Tech Watch: April 2024

What's Intel going to do with billions of dollars in federal funding? What does the Internet think about the DOJ's antitrust case against Apple? And how will AI transform the IT industry? We answer all those questions and more in this month's newsletter. Keep scrolling!

Intel Set To Benefit From Federal Chip Funds

The Biden administration is betting big on Intel. It announced last month that it will provide up to $8.5 billion in direct funding along with $11 billion in loans to support the construction and expansion of Intel facilities in four states: Arizona, Ohio, New Mexico, and Oregon.

The money is part of the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act, legislation that aimed to bring chip manufacturing to the United States. Currently, 90 percent of the world’s chips are made in Taiwan.

Intel’s Arizona plans call for building two new chip plants and modernizing an existing one. The company also plans to use the funding to establish two plants in the Columbus, Ohio area, and to modernize plants in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, and Hillsboro, Oregon.

For more on Intel's plans, watch this Yahoo Finance interview with Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger:

DOJ-Apple Suit Divides The Internet

There’s nothing the Internet loves more than fighting about the merits of a juicy tech story. The DOJ’s antitrust suit against Apple is no exception. The government claims that the iPhone maker has a monopoly over the smartphone market that harmed consumers, developers, and rival companies.

Opinions on the suit are mixed, to put it mildly.

Some are saying the suit builds a very strong case against Apple, including Rebecca Haw Allensworth, an antitrust professor, who spoke to The Verge. “I think that they made an even stronger case than I thought that they could,” she said. “They told a very coherent story about how Apple is making its product, the iPhone and the products on it – the apps — less useful for consumers in the name of maintaining their dominance.”

On the other side of the debate are people like Bloomberg tech writer Mark Gurman who opines: “There are very real concerns with some of Apple’s practices. But the Justice Department spends less time on those issues, focusing instead on half-baked claims that suggest a lack of familiarity with modern technology.”

For its part, Apple is denying all the allegations made by the DOJ, issuing a statement to TechCrunch that read in part, “We believe this lawsuit is wrong on the facts and the law, and we will vigorously defend against it.”

Credit Card Payment Failures in UK Point to Vulnerabilities

CIO has an interesting report from across the pond. Several large retailers in England – think McDonald’s and British supermarket Tesco – suffered credit card payment processing errors last month that shut down commerce. Details on the cause have been sparse, but CIO reports that several of the impacted companies said the failures were due to a “software update,” probably related to a third-party processor.

Tamir Passi, senior product manager at automated software-as-a-service security provider DoControl, is quoted as saying:

“The only guarantee for any computer technology is that it will fail at some point.”

Will AI Kill the Search Engine? Maybe Not

Here’s an interesting take from David Pierce at The Verge. He argues that Google is still the best at what Google is good at. AI tools, like Chat GPT, Gemini, or Perplexity, fail on many of the most common search queries.

For example, Pierce notes that the most common type of search queries in Google are “navigational,” meaning people type in “wordle” to get to their daily word game fix. AI tools are universally bad at these types of searches.

Pierce does note that generative AI does excel in unearthing answers to specific questions that are buried on long webpages full of useless content and ads (think about those annoying recipe websites that make you scroll and scroll to get to the actual ingredients list).

How Will AI Impact Tech Workers?

Of course, AI isn’t just shaking up the world of search. It’s also transforming how we work, including those in the realm of IT. Amit Choudhary, COO of India-based tech services company Wipro, predicts that generative AI will impact IT professionals in numerous ways, and lead to:

• more time for higher value tasks
• faster and more accurate decision-making
• enhanced ability to mitigate cyber risks

He goes on to argue that soft skills will become just as important as tech skills in the age of AI.

Read Choudhary’s full article here.