Apple gets an antitrust lawsuit See this week's column. LINK Microsoft buys Inflection without buying it Inflection is one of the new wave of generative AI startups building their own LLMs; it was founded by Mustafa Suleyman, previously a co-founder of Deepmind. Except, this week he went to work for Microsoft as CEO of 'Microsoft AI', running all consumer-facing AI products, including Bing and Copilot. Microsoft also hired most of the staff, and paid a $650m licence fee for the technology. (Note: I am a venture partner at Mosaic Ventures, which has invested in Inflection: I was not involved in this transaction.) LINK, PAYMENT The week in AI Apparently, Apple is in conversations with Google around using some parts of its Gemini generative AI platform in iOS. I would be surprised if Apple added a simple chatbot to iOS, given the reliability issues (and if it did, surprised if it relied on someone else for such a prominent feature) - I would expect more that there will be be lots of new features powered by generative AI that solve specific problems in new ways. We'll find out at WWDC in the summer. LINK The FT is testing a chatbot that can answer questions based on its archive. LINK The French competition agency fined Google €250m for using data from French newspapers as training data for Bard. Memo to Americans: other countries have laws too, and can even change them, so no, US copyright law does not tell us all the answers. LINK The FT reports that the BBC is planning to build its own generative AI models, using its century or so of data, and is exploring licensing that data to AI companies as well. LINK Bloomberg reports that OpenAI has been doing a tour of Hollywood, presumably on the back of its Sora video generation tool. LINK Apparently, Saudi Arabia wants to set up a $40bn AI fund. Apparently, Andreessen Horowitz (where I worked from 2014 to 2019) is involved. LINK The decline of Stability Stability AI got lot of attention in late 2022 for Stable Diffusion, one of the first break-out generative AI image tools. The initial publicity tended to miss the fact that the model itself came from a research group at Munich University, not the company itself, and there has been a lot of staff and management turnover since. Now the CEO, Emad Mostaque, is out. LINK Car data Last week the NY Times reported that a bunch of big car companies were giving personally identifiable telemetry data from connected cars to data brokers: this week GM said it would stop. LINK Cameo and the Covid rotation Cameo might just have been a fad, sadly: it's raising money at a $100m valuation, down from $1bn in 2021. (See also Clubhouse.) LINK Chinese cars Xiaomi will start delivering its first EVs this month. The global expansion of the Chinese car industry, unlocked by electric, seems like it will be a very big story in the next decade - will it be as big as Japan in the 80s? Bigger? LINK Meanwhile Wired reviewed the driving assistants offered by the top Chinese car companies. LINK LInkedIn does games? Apparently LinkedIn plans to add games of some kind. I thought we all knew that LinkedIn itself is a massive multiplayer game, in which middle-managers compete for the most 'connections' to total strangers? LINK Mr Beast does TV Breaking the narrative, Mr Beast will do a TV gameshow with Amazon Prime. LINK | 
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