Google AI Chip Strategy and Weekend Reads

Are roll batteries the same? That's like asking ev soccer players are the same Take Messi, the most decorated player ever Is there any other player who has achieved that? No, just him. Now take Duracl. Is there any other battery with power boost ingredients inside? No, just Duracl. Remember, goats only trust goats because they're built different. and Messi only trusts Duracl Welcome to the Tech We Rite homeome for juneenth, twenty six. I'm Brian MCell. Today Intel stock popped after Trump said Apple agreed to build chips with it in America. Wimo yanked his rowa taxis off highways over construction zone blunders GTA six preordders are finally happening june twenty fifth. and of course the weekend longongread suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Think you have to build your own search engine scraping infrastructure. Thank again, folks. SRP API can take care of all your search engine scraping needs. It lets AI products access real time web search data programmatically No scraping infrastructure required Their APIs offer structured JSON data from all the top search engines, including Google, Amazon, and YouTube. Top tech companies already use SERP API to power their AI agents, their market intelligence tools, and their automated research workflows See how it can help you and your team. SERP API provides two hundred and fifty free searches per month Go check it out at SRPapPi. com That's SRP SERpapPi d. com More signs that Apple might be returning to the Intel Fld at least in some capacity QotingBC. Intels stock rose ten percent on Thursday after President Donald Trump said the semiconductor company had agreed to a deal with Apple to design and build chips in the US Intel stock has seen significant gains recently after struggling for years having relinquished its dominant market position The stock has surged four hundred and sixty four percent in the past twelve months, with the company hitting a market cap of six hundred eight point seven billion dollars. For years, Intel largely sat out the AI race as it grappled with manufacturing delays and awaited a major customer for its chip fabrication business. But CEO Lip Boutan, who took the helm early last year, has revived Wall Street interest in the struggling chip maker by drawing investments from NVidia and the Trump administration I decided to help Intel because we need to design and build our chips right here in America. Trump said Thursday on trruth Social First, we helped bring in Nvidia and they agreed to build their first level chips with Intel, he added. Next, Elon agreed to build his terrafab, the largest chip factory in the world, designed together with Intel's technology team The TerraFab project is the first major outside commitment for Intel's capital intensive foundry business, which had only manufactured chips for its own products While conflict in the Middle East has disrupted supply chains and seen oil prices skyrocket, the AI boom has so far insulated stocks, especially those tied to infrastructure around the technology NSDAq's Philadelphia semiconductor sector indndex comprising the thirty largest US. traded chip companies is up ninety percent so far this year, and quote. Filings reveal that WayMo has pulled its robot taxis from highways after finding more than thirteen instances of Wayo cars driving into highway sections under construction oting Techrch. Six of these happened in Phoenix, Arizona in April and seven occurred in San Francisco, California in May WMo pulled its roba taxis from all highways on may nineteenth, and a fix for the problem is currently under development, according to filings with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The company is not pulling vehicles off the road and is still operating on surface streets, though it has periodically paused service during severe weather that could lead to flooding We identified an area of improvement regarding performance around freeway construction zones, Wimo said in a statement to Tech Crunch, We voluntarily restricted freeway operations last month while making improvements proactively notified state and federal regulators and decided to file a voluntary software recall NHTSA This is the sixth recall Wayo has issued for its Rbot taxis. In May, the company recalled its Rbot taxis after they drove into flooded roads and in December, it issued one to address its vehicle's illegal behavior around school buses. Wimo has previously issued recalls to fix low speed collisions with chains and gates and telephone poles and one to solve a problem regarding tow to trucks The company's driving software is currently under investigation by the NHTSA and National Transportation Safety Board regarding its behavior around school buses after one of its robot taxis struck a child near a school in January Alphabet owned Wimo says its vehicles have driven more than one hundred seventy million miles autonomously and claims they have demonstrated a thirteen X reduction in serious injury or worse crashes when compared to human drivers. The Robot taxi company is in the middle of a massive expansion planning to launch in more than twenty cities this year alone, including in London and Tokyo. The expansion has helped highlight a number of edge cases that WMo's Robotaxi software has struggled with which now includes highway construction zones Weayo, which started offering highway rides in november twenty twenty five, told the NHTSA that its robotaxis did not recognize and drove past ramp closure signs into pre plananned freeway construction zones in mid April in Phoenix. After a review, the company's Field safety Committee restricted freeway operations in the city while WeayMo worked on a fix, the NHTSA documents show On may eighteenth, seven Waymo Robot taxis drove into highway lanes under active construction in the San Francisco Bay Area because the company software was prioritizing the avoidance of other freeway hazards and or failing to recognize the construction zone The company suspended off freeway driving the following day Wayo's saafety Board decided to issue the recall on june