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1.	DOJ Asks Judge to Make Google Sell Chrome and Possibly Android Too By Erin Woo Source: The Information

The U.S. Department of Justice late Wednesday asked a federal judge to force Google to sell its Chrome browser and potentially its Android operating system to undo Google’s illegal search monopoly.

The DOJ, which won an antitrust case against Google over the summer, also requested that Google allow rivals to access data related to its search engine and search ads so that they could better compete, and be barred from paying tens of billions of dollars a year to companies such as Apple and Samsung to make Google the default search provider on their devices or in their browsers.

The DOJ also asked that Google be prevented from investing in or owning other search rivals or companies that develop artificial intelligence search or advertising. It wasn’t immediately clear whether such a decision would affect Google’s investment in AI developer Anthropic.

In the DOJ’s Wednesday filing, its lawyers said selling Chrome—which helped Google grow the reach of its search engine—was necessary to “permanently stop Google’s control of this critical search access point and allow rival search engines the ability to access the browser that for many users is a gateway to the internet.” Regarding Android, the DOJ said Google should be barred from bundling its services, including search, with the mobile operating system. If that isn’t effective, Google should be made to sell Android, which also is a key profit generator for the company because of its Play app store.

In a statement, Kent Walker, Google’s president of global affairs, called the DOJ’s proposed remedies “a radical interventionist agenda that would harm Americans and America’s global technology leadership.”

A judicial ruling in favor of any of the DOJ requests could reshape Google’s business and the search industry writ large. The judge, Amit Mehta, will hold a trial in the spring on the DOJ’s proposed penalties, and has said that he aims to issue a final decision by August. Google has also said it will appeal Mehta’s initial finding that it runs an illegal search monopoly.

2.	Nvidia Forecasts 70% Quarterly Growth as AI Boom Continues By Anissa Gardizy Source: The Information

Nvidia on Wednesday said revenue rose 94% year-over-year to $35.1 billion in the October quarter, continuing its two-year streak of blowing past its own growth projections as more artificial intelligence developers and cloud providers gobble up its data center chips. The revenue growth was 14.5 percentage points higher than what Nvidia had projected three months ago.

Notably, Nvidia CFO Colette Kress said the company was generating software, service and support revenue at a pace of $1.5 billion per year, implying $125 million per month in revenue, and said the annualized pace would hit $2 billion by the end of this year. She previously said Nvidia generated $1 billion in annualized revenue from that business at the end of 2023, meaning the business will double this year, putting Nvidia in competition with some of its key customers, such as cloud providers.

Free cash flow reached a record $16.8 billion in the quarter while the company purchased $11 billion of its own shares. Nvidia forecast 70% revenue growth to $37.5 billion in the current fiscal quarter, which ends at the end of January. Nvidia shares fell 2% in after-hours trading, though they have tripled so far this year.

Impressively, Nvidia’s sales of data center server chips and networking gear in the October quarter rose 112% from a year earlier. That’s only 10 percentage points lower than the sales growth of competing data center chips from Advanced Micro Devices in the September quarter, despite Nvidia generating 10 times more revenue from such hardware than AMD.

To put Nvidia’s growth in perspective, quarterly data center chip sales have risen 8.5 times from the first full quarter after OpenAI launched ChatGPT, in early 2023, setting off an AI boom. There have been some snags, including a delay with its next flagship chip, Blackwell, and overheating issues with the server racks Nvidia designed to house the chip, The Information has reported. (During an earnings conference call with analysts, CEO Jensen Huang did provide an answer when asked about the overheating report.) Kress said demand for Blackwell will exceed supply for at least the next few quarters, due to supply chain constraints, and Huang said the company is shipping more Blackwell chips this quarter than it had anticipated.

3.	DCG Founder Barry Silbert to Lead New AI Subsidiary as CEO By Yueqi Yang Source: The Information

Digital Currency Group, the parent company of crypto asset manager Grayscale, is launching a decentralized artificial intelligence subsidiary called Yuma, led by DCG founder and CEO Barry Silbert, who will also serve as the subsidiary’s CEO.

