Welcome back to Week in Review. This week, we’re exploring the DOJ telling Google to sell off Chrome to break up its monopoly, OpenAI accidentally deleting potential evidence in The New York Times’ copyright lawsuit against it, and how AI companies are using TikTok brainrot for study tools. Let’s do this.
The U.S. Department of Justice argued that Google should divest its Chrome browser to help break up the company’s illegal monopoly in online search. District Court judge Amit Mehta ruled in August that Google was an illegal monopoly for abusing its power over the search business, and the DOJ’s latest filing suggests that Google’s ownership of Android and Chrome pose “a significant challenge” to apply remedies for making the search market competitive.
Anthropic has raised an additional $4 billion from Amazon and has agreed to make Amazon Web Services the primary place it’ll train its flagship generative AI models. Anthropic is also working with Annapurna Labs, AWS’ chipmaking division, to develop future generations of Trainium accelerators, AWS’ custom-built chips for training AI models. The new cash infusion from Amazon brings the tech giant’s total investment in Anthropic to $8 billion.
OpenAI accidentally deleted potential evidence in The New York Times and Daily News’ copyright lawsuit, lawyers for the publishers allege. As part of the suit, OpenAI agreed to provide two virtual machines so that counsel could perform searches for their copyrighted content in its AI training sets. But in a letter, attorneys for the publishers say that OpenAI engineers erased all the publishers’ search data stored on one of the virtual machines.
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Kim Kardashian meets Optimus: The fashion mogul got some hands-on experience with Tesla’s bipedal, humanoid robot. In videos posted to X, Kardashian prompts Optimus to make a heart with its hand, dance like it’s at a luau, and play rock, paper, scissors. Read more
Oura’s valuation surpasses $5B: The smart ring maker received a $75 million investment from glucose device maker Dexcom. The investment, which marks Oura’s Series D funding round, brings the company’s valuation to more than $5 billion. Read more
Let’s throw a party for Partiful: The customizable event-planning app challenging older solutions like Evite, Eventbrite, and Facebook Events is a favorite among Gen Z users — and has just been named Google’s best app of 2024. Read more
Talk to me in your language: Microsoft will soon let Teams users clone their voices so they can have their sound-alikes speak to others in up to nine languages: English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Mandarin Chinese, and Spanish. Read more