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- [00:05]
Brian McCullough
Welcome to the TechMe Write Home for Wednesday, April 23rd, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, that delayed action from the European Commission finally came down on Apple and meta. Would OpenAI be a logical home for the Chrome web browser? Massive layoffs coming to Intel? Any sphere turned down an acquisition offer from OpenAI. And are the tariff wars coming for Elon Musk's robots? Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. The European Commission has fined Apple 500 million euros and Meta 200 million euro under the DMA and issued cease and desist orders to both companies. Apple and Meta say they will appeal, but perhaps more importantly this quoting the Journal the commission also issued cease and desist orders against both companies, which target business practices that are an important part of their revenue streams and could have a bigger impact than the fines. It ordered Apple to remove what it were technical and commercial restrictions on app developers ability to inform users about cheaper and alternative ways to buy digital products outside the company's app store. The commission also said it is still evaluating whether an option Meta has for several months given European users to see less personalized ads on Instagram and Facebook without paying a subscription fee complies with the cease and desist order, raising the specter of further changes. The EU fine covers a period last year when Meta required European users to agree to seeing personalized ads on those apps or pay for an ad free subscription. The actions against both companies come under the EU's Digital Markets Act, a law passed in 2022 that seeks to make it easier for smaller companies to compete with global tech behemoths. Breaches of the law carry a potential fine of up to 10% of a company's global annual revenue. The fines issued Wednesday were far below that level, around 0.1% of each company's annual revenue. Apple's controversial Core technology Fee, or ctf, applies to developers who want to distribute their apps on third party app marketplaces and use alternative pay options. Apple has been forcing developers to pay €50 cents for each annual app install after 1 million downloads, a pricey commission, particularly for smaller developers. Apple did make more developers exempt from its alternative app store tax last year, allowing developers of free apps without monetization to avoid the fee. While the CTF is an issue for the European Commission, the fiddly process of installing alternative app marketplaces and associated apps are also a concern for the commission. Apple makes it overly burdensome and confusing for end users to install apps when using using such alternative app distribution channels, says the European Commission in a statement. Apple has now been sent the commission's preliminary findings and will have time to respond to the findings before a final decision is made. The European Commission has also closed its investigation into the iPhone's browser Choice screen today, ruling that changes Apple made to its iOS satisfy its antitrust obligations. The probe into Apple's default browser choice screen was launched in March 2024, and Apple introduced several changes in iOS 17.4 to comply with DMA requirements, including opening up its system to other browser engines Besides its own WebKit engine, and directly prompting users to choose their own default browser. End Quote if in the US V. Google case Google is forced to sell off its chrome web browser, OpenAI's ChatGPT chief Nick Turley says the company would be interested in buying it, quoting Bloomberg yes, we would, as would many other parties, Nick Turley, OpenAI's ChatGPT chief, said in response to a question about whether the company would seek to buy Google's browser. Turley was called by the Justice Department to testify as part of a three week trial aimed at determining what changes Alphabet's Google must make to its business after a federal judge found last year that the company monopolized the search market. Judge Amit Mehta is set to decide by August what business practices Google must modify. The Justice Department has asked that Google be forced to divest Chrome. Currently, OpenAI's chatbot ChatGPT has an extension in Google's Chrome browser available for users to download. But having Chrome be more deeply integrated into OpenAI would allow for a better product, Turley said. You could offer a really incredible experience if ChatGPT was integrated into Chrome, he said. We would have the ability to introduce users into what an AI first experience looks like. Turley said one of the company's most difficult issues today is with distribution. While the company has reached a deal to integrate ChatGPT into Apple's iPhone, it hasn't had any success with Android smartphone manufacturers, he said. Also from the trial, Turley also said that Google declined to let OpenAI access its search index. That is noteworthy because another proposed DOJ remedy would be to let Google's rivals access the index, quoting Bloomberg, OpenAI's goals of building a Super Assistant app and reaching general artificial intelligence won't succeed without search technology, but Google has declined to work with the startup. The head of its ChatGPT product testified Tuesday in the Google Anti Trust trial. OpenAI's Nick Turley said