AI: Weekly Summary. RTZ #864

Michael Parekh AI: Reset to Zero

4 weeks ago

4 MIN READ

Meta, Google, OpenAI lean into AI Generated Social Feeds: Meta, OpenAI join Google in AI generated TikTok style scrolling social content feeds. Meta with its Vibes app, and OpenAI with a standalone iOS Sora 2 app, which for now is invitation only. Google showed earlier success with its ‘Nano Banana’ strategy and is also building on that momentum. OpenAI’s Sora app is already at the top of the iOS apps charts. The viral popularity is an echo of its AI image generated launch that saw the ‘Ghibli’ craze a few weeks ago. These launches represent an acceleration of AI generated content that has already been dubbed ‘AI Slop’. Done right, these feeds could provide new opportunities for online ‘Creators’ in the nearly half trillion dollar ‘Creator’ economy. Meta in particular is leaning into bringing in advertisers into its feeds sooner than later. More here.

Amazon finally launches Alexa+ Echo Show Devices: Amazon launched its long awaited AI powered Alexa+ service for its base of hundreds of millions of Alexa and Echo device users. As well as launching updated AI powered Echo and Echo Show devices. Also rolled out were color Kindles with AI powered writing features. The launch is notable as Apple is poised to launch its AI powered Siri next year, and Google is aggressively adding its Gemini AI into Google Nest ‘smart home’ devices. These initiatives also run parallel with OpenAI’s plans to launch AI smart devices next year, following its recent acquisition of IO, founded by former Apple Design Guru Jony Ive. Expect more distribution platforms for AI smart devices going into next year. More here.

Apple shifts from Vision Pro to AI Smart Glasses: Continuing on AI smart devices, Apple is shifting its strategy on AI Smart Glasses, postponing updated versions of its Vision Pro headsets, into simpler AI Smart Glasses that are less expensive and offer features similar to the rising competition from Meta. As noted earlier, Meta founder/CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been ‘all in’ on AI Smart Glasses, with billions invested over a decade. Google and Amazon are also ramping up on AI Smart Glasses shortly. The category is viewed at the very least as a supplemental platform for AI services beyond the smartphone. Meta in particular is trying to build an AI smart glasses platform to get around the Apple and Google platform advantage with iOS and Android devices. More here.

OpenAI’s AI Power Play: OpenAI founder/CEO Sam Altman outlined the company’s aggressive plans to build multi-gigawatt data centers over the next few years. These would be independent of its partnership with Microsoft. And built with partners like Oracle, CoreWeave and other neoclouds. The plans call for 250 gigawatts worth of data centers, which would be a third of all US Power capacity. At $50 billion per 1 GW datacenter equipped with the latest Nvidia AI GPUs and other hardware, this represents an eventual AI capex budget of $12.5 trillion. That would be a tenth of the 2025 global GDP. Also note that peers like Meta, xAI/Tesla, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon have similar ambitions. This move signals OpenAI’s commitment to building out its AI Compute vs competitors. More here.

Apple’s ‘need’ for its own AI Chatbot: The debate continues on whether Apple should have its own LLM AI chatbot, vs partnering with OpenAI, and potentially Google and others to distribute their models over Apple platforms. Apple remains the only member of the ‘Mag 7’ without its own home-grown frontier model. And its current Apple Intelligence strategy is focused on partnerships with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, as well as potential distribution agreements with other AI companies like Google, Anthropic, Perplexity and others. Apple is focused on developing its own small AI models that reside on its devices, and work with external models as needed. The debate over both strategies remains a key focus by investors and media. More here.