Week in Review: Google loses a major antitrust case

Summary

Welcome back to Week in Review! We’ve got tons of stuff for you this week: antitrust lawsuits against Google and Meta; Grok can now remember; Bolt CEO Ryan Breslow wants to make his mark; and much, much more. Have a great weekend! It’s over: Google violated antitrust laws in the ad tech market, a judge ruled, ending a two-year battle after eight states filed complaints against the Big Tech giant. Remedies could include forcing Google to break up its advertising business, like selling Google Ad Manager. “We won half of this case, and we will appeal the other half,” said Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google’s vice president of regulatory affairs. Gone surfing: OpenAI is reportedly in talks to buy Windsurf, formerly Codeium, which makes a popular coding assistant. Before the news broke, OpenAI approached Anysphere, which makes Cursor, another coding assistant. These talks signal how important capturing a slice of the code-generation market has become for the ChatGPT maker. A tweet started it all: Theseus, a defense tech company, tweeted that it had built a cheap drone at a hackathon with tech that had clear potential to combat rampant GPS jamming of drones. The tweet went viral, and the company soon found itself in Y Combinator’s 2024 cohort with $4.3 million in seed funding. The U.S. Special Forces has also entered into an agreement for early testing and development. News Image Credits:ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS / AFP / Getty Images Meta on the stand: The government’s antitrust suit against Meta started with a bang this week. Among the testimony, a few things stood out: Mark Zuckerberg once proposed the strategy of “wiping everyone’s graphs and having them start again” to try and make Facebook culturally relevant again. And around the time that Meta noticed TikTok affecting its growth, it stopped reporting Facebook’s user numbers in its quarterly reports. New trend in town: People are using ChatGPT to figure out the location shown in pictures. These image-analyzing capabilities...