Google's parent company hit a major financial milestone on Monday, reaching a $4tn valuation for the first time and surpassing Apple to become the second-most valuable company in the world. Alphabet is the fourth company to hit the $4tn milestone after Nvidia, which later hit $5tn, Microsoft and Apple . The spike in share price comes after Apple announced it had chosen Google's Gemini AI model to power a major overhaul of the iPhone maker's digital assistant Siri, which comes installed in every iPhone. Neither company disclosed how much the deal was worth. "After careful evaluation, we determined that Google's technology provides the most capable foundation for Apple Foundation Models," Apple said in a statement to CNBC . As tech stocks continue a years-long meteoric rise, fears of a bubble in the stock market persist; however, Wall Street's excitement for new avenues of investment in AI does as well.

Nvidia's chief executive, Jensen Huang, has been on an energetic world tour as the company's share price has soared. Nvidia's chief executive, Jensen Huang, has been on an energetic world tour as the company's share price has soared. Nvidia insists it isn't Enron, but its AI deals are testing investor faith The chipmaker's sprawling partnerships are driving extraordinary growth but also bank its future on the AI boom paying off quickly N vidia is, in crucial ways, nothing like Enron - the Houston energy giant that imploded through multibillion-dollar accounting fraud in 2001. Nor is it similar to companies such as Lucent or Worldcom that folded during the dotcom bubble. But the fact that it needs to reiterate this to its investors is less than ideal. Now worth more than $4tn (£3tn), Nvidia makes the specialised technology that powers the world's AI surge: silicon chips and software packages that train and host systems such as ChatGPT.

OpenAI has signed a new deal valued at $38bn with Amazon that will allow the artificial intelligence giant to run AI workloads across Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud infrastructure. The seven-year deal announced on Monday is the first big AI push for the e-commerce giant after a restructuring last week. Experts say this does not mean that it will allow OpenAI to train its model on websites hosted by AWS - which includes the websites of The New York Times, Reddit and United Airlines. "Running OpenAI training inside AWS doesn't change their ability to scrape content from AWS-hosted websites [which they could already do for anything publicly readable]. This is strictly speaking about the economics of rent vs buy for GPU [graphics processing unit] capacity," Joshua McKenty, CEO of the AI detection company PolyguardAI, told Al Jazeera. The deal is also a major vote of confidence for the e-commerce giant's cloud unit, AWS, which some investors feared had fallen behind rivals Microsoft and Google in the artificial intelligence (AI) race.

Anti-Trump Protesters Take Aim at'Naive' US-UK AI Deal Thousands marched in London to protest President Donald Trump's second state visit. Among them were many environmental activists unhappy with Britain's new AI deal with the US. They played extremely loud music. They let off foul-smelling smoke from a can. Thousands of people gathered on Wednesday in central London to protest against Trump's presence in the UK, accusing the UK government of kowtowing to him by hosting him for a state visit for the second time.

The administration of U.S. President Donald Trump is clearing a path for two key Persian Gulf allies to pursue their artificial intelligence ambitions -- and some of the biggest U.S. tech companies are seizing on that opening with plans to spend billions of dollars in the region. Under agreements with the U.S. expected to be unveiled in coming days, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are poised to win wider access to advanced AI chips from Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices that are considered the gold standard for running AI models. The deals are taking shape while President Donald Trump visits the Middle East seeking to forge deeper business ties that put U.S. technology initiatives at center stage. Even before any formal announcement of accords between the U.S. and its partners, news began to emerge of American companies readying expanded projects in the region.

Technology AI What a major movie studio's AI deal could mean for the future of Hollywood Generative AI might save studios'millions and millions of dollars,' but at what cost? Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. When Hollywood's actors took to the streets last year for a 118 day strike, many wielded signs reading "no digital clones," "AI is soulless," and "AI is not art." These ticked-off thespians were expressing a sentiment shared by a growing share of writers, video games voice actors, and many other creatives: generative AI tools, trained off their work, may threaten their jobs and shrink the entertainment industry. When the strike ended, actors were awarded new, hard-won protections against AI-generated clones .

Under the Biden administration, federal regulators have stepped up their scrutiny of Big Tech companies' acquisitions of smaller rivals, bringing lengthy and costly legal challenges against Meta's acquisition of the virtual reality company Within and Microsoft's purchase of the game maker Activision. In the age of generative AI, Silicon Valley giants have to date sidestepped such legal obstacles by instead funneling investments into younger AI companies and striking deals to ensure those start-ups are giving preference to their computing services.

The United States trade regulator launched an inquiry on Thursday into generative artificial intelligence investments and partnerships. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) said in a statement that it issued orders to five companies requiring them to provide information on the matter. The companies were Google's parent company Alphabet, Amazon, Anthropic, Microsoft, and ChatGPT maker OpenAI, the agency's statement said. The inquiry will focus on what authority and rights the tech giants' investments in the fledgling AI companies have conferred and whether those deals harm competition. "Our study will shed light on whether investments and partnerships pursued by dominant companies risk distorting innovation and undermining fair competition," FTC chair Lina Khan said in a statement.

Back in May, just a week into the the Writers Guild of America's strike, John August, a member of the union's negotiating committee and writer of Charlie's Angels, described his personal dystopia: "the Nora Ephron problem"--a world in which artificial intelligence evolves to become a writer so profound it can mimic the style of a surefire hitmaker. The synthetic Nora Ephron may yet come to pass, but the deal struck this week between the WGA and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) will go some way toward protecting writers against its impact. In short, the contract stipulates that AI can't be used to write or rewrite any scripts or treatments, ensures that studios will disclose if any material given to writers is AI-generated, and protects writers from having their scripts used to train AI without their say-so. Provisions in the contract also stipulate that script scribes can use AI for themselves. At a time when people in many professions fear that generative AI is coming for their jobs, the WGA's new contract has the potential to be precedent-setting, not just in Hollywood, where the actors' strike continues, but in industries across the US and the world.

PALO ALTO, California, March 24 (Reuters) - In December and January, several venture capitalists from the U.S. and Britain raced to Paris to vie for a stake in a new artificial intelligence company that could reshape how people work. The startup they courted, Dust, consisted of just two people. It had not been incorporated yet. And it rejected a generous proposal by top investment firm Coatue Management among other offers, three people familiar with the deal told Reuters. Sequoia Capital won, two of the people said, leading a sizable "seed" fundraising round of $5 million.