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A photo illustration of a smartphone displaying the NVIDIA Corporation stock price on the NASDAQ market, with an NVIDIA chip visible in the background.
A chip bottleneck
Margrethe Vestager, the European Union’s competition chief, has warned of a “huge bottleneck” involving Nvidia. The US semiconductor company plays a pivotal role in designing chips necessary for training and running artificial intelligence models and applications — good for 80% of the market. In recent months, Nvidia has become a $3.1 trillion company — now the third-most-valuable firm in the world behind only Microsoft and Apple.
It’s too much of a good thing: NVIDIA’s chips are so in demand that it can’t make enough for AI firms looking to train bigger and better models. EU regulators are starting to wonder whether that bottleneck raises concerns over fair competitive markets.
In Singapore, Vestager told Bloomberg that the EU’s watchdogs are asking preliminary questions of Nvidia but haven’t made up their mind about any further regulatory steps. Vestager said a robust secondary market could relieve competitive concerns, implying that as long as Nvidia respects smaller firms it should stay in antitrust regulators’ good graces. Meanwhile, AMD and Intel are looking to close the gap with Nvidia, something that intense regulatory scrutiny on the market leader might aid.
Nvidia logo in Taipei, Taiwan.
Hard Numbers: Nvidia soars, Salesforce’s UK investment, step up for your eye exam, More millionaires (more problems?), Apple’s rebound
4 billion: Salesforce is investing $4 billion in the United Kingdom and opening a 40,000-square-foot AI-focused office in London on June 18. The US-based software company said it’ll also run training and upskilling programs for professionals looking to gain AI-related skills.
6 million: Want a 90-second eye exam without interacting with a human? The startup Eyebot raised $6 million for AI-enabled kiosks that’ll do just that. The kiosks perform an eye exam, evaluate prescription lenses or contacts, and any recommended prescriptions are sent to a doctor for final review and approval. The company hopes that this telehealth initiative can be an affordable way for people to get their vision checked, especially those without easy access to professionals.
600,000: There are now 600,000 millionaires in the US, thanks to the AI boom. Atop an AI-fueled stock market boom, America’s number of millionaires jumped more than 7% year over year in 2023. Asia gained about 5% more millionaires while Europe saw a 4% increase.
471 billion: Apple’s stock has rallied since early April, gaining 20% — or $471 billion — in value on the back of investor anticipation of AI rollouts on its devices. The company kicked off its Worldwide Developers Conference on June 10, announcing Apple Intelligence, an AI upgrade to its iPhones that will prioritize certain messages and notifications, offer new writing tools, and boost Siri’s capability as a voice-powered assistant.Malawi's Vice President Saulos Klaus Chilima arrives at a polling station in Lilongwe, Malawi May 21, 2019 in this still image obtained from REUTERS TV video.
Hard Numbers: Malawi VP’s dead in plane crash, Swiss-hosted Ukraine peace summit, Gaza pier aid paused, Nvidia stock split, Snow in Alabama
10: Malawi’s Vice President Saulos Chilima was one of 10 people killed in a military plane crash after taking off from the capital Lilongwe early Monday. The official search investigation launched after Chilima’s plane “went off the radar” was concluded on Tuesday after the rescue team found the wreck in a mountainous area with no survivors.
90: Next weekend, representatives from 90 countries will travel to Switzerland to participate in a peace summit to develop a path for sustainable peace in Ukraine. Russia said it would not be in attendance (not that it was invited), but thousands of military personnel will be on hand to provide security.
2: The UN’s World Food Program halted aid distribution from the US-built pier off Gaza on Sunday, the day after two of its warehouses were reportedly hit in an Israeli military attack to rescue four Israeli hostages – a mission that also claimed more than 200 Palestinian lives. The pier had just reopened after severe water and winds rendered it nonoperational, and the latest pause will only heighten concerns about the worsening famine in the region.
120: Before markets closed on Friday, AI leading chipmaker Nvidia’s stock was selling at about $1,150, but as of Monday, the stock was split tenfold. This essentially divided each share into 10 $120 shares to make it more affordable for investors without diluting the value of existing shares.
450,000: Over 50 pounds of cocaine worth an estimated $450,000 recently washed ashore on Dauphin Island, south of Mobile, Ala. The discovery was made just a day after divers found a similar amount of drugs off the coast of Florida, and a month after $1.2 million worth of cocaine washed up on the same Alabama beach.
AMD chairman and CEO Lisa Su delivers the first AI keynote speech in Computex in Taipei on June 3, 2024.
AMD’s big plans
AMD has big plans to challenge Nvidia’s dominance in the AI chip market. At a trade show in Taipei on June 3, AMD unveiled its MI325X accelerator chip, which will be available by the fourth quarter of the year. It also stated plans to launch two additional chips, one in 2025 and one in 2026.
Nvidia dominates the chip market with about 70% market share, but AMD along with Intel and other chipmakers, want to make a dent in their rival’s sales. Meanwhile, reports suggest that Meta and Google are building their own chips while OpenAI chief Sam Altman is trying to raise money for a chip venture of his own.Google's Gemini home page displayed on a smartphone in a photo illustration.
Hard Numbers: Pay for Google?, Indonesian investment, Amazon walks out on AI, Scraping YouTube
175 billion: Google said it made $175 billion in revenue from its search engine and related advertising last year, but is it ready to risk the golden goose? The company is reportedly considering charging for premium features on its search engine, including AI-assisted search (its traditional search engine would remain free). We’ve previously tested Perplexity, one of the companies trying to uproot Google’s search dominance with artificial intelligence, and you can read our review here.
