It's quiet out there in TechnologyLalaland, ahead of the United States elections. Which is understandable as that monumental event drowns out everything, including any news that tech companies might have. Besides, it's tough to write releases about the news while holding your breath.
Overshadowed as they are by the US elections, things aren't standing still though. End of last week, Amazon put in an impressive set of third quarter results, bringing in as much revenue as a medium-sized national economy does annually and beating expectations. Looking at the commentary around the figures, analysts singled out Amazon's advertising business as a standout earner, along with the company's cloud computing unit.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) sales grew by 19 per cent which is an accelerated rate compared to last year. Yes, it's due to artificial intelligence (AI) demand, which is still running hot. To the point that it appears AWS isn't able to keep up, as per what chief executive Andy Jassy said:
"We have more demand than capacity, particularly in chips. Our partnership with NVIDIA and custom silicon like Trainium will help address this," Jassy said.
There's going to be chunky capex spending, US$75 billion this year and more in 2025, to build out capacity at AWS, for the cloud provider to catch that "once in a lifetime opportunity" that Jassy called AI.
From our perspective on a small island in the South Pacific, that's a big chunk'o'change. Investors elsewhere appear to think the same, and have started adding up numbers, not just for AWS but for its competitors Google and Microsoft too, and feel less than enamoured by the results they see.
Nevertheless, Jassy has slashed staff numbers by 27,000 the last two years at Amazon, and with the recent Q3 results the company looks set to remain in investors' good books for now.
By the way, if you think 19 per cent sales growth for AWS is huge, think again. Microsoft's Azure cloud biz grew by a third in its last year, while Google Cloud rose by 35 per cent.
AI for search
Meanwhile, Microsoft-backed OpenAI said it now, finally, offers Internet search for the ChatGPT interface to the GPT large language models after talking about it since the middle of this year. There's much scepticism around how well LLM-based search engines will work.
That's mainly because as almost everyone knows by now, Generative AI can and will make stuff up. If it happens, GenAI will do so in a plausible-looking fashion, and it might not do that every time you type in a query.
Google discovered that the hard way when it introduced the AI Overviews with glue on pizza recipe results, a feature launch that the tech giant will never be able to live down. AI Overviews can still produce some subtly amusing results:
Facebook parent Meta is also working on AI search however, probably because it doesn't want to be stuck with Google and Microsoft Bing.
ChatGPT search is only available for paid subscribers at the moment. Some who have tried it and compared ChatGPT to Google Search are impressed by the clear answers with direct links to the sources - and no advertising with prioritised results à la Google.
We'll see if this is the beginning of the end of Google's Internet advertising empire, or just a whole lot of confusion but yes, do watch this space.
Apple expands in space
Look what I did there, segueing beautifully into Apple which has stumped US$1.1 billion for its satellite partner Globalstar for, it appears, to expand the low Earth orbit (LEO) operator's space and and terrestrial network. In pre-payments and other money, with some sources suggesting it might be as much as US$1.5 billion.
From the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing:
On October 29, 2024, the Company and Customer agreed to make certain amendments to the Services Agreements and entered into other related agreements (collectively, the “Updated Services Agreements”) for Globalstar to deliver expanded services to Customer over a new mobile satellite services (“MSS”) network, including a new satellite constellation, expanded ground infrastructure, and increased global MSS licensing (the “Extended MSS Network”). The Extended MSS Network will be owned by Globalstar Licensee, LLC, together with its subsidiaries (collectively, the “Globalstar SPE”), and operated by the Company.
Since the iPhone 14, you've been able to connect the devices to satellites. With big caveats, for contacting emergency services and the find my location feature, for when you're out of cellular or Wi-Fi coverage. Everyone telco and their dog is talking about satellite connectivity at the moment, and it'll be interesting to see what Apple will do with its bigger stake in Globalstar.
Globalstar has quite a small constellation currently with 25 satellites, but it has rights to the licensed n53 2.4 gigahertz band which apparently can be used for terrestrial LTE mobile broadband service in North America, Brazil and other big economies. Sounds difficult, technically, but then so's SpaceX Starlink's stuff and that's going just fine.
A US election influenced by inauthentic behaviour
Back to the US election, ProPublica in collaboration with the Tow Centre for Digital Journalism at the Columbia Journalism School looked at how eight deceptive advertising networks placed over 160,000 ads on Meta properties with bogus offers and seeking to influence opinion. It's a great story, so please read it.
That type of "inauthentic behaviour" (Facebook's term, not the writer's) has been around for well over a decade now, probably longer. Whatever Meta is doing to stem the torrent of fakeness, well... it's not really working that well is it?
Closer to home, open source intelligence researcher Elise Thomas discovered a big AI bot network on Twitter-X, which is powered by ChatGPT it would appear. The bot network looks like it was adapted to post pro-Trump messages ahead of the election, but it's also badly put together and revealed itself to Thomas inadvertently.
The AI-automatons are not very obedient to Bot Herders, and get confused, argue with each other or simply refuse to do as prompted. Many of the bot accounts have now been suspended by Twitter-X.
Click through to the thread on Twitter-X (and yes I know, the Musk-ordered changes have made it harder to share threads) for an amusing read.
1. I've found a large, AI-driven bot network on X which is posting in support of Trump in the US election.
— Elise Thomas (@elisethoma5) November 3, 2024
Thread. pic.twitter.com/ez38QbkVsP
Right, now to wait until things get back to normal in a few days time. Ha ha. Who am I kidding?
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