While the normies were resting, I was mainlining tech discourse all weekend to bring you the latest trends, rumors, fights, and innovations from the sweatiest corners of the internet. This week: The Musk v. Altman jury returns, anti-corporate pranksterism abounds worldwide, and a second commencement speaker gets booed.
This is Manic Monday.
Jury sides with Altman in OpenAI case
This morning at a federal courthouse in Oakland, the nine-person jury deciding Musk v. Altman rejected Elon Musk’s claim that Sam Altman and Greg Brockman “stole a charity” by attaching a for-profit company to OpenAI, which originally launched as a nonprofit. The determination hinged on a statute of limitations, with the jury noting that Musk did not file the lawsuit until 2024 despite having known about Altman’s plans to add the for-profit arm to OpenAI since 2021. The jury deliberated for less than two hours before returning its verdict. Musk’s lead counsel, Steven Molo, reserved his client’s right to appeal.
College students love their boos
A second commencement speaker got booed by their graduating audience for extolling AI: This time it was former Google CEO Eric Schmidt at the University of Arizona. Schmidt didn’t seem quite as clueless as the University of Central Florida speaker who got the boo’t last week, and I do wonder if these speakers will start to adjust their rhetoric in anticipation of this sort of response as graduation season continues. It’s like machine learning, but for humans!
College students also love their books
Theo Baker, a Stanford senior whose investigative reporting for his college newspaper exposed a research scandal that brought down the university’s president in 2023, is apparently advising the San Francisco Standard to help build “Hinge for news.” What exactly that means is unclear, though it certainly sounds Stanford as hell. Standard CEO Griffin Gaffney gave few details when he posted about the effort on LinkedIn over the weekend, choosing instead to focus on his hope for the future of journalism personified by young upstarts like Baker, a 21-year-old son of two high-powered journalists. Baker’s memoir, How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University, comes out tomorrow, with Gaffney included in the acknowledgements.
Hating on corporations: An international affair
Much to my personal delight, anti-corporate “brandalism” has become a global phenomenon in the AI age. While some sneaky little hellions continue to mess with the Gemini ads on Lyft bikes here in SF, the mischief continues across the pond: Palantir and Tinder (Palantinder?) are the latest targets of UK-based culture jammer Fokawolf.
Actor, writer, folk hero
Seth Rogen joins the growing list of Hollywood heavy-hitters denouncing AI in creative work. Speaking to Brut. media at this year’s techified Cannes Film Festival, Rogen said of AI, “I don’t understand what it’s supposed to do. Every time I see a video on Instagram that’s like, ‘Hollywood is cooked,’ what follows is, like, the most stupid dog shit I’ve ever seen in my life.” Amen, brother.
The week ahead: We feel Musk’s fury on the X feed.
Editor’s note: The Theo Baker entry has been updated to clarify that Baker is an advisor to The San Francisco Standard.
