Welcome back to review week! Much of the news this week – Travis Caranic could possibly be back in the world of self-driving cars. CoreWeave's CEO is worth $10 billion. Apple users are not happy with the way the company promotes the new “F1” movies.
Please note that the quick memo will be out next week on the holiday on July 4th. Have a great weekend!
And one more thing: Meta has gotten a leading Openai researcher, Trapit Bansal, to boost the new AI Superintelligence team. He is the same guy who helped Ilya Sutskever start his job as an inference model for Openai. As Zuckerberg unfolds the red carpet (and possibly a huge salary), Meta's Brainy New Squad is shaping who is who the AI talent poached from rival labs.
Revolving Door: Travis Kalanick may have returned to autonomous car games with the help of Uber, trying to buy the US arm of the Pony Ai, according to the New York Times. The move will mark a full-sake moment for the founder of Uber, who has been cooking ghost kitchens since his exile in 2017 and now appears to be ready to go back to self-driving cars.
The federal judge has just handed a big legal victory over AI companies. Training of books that are copyrighted without permission may be counted as fair use. Creatives are shaking from the blow, but courts are brought to justice by humanity using pirated books to build all the “central libraries” ever written.
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Fashion Forward: Google has released a new experimental app called DoPpl. You can also mix Thrift Find, social media, or camera roll look, or generate short videos to see how your new outfit works in real life.
In the Nevada Desert: JB Straubel's Redwood Materials turned the switch on North America's largest microgrid, equipped with an 805 retired EV battery, and fueled the AI data center. With his new venture, Redwood Energy, Straubel is turning yesterday's car battery into tomorrow's clean, profitable power source. It could also outperform the company's core recycling business in the process.
To the Moon: CoreWeave CEO Michael Intrator is worth dropping $10 billion a few months after a bumpy IPO from an AI cloud company. What began as the Scrappy Crypto Mining Hustle is now a GPU-fueled AI powerhouse serving Openai and Microsoft. But with $8.8 billion in debt and a water-cooled interest rate, it's still walking the tightrope.
Copyright Issues: Openai quietly pulled out a flashy video hypes over Sam Altman and Jony Ive Partnership and $6.5 billion device startup deals. But that's not because the deal is falling apart.
Never forget iTunes' U2: As a F1 fan, I don't mind the promotion of Apple's “F1: The Movie,” but I might be in the minority. Apple users are not satisfied with ads that are not invited to the wallet app, which has rekindled complaints that Apple is using the core app to sell its own content without consent.
Ah, just a day after Tesla began boarding her new Robotaxis in Austin, Texas, federal safety regulators have already asked questions. The NHTSA confirmed it was in contact with Tesla after video of a self-driving vehicle speeding and swinging it around towards the wrong lane, raising new concerns about the safety of Tesla's unsupervised, fully autonomous technology.
Thank you for helping? With AI search capabilities digging into publisher traffic, Google is rolling out a new tool from an ad manager called Offerwall to help sites make money otherwise, allowing Micropayments, research, or readers to watch ADS and unlock content. Early tests show a modest revenue bump, but what Google knows is narrowing down its ecosystem is another sign.
Change: Elon Musk reportedly fired Omead Afshar, vice president of Tesla, who is responsible for sales and manufacturing in North America and Europe. His departure occurs when the company's sales growth fades.
Ban Hammer: Instagram and Facebook users have called for a massive ban, and now Facebook groups have complained that the mass suspensions are also affected by the Facebook group. The reason for the massive ban is yet to be known, but AI-based moderation errors could be liable.
Before you go
Pour: The iconic Windows error screen has acquired a transformation almost 40 years after it debuted with the first version of Windows. Instead of the Blue Screen of Death, users will see a black screen of Death. Rip to a real thing.