Gay men have long been rumored to run Silicon Valley. No one can say exactly when, or if, gay men started running Silicon Valley. They seem to have dominated its upper ranks at least the past five years, maybe more. On platforms like X, the clues are there: whispers of private-island retreats, tech executives going "gay for clout," and the suggestion that a "seed round" is not, strictly speaking, a financial term. It is an idea so taken for granted, in fact, that when I call up a well-connected hedge fund manager to ask his thoughts about what is sometimes referred to in industry circles as the "gay tech mafia," he audibly yawns. "This has always been the case." It had been the case, the hedge funder says, back in 2012, when he was raising money from a venture capitalist whose office was staffed with dozens of "attractive, strong young men," all of whom were "under 30" and looked as though they had freshly decamped from "the high school debate club." "They were all sleeping with each other and starting companies," he says. And it is absolutely the case now, he adds, when gay men are running influential companies in Silicon Valley and maintain entire social calendars with scarcely a straight man, much less a woman, in sight. "Of course the gay tech mafia exists," he continues. "This is not some Illuminati conspiracy theory. And you do not have to be gay to join. They like straight guys who sleep with them even more." Ever since I started covering Silicon Valley in 2017, I've heard variations of this rumor--that "gays," as an AI founder named Emmett Chen-Ran has quipped, "run this joint." On its face, a gay tech mafia seemed too dumb to warrant actual investigative inquiry.

The billionaire investor campaigned for Kamala Harris, but thinks tech execs have a "moral imperative" to play nice with the president. Back in May, Mark Cuban appeared in his last episode of ABC's after spending more than a decade on the show investing in--or deprecating--entrepreneurs' big ideas. But that doesn't mean the billionaire is going away. Yes, Cuban loves to talk--about ideas, about the future, about what it takes to actually make America healthy again. Or, at least, to get Americans more affordable drugs, which Cuban is endeavoring to do with his startup, Cost Plus Drug Company. Nor does Cuban, like many billionaire businessmen, shy away from talking politics: Does he like President Trump? But would he join the president for dinner like so many of his peers have in recent months? With enthusiasm, according to a conversation we had for this week's episode of . Keep reading to find out why. Just so you know--well it's too late now--we always start these conversations with some rapid-fire questions. What is the smartest investment you ever made? What's the dumbest purchase you ever made? Alright, one word to describe the startup pitches that you hate. Would you rather invest in passion or in numbers? Tell me a little bit about why.

How Trump's policies are affecting early-career scientists--in their own words Every year, we recognize extraordinary young researchers on our Innovators Under 35 list. Recent honorees told us how they're faring under the new administration. Every year celebrates accomplished young scientists, entrepreneurs, and inventors from around the world in our Innovators Under 35 list . We've just published the 2025 edition . This year, though, the context is pointedly different: The US scientific community finds itself in an unprecedented position, with the very foundation of its work under attack . Since Donald Trump took office in January, his administration has fired top government scientists, targeted universities individually and academia more broadly, and made substantial funding cuts to the country's science and technology infrastructure .

On a sunny day in San Francisco, along the city's waterfront, families dived into the wacky world of artificial intelligence inside the Exploratorium museum. Visitors made shadow puppets for AI to identify, used AI to generate songs, asked chatbots questions and faced off with AI in a game in which players tried to draw images that only humans would recognize. A giant robot hand moved around and people peered into a video game chip. They jotted down their hopes and worries about AI on cards displayed in the museum. Hope: AI will cure cancer.

This paper introduces a parameterization framework for controlling conversation quality in large language models. We explore nine key parameters across six dimensions that enable precise specification of dialogue properties. Through experiments with state-of-the-art LLMs, we demonstrate that parameter-based control produces statistically significant differences in generated conversation properties. Our approach addresses challenges in conversation generation, including topic coherence, knowledge progression, character consistency, and control granularity. The framework provides a standardized method for conversation quality control with applications in education, therapy, customer service, and entertainment. Future work will focus on implementing additional parameters through architectural modifications and developing benchmark datasets for evaluation.

