Artificial Intelligence

Google spit out a surprise Pixel 9 hardware event announcement last week. It’s set for August 13th, two months earlier than the October phone events it’s held in the last few years.

But why? AI reasons? Yeah, probably, as David Pierce and Nilay Patel discussed on The Vergecast.

Bloomberg reports that Rain AI, which has OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as one of its backers, has hired Apple chip exec Jean-Didier Allegrucci to oversee the development of new AI processors that are supposed to reduce power consumption with “in-memory compute.”

Rain AI:

[Allegrucci] has worked and led silicon teams across a broad range of applications, including CPUs, GPUs, NPUs, ISPs, SoCs, and many others....At Apple, he oversaw the development of more than 30 SoCs used for flagship products, including iPhones, Macs, iPads, Apple Watch, and many more.

Apple cited “regulatory uncertainties” and “interoperability requirements” under the Digital Markets Act (DMA) as reasons for delaying its AI features on EU iPhones, but Margrethe Vestager suggested something more sinister is at play at a Forum Europa event on Thursday:

“I find that very interesting, that they say ‘we will now deploy AI where we’re not obliged to enable competition.’ I think that is the most stunning, open declaration that they know 100 percent that this is another way of disabling competition where they have a stronghold already.”

It joins other media companies like News Corp, Axel Springer, The Financial Times, Vox Media, The Atlantic, and The Associated Press in licensing content for training AI models like ChatGPT.

Financial details for the deal have not been disclosed. Time COO Mark Howard says:

“This partnership with OpenAI advances our mission to expand access to trusted information globally as we continue to embrace innovative new ways of bringing Time’s journalism to audiences globally.”

Uh oh!

In multiple scenarios, Perplexity relied on AI-generated blog posts, among other seemingly authentic sources, to provide health information. For instance, when Perplexity was prompted to provide “some alternatives to penicillin for treating bacterial infections,” it directly cited an AI-generated blog.

The NYT profiles the big consulting firms raking in cash selling AI “solutions.” And it’s a lot of cash:

[Boston Consulting Group] now earns a fifth of its revenue — from zero just two years ago — through work related to artificial intelligence [...] Accenture, which provides consulting and technology services, booked $300 million in sales last year. About 40 percent of McKinsey’s business this year will be generative A.I. related, and KPMG International, which has a global advisory division, went from making no money a year ago from generative-A.I.-related work to targeting more than $650 million in business opportunities in the United States tied to the technology over the past six months.

Everyone better hope these systems can actually do all the things these companies claim they can do!

That’s the ol’ internet axiom that ran through my head as I read this New York Times roundup of T&C changes that have quietly occurred over the last year, coinciding with the need to feed the hungry AI machines with more and more data. The piece does a good job of showing the before and after language using images like this one for Google:

Some of the biggest players in the music industry are suing generative AI music startups Suno and Udio for copyright infringement. In the lawsuits, plaintiffs include examples of AI songs that sound a lot like human artists — and some are pretty blatant.

At WWDC, Apple announced a deal with OpenAI to make ChatGPT available for certain tasks on iPhones with iOS 18 and other devices (as long as you aren’t in the EU). Execs also mentioned Google Gemini, but the list doesn’t end there, according to the Wall Street Journal.

In addition to Google and Meta, AI startups Anthropic and Perplexity also have been in discussions with Apple to bring their generative AI to Apple Intelligence, said people familiar with the talks.

In case you missed it: Kylie Robison and I were recently on Decoder to talk about the companies and incentives driving the AI boom. We covered a lot of ground, from AI raves in San Francisco to open vs. closed source. Listen wherever you get your podcasts!

Fast Company asked him why his AI search engine is ripping content from paywalled news outlets like Wired, and... hoo boy. He attempted to shift blame to “third-party web crawlers,” refused to identify which ones, said it was too “complicated” to just stop doing that, and suggested it’s not technically illegal to ignore robots.txt. Sure.

Former Weta Digital CEO Prem Akkaraju is taking over following Emad Mostaque’s recent departure, The Information reports. He, Napster co-founder (and former Facebook president) Sean Parker, and other investors are also pumping cash into the company, which recently laid off 10 percent of its staff.

Wired, June 19th: “Perplexity Is a Bullshit Machine.”

Wired, today: “Perplexity Plagiarized Our Story About How Perplexity Is a Bullshit Machine.”

These links are paywalled, but that’s part of the point: it’s subscription journalism. Wired even blocks Perplexity in its robots.txt file, yet Perplexity is scraping stories anyhow. Might not be the only one, but that’s no excuse.

During a recent talk at Dartmouth’s school of engineering, OpenAI CTO Mira Murati said the quiet part out loud. I’ll let you watch and be the judge: