Emails from the Justice Department’s antitrust case against Google showed Microsoft executives worried and even jealous about Google’s AI lead.
In an email thread, CTO Kevin Scott wrote that he was “very, very concerned” about Google’s rapidly growing AI capabilities. He said he initially dismissed the company’s “gameplay stunts,” likely referring to Google’s AlphaGo models. The emails point to Gmail’s autocomplete features, which executives describe as “shockingly good.” Microsoft has struggled to copy Google’s BERT-large, an AI model that deciphers the meaning and context of words in a sentence. It took the company six hours to replicate the model, while Google continued to develop more elaborate, larger models.
Scott said Microsoft has “very smart” people on its machine learning teams, but their ambitions have been curbed and their company is “several years behind the competition in terms of ML scale.” This all resulted in a multi-billion dollar investment in 2019 Push into OpenAI. Since then, $13 billion has been invested.
– Mat Smith
The biggest stories you may have missed
You can receive these reports directly to your inbox every day. Subscribe right here!
What connects you to a B2B marketer in West Virginia? Four letters.
LinkedIn, the career-focused social network, is getting into gaming. But the kind of serious, word-based games your mother made you play as a child. LinkedIn describes them as “thinking games,” although the format will probably look familiar to fans of the New York Times Games app. You can only play each game once per day and share your score with friends. And maybe… you’ll start a conversation about how you can help each other with targeted SaaS projects. Yes, I have a feeling for who speaks to me on LinkedIn.
Continue reading.
It appears to be intended to instruct users to “avoid in-app service fees.”
TikTok is reportedly violating Apple’s App Store rules because the app allows (even recommends) certain users to purchase their coins directly from the site. TikTok has apparently given some iOS users the option to “Try top-up on tiktok.com to avoid in-app service fees” – namely Apple’s 30 percent commission on purchases, which will most likely be passed on to those users. It’s definitely not available to all users and appears to be there for TikTok users who have previously purchased a large number of coins – the TikTok, if you will.
Continue reading.
Someone pulled out the APK and loaded it onto an Android phone.
The Rabbit R1, a pocket-sized AI virtual assistant device, runs Android under the hood. Now the first users have been able to download the R1 APK, install it on an Android phone and get it working – although not with all the features. If that’s the case, then what’s the point of the $200 device?
In a statement sent to Android AuthorityRabbit CEO Jesse Lyu said the Rabbit R1 is “not an Android app.” He added that R1 ran on a very customized AOSP (Android Open Source Project) build and lower-level firmware changes, so a local bootleg APK cannot access most R1 services. We’re wrapping up our own in-depth review – stay tuned.
Continue reading.