This Week’s Top 5 Stories in AI
Why Elon Musk Sues Apple Over its OpenAI ChatGPT iPhone Deal
Elon Musk is escalating his feud with OpenAI, launching a legal battle that brings Apple into the crossfire.
Two of his companies, X and xAI, are filing a lawsuit in Texas federal court, alleging the tech giants struck an anti-competitive deal that shuts out rivals from the lucrative smartphone AI market.
Musk is challenging Apple’s exclusive partnership with OpenAI – as the arrangement embeds OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot directly into iPhones, giving users access through Siri and other system features without requiring a separate app download.
The lawsuit strikes at the heart of the smartphone AI battle, where access to hundreds of millions of users represents enormous commercial value.
Musk’s xAI develops Grok, a rival chatbot that competes with ChatGPT in the fast-expanding Gen AI market – but Grok lacks the privileged access that ChatGPT enjoys on iPhones, forcing users to download a separate app or visit a website.
Nvidia’s Revenue Results Amid China Tensions: Explained
Nvidia reports another blockbuster quarter, with revenue hitting US$46.7bn – a 56% jump from last year – though the chip designer’s shares still tumbled in after-hours trading as investors fretted over China trade tensions.
The company saw its data centre business pull in US$41.1bn during the three months to July. That’s a 56% increase year-on-year, though it came in slightly below what analysts had been expecting.
CEO Jensen Huang says that the four biggest tech companies are now spending US$600bn a year on AI infrastructure – double what the company was shelling out before.
“Over time, you would think that AI would accelerate GDP growth. Our contribution to that is a large part of the AI infrastructure,” Jensen says in a call following the report’s release.
Much of that spending is coming from the likes of Meta, which runs Instagram and Facebook and OpenAI.
“The AI race is now on.”
Both companies need Nvidia’s high-end chips to power AI systems and train new models.
The Results of Anthropic’s Claude AI Chrome Extension Pilot
Anthropic, the AI company behind the Claude chatbot, is beginning to test a Chrome browser extension that allows its AI assistant to take actions directly within web browsers.
This is a unique development that could change how people interact with AI tools.
So far, the company is running a controlled pilot with 1,000 users on its Max subscription tier. The extension lets people ask Claude to perform tasks like clicking buttons, filling out forms and managing calendar appointments without switching between applications.
It’s a logical next step for Anthropic, which has spent recent months connecting Claude to calendars, documents and other software – but browser-based AI brings fresh challenges that the company is still working to solve.
The pilot is revealing some troubling vulnerabilities already.
Inside Meta’s Cloud Deal with Google for AI Infrastructure
The AI industry is gaining more partnerships as technology companies grapple with the enormous infrastructure demands of developing competitive AI systems.
The latest agreement between Meta and Google Cloud demonstrates the strategic shifts occurring as firms balance internal AI development with external cloud partnerships.
Meta has signed a six-year cloud computing agreement with Google worth more than US$10bn.
The deal is Google's second major cloud agreement in recent months, following a similar arrangement with OpenAI.
Under the agreement, Meta will use Google Cloud’s servers, storage, networking and other infrastructure services.
Cloud computing is important for Meta to be able to rent computing power and storage from providers rather than building its own data centres.
This collaboration comes as the AI sector faces mounting pressure to scale computing resources rapidly whilst managing spiralling costs.
The partnership also reflects the broader industry trends where even the largest technology companies are turning to cloud providers to supplement their internal infrastructure capabilities.
Could NASA’s Quantum Theory AI Change Meteorology Forever?
NASA is partnering with San Francisco-based weather prediction company Planette to develop ‘QubitCast’, an innovative quantum-inspired AI system designed to predict extreme weather events months in advance.
The collaboration addresses a critical limitation in current forecasting capabilities, where meteorologists face challenges in providing accurate predictions beyond a 10-day window.
While some organisations offer two-week forecasts, maintaining accuracy for longer periods remains problematic.
QubitCast leverages algorithms inspired by quantum physics principles, particularly the concept of exploring multiple possibilities simultaneously.
This innovative approach enables efficient processing of vast amounts of atmospheric, ocean and land data.
“You can think of it like reading the entire history of Earth’s systems all at once,” says Dr Kalai Ramea, Co-Founder and CTO of Planette.
