The former president joined me on Decoder to discuss AI regulation, the First Amendment, and of course, what apps he has on his homescreen.
The real-estate-company-pretending-to-be-a-tech-company just filed to have its debts forgiven and some of its leases canceled.
As of last Friday, the company was valued at $45 million, just slightly less than its 2019 peak valuation of, uh, $47 billion. Whoops!
The 44th President just posted his AI reading list and let it slip that he and I chatted about the challenges of regulating AI — and he recommended our episode on free speech and social networks with Larry Lessig as well. Coming on Tuesday — subscribe now so you don’t miss it.
Legacy car company trying a “Silicon Valley-style” software unit with impossible ambitions running into the cold hard reality of needing to actually ship working software? Nope, not VW: this time it’s Toyota, whose Woven Planet software subsidiary working on CES-style nonsense ideas has basically hit the rocks.
Toyota named the concept Arene, a kind of operating system for cars that was envisioned as making it possible for drivers to wirelessly download a wide array of upgrades, just like Tesla. Arene-powered vehicles would connect to a cloud network, gathering and sharing data among millions of vehicles, smart homes and city infrastructure. Developers outside of Toyota would be able to use it to design their own applications and services for cars, and Arene would be open for use by other automakers as well, in the manner of Android, the mobile operating system that runs on many brands of smartphone.
I’m just trying to imagine the pitch meeting where “surely some Ford electric truck owners want external speakers that make Chevy V8 sounds” got funded to production.
Fair to say Danny does not love Amanda Chicago Lewis’ excellent piece about the web SEO built — and the people who’ve made millions running SEO schemes. (Also important to note that Danny says he is not responding in his professional capacity as a Google employee here!)
Danny calls out an email conversation we had a while ago about indexing quick posts in search while we were redesigning the site; the only thing I’ll say is that I found it very instructive that our ideas about how to make our site more useful ran headfirst into a discussion about what Google would want instead of what our audience would want. And ultimately Google’s guidance was so opaque that we excluded quick posts from the search index rather than accept the traffic risk. (We’re going to let them get indexed soon, though. Yolo.)
[Danny Sullivan]
The publisher behind the songwriting copyrights to some of the most popular music ever recorded doesn’t think AI spells doom for the industry.
John Gruber, responding to a Mark Gurman report in Bloomberg about Apple scrambling to catch up in AI:
The anxiety inside Apple is that many people inside do not believe Apple’s own AI/ML team can deliver, and but that the company — if only for privacy reasons — is only going to use what comes from their own AI/ML team.
Hmm. Hmmm.
[Daring Fireball]
After 30 years teaching law, the internet policy legend is as worried as you’d think about AI and TikTok — and he has surprising thoughts about balancing free speech with protecting democracy.
