last highlighted date: 2023-12-06
Highlights
- Google agreed to pay Canadian news corporations 15-20bn a year to be a default that everyone would choose anyway, who cares about $75m for a little light blackmail? LINK
- Note: Google
- Incumbents always try to react to the new thing by making it a feature, or buying it. Adobe has been doing both, moving Photoshop first to subscription and now to the web on one hand and buying Figma on the other (see also adding generative fill to Photoshop and launching Firefly). But the Figma deal was always a very obvious target for competition regulators: the dominant company in an existing market buys the dominant company implementing the model that would overturn its position? This is much easier and less speculative than cases like Within or Giphy. So now Adobe is bargaining with both the EU and the UK, while in the USA the DoJ has been looking at this all year. EU, UK
- Google’s Deepmind has a paper proposing a federated, decentralised model for training LLMs. This could address the infrastructure challenges of putting an enormous amount of compute in one place, but it also suggests questions about centralised control in the future, rather like the growth of open source. LINK