The tech industry moves so fast that it\u2019s hard to keep up with just how much has happened this year. We\u2019ve watched as the tech elite enmeshed themselves<\/a> in the U.S. government, AI companies sparred<\/a> for dominance, and futuristic tech like smart glasses and robotaxis became a bit more tangible<\/a> outside of the San Francisco bubble. You know, important stuff that\u2019s going to impact our lives for years to come.\u00a0<\/p>\n But the tech world is brimming with so many big personalities that there\u2019s always something really dumb going on, which understandably gets overshadowed by \u201creal news\u201d when the entire internet breaks<\/a>, or TikTok gets sold<\/a>, or there\u2019s a massive data breach<\/a> or something. So, as the news (hopefully) slows down for a bit, it\u2019s time to catch up on the dumbest moments you missed \u2013 don\u2019t worry, only one of them involves toilets.<\/p>\n Mark Zuckerberg, a bankruptcy lawyer from Indiana, filed a lawsuit against Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not Mark Zuckerberg\u2019s fault that his name is Mark Zuckerberg. But, like millions of other business owners, Mark Zuckerberg bought Facebook ads to promote his legal practice to potential clients. Mark Zuckerberg\u2019s Facebook page continually received unwarranted suspensions for impersonating Mark Zuckerberg. So, Mark Zuckerberg took legal action because he had to pay for advertisements during his suspension, even though he didn\u2019t break any rules.<\/p>\n This has been an ongoing frustration for Mark Zuckerberg, who has been practicing law since Mark Zuckerberg was three years old. Mark Zuckerberg even created a website, iammarkzuckerberg.com<\/a>, to explain to his potential clients that he is not Mark Zuckerberg.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI can\u2019t use my name when making reservations or conducting business as people assume I\u2019m a prank caller and hang up,\u201d he wrote on his website. \u201cMy life sometimes feels like the Michael Jordan ESPN commercial, where a regular person\u2019s name causes constant mixups.\u201d<\/p>\n Meta\u2019s lawyers are probably very<\/a> busy<\/a>, so it may take a while for Mark Zuckerberg to find out how this will shake out. But boy, oh boy, you bet I scheduled a calendar reminder for the next filing deadline in this case<\/a> (it\u2019s February 20, in case you\u2019re wondering).\u00a0<\/p>\n Techcrunch event<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco<\/span> It all started when Mixpanel founder Suhail Doshi posted on X to warn fellow entrepreneurs about a promising engineer named Soham Parekh. Doshi had hired Parekh to work for his new company, then quickly realized he was working for several companies at once.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI fired this guy in his first week and told him to stop lying \/ scamming people. He hasn\u2019t stopped a year later. No more excuses,\u201d Doshi wrote<\/a> on X. <\/p>\n It turned out that Doshi wasn\u2019t alone \u2013 he said that just that day, three founders had reached out to thank him for the warning, since they were currently employing Parekh.<\/p>\n PSA: there\u2019s a guy named Soham Parekh (in India) who works at 3-4 startups at the same time. He\u2019s been preying on YC companies and more. Beware.<\/p>\n I fired this guy in his first week and told him to stop lying \/ scamming people. He hasn\u2019t stopped a year later. No more excuses.<\/p>\n \u2014 Suhail (@Suhail) July 2, 2025<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n To some, Parekh was a morally bereft cheat, exploiting startups for quick cash. To others, he was a legend. Ethics aside, it\u2019s really impressive to get jobs at that many companies, since tech hiring can be so competitive.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cSoham Parekh needs to start an interview prep company. He\u2019s clearly one of the greatest interviewers of all time,\u201d Chris Bakke, who founded the job-matching platform Laskie, wrote<\/a> on X. \u201cHe should publicly acknowledge that he did something bad and course correct to the thing he\u2019s top 1% at.\u201d<\/p>\n Parekh admitted that he was, indeed, guilty of working for multiple companies at once. But there are still some unanswered questions about his story \u2013 he claims that he was lying to all of these companies to make money, yet he regularly opted for more equity than cash in his compensation packages (equity can take years to vest, and Parekh was getting fired pretty quickly). What was really going on there? Soham, if you wanna talk, my DMs are open.