Welcome to the Techmeme Ride Home for Wednesday, December 27, 2023. I'm Brian McCullough. The New York Times has broken the seal and sued OpenAI and Microsoft. Ads are coming to Prime Video in mere days, more rumors about Johnny I founding an AI hardware startup with Sam Altman. Anthropic seems to be proving OpenAI isn't the only one that can make money in the AI space, and when chips go beyond the one kilowatt barrier, you need to liquid
cool them. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Well, we knew something like this was coming. We just didn't know who would fire the first shot. Turns out it's the New York Times, which has sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement. Allegeing millions of articles were used in training their AI products. This is the first major US media organization to sue on these grounds, quoting, well, The New
York Times. The lawsuit filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan contends that millions of articles published by the Times were used to train automated chatbots that now compete with the news outlet as a source of reliable information. The suit does not include an exact monetary demand, but it says the defendant should be held responsible for, quote, billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages related to the, quote, unlawful copying and
use of the Times's uniquely valuable works. It also calls for the companies to destroy any chatbot models and training data that use copyrighted material from the Times. Defended seek to free ride on the Times's massive investment in its journalism. The complaint says, accusing OpenAI and Microsoft of using the Times's content without payment to create products that
substitute for the Times and steal audiences away from it. And quote, so apparently this lawsuit came after extensive negotiations between the Times and the two companies hit a wall. The newspaper apparently proposed a potential commercial partnership along with the implementation of technological guardrails on AI-driven products like chat GPT. The lawsuit goes beyond intellectual property, though it positions AI technologies such as chat GPT
as emerging rivals in the realm of journalism. This is particularly relevant when AI systems upon querying them produce content on current events and topics of public interest, often drawing upon the Times's past reporting. The Times is worried that consumers might opt for AI-generated summaries instead of accessing its own website, potentially diminishing its web traffic. In the legal complaint, the Times highlighted instances where AI chatbots
like chat GPT replicated content from its articles almost word for word. Such content is usually behind a paywall and accessible only to its subscribers. The lawsuit underscores the emphasis by OpenAI and Microsoft on incorporating content from the New York Times in their AI planning processes. Remember that recent story we did about Apple wanting to pay to get
content from say the New Yorker? Increasingly, the idea is that training content from say the New York Times and the New Yorkers of the world is of higher quality than say YouTube comments. Plus, it helps to have content that can go back decades or even centuries, thus the deals OpenAI struck with the AP and Axel Springer. One wonders if this is a negotiating tactic on the Times' part or an actual lawsuit that will see through to seeking redress.
Though the law firm, the Times retained for this suit, is the same one that represented Dominion voting systems in that defamation case against Fox News that resulted in a $787 million settlement, so that suggests they're serious. Amazon Prime Video plans to start showing ads starting in two days on January 29th, though they do give you an option for customers to pay an additional $299 per month to avoid the ads.
Quoting the verge. This will allow us to continue investing in compelling content and keep increasing that investment over a long period of time the company said in an email to customers about the penning shift to what they call limited advertisements. We aim to have meaningfully fewer ads than linear TV and other streaming TV providers. No action is required from you and there is no change to the current price of your Prime membership.
The company wrote, customers have the option of paying an additional $299 per month to keep avoiding advertisements. The rest of the email summarizes the many benefits of a Prime subscription. No doubt in attempt to keep customers from canceling over this decision. And quote, yeah, they want you to feel like nothing is changing. But Amazon Prime is $1499 a month or you can get it for $139 if you pay for the whole year. But if you just
want Prime Video, it's $899 a month with this extra $299 per month to avoid ads. Prime would cost you just shy of $18 monthly. And if you're only into Prime Video, it's going to be almost $12. Amazon does have another streamer called free V. It's totally free, but it's got ads. So you're almost out of options to avoid ads on Amazon at this point unless you do pay up.
