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Hard Numbers: Hey big spender, an iPhone boost, Google’s robot coders, Super Micro’s super downfall
200 billion: Capital expenditures from four of the largest US tech companies — Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, and Google — are set to exceed $200 billion this year, inflated by enormous spending on artificial intelligence software and hardware investments. Amazon’s spending alone surged 81% in a year, leading CEO Andy Jassy to assure investors the company’s bets will pay off. These are record sums at a time when Wall Street seems hesitant to keep rewarding excessive spending on AI.
46 billion: Apple reversed its fortunes after a bad year of iPhone sales, selling more than $46 billion of its signature smartphone between July and September — a 6% increase year over year. The company’s new iPhone 16 is part of its push into artificial intelligence — marketed as a phone capable of handling all of its Apple Intelligence features, such as a supercharged Siri, new writing tools, and call transcription — which started rolling out last week. The company hopes that AI can convince customers old and new that it’s time to pay up for a new iPhone, which starts at $799.
25: More than 25% of all new code produced by Google is written by artificial intelligence, according to CEO Sundar Pichai. AI produces the code, which is then reviewed and accepted by human engineers. A recent Stack Overflow survey found that 76% of all software developers are using or are planning to use AI to code.
45: Super Micro Computer, a key supplier of Nvidia servers, saw its stock fall 45% after its auditor, Ernst & Young, resigned because it was “unwilling to be associated with the financial statements prepared by management.” Once one of the hottest AI stocks, the company has now wiped out all of its 2024 gains.Google logo is displayed on a mobile phone screen photographed with a Russian flag in the background for an illustration.
Hard Numbers: Kremlin hits Google with zeroes, Chileans demand tighter borders, Americans suffer election anxiety, Flash flooding wreaks havoc in Spain, Mount Fuji is missing something
20 decillion: The Kremlin hit Google with a fine of $20 decillion on behalf of Russian broadcasters banned by the company’s subsidiary, YouTube. Russia says the $20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 — more than a million trillion times larger than the size of the entire global economy but still nearly 70 zeroes smaller than a “googol” – is symbolic. There aren’t enough zeroes in the world to convey how minimal the chances are of Google paying the Kremlin a single cent.
96: How popular is the idea of tighter immigration restrictions in Chile? Some 96% of the country now favors reducing the influx of foreigners, according to a new poll. Chile, a relatively prosperous country that has long had a relatively lax border policy, saw its foreign-born population surge by 25% between 2018 and 2022, driven largely by the mass exodus from Venezuela. A backlash against migrants, partly shaped by the 2021 presidential election, has continued to grow.
70: Roughly 70% of Americans are feeling anxious or frustrated about the election, according to a new AP/NORC poll. If you are one of the afflicted, find someone among the 36% who report feeling “excited” about the upcoming vote. Who are these people?
158: At least 158 people have been killed by devastating flash floods in Spain's Valencia region, as rescuers continue to search for survivors. The fatal flooding, the worst such disaster for the country in a century, wreaked havoc — sweeping away entire homes and leaving cars piled in the streets.
130: Japan’s Mount Fuji is missing something right now: snow. The peak’s iconic snowcap usually begins forming in October, and never in 130 years of records has it gone without one this late in the month. The summer of 2024 was tied with 2023 for Japan’s hottest ever.Google’s control over search isn’t what it used to be
TikTok recently allowed advertising on its search results. And Perplexity, the AI search engine, plans to introduce ads on its search results later this month. Google, which had a 60% market share in US search advertising in 2018, is projected to have a 48.3% market share in 2025, according to the market research firm eMarketer.
Professor Ellen Moons, Secretary General at the Swedish Academy of Sciences Hans Ellegren, and Professor Anders Irback announce that John J. Hopfield and Geoffrey E. Hinton are the winners of this year's Nobel Prize winners in Physics in Stockholm, Sweden, on Oct. 8, 2024.
Hard Numbers: Nobels awarded, OpenAI’s soaring valuation, Gemini is getting fluent, Grindr’s wingmen, Supermicro’s macro sales
2: Two AI researchers, Geoffrey Hinton and John Hopfield, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics on Oct. 8. The pair were credited as pioneers of artificial neural networks, the machine learning technique that has powered the artificial intelligence revolution. Neural networks help computers learn by mimicking the activities of the human brain. “Thanks to their work humanity now has a new item in its toolbox, which we can choose to use for good purposes,” the Nobel committee wrote on X.
157 billion: OpenAI raised $6.6 billion last week in a new funding round led by Thrive Capital, including other investors such as Microsoft, SoftBank, and Nvidia. The company behind ChatGPT is now the second-most-valuable private company in the world, worth $157 billion, behind ByteDance ($220 billion) and just ahead of China’s Ant Group ($150 billion) and SpaceX ($125 billion).
9: Google is expanding its Gemini AI services in India. Since 40% of users there rely on voice interactions with the chatbot, the company says it will soon support not just Hindi, but nine total Indian languages — Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Telugu, Tamil, and Urdu.
14 million: The gay dating app Grindr wants its 14 million users to have AI “wingmen.” These agents will help people find the most meaningful connections, plan dates, and — eventually — book reservations so you don’t have to lift a finger. Grindr says these features will be fully up and running by 2027 at the latest. Will your next date have to make any effort at all?
