Why it matters: SVB served a range of roles across the industry; it not only took startups' cash but also offered them venture debt and other loans while providing banking and lending money to venture capital firms. Its collapse is the largest bank failure since Washington Mutual in 2008.
The big picture: This weekend is key to determining if the situation escalates from an inconvenience to a crisis for SVB clients, most of which are businesses that need to meet payroll.
U.S. banking regulators on Friday assumed control of Silicon Valley Bank, the country's 16th largest bank and a top financial institution for technology and life sciences companies.
The big picture: This is the largest bank failure since Washington Mutual in 2008.
A hacker who uses the pseudonym "Denfur" is selling a database they claim includes stolen sensitive data from at least 55,000 customers of D.C.'s health insurance marketplace, including members of Congress and their staffs.
Employers are struggling to figure out how to fold ChatGPT into their workflows without risking the security of their corporate secrets, customer information and intellectual property.
The big picture: Engineers and programmers across many industries have found great utility in refining code or double-checking their work by running it through ChatGPT.
Why it matters: SVB is a cornerstone of the tech and life sciences startup economy. It's also America's 16th largest bank, and its failure would be the biggest since Washington Mutual.
Machine learning techniques can be successfully deployed to better identify food insecurity outbreaks across the world long before they take place, according to a new study.
Why it matters: The timely disbursement of humanitarian aid can be a matter of life or death during a food crisis. How we gather information and when we respond can make all the difference.
Police asked an Ohio businessman for video from his Ring doorbell camera, then issued a warrant for footage from more than 20 other cameras at his home and business.
Chinese-owned TikTok faces the threat of a ban over fears that the user data it collects could get fed to Beijing.
What's happening: Congress' long-running inability to pass a comprehensive privacy law has left online personal information vulnerable to be mined, hoarded and poached.
Why it matters: Virtually every major technology today opens data vulnerabilities that can cause havoc.
"Data privacy" may sound like an abstraction to much of the U.S. public, but our national failure to set privacy rules can have very concrete consequences.
Zoom out: Legal experts and privacy advocates have long warned of the dangers of the U.S.'s failure to bring privacy law into the 21st century.
It means that government authorities have a freer hand to seize digital information as evidence.
Private companies are freer to gather and resell the personal information of their customers and users.
In both public and private sectors, the absence of tough rules governing data handling makes every breach and hack more potentially damaging.
AI experts fearthat chatbots like ChatGPT trained on vast troves of internet text will already be seeded with an unknowable volume of personal data.
On its own, that's little different from what's available on Google or any other search engine today.
The difference is that ChatGPT and similar programs are capable of "remembering" and reusing information users share with them in unpredictable ways.
That means that details from any legal document, medical report, financial calculation or other input that someone shares with these systems might turn up again — accurately or erroneously — in answers to someone else's query, with no indication of the original source.
Our thought bubble: Every time you type at ChatGPT, consider that you might be sharing secrets with a thing that has an impossibly vast memory — and doesn't have a clue what a secret even is.
Between the lines: There may well be ways to equip generative AI systems with guardrails to protect against this kind of unintended sharing.
But right now developers have little incentive to build them, and the rest of us have no visibility into what data the systems are holding onto.
The bottom line: The faster technology advances and the more central it becomes in our lives, the more we'll miss having a good privacy law.
Religious leaders are dabbling in ChatGPT for sermon writing, and largely reaching the same conclusion: It's great for plucking Bible verses and concocting nice-sounding sentiments but lacks the human warmth that congregants crave.
Why it matters: As scarily good generative artificial intelligence tools start to disrupt all manner of professions, men and women of the cloth are pondering how eerily close it can come to projecting a human — or divine — soul.