying Dreamforce will only stay as long as SF “remains safe and secure and trusted.”
Business & Tech Instagram Tightens Up Protections on Teen Accounts, Adds Major Restrictions for Users 16 and Under After years of criticism over online bullying, ads that stoke depression, and predators chasing teens on the platform, Menlo Park-based Instagram is tightening up the controls over what teens can see when they log in.
SF News Dreamforce Kicks Off Tuesday With Celebrity Speakers, Largest Crowd Since 2019 Salesforce's annual Dreamforce conference, which these days is all about AI, is set to bring in about 45,000 attendees when it kicks off Tuesday in SoMa, which is the biggest crowd it's had since the pandemic.
Business & Tech Elon Musk Offers to Impregnate Taylor Swift In Ill-Advised, Tuesday Night Tweet Elon Musk doubles down on the creepiness of his already weird polygamist-baby-factory lifestyle by tweeting at Taylor Swift Tuesday night, following her endorsement of Kamala Harris.
Business & Tech Ninth Circuit Sides With Musk In Case About California Social Media Content Moderation Law A three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has taken Elon Musk's and Xitter's side in a case concerning a new California law that mandates broad disclosures for social media platforms about their content moderation practices.
