Arresting Telegram The French government arrested Pavel Durov, CEO of Telegram (and a French citizen). We don't yet know the detail of the charges (which hasn't stopped an explosion of over-excited comment on social media), and we should note that the French legal system is much more arrest-first than Anglo-Saxon systems, but the press release indicates that this is about child abuse material (CSAM) on Telegram, and Telegram's alleged decision to ignore it. Telegram has 900m MAUs, and talks a lot about being 'secure', but the main selling point is very large group chats and channels (with tens or hundreds of thousands of users), and these do NOT use end-to-end encryption: the traffic is encrypted between your device and Telegram's servers (so your government can't read it, unless it joins the group), but Telegram itself can read everything, if it chooses. Meanwhile, Telegram has a reputation for having huge amounts of CSAM and other seriously illegal activity in these groups and simply ignoring it. To be clear, this activity happens on all networks where people can share files or images (even LinkedIn), but other companies either have large teams dealing with it (eg Meta, Google), or can't see most of it because it's end-to-end encrypted, or both. Telegram can see it and, apparently, doesn't appear to care and doesn't respond to law enforcement requests of any kind. We will see - and again, we don't actually know what the charges are yet, but they don't appear to be about 'free speech.' However, given that this involves both France and Russia, there may be plenty more going on. After all, Russia effectively confiscated Durov's first company, the social network VKontakte. He has been in conflict with Putin over Telegram, but the Russian military uses it too, and so there is, at the least, some geopolitical maneuvering behind the scenes. So let's see what the charges are, and then see what they really are. BBC, PRESS RELEASE EU versus AI, open source and startups Mark Zuckerberg and Daniel Ek published an editorial in The Economist arguing that the EU's regulation of AI in general and open source AI in particular is hasty, opaque, arbitrary, complex and squashes startups. All true. LINK, PUBLIC The week in AI Right on schedule, Perplexity will start running ads (or trying to). Zawinski's Law states that every program expands until it can read mail - now all consumer internet services expand until they run ads. LINK Today in 'CHATGPT! IS! NOT! A! SEARCH! ENGINE!' - a trailer for the new (and troubled) Coppola movie 'Megalopolis' used lots of historic quotes from critics panning his past masterpieces - most of which were not real. Someone asked ChatGPT for 'bad reviews of Coppola movies' and, as ever, it gave what looked like a good answer. LINK Google acquihired the Character.ai team earlier this month, and now the CEO Noam Shazeer (a former Googler) will be co-head of Gemini. LINK Amazon's CEO Andy Jassey on LLMs for coding productivity: "average time to upgrade an application to Java 17 plummeted from what's typically 50 developer-days to just a few hours." LINK OpenAI is racking up old media licensing deals - this week Condé Nast. LINK A fun problem in deploying LLMs for enterprise knowledge management - it might find data buried somewhere on the network that you aren't supposed to see, but that IT policies don't technically block, like, say, salary information. LINK Software eats cars Not a good week for GM as a 'tech' company: on one hand, it's being sued for selling driver data to insurers, and on the other, it laid off over 1k software developers. Tesla may still struggle to build cars, but car companies still struggle with software. LAWSUIT, LAYOFFS | 
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