Breaking up Google is now a bipartisan view
Breaking up Google is now a bipartisan view
Welcome to Cautious Optimism, a newsletter on tech, business, and power. Modestly upbeat. A reminder that my next child arrives early next week, so there will be a rapid deceleration in CO’s production until everyone is home and safe. Then I intend to write to keep my mental balance as we sort out having two kids under two instead of just one. Hugs, love, and I won’t be gone for long. — Alex
📈 Trending Up: Helping developers code … no, really … Circle competitors … Zepto … MongoDB, Dell after earnings …
📉 Trending Down: Email … inflation in Europe … unemployment in Europe … inflation in the United States …
🧠 OpenAI, open AI: News that Runway pulled its models from HuggingFace — the open-source hub for AI models online — made waves this morning, but smaller ripples than news that OpenAI has seen its active user base double.
Axios reports that “ChatGPT now has more than 200 million weekly active users — twice as many as it had last November.”
That helps explain OpenAI’s rumored, impending valuation boost to $100 billion. That deal could include Apple, which means that OpenAI is collecting mega-cap tech backers like Infinity Stones (I saw that movie!).
But open-source AI is putting up points as well. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote on his Twitter competitor that his company’s Llama family of AI models is “growing even faster than I expected” with “almost 350M downloads (>20M in the last month!) and a 10x jump in monthly usage since the start of the year.”
What I find astounding today is how much AI the market can support. Or seem to support. OpenAI is seeing massive demand for its products; Meta is seeing big demand for its products. And startups like Codeium and Magic are raising nine-figure rounds simultaneously as GitHub Copilot, Amazon Q, and Gemini Code Assist also exist and do numbers.
So much for an AI slump, even if expectations for near-term productivity gains from genAI tools and services have tempered some in the last few months.
Breaking Up Google
Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance told the FT that Google should be broken up. He’s not alone in thinking that the search, advertising, mobile operating system, hardware, cloud and AI company is too big for its own good; the Department of Justice recently ruled that Google is a “monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly.”
Here’s the FT:
If former President Trump was to win a second term, companies like Google that might have hoped for a more lenient regulatory regime might not get as much of a reprieve from government intrusion than they hoped.
We should not be surprised here. Vance previously praised Silicon Valley bugbear Lina Khan, whose tenure atop the Federal Trade Commission has seen more aggressive antitrust work than many in tech circles are comfortable with. (Not to be inflammatory, but given the age of his running mate, the chance that Vance could wind up in the Oval Office is non-zero, and thus must be considered.)
It is possible to favor breaking up the largest tech companies and consider onself pro-startup. It’s my loosely held position, at least. But it’s not a view that I’ve heard from too many investors in recent months. The opposite, in fact.
The argument is pretty simple to grok: