The Intel turnaround Intel is at risk of falling off the cutting edge of Moore's Law, and probably needs $15-25bn that it does not have to get back. This week the US government took a 10% stake for $8.9bn, in the form of grants that had already been awarded under the (Biden) CHIPS Act but not yet paid. There won't be a board seat. Broader context: Samsung is also at risk of falling off (though it does have money), and China's SIMC is of course trying to get there - so there's a real risk that either TSMC will have a monopoly, or that it will share one with China. Either outcome would be bad both for the tech industry (most obviously, what happens to prices?) and for the strategic security of the USA. After that, nothing is clear - most of all, does Intel still give up on SOTA, and if not, how much more money does it need, where from, and how does a government stake change that? LINK OpenAI India OpenAI is launching a cut-price, cut-down version of ChatGPT5 in India for ₹399/month (~$4.5). There are 6-700m smartphone users in India, and every consumer tech company wants to be there. LINK Prompt injection Brave, the browser company, discovered that the AI sidebar in Perplexity's Comet browser is vulnerable to prompt injection, which means that a web page you visit could contain text that tells Comet to use Gmail to pass on your bank details, and it would do that. The indeterministic nature of LLMs makes prompt injection a fascinating problem that's surprisingly hard to fix. LINK FreeGPT for the Feds Google and OpenAI are both now giving employees of US federal agencies access for the next year for a nominal fee (whether those employees have a PC or internet access is another problem). There are lots of land-grabs going on right now - see also the India story. GOOGLE, OPENAI Apple Gemini? Apple is apparently looking at using some form of Google's Gemini. This might mean actually powering new features (i.e. the much-delayed rebuild of Siri), or might just be an alternative to the existing ChatGPT integration, which works much like having Google as default search in Safari. It's very likely that this year a judge will order Google to stop paying Apple a ~$20bn revenue share to be search default: it would be hilarious if that was replaced by a $20bn deal to be Apple's chatbot default. LINK Meta AI Meta is still working out the new AI strategy - after spending hundreds of millions of dollars (or more?) to poach researchers from competitors, it's also now doing a licensing deal with Midjourney. LINK And, it's also apparently done a deal to use Google Cloud, worth $10bn over six years. LINK Amazon blocking bots Amazon is now blocking AI scraping from Meta, Google and other LLM systems, which means they won't send purchasing traffic to Amazon (or will send less), but also means they won't have access to all of that SKU-level data and reviews about products. LINK The UK backs down on Apple back doors Earlier this year it was reported that the UK was demanding (in secret) that Apple provide a back door to encrypted user data. This is a bad idea in general, but bizarrely it also emerged that the UK was trying to get this not just for users in the UK, where at least there is jurisdiction, but for all Apple customers globally. Apple reacted by pulling the product from the UK and going to court, but this week Trump's director of national intelligence said that the UK has backed down. I have far more sympathy than most people in tech for the reasons that intelligence agencies and law enforcement would like to read terrible messages from terrible people, but it was always untenable for the UK to try to order Apple to let UK spies read the messages of Americans in America - no US administration would be relaxed about that. LINK | 
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