Posts by lucidcapitalism

(Bloomberg) Executives will face bonus cuts if the companies they run fail to hit climate transition targets, under a new European Union proposal that greatly expands the range of levers regulators can draw on to meet terms of the Paris Agreement. C-suite managers at companies with more than 1,000 employees will be held personally responsible…

(PitchBook) Twenty-three venture capital firms, including Tiger Global, have committed to reducing carbon emissions to net-zero by 2030 and achieving portfolio-wide net-zero emissions by 2050. This Venture Climate Alliance is among the most significant efforts to reduce emissions among early-stage companies. Still, some investors felt the bar should have been set higher. Read more here.

(Bloomberg) Shortly before Google introduced Bard, its AI chatbot, to the public in March, it asked employees to test the tool.  One worker’s conclusion: Bard was “a pathological liar,” according to screenshots of the internal discussion. Another called it “cringe-worthy.” One employee wrote that when they asked Bard suggestions for how to land a plane, it…

(Institutional Investor) Venture capital firms are facing increasing scrutiny from limited partners for their limited progress on diversity, equity, and inclusion. Forty-seven percent of VC firms surveyed by Deloitte said LPs had requested DEI information in the last 12 months, up from 41 percent in 2020 and 36 percent in 2018. The survey included responses…

(New York Times) Faking it is over. That’s the feeling in Silicon Valley, along with some schadenfreude and a pinch of paranoia. Not only has funding dried up for cash-burning start-ups over the last year, but now, fraud is also in the air, as investors scrutinize start-up claims more closely and a tech downturn reveals…

(Fast Company) In rural Oregon, a small electric utility called Umatilla Electric Cooperative used to rely mainly on clean hydropower. It had a small carbon footprint. But when large data centers came to the area—built by companies like Amazon—demand for power soared, and the utility had to find sources other than hydro. Over the past…

(Politico) Last Thursday POLITICO’s Mark Scott, author of the Digital Bridge newsletter, interviewed the computer scientist and activist Timnit Gebru about a recent open letter from her Distributed AI Research Institute that argued — contra the Future of Life Institute’s high-profile letter calling for an “AI pause” — that the major harms caused by AI are already here, and therefore “Regulatory efforts…

(Pitchbook) Last month, Y Combinator made a decision that would have been considered an investment heresy during the boom market. The accelerator, which helped incubate some of the strongest VC-backed businesses created over the last 15 years, including Airbnb, DoorDash and Stripe, said it’s pulling back from doubling down on its breakout portfolio companies when they reach the late stage. Y…

(The Information) When Helen Min and Meena Harris started raising money for their debut venture capital fund in January of last year, they expected that their combined 30 years of experience at tech companies would allow them to collect $15 million, a standard first-time fund target. Then interest rates spiked, sending tech stocks careening. By…

(NYT) In March, two Google employees, whose jobs are to review the company’s artificial intelligence products, tried to stop Google from launching an A.I. chatbot. They believed it generated inaccurate and dangerous statements. Ten months earlier, similar concerns were raised at Microsoft by ethicists and other employees. They wrote in several documents that the A.I.…