WHTTW (What Happened in Tech This Week)

Why can't AI (Artificial Intelligence) replace managers? because it’s not designed to be useless

Alright, now that we've gotten that mandatory cringe out of the way, let's dive into the real 1s and 0s of this week.

Techy Headlines

Elon Musk vs. The World (feat. Apple & OpenAI) - This week's main character was undoubtedly Elon Musk, who went on a rampage against... well, pretty much everyone. First, he declared that his AI company, xAI, is taking "immediate legal action" against Apple for what he calls an "unequivocal antitrust violation." His beef? He claims Apple is rigging the App Store to make it impossible for any AI company other than its partner, OpenAI, to hit the #1 spot. OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman clapped back on X, accusing Musk of manipulating his platform to benefit himself, sparking a public spat between the two former partners.

GitHub's CEO Says git commit -m "new startup" - In a classic Silicon Valley plot twist, GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke has announced he's stepping down to venture back into the wild world of startups. It's the tech equivalent of reaching the final boss and then deciding to start a new game on hardcore mode. We wish him the best of luck and hope his new venture has fewer merge conflicts. (Levels day this tech thing)

Google Puts a Date on It! Circle your calendars, folks, because Google has finally dropped the invite for its annual "Made by Google" event, now officially slated for August 20th! The rumor mill is churning faster than my laptop fan running Docker, with all signs pointing to the grand reveal of the Pixel 10 and Pixel 10 Pro. Whispers suggest a new "Camera Coach" feature powered by AI to tell you how to take better pictures. Because who needs friends when your phone can criticize your photography skills in real-time?

The AI Overlords Section 🤖

Perplexity Tries to Buy... Chrome? In the "most audacious move of the week" category, AI search engine Perplexity reportedly made a bid to acquire the Google Chrome browser. 😲 That's like a newly bootstrapped startup trying to buy AWS. You have to respect the sheer audacity. The deal didn't go through, obviously, but what a headline!

AI Bots Are Now Outsmarting Anti-Bot Defenses - Codeberg, a non-profit code hosting community, reported this week that AI crawlers have figured out how to solve the "heavy computation" challenges of their anti-bot tool, Anubis. The bots are now swarming the site to scrape data for training models, causing a denial-of-service attack and extreme slowness for actual human users. AI is fighting back against measures designed to stop it.

VCs Making it Rain 💰

Cohere Hits the Jackpot with $500M AI startup Cohere, known for its enterprise-focused large language models, just closed a massive $500 million funding round. With that kind of cash, they could probably afford to buy a lifetime subscription to every SaaS product on the market and still have change left over to buy a small island.

Parag Agrawal is Back in the Game. Remember Parag Agrawal, the former CEO of Twitter? He's back with a new stealth AI startup named "Parallel" and has already pocketed a cool $30 million in funding. 🤫 Nobody knows what it does yet, but with that name, I'm betting it has something to do with running processes that don't block the main thread.

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Did You Know That??

In JavaScript, typeof null is 'object'. It's a long-standing bug from the very first version of the language that was never fixed to avoid breaking existing code. The more you know! 🤯

const signOff: string = 'Catch you on the next commit!';