War signals You don't need this newsletter to tell you that a group of Trump officials used Signal, a smartphone messaging app, to discuss plans for military action in Yemen, but it's worth noting why this was very very stupid from a smartphone security perspective. It's not just that they added a journalist by mistake, but that they're using personal smartphones. While Signal itself is (probably) secure, if your phone has been compromised then whoever did that can read all the messages in all the apps. Intelligence agencies find ways to hack the phones of specific individuals and companies like NSO sell those as tools (this is what some of those Apple and Android security updates are about), and so some or all of these people's phones might have been sending all their chats - these and others - to another country. This is why security rules exist and why you get sacked or court-martialed for breaking them. LINK Google leapfrogs I don't call every new model release (there are dozens of them), but Google's new version of its Gemini model is notable because it's at the top of a lot of the benchmarks for the first time, and by a significant margin. OpenAI is still probably first amongst equals, but the top of the field is getting more and more crowded. LINK OpenAI is back in images OpenAI's Dall-E models were amongst the first image generators that were interesting outside research circles, but the company fell behind the cutting edge as the attention moved to MidJourney (even though MidJourney has never really got around to building a product). Now OpenAI is back, with a really good image generator that allows for refinement of the previous image (no more prompt slot-machine) and is even pretty good at text. It went viral this week with people doing style-transfer of Studio Ghibli, which was accompanied by equally viral outrage at this 'theft' or just 'disrespect' (I wrote about the IP challenges of these models a while ago). Meanwhile, try taking a photo of your living room and giving it to ChatGPT, along with a photo of a table or a lamp, and ask it to insert the lamp into the room. LINK, GHIBLI AI middleware OpenAI announced support for MCP, a standard protocol proposed by Anthropic a while ago to make it easier for AI agents to talk to other kinds of software (Uber, Instacart, Oracle, Salesforce). This is basically middleware, and developers always want that, but there are always two basic problems that are really hard to overcome. First, you're trying to abstract very different and complex pieces of software into a standardised universal layer, and that creates a 'lowest common denominator' problem - the middleware can never support all the features the underlying tools create (see Steve Jobs' 'Notes on Flash'). Second, why would, say, Instacart want to become a dumb API call for someone else's trillion dollar company? Instacart makes all its profits from ads, Uber wants to upsell you a black car and a subscription, and Salesforce want you to to use its new LLM tools - they don't want someone else to control their user experience and own their customer. LINK Xiaomi raises Chinese OEMs won the Android market outside the USA, and as EVs disrupt the car market there's a pretty good thesis that Chinese EV OEMS will do the same to cars, with no equivalent of Apple. And Xiaomi, one of the winning Android OEMs, has itself been working on cars for a while (see previous issues). Now it's raising over $5bn to push harder. LINK Cloud GPUs CoreWeave's IPO got out this week, but well under the initial ask, signalling I think how ambivalent or just nervous the market is about LLM infrastructure. Now Nvidia (which build up CoreWeave by giving it GPU allocation) may be buying a competitor for a few hundred million. LINK The week in AI Microsoft is still in an ambivalent position, making itself 'the AI company' yet still depending on OpenAI and lacking its own SOTA model family. It's building, though, and just added 'chain of thought' to Co-pilot. LINK Reve - the latest hot photo-realistic image generator, at least until OpenAI launched. LINK Reddit is deploying AI translation at scale. LINK OpenAI expects $12.7bn of revenue this year, and is raising a new round (mostly from SoftBank) that is apparently the largest private round ever. LINK Perplexity says it wants to buy TikTok and open-source the algorithm. 🤷🏻♂️. LINK 'Accent-neutralisation' for call centres, from Krisp - things like this, plus translation and dubbing, are flattening the world. LINK Virtual models at H&M H&M is planning to produce AI versions of specific models, so that it can generate many different products shots for new SKUs more quickly and efficiently. Ikea was using 3D models for product shots 15 year ago: now it's reached fashion. H&M is being careful to (at least try to) do the right thing, giving new rights to the talent and even letting them use their 'digital twins' for other companies, but as this scales it might be a big change to the bread-and-butter of the industry. LINK TechCrunch goes… where? In the 2000s TechCrunch was the main new place reporting insider startup news. But the founder's been gone a long time, it was sold to AOL, which is now Yahoo, and now Yahoo has sold it on to a PE firm. LINK Elon discovers digital transformation Like a lot of old, big and slow organisations (banks, airlines, taxes everywhere) the US social security system runs on mainframes with software dating back to the 1960s and 1970s. This means it's very reliable but it's also very hard and expensive to change or improve anything. The challenge for all of these systems is that it's even more expensive to re-platform the whole thing and hard to get the budget for that, so these systems tend to drift on and on, expensively (again) tended by consultants and by IBM. Now Elon Musks's government 'efficiency' posse wants to migrate it! Right now! Using AI! The trouble is, if you move slowly and carefully you'll never do it, but if you move at Elon speed you'll break things and a lot of people won't get their cheques. LINK Elon Musk restructuring Elon Musk merged Twitter-as-was into xAI, his LLM company, buying out the investors who helped him buy Twitter with xAI stock at roughly par to the purchase price, on the valuation he gives for xAI, of course. That seems like a pretty good result for them, swapping 100% of a turkey for a stake in a hot AI rocketship, though it is not clear to me how xAI will win in a world where foundation models are commodities. LINK | 
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