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Timnit Gebru co-authored 'On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?' with Emily Bender, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Margaret Mitchell. Published at FAccT 2021, the paper warned about environmental costs, encoded biases, and limitations of large language models. It has been cited over 8,000 times and 'stochastic parrot' was named 2023 AI-related Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society.

In March 2021, Haugen moved to Puerto Rico to join 'crypto friends' on the island. Under Act 22, Puerto Rico residents who live there at least half the year are exempt from taxes on capital gains. Haugen stated 'I did buy crypto at the right time' when asked how she supported herself. Critics noted the irony of calling for tech companies to fulfill social duties while living in a tax haven in a U.S. territory with high poverty rates.

EVGA's GeForce RTX 3090 FTW3 graphics cards experienced widespread thermal pad quality issues, with GDDR6X memory junction temperatures reaching 110°C and causing thermal throttling. The problem was traced to inadequate thermal pad contact between memory modules and the heatsink. EVGA addressed the issue through its RMA process but did not issue a formal recall.

In February 2021, security researchers discovered that Brave's private browsing with Tor mode was leaking DNS queries for .onion addresses to the user's regular DNS resolver rather than routing them through Tor. This exposed users' attempts to visit hidden services to their ISP or DNS provider, undermining the core privacy guarantees of Tor browsing. Brave acknowledged the bug and issued a patch.

On February 19, 2021, the UK Supreme Court unanimously upheld in Uber BV v Aslam that Uber drivers are 'workers' under employment law, not self-employed contractors. The ruling entitled approximately 60,000 UK Uber drivers to national living wage, paid holidays, and other worker protections from the moment they log into the app. The court cited five factors including Uber's control over fares, driver autonomy restrictions, the ratings-based penalty system, and restrictions on driver-passenger communication. Uber had fought the ruling through every level of the court system since 2016.

On February 16, 2021, IBM announced a commitment to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, prioritizing actual emissions reductions, energy efficiency, and clean energy use. IBM pledged to procure 75% of electricity from renewable sources by 2025 and 90% by 2030. In 2021, IBM received the inaugural Terra Carta Seal from the Prince of Wales for environmental sustainability commitment.

In 2021, Jack Dorsey and Jay-Z established the Bitcoin Trust (Btrust) with initial funding of 500 Bitcoin to nurture developer talent and support the free and open-source Bitcoin ecosystem in Africa. Block also led a $2 million seed investment in Gridless, which builds bitcoin mining sites alongside small-scale renewable energy producers in rural Africa. Dorsey has actively championed Africa Bitcoin Conference and attended as a speaker.

The NZXT H1 mini-ITX case was recalled by the US Consumer Product Safety Commission in February 2021 after reports of the case's PCIe riser card screw causing electrical shorts that led to fires. Approximately 32,000 units were affected. NZXT initially attempted a fix with nylon screws before the full CPSC recall was issued. At least one house fire was reported.

The Musk Foundation funded the $100 million XPRIZE Carbon Removal competition, the largest incentive prize in history, attracting 1,300+ teams from 88 countries to develop carbon dioxide removal technologies. The grand prize of $50 million was awarded to Mati Carbon in April 2025, with $20 million to NetZero and additional milestone awards. The competition also provided twenty-five $200,000 student scholarships.

Clover Health, which went public through Palihapitiya's SPAC (Social Capital Hedosophia III) in January 2021 at a $3.7B valuation, received an SEC investigation notice in February 2021 after Hindenburg Research revealed an active, undisclosed DOJ investigation into kickbacks, upcoding, and marketing practices. Palihapitiya had stated on CNBC in October 2020 that Clover 'doesn't play games' and doesn't 'motivate doctors to upcode' - the very practice DOJ was investigating. Palihapitiya received over 20 million founders shares for $25,000. Clover later settled a securities class action for $22 million.

Kristo Käärmann was fined by HM Revenue & Customs for deliberately failing to notify them of a capital gains tax liability after selling shares worth approximately £10 million in September 2017. Despite multiple HMRC communications in 2019 and 2020, he failed to respond. He was added to HMRC's public tax defaulters list in September 2021. The fine was for either intentionally submitting incorrect documents or deliberately failing to provide correct information.

At 1:30 AM on February 1, 2021, a 22-year-old Pinduoduo employee heading home from work collapsed and died hours later. Less than two weeks later, another Pinduoduo employee committed suicide when visiting his parents. These deaths occurred amid reports of 300-380 hour monthly work requirements and sparked widespread criticism of China's overwork culture.

In February 2021, the EEOC concluded a five-year investigation finding 'reasonable cause to believe' Intel discriminated against eight workers over age 40 during 2015-2016 layoffs in violation of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act. During the layoffs involving approximately 2,300 employees, the median age of laid-off employees was 49—seven years older than the median age of employees who were retained (42). The EEOC investigation was prompted by employee complaints following the mass layoffs. This finding represents one of the clearest federal agency determinations of age discrimination in tech industry layoffs.

