AI in Focus: Hot seat

Hello, fellow humans! This is our last monthly AI-focused special edition of the Daily Brief. We hope you’ve enjoyed them! We’ll see you again on Monday with your regularly scheduled Quartz news.

Here’s what you need to know

Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference kicks off on Monday with a special event at its headquarters. Apple is expected to finally give some insight into its guarded AI strategy…

… which could include ChatGPT in iPhones. Bloomberg reported that Apple is working with OpenAI to bake the chatbot into its operating system. If you can’t beat ‘em…

But let’s just hope OpenAI has some fixes for recent ChatGPT outages. The chatbot was down for thousands of users multiple times last week.

Not down: AI stocks. They boomed last week, and the S&P 500 and Nasdaq rode the wave. Nvidia and Apple briefly joined the $3 trillion club in market cap, and the indexes reached record highs on Wednesday — all before Nvidia’s big stock split on Friday.

Saudi Arabia is getting into semiconductors. But the kingdom isn’t trying to be Nvidia (yet). It’s focused on attracting firms that can make humble, simple chips.

AI takes the antitrust hot seat — but is that a good thing?

The exclusive AI party that OpenAI, Nvidia, and Microsoft have been throwing may be forced to expand its guest list. The Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission have reportedly reached a deal to investigate the three over potentially anti-competitive behavior in the AI space.

Experts aren’t entirely convinced that federal regulators have ground to stand on, and if the investigations were to lead to lawsuits, any outcome wouldn’t be a clear cut victory.

If the top guns have to divert money to compliance that they would have used to create new AI products, that could open the door to incomers, drive up competition, and drive down prices — a win for consumers. But if scrutiny is increased across the board, it could hinder startups and innovation.

There’s a lot to take in when it comes to AI and antitrust. We’ve compiled a short reading list on the topic if you want to go deeper:

🔦 Microsoft’s weird Inflection AI deal is now in the antitrust spotlight

🤓 Apple’s slow AI strategy just helped it avoid a major antitrust probe

🤫 Leaked Google documents reveal secrets behind the world’s biggest search engine

⚖️ 4 takeaways from the Google antitrust trial

🧐 Microsoft and Amazon’s AI deals are getting antitrust scrutiny in the U.K.

Pop quiz: Grok’s new home

In which state is Elon Musk building his AI supercomputer?

A. Texas
B. North Carolina
C. Florida
D. Tennessee

Find the answer here or at the bottom — and yes, the xAI facility, which will help power its Grok chatbot, is called a “gigafactory of compute.”

Quotable: Drive to AI

“It’s something completely new. I mean, putting five or six world champions together is very dangerous anyway.” — Nigel Mansell, the 1992 Formula 1 world champion, in an interview with Quartz about the sport’s “first-ever real vs. virtual race” in May made possible with AI. Current Williams Racing driver Logan Sargeant raced six AI-generated avatars with the help of a fancy racing helmet that was fitted with an augmented reality visor.

We wouldn’t recommend putting six real Formula 1 world champions on a single race track either — but AI in racing is about so much more than virtual champion races.

Other AI reads

🫀 Stethoscope startup that uses AI to detect heart failure gets $41 million in funding

🤨 Older generations don’t trust AI to manage their money

🍕 Domino’s says it uses AI to make pizzas ‘before people order them’

🧐 Former OpenAI employees say AI companies pose ‘serious risks’…

👿 … but OpenAI says bad actors aren’t very good at using AI to manipulate you.

Ask an AI

If you’ve been a steadfast Quartz reader, you’ll know that we value a good haiku. We asked ChatGPT to help us sign off our AI in Focus newsletter in our favorite poetic format. Here’s what it generated:

Tech whispers fade out,
AI journeys yet to come,
Farewell, stay curious.

Well first off — that’s an unforgivable sixth syllable in the final line. But if you can somehow look past that, the sentiment is there. Aw, thanks ChatGPT.

Now our turn. We asked former editor and current reader Susan Howson to contribute one final time. Here’s her sendoff:

Empty robin nest
The egg fragments here and there
Fly away, email

Who did it better? Let us know at talk@qz.com — or send us your own!

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Our best wishes for a very human day. Send any news, comments, Grok homes, and AI haikus to talk@qz.com. Reader support makes Quartz available to all—become a member. Today’s AI in Focus Daily Brief was brought to you by Morgan Haefner.

The answer to the pop quiz is D. Tennessee.