the company never intended to simply create a chatbot like its popular ChatGPT, and instead wanted to deliver a Super Assistant that can help users complete tasks. But the large language models that underline the company's chatbot have inherent limitations because of a lack of recent information and their tendency to hallucinate or invent false answers to questions when they don't know the answer. That's where search capability becomes essential, he said. Search technology is a necessary component. Turley testified in Washington federal court as part of the Justice Department's antitrust case against Alphabet's Google. You can't have a Super Assistant that doesn't know the current facts or makes things up. We are not trying to recreate the type of experience you find on Google with 10 blue links and ads, he said. End quote Sources say Intel is set to unveil plans this week to cut more than 20% of staff, its first major restructuring under new CEO Lip bhutan. Intel had 108,900 workers in December 2024. Quoting Bloomberg, intel shares rose as much as 3 1/2% in pre market trading before New York exchanges opened on Wednesday. The stock has declined about 43% in the past 12 months and closed at $19.51 on Tuesday. Tan is aiming to turn around the iconic chipmaker after years of intel ceding ground to rivals. The Santa Clara, California based company lost its technological edge and has struggled to catch up with Nvidia in artificial intelligence computing. That contributed to three straight years of sales declines and mounting Red Tan, a veteran of Cadence Design Systems, has vowed to spin off intel assets that aren't central to its mission and create more compelling products. Last week, the company agreed to sell a 51% stake in its programmable chips unit, Altera to Silver Lake Management, a step toward that goal. Intel needs to replace the engineering talent it has lost, improve its balance sheet and better attune manufacturing processes to the needs of potential customers, tan said last month at the intel vision conference, quoting TechRadar. Intel had a particularly troubling fourth quarter, with revenue dropping 7% year over year. The full 12 month period wasn't especially positive either, with a 2% year over year decrease in revenue to $53.1 billion. The cost reduction plan we announced last year to improve the trajectory of the company is having an impact, CFO David Zinsner explained. Intel shares are down 43% over the past year alone, with the company currently sitting at a market cap of $85.07 billion. To put that in perspective, AMD's total Val currently 140.14 billion and Nvidia is the third most valuable company in the world and one of only eight to measure its market cap in trillions, not billions at 2.412 trillion. End Quote A startup called Nary Labs has unveiled DIA, a 1.6 billion parameter text to speech model designed to produce naturalistic dialogue directly from text prompts built with what they are calling zero funding. Quoting Venture Beat, the two person startup claims it surpasses the performance of competing proprietary offerings from the likes of ElevenLabs and Google's hit Notebook LM AI podcast generating product. It could also threaten uptake of OpenAI's recent GPT 4.0 mini TTS. DIA rivals NotebookLM's podcast feature while surpassing ElevenLabs Studio and Sesame's open model in quality, said Toby Kim, one of the co creators of Nary and dia, on a post from his account on the social Network X. In a separate post, Kim noted that the model was built with zero funding and added across a thread. We were not AI experts from the beginning. It all started when we fell in love with NotebookLM's podcast feature when it was released last year. We wanted more more control over the voices, more freedom in the script. We tried every TTS API on the market. None of them sounded like real human conversation. Kim further credited Google for giving him and his collaborator access to the company's Tensor processing units, or TPUs, for training DIA through Google's Research Cloud, DIA's code and waits. The internal model connection set is now available for download and local deployment by anyone from hugging face or GitHub. Individual users can try generating speech from it on a hugging face space. Nari offers a host of example audio files generated by DIA on its Notion website, comparing it to other leading text to speech rivals, specifically ElevenLabs Studio and Sesame CSM1B, the latter a new text to speech model from Oculus VR headset co creator Brendan Uribe, yet went somewhat viral on X earlier this year. Side by side examples shared by Nari Labs show how DIA outperforms the competition in several areas. In standard dialogue scenarios, DIA handles both natural timing and nonverbal expressions better. For example, in a script ending with laughs, DIA interprets and delivers actual laughter, whereas elevenlabs and Sesame output textual substitutions like haha end quote. Here you go with an actual example. Here's a sentence produced by eleven Labs. Deer is an open weights text to dialogue model. You get full control over scripts and voices. Wow. Amazing.
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Toby Kim
Haha.
- [10:17]
Brian McCullough
Try it now on GitHub or hugging face and here's the same sentence from DIA. DIA is an open weights, text to dialogue model, you get full control over scripts and voices.
- [10:28]
Toby Kim
Wow.
