Let's get into it.

Elon Musk didn’t shoot his shot in time…

I’m sure basically all of our readers know by now, but in case you’ve been MIA for the past few weeks, Elon Musk and OpenAI have been in a heated legal battle. 

Elon Musk brought the lawsuit against OpenAI, claiming that they swindled him into investing in a non-profit, only to later pivot to a for-profit. He claims that he and the founding team had originally co-founded OpenAI with the goal of building safe AI that would better mankind. But after years of work and his parting with the company, Sam Altman and his cohort launched a for-profit subsidiary against his wishes.

However, after weeks of testimony, the jury has finally reached a verdict in the case. Unfortunately for Musk, they didn’t actually conclude anything. The jury deliberated for only 2 hours and determined that Musk filed his lawsuit over 4 years past the statute of limitations and therefore had no case.

This is obviously a huge bummer for the tech world, as this was looking to be a landmark case that could set major legal precedents in the AI world. Instead, the jury effectively told us nothing, and we’re left scratching our heads, wondering what might have happened had he launched this case years ago.

The truth is, no one knows what would have happened if he had filed this suit years ago. The only saving grace is that the drama was incredibly entertaining in the last few weeks. Now that it's over, we expect Musk to do a whole lot of whining and complaining on X until his goldfish-like memory allows him to forget and move on to bitching about something else.

Google announces the biggest update to its search engine in years

This week, Google announced that it made the largest changes to its search engine in over 25 years. On the surface, users may not notice all that much, but the changes they are implementing have far-reaching implications for how users may interact with search engines in the future.

Let's break down some of the major highlights.

1. Huge upgrades to AI Mode.

Google is now utilizing newer, more advanced versions of Gemini in its AI mode search engine. Users can now ask complex questions to Google, and rather than using keywords to return the best search results, Google’s AI will essentially do all the research and analysis required to give you a complete answer.

For example, if you were to search, “What is the best beach front hotel in Jamaica with direct flights from NYC and calm water,” Google will now break this question into multiple sub searches, scan and collate the results from the search, and then summarize all the information into a single output. 

2. Search is becoming personalized.

Google search is tied into every single app you use in the Google environment. It has access to your personal data from Gmail, Chrome, Docs, Maps, etc. Let's use another example to highlight what these changes actually mean.

Imagine you’re still planning that vacation to Jamaica we just referenced earlier. You open up Google search to look for destinations to stop on your road trip. Well, because Google is fully integrated with all its apps, it already has all of your trip confirmation emails for flights, car rentals, hotels, and restaurants. This means that search results will return you stopping destinations that actually meet time restrictions like hotel check-in time, travel distance, or restaurant reservation times. The results that come up on Google are literally tailored to your individual trip requirements.

3. Google Search is going to become Agentic

Now this is a big word, and most of us probably don’t know what this means. To put it simply, agentic means Google is going to increasingly have the ability to work autonomously. As it gets more advanced, it can make decisions and take actions based on your searches.

This means that it will eventually have the ability to make bookings for you based on your searches. Maybe you’re doing research on what fitness tracker to buy, Google will realize this and automatically start searching and comparing purchase options. Further in the future, Google may just buy the tracker for you.

Now I’m gonna be honest, some of this stuff seems like it could cause major issues in the future. Having AI automatically make purchases for us seems like it could cause major legal and marital issues. I mean, if you think about it, there are approximately 150M men in America who would have sex dolls and pocket pussies showing up on their doorsteps if Google could actually make automatic purchase decisions.

Jokes aside, these changes are absolutely massive. They’re going to completely change how we think about and use search engines. And based on how many students booed former Google CEO Eric Shmidt last week when he brought AI in a graduation speech, not everyone is excited about the future. That being said, it’s undeniably going to be interesting to watch history as it unfolds. Regardless of what happens, we’ll stick around to keep you up to date.

This Week In Tech

Headlines you may have missed:

• NVIDIA reports $81.6B quarterly revenue as AI infrastructure spending explodes (G)

• Google says AI-powered Search now serves more than 1 billion monthly users (RT)

• Anthropic is expected to pay SpaceX $45B (B)

• Eric Schmidt booed by UoA graduates while urging them to embrace AI (X)

• Cerebras rallies 68% on IPO debut, expects a year of massive AI IPOs (BI)

• Remember Google Glass? Well, it's making a comeback… (G)

• Samsung reaches last-minute labor deal to avoid one of the largest tech manufacturing strikes in years (RT)

• Zuckerberg nails his impression of a human and pretends to be sad about layoffs (Y)

Meanwhile in venture… 

• Mercury, Digital banking ($200M @ $5.2B)

• Armada, Modular data centers ($230M @ $2B)

• Cowboy Space, AI space infrastructure ($275M @ $2B)

• Exaforce, AI cybersecurity ($125M @ $725M)

• Rapido, Indian ride-hailing platform ($240M @ $3B)

• Viktor, AI employees ($75M @ ~$500M)

That's it. Go build something. Or just refresh Twitter, we won't judge.

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Thanks for reading. We'll be back next Friday to monitor the situation

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