Agents for OpenAI and Claude OpenAI's big splash this week is its own agent platform, linking together 'Operator' (using websites for you) and 'Deep Research' (long-form analysis) such that ChatGPT can make use of the web, download files and make reports, spreadsheets and slides for you. This is magic. But also, watch the demos, and you hear phrases like "it got 98% of the numbers right". Is that good, or a deal-killer? Also this week, and on the same theme, Anthropic released a product aimed at financial services, which has "83% accuracy on complex financial modelling tasks". Again, what does that mean? See this week's column. OPENAI, CLAUDE Windsurf fallout Last week the management and core engineering team at Windsurf (AI coding) abandoned the company to work for Google, while Google paid $2.4bn into Windsurf as a 'licensing fee' - leaving the actual company, its customers and its employees marooned. This week Cognition, another AI coding startup, bought the remainder, mostly to get the sales team, meaning they at least get a softer landing. There is a crushing sense of urgency around AI at the big tech companies, but as I wrote last week, urgency means things get missed, and meanwhile these kinds of structures risk breaking the social contracts of what it means to fund or work at a successful startup. LINK JP Morgan takes private markets under coverage JP Morgan's equity research group will start covering large private tech companies, even though they're not directly investable, reflecting just how big they've become (Anthropic is apparently planning a raise at $100bn and OpenAI closed at $300bn a couple of months ago), and how much public markets investors need to understand them as part of the broader context. See my previous point. JPMORGAN, ANTHROPIC Kimi as the new DeepSeek Chinese open source models keep coming - Kimi is the latest, with top-tier benchmarks: it's number 5 on the overall LMArena benchmark, matching Claude. SOTA foundation models are expensive, but there are a lot of them. LINK The week in AI Mark Zuckerberg says Meta will "invest hundreds of billions of dollars into compute to build super-intelligence. We have the capital from our business to do this." Current capex guidance for 2025 is $64-72bn. LINK Netflix used generative AI for an effects shot in an Argentinian sci-fi series. This shouldn't surprise anyone. LINK Google is expanding AI-based security capabilities. LINK An interesting rumour: apparently Accenture has considered buying WPP. These are two companies being overturned by generative AI, from different directions. LINK The US slightly relaxed restrictions on semiconductor exports to China, allowing Nvidia to resume sales of more powerful hardware in return for China relaxing restrictions on 'rare earth' minerals. LINK Uber builds its robotaxi strategy I noted recently that Uber may be looking at partnering with Travis Kalanick to invest in Pony.ai, a Chinese/US autonomy company. This week it said it would partner with Lucid (EVs) and Nuro (autonomy) to launch a fleet, investing in both companies. In parallel, it's partnering with Baidu to deploy outside the USA. Just to keep things interesting, a short seller claimed Pony is a fraud. LUCID, BAIDU, PONY Google merging ChromesOS and Android Google has two main device platforms, ChromeOS and Android - it's tried running Android apps on Chrome, but now it's going to build ChromeOS on top of Android. This is probably part of a more general consolidation and housecleaning as the company pivots everything around AI, but the product strategy puzzles me. The appeal of ChromeOS is the simplicity and invulnerability, and how do you keep that if it runs on Android and runs Android apps? Android tablets have never rivalled the iPad - how does this fix that? (If it's any comfort, Apple seems just as confused about its iPad strategy - is this simpler than a Mac or not?) LINK Google TV? Apparently, Google is planning a new entertainment studio to make programming that's 'positive' about tech. How much money do they plan to spend on that? This sounds like an idea that shouldn't have left the bar at the comms team's offsite. LINK Microsoft in China ProPublica discovered that Microsoft was using Chinese engineers in China to do tech support for the US military. Microsoft is scrambling. Stories like this make me wonder why China needs its own spies. LINK | 
No comments:
Post a Comment