Elizabeth Lopatto
A whale joined the Olympic surfers.
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.
Elizabeth Lopatto
Senior Reporter
Senior Reporter
More From Elizabeth Lopatto
Elizabeth Lopatto
New York Times can add another seven million works to its complaint against OpenAI and Microsoft.
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.
Elizabeth Lopatto
The terror machines at Elliot Management view Nvidia as overvalued and say AI isn’t going to live up to the hype.
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.
Elliott says Nvidia is in a ‘bubble’ and AI is ‘overhyped’
[Financial Times]
Elizabeth Lopatto
Number go down, Wall Street edition.
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.
Why Is the Stock Market Crashing Today?
[Intelligencer]
Elizabeth Lopatto
So what happens when the AI bubble bursts?
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?
The Grimy Residue of the AI Bubble
[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.
Elizabeth Lopatto
Elizabeth Lopatto
“It never seemed like he was even working.”
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.
Elizabeth Lopatto
A former CEO behind the Truth Social merger is getting sued for securities fraud.
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.
Elizabeth Lopatto
It is fully 2024 and J. D. Vance’s Venmo is still public.
Apparently J. D. Vance didn’t read my PSA about Venmo. Among his contacts? The elites he claims to loathe, execs from Anthropic and AOL, lobbyists, Tucker Carlson, and the people pushing Project 2025.
Elizabeth Lopatto
SpaceX’s and X’s headquarters are moving to Texas, Elon Musk says.
Musk, who has been a resident of Texas since 2019, says he decided to move the companies because Gavin Newsom didn’t do what Musk told him to. Previously, Musk moved Tesla’s headquarters to Austin after local health officials closed the Fremont plant during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic; Musk has a history of political donations in Texas.