silicon valley - CybAI news

22 Jul

Here’s What Happens When You Give People Free Money

stp2y0 CommentsRAG modelsfinance, silicon valley, venture capital, work

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s decade-in-the-making effort to understand how handing out free money affects recipients and the broader economy delivered its first big results Monday. OpenResearch found that when it gave some of the poorest Americans $1,000 a month for three years with no strings attached, they put much of the money toward basic needs such as food, housing, and transportation. But what amounted to $36,000 wasn’t enough to significantly improve their physical well-being or long-term financial health, researchers concluded.The initial results from what OpenResearch, an Altman-funded research lab, describes as the most comprehensive study on “unconditional cash” show that…

19 Jul

Donald Trump and Silicon Valley’s Billionaire Elegy

stp2y0 CommentsRAG models2024 election, donald trump, plaintext, politics, silicon valley, venture capital

Andreessen talks about the proposal as if it were Putin himself invading Atherton, California, the elite zip code where he resided until recently. If this tax is imposed, he says, investors will exit the market and innovations won’t be funded. “Number one, you kill startups and venture capital. So congratulations, you kill the technology industry, essentially,” he says. “Number two, you kill the California tax base—California is done!”But the carnage doesn’t stop there, says Andreessen. Once the government gets a taste of this new tax on the rich, it will want more, more, more, until eventually this endangered class of…

17 Jun

OpenAI-Backed Nonprofits Have Gone Back on Their Transparency Pledges

stp2y0 CommentsGenAIartificial intelligence, openai, regulation, silicon valley, startups, tech policy and law

Neither database mandates nor generally contains up-to-date versions of the records that UBI Charitable and OpenResearch had said they provided in the past.The original YC Research conflict-of-interest policy that Das did share calls for company insiders to be upfront about transactions in which their impartiality could be questioned and for the board to decide how to proceed.Das says the policy “may have been amended since OpenResearch’s policies changed (including when the name was changed from YC Research), but the core elements remain the same.”No WebsiteUBI Charitable launched in 2020 with $10 million donated from OpenAI, as first reported by TechCrunch…

17 Jun

AI Is Coming for Big Tech Jobs—but Not in the Way You Think

stp2y0 CommentsRAG modelsartificial intelligence, google, microsoft, silicon valley, work

Aaron Damigos’ inbox was hit with a dreaded, ubiquitous business-update calendar invite on June 3. The meeting included someone from HR, his manager, and upper management—and ultimately resulted in the sudden end to his job as a web support associate with Microsoft.Microsoft reportedly laid off some 1,000 people in early June, pulling from its mixed reality and Azure cloud departments, and also Damigos’ consumer sales division. An email to employees from Jason Zander, executive vice president of strategic missions and technologies at Microsoft, leaked to Business Insider, blamed a pivot to invest in artificial intelligence: “Our clear focus as a…

07 Jun

Don’t Let Mistrust of Tech Companies Blind You to the Power of AI

stp2y0 CommentsGenAIartificial intelligence, chatgpt, donald trump, openai, plaintext, silicon valley

Meanwhile, in less visible ways, AI is already changing education, commerce, and the workplace. One friend recently told me about a big IT firm he works with. The company had a lengthy and long-established protocol for launching major initiatives that involved designing solutions, coding up the product, and engineering the rollout. Moving from concept to execution took months. But he recently saw a demo that applied state-of-the-art AI to a typical software project. “All of those things that took months happened in the space of a few hours,” he says. “That made me agree with your column. Tons of the…

05 Jun

Marc Andreessen Called Online Safety Teams an Enemy. He Still Wants Walled Gardens for His Kid

stp2y0 CommentsAIalgorithms, artificial intelligence, investing, silicon valley, social media, startups, twitter, vcs

In his polarizing “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” last year, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen listed a number of enemies to technological progress. Among them were “tech ethics” and “trust and safety,” a term used for work on online content moderation, which he said had been used to subject humanity to “a mass demoralization campaign” against new technologies such as artificial intelligence.Andreessen’s declaration drew both public and quiet criticism from people working in those fields—including at Meta, where Andreessen is a board member. Critics saw his screed as misrepresenting their work to keep internet services safer.On Wednesday, Andreessen offered some clarification: When it comes…

29 May

A Nonprofit Tried to Fix Tech Culture—but Lost Control of Its Own

stp2y0 CommentsRAG modelscontent moderation, facebook, google, meta, philanthropy, platforms, silicon valley, social media, startups

Allen, a data scientist, and Massachi, a software engineer, worked for nearly four years at Facebook on some of the uglier aspects of social media, combating scams and election meddling. They didn’t know each other but both quit in 2019, frustrated at feeling a lack of support from executives. “The work that teams like the one I was on, civic integrity, was being squandered,” Massachi said in a recent conference talk. “Worse than a crime, it was a mistake.”Massachi first conceived the idea of using expertise like that he’d developed at Facebook to drive greater public attention to the dangers…