Example number two. And as many days that Sam Altman's ambitions have not taken a hit even after his recent issues with the open AI board, sources are telling Mark Gurman that outgoing Apple executive Tang Tan plans to join Johnny Ives love from to work on some mystery hardware product that would incorporate AI heavily. Sam Altman is apparently planning
to provide the software for this product. Quoting Bloomberg. The work marks one of the most ambitious efforts undertaken by Ives since he left Apple in 2019 to create love from the iconic designer is famous for the products he helped devise under Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, including the iMac iPhone and iPad. His hope is to turn the AI device work into a new company, but development of the products remains at an early stage according to the
people. The efforts so far are focused on hiring talent and creating concepts. Tan will lead hardware engineering at the project while working at Love From. The people said Bloomberg News previously reported that the executive was stepping down as Apple's vice president of iPhone and watch product design. He isn't slated to depart until February though his
responsibilities were already divided up this month. Altman, who was fired as open AI chief executive officer in November and quickly reinstated, earned some board members by raising funds for other endeavors. That included the effort with Ives. Bloomberg News reported in November. Altman had courted soft bank chairman Masio Shisan about making a multi-billion
dollar investment in the new company. Projects in the concept stage include devices for the home, open AI referred questions to Love From, which declined to comment, Apple also declined to comment. For Apple, Tan's departure underscores an exodus of design talent since 2019 about 14 members of Ives former team at Apple have left. Only roughly half a dozen of the designers
who once reported to Ives still remain at Apple. Meanwhile, Love From's roster of clients include Airbnb and Ferrari, that three year consulting gig it had with Apple ended last year, and roughly 20 former Apple employees are employed by Ives at Love From. According to pitch book Microsoft Google and Amazon at main investments amounting to two thirds of the 27 billion dollars raised by AI startups this year in 2023, vastly outspending
VC firms, quoting the financial times. The huge outlay, which exploded after the launch of open AI's chat GPT in November highlights how the biggest Silicon Valley groups are
crowding out traditional tech investors for the biggest deals in the industry. The rise of generative AI systems capable of producing human-like video, text, image, and audio in seconds have also attracted top Silicon Valley investors, but VCs have been outmatched having been forced to slow down their spending as they adjust to higher interest rates and
following valuations for their portfolio companies. Over the past year, we've seen the market quickly consolidate around a handful of foundation models with large tech players coming in and pouring billions of dollars into companies like open AI, cohere, andthropic, and mistral, said Nina Akajian, a partner at US venture firm index ventures referring to some of the
top AI startups. For traditional VCs, you had to be in early and you had to have conviction, which meant being in the know on the latest AI research and knowing which teams were spinning out of Google deep-minded and others she added. Yes, but a lot of this is strategic. After Microsoft swallowed up open AI at least de facto, every other major tech platform needed its own big AI partner, its own LLM factory,
if you will. At the same time, every one of those players needed a big pocketed partner with tons of compute capacity, so it's not crowding out so much as, you know, market fit in a sense. Ever walk into a store and have no idea what wine to get? Yeah, me too. Wine buying is so 20th century, one of the last buying experiences where you have to ask a clerk
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at least some of the players, some types of players seem to be quite capable. Quote, anthropic and open AI rival backed by Amazon and Google has projected it will generate more than $850 million in annualized revenue by the end of 2024, according to two people with knowledge of its financial picture. Just three months ago, anthropic told some investors it was generating revenue at $100 million annualized rate and expected that figure would
reach $500 million by the end of 2024. It isn't clear why the latest projections are
materially higher. The projection underscores the three-year-old startups remarkable growth expectations and may offer more evidence that generative artificial intelligence is gaining steam among enterprises annualized revenue typically reflects the prior months revenue multiplied by 12 so the projection implies the startup will generate revenue of at least $70 million per month by the end of next year an increase of more than eight times from
its monthly revenue around September of this year. Anthropic generates revenue from the sale of clawed AI that can generate and analyze text and anthropic spokesperson did not have a comment for this article. The new projection comes as anthropic is in the process of raising around $750 million from men low ventures and other investors at a $15 billion pre-investment valuation at least three times its prior valuation from an earlier funding
round in 2023. The new capital will be added to the billions of dollars and funding Amazon and Google have already committed to the startup and the topic will train its AI using Amazon's and Google's cloud servers. Anthropic is also selling clawed to the two cloud providers customers. Some people close to the company believe Anthropic could reach $1 billion per month by the end of next year and analyze revenue next year or 83 million in revenue
per month a mark open AI past during the summer. The creator of chat GPT has likely passed $1.5 billion in annualized revenue by now given its recent revenue growth trajectory and thanks in part to Microsoft selling the startup's technology to cloud customers and quote. Microsoft is testing a feature that would let Windows 11 users reinstall the operating system using Windows update a method that would preserve files settings and
installed apps from Windows latest. A new Windows update feature could be a game changer for those scared of losing files or pictures when attempting to reinstall or recover their Windows 11 installations. The new feature fixed problems using Windows update lets you reinstall Windows 11 using Windows update. Currently if you want to repair or reinstall the installed version of Windows you need to perform an in place upgrade using the media
creation tool. The process lets you keep all your files settings and installed apps but reinstall the installed version of Windows or sometimes newer versions without losing files. Windows in place upgrades are generally considered a somewhat lengthy and time consuming process and some users fear they might lose their files or pictures. Thankfully Microsoft is aware of the concerns and is adding a new feature called fixed problems using Windows update.