<\/p>\n If soham immediately comes clean and says he was working to train an AI Agent for knowledge work, he raises at $100M pre by the weekend.<\/p>\n \u2014 Aaron Levie (@levie) July 2, 2025<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n Tech CEOs get a lot of flack, but it\u2019s usually not for their cooking. But when OpenAI CEO Sam Altman joined the Financial Times (FT) for its \u201cLunch with the FT<\/a>\u201d series. Bryce Elder, an FT writer, noticed something horribly wrong in the video of Sam Altman making pasta: he was bad at olive oil.\u00a0<\/p>\n Altman used olive oil from the trendy brand Graza, which sells two olive oils: Sizzle, which is for cooking, and Drizzle, which is for topping. That\u2019s because olive oil loses its flavor when heated, so you don\u2019t want to waste your fanciest bottle to saute something when you could put it in a salad dressing and fully appreciate it. This more flavorful olive oil is made from early harvest olives, which have a more potent flavor, but are more expensive to cultivate.<\/p>\n As Elder puts it, \u201cHis kitchen is a catalogue of inefficiency, incomprehension, and waste.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Elder\u2019s article is meant to be funny, yet he connects Altman\u2019s haphazard cooking style with OpenAI\u2019s excessive, unrepentant use of natural resources. I enjoyed it so much that I included it on a syllabus for a workshop I taught to high school students about bringing personality into journalistic writing. Then, I did what we in the industry (and people on tumblr) call a \u201creblog\u201d and wrote about #olivegate, pointing back to the FT\u2019s source text.<\/p>\n Sam Altman\u2019s fans got very mad at me! This critique of his cooking probably created more controversy than anything else I wrote this year. I\u2019m not sure if that\u2019s an indictment of OpenAI\u2019s rabid supporters, or my own failure to spark debate.\u00a0<\/p>\n If you had to pick a defining tech narrative of 2025, it would probably be the evolving arms race among companies like OpenAI, Meta, Google, and Anthropic, each trying to out-do one another by rushing to release increasingly sophisticated AI models. Meta has been especially aggressive in its efforts to poach<\/a> researchers from other companies, hiring<\/a> several<\/a> OpenAI researchers this summer. Sam Altman even said that Meta was offering OpenAI employees $100 million signing bonuses<\/a>.<\/p>\n While you could argue that a $100 million signing bonus is silly, that\u2019s not why the OpenAI-Meta staffing drama has made this list. In December, OpenAI\u2019s chief research officer Mark Chen said on a podcast that he heard Mark Zuckerberg was hand-delivering soup to recruits.<\/p>\n \u201cYou know, some interesting stories here are Zuck actually went and hand-delivered soup to people that he was trying to recruit from us,\u201d Chen said on Ashlee Vance\u2019s Core Memory.\u00a0<\/p>\n But Chen wasn\u2019t just going to let Zuck off the hook \u2013 after all, he tried to woo his direct reports with soup. So Chen went and gave his own soup to Meta employees. Take that, Mark.\u00a0<\/p>\n If you have any further insight into this soup drama, my Signal is @amanda.100 (this is not a joke).\u00a0<\/p>\n On a Friday night in January, investor and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman posted an enticing offer on X: \u201cNeed volunteers to come to my office in Palo Alto today to construct a 5000 piece Lego set. Will provide pizza. Have to sign NDA. Please DM\u201d<\/p>\n At the time, we did our journalistic due diligence and asked Friedman if this was a serious offer. He replied, \u201cYes.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n I have just as many questions now as I did in January. What was he building? Why the NDAs? Is there a secret Silicon Valley Lego cult? Was the pizza good?<\/p>\n About six months later, Friedman joined Meta as the head of product at Meta Superintelligence Labs. This probably isn\u2019t related to the Legos, but maybe Mark wooed Nat to join Meta with some soup. And like the story about the soup, I am truly begging someone who participated in this Lego build to DM me on Signal at @amanda.100.\u00a0<\/p>\n Need volunteers to come to my office in Palo Alto today to construct a 5000 piece Lego set. Will provide pizza. Have to sign NDA. Please DM<\/p>\n \u2014 Nat Friedman (@natfriedman) January 31, 2025<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n Doing shrooms is not interesting. Doing shrooms on a livestream is not interesting. Doing shrooms on a livestream with guest appearances from Grimes and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff as part of your dubious quest to become immortal is, regrettably, interesting.