Google Trial Puts LLMs On the Docket; Databricks Projects Explosive AI Spending

Artificial intelligence developers are undoubtedly lapping up a couple of stories my colleagues published Monday about Nvidia leveraging its hardware dominance to muscle into cloud services and Databricks projecting big corporate spending on artificial intelligence services. But first, today’s news.

The trial over the U.S. Department of Justice’s antitrust case against Google Search started this morning in Washington, promising to shed light on Google’s secretive contracts to embed its search engine in Apple devices—and hopefully a lot more. While the trial will largely focus on the past, the information it turns up might have implications for a newer question kicking around in the minds of government antitrust enforcers: Whether Google’s (and Microsoft’s) access to immense pools of data, including a rapidly-updated search index of the whole web, gives them an insurmountable edge in large-language models and the next wave of AI-powered businesses.

How Google could extend its search dominance to AI will be part of the DOJ's trial argument, said Adam Kovacevich, a former Google public policy manager who now leads an industry trade group that opposes the antitrust case.