eighth Footage of some of these incidents was shared on social media on may nineteenth, ex user at Elliot Slade posted a video where they claimed A WMo blasted through cones and said it was chased by police. There were construction signs, Slade told CBS News last month. There were lights going on, police in the distance and it sped up. That's when I looked at my fiancee. We're done. This is it. We're dead. We're going to die right here in the wayo Wayo offered Slade, quote, three free rides up to forty dollars each in the future, according to CBS, end quote t long last, it appears to finally be happening, quoting Kataku Grand Theft Auto sixix is launching on november nineteenth. Some of you might roll your eyes at the seeming certainty of that statement, and understandably so. Rockstar and Take two have delayed the game a few times now, but this time, I'm feeling very confident that GTA six is actually for real, seriously launching as planned. Why? Because Rockstar has made all their social media accounts Pink On Thursday, Rockstar Games announced that preorders for GTA six would go live on june twenty fifth. Alongside that news came the reveal of the game's official cover art. It looks rad and has some serious GTA Vice City on PS two vibes And as all of this was happening, Rockstar Games went around and changed all of the profile picks and banners found on the company's veryious social media accounts. before they featured the old classic yellow rockstar logo. Now, however, they all feature purple and pink palm trees with a neon white rockstar logo plastered on top. Why does this matter? Well, it signals to me that the company has officially entered GTA six marketing mode. Historically, and there's not that much to go on because Rockstar's slow release schedule means they haven't put out all that many new games in the social media era. Once the company switches its icons and enters this phase of marketing for a game, it doesn't announce a new delay. You can look back at Rockstar's Facebook page to see that once the company swapped its icon for a Red Dead Redemption two theme logo on May of twenty eighteen, a few months after announcing a delay, the game stuck to its october twenty eighteen launch date Essentially, once Rockstar and Take two start showing off the cover, taking people's money and swapping social media icons and banners, you can be pretty damn sure that everyone involved is confident that the game is coming out as planned, barring some catastrophic event So as long as the world doesn't end between now and November, GTA six will launch as planned on november nineteenth on PS five and Xbox, end quote A again, if the current state of the art in AI proves to be sufficient to run our agentic future Then what happed six months from now when open weight open source AI models are equivalent to today's state of the art? Win is good enough, good enough for a lot of people not to need to pay the major model players Apparently a model called GLM five point two is getting a lot of attention in AI circles because it is now the leading open weights model on artificial analyses intntelligence indndex scoring fifty one In comparison, Fabable five scored sixty. Ous four point eight scored fifty six and GPT five point five scored fifty five quoting I implicicator.. Artificial analysis this week named ZAI's GLM five point two the leading open source open weight model on its intelligence index, the independent benchmarking firm said in a post on june sixteenth The model scored fifty one on the V four point one index of eleven points from GLM five point one and ships under an MIT license with a one million token context window. Independent reviewers who ran it over the past week reported that it matched or beat Anthropics Ous four point eight on several build tasks at a fraction of the cost Nate Herk, who runs the AI automation channel on YouTube switched Caud code over to GLM five point two and ran it for a day. He clocked a one shot website build at three minutes, fifty nine seconds against fourteen minutes, fifty nine seconds for Opus four point eight on the same prompt and said the GLM run used fewer tokens. Herk routed claud code to the model by setetting anthropic basase URL to ZAI in his settings. local. jSON, a swap he described to viewers as switching out the engine of a car. He ran it on a sixty dollars a month ZAI plan The model did not match Opus everywhere on one head to head hk head, open eyes, Codex generate a homework task and then grade both outputs and Codex judged Opus the more precise of the two. It cited a duplicate records edge case, the GLM run mist where values such as true versus one, tripped it up. Herk put the share of his work that genuinely needs opus at maybe ten percent to twenty percent and said GLM five point two handled most of the rest Julian Goldi, who tested the model on june fourteenth against Moonshot's Kimi K two seven and Opus four point eight said GLM five point two won four of his five build tests. He gave it the edge on a temple run style Voxel runner, a liquid metal ball simulation, an Apple style landing page and a neon arcade game and handed the fifth and In Solar System orbit map. Kimi K two point seven I can't believe JLM five point two is beating Opus four point eight Goldie told viewers. He noted the model was so new, it had not yet appeared on openen Router The same artificial analysis report recorded a higher token cost though. GLM five point two spends forty three thousand output tokens per intelligence index task Of which thirty seven thousand are reasoning tokens up from twenty six thousand for GLM five point one and above the thirty five thousand Kimi K two point six uses. That works out to about forty six cents per task against roughly five cents for a Deep Sek V four Pro at its maximum setting. Artificial analysis still plac the model on its intelligence versus cost Perito frontier citing the lowest cost per task among models at its intelligence level and quote, When inspiration strikes, you're usually not sitting at your desk ready to take notes. and honestly, some ideas are easier to say out loud than to type into your phone That's where Plaod Noteepin S comes in. 