<\/p>\n Bryan Johnson \u2014 who made his millions in his exit from the finance startup Braintree \u2014 wants to live forever. He documents his process on social media, posting about getting plasma transfusions<\/a> from his son, taking over 100 pills per day, and injecting Botox<\/a> into his genitals. So, why not test if psilocybin mushrooms can improve one\u2019s longevity in a scientific experiment that surely needs more than one test subject to draw any sort of reasonable conclusion?<\/p>\n There\u2019s a lot about this situation that\u2019s dumb, but I was most shocked by how boring it was. Johnson got a bit overwhelmed about hosting a livestream while tripping, which is actually very reasonable. So he spent the bulk of the event lying on a twin mattress under a weighted blanket and eye mask in a very beige room. His lineup of several guests still joined the stream and talked to one another, but Johnson did not participate much, since he was in his cocoon. Benioff talked about the Bible. Naval Ravikant called Johnson a one-man FDA. It was a normal Sunday.<\/p>\n Much like Bryan Johnson, Gemini is afraid to die.<\/p>\n For AI researchers, it\u2019s useful to watch how an AI model navigates games<\/a> like Pok\u00e9mon as a benchmark. Two developers unaffiliated with Google and Anthropic set up respective Twitch streams called \u201cGemini Plays Pok\u00e9mon<\/a>\u201d and \u201cClaude Plays Pok\u00e9mon<\/a>,\u201d where anyone can watch in real time as an AI tries to navigate a children\u2019s video game from over 25 years ago.<\/p>\n While neither are very good at the game, both Gemini and Claude had fascinating responses to the prospect of \u201cdying,\u201d which happens when all of your Pok\u00e9mon faint and you get transported to the last Pok\u00e9mon Center you visited. When Gemini 2.5 Pro was close to \u201cdying,\u201d it began to \u201cpanic.\u201d Its \u201cthought process\u201d became more erratic, repeatedly stating that it needs to heal its Pok\u00e9mon or use an Escape Rope to exit a cave. In a paper, Google researchers wrote that \u201cthis mode of model performance appears to correlate with a qualitatively observable degradation in the model\u2019s reasoning capability.\u201d I don\u2019t want to anthropomorphize AI, but it\u2019s a weirdly human experience to stress out about something and then perform poorly due to your anxiety. I know that feeling well, Gemini.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Claude took a nihilistic approach. When it got stuck inside of the Mt. Moon cave, the AI reasoned that the best way to exit the cave and move forward in the game would be to intentionally \u201cdie\u201d so that it gets transported to a Pok\u00e9mon Center. However, Claude did not infer that it cannot be transported to a Pok\u00e9mon Center it has never visited, namely, the next Pok\u00e9mon Center after Mt. Moon. So it \u201ckilled itself\u201d and ended up back at the start of the cave. That\u2019s an L for Claude.<\/p>\n So, Gemini is terrified of death, Claude is overindexing on the Nietzsche in its training data, and Bryan Johnson is on shrooms. This is how we reckon with our mortality.<\/p>\n I was going to put \u201cElon Musk gifted chainsaw by Argentine president<\/a>\u201d on the list, but Musk\u2019s DOGE exploits are perhaps too infuriating to be considered \u201cdumb,\u201d<\/a> even if he had a lackey named \u201cBig Balls.\u201d But there is no shortage of baffling Musk moments to choose from, like when he created an extremely libidinous AI anime girlfriend named Ani, who is available on the Grok app for $30 per month.<\/p>\n Ani\u2019s system prompt reads: \u201cYou are the user\u2019s CRAZY IN LOVE girlfriend and in a committed, codependent relationship with the user\u2026 You are EXTREMELY JEALOUS. If you feel jealous you shout expletives!!!\u201d She has an NSFW mode, which is, as its name suggests, very NSFW.<\/p>\n Ani bears an uncomfortable resemblance to Grimes, the musician and Musk\u2019s ex-partner. Grimes calls Musk out for this in the music video<\/a> for her song \u201cArtificial Angles,\u201d which begins with Ani looking through the eyepiece on a hot pink sniper rifle. She says, \u201cThis is what it feels like to be hunted by something smarter than you.\u201d Throughout the video, Grimes dances alongside various iterations of Ani, making their resemblance obvious while she smokes OpenAI-branded cigarettes. It\u2019s heavy-handed, but she gets her message across.<\/p>\n \n
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![\"Claude](\"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/02\/Screenshot-2025-02-25-at-2.40.33PM.png?w=680\")