In January 2021, Palihapitiya bought $125,000 in GameStop call options after polling his Twitter followers, then publicly defended retail investors on CNBC, saying the GameStop phenomenon was individual investors 'pushing back against the Wall Street establishment.' He compared transparent Reddit forums favorably to hedge fund 'idea dinners' in the Hamptons. He closed his position the next day and donated the $500,000 in proceeds to the Barstool Sports small business fund. Critics noted the brief holding and self-promotional nature of the trade.

In January 2021, Elastic changed Elasticsearch and Kibana from the Apache 2.0 open-source license to a dual SSPL/Elastic License v2, motivated by dissatisfaction with AWS offering a competing managed service. The change prompted AWS to create the OpenSearch fork. Many developers migrated away, and the community felt betrayed by a bait-and-switch after building on what they believed was truly open-source software.

In 2018, Social Capital restructured to a family office deploying Palihapitiya's personal wealth, with climate solutions as a core focus area. In January 2021, Palihapitiya announced private funding for climate investments spanning seven areas: recycling, electrification, grid-level storage, batteries, materials and mining, resiliency, and project finance lending. He described climate change as 'the simplest way to fix problems' globally and consistently listed it as one of his top two priorities alongside inequality.

Following the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot, Chuck Robbins announced Cisco would halt some employee political donations while the company assessed future political giving. This was part of a wave of corporate responses to the insurrection.

On January 13, 2021, Snap permanently banned Donald Trump's account, effective on Inauguration Day (January 20). The company cited "public safety" and Trump's "attempts to spread misinformation, hate speech, and incite violence."

HireVue announced in January 2021 that it would discontinue its facial analysis feature in video interviews, responding to sustained criticism from civil rights organizations, researchers, and regulators about algorithmic bias.

In January 2021, Sandberg stated the Capitol attack was 'largely organized on platforms that don't have our abilities to stop hate,' deflecting responsibility from Facebook. Democratic lawmakers criticized this as inadequate and called for her resignation, noting Facebook's role in enabling the insurrection.

By January 2021, DuckDuckGo reached over 100 million daily search queries, growing from about 62 million in January 2020. The growth was driven by increasing public concern about online privacy and data collection by major tech companies. DuckDuckGo does not track users, store search histories, or create user profiles.

Following the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot, Stripe suspended payment processing for Trump's campaign, citing that the campaign 'encouraged violence.' This made Stripe one of the few payment processors to take action against Trump's campaign.

Following the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot, Stripe suspended payment processing services for Parler, a social media platform that had been used to coordinate the attack. Multiple technology providers including AWS and Okta also suspended Parler's services, effectively shutting down the platform. This was part of broader tech industry action against platforms seen as facilitating the insurrection.

In January 2021, China's propaganda arm ordered news outlets to strictly echo official line on Alibaba's antitrust probe, prohibiting original reporting and extended analysis. The restrictions also applied to coverage of Jack Ma. State directive required media to limit reporting on regulatory actions against the company.

On January 7, 2021, programmer Wang Taixu posted a photo of a colleague being taken to hospital by ambulance at Pinduoduo's Shanghai headquarters. The post went viral on Maimai social platform. Pinduoduo fired Wang the next day. He continued speaking out about 300-380 hour monthly requirements, with his vlog receiving 94,000 comments mostly supporting him and criticizing the company's retaliation.

On January 7, 2021, Wang Taixu witnessed a colleague taken away by ambulance at Pinduoduo's Shanghai headquarters and anonymously posted a photo on Maimai social platform. Pinduoduo fired him the next day. Wang continued speaking out via 15-minute Bilibili vlog exposing that Shanghai headquarters employees work over 300 hours/month and grocery unit workers over 380 hours/month. His video received 94,000 comments with top-voted expressing support and criticizing overwork culture.

On the All-In Podcast immediately after January 6, 2021, Sacks said Trump had 'disqualified himself from being a candidate at a national level again.' He described Jan 6 as a 'disaster' and when asked if Trump was responsible, said 'One hundred percent yes.' This position represented a clear break from Trump, whom Sacks would later fully endorse in 2024 after political evolution from moderate (donated to Hillary Clinton 2016, Gavin Newsom 2018) to MAGA supporter.

In January 2021, WhatsApp announced mandatory data sharing with Meta including metadata, phone numbers, IP addresses, contacts, and app usage data - removing previous opt-out option. Users had until February 8 to accept or face account deletion. Led to 4,200% spike in Signal downloads, Competition Commission of India investigation, and Rs. 213.14 crore (~$26M) fine for violating Competition Act. Policy discriminated against Indian users compared to EU users under GDPR protections. Delayed to May 2021 after backlash.

As YC's Managing Director, Seibel led efforts to significantly increase diversity among YC-funded startups. Under his leadership from 2014-2024, YC funded over 500 female founders, 200+ Black founders, and approximately 300 Latine founders. He stated 'You change the stats by funding people.'

In 2021, Hinrikus co-founded kood/Jõhvi, a free coding school in northeastern Estonia with no teachers, no classes, but 100% peer-to-peer coding education. The school raised €2.3 million from private and government funds. By 2025, 1,100 students had enrolled across six cohorts, with over 300 graduates and nearly two-thirds now working in tech. The school has expanded internationally to Ukraine, Kenya, and Finland. Hinrikus serves as chairman of the kood/Jõhvi council.