(The Guardian) A UN resolution was adopted on Wednesday that should make it easier to hold polluting countries legally accountable for failing to tackle the climate emergency, in a vote which was hailed as a historic victory for climate justice. The UN general assembly adopted by consensus the resolution spearheaded by Vanuatu, a tiny Pacific island nation…

(Vice) More than 30,000 people—including Tesla’s Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, politician Andrew Yang, and a few leading AI researchers—have signed an open letter calling for a six-month pause on training AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.  The letter immediately caused a furor as signatories walked back their positions, some notable signatories turned out…

(The Washington Post) The artificial intelligence revolution has arrived. One of us is a venture capitalist, the other a philanthropist, and we see leaders in every field placing bets, by the billions, on what comes next. That makes this a perilous moment. Machine learning is poised to radically reshape the future of everything for good…

(Bloomberg) The Republican Party’s crusade against ESG investments is fracturing after pension-fund managers and budget watchdogs in several states denounced proposals that came with hefty price tags for retirees and taxpayers. In a rebuke to a movement that’s taken hold in conservative strongholds like Texas and Florida, legislators in the GOP-controlled statehouses of Kansas, Wyoming, North Dakota and Indiana…

(TechCrunch) On the eve of its 25th anniversary, Mozilla, the not-for-profit behind the Firefox browser, is launching an AI-focused startup. Called Mozilla.ai, the newly forged company’s mission isn’t to build just any AI — its mission is to build AI that’s open source and “trustworthy,” according to Mark Surman, the executive president of Mozilla and the…

(WSJ) The Federal Trade Commission is prodding tech giants over misleading ads on their platforms.  The agency last week ordered eight major social-media and video streaming providers to detail the ways in which they are acting to curb a pandemic-era rise in fraudulent advertising. Read more here.

(WSJ) President Biden issued the first veto of his presidency Monday, rejecting a Republican-led measure that would overturn a regulation allowing retirement-plan managers to consider climate change in their investment decisions. The bill would have overturned a Biden administration regulation on environmental, social and corporate governance guidelines, or ESG.  Read more here.

(PR Newswire) Dear Wall Street Journal Editors: Every day, there is new analysis or additional opinions on the cause of the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB). SVB has played a foundational role in the infrastructure of the venture capital industry for decades. In fact, SVB’s failure was the second-largest bank failure in all of…

(Forbes) Just after 5:30 pm Pacific on Saturday, a memo started making the rounds among policymaker staff. Called “United States Cascade Bank Failure Scenario,” the private document laid out the case for why the U.S. government needed to take “decisive action” to avoid a continued bank run in the wake of the abrupt closure of Silicon…

(The Verge) Microsoft laid off its entire ethics and society team within the artificial intelligence organization as part of recent layoffs that affected 10,000 employees across the company, Platformer has learned. The move leaves Microsoft without a dedicated team to ensure its AI principles are closely tied to product design at a time when the…