SF News Day Around the Bay: Muir Woods Reopens Through November 1, Entry Fees Waived The National Weather Service is forecasting 20-foot sneaker waves and rip tides this weekend; the one remaining Walgreens pharmacy in the Mission has an average 45-minute line; and some of Muir Woods National Park’s operational partners pitched in to reopen the park for ten days.
Business & Tech Guess Who's Helping Pay For Trump's Ballroom? Alphabet, Meta, Apple, Palantir Given how the billionaire CEOs all lined up to throw money at Trump's second inauguration, helping the despot feel like the king he's always wanted to be, his royal ballroom is also being funded by these billionaires, including the Bay Area's tech-wealthy.
Arts & Entertainment Tiny Bird From Asia Makes First-Ever California Appearance on Google Campus, Draws Crowds The dark-sided flycatcher, a small brown bird from Asia, made its California debut last week when it veered off-route and spent three days at the nature preserve behind Google’s Mountain View campus, attracting birding enthusiasts from across the country.
SF News YouTube Accounts Previously Banned for Misinformation Could Soon Be Reinstated YouTube’s parent company Alphabet announced Tuesday it’s allowing creators who received permanent bans over misinformation relating to COVID-19 and the 2020 election to apply to be reinstated. This likely includes Robert F. Kennedy Jr and Steve Bannon.
SF News Sunday Links: Small Businesses Say Google Misled Them Into Opposing New Privacy Law California tied with Louisiana for highest poverty rate in the US; lawmakers passed a bill that would protect the state’s vaccines from federal interference; and Google told small businesses Assembly Bill 566 would hurt their online ad reach.
Business & Tech Judge Stops Short of Making Google Sell Chrome, Forces It to Share Search Data With Competitors In a landmark decision in a landmark antitrust case, a federal judge in DC has ruled that in order to make restitution for its longstanding monopoly over internet search, Google will have to share some of its data and its search results to several qualified competitors.
Business & Tech Google Agrees to Pay $50 Million Settlement In Racial Discrimination Lawsuit A group of nearly 4,000 current and former Black Google employees will split a $50 million pot after the online search giant agreed to that settlement in a lawsuit that alleges Black employees were paid lower wages and denied promotions.
Business & Tech Tech Updates: New Groq AI Chips Push Boundaries Groq leads the race for energy-efficient AI infrastructure; SeafoodAI automates crab fishing for better traceability; and Google backs Charm Industrial’s biochar tech to advance carbon removal goals.
Business & Tech Federal Judge Rules Against Google In Second Antitrust Case, This One About Its Ad Network For the second time in less than a year, a federal court has dealt a blow to Google's business model, ruling that it holds an illegal monopoly in a key sphere of its operations.
Business & Tech Bay Area Tech Stocks Get Destroyed By Trump Tariffs, SF CEO Screams Obscenity on Live Earnings Call Remember when all those Bay Area tech CEOs cuddled up to Trump with $1 million inauguration donations? Boy did that just blow up in their faces! They lost billions today, and one yelled “Oh sh*t!” when he checked his stock on a live earnings call.
Business & Tech The Search for Ethical Tech Alternatives As major tech companies become more invasive, users are turning to privacy-focused alternatives. Proton has a solid suite of offerings, but mixing things up is probably the way to go.
Business & Tech Google DeepMind Says They Have an AI Weather Model That Outperforms All Existing Models at 15-Day Forecasts Reliably predicting the weather more than a week out has been something of a Holy Grail in the meteorology industry for half a century.
Business & Tech Department of Justice Pushes for Google to Sell Off Chrome, Android Following a landmark antitrust ruling in August, the Department of Justice and a group of states made a court filing Wednesday asking a judge to force Google to sell its popular Chrome web browser.
Business & Tech Russia Fines Google $20 Decillion For Blocking Channels on YouTube A Russian court has ordered Google/Alphabet to pay two undecillion rubles in fines — that's a two followed by 36 zeroes — in an obviously symbolic ruling expressing the government's wrath over YouTube continuing to block pro-Russian channels.
Business & Tech Google Says It's Fixed Gemini People-Generating Feature, Also It's Releasing Customizable Chatbots Google's AI project Gemini hit a snag earlier this year when its image-generating feature was found to create wild historical inaccuracies in the interest of diversity. Google says it's been working on that, and the new and improved people-generator will made available to some paid users soon.
Business & Tech Google Has Illegal Monopoly Over Web Searching, Federal Judge Rules Google has been declared "a monopolist" in a landmark decision that may shake things up in Silicon Valley. The decision came down Monday in US District Court for the District of Columbia.
Business & Tech Google Scales Back 'AI Overviews,' Admits the AI Has Been Getting Things Wrong Despite what they said was extensive testing before launch, Google is admitting that its "AI Overview" system has been prone to spreading untruths, and some very weird untruths at that.
Business & Tech Google's 'AI Overview' Gets Facts Wrong, Is Worse Than a Regular Search You may have noticed if you've Googled something in the last week that the search results page on the site is now topped with an "AI Overview" that purports to answer whatever question you may have been trying to get answered. The trouble is, some answers can be blatantly wrong.
Business & Tech ChatGPT Reportedly Rolling Out a ‘Google Killer’ Search Engine, But Failed to Do So In Underwhelming Monday Demo There are reports that new tech industry darling OpenAI is working on an AI-powered search engine they hope will overtake Google, but the company’s ballyhooed Monday announcement did not show anything that will have Google shaking in their shoes.
Business & Tech Google Is Bailing From Its Offices at Trophy SF Building One Market Plaza A prize tenant is leaving a prized property at the luxe waterfront offices of One Market Plaza, as Google is reportedly vacating its 300,000 square feet of the property when the lease expires next year.
SF News Humpday Headlines: Google Outage Affects Search, Google Drive Police in San Jose busted a brothel; a beloved formerly homeless man in Berkeley was found dead from an apparent fall; and Google was experiencing a major outage this morning.
Business & Tech Google Fires All 28 Workers Who Pulled an In-Company Protest Against Israeli Defense Contract In a not-at-all surprising development, Google has fired the 28 workers who staged a sit-in protest Tuesday in a top executive’s office, all in protest of a billion-dollar contract Google has with the Israeli government during the Gaza conflict.
Business & Tech Bay Area Man Arrested For Stealing AI Trade Secrets From Google, Shipping Them to Chinese Companies A Chinese national living in Newark was arrested by the feds for allegedly stealing AI technology from Google, and secretly sending the information to two Chinese companies he was working for on the sly.
Business & Tech Google Suspends Gemini Image Module After Backlash Over Diverse Depictions of Founding Fathers, Nazis In case you missed the hubbub on Xitter, many people including Elon Musk have been flipping out this week over historic inaccuracies being produced by Google's Gemini chatbot image generator, which have included racially diverse images of "the Founding Fathers."
Business & Tech Google Co-Founder Sergey Brin Hit With Wrongful-Death Lawsuit Over Fatal 2023 Plane Crash A private plane belonging to Google co-founder Sergey Brin crashed off Half Moon Bay last year, killing both pilots onboard, and one pilot’s widow is now suing Brin and Google for allegedly making improper modifications to the plane and obstructing the crash investigation.
