Google CEO Testifies at Ozy Trial, Denies $600 Million Offer


Avalon Pernell
Fri, Jun 14, 2024

(Bloomberg) -- Alphabet Inc. Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai took the witness stand at the fraud trial of Ozy Media Inc. co-founder Carlos Watson, testifying that the search giant never intended to buy the startup for any amount of money.

Watson isaccused of defrauding investors of tens of millions of dollars by lying about Ozy’s business success, including boasting that Alphabet’s Google had offered to buy the company for “hundreds of millions of dollars.”

The once high-flying media startup collapsed after the New York Times reported in 2021 that Chief Operating Officer Samir Rao impersonated a senior executive at Google’s YouTube unit to praise Ozy on a February 2021 call with Goldman Sachs Group Inc. bankers. Rao, who’s pleaded guilty, testified earlier that it was part of his and Watson’s scheme to fool investors into thinking Ozy was profitable.

Pichai on Friday told the jury in Brooklyn, New York, federal court that an acquisition of Ozy was never discussed but that Google did consider hiring Watson as head of its news programming. A $25 million investment in Ozy would have been part of that deal.

No Offer

“Mr. Watson was a critical part of Ozy Media, and we were considering making an investment in the company to make the transition easier,” Pichai testified.

“Did you ever offer to purchase Ozy Media for $600 million?” prosecutor Dylan Stern asked.

“No,” Pichai said.

In his opening statement at the trial, Stern said Watson used the fake Google offer to attract another Ozy investor following the incident with Goldman.

“When the Goldman deal fell through, Watson found another victim and lured them into investing $20 million into Ozy by telling them that the CEO of Google himself had offered to purchase Ozy for hundreds of millions of dollars,” Stern said. “That was a lie. But Watson did not let the truth stand in his way.”

Though Watson allegedly claimed to have a far-reaching relationship with the Google boss, Pichai said they only spoke twice. The first was a conversation of “just a few minutes” at a conference, while the second was Watson’s job interview on Feb. 25, 2021, weeks after the Goldman call.

Watson didn’t get the job.

‘Most Disturbing’

Also testifying Friday was Hillel Moerman, one of two Goldman bankers who were on the Feb. 2, 2021, call when Rao impersonated YouTube executive Alex Piper. Moerman told jurors it was “one of the most disturbing calls I’ve been on in my career.”

Moerman described it as “a surreal experience. The person spoke in an unnaturally deep voice.”

Goldman was considering a $35 million investment in Ozy and had requested the call after Watson claimed YouTube was one of Ozy’s “most important” clients. Rao testified he’d used a voice-altering app to conceal his identity and that Watson, who was seated nearby as he spoke to the bankers, coached him on what to say.

Another Goldman banker, Allison Berardo, testified Thursday that what she and Moerman heard on the call “did not sound like a human voice.”

“We were both in a state of shock,” Moerman said. “Something was off.”

Shortly after the call, the bankers canceled plans for the investment in Ozy.

Jurors also heard Friday from Ozy’s chief of staff, Suzee Han, who has pleaded guilty and is cooperating with prosecutors.

“I lied about Ozy’s past performance and historical financials,” Han said. “We, and I mean Carlos, lied about how the company was doing at that time, so the company’s current performance. We lied about how the company was going to do.”

Bloomberg Businessweek

Former Neuralink Staffer Sues After Scratches From Herpes Monkey

FIRED FOR GETTING PREGNANT


Sarah McBride
Fri, Jun 14, 2024

(Bloomberg) -- Elon Musk’s brain-implant startup Neuralink Corp. forced an employee to work with monkeys that carried the Herpes B virus in conditions in which the animals scratched her bare skin, according to a complaint filed Friday in state court in California.

The employee, Lindsay Short, said that once she transferred to the company’s Fremont, California, site in August 2022, she encountered “a work environment fraught with blame, shame, and impossible deadlines.” She said she was later fired after telling her supervisors that she was pregnant.

Short sued the company for retaliation, wrongful termination and discrimination based on her gender among other issues.

Neuralink didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the suit.

