Welcome to SED News, a podcast from Software Engineering Daily with hosts Gregor Vand and Sean Falconer discussing the latest in software engineering and tech. This episode covers Meta’s legal issues over AI training data, Meta’s strategic $14 billion investment in Scale AI, and how competition in AI is affecting the dynamics between major tech companies like Microsoft, OpenAI, and Google. They highlight stories from Hacker News, including a solar-powered iPhone OCR server and why some AI agents should just be SQL queries.
Gregor Vand, founder and CTO of Mailpass, has a background in cybersecurity and cyber insurance, and has been based in Asia Pacific for nearly a decade. Sean Falconer, an academic, startup founder, and former Googler, is currently an AI Entrepreneur in Residence at Confluent and focuses on AI strategy. Connect with them via their profiles. See the episode transcript [here](http://softwareengineeringdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/SED1856-News-25-07.txt). Sponsors: [Details about sponsors]