The Finance Side of Tech

Author

Walter Wimberly
May 05, 2025

Welcome back my Tech Curious friend. Don’t have the time to read all the Tech News this past week, then get your summary here.

Below you can find information about the most recent tech news. So let’s get started.

Table of Contents

New Model from Alibaba Narrows AI Gap

While US led models have had the lead in AI, some new models from China are putting pressure on those in Silicon Valley. This includes Alibaba’s Qwen3 AI model, which shows capabilities rivalling top US offerings.

Interesting about this model was the scope of content that it was trained on, including over 36 trillion tokens spanning 119 languages and dialects. This is much more than most of US based models.

The real questions are: How well can it perform in the real world, and how censored is the model?

You’ll Own Nothing…and Like It… Or Else

Ubisoft is arguing in court that players should have no reasonable expectation that players were purchasing “unfettered ownership rights in the game.” i.e. We can shut the game servers down even though you paid for the game, whenever we feel like it.

This is the problem with many online games. You enjoy the game, build your characters, investing time and effort - only to find out the game is going away in a few days/weeks.

So, do you really own your games, or videos, or music, or anything else online? This isn’t the first time this has happened, and it won’t be the last.

Apple Doesn’t Have to Listen to a Judge?

The old Fortnite case keeps coming back…

Recently, a judge issued a scathing rebuke of Apple’s failure to comply with allowing companies to bypass Apple’s in app payment system. Apple took 30% off the top for providing this payment system and wanted 27% to by-pass it. This was considered unacceptable to the court, and could cause a total shake up of how payment systems work in the near future for mobile apps.

This relates directly to Epic’s Fortnight case against Apple and Google, and has far-reaching implications for digital platforms.

Microsoft CEO claims 30% of code written at Google and Microsoft used AI

CEO Satya Nadella said at Meta's LlamaCon conference recently while at a sitdown with Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg. He also said that Microsoft is working on implementing AI Agents to review code automatically.

While investors want to see AI funds being used for such things, some engineers feel otherwise. Recent engineers at Google have said that their “AI tools” were basically Intellisense on steroids, and that while it made coding faster/easier, it was not being written with tools like ChaptGPT as most people think it is.

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