Mark Zuckerberg's AI manifesto Mark Zuckerberg has written half a dozen 'change the mission' manifestos since he started the company - the last one was about the 'metaverse', and now, naturally, he's written about AI. See this week's column. Driven by that, capex for 2025 is now planned at $66-72bn, slightly up from the Q1 outlook of $64-72bn and compared to $39bn in 2024: they expect 'similarly significant' capex growth next year. Meanwhile, Meta's 'Reality Labs' division had an operating loss of another $4.5bn - the cumulative total investment in xR since buying Oculus back in 2014 is now close to $100bn. LINK Results season I generally try to steer clear of calling the results seasons in favour of more strategic and structural news, but there's a very clear theme from the big tech quarterly earnings this week - generative AI is driving a lot of demand for enterprise cloud, with Amazon, Microsoft and Google all saying they still don't have enough capacity, and driving significantly improved ad revenue for Google and Meta, due to better targeting. LINK Microsoft's OpenAI contract Microsoft seems to have a generally painful relationship with OpenAI, but one big specific issue is that under the current contract it will lose access to OpenAI tech if and when OpenAI produces 'AGI', where OpenAI can decide by itself whether that's happened. Apparently, this is being renegotiated now. The underlying problem is that 'AGI' is a concept and a thought experiment, not any specific technology or benchmark that you could prove to a court. Most people would probably use 'AGI' to mean something roughly equivalent to human intelligence overall, not just being better at chess or Go (though, again, we have no solid definition of human intelligence), but OpenAI publicly defines AGI as 'highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work' - which you could easily argue doesn't require 'human intelligence' at all. Indeed, I think this is actually what people are trying to communicate with 'super-intelligence', another term that means whatever the speaker wants - again, see this week's column. LINK The week in AI Microsoft is entering the AI browser game, adding a Copilot sidebar to Microsoft Edge (currently used for around 10% of US web traffic). This reminds me of search toolbars 20 years ago. Also, no one tell the DoJ. LINK Samsung signed a deal to make chips for Tesla, worth $16.5bn through 2033. Bad news for Intel? LINK Anthropic had to rate-limit some users of Claude Code, who are using it far more than the $200 fee can support. LINK Youtube does AI age analysis The UK's launch of an online age verification requirement (only for adult content) got a lot of attention this week. YouTube is trying from the other direction, using AI to guess whether a user might be under 18 and adjusting the recommendations and ads accordingly. LINK Robotics news We've clearly reached some kind of turning point in limbs and robotics: China's Unitree is now selling a $6000 humanoid device that can turn cartwheels. This comes partly from AI and partly from better batteries and motors. However, we should remember Moravec's paradox, and that in general, what's hard for people is easy for machines and vice versa: backflips are a lot easier for a machine than making a cup of coffee, let alone finding the coffee in a strange kitchen. Making your robot with legs instead of wheels doesn't mean it's any more intelligent than a Roomba, so where is that useful? After all, if you want a robot to do your laundry, that's a washing machine. LINK Meanwhile, Waymo finally has autonomous cars (another 'robot') working, though only in strictly limited situations, and Aurora is now running trucks on freeways in Texas: 20k miles since May between Dallas and Houston (so one trip a day, though). LINK | 
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