"To spearhead the effort, Musk has been recruiting Igor Babuschkin, a researcher who recently left Alphabet’s DeepMind AI unit and specializes in the kind of machine-learning models that power chatbots like ChatGPT. In an interview, Babuschkin said building a chatbot with fewer content safeguards is not Musk’s objective."
I've since updated that number in Betabeat with the figure from tonight's NYT article, which says Uber planned to launch with 105 pre-registered cabs and plans to add 100 a week. (The initial, incorrect number was what I had when I broke the story this afternoon, and tried to confirm with Uber. Apologies for that.) Agreed though--it's going to be really interesting to watch, with each player having a corner of the market. There's also Taxi Magic.
Yeah, the idea of knowing how to build in NYC was a big plus. There's actually still so many hoops to jump through still: the land use agreements, any remediation of the site, potential community benefits, etc.
No, we (Betabeat and I) totally welcome feedback in any form--criticism, questions, concerns, etc. Have at us!
We usually change the headlines from paper to blog and from the blog to Hacker News only because the paper ones tend to be more opaque and literary and it seems like HN readers like it a little more straight-forward, so they know what to expect when they click on it. I've noticed other submissions doing that too, although maybe it's not the norm?
Stanford was taken aback by the unusual penalties in the contract and the negotiating stance of the city. Cornell says it was par for the course, but other NYC institutions agreed with Stanford.
I totally hear you about reintroducing issues people familiar with the backstory are already well-versed with, it's something we wouldn't do in a blog post, but the idea here was a feature that stands on its own, to encapsulates what happened over an unexpectedly tumultuous 72 hours.
Really appreciate the feedback. Always looking to improve.
Thanks for your comment. Most of our posts on Betabeat take way less than 5 minutes to read. In fact, I'd peg the bulk of the breaking blog posts on news about the campus at about a minute. This was an investigation into the backstory of how the deal for the $2 billion engineering school that could change New York's economy and tech scene went down. Did Stanford drop out because it was going to lose or is Cornell the second choice?
Sometimes things that take two pages to read are worth it, I'm sorry you didn't find that to be the case in this instance, but what you quoted above comes from Stanford and Cornell. Stanford says otherwise:
"A university source familiar with the negotiations said Stanford’s decision to drop out wasn’t based on any one issue, but rather due to “a whole host of things that held them liable for factors outside of [their] control,” such as big-ticket penalties for missed construction deadlines and the city’s desire “to indemnify themselves for any toxicity” at the Roosevelt Island site. Although a Phase II study was commissioned this year, a full scale analysis of the medical dump under the hospital cannot be done until the building is razed. Should serious hazards be uncovered, the school will be on the hook not only for the clean-up but also potentially for resultant delays.”You had a lot of institutions that wouldn’t even apply because of the terms, and they got even more severe in the negotiation process,” said the source."
Roosevelt island is in the borough of Manhattan and counted as Manhattan in the census. It's sort of independent but definitely associated with Manhattan proper.
I think the Microsoft heavy part is changing a bit. Starting with the IDF programming units mentioned in the article switching over to new languages that have gained traction. As well when start-ups pivoting into the consumer web. Avner Amit from Taykey was telling me they switched over to open source once they got to the US because they saw how popular it was. Israel has strong MS developers because MS has a strong presence. Historically its made sense to work in .NET
The ease of finding developers in Israel is the reason why a lot of the companies I talked to (Outbrain, BillGuard, Taykey), started by folks out of the IDF, take the hybrid approach: keeping their R&D arm in Israel, and biz dev sales here. They can't afford/worry about not finding developer talent in NYC. But they move here to get close to their customers, like you said.