Yuma will invest in and build on Bittensor, a decentralized network that uses crypto-powered incentives to enable companies to create and train AI by rewarding participants with its native token TAO. DCG owns more than $100 million of TAO, Silbert said in an interview, making the firm one of the biggest holders. TAO tokens have a total market cap of $3.5 billion, according to data from CoinMarketCap. The new subsidiary has about 30 people and plans to hire more. DCG has invested over $100 million across a number of different decentralized AI projects, including NEAR and TAO.

DCG’s largest subsidiary, Grayscale, has seen its revenues decline as investors pulled money out of its crypto funds after the Securities and Exchange Commission approved a group of bitcoin and ether exchange-traded funds. DCG’s third-quarter revenue was $153 million, down 8% from a year ago, according to an investor letter. Grayscale made up $103 million of revenue, down 19% from a year ago. DCG’s crypto lender unit Genesis filed for bankruptcy in early 2023 following the collapse of FTX and the trading firm Alameda, which was a big borrower from Genesis. Genesis repaid most claimholders in full under the bankruptcy plan. DCG and Silbert are also defending against a lawsuit from New York attorney general Letitia James over Genesis’s lending program.

4.	Snowflake Raises Product Sales Forecast, Shares Jump 19% By Kevin McLaughlin Source: The Information

Shares of database provider Snowflake jumped more than 19% after it reported that sales grew 28% to $942.1 million in its October quarter compared to last year. Investors seemed to be encouraged that the company sailed well past its earlier quarterly product revenue projections and raised its full-year forecast by nearly $90 million.

Snowflake’s product revenue for the quarter was just over $900 million, representing growth of 29% compared to last year. That surpassed its earlier estimate of $850 million to $855 million in product revenue and growth of 22%.

Snowflake, which hasn’t had a profitable quarter since its September 2020 IPO, reported a net loss of $327.9 million, up from $214.6 million in last year’s October quarter. That likely reflects Snowflake’s development of new products that let customers build applications using the data they store in its database, such as tools for building chatbots that draw from internal corporate data.

Snowflake has also struck a multi-year partnership with startup Anthropic that will let its customers use large language models such as Claude 3.5 to build applications, following our earlier report that the companies were in talks to form such an agreement.

5.	Anthropic CEO Says AI Gains Aren’t Slowing Down By Erin Woo Source: The Information

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said he doesn’t expect the rate of improvement of large language models to slow down, despite recent reports that upcoming LLMs from his company as well as from Google and OpenAI didn’t show as many performance gains compared to earlier models.

The Information reported earlier this month that the performance of OpenAI’s newest flagship model, Orion, isn’t improving as much on the previous flagship GPT-4, compared to the jump between GPT-3 and GPT-4. Part of the reason involved the apparent lack of high quality data needed to develop the models’ understanding of the world.

Amodei said at the Cerebral Valley AI Summit that training new models was always challenging, but “I mostly don’t think there’s any barrier at all” when it comes to the amount of data companies can use to train new models.

OpenAI and Google, for their part, have turned to newer techniques, including giving LLMs more time to process answers—known as reasoning—to improve their ability to answer questions or handle complex tasks such as coding. Anthropic’s LLMs have been particularly good at coding tasks.

6.	The Trade Desk Launches Smart TV Operating System By Catherine Perloff Source: The Information

Publicly traded ad tech giant The Trade Desk is building a TV operating system for streaming. It’s a notable move, given most of the dominant smart TV operating systems on the market have come from TV businesses, such as Roku, Samsung or LG, or big tech firms, like Amazon or Google.

The Trade Desk, by contrast, is a pure play advertising technology firm, which sells software that lets brands buy ads programmatically and has no ambitions to sell hardware. The company will offer the new software to firms like TV manufacturers and distributors, hotel chains and gaming companies. The new system, called Ventura, will launch in the second half of 2025, The Trade Desk CEO Jeff Green told Axios.

The new system could help The Trade Desk’s advertiser clients reach a wider swath of audiences, though Green told Axios it won’t seek to make money from the technology directly. Shares of The Trade Desk rose 3.7% on Wednesday.

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