Technology

➚ MOVE FAST: Altman. The OpenAI CEO seems like he is everywhere these days, including in Reddit’s IPO. He owns less than 8% of outstanding stock, which about tripled in value after the platform’s market debut. We’ll see whether that lasts; the shares fell today before regaining some value and he can’t sell his stock for six months.

➘ BREAK THINGS: Apple. On top of the Justice Department’s antitrust lawsuit, the iPhone maker is struggling to make AI inroads on its own. The latest sign is its talks with Baidu to provide AI models in China. That may help with local regulators but Apple is also looking to partner with Google for a similar setup.

Whiskey making has made a comeback in recent years as a sort of hipster passion, spawning a wave of independent distilleries all over the U.S. Is AI about to turn the industry into a software endeavor?

Diageo, the company behind brands like Johnnie Walker and Guinness, is using AI to hone in on that familiar smokey whiskey flavor. The company calls it “sequencing the genes of liquor.”

It’s using a newly reopened distillery on the Scottish Isle of Islay as a lab to test out new algorithms such as “SmokeDNAi” that can express flavors,, such as smokiness visually. The idea is that, in the long run, it can add precision to the distilling process and even cut down on cost.

“By understanding flavor profiles and key chemical composition at various stages of the distilling maturation process, [we’re] able to identify optimal release dates vs. waiting another 10 or 20 years based on historical patterns and manual testing,” said Ewan Morgan, head of whiskey outreach at Diageo. Sometimes Artificial Flavor is literal.

DOJ lawsuit aims to take a bite out of Apple’s prices

THE NEWS

Among the flurry of U.S. antitrust pressures on big technology companies, the Department of Justice’s long-awaited lawsuit against Apple is one of the few that highlights the financial costs to consumers.

“Consumers should not have to pay higher prices because companies break the law,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said Thursday.

Apple charges up to about $1,600 for an iPhone, around $400 more than the average weekly earnings for a U.S. worker. Other government lawsuits against Google and Facebook have targeted services or platforms that are free for users.

“This lawsuit threatens who we are and the principles that set Apple products apart in fiercely competitive markets,” Apple said.

REED’S VIEW

When I started covering Apple for The Washington Post in 2019, a different antitrust case revealed to me that the inner workings of the iPhone maker were much different than its public image.

One of the first stories I covered then was Apple’s lawsuit against Qualcomm, which was accused of having a wireless modem monopoly and overcharging companies for the device. Apple paid Qualcomm about $7 per phone.

The opening arguments in that trial were riveting. Apple’s slide presentation included a photo of Radar O’Reilly, the comic relief radio operator from M.A.S.H. That was Qualcomm, Apple’s lawyers argued, the company that simply operated the radio on Apple’s otherwise sophisticated device.

Then it was Qualcomm’s lawyers’ turn. They revealed bombshell documents that had not been publicly seen before; Apple’s lawyers had accidentally sent them to Qualcomm.

The documents showed that Apple’s lawsuit was years in the making, part of a masterful plan to target Qualcomm and thus reduce their $7 per iPhone fee. Apple’s executives openly discussed how Qualcomm’s technology was the best in the business and impossible to replicate.

Apple had tried to replace some of Qualcomm modems with a different model made by Intel. But Qualcomm chips were so much faster that Apple had to secretly throttle them so that all of its phones would operate at the same level.

Qualcomm didn’t even get to finish its opening arguments. Apple backed down and settled with the company.

Those documents were my first peek behind the Cupertino curtain and they were telling. Every company has its marketing spin, but the gulf between how Apple presents itself to consumers and how it operates internally was wider than I had imagined.

Far from Radar O’Reilly, the Qualcomm modems were actually essential and incredibly sophisticated. Apple had opened an office in San Diego and lured away many of Qualcomm’s experienced engineers in hopes of building its own modem. Later, it acquired Intel’s modem division for $1 billion. It’s been a 10-year effort and Apple still hasn’t built its modem.

But Apple was willing to embark on a multi-year plan to destroy Qualcomm, the company that pioneered the wireless technology that enabled the iPhone’s existence, to shave a few dollars off the cost of the Apple devices.

The approximate paper value of former President Donald Trump’s stake in social media firm Truth Social, which is set to go public next week. Shareholders of blank-check company Digital World Acquisition Corp. approved a merger with the former president’s platform, paving the way for the market debut. The company will trade under the ticker DJT, Trump’s initials.

Representatives from dozens of countries met this week to discuss how AI should be integrated into military tasks without causing undue harm, just over a year after the U.S. launched its declaration on responsible military artificial intelligence.

“All of us in the room have really now understood the path forward to getting something concrete and productive” in turning the declaration’s guidelines into practice, a senior State Department official told Semafor after the closed-door conference.

At this stage, the conference was largely about putting ideas on the table and getting the more than 50 signatories — a diverse bunch including NATO countries, Ukraine, Bahrain, and three African countries — on the same page.

Discussions were held on topics such as building a shared repository of how military AI is regulated across the countries, how to use AI to protect civilians and improve the enforcement of international humanitarian law, and sharing the steps countries had taken to ensure that AI is integrated responsibly into military tasks, the official said.

The signatories have formed three working groups to flesh out how to move the initiative forward, with Austria chairing a group on oversight, Canada and Portugal leading an accountability group, and the U.S. and Bahrain co-charing an assurance group seeking to discuss how to integrate the group’s framework into military AI systems.

While the forum remains open to new members, China has not signed on. The official said they “hope” U.S.-China talks on AI will take place this spring. Military uses of AI, though, may not be on the agenda: “If there’s an interest, we would love to discuss it,” the State official said. “But we’re not going to force it down their throats.”

— Mathias Hammer

The BBC is considering building and training its own AI model, the Financial Times reported. That would be an unusual and potentially expensive move by a major news organization, with most instead looking at licensing its content to other companies, and getting into legal battles over the issue. The BBC is looking at building a large language model based on its archives, for which it’s also exploring selling access.

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