100,000: Supermicro, a company that makes servers for data centers, said it is shipping 100,000 graphics processors per quarter. The announcement sent its stock soaring more than 15% on Oct. 7, a day when the Dow Jones fell 400 points.A laptop keyboard and Google logo displayed on a phone screen are seen in this illustration photo taken in Krakow, Poland on September 9, 2024.
Ireland sniffs around Google’s AI models
Ireland’s data privacy authority has opened an inquiry into Google’s artificial intelligence practices. The country’s Data Protection Commission has become an important data watchdog in the European Union as many of the world’s top tech companies have set up their European operations in Ireland. The DPC is specifically investigating whether Google’s Pathways Language Model 2, or PaLM 2, protected user privacy in accordance with Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation.
PaLM 2 is a foundational model developed by Google AI that’s largely been succeeded by its Gemini model, which launched in December 2023.
Under the GDPR, companies are required to carry out “data protection impact assessments” any time they develop a project that could be considered “high-risk” to citizens’ personal information. The Irish data regulator will look into whether Google improperly skipped this step. GDPR violations are no joke: If found liable, Google could be forced to cough up 4% of their global annual revenue. Google told reporters that it takes its obligations under GDPR seriously and will work with the DPC to answer their questions.European Union antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager holds a press conference after Europe's top court ruling on Apple's fight against an order by EU competition regulators to pay a record 13 billion euros in back taxes to Ireland, in Brussels, Belgium September 10, 2024.
Take two: Brussels’ banner day vs. tech firms
It was Tech Two-fer Tuesday in Brussels, as EU regulators got twin wins in their ongoing regulatory battle with US tech giants.
Google lost its final appeal in a 2017 antitrust case that found the company’s search engine had illegally prioritized its own shopping platforms. Google must now pay $2.7 billion in fines.
Apple, meanwhile, was ordered to pay $14 billion in back taxes, after the EU’s top court ruled that the Irish government had once given the tech giant sweetheart incentives that amounted to “unlawful aid.”
To be fair, these numbers are pocket change for companies raking in hundreds of billions of dollars in annual revenue. And in both cases, the underlying offenses were rectified years ago – the Irish scrapped the sweetheart deal in 2015 and Google has since tweaked its ad algorithms.
But the rulings set a precedent as the EU flexes its unique muscle as a standard-setter in global tech regulation.
The next showdown: In July, Brussels said X had violated strict EU rules on harmful content. If the two sides can’t settle, the case will go to court. That seems likely, given that X owner Elon Musk responded to the charges by vowing to fight “censorship” and calling on the EU to perform a sex act on its “own face.”
ChatGPT website displayed on a laptop screen is seen in this illustration photo taken in Milano, Italy, on February 21 2023
Hard Numbers: ChatGPTers double, Japan’s AI military, Google’s AI pop-ups, Magic money, Musk vs. Brazil
200 million: OpenAI says it now counts 200 million weekly users of ChatGPT, which has doubled in the past year. It also claims that 92% of Fortune 500 companies use its products for writing, coding, and organizational help.
59 billion: Japan’s military is having a recruitment problem. With only 10,000 of its citizens enlisting this year — half of its target — the government is investing $59 billion, a 7% yearly increase, to add additional capabilities including artificial intelligence. It’s spending $123 million alone on an AI surveillance system for its military bases.
17: A new report from the consultancy Authoritas found that Google is offering its AI Overviews — those pop-up AI-generated answers to users’ Googled questions — on 17% of user queries. The search engine company came under fire for its inaccurate AI-generated responses earlier this year and since then has reportedly reduced the frequency with which its suggested answers pop up.
320 million: The startup Magic, whose AI models generate computer code and automate software, raised $320 million in a funding round from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, among others. The San Francisco-based firm also announced a partnership with Google to build two new supercomputers on the tech giant’s cloud platform.
24: X is now shut down in Brazil, the escalation of a legal dispute between the company’s owner, Elon Musk, and the country’s top court. Musk has criticized Brazil for requesting the company remove certain accounts. Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes on Friday gave Musk 24 hours to name a legal representative in the country or else face a national ban. Musk refused and, in response, posted an AI-generated image of de Moraes behind bars, writing, “One day, @Alexandre, this picture of you in prison will be real. Mark my words.”An image of a woman holding a cell phone in front of a Perplexity AI logo displayed on a computer screen.
Hard Numbers: Search wars, Lumen lights up, Anduril gets a raise, Public-private partnership
500: Lumen Technologies is watching its stock surge thanks to AI. The US telecom company revealed its fiber optics infrastructure is in demand by data centers needed for the AI boom. The company’s stock jumped 500% in the past month, when it was hovering around $1 per share.
14 billion: Palmer Luckey’s defense tech company, Anduril, just raised $1.5 billion in a new funding round, valuing the company at $14 billion. Luckey, best known as the founder of Oculus VR, which he sold to Meta in 2014, started Anduril in 2017 to make drones and other autonomous aircraft, and it is seen as one of the major AI companies challenging the legacy defense contractors.
100,000: The state of California has struck a partnership with Nvidia to train 100,000 students in AI-related skills. The initiative focuses on community colleges and will feature new curriculums, certifications, workshops, and labs to get students ready for careers in AI — including those with the state government.