Welcome back to Week in Review. This week, we’re exploring the DOJ telling Google to sell off Chrome to break up its monopoly, OpenAI accidentally deleting potential evidence in The New York Times’ copyright lawsuit against it, and how AI companies are using TikTok brainrot for study tools. Let’s do this.
The U.S. Department of Justice argued that Google should divest its Chrome browser to help break up the company’s illegal monopoly in online search. District Court judge Amit Mehta ruled in August that Google was an illegal monopoly for abusing its power over the search business, and the DOJ’s latest filing suggests that Google’s ownership of Android and Chrome pose “a significant challenge” to apply remedies for making the search market competitive.
Anthropic has raised an additional $4 billion from Amazon and has agreed to make Amazon Web Services the primary place it’ll train its flagship generative AI models. Anthropic is also working with Annapurna Labs, AWS’ chipmaking division, to develop future generations of Trainium accelerators, AWS’ custom-built chips for training AI models. The new cash infusion from Amazon brings the tech giant’s total investment in Anthropic to $8 billion.
OpenAI accidentally deleted potential evidence in The New York Times and Daily News’ copyright lawsuit, lawyers for the publishers allege. As part of the suit, OpenAI agreed to provide two virtual machines so that counsel could perform searches for their copyrighted content in its AI training sets. But in a letter, attorneys for the publishers say that OpenAI engineers erased all the publishers’ search data stored on one of the virtual machines.
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News
Kim Kardashian meets Optimus: The fashion mogul got some hands-on experience with Tesla’s bipedal, humanoid robot. In videos posted to X, Kardashian prompts Optimus to make a heart with its hand, dance like it’s at a luau, and play rock, paper, scissors. Read more
Oura’s valuation surpasses $5B: The smart ring maker received a $75 million investment from glucose device maker Dexcom. The investment, which marks Oura’s Series D funding round, brings the company’s valuation to more than $5 billion. Read more
Let’s throw a party for Partiful: The customizable event-planning app challenging older solutions like Evite, Eventbrite, and Facebook Events is a favorite among Gen Z users — and has just been named Google’s best app of 2024. Read more
Talk to me in your language: Microsoft will soon let Teams users clone their voices so they can have their sound-alikes speak to others in up to nine languages: English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Mandarin Chinese, and Spanish. Read more
Hackers go after Andrew Tate: According to The Daily Dot, hackers breached an online course founded by the influencer and self-described misogynist, leaking data on close to 800,000 users. Tate is currently under house arrest awaiting trial on charges of human trafficking and rape. Read more
What makes a bank a bank? The U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau ruled that all digital services that handle a significant number of transactions should be subject to bank-like supervision, which could affect Apple Pay, Cash App, Google Pay, PayPal, and Venmo. Read more
A more conversational Siri: Apple is developing a new version of Siri powered by advanced large language models, according to sources cited by Bloomberg, in an attempt to catch up with more natural-sounding competitors like Google’s Gemini Live. Read more
Cashing in on TikTok brainrot: Several AI-based study tools are capitalizing on a “PDF to Brainrot” trend, in which the text of a document you upload is read to you in a monotone voice over “oddly satisfying” vertical videos like Subway Surfers gameplay. Read more
Threads takes a stab at Bluesky: As Bluesky tops 20 million users, Instagram Threads has begun rolling out a new feature called custom feeds in an effort to capitalize on the user demand for more personalization. Read more
ChatGPT in the classroom: OpenAI released a free online course designed to help K-12 teachers learn how to bring ChatGPT into their classrooms. But some educators are wary of the technology — and its potential to go awry. Read more
Do we need another daily word game? I am a daily word game and crossword puzzle evangelist, but it feels like we’re quickly approaching oversaturation in the market. Netflix, in collaboration with TED, launched its new daily word puzzle called TED Tumblewords. Read more
Analysis
Please don’t upload your X-rays to a chatbot: People frequently turn to generative AI chatbots to ask questions about their medical concerns and to better understand their health. Since October, X users have been encouraged to upload their X-rays, MRIs, and PET scans to the platform’s AI chatbot, Grok, to help interpret their results. Medical data is a special category with federal protections that, for the most part, only you can choose to circumvent. But just because you can doesn’t mean you should. As Zack Whittaker writes, it’s good to remember that what goes on the internet never leaves the internet. Read more
