“You see? Another ad. We were just talking about this yesterday! How can you be so sure they’re not listening to us?” – My wife, at least once a week.

Internet advertising has gotten so good, it’s spooky. We worry about how much “they” know about us, but in exchange, we got something future generations may not: free content and services, and a mostly open Internet. It is unprecedented Faustian bargain, one that is now collapsing.

At the epicenter of the modern Internet sits Google. Forget the East India Company, Google, with an absurd +$100B in net income, is arguably the most successful business in history. By commanding nearly 70% of the global browser market and 89% of the search engine market, they dominated Internet through sheer reach. How did this happen? A delicate balance of incentives where every player on the Internet got exactly what they wanted. — Read More

Mark Zuckerberg said Monday that he’s creating Meta Superintelligence Labs, which will be led by some of his company’s most recent hires, including Scale AI ex-CEO Alexandr Wang and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman.

Zuckerberg said the new AI superintelligence unit, MSL, will house the company’s various teams working on foundation models such as the open-source Llama software, products and Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Research projects, according to an internal memo obtained by CNBC. — Read More

The leader of Meta’s Superintelligence lab, Alexandr Wang, 28, is one of the priciest hires anywhere.

Meta has made offers to dozens of researchers at OpenAI. The startup has responded to Zuckerberg’s blitz with impressive packages of its own.

Not everyone on Meta’s list gets $100 million, though they’re still fetching astronomical sums. — Read More

This is how I opened January 2023’s AI and the Big Five:

The story of 2022 was the emergence of AI, first with image generation models, including DALL-E, MidJourney, and the open source Stable Diffusion, and then ChatGPT, the first text-generation model to break through in a major way. It seems clear to me that this is a new epoch in technology.

Sometimes the accuracy of a statement is measured by its banality, and that certainly seems to be the case here: AI is the new epoch, consuming the mindshare of not just Stratechery but also the companies I cover. To that end, two-and-a-half years on, I thought it would be useful to revisit that 2023 analysis and re-evaluate the state of AI’s biggest players, primarily through the lens of the Big Five: Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon.

The proximate cause for this reevaluation is the apparent five alarm fire that is happening at Meta: the company’s latest Llama 4 release was disappointing — and in at least one case, deceptive — pushing founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg to go on a major spending spree for talent.  — Read More

Questions deserve answers, ideas beg for realization, and curiosity seeks satisfaction. Two years ago, we brought this belief forward with Bing Image Creator, helping users everywhere create whatever they can imagine through words—for free. Last month, we continued the next evolution of search with Copilot Search in Bing, blending the best of traditional and generative search to meet you where you are at in your discovery journey.

Today we’re taking the next leap with Bing Video Creator, allowing you to turn your ideas into videos, for free. Powered by Sora, Bing Video Creator transforms your text prompts into short videos. Just describe what you want to see and watch your vision come to life. — Read More

A few years ago, most Google executives didn’t talk about A.G.I. — artificial general intelligence, the industry term for a human-level A.I. system. Even if they thought A.G.I. might be technically possible, the idea seemed so remote that it was barely worth discussing.

But this week, at Google’s annual developer conference, A.G.I. was in the air. The company announced a slate of new releases tied to Google’s Gemini A.I. models, including new features designed to let users write A.I.-generated emails, create A.I.-generated videos and songs, and chat with an A.I. bot on the flagship search engine. Google’s leaders traded guesses about when more powerful systems might arrive. And they predicted profound changes ahead, as A.I. tools become more capable and autonomous.

The man most responsible for making Google “A.G.I.-pilled” — industry shorthand for the way people can become gripped by the notion that A.G.I. is imminent — is Demis Hassabis.

… This week on “Hard Fork,” we interviewed Mr. Hassabis about his views on A.G.I. and the strange futures that might follow its arrival. You can listen to our conversation by clicking the “Play” button below or by following the show on Apple, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. Or, if you prefer to read, you’ll find an edited transcript of our conversation, which begins about 24 minutes into the podcast, below. — Read More

We launched AI Overviews last year at I/O, and since then there’s been a profound shift in how people are using Google Search. People are coming to Google to ask more of their questions, including more complex, longer and multimodal questions.

AI in Search is making it easier to ask Google anything and get a helpful response, with links to the web. That’s why AI Overviews is one of the most successful launches in Search in the past decade. As people use AI Overviews, we see they’re happier with their results, and they search more often. In our biggest markets like the U.S. and India, AI Overviews is driving over 10% increase in usage of Google for the types of queries that show AI Overviews ¹ . This means that once people use AI Overviews, they’re coming to do more of these types of queries, and what’s particularly exciting is how this growth increases over time. And we’re delivering this at the speed people expect of Google Search — AI Overviews delivers the fastest AI responses in the industry.

We’re continuing to advance Search with AI, and today at I/O, we showed the latest in how we’re building the future of Search, as we go beyond information to intelligence. Here’s a look at everything we announced. — Read More

For decades, understanding the clicks, whistles and burst pulses of dolphins has been a scientific frontier. What if we could not only listen to dolphins, but also understand the patterns of their complex communication well enough to generate realistic responses?

Today, on National Dolphin Day, Google, in collaboration with researchers at Georgia Tech and the field research of the Wild Dolphin Project (WDP), is announcing progress on DolphinGemma: a foundational AI model trained to learn the structure of dolphin vocalizations and generate novel dolphin-like sound sequences. This approach in the quest for interspecies communication pushes the boundaries of AI and our potential connection with the marine world. — Read More

Meta’s new flagship AI language model Llama 4 came suddenly over the weekend, with the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Quest VR (among other services and products) revealing not one, not two, but three versions — all upgraded to be more powerful and performant using the popular “Mixture-of-Experts” architecture and a new training method involving fixed hyperparameters, known as MetaP.

But following the surprise announcement and public release of two of those models for download and usage — the lower-parameter Llama 4 Scout and mid-tier Llama 4 Maverick — on Saturday, the response from the AI community on social media has been less than adoring. — Read More

At re:Invent 2024, we announced Amazon Nova models, a new generation of foundation models (FMs), including Amazon Nova Reel, a video generation model that creates short videos from text descriptions and optional reference images (together, the “prompt”).

Today, we introduce Amazon Nova Reel 1.1, which provides quality and latency improvements in 6-second single-shot video generation, compared to Amazon Nova Reel 1.0. This update lets you generate multi-shot videos up to 2-minutes in length with consistent style across shots. You can either provide a single prompt for up to a 2-minute video composed of 6-second shots, or design each shot individually with custom prompts. This gives you new ways to create video content through Amazon Bedrock. — Read More