Good morning. We’re all familiar with the phenomenon of “smart” products being abandoned by their makers, leaving them insecure or even nonfunctional.
Now the Federal Trade Commission has put a figure on the issue: A whopping 89% of the 184 smart products it surveyed didn’t come with a disclosure of how long they would be supported with updates. And of those manufacturers that did disclose this information, most hid it in the tech specs or other small print.
FTC consumer protection chief Samuel Levine: “Consumers stand to lose a lot of money if their smart products stop delivering the features they want.” No kidding! —David Meyer
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Lina Khan’s parting shot at Microsoft
FTC Chair Lina Khan is very likely in the final weeks of her tenure, with Donald Trump widely expected to replace her after he is sworn in as president in January. But if Big Tech thought they were out of the woods, they’re in for a surprise. Just ask Microsoft.
The federal regulator has opened a broad antitrust investigation into Microsoft’s cloud computing and software licensing practices, and has sent detailed questions to the company, according to Bloomberg. The demand for information is hundreds of pages long and focuses, among other things, on cybersecurity incidents involving Microsoft’s cloud services as well as the terms of Microsoft’s software licensing.
The probe comes about 25 years after Microsoft fought a high-stakes antitrust battle with the U.S. government over the company’s bundling of its internet browser and its Windows PC operating system. The trial judge in that case ordered that Microsoft be broken up into several companies, but the ruling was overturned on appeal. Today Microsoft is one of the world’s most valuable companies.
The $3 trillion question this time around for Microsoft will be whether the incoming Trump administration perseveres with Khan’s antitrust investigation or decides to drop it. —Alexei Oreskovic
SoftBank buys more OpenAI
SoftBank had been seeking a bigger slice of OpenAI, and now it may be getting what it wants.
According to CNBC, OpenAI employees have a chance to cash out their shares; by Dec. 24, they must decide if they want to participate in the tender offer.
OpenAI relaxed its policy on secondary share sales in June, after employees complained. Of course, if those employees reckon the company’s trajectory will continue to point upwards, they may have an incentive to hang onto their shares.
Masayoshi Son’s SoftBank conglomerate had already put $500 million into OpenAI. Its tender offer for OpenAI employee shares, which involves its Vision 2 fund, could run to around $1.5 billion. SoftBank is flush with cash these days, and is plowing ever deeper into AI. —DM
Elon vs. The Onion
The Onion’s humorous-but-completely-serious bankruptcy-court bid for Alex Jones’s conspiracy site InfoWars has hit another hurdle of sorts.
Elon Musk’s X has filed an objection to the sale (which a judge recently paused for review) on the basis that it would give The Onion ownership of the InfoWars X accounts. The social network claims that it owns all its users’ accounts.
“The ‘sale’ of the X Accounts as the Trustee requests would be a wrongful transfer of the license to use X Corp.’s Services,” X’s lawyers argued, per TechCrunch. “Such a sale would plainly violate X Corp.’s [terms of service] and its ownership rights.”
Pre-Musk Twitter banned InfoWars for abusive speech, but the new owner restored Jones’ accounts last year on the basis of “free speech.”
Musk can’t stop the InfoWars sale from going through, but he might be able to prevent the world’s most famous satirical website from spreading laughs through the @infowars, @BANNEDdotVIDEO, @WarRoomShow, or @RealAlexJones accounts. —DM
Bluesky scrutiny
X rival Bluesky promised not to train generative AI models on its users’ posts (or “skeets,” to use the Bluesky vernacular). But an apparent loophole has caused a kerfuffle.
The Bluesky site provides an API that allows developers to monitor pretty much everything that happens on the social media platform—and Hugging Face machine learning librarian Daniel van Strien seized the opportunity to compile a dataset of a million public Bluesky posts, for the purpose of training AI models.
Cue outrage among many Bluesky users, particularly those who have boned up on EU data protection law, which does not look kindly on reusing people’s data without their permission.
“While I wanted to support tool development for the platform, I recognize this approach violated principles of transparency and consent in data collection,” van Strien wrote when announcing he had taken down the dataset. “I apologize for this mistake.”
In related news, Bluesky has promised to provide EU authorities and users details about its user numbers there, to comply with EU content laws. The European Commission had called out the network for failing to toe the line. —DM
Here comes the Grok app
Roughly one year after launching, Grok is finally getting an important asset: its own app.
The AI chatbot created by Elon Musk’s xAI plans to release a consumer-facing app as soon as December, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. A standalone app would allow Grok to better compete against rival AI chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. Grok is currently only available to users of Musk’s X social media platform, who pay a fee to access the premium version of X.
It’s not clear if the forthcoming Grok app will provide a certain level of free access to the chatbot—which touts its snarky responses and ability to answer “spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems”—or whether it will be a for-pay app. But given that Musk’s xAI firm has raised at least $11 billion at a valuation of $50 billion, a new revenue stream might not be a bad thing. —AO
More data
The new ‘land grab’ for AI companies, from Meta to OpenAI, is military contracts. Defense was a very controversial use case not long ago.
Microsoft hits back at claims it slurps your Word, Excel files to train AI models. Redmond has a trust problem.
Israeli tech entrepreneurs and engineers from major companies like Google and Microsoft are seeking refuge in Europe. The “Startup Nation” is leaking talent.
Foxconn says global presence to shield it from Trump tariffs. Good luck with that.
Chinese driverless-tech firm Pony AI said to raise $260 million in U.S. IPO. Seems investors have a good appetite for robo-taxis.
