Articles

What Flock’s defenders are missing

As cities reconsider the technology, it’s worth asking how the company’s design choices have shaped the trade-off between solving crimes and protecting civil liberties.

Bloomberg: Andreesen Horowitz is the focus of an antitrust investigation.

According to Bloomberg, a “nearly year-old investigation” is looking into the possibility that a16z “investment partners are improperly serving on the boards of competing artificial intelligence companies.” Co-founder Ben Horowitz is on the board of Databricks, while partner Martin Casado was on the board of dbt labs before it was acquired by Fivetran, where he now holds a seat.

These french fries told me I made a really good point.

AI terminology has broken containment so thoroughly that there’s actually something called “Fries GPT” on the menu at Dave & Buster’s, I regret to inform us. GPT stands for garlic, parmesan, and truffle dust in this case, which is a lot going on, flavor-wise. Personally, I think D&B should have committed to the bit and let you wash them down with an ice-cold LLMonade, but alas.

Hidden Airtag Reveals Amazon is Trashing Rare Books to Train AI

Amazon’s team uses a T. rex preparing to devour a book as its logo.

Amazon, once an online bookseller, is destroying rare books to train AI models

Rare books are incredibly valuable for training LLMs, since these models have already trained on whatever's available online.

Groq raises $350M to fuel its pivot from AI chips to neocloud

Groq raised $350 million at a $3.5 billion valuation as the former AI chipmaker pivots to a neocloud business and expands its Nvidia-powered data center footprint.

Similarweb says it can track conversational AI ads.

The new AI Ads tracking data set for ChatGPT and Google’s AI Mode and AI Overviews pulls insights from anonymized web usage data provided by a panel of Similarweb users, instead of relying on synthetic prompts. Similarweb reports that 26 percent of ChatGPT responses and nearly 30 percent of ad-eligible Google AI Mode queries include a sponsored ad.

The global stakes of China's slowdown

The push to supercharge production even as domestic demand weakens leaves China's producers more reliant on foreign buyers and pressures industries abroad.

Nvidia guarantees up to $105 billion to support an OpenAI data center.

The news comes as part of OpenAI’s plans to lease an Ohio data center being built by SB Energy, a subsidiary of SoftBank. The deal will allow OpenAI to secure 8 gigawatts of capacity, with the first 800 megawatts expected to come online in 2028. Nvidia will also invest $1.5 billion in SB Energy.

Saber's CEO apologized to former Rideshare “Stimulator” writer Stella Sacco.

After saying to This Week in Videogames that he would have been “happy to replace her with AI,” Sacco says CEO Matthew Karch emailed her and “apologized unreservedly for the awful way he spoke about me in the press.” You can read her full statement below.

AI startup founders are in flux

AI valuations keep rising while loyalty lowers.

Nvidia investing $1.5B in SoftBank data center developer behind OpenAI project

Nvidia's investment in SoftBank's data center developer will guarantee its chips power an OpenAI data center.