Posts by lucidcapitalism

(MIT Technology Review) Joy Buolamwini, the renowned AI researcher and activist, appears on the Zoom screen from home in Boston, wearing her signature thick-rimmed glasses.  As an MIT grad, she seems genuinely interested in seeing old covers of MIT Technology Review that hang in our London office. An edition of the magazine from 1961 asks:…

(Washington Post) Forty-one states and D.C. are suing Meta, alleging that the tech giant harms children by building addictive features into Instagram and Facebook — legal actions that represent the most significant effort by state enforcers to tackle the impact of social media on children’s mental health. The barrage of lawsuits is the culmination of…

(Axios) Venture capitalists are pouring huge money into AI startups, with a dollar weighting toward those building foundational models. Why it matters: The VC market may be making its biggest binary bet ever, without quite realizing it. Behind the scenes: Many of those models are being built, in part, on data that is under U.S. copyright protection. Several of…

(Wired) When OpenAI published details of the stunningly capable AI language model GPT-4, which powers ChatGPT, in March, its researchers filled 100 pages. They also left out a few important details—like anything substantial about how it was actually built or how it works. That was no accidental oversight, of course. OpenAI and other big companies are keen to keep the workings…

(Bloomberg) Celebrity venture capitalist Marc Andreessen issued a call to action on Monday morning, California time. In a blog post titled “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” the Netscape co-founder excoriated the enemies of progress (“elites,” “luddites,” “communists”) and celebrated the potential for technology to advance human greatness. Like many of Andreessen’s big-picture essays on tech over the years, the message…

(Techcrunch) Despite what numbers might show, some venture capitalists are quite serious in their commitment toward diversity, equity and inclusion — and they are not going away. The New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) on Wednesday announced the launch of Venture Access Alliance, a group of 70 investors who have promised to boost diversity in…

(Washington Post) A WhatsApp voice memo purporting to have insider information ricocheted across hundreds of group chats in Israel early on Monday. The Israeli army was planning for another “battle like we’ve never experienced before,” the anonymous woman said in Hebrew, warning that people should prepare to lose access to food, water and internet service…

(Cooley) California’s governor recently signed into law SB 54, a bill intended to increase transparency regarding diversity of founding teams in the venture capital (VC) industry. The new law will require VC companies, including “venture capital funds” (as defined in the Investment Advisers Act of 1940), with a nexus to California to report to the California…

(TechCrunch) Fearless Fund, which provides grants and investments to women of color, has been indefinitely barred from deploying its $20,000 grant to Black women after the American Alliance for Equal Rights, led by conservative activist Edward Blum (best known as the man who helped overturn affirmative action in education), sued them over the scheme. The lawsuit against the…

(Financial Times) Concern about climate change is the most common reason for financial groups to exclude companies from their portfolios, according to research that underlines how the phenomenon continues to affect investment decisions despite a pushback against “woke” capitalism. The findings, from a coalition of non-profit environmental and sustainability groups, show that 40 per cent…