The Great AI Takeover Rush

Meta and Google have faced antitrust lawsuits for taking over competitors, so they have a new model. Pay billions for the technology and the leaders, and leave a supposedly independent company. They (and Microsoft and Amazon) have now done it to these companies:

Scale AI
Character AI
Inflection AI
Adept AI
Windsurf

Windsurf trails market leader Cursor, but before you use that, see This Developer Lost $500,000 While Coding in Cursor - I Explain Why. A Cursor plugin was malware that took over his computer and stole his bitcoin.

No, an AI agent did not turn evil on its own and rob him, but that is probably coming. You may want to get your AI from reputable sources, and/or put your own guardrails on it.

There has been amazing progress in getting AI models to run freely and cheaply, but the big companies and experts are more convinced than ever that the big payoffs will come from massively scaling up computers, memory, electricity, datasets, users, etc. It appears that trillions of dollars will be spent chasing artificial general intelligence.

Google, Meta, Apple, and Amazon do seem to have some monopoly power, but it is hard to understand the cases against them. The US DoJ proposed remedy against Google is to force the divestiture of the Chrome browser. What would that accomplish? There are lots of excellent browsers, available for free, and many of them share code with Chrome. OpenAI and Perplexity AI have announced that they will release browsers. Google does control Chrome in a that lets them make more money serving more relevant ads, and that makes it hard to block Youtube ads. But just use another browser. And use another search engine, as the AI portals are now much more useful than Google Search.