- [10:28]
Brian McCullough
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TechCrunch has sources who say that Cursor maker Any Sphere has reached around $300 million in annual recurring revenue and declined an acquisition offer from OpenAI, which is now trying to buy rival windsurf, which has $100 million in ARR instead. Quoting TechCrunch, the company previously walked away from early acquisition discussions with OpenAI after the ChatGPT maker approached Cursor, the two sources close to the company confirmed, and CNBC reported. Anysphere has also received other acquisition offers that the company didn't consider, according to one of these sources. Cursor turned down the offers because the startup wants to stay independent, said the two people close to the company. Instead, AnySphere has been in talks to raise capital at about a $10 billion valuation, Bloomberg reported last month. Although it didn't nab anySphere, OpenAI didn't give up on buying an established AI coding tool startup. OpenAI talked with more than 20 others, CNBC reported, and then it got serious over the next fastest growing AI coding startup, windsurf, with a $3 billion acquisition offer, Bloomberg reported last week. While Windsurf is a comparatively smaller company, its ARR is about $100 million, up from 40 million in ARR in February, according to a source. Windsurf has been gaining popularity with the developer community, too, and its coding product is designed to work with legacy enterprise systems. Windsurf did not respond to TechCruncher's request for comment. OpenAI declined to comment on its acquisition talks. OpenAI is likely shopping because it's looking for its next growth areas as competitors such as Google's Gemini and China's Deep Seq put pricing pressure on access to foundational models. Moreover, Anthropic and Google have recently released AI models that outperform OpenAI's models on coding benchmarks, increasingly making them a preferred choice for developers. While OpenAI could build its own AI coding assistant, buying a product that is already popular with developers means the ChatGPT maker wouldn't have to start from scratch to build this business. End quote. Geoffrey Hinton, other AI experts and 10 former OpenAI staff have written to the California and Delaware attorneys general opposing OpenAI's for profit restructuring, echoing Elon Musk's previous arguments. Quoting the FT, the signatories argue that the proposed restructuring would transfer control of the development of artificial general intelligence or AGI computer systems with equal or superior cognitive abilities to most humans to a company driven by profits. They added that this contradicts OpenAI's founding mission of ensuring that AGI benefits all of humanity rather than the private gain of any person. I would like OpenAI to execute that mission instead of enriching their investors, said Hinton, a Nobel laureate and professor at the University of Toronto. The intervention brings further attention to OpenAI's controversial plan to transform into a for profit entity by the end of this year without the switch. The San Francisco based company, led by Chief Executive Sam Altman, risks forfeiting some of its recent $30 billion investment from SoftBank, as well as additional contributions from investors in previous rounds. OpenAI, which is now valued at $300 billion, has argued that at a time when rivals such as Google and Meta are investing hundreds of billions of dollars to develop the technology, its investors need conventional equity and less structural bespokeness to commit further capital. But Paige Headley, one of the former OpenAI employees to have signed the letter opposing its conversion, said competing is not mission. By all accounts, it has already been extraordinarily successful at raising money, he added. Under the pbc, the board would not have a fiduciary duty to the beneficiaries of the mission, the public. And if the board does not fulfill its fiduciary duty to shareholders, they would have recourse. End quote. Finally today, Tariff Watch Tesla had some bad earnings announced yesterday, though that's a bit outside our remit. This, however, however is worth noting. Elon Musk says production of Tesla's humanoid robot Optimus is affected by China's recent restrictions on exports of rare earth minerals used in magnets, quoting Bloomberg. Tesla's production of Optimus, a robot that promises to take over household chores, has been disrupted by China's curbs on rare earth exports introduced by Beijing earlier this month in an escalating trade war with Washington. Speaking on the company's earnings call on Tuesday, Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk said production was impacted by the magnet issue. While weeks of delays are expected as exporters grapple with tighter permit requirements for the key ingredients. Tesla is one of the highest profile buyers so far to flag the direct consequence of the change. We're working through that with China. Hopefully we'll get a license to use the rare earth magnets, said Musk, who is also an advisor to the White House. China wants some assurances that these are not used for military purposes, which obviously they're not. They're just going into a humanoid robot. Beijing added seven rare earth minerals to its export control list in response to the increasingly punitive tariffs imposed by US President Donald Trump. It said restrictions were required given rare earths are considered dual use items. Minerals with civilian but also military applications. The minerals, while niche, have vital uses across optical laser technology, radar devices, magnets for wind turbines, jet engine coatings and other advanced technologies. Chinese robot related stocks climbed following Tesla's earnings call with Ubtech Robotics Corp. Horizon and Robotics Inc. Zhejiang Changsheng Sliding Bearings Co. And Jiangsu Pacific Precision Forging Co. Jumping more than 10%. Rare earth minerals maker JL Mag Rare Earth Company's shares also surged more than 10%. Musk also weighed in on the impact of tariffs, saying Tesla's energy business is the most impacted. The impact of tariffs on the energy business will be outsized since we source LFP lithium iron phosphate battery cells from China, he said in the earnings call. We're in the process of commission equipment for the local manufacturing of LFP battery cells in the U.S. he said, adding that Tesla has been working to secure supply from non China based suppliers, but the process will take time. End quote. Nothing more for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.
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Toby Kim
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