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Oct 29, 2024
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Happy Tuesday! Meta Platforms is working on an artificial intelligence-powered search engine. Microsoft accused Google of running "shadow campaigns" to turn regulators and the public against Microsoft. The U.S. issued final rules that limit and screen U.S. investments in China in sensitive technology areas.
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Microsoft on Monday accused Google of running “shadow campaigns” to turn monopoly regulators and the public against the enterprise and cloud incumbent and distract them from Google’s own antitrust woes. While Google has publicly alleged Microsoft is stifling competition in the cloud computing market, Microsoft said
Google also formed a lobbying group to carry out this work but without acknowledging Google’s lead role in it. Microsoft and Google have for years been lobbying against each other behind the scenes, each relying on a handful of key executives to carry out the attacks. But Microsoft’s statement on Monday—detailed in a blog post by deputy general counsel Rima Alaily—was unusually vociferous. Google has accused Microsoft of making it more expensive for customers to run its popular Windows Server software on competitors’ cloud platforms and
steering customers towards its own Azure cloud. Alaily pushed back in her statement Monday, arguing that because Windows Server is Microsoft’s intellectual property, Google shouldn’t be allowed to run it in its own cloud for free. Google has funded lobbying groups including the Coalition for Fair Software Licensing and the newly formed Open Cloud Coalition to lobby against Microsoft in the US and Europe, Alaily said, and she accused Google of spreading “misleading” accusations about Microsoft’s China business to politicians and news outlets. In a statement on Monday, a Google spokesperson said the company has “been very public about our concerns with Microsoft’s cloud licensing,” which it said “lock-in customers and create negative downstream effects.”
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Meta Platforms is working on a search engine that crawls and indexes the web so its artificial intelligence assistant can provide information about current events and news, The Information reported. The work aims to lessen Meta’s reliance on Google Search and Microsoft’s Bing, which currently provide information about sports, stocks and other current events to people using the Meta AI chatbot. If Google or Microsoft withdrew from these arrangements, Meta would be better positioned to fill the gap. Meta AI is the centerpiece of Meta’s strategy to capitalize on the boom in generative AI. The assistant has almost 500 million monthly active users, Meta said this month. That’s up from more than 400 million monthly active users in August, The Information previously reported.
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The U.S. Treasury Department issued final rules that limit and screen U.S. investments in China in sensitive technology areas. The restrictions will take effect on Jan. 2. Under the new rules, certain U.S. investments in semiconductors, artificial intelligence and quantum computing in mainland China, Hong Kong and Macau would be prohibited while other deals in those areas would require a notification to the Treasury Department. The rules implement President Biden’s draft executive order last year that called for new restrictions on U.S. outbound tech investments in China. The Biden order cited concerns that such investments enable China to accelerate its development of technologies that could be used for military, surveillance and intelligence purposes. The new rules grant certain exemptions such as minority-stake
public market investments and certain limited partner investments.
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The RealReal announced Monday that John Koryl had left the company after less than two years as CEO and named Rati Sahi Levesque, a longtime executive at the luxury resale site, to the top role. Levesque, most recently the company’s president and chief operating officer, helped The RealReal’s founder Julie Wainwright start the company in 2011. She also served as an interim co-CEO after Wainwright stepped down from the CEO role in 2022. Koryl, a former Neiman Marcus executive, had pushed to cut costs and focus on higher-margin merchandise, a reversal from the growth-at-all-costs strategy favored by Wainwright. The RealReal also announced preliminary third-quarter financial results on Wednesday, reporting revenue of $148 million, up 11% from the same period a year earlier. It raised its full-year revenue outlook to between $595 million and $602 million and projected adjusted EBITDA of between $4.5 million and $7.5 million for 2024. Shares in the company have climbed nearly 40% this year, but are still down roughly 90% from their 2019 IPO price. The RealReal will report full financial results Nov. 4.
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Elon Musk’s Memphis, Tenn., data center for xAI has drawn an enormous amount of attention—from people who believe his claims that he built the world’s largest AI cluster in just 19 days, an unbelievably short timeframe, and those who are skeptical he actually pulled it off. On Monday Musk got additional support from Nvidia. In a press release, Nvidia said from the time the first servers arrived, they were up and running in 19 days, though it noted it took the companies 122 days to build out other aspects of the data center and supercomputer. Nvidia also did not specify
whether the 100,000 chips were all operational in 19 days, or whether they were all connected to each other, as opposed to being set up in smaller clusters. Nvidia said xAI plans to double the size of its GPU cluster to 200,000 chips. It did not provide a timeline. Nvidia said Musk was able to string together such a large cluster of chips because he used Nvidia’s Ethernet-based networking technology. AI model developers have increasingly been considering switching away from Nvidia’s proprietary Infiniband networking technology to Ethernet-based networking. Ethernet is generally viewed as a cheaper alternative to
Infiniband that could work better for AI clusters. While Nvidia sells an Ethernet-based product, so do others.
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AI search startup Perplexity has had a turbulent relationship with some news publishers, and now it has hired a tech industry veteran to help change that. Jessica Chan, a former manager at LinkedIn and Meta, joined Perplexity last month as the two-year-old startup’s first head of publisher partnerships, according to a spokesperson. News of her hiring hasn’t been reported. Chan is leading a program that will go into effect when Perplexity starts displaying ads next to search results later this year, in which publishers will get a cut of the money Perplexity makes when an answer references their sites. This could be a difficult job for a couple of reasons. While Perplexity says it wants to build trust with publishers, its management also hasn’t always
responded diplomatically to criticism. After News Corp. filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Perplexity earlier this month, Perplexity complained that it was indicative of the “adversarial posture between media and tech.”
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