Microsoft’s OpenAI partnership was born out of Google AI envy

Emails from the Justice Department’s antitrust case against Google revealed how Microsoft executives were alarmed and even envious of Google’s leadership in AI.

In an email thread, CTO Kevin Scott wrote that he was “very, very worried” about Google’s rapidly growing AI capabilities. He said he initially dismissed the company’s “gaming stunts,” possibly referring to Google’s AlphaGo models. The emails mention Gmail’s autocomplete features, which the developers called “scary good.” Microsoft struggled to copy Google’s BERT-large, an AI model that deciphers the meaning and context of words in a sentence. It took the company six hours to reproduce the model, while Google moved forward with more complex, larger models.

Scott said Microsoft has “very smart” people on its machine learning teams, but their ambitions have been limited and that their company is “many years behind the competition in terms of machine learning scale.” All of this led to billions of dollars flowing into OpenAI in 2019. Since then, $13 billion has been invested.

— Matt Smith

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What connects you to a B2B marketer in West Virginia? Four letters.

LinkedIn, the career-oriented social network, is getting into gaming. But those heartfelt word-based games your mom would let you play when you were a kid. LinkedIn describes them as “thinking games,” though the format will likely look familiar to fans of The New York Times Games app. You can play each game only once per day and you can share your score with friends. And just maybe… start a conversation about how you can help each other with targeted SaaS projects. Yes, I have feelings about who hits me on LinkedIn.

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It appears to direct users to “avoid in-app service charges.”

TikTok allegedly violates Apple’s App Store rules, with the app allowing (even recommending) certain users to buy its coins directly from its website. TikTok has apparently given some iOS users the “Try reloading on tiktok.com to avoid in-app service fees” option — namely Apple’s 30 percent commission on purchases that more likely than not, yes be transferred to these users. It is definitely not available for all users and seems to be there for TikTok users who have previously bought a large number of Coins – TikTok if you please.

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Someone extracted the APK and put it on an Android phone.

Rabbit R1, a pocket-sized AI virtual assistant device, runs Android under the hood. Now, early users have been able to try the R1 APK, install it on an Android phone and get it working – if not with all the features. If that’s the case, what’s the point of a $200 gadget?

In a statement sent to Android Authority, Rabbit CEO Jesse Liu said Rabbit R1 “is not an Android app.” He added that R1 runs on a lot of custom AOSP (Android Open Source Project) builds and lower-level firmware mods, so a local bootleg APK won’t be able to access most R1 services. We’re wrapping up our own in-depth review — stay tuned.

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