Facebook’s parent has held discussions with Apple about integrating Meta Platforms’ generative AI model into Apple Intelligence, the recently announced AI system for iPhones and other devices, according to people familiar with the matter.
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In its talks with other AI companies, Apple hasn’t sought for either party to pay the other, the people said. Instead, the AI companies can sell premium subscriptions to their services through Apple Intelligence. As it does on its app store, the iPhone maker would keep a cut of subscription revenue from its devices.
The almost overnight surge in electricity demand from data centers is now outstripping the available power supply in many parts of the world, according to interviews with data center operators, energy providers and tech executives. That dynamic is leading to years-long waits for businesses to access the grid as well as growing concerns of outages and price increases for those living in the densest data center markets.
The dramatic increase in power demands from Silicon Valley’s growth-at-all-costs approach to AI also threatens to upend the energy transition plans of entire nations and the clean energy goals of trillion-dollar tech companies. In some countries, including Saudi Arabia, Ireland and Malaysia, the energy required to run all the data centers they plan to build at full capacity exceeds the available supply of renewable energy, according to a Bloomberg analysis of the latest available data.
Aaron has spent the past 13 years optimizing the way Netflix encodes its movies and TV shows. The work she and her team have done allows the company to deliver better-looking streams over slower connections and has resulted in 50 percent bandwidth savings for 4K streams alone, according to Aaron. Netflix’s encoding team has also contributed to industrywide efforts to improve streaming, including the development of the AV1 video codec and its eventual successor.
Now, Aaron is getting ready to tackle what’s next for Netflix: Not content with just being a service for binge-watching, the company ventured into cloud gaming and livestreaming last year. So far, Netflix has primarily dabbled in one-off live events like the SAG Awards. But starting next year, the company will stream WWE RAW live every Monday. The streamer nabbed the wrestling franchise from Comcast’s USA Network, where it has long been the No. 1 rated show, regularly drawing audiences of around 1.7 million viewers. Satisfying that audience week after week poses some very novel challenges.
If OpenAI is willing to 'give away' their AI chat bot to Apple, it seems quite likely that there will be others that will follow.
Will there be any EU AI companies that is willing to come on board with Apple too? If one is to trust Apple at its words, there seems to be quite a bit of uncertainty when Apple will launch integrations with AI chat bots in EU, and also perhaps quite a bit of uncertainty whether EU is okay with Apple's integration approach.
And if the EU is okay with this approach, will we also see Apple slowly moving the App Store in EU to a negotiate-behind-closed-doors approach?
(Five years ago, Apple may well have gone with a Siri App Store, I imagine.)
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