Our faith in technology officially died this week

March 8, 2024

(Washington Post) I felt relieved when I started writing about technology full time more than 12 years ago. Many industries and people were still reeling from and angry about the Great Recession. The technology industry felt like an island of bubbly optimism about its future and ours. Faith in the magic of technology was painfully…

Microsoft’s AI Tool Generates Sexually Harmful and Violent Images, Engineer Warns

March 6, 2024

(WSJ) An artificial intelligence engineer at said the company’s AI image tool generated violent and sexual images that could pose a danger to society. In letters to the Federal Trade Commission and to Microsoft’s board on Wednesday, Shane Jones, a principal software engineering manager, addressed concerns he said he has about the tech giant’s “approach to responsible…

AI is Taking Water from the Desert

March 1, 2024

(The Atlantic) One scorching day this past September, I made the dangerous decision to try to circumnavigate some data centers. The ones I chose sit between a regional airport and some farm fields in Goodyear, Arizona, half an hour’s drive west of downtown Phoenix. When my Uber pulled up beside the unmarked buildings, the temperature was…

Drop In Venture Funding To Black-Founded Startups Greatly Outpaces Market Decline

February 27, 2024

(Crunchbase) Venture funding to Black-founded U.S. startups last year totaled only $705 million — marking the first time since 2016 that the figure failed to even reach $1 billion, Crunchbase data shows. The decline in capital to Black-founded companies greatly outpaces the overall decline in startup funding. While total venture dollars in the U.S. fell 37% last year,…

What Have You Made on Private Equity? Who Knows?!

February 26, 2024

(Bloomberg) There are lies, damned lies and statistics – and then there’s IRR. The internal rate of return metric used by private-capital managers has long had critics in finance and academia because it is easily manipulated and hard to compare with the transparent returns of, say, stocks and bonds. Still, it survives because there is…

Wall Street’s Latest Pitch Is a Contradiction: Private IPOs

February 25, 2024

(WSJ) Private-equity firms are desperate to cash out of investments. But enthusiasm for initial public offerings is low after several stock-market debuts flopped. Enter so-called private IPOs. Read more here.

Here’s how AI experts think ChatGPT might help the military

February 22, 2024

(Washington Post) Pentagon officials were hanging on to every word as Matthew Knight, OpenAI’s head of security, explained how the latest version of ChatGPT had succeeded in deciphering cryptic conversations within a Russian hacking group, a task that human analysts had found challenging. “These logs were in Russian shorthand internet slang,” Knight said. “We had a Russian…

The California Endowment Will Plow Its Entire $4 Billion Into Mission Investments

February 21, 2024

(Institutional Investor) ESG may be a dirty acronym to some institutions these days, but one endowment is going all-in on it. The California Endowment, a private non-profit focused on expanding access to affordable and quality healthcare in the state, is expected to announce that it is planning to move its entire $4 billion in assets…

EU opens formal investigation into TikTok over possible online content breaches

February 19, 2024

(Reuters) The European Union will investigate whether ByteDance’s TikTok breached online content rules aimed at protecting children and ensuring transparent advertising, an official said on Monday, putting the social media platform at risk of a hefty fine. Read more here.

How AI copyright lawsuits could make the whole industry go extinct

February 15, 2024

(Verge) The New York Times’ lawsuit against OpenAI is part of a broader, industry-shaking copyright challenge that could define the future of AI… There’s a lot going on in the world of generative AI, but maybe the biggest is the increasing number of copyright lawsuits being filed against AI companies like OpenAI and Stability AI. So…