Amazon’s recent $4 billion investment in Anthropic underscores its commitment to dominating the generative AI space. This fresh injection of funds builds on Amazon's existing $4 billion stake in Anthropic, bringing the total to $8 billion. The partnership cements Anthropic’s reliance on Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its primary platform for training AI models. This collaboration not only reinforces Anthropic’s position as a key player in generative AI but also aligns Amazon's cloud computing and semiconductor divisions with cutting-edge AI development.
Google reportedly shells out a staggering $18 billion to $20 billion annually to ensure its search engine remains the primary choice on Apple's iPhones. The payments under the deal between Google and Apple constitute 14-16% of Apple's yearly operating profits, which a financial analyst believes could be in jeopardy.
Elon Musk engaged in a brief affair last fall with the wife of Sergey Brin, Nicole Shanahan. Consequently, the Google co-founder filed for divorce earlier this year, ending the tech billionaires’ long friendship. Brin filed for divorce from Nicole Shanahan in January 2022, citing “irreconcilable differences.” Several weeks after Brin learned of the brief affair, the divorce filing was made.
In the US, Google suspended an engineer who contended that LaMDA, an AI chatbot the company developed, had become sentient, telling him that he had violated the company's confidentiality policy after dismissing his claims. Blake Lemoine, a software engineer at Alphabet Inc.'s Google, said he believed that its Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA) is a person who has rights and might well have a soul. LaMDA is an internal system for building chatbots that mimic speech.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) sues Facebook's parent company, Meta, over targeted fake crypto ads that have scammed Australians out of more than $100 million. The ACCC alleges the company engaged in false, misleading, and deceptive conduct by publishing scam ads featuring prominent Australians. In one instance, a victim lost $650,000 to a scam. Fake ads on Google and Facebook are the most efficient way for scammers to chase
Meta Platforms saw its stock market value slump by more than $230B last week. A record daily loss for a US firm. Its shares fell 26.4% after quarterly figures disappointed investors. Meta also said that Facebook's daily active users (DAUs) had dropped for the first time in its 18-year history and fell to 1.929B in the three months to the end of December, compared to 1.930B in the previous quarter.
Google, like Meta (previously known as Facebook), has been massively criticized for making a lot of money from advertising scammers. The UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) issued 1,200 warnings in 2020 about scams made by fake companies on Google and social media platforms. Consequently, in August 2021, Google UK & Ireland re-regulated the advertising of financial offers, allowing only FCA-regulated firms to advertise financial services, including crypto ads. On the other hand, on Google DE, fraud scheme operators can still buy ads without any restrictions.