Business & Tech As Promised, Elon Musk Has Launched an AI Company, xAI Restless billionaire Elon Musk has just launched a sixth company that he'll be overseeing, this one hoping to get into the artificial intelligence space and, ahem, "understand the true nature of the universe."
Business & Tech Threads Beats ChatGPT to 100 Million User Milestone; Twitter Traffic Allegedly 'Tanking' Meta's Threads app, which just went live last Wednesday evening, already reached 100 million users on Sunday, handily beating ChatGPT's recently set record for achieving that many users in a brief span of time.
SF News Tuesday Morning Topline: Judge Declines to Block Microsoft-Activision Deal A federal judge in SF has declined to block Microsoft's $69 billion deal to acquire Activision Blizzard; Elizabeth Holmes has already seen her sentence reduced by two years, and a man was shot and injured in West Oakland Tuesday morning.
Bay Area Sports New York Times Completely Guts Its Sports Section, Sources It to SF-Based The Athletic The NY Times will now source its sports coverage from SF’s The Athletic, which has poached a ton of prestigious sportswriters, pulled $140 million in VC money, was bought up by the NYT, though has never shown a profit.
Business & Tech Four More East Bay Chain Hotels Being Surrendered to Lenders In Nationwide Loan Default This is not just a Bay Area “doom loop” story, as Dallas-based Ashford Hospitality Trust is handing back the keys to 19 U.S. hotels, four of which are in Oakland, Newark, and Walnut Creek.
Business & Tech Pranksters Claim They Can Stop Self-Driving Cars With Orange Cones, Waymo and Cruise Not Amused A viral video this week made the curious claim that self-driving robotaxis on SF streets can be brought to a halt with the placement of an orange cone on the vehicle’s hood. Cruise and Waymo have both responded that the jokers doing this need to knock it off.
Business & Tech Elon-Zuck Battle Heats Up With Musk Threatening Lawsuit Over Meta’s Copycat Product Threads Elon Musk’s lawyer sent Mark Zuckerberg a quasi-cease-and-desist letter complaining that Meta poached “dozens of Twitter employees” (whom Musk had fired!) to create the Twitter knock-off Threads, and even implies that Zuckerberg played a role in Twitter’s recent glitches.
Business & Tech SF-Based Pokémon Go Creator Niantic Labs Celebrates Game’s Seventh Anniversary After Layoff Of 25% of Staff To be fair, Niantic Labs is also doing a bunch of game promotions and specials for Pokémon Go’s seventh anniversary, but that’s probably little comfort to the 230 employees the company just laid off.
SF News Thursday Morning What's Up: Two More Conferences Cancel at Moscone for 2024 SFPD is searching for a female suspect in Monday's Bayview shoving homicide; a toddler was killed in Vallejo by a car backing out of a driveway; and two moderate-sized conferences have canceled at the Moscone Center for next year.
Business & Tech San Mateo-Based Startup Wins FAA Approval To Test Their Futuristic, $300,000 Flying Car There are still many regulatory hurdles to clear, but San Mateo’s Alef Aeronautics has won a Special Airworthiness Certification from the Federal Aviation Administration to perform limited testing on their “Model A” flying car.
Business & Tech Meta's 'Twitter Killer,' Called Threads, Launches Thursday It looks like Mark Zuckerberg and his crew at Meta wanted to fast-track their Twitter competitor just as other products like BlueSky are drawing away disgruntled Twitter users. And now the new app, called Threads, hits the App Store Thursday.
Business & Tech Musk's Move to Limit Tweet Views Looks to Be Another User- and Advertiser-Alienating Blunder Over the holiday weekend, Twitter users started getting messages about having "exceeded" their "rate limit" for viewing tweets, and it turns out this was non-CEO-CEO Elon Musk's latest effort to crack down on data scraping, which in turn pissed off a legion of loyal users.
SF News Op-Ed Suggests St. Louis, Moreso Than SF, Is In a Serious 'Doom Loop' and No One Is Talking About It It is actually dangerous and deserted in parts of St. Louis, and a Republican legislature in Missouri has tried its best to counter any progressive policy the city tries to enact, leading to unproductive political fights, as a Times opinion piece suggests.
