Week in Review: Google loses a major antitrust case
Welcome back to Week in Review! We’ve got tons of stuff for you this week: antitrust lawsuits against Google and Meta; Grok can now remember; Bolt CEO Ryan Breslow wants to make his mark; and much, much more. Have a great weekend!
It’s over: Google violated antitrust laws in the ad tech market, a judge ruled, ending a two-year battle after eight states filed complaints against the Big Tech giant. Remedies could include forcing Google to break up its advertising business, like selling Google Ad Manager. “We won half of this case, and we will appeal the other half,” said Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google’s vice president of regulatory affairs.
Gone surfing: OpenAI is reportedly in talks to buy Windsurf, formerly Codeium, which makes a popular coding assistant. Before the news broke, OpenAI approached Anysphere, which makes Cursor, another coding assistant. These talks signal how important capturing a slice of the code-generation market has become for the ChatGPT maker.
A tweet started it all: Theseus, a defense tech company, tweeted that it had built a cheap drone at a hackathon with tech that had clear potential to combat rampant GPS jamming of drones. The tweet went viral, and the company soon found itself in Y Combinator’s 2024 cohort with $4.3 million in seed funding. The U.S. Special Forces has also entered into an agreement for early testing and development.
News
Meta on the stand: The government’s antitrust suit against Meta started with a bang this week. Among the testimony, a few things stood out: Mark Zuckerberg once proposed the strategy of “wiping everyone’s graphs and having them start again” to try and make Facebook culturally relevant again. And around the time that Meta noticed TikTok affecting its growth, it stopped reporting Facebook’s user numbers in its quarterly reports.
New trend in town: People are using ChatGPT to figure out the location shown in pictures. These image-analyzing capabilities, paired with the models’ ability to search the web, make for a potent location-finding tool. Great, just what we wanted.
Grok catches up: Grok now has a “memory” feature that lets the bot remember details from past conversations with a user, and it’s available in beta on Grok.com and in the Grok iOS and Android apps in the U.S. It should be noted that ChatGPT and Gemini both already have this feature.
Climate for the win: Big Tech companies are in a race to see who can eliminate carbon pollution first. This week Apple announced that it’s halfway there: Since 2015, the company says it has reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by around 60%.
Back at it: After retaking the helm at Bolt, CEO Ryan Breslow announced this week a “one-click crypto and everyday payments” solution all in one “super app” that he hopes will formally mark his return as the company’s leader.
Oh? Nvidia said this week that it was informed by the U.S. government that it will need a license to export its H20 AI chips to China. Earlier in the week it flagged that it will spend hundreds of millions of dollars to start producing some of those chips in the U.S., but it was light on details.
Call me “Dev Mode” now: Figma sent a cease-and-desist to popular no-code AI agent Lovable so it would stop using the term “Dev Mode” for a new product feature. Figma also has a product called Dev Mode, which it trademarked last year. Isn’t there enough Dev Mode to go around?
Where in the world? Rippling filed a lawsuit against rival Deel alleging that Deel paid one of its employees to spy on Rippling. Rippling was trying to serve Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz with papers but couldn’t find him. Now it’s even more complicated: Bouaziz and his lawyers are in Dubai, which has a reputation for being a safe haven for those wanting to avoid extradition.
More AI with your AI: Notion this week released Notion Mail, an AI-powered email client that hooks up with your Gmail to help organize emails, draft responses, schedule meetings, and search across messages.
Lucid Gravity first drive: “The Lucid Gravity may just be over-engineering at its best,” writes Abigail Bassett, who took a spin in the electric SUV. It’s poised to take market share from the likes of other luxury EV and internal combustion SUVs like the Rivian R1S, Cadillac Escalade IQ, BMW X7, and Audi Q8.
Before you go …
Ah, nature: Need something relaxing to do this weekend? Check out the Great Moose Migration livestream, which offers 24 hours of tranquil scenes of forests and rivers. And if you’re lucky, you just might glimpse a passing moose. What could be better than that?
Karyne Levy is the deputy managing editor of TechCrunch. Before joining TC, Karyne was deputy managing editor at Protocol, helping manage a newsroom of more than 40 people. Prior to that she was a senior producer at Scribd, an assigning editor at NerdWallet, a senior tech editor at Business Insider, and assistant managing editor at CNET, where she also hosted Rumor Has It for CNET TV. She lives outside San Francisco.
