Nvidia day Nvidia's Jenson Huang gave a 2 hour keynote at the company's GTC developer conference. See this week's column. LINK Apple's Siri problem After announcing last week that the new LLM-based Siri it's been promoting for nine months is delayed indefinitely, Apple has shuffled execs, putting the head of the Vision Pro in charge of shipping. That might seem odd given that the Vision Pro has arguably flopped, but IMO while the decision to launch the Vision Pro was questionable at best, the actual execution of what they decided to ship is first-rate: it's a bad idea well-executed. Conversely, Siri 2 is a great idea, but either badly-executed or beyond the reach of current execution. We will see. LINK Apple's vanity TV project Meanwhile, the Information reports that Apple has been cutting heads at its subscription TV service, which is apparently losing $1bn a year. This project has always been a puzzle. Yes, Apple builds services to drive iPhone sales, but those services always produce revenue and support themselves as well. Meanwhile, Apple services are either essential for Apple to have (iCloud, Music, Maps), or try to solve problems for users in some uniquely Apple way (Fitness, the credit card). Apple TV does none of this. It doesn't solve any problem, it does nothing different and Apple adds nothing. All that Apple contributes is money: Eddie Cue flies down to LA and buys LA stuff from LA people. Some of the shows are good, yes, but that has nothing to do with Apple. Worse, it doesn't even drive device sales - almost no-one watches the shows and you can watch them on competitors' devices anyway. As I and many others have said - why does this exist? LINK Wiz opens the M&A market? Google bought Wiz, a private Israeli cloud security startup, for $32bn, its biggest acquisition ever. This comes after a failed purchase attempt last year for $23bn. This is not my industry, but Google is clearly betting that big tech acquisitions will be allowed again - there's a 10% break clause. LINK Pirate training LibGen is a cache of ebooks, many/most of them pirated, that's floated around AI research circles for years as a source of human-written text without many people noticing. But now LLMs are a trillion-dollar industry, some writers are very upset, and it's emerged in a lawsuit that Meta used LibGen to train Llama. There are narrow legal points to this, there's the general legal question of whether using material (however obtained) for training data counts as fair use and doesn't need permission, the moral question of training on people's work… and also the inconvenient question of how much a writer thinks their work is worth if they worry it can be replaced by a statistical averaging machine. LINK Google chips Google's TPU server AI chips are designed in partnership with Broadcom (and made by TSMC), but now Google may be adding MediaTek as a cheaper partner. LINK Anthropic web search Anthropic added 'web search' to Claude - as for competing systems, this means that it can answer questions by looking at the web today rather than relying on whatever was in the (static) training data for the underlying model. In practice, that means running a standard, old-fashioned web search and then using the LLM to analyse the results: in Anthropic's case, it appears to be using Brave's index. LINK BYD's fast charging The Chinese EV industry is already clearly pulling ahead of the legacy incumbents, much as Chinese Android OEMs pulled ahead of the incumbent phone makers in the 2010s. But now BYD is also claiming to have a solution to 'range anxiety' with a fast-charging tech that can recharge a car in 5 minutes. Actually deploying this will be hard; such charging stations will need higher-power grid connections and be more expensive besides. But any Americans still claiming that all China does is copy and pay lower wages really need to wake up and look at the last 20 years. LINK EU versus Apple The EU produced a long list of new changes it wants in the ways Apple devices talk to each other, opening those features up to competitors. Some of these demands come with significant security and ease-of-use challenges (do you really want your iPhone to accept incoming Airdrop requests from any untrusted device?), but there's also a basic principle: part of Apple's competitive proposition is that its devices all work better with each other, and the EU is declaring that's not allowed. LINK | 
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