Welcome back to our weekly recap! This week, we’re diving into some interesting stories: the U.S. government is pushing Google to sell its Chrome web browser to help break up what it considers an illegal monopoly, OpenAI may have accidentally deleted important evidence in a lawsuit over copyright issues, and we’ll also look at how AI companies are using TikTok trends to create study tools. Let’s get started!
First up, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is arguing that Google should sell off its Chrome web browser. They believe this is necessary to break up Google’s monopoly in online search services. Back in August, a judge named Amit Mehta ruled that Google was indeed acting like an illegal monopoly because it was misusing its power in the search market. The DOJ’s recent statement suggests that Google’s ownership of both the Android operating system and the Chrome browser makes it much harder to create fair competition in the search industry.
In another story, a company called Anthropic has secured an additional $4 billion investment from Amazon. This funding will help Anthropic make Amazon Web Services (AWS) the main platform for training its advanced AI models. Anthropic is also collaborating with a division of AWS called Annapurna Labs, which specializes in making chips. Together, they are working on the next generation of specialized chips, called Trainium, that are designed specifically for training AI systems. With this new investment, Amazon’s total funding in Anthropic has reached an impressive $8 billion.
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Lastly, there’s a troubling development involving OpenAI. The company reportedly deleted important data that could have been used as evidence in a copyright lawsuit filed by The New York Times and Daily News. As part of the legal proceedings, OpenAI had agreed to provide two virtual machines—essentially, powerful computers in the cloud—so that the publishers’ lawyers could search for their copyrighted material within OpenAI’s AI training datasets. However, the lawyers have claimed that OpenAI’s engineers accidentally erased all the search data that had been stored on one of those virtual machines, which could complicate the lawsuit significantly.
That wraps up this week’s highlights!
