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(WSJ) California Public Employees’ Retirement System ratcheted up its scrutiny of private-equity manager Blackstone in the wake of a child labor scandal at a company the firm owns.   During a Tuesday investment committee meeting, Anton Orlich, managing investment director for private equity, said Calpers had demanded that representatives of Blackstone come to the pension’s Sacramento headquarters…

(TechCrunch) Earlier today at a Bloomberg conference in San Francisco, some of the biggest names in AI turned up, including, briefly, Sam Altman of OpenAI, who just ended his two-month world tour, and Stability AI founder Emad Mostaque. Still, one of the most compelling conversations happened later in the afternoon, in a panel discussion about…

(Bloomberg) It’s a bargain-hunter’s dream, and for sellers it’s sometimes the only good option left. Secondary markets — where backers of closely held startups can sell their stakes to other investors — are drawing increasing interest from venture capital funds and other money managers seeking to snap up chunks of private companies on the cheap.…

(Financial Times) Advocates of more environmentally and socially responsible models of capitalism have had the upper hand in recent years. In the US, however, they have run into a serious backlash: red-state politicians have sought to blacklist banks and asset managers they deem to be boycotting fossil fuels, brands including Bud Light and Target are…

(The Verge) A few months after graduating from college in Nairobi, a 30-year-old I’ll call Joe got a job as an annotator — the tedious work of processing the raw information used to train artificial intelligence. AI learns by finding patterns in enormous quantities of data, but first that data has to be sorted and tagged…

(The Verge) A few months after graduating from college in Nairobi, a 30-year-old I’ll call Joe got a job as an annotator — the tedious work of processing the raw information used to train artificial intelligence. AI learns by finding patterns in enormous quantities of data, but first that data has to be sorted and tagged…

(TechCrunch) Smaller venture funds are finding a way to manage in the midst of a conservative market. As with all bear markets, the appetite for risk drops, and although emerging fund managers are often noted to outperform their more established counterparts, some limited partners are weary of bringing on new venture partners. Instead, they retreat to…

(NYT) The European Union took an important step on Wednesday toward passing what would be one of the first major laws to regulate artificial intelligence, a potential model for policymakers around the world as they grapple with how to put guardrails on the rapidly developing technology. The European Parliament, a main legislative branch of the…

(Bloomberg) As tranquil instrumental music plays over gauzy images of nature, a woman’s voice-over begins. “Isn’t it a paradox,” she wonders aloud, “that the love for this world that gets us out in it, sometimes leaves behind the things that can harm it? Flight by flight, we broaden our views. We gain new perspectives. And…

(The Guardian) Meredith Whittaker is the president of Signal – the not-for-profit secure messaging app. The service, along with WhatsApp and similar messaging platforms, is opposing the UK government’s online safety bill which, among other things, seeks to scan users’ messages for harmful content. Prior to Signal, Whittaker worked at Google, co-founded NYU’s AI Now Institute and was an adviser to…