Competition authorities were too slow to stop tech giants from dominating Web 2.0. They can’t repeat that mistake with AI When a company triples in value in just a few months, as computer chip company Nvidia has, investors take notice. But regulators do too, because they know from experience how monopolies engage in illegal anti-competitive behavior that squashes competitors and manipulates the market to expand their dominance. The US Department of Justice (as well as other competition authorities and tech observers) suspects Nvidia has used such tactics to entrench its chips monopoly, and last month it was reported that the Department of Justice was opening an antitrust investigation. It’s high time. Before the pandemic, few beyond video game enthusiasts – whose top-of-the-line gaming computers and consoles are built on high-capacity Nvidia chips – had ever heard of the company. But thanks to the generative AI boom, Nvidia has become one of the fastest-growing companies ever, and its chips have powered every important AI milestone – including OpenAI’s development of ChatGPT, which holds two-thirds of the AI business tools market. Max von Thun is the director of Europe and transatlantic partnerships at the Open Markets Institute, an anti-monopoly thinktank Continue reading...

Fall overnight comes after it shrinks by $279bn on Tuesday in biggest one-day drop in value by US company * Business live – latest news Shares in the AI chip designer Nvidia have continued to slide overnight after a report said US authorities were ramping up an investigation into whether the company had breached competition laws. The company’s shares fell 2.4% in after-hours trading, exacerbating a near-10% drop in the regular trading session that slashed its value by $279bn (£212bn) to $2.6tn, marking the largest one-day drop in history for a US company. Continue reading...

Doubling of quarterly revenues fails to allay concerns about production delays to its next-generation of AI chips * Business live – latest updates Shares in the chip designer Nvidia have fallen after investors were spooked by signs of slowing growth and production issues, despite the artificial intelligence company posting a doubling of quarterly sales. The Silicon Valley company posted a 122% rise in second-quarter revenues to $30bn (£23bn) compared with the same period last year. While that beat average analyst estimates of $28.7bn, investors were spooked by signs of a slowdown in growth, particularly around its next-generation AI chips, code-named Blackwell. Continue reading...

Chipmaker, third most valuable company in world, records $30.04bn in revenue, showing AI demand continues to rise Chipmaker Nvidia reported its latest financial results on Wednesday, recording $30.04bn in revenue over the past three months – a 122% jump from the year prior – and showing that artificial intelligence investment mania shows no signs of cooling. Analysts had anticipated about $28.7bn in revenue. Shares slid more than 3% in after-hours trading. Continue reading...

Curtis Priem has a vision for a quantum computing future and believes the area along the Hudson valley is fertile for the next tech boom The “quantum chandelier” that sits within a glass box in the chapel at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s campus in Troy, New York, is the symbolic centerpiece of an ambitious effort to turn upstate New York into an advanced technology center – what Silicon Valley is to social media or Cambridge, Massachusetts, is to biotech. The silver sci-fi object, named for interior gold lattices that suspend, cool and isolate its processor, is the heart of a “quantum computing system” that could herald a new age of computing. It’s the centerpiece of the dream Curtis Priem, a co-founder of Nvidia, the $2.8tn artificial intelligence hardware and software company, has of turning Rensselaer, or RPI, into an advanced computing hub and refashioning this area of upstate New York into a new Silicon Valley. Continue reading...

My close read of the world’s most powerful posting addict turned up surprising results. Plus, a viral press release about AI, and Nvidia is accused of ‘unjust enrichment’ • Don’t get TechScape delivered to your inbox? Sign up for the full article here “I hope I don’t have to cover Elon Musk again for a while,” I thought last week after I sent TechScape to readers. Then I got a message from the news editor. “Can you keep an eye on Elon Musk’s Twitter feed this week?” I ended up doing a close-reading of the world’s most powerful posting addict, and my brain turned to liquid and trickled out of my ears: His shortest overnight break, on Saturday night, saw him logging off after retweeting a meme comparing London’s Metropolitan police force to the Nazi SS, before bounding back online four and a half hours later to retweet a crypto influencer complaining about jail terms for Britons attending protests. AI poses no existential threat to humanity – new study finds. LLMs have a superficial ability to follow instructions and excel at proficiency in language, however, they have no potential to master new skills without explicit instruction. This means they remain inherently controllable, predictable and safe. Large language models, comprising billions of parameters and pre-trained on extensive web-scale corpora, have been claimed to acquire certain capabilities without having been specifically trained on them … We present a novel theory that explains emergent abilities, taking into account their potential confounding factors, and rigorously substantiate this theory through over 1,000 experiments. Our findings suggest that purported emergent abilities are not truly emergent, but result from a combination of in-context learning, model memory, and linguistic knowledge. Our work is a foundational step in explaining language model performance, providing a template for their efficient use and clarifying the paradox of their ability to excel in some instances while faltering in others. Thus, we demonstrate that their capabilities should not be overestimated. A federal lawsuit alleges that Nvidia, which focuses on designing chips for AI, took YouTube creator David Millette’s videos for its AI-training work. The suit charges Nvidia with “unjust enrichment and unfair competition” and seeks class action status to include other YouTube content creators with similar claims. Nvidia unlawfully ‘scraped’ YouTube videos to train its Cosmos AI software, according to the suit, filed Wednesday in the Northern District of California. Nvidia used software on commercial servers to evade YouTube’s detection to download ‘approximately 80 years’ worth of video content per day’, the lawsuit says, citing an Aug 5 404 media report. [Judge] Orrick found the artists had reasonably argued that the companies violate their rights by illegally storing work and that Stable Diffusion, the AI image generator in question, may have been built ‘to a significant extent on copyrighted works’ and was ‘created to facilitate that infringement by design’. Many site owners say they can’t afford to block Google’s AI from summarising their content. That’s because the Google tool that sifts through web content to come up with its AI answers is the same one that keeps track of web pages for search results, according to publishers. Blocking Alphabet Inc’s Google the way sites have blocked some of its AI competitors would also hamper a site’s ability to be discovered online. Continue reading...

Their shares have fallen 11.8% from last month’s peak but more AI breakthroughs may reassure investors It has been tough week for the magnificent seven, the group of technology stocks that has played a dominant role in the US stock market, buoyed by investor excitement about breakthroughs in artificial intelligence. Last year Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, the chipmaker Nvidia, Google’s parent, Alphabet, Facebook’s owner, Meta, and Elon Musk’s Tesla accounted for half the gains in the S&P 500 share index. But doubts about the return on AI investment, along with a mixed set of quarterly results, investors shifting their focus to other sectors and weak US economic data have hit the group over the past month. Continue reading...

Even as shares fall about 9%, chief financial officer says firm is seeing ‘more investment’ in AI than ‘even 90 days ago’ Chip designer Arm Holdings on Wednesday reported a stronger-than-expected 39% surge in quarterly revenue, and forecast fiscal second-quarter sales broadly in line with Wall Street estimates, yet its shares fell about 9% in extended trading. For the current fiscal second quarter, Arm forecast revenue in a range between $780m and $830m, compared with an average analyst estimate of $804.1m, according to LSEG data. Continue reading...

Powerful new chips are on the way but there are questions over whether tech firm’s growth can be sustained When Jensen Huang spoke at the Nvidia annual general meeting last week, he made no mention of a share price slide. The US chipmaker, buoyed up by its key role in the artificial intelligence boom, had briefly become the world’s most valuable company on 18 June but the crown slipped quickly. Nvidia shed about $550bn (£434bn) from the $3.4tn (£2.68tn) peak market value it had reached that week, as tech investors, combining profit-taking with doubts about the sustainability of its rocketing growth, applied the brakes. Continue reading...