Medialab, started by Whisper co-founders Michael Heyward and Brad Brooks, has left a trail of lawsuits following its acquisitions. Apparently it loaded up on cheap debt — and the Genius lawsuit alleges that it’s slow-rolling its acquisition payments to service that debt.
Byron Bernstein had six livestreamed conversations with Alok Kanojia, a psychiatrist. Then Bernstein died by suicide. Were those conversations ethical?
[The New York Times]
Yesterday, we got a cetacean entry in the annals of photobombing. Congratulations to everyone involved, and also to me, since I have watched this clip like 10 times.
The newspaper will file an amended complaint by August 12. If the Times wins its suit, adding those works means those two companies are on the hook for a minimum of $7.5 billion in statutory damages alone.
Elliott Management, famous for targeting underperforming companies such as Twitter, says Nvidia is in a bubble, in a new letter to investors.
Many of AI’s supposed uses are “never going to be cost-efficient, are never going to actually work right, will take up too much energy, or will prove to be untrustworthy”, it said.
[Financial Times]
The sell-off at least in part is about Wall Street losing confidence in AI. (I did warn you it was going to be a year of reckoning back in February!) There are a couple of other things going on, with potentially long-term effects on tech, too.
Crypto, a proxy for investors’ appetite for brainless risk, started a plunge that continued to worsen into Monday morning. The cause of all this came from three surprising pieces of economic data that came out last week, causing traders to rethink how they make, or at least don’t lose, money.
[Intelligencer]
Researcher Alex Hanna, of Distributed AI Research Institute and previously of Google, reflects on what might come next:
After the dust settles and NVIDIA has stopped churning out shovels (e.g. H100s) for the gold rush, what will be left behind? Will data centers go the way of shopping malls? Likely not—they’ll be repurposed for other massive computing projects. But what about those climate pledges?
[Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000: The Newsletter]
Two of Silicon Valley’s famous venture capitalists make the case for backing Trump: that their ability to make money is the only value that matters.
JD Vance’s former coworkers say the vice presidential candidate wasn’t very good at being a venture capitalist. One person said he was too consumed with his book tour around Hillbilly Elegy to show up to work.
Patrick Orlando, who once led Digital World Acquisition Corp, lied to the public when he said his SPAC didn’t have a target in its S-1 form. It definitely did: Trump Media, parent company of Donald Trump’s Truth Social. The SEC complaint is chock-full of his texts and emails. DWAC, incidentally, already settled a similar suit.