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Tech Talk is a weekly digest by Boardroom’s Michelai Graham that breaks down the latest news from the world’s biggest tech companies and the future of industry-shaping trends like AI.
SpaceX was granted a license for its second Starship rocket launch, and for the atmosphere’s sake, I hope this trip goes better than its first, which ended in an explosion.
A peak into today’s edition:
Nepal has officially banned TikTok for the platform’s apparent reluctance to halt hate content that disrupts “social harmony” and “family structure” across the country. TikTok had 2.2 million users in Nepal, but its app will go offline across the country soon after Nepal’s government felt like TikTok’s content was promoting religious hate, violence, and sexual abuse. The news comes after Nepal implemented a rule that requires social platforms to register with the local government.
Several countries have implemented partial TikTok bans, including the US, Britain, and New Zealand, which don’t allow the app on government devices. There are some US state-specific bans in the works that may go into effect next year. Nepal’s ban comes as TikTok’s parent company, Byte Dance, reported $29 billion in second-quarter revenue, a surge of more than 40% year-over-year.
I think it’s time I start building out a TikTok ban tracker. Stay tuned for updates on that.
A couple of weeks ago, during Google’s antitrust trial with the SEC, we learned that the Big Tech leader paid Apple somewhere between $18 billion and $20 billion to be the default search engine on iPhone and other Apple devices. It doesn’t help that another big secret slipped during Google’s antitrust trial with Epic Games, this time by University of Chicago professor Kevin Murphy, who told a federal court that Google pays Apple 36% of its revenue from search advertising through Apple’s Safari browser. Professor Murphy wasn’t supposed to disclose this information, especially since his testimony was supposed to be in Google’s defense.
Alphabet CEO and Google chief Sundar Pichai confirmed Google and Apple’s revenue-sharing agreement is true when he took the stand for a second time for a 90-minute testimony in the Epic Games antitrust trial.
More news updates from Google’s world:
On Friday, OpenAI’s board of directors announced in a blog post that its CEO Sam Altman is exiting the company. In the interim, Mira Murati, who previously served as chief technology officer, will assume the position.
“Mr. Altman’s departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities,” the company said in the post. “The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.”
After helping to found OpenAI in 2015, Altman has become a high-profile tech executive in the last year following the company’s release of ChatGPT. Open AI is currently exploring a new round of funding that would put its value at more than $80 billion and will help to fuel GPT-5.
YouTube dropped a sneak peek of how its platform is experimenting with AI and music alongside Google DeepMind. The music platform announced Dream Track in YouTube Shorts, which allows artists and creators to create up to 30-second soundtracks featuring music from nine renowned artists who agreed to collaborate on the experiment. Those artists include Alec Benjamin, Charlie Puth, Charli XCX, Demi Lovato, John Legend, Papoose, Sia, T-Pain, and Troye Sivan. The new feature is only available to a select group of artists and creators for now, who will help inform and help YouTube fine-tune its offerings for future products and tools. YouTube is also working closely with artists, songwriters, and producers in its Music AI Incubator to build out a set of music AI tools.
As YouTube leans into AI more, it’s working to do it in the right way, which is why the platform is also implementing AI-generated content labels. The new tags will come as a requirement for creators when they publish content that depicts real people and events. AI-generated animations are exempt from this requirement.
Indie studio A24 was granted the rights to make a movie based on Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk. I can’t pinpoint who I think will play the controversial tech tycoon, but I am going to bet that Musk will put his bid in to play himself in the highly-anticipated film.