Microsoft is testing the feature with users in the beta channel and you will find the fixed problems using Windows update toggle under settings system recovery but it doesn't seem to work at the moment. With this new recovery tool you can quote reinstall your current version of Windows your apps files and settings will be preserved.
That's according to the description of the toggle in the settings app. The idea is to repair the existing Windows installation by downloading a fresh copy of the OS from Windows update and the best part it won't remove any files settings or apps according to a support document from July of 2023. So how is this different from the existing reset your PC or cloud reset features? The key difference is that Windows will download
the files from Windows update without OEM bloatware software or other junk. Another notable difference is the new recovery feature won't delete your data or uninstall apps unlike the reset options. GM has had to pause Chevy Blazer EV sales as it works to fix software problems including the infotainment screen going blank which apparently is affecting a limited number of vehicles.
Quoting tech crunch. The automaker told tech crunch that owners are experiencing problems with the SUV screens and with charging at DC fast stations confirming early reports from journalists who had access to review vehicles. GM said its engineering teams are quote working around the clock toward a solution and that when it has one ready Blazer EV owners
will have to bring their vehicles to a dealership for a software update. GM also claimed a quote limited number of vehicles are affected but didn't offer a figure and that the problems are quote not safety related nor related to optimum or Google built in. The Blazer EV only just had its official launch a few weeks ago but pretty quickly two media outlets had big problems with their longer term test cars. Kevin Williams at Inside EV saw his Blazers
infotainment screen go completely blank and unusable. Then he had problems charging the car including an alert to have the vehicle immediately serviced and was ultimately stranded midroad trip. We've spoken about this dilemma before car buyers are increasingly buying
cars based on how easy the user experience is especially digitally. Car makers want to own that experience thus the move away from Apple's car play and Google's various implementations and yet UI and UX it's not something the car companies have a long history of experience with so delicate balancing act. Finally today just some interesting in the weeds technical stuff as more high performance computing chips have pushed past the one kilowatt mark at least this year. I'm thinking
of chips like Nvidia's GH 200 super chips. Many manufacturers have begun embracing direct liquid cooling. Quoting the register as Moore's law slowed to a crawl chips particularly those used in AI and high performance computing have steadily gotten hotter in 2023 we saw accelerators enter the kilowatt range with the arrival of Nvidia's GH 200 super chips.
We've known these chips would be hot for a while now Nvidia has been teasing this CPU GPU frankenship for the better part of two years what we didn't know until recently is how OEMs and systems builders would respond to such a power dense part would most of the systems be liquid cooled or would most stick to air cooling how many of these accelerators would
they try to cram into a single box and how big would the box need to be. Now that the first systems based on the GH 200 make their way to market it's become clear that the form factor is very much being dictated by power density than anything else it boils down to how much surface area you have to dissipate the heat. There are a couple of advantages to liquid cooling beyond a mere efficient transfer of heat from these densely packed accelerators.
The higher the system power is the more static pressure and airflow you need to remove the heat from the system. This means using hotter faster fans that use more power potentially as much as 20% of system power in some cases beyond about 500 watts per rack unit most of the OEMs and OEMs seem to be opting for liquid cooled chassis as fewer slower fans are required to cool lower power components like NICs storage and other peripherals and quote. Nothing for you today, talk to you tomorrow.