The startup is in the early stages of clinical trials for its device, which is aimed at restoring function for paralyzed patients. An Arizona man, Noland Arbaugh, recently underwent surgery and became the first human patient to have the device implanted. A quadriplegic, Arbaugh can now successfully play video games by using only his thoughts.

The company has also come under fire for the mistreatment of monkeys and other animals in the past, including botched surgeries when it conducted research on monkeys housed at the University of California at Davis. It has since moved monkey research to its own facilities.

Short said she was working with monkeys that carried the Herpes B virus when she was scratched through a glove. She accused the company of failing to provide proper protective gear to work with the monkeys. In another incident, after she was forced to perform a procedure she wasn’t familiar with, a monkey scratched her face. When she insisted on medical treatment, her boss threatened “severe repercussions” if it happened again, according to the complaint.

In the lawsuit, Short also said Neuralink didn’t honor a promise for flexible work hours to accommodate her family, then demoted her in May 2023, two months after a promotion.

The following month, she told Neuralink’s human resources department she was pregnant. Short was fired the following day with the company saying the dismissal was for performance issues, according to the lawsuit.

Major veterans organization weighs in on upside-down American flags

Megan Lebowitz
Thu, June 13, 2024 



WASHINGTON — The veteran organization the American Legion weighed in on the upside-down American flag controversy on Thursday, noting that flags should only be flown this way if there is "extreme danger to life or property."

The potential implications of flying an American flag upside down have been the subject of debate since reports emerged that an upside-down flag flew outside Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito's home in early 2021. The justice said the flag was raised by his wife, Martha-Ann.

Some supporters of former President Donald Trump have also reportedly flown upside-down flags in support of the former president falsely claiming that the 2020 election was stolen, leading it to be interpreted as a "stop the steal" symbol.


"The American flag is a symbol of courage, strength, freedom and democracy," said the American Legion National Commander Daniel Seehafer in a statement to NBC News. "American Legion members swore with their lives to protect all that the flag stands for."

Seehafer pointed to the Flag Code, a detailed set of guidelines laying out how the American flag should be displayed, as evidence the flag should not be inverted unless to signal distress.

"Our organization also led the creation of the U.S. Flag Code, which includes the following: ‘The flag should never be displayed with the union down, except as a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property,’” Seehafer said.

Alito had told Fox News last month that his wife flew the upside-down flag after an argument with a neighbor. Martha-Ann Alito told The Washington Post in January 2021 that the upside-down flag was "an international signal of distress" and appeared to indicate it was raised in reference to a neighborhood argument.

But the Alitos' timeline was thrown into question by the neighbor whose conduct was cited as the reason for the flag being hoisted upside down.

That neighbor, Emily Baden, said she did not personally see the upside-down flag, which The New York Times reported was displayed as early as Jan. 17, 2021. But Baden said that her argument with the Alitos took place nearly a month later, on Feb. 15.

The Alitos "seem to be implying that it happened directly before they put up the flag,” Baden told NBC News, adding that it was a “lie.”

The American Legion has weighed in on American flag-related controversies before.

In 2016, Trump said in a post to X that "nobody should be allowed to burn the American flag."

He added that "if they do, there must be consequences — perhaps loss of citizenship or year in jail!"

The American Legion praised Trump's comments, with the group's then-National Commander Charles E. Schmidt saying that "no one should tolerate desecration of the American flag.” The group went on to push for a constitutional ban on flag-burning. The most recent attempt to implement a constitutional amendment banning flag-burning failed by one vote in 2006.

The American Legion has nearly 2 million members, making it the “largest wartime veterans service organization,” according to their website.

This article was originally published on NBCNews.co

Opinion

It’s Alito’s Vitriolic Wife’s Favorite Holiday

Edith Olmsted
Fri, June 14, 2024 

It’s officially Martha-Ann Alito’s favorite holiday: Flag Day. And the internet won’t let her forget it.

When it was first officially signed into law in 1949, Flag Day was meant to serve as a reminder of a unified nation, which found common ground under one symbol. Cut to 75 years later, and the wife of a U.S. Supreme Court justice has gleefully subverted that edict, cheered on the destruction of Democracy, and fantasized about new ways to sow division and hate.