Would you like to work nearly double the standard 40-hour week? It's a question that many startups in the US are asking prospective employees--and to get the job, the answer needs to be an unequivocal yes. These companies are embracing an intense schedule, first popularized in mainland China, known as "996," or 9 am to 9 pm, six days a week. The 996 phenomenon in China gave rise to major protests and accusations of "modern slavery," with critics blaming the schedule for a spate of worker deaths. Despite the negative connotations overseas, US firms, many of them working on artificial intelligence, are adopting both the schedule and its nickname as they race to compete against each other--and with China.

External funding is crucial for early-stage ventures, particularly technology startups that require significant R&D investment. Business angels offer a critical source of funding, but their decision-making is often subjective and resource-intensive for both investor and entrepreneur. Much research has investigated this investment process to find the critical factors angels consider. One such tool, the Critical Factor Assessment (CFA), deployed more than 20,000 times by the Canadian Innovation Centre, has been evaluated post-decision and found to be significantly more accurate than investors' own decisions. However, a single CFA analysis requires three trained individuals and several days, limiting its adoption. This study builds on previous work validating the CFA to investigate whether the constraints inhibiting its adoption can be overcome using a trained AI model. In this research, we prompted multiple large language models (LLMs) to assign the eight CFA factors to a dataset of 600 transcribed, unstructured startup pitches seeking business angel funding with known investment outcomes. We then trained and evaluated machine learning classification models using the LLM-generated CFA scores as input features. Our best-performing model demonstrated high predictive accuracy (85.0% for predicting BA deal/no-deal outcomes) and exhibited significant correlation (Spearman's r = 0.896, p-value < 0.001) with conventional human-graded evaluations. The integration of AI-based feature extraction with a structured and validated decision-making framework yielded a scalable, reliable, and less-biased model for evaluating startup pitches, removing the constraints that previously limited adoption.

An entrepreneur has told how she was left feeling "humiliated" after being turned away from London Tech Week, an annual corporate event, because she was with her baby daughter. Davina Schonle was prevented from entering the event on Monday after travelling for three hours with her eight-month-old and had to cancel meetings with potential suppliers to her tech startup. Schonle told TheBusinessDesk.com that as she went to the entrance with her daughter in her pram: "I was asked if I was a VIP. I was then told I wasn't allowed in with a baby. I went to get my badge, but was then taken over to the organisers from Informa, who told me they weren't insured. But they asked again if I was a VIP or speaker, and later another lady came over and twisted my badge around to see, clearly checking to see if I was a VIP."

Four tech billionaires walk into a mansion. It sounds like the setup for a punch line, but it also forms nearly the entire conceit behind "Mountainhead," a savagely entertaining but somewhat shallow new satire written and directed by Jesse Armstrong, the creator of "Succession." The film, which is streaming on HBO's Max, is a sort of chamber play, its stage a modernist castle in Utah--the Mountainhead of the title--overlooking snowy peaks. The players are a quartet of friends, or, more accurately, frenemies, who resemble a mishmash of real-world Silicon Valley founders. Steve Carell plays Randall Garrett, the group's Peter Thiel-esque mentor who, not unlike the late Steve Jobs, has cancer that his doctor tells him is incurable.

On a misty Saturday afternoon in Shenzhen's Central Park, a gaggle of teenage girls are sheltering from the drizzle under a concrete canopy. With their bags of crisps piled high in front of them, they crowd around a couple of smartphones to sing along to Mandopop ballads. The sound of their laughter rings out across the surrounding lawn – until it is pierced by a mechanical buzzing sound. A few metres away from the impromptu karaoke session is an "airdrop cabinet", one of more than 40 in Shenzhen that is operated by Meituan, China's biggest food delivery platform. Hungry park-goers can order anything from rice noodles to Subway sandwiches to bubble tea.