by Raphael Dudler | May 21, 2026 | meta ai
Meta has launched Muse Spark — its first flagship large language model built entirely in secret, under Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang’s newly formed Superintelligence Labs. It is a closed, proprietary model — a direct departure from the open-source Llama strategy that Meta has championed since 2023. Muse Spark delivers competitive performance on multimodal perception, reasoning and agentic tasks at a fraction of the compute cost of Llama 4. The open-source era at Meta may be ending.
by Raphael Dudler | May 20, 2026 | gafam watch
Today, May 20, Meta begins executing its 8,000 layoffs — 10% of its global workforce. LinkedIn is cutting 5% of staff this week. Amazon has eliminated 30,000 corporate roles across six months. More than 103,000 tech employees have lost their jobs in 2026 — approaching the total for all of 2025 in just five months. Google I/O is celebrating the AI future. On the same day, the human cost of that future is arriving in employees’ inboxes.
by Raphael Dudler | May 20, 2026 | google ai
Day 2 of Google I/O 2026 fills in the details that the keynote left out. Gemini Spark — Google’s 24/7 personal AI agent — requires AI Ultra at $100 per month. Sundar Pichai told the audience that artificial general intelligence is “just a few years away.” Ask YouTube turns Google’s video platform into a conversational AI search engine. And Google is moving from prompt limits to a compute-based usage model that charges by complexity, not by query. The implications for European users and regulators are significant.
by Raphael Dudler | May 19, 2026 | apple ai
The partnership that put ChatGPT inside Siri is falling apart. Bloomberg reports the two-year alliance between Apple and OpenAI has deteriorated significantly — with OpenAI consulting legal counsel about issuing a breach of contract notice against Apple. OpenAI alleges Apple failed to adequately integrate and promote ChatGPT on the iPhone. Apple has concerns about OpenAI’s privacy practices. And OpenAI is building its own hardware. The breakup — if it happens — reshapes AI on a billion devices overnight.
by Raphael Dudler | May 18, 2026 | google ai
Google I/O 2026 is confirmed. Gemini 3.2 Flash — not 4.0 — deploys simultaneously across Search, Maps, YouTube, Gmail and Chrome for billions of users. Android XR glasses from Samsung, XREAL, Warby Parker and Gentle Monster get their first public preview. Gemma 4 open-weights launch commercially. Google Health Coach arrives at $9.99 per month. This is not a capability story. It is a distribution story. gafam.ai — the European eye on Big Tech and AI.
