(NYT) The celebration that greeted Microsoft’s release of its A.I.-boosted search engine, Bing, to testers two weeks ago has lurched to alarm. Testers, including journalists, have found the bot can become aggressive, condescending, threatening, committed to political goals, clingy, creepy and a liar. It could be used to spread misinformation and conspiracy theories at scale; lonely…

(TechCrunch) If the last year has taught us anything, it’s that VCs let their portfolio companies get away with a lot. No balance sheet? No problem; here’s a $32 billion valuation. No proven product-market fit and your last venture cost investors billions? Here’s a check worth more than all Black founders raised in 2021’s otherwise record-breaking year. Cut a check…

(FT) The chief executive of Vanguard has defended his decision to pull the world’s second largest asset manager out of an industry-wide alliance to tackle climate change, saying the group’s “voice was being drowned out”. In December, Vanguard resigned from the Net Zero Asset Managers initiative, a coalition of 301 asset managers committed to reducing…

(Financial Times) When Nestlé subsidiary Nespresso was awarded “B Corp” status in May 2022, the founders of tiny Glen Lyon Coffee Roasters could scarcely believe it. Their initial reaction was “dismay”, the Scottish firm said in a post on its website last summer. It had only just attained the same certification, which demonstrates enhanced commitments…

(Wired) During a trip home to Johannesburg, South Africa, while completing an engineering master’s program in Japan, Pelonomi Moiloa attended the largest machine learning community gathering she’d ever seen in Africa, just a few miles from where she grew up. In all, 600 people from 22 nations attended 2017’s Deep Learning Indaba, held at the University of…

(Bloomberg) An upcoming Supreme Court case could answer one of the toughest questions of the internet age: Should online companies be held responsible for promoting harmful speech?  The case, Gonzalez v. Google, could upend the modern internet economy, sparing no online business. A ruling against Google will likely leave internet companies — from social media platforms to…

(Politico) The U.S. Chamber of Commerce represents a diverse group of businesses, but its positions on climate policies mostly reflect the views of its fossil fuel members, the nonprofit group InfluenceMap finds in an analysis released Thursday. Read more here.

(Fortune) The dark side of ESG investing has the potential to undermine a whole generation of clean-tech strategies. Adam Matthews, chief responsible investment officer at the Church of England Pensions Board, said the risks posed to the renewables boom via the mining industry aren’t getting nearly enough attention. The upshot, according to the 47-year-old, is that portfolios…

(Wired) Integrating large language models into search engines could mean a fivefold increase in computing power and huge carbon emissions. In early February, first Google, then Microsoft, announced major overhauls to their search engines. Both tech giants have spent big on building or buying generative AI tools, which use large language models to understand and…

(Axios) Why it matters: This is the largest U.S. IPO since Mobileye went public last October, and the largest solar energy IPO in more than two years. It also comes on the same week that three other companies are planning to raise at least $150 million in IPOs of their own, suggesting something of a…