Welcome back to SED News, a podcast series from Software Engineering Daily where hosts Gregor Vand and Sean Falconer break down the latest stories in software engineering, Silicon Valley, and the wider tech industry.

In this episode, Gregor and Sean dig into Meta’s legal battle over AI training data, discuss the strategic implications of Meta’s $14 billion stake in Scale AI, and examine how competition in the AI space is reshaping relationships between tech giants like Microsoft, OpenAI, and Google. They also highlight some of the most interesting stories from Hacker News, including a solar-powered iPhone turned OCR server, and a provocative case for why some AI agents should really just be SQL queries.

Gregor Vand is a security-focused technologist, and is the founder and CTO of Mailpass. Previously, Gregor was a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance and general software engineering companies. He has been based in Asia Pacific for almost a decade and can be found via his profile at vand.hk.

Sean’s been an academic, startup founder, and Googler. He has published works covering a wide range of topics from AI to quantum computing. Currently, Sean is an AI Entrepreneur in Residence at Confluent where he works on AI strategy and thought leadership. You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn.

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