Why it matters: The donation reflects a long, collaborative relationship between Trump and Cook that included many meetings during Trump's first term, and dinner at Mar-a-Lago last month.
The big picture: The profile became unavailable on Friday immediately following widespread social media outrage and concerns about "digital blackface as a service," but Meta says it will continue to push AI generated content on all of its platforms.
Codebook readers spent the last couple of weeks looking into a crystal ball and sending me their predictions for 2025.
Here's what you're all anticipating:
🤖 AI and security
"I expect we'll see a continued increase in very advanced levels of cross-account attacks thanks to AI-driven credential compromising. As new AI-powered attacks emerge, traditional security-awareness training programs are quickly becoming obsolete." —Dror Liwer, co-founder of Coro
"In 2025, we'll adopt the 'trust nothing, verify everything' mindset, as AI will impersonate everyone from public figures, personal contacts, even ourselves at a record rate." —Andre Durand, CEO and founder of Ping Identity
👀 Newly unsealed court documents help answer some of the lingering questions about then-President Trump's 2020 pardon of cybersecurity executive Chris Wade — including what crimes Wade actually committed. (Business Insider)
😬 The State Department's disinformation office closed on Christmas Eve after lawmakers failed to renew its funding and authorization. (CyberScoop)
🤖 OpenAI is tripling the size of its D.C. policy team as it continues to urge political leaders to give AI companies an edge in the economic and security race against China. (Politico)
@ Industry
💰 Apple has agreed to pay $95 million to settle a proposed class-action lawsuit alleging that Siri violated users' privacy. (Reuters)
Venture capitalists spent much of last year blaming government for their dearth of distributions. Those excuses wore pretty thin, but will evaporate come Jan. 20.
The big picture: Silicon Valley is about to influence D.C. like Wall Street once did.
Elon Musk hijacked British politics this week with a stream of at least 60 X posts since Tuesday attacking Prime Minister Keir Starmer, defending an anti-Islam campaigner and endorsing the far-right Reform Party.
Why it matters: The right-hand man to America's next president has gone after the leaders of several of its closest allies in recent months. But his fight with the British government is turning into the nastiest yet.
AI stocks led markets to record heights in 2024, but some investors are already moving on to the new hotness: quantum computing.
Why it matters: Investors who tripled or quadrupled their money on AI plays are hungry for the next big thing, even if quantum computing is still relatively nascent in comparison.
With the wide release of Sora, OpenAI's video tool, most of the big tech giants — and some startups — are now racing to create models capable of generating realistic, high-quality videos from text prompts.
Why it matters: GenAI video tools could save time and money for filmmakers, but they could also unleash novel copyright issues and a flood of deepfakes.
