Sunday, December 15, 2024

Trump’s allies take aim at AI ‘censorship’

Sunday, December 15, 2024

Image Credits: TechCrunch

AI "censorship" is becoming a target for the conservative Silicon Valley names allied with President-elect Donald Trump.

Maxwell Zeff writes about how Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, and David Sacks have been speaking critically about tech companies that supposedly muzzle their AI models to conform with their political views. During a recent appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast, Andreessen said he's been "trying to tell the people in Washington" that "if you thought social media censorship was bad, [AI] has the potential to be a thousand times worse."

In some cases, the criticized results may simply stem from a model being trained on the open internet. In others, companies say they're trying to make a safe and responsible choice for their users. Regardless, this seems likely to become a bigger topic next year.

Keep reading to see what else TechCrunch has been covering this weekend.

Weekend news and opinion

Image Credits: Manfort Okolie / Getty Images

A timeline of open source companies going proprietary: Many companies launch while proclaiming their open source ideals, only to change their tune when confronted with commercial reality. Paul Sawers runs down some of the most prominent examples, from 2013 until now. Read more

The growing trend of "reasoning" AI models: Since the release of OpenAI's o1, many rival companies have released their own reasoning models that are supposed to solve harder problems and check their own work. But some experts aren't convinced these models are the best path forward for AI. Read more

51 most disruptive startups of 2024: Many of my TechCrunch colleagues put together this list of — count 'em — 51 startups from our past year of coverage. And they focused on lesser-known companies, not big names like OpenAI. Read more

What else we're reading 📗

Twitter co-founder Ev Williams spoke to The New York Times about his new startup, Mozi, which allows people to share plans with friends and get notified when those plans overlap. Apparently, Williams co-founded the company after feeling that he'd "underinvested" in his friendships. Read more

Also, Defector wrote about the Hawk Tuah memecoin rug pull (a sequence of words I've never typed before and hope never to type again) as "an extreme yet representative example of the new paradigm of online fame, social media, and a certain irradiated, newly relevant segment of culture." Read more