“Lin cannot seriously dispute that the decision to allow opioid sales on Incognito was his own,” the prosecution’s filing reads. “And, Lin made that decision knowing full well that encouraging opioids is tantamount to welcoming fentanyl poisonings.”Yet portions of the defense’s memos related to Lin’s sentencing point to several specific instances when the FBI informant, while actively controlled by his law enforcement handlers, allegedly made decisions that allowed sales of fentanyl-tainted products—in several cases approving dealers to continue their sales even after clear warnings that their drugs contained fentanyl, Lin’s defense memo says.In November of 2023, for instance, one Incognito…
Code Metal, a Boston-based startup that uses AI to write code and translate it into other programming languages, just closed a $125 million Series B funding round from new and existing investors. The news comes just a few months after the startup raised $36 million in series A financing led…
A group of 23 Democratic US senators sent a letter Friday to the top federal regulator overseeing prediction markets, urging the agency to avoid weighing in on pending court cases over the legality of offerings on the platforms tied to “sports, war, and other prohibited events.”Prediction markets, which sell contracts…
This will not be a banner year for the real estate app Zillow. “We describe the home market as bouncing along the bottom,” CEO Jeremy Wacksman said in our conversation this week. Last year was dismal for the real estate market, and he expects things to improve only marginally in…
Last month, Jason Grad issued a late-night warning to the 20 employees at his tech startup. “You’ve likely seen Clawdbot trending on X/LinkedIn. While cool, it is currently unvetted and high-risk for our environment,” he wrote in a Slack message with a red siren emoji. “Please keep Clawdbot off all…
Today, Meta went to trial in the state of New Mexico for allegedly failing to protect minors from sexual exploitation on its apps, including Facebook and Instagram. The state claims that Meta violated New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act by implementing design features and algorithms that created dangerous conditions for users.…
Employees at Salesforce are circulating an internal letter to chief executive Marc Benioff calling on him to denounce recent actions by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, prohibit the use of Salesforce software by immigration agents, and back federal legislation that would significantly reform the agency.The letter specifically cites the “recent…
For Elon Musk, the US Justice Department’s release of 3 million additional files related to criminal investigations of Jeffrey Epstein last month was immediately embarrassing. Attention in particular fell on emails Musk sent the financier several years after he pleaded guilty to solicitation of prostitution and of procurement of minors…
OpenAI’s president and cofounder Greg Brockman doesn’t consider himself political, which is surprising, because he was one of President Trump’s biggest individual donors of 2025.Greg and his wife, Anna Brockman, gave $25 million to MAGA Inc—a super PAC that supports President Trump—in September of last year. The pair also gave…
Leah Feiger: Talking about him. Yeah. Absolutely.Brian Barrett: Yeah. It’s just this web. It fills out this web.Leah Feiger: Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Eric Schmidt, these are the tech titans.Brian Barrett: Yeah. Up until as recently as 2019, I think some of these people were actively in touch.Leah…
More Than 880 employees and contractors working for Google signed a petition this week calling on the company to disclose and cancel any contracts it may have with US immigration authorities. In the letter unveiled on Friday, the workers said they are “vehemently opposed” to Google’s dealings with the Department…
Since the middle of last year, there have been at least three major AI “acqui-hires” in Silicon Valley. Meta invested more than $14 billion in Scale AI and brought on its CEO, Alexandr Wang; Google spent a cool $2.4 billion to license Windsurf’s technology and fold its cofounders and research…
Peter Thiel—the billionaire venture capitalist, PayPal, and Palantir cofounder, and outspoken commentator on all matters relating to the “Antichrist”—appears at least 2,200 times in the latest batch of files released by the Department of Justice related to convicted sex offender and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.The tranche of records demonstrate how…
“I had very little correspondence with Epstein and declined repeated invitations to go to his island or fly on his ‘Lolita Express,’ but was well aware that some email correspondence with him could be misinterpreted and used by detractors to smear my name,” Musk said in a post on X…
Mistral AI has released a new family of AI models that it claims will clear the path to seamless conversation between people speaking different languages.On Wednesday, the Paris-based AI lab released two new speech-to-text models: Voxtral Mini Transcribe V2 and Voxtral Realtime. The former is built to transcribe audio files…
Spotlight
Villages looked for niches they could fill in the global market. The…
We have incredibly wonderful tools through generative AI that could potentially take…
Elon Musk’s X has introduced new restrictions stopping people from editing and…
Caterpillar has long been synonymous with the machines that build, mine and…
