Breakaway start-up has an impossible mission. Anthropic is a new breakaway start-up from Open AI but its approach remains pretty much the same meaning that its focus on “reliable, interpretable and steerable AI” is going to be very hard to achieve. Anthropic has also just raised $124m at a valuation of $845m which is pretty incredible as there does not...
The outcome is likely to be somewhere in the middle. The first stage of this battle is over as the judge has retired to consider her decision, but it looks like neither side is going to like the outcome which I think ends up as a net win for Epic until round 2 when Apple appeals the ruling. The problem...
Amazon overpays for a jaded asset. Amazon is acquiring MGM Studios to bolster its digital ecosystem but while it has a great name and impressive catalogue, its distinct lack of recent franchises makes me wonder whether Amazon is overpaying in its haste to expand. Amazon is paying $8.45bn to acquire MGM from the creditors who brought it out of bankruptcy...
Peloton should be moving out of hardware. Peloton’s move deeper into hardware will benefit the company in the short term, but as the value in this sector moves into software and the content, hardware manufacturing will rapidly become a liability that will likely crash the company’s valuation. Peloton has announced that it will invest $400m in the construction of a...
No oligarchs please we are Chinese. The withdrawal of Zhang Yiming from the management of ByteDance is all about ensuring that the IPO goes well and that the events that destroyed Ant Group are not repeated. This is another clear indication that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has no real issue with any of these companies but will ensure that...
Tim Cook has a really bad memory. There are a number of items that stretch one’s credibility in the testimony given by senior Apple executives which I think has started to tip the balance of the outcome more in Epic’s favour. Both Tim Cook and Phil Schiller have given testimony in the court case between Epic Games and Apple which...
Google plays catch up on multiple fronts. Google used its keynote to highlight updates to its ecosystem that offer up its version of competing products as well as a few new tweaks of its own. First, LaMDA: which is Google’s answer to Open AI’s GPT-3. In a nutshell, this is a new language model that attempts to make conversation more...
RISC-V gains more momentum. One of the big problems of Arm’s perceived loss of independence by being acquired by NVIDIA is that interest in rivals, once thought to be dead, has been greatly revived. I don’t think that RISC-V has any chance of challenging Arm at the high end without massive Chinese government intervention, but at the low end, Arm...
AT&T & Verizon admit defeat. AT&T and Verizon’s failure to differentiate themselves through media consumption is a stark warning to all telco operators that they need to do something very special in order to avoid being packet pushers. First, it was Verizon that decided that it was unable to make a go of its 3rd rate media assets and sold...
Facebook & Google – The Wizard of OZ pt. III.
Regulator claims a victory which looks like defeat. The Australian regulator is claiming victory in its fight with Facebook and Google, but I suspect that its only achievement is to put in writing the same terms that were already in place before all this fuss started. In an interview with the FT (see here), Rod Sims the chairman of the...