Google goes to the edge Google announced a range of new AI features and capabilities for Android, some of which look good, though none of which are radically new. The most significant part of how much this relies on edge is running the models on the phone. You don‘t have marginal cost if your users bring their own compute. The catch is that the compute and memory requirements rule out the vast majority of the Android install base, which Google spins as ‘coming this summer to our most advanced devices’. Next month, Apple is expected to relaunch its rewritten Gemini-powered Siri, which, if it actually ships this time, will reach a much wider part of the base. LINK Meanwhile, Google will rebrand Chromebooks ‘Googlebook’ (reflecting the merger with Android), and add the same AI features. No specifics, but apparently, devices will be announced later this year (with OEMs hoping for an answer to the MacBook Neo). LINK The week in AIAs reported last week, OpenAI launched ‘the OpenAI Deployment Company’. There used to be a joke that an ‘AI scientist’ is a statistician who lives in San Francisco - maybe now Accenture will rename all their staff ‘forward deployed engineers’. LINK SAP, the proverbial legacy IT company, is building its own AI story, buying Prior Labs, which had raised €9m, for (apparently) about €1bn. LINK Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw (now at OpenAI), posted a screenshot showing he spent a notional $1.3m on tokens in the last 30 days. Tokenmaxing is over: we have a winner. =LINK Meanwhile, Amazon is measuring staff’s token usage, so, Goodhart’s Law being what it is, people are deliberately inflating their ‘scores’. LINK With OpenAI’s CEO Fidji Simo still out on medical leave, Greg Brockman (CTO) is now head of product. Careful of the turnover - we don’t want the head of product at OpenAI to end up like ‘Drummer at Spinal Tap’. LINK Someone at OpenAI decided to complain to Bloomberg that Apple isn’t using OpenAI for every new AI feature, and hinted at lawsuits. Good luck with that. LINK The FT says Anthropic is raising $30bn at a $900bn valuation. As I noted in my new presentation, $900bn is more than the market cap at the issue of all the venture-backed IPOs in the USA from 1995 to 2000 combined. LINK Cerebras, which makes AI inference chips as big as possible (using the entire wafer for one chip instead of putting lots of chips on each wafer), IPOed this week, and the shortage of any AI stocks where you can go long instead of short led to a giant spike: it peaked at a $95bn market cap. LINK AI and cyberRipples keep spreading out from the launch of Anthropic’s Mythos model, with by all accounts startling new abilities to find and exploit security holes in software. This week OpenAI announced its own version, Daybreak. Where Anthropic says that Mythos is too dangerous to make available, OpenAI will sell it to approved clients. Too dangerous, or does Anthropic just not have enough compute? LINK Meanwhile, Microsoft launched its own agentic code scanning system, that chains together multiple third-party SOTA models (since Microsoft still doesn’t have its own), while Mistral (remember that?) is also apparently working on a cyber product. MICROSOFT, MISTRAL Finally, the threat intelligence team from Google says it’s now seeing real threat groups using AI. LINK Satellite to mobile A month ago Amazon bought Globalstar, and this week SpaceX bought 50MHz of US cellular spectrum from Echostar for $17bn in cash and stock. Meanwhile, the three main US mobile networks, AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile, announced a JV to provide a unified way to use satellite to fill in rural dead zones. Every few years a technology comes along that people in tech think will crush cellular, and so far they’ve always been wrong, because they miss three basic issues. First, it’s totally different to give a high headline speed to one user than to give good speeds to hundreds of thousands of people in the same place: the wireless network challenge is capacity, not speed. 5G was all about increased capacity for the same speeds. Hence, it’s vastly easier for Starlink, or any satellite tech, to fill in rural dead zones (and connect ships, airliners, and so on), than for it to connect lots of customers in one place, which is what you need to take on mobile. How many satellites would Starlink need to give 100 meg/second not to one person globally but to 100k people in a few square miles? How fast will that change? Second, there are physics problems - will this work if your phone is in your pocket indoors? In a car at speed? And third, if you solve the two previous questions, congratulations! You’ve just joined a low-margin ex-growth commodity industry. All of that said - the challenge of knowing a lot about an industry is that you know all the reasons it can’t be disrupted, and you’ll be right for a long time, until something changes. So, let’s see. MOBILE, SPACEX |
