As a federal antitrust investigation into Google's Chrome browser wraps up, rivals are striking: Perplexity has launched an unsolicited bid to buy Chrome for a whopping 34.5 billion, according to reports. Bloomberg reported the proposed deal, confirmed by a Perplexity representative, as did The Wall Street Journal. But there's a hitch: Perplexity doesn't have 34.5 billion to fund the deal with. In fact, the WSJ estimates its own valuation at just 18 billion. This means Perplexity would have to come up with another source of cash, and it appears that it has done just that.

The feud between Musk and Altman has, over time, encompassed a slew of lawsuits, email dumps and social media digs. Their rivalry can be traced back a decade, with Musk's now public belief that OpenAI, under Altman's leadership, abandoned the principles he and others used to found it in 2015. The firm was created with the intention of building artificial general intelligence (AGI) - AI that can perform any task that a human being is capable of - but by making its technology open-source and promising to "benefit humanity". OpenAI was also set up as a not-for-profit company, meaning it would not aim to make money, but in 2019 it established a for-profit arm which Musk felt was antithetical to its original mission. Musk argued in his March 2024 lawsuit that the firm had instead been focusing on "maximising profits" for its major investor Microsoft.

Gone are the days when the web was dominated by humans posting social media updates or exchanging memes. Earlier this year, for the first time since the data has been tracked, web-browsing bots, rather than humans, accounted for the bulk of web traffic. Well over half of that bot traffic is from malicious bots, hoovering up personal data left unprotected online, for instance. But an increasing proportion comes from bots sent out by artificial intelligence companies to gather data for their models or respond to user prompts. Indeed, ChatGPT-User, a bot powering OpenAI's ChatGPT, is now responsible for 6 per cent of all web traffic, while ClaudeBot, an automated system developed by AI company Anthropic, accounts for 13 per cent.

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. In our eighth grade classroom, her name was Hanna. On AOL Instant Messenger, she was Banana3017. I was in love with both. At school, she was funny, and kind, and she had blue eyes that made my cheeks glow the same fiery color as her hair when she looked at me.

Can social media's problems be solved? The polarising impact of social media isn't just the result of bad algorithms – it is inevitable because of the core components of how the platforms work, a study with AI-generated users has found. It suggests the problem won't be fixed unless we fundamentally reimagine the world of online communication. Petter Törnberg at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands and his colleagues set up 500 AI chatbots designed to mimic a range of political beliefs in the US, based on the American National Election Studies Survey. Those bots, powered by the GPT-4o mini large language model, were then instructed to interact with one another on a simple social network the researchers had designed with no ads or algorithms.

On August 9th, the developer announced on GitHub the official version 1.0 release of Flyoobe, which includes all the great features of Flyby11 but also adds more. If you only want to do what Flyby11 used to do, you can still do that and ignore all the extra stuff on the side. According to the developer, Flyoobe lets you tweak numerous Windows 11 settings, pick and choose which bloatware to keep and exclude, optimize the user interface to your liking, run your own PowerShell scripts that automate some of the setup, and more. The OOBE views in Flyoobe also run on a faster code base for a more responsive experience, and Microsoft Copilot integration has been improved for better overall reliability.

My Spotify playlists are undergoing a British invasion this week. Donald Trump announced this week that two US chipmakers would tithe 15% of their revenue from sales in China to the US government. Paying for the license to sell to Chinese customers represents an unprecedented deal. The chipmakers Nvidia and AMD have agreed to give the US government 15% of their revenue from advanced chips sold to China in return for export licences to the key market. The arrangement will lead to Nvidia giving 15% of its revenue from Chinese sales of its H20 chips, and AMD giving 15% of revenue from Chinese sales of its MI308 chips, according to reports citing US officials.

Rising seniors are the last class of students who remember high school before ChatGPT. But only just barely: OpenAI's chatbot was released months into their freshman year. Ever since then, writing essays hasn't required, well, writing. By the time these students graduate next spring, they will have completed almost four full years of AI high school. Gone already are the days when using AI to write an essay meant copying and pasting its response verbatim.

A US medical journal has warned against using ChatGPT for health information after a man developed a rare condition following an interaction with the chatbot about removing table salt from his diet. An article in the Annals of Internal Medicine reported a case in which a 60-year-old man developed bromism, also known as bromide toxicity, after consulting ChatGPT. The article described bromism as a "well-recognised" syndrome in the early 20th century that was thought to have contributed to almost one in 10 psychiatric admissions at the time. The patient told doctors that after reading about the negative effects of sodium chloride, or table salt, he consulted ChatGPT about eliminating chloride from his diet and started taking sodium bromide over a three-month period. This was despite reading that "chloride can be swapped with bromide, though likely for other purposes, such as cleaning".

While everyone else has been talking about Nvidia's GPUs, Lisa Su has discreetly turned AMD into a chipmaking phenom. Su, the leader of AMD, moves fast these days, though I suspect that's always been the case. Her company's chips underpin the artificial intelligence that's changing the world at breakneck speeds. To hear Su and literally everyone else in semiconductors talk about it, the US is in an AI with China--and the rules keep changing . The Trump administration has once again shifted its stance on what kind of chips can and can't be shipped to China, with the latest decree being that the US will take a 15 percent cut of AMD and Nvidia chip sales to China. Meanwhile, on the home front, Su has claimed that AMD's newest AI chips can outperform Nvidia's--part of her strategy to keep eroding Nvidia's dominance in the market. So, yeah: Be ready to keep up. Under Lisa Su, the stalwart American semiconductor company has reasserted itself as a force in the age of AI. "Reasserted" doesn't do it justice: Su took a struggling AMD and executed a 10-year turnaround that has been, as one economist put it, nothing short of remarkable. Since 2014, when Su took over as CEO, AMD's market cap has risen from around $2 billion to nearly $300 billion. Aside from her well-known bona fides, Su herself--what drives her, what inspires her, what irritates her, where her politics lie--is less known. This is what I was hoping to learn when I visited AMD's offices and labs in the hills of Austin, Texas, on a day in late June when the wind seemed to do little more than push heat around. Our conversation kicked off with China, which accounts for nearly a quarter of AMD's business. Su now travels frequently to Washington, DC, to grease the wheels. "We've come to realize that export controls are a bit of a fact of life," she told me, "just given how critical the chips that we make are." In other words, it's precisely because AMD's chips are so darn important--to national security, to national economies--that they're now at the heart of modern statecraft.