Google does Robots It seems like AI accelerating robotics is one of the stories of 2025, and this week Google announced that it's using its Gemini models for robots too. The cool part of this is humanoid (or quadruped) robots that don't fall over (where going to electric from hydraulic is also a big change), but I suspect the idea of more old-fashioned form factors that can now be much more flexible might open up more use cases? Another angle, meanwhile, is the idea that some kind of physical embodiment (or at least learning from the physical world) will be needed to take AI itself forward (on the theory that learning from text will top-out). LINK Better, faster, cheaper... Google released version 3 of its 'Gemma' open source models, claiming that it can outperform OpenAI's o3-mini while running only on a single GPU. I don't write up every model release (that would barely be possible), but there seem to be two directions of travel here - 'everything will run on city-sized AI factories' and 'this stuff will run on your phone. I don't believe both of these will happen. LINK White smoke from Intel Intel has chosen a new CEO to lead a turn-around: Lip-Bu Tan, a semis veteran and VC who turned around Cadence. He says he plans for Intel to continue as a foundry. Meanwhile, he will also have to work out what Trump is doing with the CHIPS Act. LINK, CHIPS The week in AI Sam Altman says OpenAI has trained a model that can write better fiction, as part of the general push towards 'creativity' (see last week's column). And yet, his example seems so predictable. LINK As it rebalances its infrastructure away from Microsoft, OpenAI has signed a $11.9bn five year contact with CoreWeave ahead of its IPO, also taking a $350m stake. Is this a tech company or an SPV? LINK As Meta tries to catch up to the hyperscalers on AI datacenter infrastructure, it is (finally) testing its own AI silicon. LINK The NY Times put a number on Google's stake in Anthropic: 14%, as per a lawsuit, with a cap of 15% and no votes or board seat. LINK OpenAI's latest lobbying push OpenAI is pivoting from asking Biden to ban open source to asking Trump to liberalise copyrights for training data and for the US to treat AI as a central part of its geopolitical competition with China. Tell me the audience and I will tell you the argument for less competition. (It also called the company 'state-controlled', which annoyed some people but is sadly a truism in describing any Chinese company that attracts the state's attention.) LINK DeepSeek's travel bans Conversely, DeepSeek is apparently now banning its researchers for leaving the country, which is ironic given that the loudest US voices were claiming that DeepSeek did little more than rip off Llama and OpenAI. The truth, I think, is that a technology can be both a generic commodity in a rush to the bottom and also involve a lot of capex and a lot of very hard engineering (think of screens, say, or cloud hosting). LINK Trump Antitrust There was a brief moment when some people argued that Trump's election meant that regulatory pressure on 'big tech' would be relieved. Nope: MAGA republicans were just as suspicious of big tech companies, though not always for the same reasons. Now the FTC is pushing forward with a wide investigation into Microsoft. (Ironically, the place where Trump's election might lead to weaker tech regulation is the EU.) LINK Pokemon Go sells Niantic Labs sold its games division, including Pokemon Go, to Scopely, a games buyout house backed by the Saudi sovereign wealth fund. The underlying geospatial tech will be spun out into a new company (which presumably has big hopes for AR glasses). Remember when Angry Birds was the hot mobile games thing? LINK Meta's fact-checking replacement launches Earlier this year Meta gave up on its manual, centralised fact-checking programme and said it would replace it with a bottom-up 'community notes' system in which users write and vote on corrections (a similar system is currently in use with limited success on Twitter). A lot of people got very upset about this decision, but the old system was really just theatre: it never checked more than a dozen or two posts a day, because after all, how could it? It was completely unscalable. The new system is theoretically scalable, but comes with its own problems, not least how you balance the voting system. We will see. LINK | 
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