Sunday, July 21, 2024

Image Credits: Margaux MacColl

Some of the biggest names in tech made headlines at this week's Republican National Convention, where Donald Trump officially accepted the party's nomination.

Elon Musk, owner of X (formerly Twitter), declared his support for Trump, as did Andreessen Horowitz's co-founders, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz (which prompted some Black founders to express disappointment). Mark Zuckerberg didn't quite endorse a presidential candidate, but he spoke admiringly of Trump's response to last weekend's assassination attempt.

In addition, it sounds like Trump's tech industry supporters got their way when the former president chose J.D. Vance as his running mate. Vance has long ties to Silicon Valley and was even a VC.

And while Silicon Valley certainly has its share of rich Democrats, some of them have been souring on President Joe Biden as their candidate. In fact, Sequoia Capital's Michael Moritz became the latest Democratic donor to call on Biden to drop out.

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

Weekend news and opinion

Image Credits: Strava

Strava's new CEO talks AI and inclusivity: Paul Sawers interviews former Nike and YouTube executive Michael Martin six months into his role at the chief executive of social fitness company Strava. Martin's goals include bringing more women onto the network and incorporating AI across the product. Read more

What's coming at Made by Google: With Google's next big hardware event scheduled for August 13, Brian Heater looks at the already-announced devices that will be featured. That means new Pixel 9 phones, including a new foldable phone. Read more

The CIA has a director of AI: Kyle Wiggers speaks to Lakshmi Raman, director of AI at the CIA, who says the intelligence agency is looking to take a "thoughtful approach" to utilizing the tech in a way that follows ethical guidelines and mitigates bias. Read more

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What else we're reading 📖

📕 An investigation by Proof News found that companies, including Anthropic, Nvidia, Apple and Salesforce, trained their AI models using subtitles from popular YouTube videos. Not surprisingly, the news made many YouTube creators angry, while Dave Wiskus, CEO of the Nebula streaming service, called it "theft." Read more

📘 Meanwhile, Bloomberg examined Apple's latest streaming plans. While the current Apple TV+ library is almost entirely original content, the company is reportedly looking to expand by licensing more films from Hollywood studios. Read more