404 Media managed to get their hands on internal documentation that shows Tumblr is selling the contents of user posts to OpenAI and Midjourney for AI-training. Compounding that, they accidentally sent private posts to Midjourney and OpenAI. None of this was done with the explicit permission of the authors of that content, something Automattic must know, as it is planning to add a setting so people can opt-out of having their data sent to 3rd parties. The damage has already been done however, with all of Tumblr's public content from 2014 to 2023 in the hands of OpenAI and Midjourney. Automattic's CEO (the parent company of Tumblr) had an unrelated meltdown on the weekend, disclosing private account info in an internet argument with Tumblr's users. Here I was thinking Automattic is one of the good guys. How wrong I was.
According to Bloomberg and "people with knowledge of the matter", Apple is finally ditching their plans to make a car - which they never announced or made public anyways, despite loads of car industry people going to work at Apple. There was around 2,000 employees working on it and they will now be moved from the Special Projects Group to an artificial intelligence division (ugh). It must be tough for a company like Apple, with more money than God to decide what the hell to do next. Anything that moves the needle on their share price is a massive undertaking. In a funny way they're now the Xerox and IBM of their time, too big to do anything new and exciting.
Completing the trifecta of AI-related news stories today (I wish there was other stuff to write about, I really do), OpenAI wants the lawsuit against it started by the New York Times dismissed because the NYT "paid someone to hack OpenAI's products". They believe that the NYT was able to get examples of OpenAI's alleged copyright infringement by "targeting and exploiting a bug" and "using deceptive prompts that blatantly violate OpenAI's terms of use". How convenient that anything that comes out of ChatGPT that causes OpenAI problems can be dismissed as a "bug" and anyone using ChatGPT in a way that makes them look bad "violates" their terms of use.
A research paper has looked into a vibe I've been feeling for a while now - the big five tech companies are experts in suppressing true technological innovation so it doesn't kick them off the perch like they did to companies before them. The paper argues Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft "identify potentially disruptive technologies, use their money to influence the startups developing them, strategically dole out access to the resources the startups need to grow, and seek regulation that makes it harder for the startups to compete. When a threat emerges, they buy it off. And after they acquire a startup, they redirect its people and assets to their own innovation needs. These seemingly unrelated behaviors work together to enable the tech giants to maintain their dominance in the face of disruptive innovations". Found this in The Crux, a good free weekly newsletter if you're interested in enterprise computer stuff.
A promotional Xbox Series X (Always On)
📻 Where Did She Come From? - Hard-Ons
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