Elizabeth Lopatto is a senior writer at The Verge, where she covers how the internet is changing how we think about money: cryptocurrency, business, fintech and Elon Musk for some reason. She joined the site in 2014, as science editor, then deputy editor running science, transportation and social media, before she got tired of being an authority figure and went back to blogging.
What three hours of a documentary looks like to someone who spent four months at the Holmes trial.
In a deep-dive profile of Marc Andreessen’s petty grievance bullshit, Bloomberg Businessweek gently points out that he is not exactly a member of the reality-based community. Since covid, that’s gotten worse, as he and his wife have cocooned themselves away from ever encountering a normal person.
The London Review of Books surveys the gambling landscape: how “prediction markets” have been handed the CFTC, market manipulation, and the blurring of reality. To state the obvious: “Prediction markets don’t produce truth. They are high-stakes wait-and-see machines, that’s all.” Do stay to read the very end.
[London Review of Books]
The company’s unsecured debt due in 2032 is now trading below 80 cents on the dollar, Bloomberg reports. “Yikes” is right, Elon — if CoreWeave crumbles, other debt-laden neoclouds might be in trouble, too.
CoreWeave is in many ways the poster child of the current AI buildout, which may have disastrous consequences if things don’t go as planned.
Write Love Pens, a small pen and stationery shop, had initially used AI-generated images (including one of a pen with two clips on the cap) to advertise surprise boxes that the shop puts together. After getting yelled at on fountain pen Reddit, the shop’s owner apologized, and replaced the AI images with extremely cute amateur drawings.
Nvidia, which recently debuted “compute as an asset class” and definitely is not doing circular financing, is reportedly buying Hugging Face for almost $13 billion, according to The Information, which cites a single anonymous source. Almost an hour earlier, Business Insider reported that the two companies were in talks but had not yet reached a deal, also citing a single anonymous source.
You may recall Apollo is majorly involved in AI infrastructure financing; it even is one of the “compute is an asset class” consortium. Sounds like the hackers stole a bunch of the usual things, like employees’ social security numbers. If they stole interesting things, like internal data on the AI deals Apollo has been making, that wasn’t disclosed in the breach notification. If you know anything about the hack, hit me up on Signal: lopatto.46.