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Whichever you choose, delicious coffee awaits. Find Starbucks Rappuccino drinks wherever you buy your groceries. Time for the weekend long read suggestions. firstirst up in the journal sources detail how Google is using Nvidia's playbook to build out its AI chip business, including providing three point two billion dollars to fund a New York data center renting TPUs to Anthropic Until recently, NVIidia all but had that market to itself, its graphics processing unit or GPU's coveted by tech companies for their power to train and run AI models. as the AI race has morphed over the past year into a contest for computing resources though, challengers have begun to edge in, none of them more formidable than Google You have all these very well capitalized companies who are big believers that this market around compute is going to have tremendous value, said Nazar Khan, co founder and chief exxecutive offfficer of the AI infrastructure company Terra Wolf, which is developing Lake Mariner with Fluidstack, a Google Backs Cloud provider They want to be in the game, they don't want to be left behind. In corrallaling customers for its chips known as Tensor processing units or TPU's, Google has mimicked Nvidia's practice of using financial guarantees to help data centers raise cheaper debt and provide so called circular financing in which some of the money it invests flows back in the form of chip purchases A shake upp in the leadership of its cloud unit has increased the level of urgency. people familiar with the matter said. NVidia has a close partnership with and is a major investor in open AI. Google has a similar relationship with Anthropic as well as its own frontier model Gemini private and in public. Jensen Wong has played down Google's ability to compete with his company, meaningfully. In April appearing on the podcast or Dwarkish Patel's showow, Wang said Nvidia enjoys a wide lead over Google and other makers of custom chips known as ASIx and argued that Anthropic is Google's only significant external customer for the TPU Our market research is far greater than any TPU or ASIC can possibly have, Hang said. I would love to hear them demonstrate the cost advantages of TPU's. It makes no sense in my mind. In its most direct challenge to date, Google recently struck a five billion dollars deal with Blackstone to establish a new cloud services company that would compete with Corewave and Nebius to NvidIia backed clloud providers that exclusively use the Chip Giant's hardware stack They're clearly being more opportunistic and more aggressive about monetizing what they have relative to a few years ago, said Stacy Raskin, a tech analyst at Bernstein But a few years ago the opportunity wasn't there. Today, all we're hearing is that nobody has enough compute end quote. Then a PWC study suggests that AI is rewarding companies that use it enhance human skills while leaving further behind those that use it to merely cut costs Coting Bloomberg Artificial intelligence is pulling the global labor market in two opposite directions, rewarding companies that use AI to enhance human skills while leaving those who use it merely to cut costs for the behind, a new study suggests Rles requiring specific AI skills increased almost eight times faster than the total job market in twenty twenty five, according to a Price Waterhouse Coopper's LLP study. Such roles are also seeing higher wage growth, the PWC twenty twenty six AI jobs Barometer report showed Jobs that can use AI to amplify human skills such as creativity and judgment are rising the fastest with PWC naming radiologists and recruiters as examples Jobs where AI makes the task easier for non experts to perform such as IT service managers and medical secretaries are seeing much slower growth The company seeing the greatest returns on AI are using it to amplify human expertise, accelerate innovation, and create entirely new sources of value, said Joe Atkinson, PWC's global chief AI offfficer. They're pulling further ahead on productivity and growth then companies that focus primarily on automation The report drew on data including over one billion job postings across twenty seven countries and territories, combining labor market, financial and occupational information to track how AI is reshaping work, skills, wages, and productivity, end quote Finally today from the Verge, I didn't know this was a feature in IiOS, but this sounds useful to me, so FYI Introduced in twenty twenty four, Apple's Vvehicle motion cues promiseed to tap into your device's accelerometer and gyroscope to reduce or in my case, even eliminate The motion sickness felt when trying to use an iPhone iPad or MacBook inside a moving vehicle According to Big S science, this type of vehicle motion sickness is caused by the eyes staring at a static display while the inner ear feels the car turning, braking, and accelerating MotionQues solve this by placing dots around the periphery of the display that move in harmony with the motion of the car When the car turns right, the dots sweep across the screen to the left. When the car breaks, the dots slide forward It sounds preposterous, but I'm here to tell you that it actually works Once enabled, I've comfortably read books in the Kindle app on my phone for a few hours out a go and even written thousand word reviews while my wife drove our camper van to the next destination. She uses Apple's vehicle motion cues now too because they've been a game changer for how we balance work with life on the road Vehicle motion ceues can be configured under accessibility settings in OS, iPadOS and MacOS. They can be turn on off for set to appear automatically when vehicle motion is detected I made it easy to quickly toggle the motion cues on and off by double tapping the back of my phone To do the same, head over to accessibility, touch, backtap, and set the double tap gesture to vehicle motion cues on devices supporting IiOS eighteen and above, and quote. No weekend bonus episodes for you this weekend, talk to you on Monday