GeekWire

This week on the GeekWire Podcast: The NBA suspends former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer for a year and hits the Clippers with $30 million in fines and five lost draft picks over allegedly sham endorsement deals for Kawhi Leonard, drawing comparisons to the Microsoft antitrust era. A new Redfin report says San Francisco’s housing market is booming on AI wealth while Seattle slumps, with the Bay Area-to-Seattle migration pipeline nearly dried up.

Seattle and San Francisco have shaped the modern tech industry, but they’ve also transformed politics, housing, culture, and civic life. How did two very different cities become the twin capitals of tech, and where do they go from here?

Microsoft was sued Friday by the parent company of its hometown daily newspaper, The Seattle Times Co., which joined with Newsday to accuse the Redmond tech giant and OpenAI of using their journalism to train their artificial intelligence models. The lawsuit alleges that the companies scraped hundreds of thousands of Seattle Times and Newsday articles — bypassing paywalls and ignoring terms of service — to train their AI models.

She spent more than two decades in national laboratories working on space exploration, energy and defense, followed by top leadership roles at state universities in Utah and Arizona driving significant growth in research funding. The longtime sci-fi fan embraces “future-casting” — a systems engineering approach to imagine and prepare for technological shifts a decade out.

If you attended the Sunset Market in Seattle’s Pioneer Square on Thursday night, you might’ve noticed that one of the local galleries had been transformed into a shrine to, of all things, Sonic the Hedgehog. That’s because on Labor Day weekend, Seattle is hosting 35 Years of Speed: The Sonic Art Exhibit. This touring art collection is part of the celebration of the anniversary of the Sonic franchise, which began in 1991 with the original Sonic the Hedgehog for the Sega Genesis.

Startup Spotlight: Food photographer uses 25-year archive to build an AI tool that eliminates costly reshoots Longtime Seattle food photographer Scott Pitts spent 25 years capturing commercial imagery for major brands, and now he’s using that quarter-century archive to train Pallat. The new AI-powered production system is designed to eliminate costly reshoots while keeping real studio craft at the center of generative creative tech.

Legal Technology for Equitable Justice: Expanding Integrity, Privacy, and Education in an Ever-Evolving AI Landscape In-person/virtual | CLE credits (6.25 pending) | Free to attend and open to all Integrity is key to the rule of law and public trust in the legal system. And artificial intelligence has a transformative impact on the practice of law.

Emily Calandrelli — “The Space Gal,” the 100th woman to fly to space and an MIT-trained engineer turned Emmy-nominated science TV host — headlines the Museum of Flight’s Beyond the Horizon speaker series with a fireside chat on women in STEM and the role diversity plays in shaping the future of science, technology and discovery.

MIT engineer, author and TV host Emily Calandrelli — “The Space Gal” — performs a live science demonstration for the whole family, running experiments from her #1 New York Times bestseller Stay Curious and Keep Exploring. Expect the surprising science behind magnetic space slime, unpoppable bubbles and alien hovercrafts, with a book signing to follow.

BrickCon bills itself as the longest-running LEGO® fan exhibition in the world, and it returns to the Meydenbauer Center in Bellevue for a two-day public show. More than 400 adult fans of LEGO (AFOLs) from around the world display upwards of 1,000 models — city layouts, sculptures, working trains, spaceships and castles. This year the BotBox returns with LEGO-built robot fights running all weekend, and the LEGO Group will be on hand showing off its new LEGO Pokémon sets.