200 million: The chipmaker Nvidia is teaming up with Indonesian telecom company Indosat to build a $200 million data center for artificial intelligence in the city of Surakarta, according to Indonesia’s communications minister. This news comes weeks after AI played a central role in the country’s presidential election, and it represents a major investment from one of the world’s richest tech companies in a key emerging market as Indonesia seeks to modernize its economy.
1,000: Amazon’s Just Walk Out in-store AI system for cashier-less grocery store checkout relied heavily on more than 1,000 contractors in India manually checking that the checkout transactions were accurate. Now, Amazon has announced it’s ditching the technology, which was being used in 60 Amazon-branded grocery stores and two Whole Foods stores.
1 million: One OpenAI team reportedly transcribed more than 1 million hours of YouTube videos to train its GPT-4 large language model. The company built a speech recognition tool called Whisper to handle the massive load, a move that may have violated YouTube's terms of use. YouTube parent company Google is a major rival to OpenAI in developing generative AI. Google hasn’t filed suit yet, but legal action could eventually come.A visitor plays a video game with virtual reality glasses at the Mobile Word Congress The Mobile World Congress has closed after four days of activity with a figure of 101,000 visitors according to the Director of Fira de Barcelona Constantí Serrallonga.
Hard Numbers: Game devs have qualms, Pulitzer-winning AI, Klarna it, Super Micro growth, NVIDIA chip disappoints
79: In a survey of more than 3,000 video game developers, 79% had ethical concerns about the use of generative AI in their work. Among the ethical concerns were that the technology could lead to layoffs in the video game sector as well as that it could “supercharge copyright infringement.”
5: Out of the 45 works named as finalists for this year’s Pulitzer Prizes, five were made in part with AI. This is the first year that the awards committee asked nominators to clarify whether or not AI was used in the production of their submissions, and it comes as the journalism world is grappling with what its relationship with AI should be. It’s not yet clear how the finalists used AI and if they’ll actually be named winners later this spring.
700: The buy-now, pay-later company Klarna recently boasted that its AI system can do the jobs of 700 employees. That’s raising eyebrows because it’s around the same number of people the company laid off in October 2022, though Klarna denied the insinuation that AI directly replaced those recently given the boot.
1,000: We’ve written a lot about how the AI chipmaker NVIDIA is having a massive year of stock growth, but another firm in the supply chain is doing even better. The company, Super Micro Computer, or SMC, makes servers popular with artificial intelligence companies, and officially joined the S&P 500 yesterday after a year in which its stock jumped about 1,000%.
2.18: While Nvidia is bullish on its ability to keep growing, investors may be curbing their once-unbridled expectations. Yesterday, the chipmaker unveiled its powerful Blackwell series of processors at its "AI Woodstock" event. In response, the company's stock fell 2.18% in premarket trading today – whether this reflects tempered attitudes about NVIDIA's unilateral success in the AI-grade chip market or the AI industry as a whole is uncertain.Amrapali Gan, CEO at OnlyFans, addresses the audience during the second day of the Web Summit 2022 in Lisbon.
Hard Numbers: OnlyAI, Raw deal for media companies, AGI approaches, Less work and more money
10: OnlyFans CEO Amrapali Gan said in an interview that verified creators on the platform need to provide 10 different pieces of personal information in the US — nine everywhere else — including government ID, which she claims will help prevent the site from being overrun by AI porn bots. She admitted that sex workers may use AI tools on the platform but emphasized that their work can't be “wholly AI.”
2,500: Media outlets Raw Story, Alternet, and The Intercept sued OpenAI last week for copyright infringement, following the leads of the New York Times and others. The companies are seeking $2,500 per violation — that would add up quickly — in addition to the removal of the violating material. “Big Tech has decimated journalism,” Raw Story founder John Byrne said. “It’s time that publishers take a stand.”
5: AI-focused chip maker Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang, says we’re just five years away from artificial general intelligence, where AI systems can outperform humans in most cognitive tests.
90: JPMorgan Chase claims its new AI-powered cashflow management tool was able to help clients cut back on manual labor by 90% and made it easier to “analyze and forecast cashflows.” The tool is currently free, though the company is considering charging in the future.Hard Numbers: NVIDIA rising, the magician’s assistant, indefensible budget lags, Make PDFs sexy again
3: NVIDIA is now the third-most valuable company in the U.S. after reporting rosy financial returns. The AI-focused chipmaker’s market capitalization is now $1.812 trillion, surpassing Google parent company Alphabet, and trailing only Microsoft and Apple. How things change: just one year ago, NVIDIA’s market cap was a paltry $580 billion.
1: A New Orleans magician says he was paid $150 by a Democratic operative supporting presidential longshot Dean Philipps to create the fake Joe Biden robocall sent to New Hampshire voters in January. Creating the fake audio took him 20 minutes and cost $1, the magician said. The incident sparked national outrage, including an investigation by the New Hampshire attorney general and the Federal Communications Commission banning unsolicited AI-generated robocalls.
1.8 billion: The U.S. Department of Defense is seeking $1.8 billion in the federal budget solely for AI. But with congressional budget talks still ongoing, Craig Martell, the Pentagon’s chief digital and AI officer, said his office needs to make tough decisions about what projects to prioritize. AI-related defense projects range from the simple—such as making administrative tasks more efficient—to the complex, like building new advanced weapons systems.
400 billion: Adobe has lots of cutting-edge products: Photoshop, Premiere, After Effects; but there’s nothing sexy about PDFs. On paid versions of Acrobat and Reader, which people use to view 400 billion PDFs each year, an AI chatbot will soon summarize and search your document. Adobe wants users to have a “conversation” with their PDFs—summaries sound nice, but does anyone want a full dialogue?