Posts by lucidcapitalism

(Bloomberg) OpenAI has hired former Uber Technologies Inc. executive Scott Schools to serve as its first chief compliance officer, bolstering the startup’s efforts to adapt to emerging global regulations around artificial intelligence. Schools most recently was the chief ethics and compliance officer at Uber, another tech company that has dealt with a complicated regulatory landscape…

(WSJ) The tech industry is enamored with nuclear power, but for now it will lean heavily on fossil fuels to power its artificial-intelligence boom. Amazon.com, Google and Microsoft each struck recent deals meant to bring more nuclear power online to satiate burgeoning energy demand tied to AI. They are betting billions of dollars that nuclear…

(Financial Times) Elon Musk could face a hefty fine as European regulators look at including revenues from the billionaire’s business empire to calculate a potential fine against social media platform X. Under the bloc’s Digital Services Act (DSA), a landmark piece of legislation aimed at setting the rules on how tech companies should police the…

(Axios) Google will block election ads across all of its platforms after the last polls close on Nov. 5, according to a memo sent to its advertising partners Thursday and obtained by Axios. Why it matters: The policy, first introduced during the 2020 election, is meant to prevent misinformation about voting, including candidates prematurely claiming…

(Bloomberg) Startups typically depend on serial infusions of funding from backers to get through their early years, and a so-called down round—raising money at a lower implied valuation than before—is a big black eye. So lately, companies have gotten increasingly creative at trying to avoid being considered less valuable, particularly when investors seek to unload…

(NYT) Here at the World Economic Forum in Davos, the most revealing discussions often happen not on the main stage, but at the myriad side events that transform this Swiss ski town into a high-minded networking event. Case in point: the annual luncheon hosted by Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff, who is plowing some of…

(Verge) Climate change disinformation on YouTube has morphed into a misleading new narrative, according to a report published today. With compounding disasters making it harder to deny that climate change is happening, creators spreading disinformation have pivoted to content that targets clean energy. In the past, content that falsely claimed that climate change was either not happening or not…

(Wired) “It might be the best time for any kind of business in any industry to raise money for all of history, like since the time of the ancient Egyptians,” an excitable Stuart Butterfield, CEO of Slack, told Farhad Manjoo in The New York Times in 2015. This was no exaggeration. While interest rates remained close to…

(Washington Post) Instagram and Facebook unveiled further limits on what teens can see on the apps, a move their parent company Meta says will reduce the amount of potentially harmful content young people encounter. Already, teens could opt to have Instagram’s algorithm recommend less “sensitive content” — which includes bare bodies, violence, drugs, firearms, weight-loss…

(WSJ) What are venture fund portfolios worth now? There is little agreement on that question today, an issue that is slowing down an already sedate venture fundraising market.  Once all the data is tallied, 2023 is expected to be the worst year for venture fundraising globally since 2015, according to both research firms Preqin and…