Brian McCullough (0:04)

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.