Head of Pentagon innovation unit withdraws nomination for higher post. Michael Brown, a former Silicon Valley executive, withdrew his nomination to become the Defense Department’s undersecretary for acquisition. In a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Mr. Brown cited an inspector general’s investigation into his office. The letter didn’t provide details on the investigation. (WSJ) SPAC attacks. Scheduled to merge with special-purpose acquisition companies in the near future are ServiceMax, maker of software for field-service technicians, 3-D printing company Fathom Digital Manufacturing Corp. and self-driving technology companies Aurora, PlusAI Corp. and Embark Trucks Inc. Netflix’s videogame gambit takes shape. The streaming business this week said it hired Facebook Inc. executive Mike Verdu as vice president of game development. Mr. Verdu was responsible for bringing games and other content to the company’s Oculus-branded virtual-reality headsets. (WSJ) Bourdain voice deep-faked. Filmmaker Morgan Neville told the New Yorker that he used an AI model to recreate Anthony Bourdain's voice for several quotes heard in his recent documentary on the chef and television personality, who died in 2018. "We can have a documentary-ethics panel about it later," he said, according to the New Yorker. Facebook open sources “brain-computer interface.” Facebook announced its moonshot in 2017 in the wake of a similar effort by Elon Musk's Neuralink Corp. The company in a blog post said it would open source its software and "share its head-mounted hardware prototypes" as it focus on what it calls "wrist-based neural interfaces." Big Tech called out for Covid-19 misinformation. U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy in a health advisory called upon tech companies to take responsibility for controlling the health misinformation found on their platforms. I was a teenage astronaut. When Blue Origin LLC’s New Shepard rocket launches former Amazon.com Inc. CEO Jeff Bezos into space Tuesday, one seat will be occupied by 18-year-old Oliver Daemen, the first paying customer to fly on board the rocket. (WSJ) About those techies who fled SF/Silicon Valley. They are coming back. (New York Times) |