The Federal Trade Commission is launching an inquiry into massive investments made by Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet into generative AI startups OpenAI and Anthropic, the agency announced on Thursday. The FTC said that it had issued "compulsory orders" to the companies and would scrutinize their relationships with AI startups to understand their impact on competition. "History shows that new technologies can create new markets and healthy competition," FTC Chair Lina Khan said in a statement. "As companies race to develop and monetize AI, we must guard against tactics that foreclose this opportunity. Our study will shed light on whether investments and partnerships pursued by dominant companies risk distorting innovation and undermining fair competition."

The sky is no longer the limit for cloud computing giants, as the slowing economy strikes at one of tech's biggest growth stories of the past decade. Two of the top cloud providers, Amazon Web Services Inc. and Google LLC, today revealed revenues in their cloud units, which have boosted their growth and profits for years now. The results weren't bad -- but cloud is no longer on the kind of rocket ride that can overcome big slowdowns in e-commerce and ad spending. Alphabet's Google Cloud unit posted a 33% rise in its fourth quarter, to $7.315 billion, with an operating loss of $480 million, down significantly from a loss of $890 million a year ago. Zacks Consensus Forecast had Google Cloud revenue rising 32% from a year ago, to $7.3 billion, so it managed to meet expectations but was still down from 38% growth in the third quarter.

Amazon and Alphabet are among the companies best positioned to take advantage of future artificial intelligence disruption in the technology industry, a GlobalData analysis shows. The assessment comes from GlobalData's Thematic Research ecosystem, which ranks companies on a scale of one to five based on their likelihood to tackle challenges like artificial intelligence and emerge as long-term winners of the technology sector. Cambricon and Graphcore are the companies best positioned to benefit from investments in artificial intelligence, all of them recording scores of five out of five in GlobalData's Advertising, Application software, Cloud services, Consumer electronics, Ecommerce, Industrial automation, IT infrastructure, Music, Film, & TV, Publishing, Semiconductors and Social media Thematic Scorecards. Amazon, for example, has advertised for 18,116 new artificial intelligence jobs from October 2020 to September 2021; and mentioned artificial intelligence in company filings 86 times. Alphabet indicated good levels of AI investment, with the company looking for 2,349 new artificial intelligence jobs since October 2020; and mentioning artificial intelligence in filings 137 times. The table below shows how GlobalData analysts scored the biggest companies in the technology industry on their artificial intelligence performance, as well as the number of new artificial intelligence jobs, deals, patents and mentions in company reports since October 2020.

UPS has become the first drone delivery service to receive full approval from the Federal Aviation Administration. The company's program, called Flight Forward, is operated in partnership with Matternet, which provides drone logistics networking company in Mountain View, California. Previously, UPS's pilots were only allowed to fly the drones within line of sight, but the FAA approval means they'll be able to significantly expand their delivery range. 'This is history in the making, and we aren't done yet,' said David Abney, UPS chief executive officer in a statement. UPS's Flight Forward drone delivery program is the first to earn full approval by the FAA (pictured one of the drones they will use in the program) The program's currently deployed in Raleigh, North Carolina, where UPS's drones have made more than 1,000 flights carrying deliveries around the WakeMed Health & Hospitals campus.