It was only eight months ago that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was triumphantly crowing about how his partnership with OpenAI had endowed him with the power to make Google “dance.” In a Washington, D.C., courtroom today, however, Nadella sounded like someone so enfeebled and despondent that he could barely operate his own laptop without escaping Google’s yoke.
“You get up in the morning, you brush your teeth, and you search on Google,” Nadella, the boss of $2.4 trillion Microsoft, testified in the antitrust trial about Google’s search monopoly, according to the Wall Street Journal.
It was a great performance by Nadella (including the sly reference to Google founder Larry Page’s “toothbrush test”—the idea that the company makes products that people will use twice a day) as the Microsoft boss plays every possible angle to score points against his arch-rival. Even the best NBA players, after all, are not too proud to flop.
The most notable takeaway of the testimony however is that the AI secret weapon that Microsoft has paid so dearly for, shelling out $13 billion to partner with OpenAI, has produced so few gains in market share. AI was supposed to be a game changer for internet search. And yet Microsoft’s Bing search engine, even with its ChatGPT superpowers, is still a bit player. Google remains the 800-pound gorilla that refuses to dance for anyone but its keepers.
By seeking succor from regulators, Microsoft is acknowledging the limits of AI’s powers as a panacea—a timely warning that the hordes of startups, venture capital firms, and established companies betting huge sums on AI makeovers would do well to take to heart.
Nadella’s plaintive court performance is also an acknowledgment that innovation does not always move faster than regulation, as many regulation-averse tech execs—most recently Spotify CEO Daniel Ek— would have you believe. It’s an important lesson to keep in mind as we debate how to put guardrails on this new class of companies and technologies.
Alexei Oreskovic
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Today’s edition was curated by Rachyl Jones.
NEWSWORTHY
Hot phones. After reports of Apple’s new iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max overheating last week, Apple confirmed the news but said it's not a result of Apple’s new titanium and aluminum hardware. The increased temperatures can be attributed to a bug in the iOS 17 software and some third-party app updates—including those of Instagram and Uber—overloading the new A17 Pro chips, Apple said. It is working on updates to address the overheating.
Wednesday is Pixel Day. Google is holding its next product event on Wednesday, where it is expected to announce a new line of Pixel products. The launch could include the Pixel 8 and 8 Pro phones, the Pixel Watch 2, and new colors for the Pixel Buds Pro earbuds. Samsung, a Google competitor, teased it may release its new Android 14 phone on the same day.
TikTok takes after Twitter. TikTok is testing a $4.99 per month subscription plan that will eliminate ads for viewers, according to Android Authority. A totally ad-free viewing experience would be the first of its kind for a platform of TikTok’s size. Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts—TikTok’s competitors—have no tier of the sort. X, the text-based social media site formerly known as Twitter, offers a subscription service that limits ads but doesn’t remove them entirely.
ON OUR FEED
"Looking at LLMs as chatbots is the same as looking at early computers as calculators."
—Andrej Karpathy, the former senior director of AI at Tesla who recently moved back to OpenAI, in a tweet about the future of AI large language models to be the basis for new operating systems, as discussed by Bloomberg.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
Tesla unveils first quarter-on-quarter decline since 2020 as Elon Musk ‘disappoints’ Wall Street bulls, by Christiaan Hetzner
Airbnb’s CEO isn’t happy with how the business has grown, and wants hosts to lower their prices: ‘We need to get our house in order’, by Orianna Rosa Royle
Mark Zuckerberg touts potential of remote work in metaverse as Meta threatens employees for violating return-to-office mandate, by Steve Mollman
Spotify CEO Daniel Ek warns laws trying to regulate AI would quickly become obsolete, by Ryan Hogg
Google finally gave teens access to generative AI in search. They were probably already using it anyway, by Rachyl Jones
BEFORE YOU GO
A match made in heaven? Elon Musk inked a deal with media personality and socialite Paris Hilton to grow X’s live shopping business. Hilton, who has 16.6 million followers on the platform, will host a series of livestream shopping events, where users can chat and shop at the same time, according to Variety. Musk and Hilton’s media company 11:11 will share revenue from the events, and Hilton will partner on the launches of new consumer products, services, and features on the app, Variety reported.
The partnership appears to be the first of its kind under Musk’s leadership, and it seems to push forward his vision of X as an “everything app,” where users can not only scroll social media but shop, send money to friends, call a taxi, and more. Other social media platforms like TikTok have tested live shopping in the U.S., but it hasn’t seen the same success as in overseas markets like China.
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