Business & Tech Oscar Winner Halle Berry Says Her 'Second Act' Will Be as Executive at SF-Based Biotech Startup Academy Award-winning actress Halle Berry, who has been making fewer movies in recent years than earlier, says she is ready for her "second act" and second career as a comms executive at a biotech startup in San Francisco.
SF News SF Fire Chief Fumes Over Self-Driving Robotaxis Blocking First Responders Dozens of Times This Year San Francisco Fire Department Chief Jeanine Nicholson notes there have been 39 incidents of Cruise and Waymo robotaxis blocking first responders this year alone, and says the robot cars are “not ready for prime time.”
SF News Mayor Breed Floats the Idea of Turning Westfield Mall Into… A Soccer Stadium? Here’s an out-of-left-field solution to the highly uncertain future of Union Square’s Westfield San Francisco Centre shopping mall — Mayor Breed pitched the idea Thursday that it could become “a whole new soccer stadium.”
Business & Tech Musk and Zuckerberg Are Play-Fighting Over Meta's 'Sanely Run' Twitter Competitor, Maybe Called Threads Meta is going to be rolling out its "answer to Twitter" sometime soon. The internet is chattering about it. And Elon Musk has challenged Mark Zuckerberg to a "cage match" over it.
SF Politics Biden's In Town to Debate AI's Future With Tech Leaders; Meanwhile, AI Biden and AI Trump Are Debating on Twitch It's strange days, indeed! President Joe Biden is in San Francisco today, attending fundraisers for his re-election campaign and convening a forum with tech people to talk about the future of artificial intelligence. And meanwhile, someone has set up a video AI on Twitch with a chatbot Biden.
Business & Tech Hacking Outfit Demands $4.5M Ransom From Reddit, Threatens to Leak 80GB of Confidential Data A ransomware group known as BlackCat or ALPHV is reportedly trying to extort $4.5 million from Reddit, and they have glommed on to the recent user controversy and boycott over recently announced pricing for Reddit's API.
Business & Tech Meta Is Abandoning Their COVID-19 Misinformation Policy on Facebook and Instagram Great news for your crazy uncle: Facebook and Instagram will no longer remove posts with COVID misinformation in countries that no longer have a COVID-19 public health emergency declaration, which is basically most of the world.
SF Politics Tucker Carlson Gets Cease-And-Desist Letter From Fox News, Hires Former SF GOP Chair As Lawyer It was already going to be massively entertaining to watch Fox News wage legal war on Tucker Carlson over his Twitter show, but now add to the mix that Carlson’s attorney is former SF GOP chair Harmett Dhillon, who’s facing her own set of financial impropriety allegations.
SF Politics Tucker Carlson Debuts Painfully Low-Budget ‘Tucker On Twitter’ Show Incel messiah Tucker Carlson debuted his new Twitter streaming show this week, and it’s now two episodes in, with Elon Musk apparently gaming the Twitter platform to wildly over-inflate how many views the videos appear to be getting.
Business & Tech Hotel Expert: Hilton Owner's Declaration on Loan Might Just Be Negotiating Tactic It was one of the biggest local stories of the week, but is the owner of the Hilton San Francisco Union Square and Parc 55 hotels just negotiating with its bank by publicly saying they're defaulting on their loan?
Business & Tech Apple Unveils One Very Expensive and Slick AR/VR Headset, the Vision Pro, On Sale Next Year At the annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) on Monday, Apple CEO Tim Cook got to do one of those famous "One more thing..." product drops, this time with Apple's biggest new piece of hardware since the Apple Watch.
Business & Tech Owner of SF's Largest Hotel, the Hilton Union Square, Is Walking Away, Surrendering It to Lender Another bit of bad news for downtown San Francisco arrived Monday morning with the revelation that the investment firm that owns the Hilton San Francisco Union Square and Parc 55 hotels is walking away from its debts and giving up hope on a return of SF's convention market.
