Google

Google is taking direct control of a Wyoming data center project it once declined to use as a customer. Crusoe, the Denver-based developer that started the campus in southeastern Wyoming, confirmed on Friday that it has sold the unfinished project to Google, a day after Google announced a planned 17 billion dollar investment to build its first data center in the state.

Google has given schools a new set of controls over artificial intelligence in the classroom,. In a blog post on November 3, Chris Phillips, Google's vice president and general manager of education, said access to Gemini, Gemini Notebook, Gemini in Classroom and Google Search will be entirely off for K-12 student accounts until school administrators explicitly turn them on.

Google faced a setback on Tuesday when an adviser to Europe's highest court said its Gemini chatbot may breach press publishers' rights when it retrieves news articles and reuses them to answer questions. The opinion draws a clear line that is likely to matter well beyond one case: training a model on published material is usually permitted in Europe, but an answer that echoes an article too closely is a different legal question.

Google and a coalition of security partners have disrupted a botnet of more than 1.3 million Android devices, most of them television set-top boxes, and Google says the infection was not an accident. In a report published on Monday, November 2, the Google Threat Intelligence Group said it assesses with high confidence that Videostrong Technology Co., a device maker based in Shenzhen, China, intentionally developed, deployed and operated the backdoor for financial gain, then sold access to criminal affiliates.

Publishers who want to keep their work out of AI training have spent years juggling a different switch for every company: one token for Google, another for OpenAI, another for Anthropic, and so on. On Friday, October 30, the four largest Western AI builders moved to end that patchwork, announcing they will all honor a single shared signal in a website's robots.txt file.

October is ending as the month the AI trade finally met its skeptics. Reuters reported on Friday that more than 2 trillion dollars in market value is set to be wiped from the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 this month, a loss slightly larger than the entire market value of SpaceX. The index has fallen more than 5.8 percent so far in October, as a week of big tech earnings intensified investor scrutiny of whether the billions being poured into artificial intelligence can generate returns quickly enough.

Alphabet reported third-quarter results on Wednesday, October 28, that captured both sides of the artificial intelligence boom. Revenue rose 25 percent to 127.577 billion dollars for the quarter ended September 30, up from 102.346 billion dollars a year earlier, a 13th consecutive quarter of double-digit growth. Yet the Google parent missed expectations on revenue, earnings and operating income, and shares fell more than 8 percent after hours.

OpenAI plans to buy Google's artificial intelligence chips, according to a report by The Information on Tuesday, cited by Reuters. The report, which relies on a person familiar with the matter, says the ChatGPT maker intends to purchase Google's Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs, as technology companies keep ramping up spending on data centers and semiconductors to meet surging demand for AI computing.

Google has quietly rewritten one of the clearest promises in its privacy policy. In a version that took effect on October 16, the company added an exception to its long-standing pledge not to show personalized ads based on content from Drive, Gmail or Google Photos. The pledge still stands, but only until a user chooses to share that content with another Google service that supports personalized ads.

Google is putting far more weight behind an unusual answer to the AI power crunch: paying households and businesses to use less electricity at the moments the grid needs relief most. On Thursday, Google and distributed energy platform Voltus announced a tenfold expansion of their "Bring Your Own Capacity" agreement in the PJM region, adding 1,070 megawatts of flexible capacity to the 100 megawatts the two companies first committed in June.