The'painted ladies' in San Francisco on 20 August 2024. The'painted ladies' in San Francisco on 20 August 2024. Home prices in the San Francisco Bay Area's already expensive market are skyrocketing as employees at leading artificial intelligence companies come into gargantuan sums of money thanks to a boom in initial public offerings . With San Francisco's OpenAI and Anthropic, as well as SpaceX, which operates a major facility in the Los Angeles area, eyeing debuts on the stock market, the hot housing market may not abate soon. If their initial public offering (IPO) is well-received, the companies' multibillion-dollar valuations are poised to produce massive wealth for employees and executives holding shares, which experts say could trigger an uptick in demand for the Bay Area's limited housing stock.

The tension between OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is the driving force in today's biggest technological revolution. SAN FRANCISCO/NEW YORK - If not for the intense rivalry between Anthropic and OpenAI, the generative AI boom might not have arrived so quickly. In late 2022, OpenAI caught wind that Anthropic was working on an AI-powered chatbot. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman immediately directed employees to fast-track a competing product, four people familiar with the matter said. Two weeks later, the company released ChatGPT, sparking a technological revolution that promises to overhaul the global economy and the way humans interact.

It might not feel all that different from older World Cups--for better or worse. Waymo, the Alphabet subsidiary offering robotaxi rides in 11 US metros right now, says it's ready for the FIFA World Cup . Match attendees can catch driverless rides to six of the 16 North American venues: stadiums in Atlanta, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, and the San Francisco Bay Area. The sprawling football event, expected to attract some 6.5 million visitors to the continent over more than a month, could prove an exciting close-up for Waymo . The company says it's serving half-a-million paid rides a week--paltry stuff compared to the likes of ride-hail giants Uber and Lyft, but more impressive once you remember that the things don't have drivers.

China-based actors are likely behind the use of ChatGPT for "covert influence operations" aimed at stoking opposition to data centres in the United States, OpenAI has said. In a research report released on Wednesday, the company behind the world's most popular AI chatbot said it had banned a cluster of accounts likely based in China for attempting to "manipulate a legitimate debate about American AI". Among other content, the accounts generated a comic strip showing a cigar-chomping businessman holding bags marked with dollar signs as a family reacted in shock to their electricity bill, according to the San Francisco-based company. OpenAI said a second cluster of accounts had generated content casting US tariffs as an effort to "dominate technological competition" with China, and specified that the material should not mention Chinese leader Xi Jinping. While the campaign sought to "exploit and amplify existing public concerns" about energy prices, OpenAI found no evidence that it had a "meaningful" influence, the company said.

OpenAI, founded in San Francisco in 2015 as a nonprofit research lab, burst into the mainstream with the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022. It has since restructured as a for-profit corporation. SAN FRANCISCO, UNITED STATES - ChatGPT-maker OpenAI on Monday took the first step toward going public, one week after archrival Anthropic announced its own filing, as both companies look to raise the massive sums needed to expand. In a social media post, the Sam Altman-led company said it had confidentially submitted an S-1 registration statement to U.S. securities regulators but had "not decided on timing yet" for any potential debut. OpenAI's move follows a confidential filing by Anthropic, the maker of the Claude chatbot, which announced last Monday that it had taken the same step. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.

Could humanoid robots be heading for the battlefield? I've come to an industrial space in a tech-heavy area of San Francisco expecting to see a menacing humanoid robot solider doing something combat-like: the future of land-based warfare, perhaps. Instead, the black shiny faceless Phantom robot is engaged in free play, manipulating a bunch of coloured kids blocks. We need data from it just interacting with its environment [and] this is today's menu, explains Sankaet Pathak, co-founder and CEO of two-year-old start-up Foundation Robotics, which is developing Phantom for military and civilian applications. Later he pushes its 80kg steel-covered body around the room to demonstrate its stability and shows me how it walks.

The pale blue vans have begun picking up passengers in California and Arizona. Waymo has begun offering rides in its brand-new Ojai robotaxi to passengers in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Phoenix. Trips will be free for a limited time. The Ojai is a big step for Waymo. This is the company's first purpose-built robotaxi.

'My job is going': U.K. workers squeezed out by AI In the U.K., the IMF estimated in 2024 that more than two-thirds of British workers perform tasks that AI could potentially carry out. London - When a client asked her a year ago to design a glossary to train an artificial intelligence system, translator Jessica Spengler realized she was going to train her own replacement. "That was the day I really thought ... my job is going," said the 52-year-old, who translates into English for German educational and historical organizations. In the U.K., where services account for around 80% of the economy, AI has become flexible, fast and inexpensive competition for many white-collar workers, with the impacts beginning to emerge. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.

These Robots Are Making Meals for a Nonprofit in San Francisco's Tenderloin A nonprofit in the city's most troubled district has turned to robotic meal prep tech to make up for a dearth of human volunteers. Project Open Hand, a nonprofit founded in 1985 by local grandmother and HIV-awareness advocate Ruth Brinker, prepares and packages meals to meet the diverse nutritional requirements of people who need them. The effort began in response to the AIDS crisis, but the nonprofit has since expanded the meals it makes for people with conditions such as heart disease, diabetes, or chronic kidney disease. But it takes many people to make these meals, and Project Open Hand has struggled to entice volunteers to help fill the meal kits. The organization is housed in a four-story building in San Francisco's Tenderloin district.

Global affairs chief Chris Lehane wants to tone down the debate over AI's societal impacts--and get states to pass laws that won't derail OpenAI's meteoric rise. Three months ago, OpenAI cofounder Greg Brockman told me his concerns about a mounting public relations crisis facing artificial intelligence companies: Despite the popularity of tools like ChatGPT, an increasingly large share of the population said they viewed AI negatively. Since then, the backlash has only intensified. College commencement speakers are now getting booed for talking about AI in optimistic terms. Last month, someone threw a Molotov cocktail at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's San Francisco home and wrote a manifesto advocating for crimes against AI executives.