So it’s only right that users on X, formerly Twitter, are having a little fun with it.

Screenshot of a tweet

Screenshot of a tweet

Screenshot of a tweet

Things even got a little topsy-turvy…


Screenshot of a tweet

Screenshot of a tweet

But we’re sure that Alito will figure out which way it’s supposed to go.


Screenshot of a tweet

Just last month, it was first reported that an upside-down flag was seen hanging at the home of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito in the weeks following the January 6 insurrection, a common symbol of Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” MAGA mob. Desperate to retain the illusion of neutrality, Alito blamed his wife for the flag, and thus her reputation as a virulent vexillologist began. Since then, it’s only gotten more apparent that Martha-Ann Alito sure does love her flags.

Shortly after the first flag came to light, it was reported that an Appeal to Heaven flag, a symbol favored by a Christian nationalist sect, was once flown outside their family’s beach home. House Speaker Mike Johnson flies this flag outside his office, and—desperate for some culture-war currency—MAGA Senator Tom Cotton now has one too.

Earlier this week, in a secret recording, Alito revealed that once her husband is no longer a pillar of the U.S. judiciary, she hopes to use flags to communicate every little political thought she has. Meanwhile, she whined about her neighbor’s flying a Pride flag.

“I’m gonna send them a message every day. Maybe every week I’ll be changing the flags. They’ll be all kinds,” she gushed. She revealed that she’d even designed a flag of her very own, displaying the Italian word for “shame,” that she dreamed of raising in an effort to antagonize those neighbors.

Instead of continuing to get dredged up in Alito’s drama, please enjoy this list of really cool flags.

Tim Cook Admits Apple May Never Be Able to Make Its AI Stop Lying

Victor Tangermann
Thu, June 13, 2024 at 9:05 AM MDT·2 min read

AI in the Clouds

Apple has finally logged into the AI arms race, announcing a set of strikingly familiar machine learning tools during its Worldwide Developers Conference earlier this week.

But even for Apple, a company with a market cap of $3.3 trillion — over 30 times that of OpenAI — the well-documented shortcomings of AI tech will likely persist.

In a new Washington Post interview, Apple CEO Tim Cook admitted outright that he's not entirely sure his tech empire's latest "Apple Intelligence" won't come up with lies and confidently distort the truth, a problematic and likely intrinsic tendency that has plagued pretty much all AI chatbots released to date.

When asked about his "confidence that Apple Intelligence will not hallucinate," an increasingly unpopular term that has quickly become the catch-all for AI-generated fibs, Cook conceded that plenty of unknowns remain.

"It’s not 100 percent," he answered, arguing that he's still "confident it will be very high quality."

"But I’d say in all honesty that’s short of 100 percent," he added. "I would never claim that it’s 100 percent."
Pants on Fire

It's an uncomfortable reality, especially considering just how laser-focused the tech industry and Wall Street have been on developing AI chatbots. Despite tens of billions of dollars being poured into the tech, AI tools are repeatedly being caught coming up with obvious falsehoods and — perhaps more worryingly — convincingly told lies.

Besides jumbling facts to the point where they no longer hold together, some of these AI models are trained on dubious data that they're happy to offer up as the truth. Case in point, last month, Google's AI-powered search feature confidently told one user to put glue on their pizza, referencing an 11-year-old joke on Reddit.

Cook isn't the first tech executive to admit that these tools may simply continue lying. The news comes after Google CEO Sundar Pichai made strikingly similar statements in an interview with The Verge last month.

"We have definitely made progress when we look at metrics on factuality year on year," he said. "We are all making it better, but it’s not solved."

It remains to be seen how Apple's own implementation — a revised Siri personal assistant, forthcoming ChatGPT integration, among other AI features scattered across its desktop and mobile operating systems — will fare when it comes to hallucinations.

The stakes are high, especially considering the wealth of sensitive consumer data, including photos, emails, and text messages, Apple has collected from its customers. Nobody wants Siri to make up a calendar invite or tell you a meeting was canceled when it wasn't.

More on Apple: Apple's Huge AI Announcement Is a Chatbot and an Image Generator, Which Is the Exact Same Boring Offering As Microsoft, Google, and Meta