Today's Hallucination HQGoogle Decides $80 Billion Is a Perfectly Reasonable Petty Cash AmountAlphabet has announced plans to raise $80 billion in equity capital — yes, billion with a B, eight of them — to expand its AI infrastructure and compute capacity. To put that in perspective, that's roughly the GDP of Bulgaria, earmarked entirely for bigger computers. The raise signals that the AI arms race has moved well past "expensive hobby" territory and into the sort of numbers that require a fresh font size on the spreadsheet. Source: Alphabet Investor Relations
Anthropic Files to Go Public, Presumably to Afford More Safety Research on Its Very Safe AIAnthropic has officially filed with the SEC to begin its IPO process, beating OpenAI to what may be the most watched stock market debut since everyone had an opinion about Facebook. The company, last valued in the hundreds of billions, has built its entire brand on being the responsible AI lab — which is a genuinely interesting pitch to open with when asking strangers for money. Source: The Verge
Man Writes With a Pen Six Years After Paralysis. China Calls This Tuesday.China has approved the world's first state-sanctioned invasive brain-computer interface chip, following the case of Dong Hui — a 39-year-old paralysed by a spinal cord injury — who used the implant to write by hand again. The technology, developed by Chinese researchers and now given regulatory clearance, puts China in direct competition with Neuralink for the deeply strange prize of who gets to put chips in people's heads first. The implications for medicine are enormous. The implications for privacy are left as an exercise for the reader. Source: MIT Technology Review
Nvidia Enters the Laptop Chip Market, Apologises in Advance for the Price TagNvidia has announced RTX Spark, a new Arm-based chip aimed at Windows laptops — a direct challenge to Apple's M-series dominance in the "fast, efficient, costs more than your sofa" category. The comparison to Apple's M1 moment is flattering and possibly accurate. The caveat, which The Verge buries only slightly, is that these machines are expected to be expensive enough to give pause to anyone accustomed to Windows laptops costing less than a small car. Source: The Verge
DuckDuckGo Thrives by Offering the Radical Option of Just… Not Doing AIDuckDuckGo has launched browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox that make its AI-free search engine a one-click alternative, and traffic is booming. In an era when every tech product is desperately stapling a chatbot to itself, there is apparently a large and growing audience for search results that simply answer the question without first hallucinating three paragraphs of confident nonsense. Remarkable, really, that "works like the internet used to" has become a competitive differentiator. Source: TechCrunch
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