(Bloomberg) Firms that fail to take ESG seriously face a bleak future in the European Union, as the bloc pushes ahead with the world’s most ambitious set of environmental, social and governance regulations. That’s according to Mairead McGuinness, the EU’s commissioner for financial markets and services. “What the European Union has been doing is quite extraordinary,” McGuinness said…

(WSJ) Social media was more than a decade old before efforts to curb its ill effects began in earnest. With artificial intelligence, lawmakers, activists and executives aren’t waiting that long.  Over the past several months, award-winning scientists, White House officials and tech CEOs have called for guardrails around generative AI tools such as ChatGPT—the chatbot launched…

(The Information) The California Supreme Court recently agreed to hear a challenge from labor unions to Proposition 22, which classified gig workers as independent contractors rather than as employees. Many gig workers want to be independent contractors, but Prop 22 doesn’t honor the spirit of what this means. I run a company that works frequently…

(Bloomberg) Prime Coalition and Azolla Ventures have rolled out a $239 million fund to invest in early-stage startups that are unlikely to lure traditional investors for their climate technology solutions. The new fund will look at three factors as part of its investment criteria — impact, lack of alternative funding options and commercial potential of the climate solution,…

(Axios) Limited partners’ grumpiness about VC distributions is not for naught: the industry’s cashflow ratio at the end of 2022 (-$48.8 billion) was at its most imbalanced since at least 1998, per new PitchBook data. Why it matters: Investors are giving more scrutiny to VCs in their portfolio who didn’t return much cash during 2021’s extraordinary…

(Bloomberg) Google’s Bard artificial intelligence chatbot will answer a question about how many pandas live in zoos quickly, and with a surfeit of confidence. Ensuring that the response is well-sourced and based on evidence, however, falls to thousands of outside contractors from companies including Appen Ltd. and Accenture Plc, who can make as little as…

(Politico) When do you know a bill might have legs? When there’s a bit of horse-trading going on. A first-in-the-nation bill to compel large corporations to disclose their planet-warming emissions is picking up steam in the California Legislature, where it passed the Assembly Natural Resources Committee on Monday. Read more here.

(Reuters) Global tech investor Insight Partners has raised $118 million in its second 20/20 Vision Capital fund that aims to invest in venture capital funds led by diverse managers, the firm told Reuters. This new fund expands a strategy Insight first started in 2020, after its own employees pledged $15 million of their personal capital…

(TechCrunch) Meta’s planned Twitter killer, Threads, isn’t yet publicly available but it already looks like a privacy nightmare. Information provided about the app’s privacy via mandatory disclosures required on iOS shows the app may collect highly sensitive information about users in order to profile their digital activity — including health and financial data, precise location, browsing…

(PitchBook) What GPs, LPs really think about Impact and ESG Opinions on Impact investing and ESG frameworks in the private markets are often described as politically polarized, and there are no signs that portrayal could soon fade. But between the sustainable investing die-hards and the anti-ESG stalwarts, there’s a much bigger set of investors with…