April 2025

Meta’s vanilla Maverick AI model ranks below rivals on a popular chat benchmark

April 11, 2025
Earlier this week, Meta landed in hot water for using an experimental, unreleased version of its Llama 4 Maverick model to achieve a high score on a crowdsourced benchmark, LM Arena. The incident prompted the maintainers of LM Arena to apologize, change their policies, and score the unmodified, vanilla Maverick. Turns out, it’s not very […]

Meta adds Stripe CEO Patrick Collison and Dina Powell McCormick to its board

April 11, 2025
Banking executive and former presidential advisor Dina Powell McCormick and Stripe co-founder and CEO Patrick Collison are joining the board of Meta, according to a report from Axios. Powell McCormick spent 16 years in several leadership roles at Goldman Sachs. She also served as Deputy National Security Advisor to President Donald J. Trump during his […]

Law professors side with authors battling Meta in AI copyright case

April 11, 2025
A group of professors specializing in copyright law has filed an amicus brief in support of authors suing Meta for allegedly training its Llama AI models on ebooks without permission. The brief, filed on Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, San Francisco Division, calls Meta’s fair use defense “a […]

38 consumer startup founders lobby over Trump tariffs: One faces a surprise $200K bill

April 11, 2025
Small businesses could be crushed under President Trump’s increased tariffs, according to an open letter by 38 female consumer product founders. While Trump paused his tariff increases for 90 days for various countries – setting the rate at 10% for now  –  China’s was raised to 145%, which includes the previous 20% levy. In the […]

Nikola founder Trevor Milton accused of trying to derail bankruptcy case

April 11, 2025
A court hearing on the sale of bankrupt electric truck startup Nikola’s assets to Lucid Motors was going smoothly on Friday. No objections had been filed to the transaction, and Delaware bankruptcy Judge Thomas Horan verbally approved it without hesitation. Until, that is, a lawyer piped up on the Zoom call towards the end of […]