The Register Kettle Chris Williams, The Register, Nicole Hemsoth Prickett, Tobias Mann, Iain Thomson, Brandon Vigliarolo, Tom Claburn

There's no avoiding AI and LLMs this year. The technology is being stuffed into everything, from office software to phone apps. Nvidia, Qualcomm, and others are happy to push the notion that this machine learning must be performed on an accelerator, be it a GPU or an NPU. Arm this week made the case that its CPU cores, used in smartphones and more throughout the world, are ideal for running AI software.

For this week's Kettle, our journalists discuss the merits of running AI workloads on CPUs, NPUs, and GPUs; the power and infrastructure needed to do so, from personal devices to massive datacenters; and how this artificial intelligence is being used – what with Palantir's AI targeting system being injected into the entire US military.

Microsoft has held its annual Build developer conference but frankly it felt like Built - as in this is what we're bringing in and suck up up peons.

Chief on the reader concern list was Redmond's Total Recall feature - taking a screenshot every few seconds for the AI engine (and anyone who hacks your machine) to note. Amazingly no one at Microsoft seems to have said in the planning meetings "Er, this could really backfire." And so it has.

It's been a troubling week in China's relationships with the rest of the world and there's no sign things are getting better.

The US has announced sweeping trade tariffs against Chinese technology exports, Microsoft is giving key engineering and cloud staff the opportunity to get out of the country while they still can, and the world + dog is concerned that the Chinese state may be sponsoring the largest computer espionage operation the world has yet seen.

Lest we be accused of anti-Middle Kingdom bias it's almost certain the US is hacking back, and the rest of the world are no angels, but there's something disturbing about having the world's possibly upcoming superpower just rewriting the diplomatic rulebook. You can see the full conversation below

Our security Vulture did the full RSA conference, spoke up, and held folks to account

Buying $110B of your own stock is legal, but isn't a good look.

It's earnings season and Apple showed less-than-stellar performance over the second quarter of 2024, but had a solution.
Was it to invest in the next must-have tech gadget? Maybe build its own AI model or search engine so that it doesn't have to rely on Google's technology in those areas? No, it was to spend $110 billion on its own shares - the largest share buyback in American history and a movie that the markets loved.

But - as we discuss in the Kettle you can watch below -stock buybacks (a practice that used to be illegal until the 1980s) are a bit of a red flag. When tech companies stop investing in development and start slashing the cash on buy their own shares - we're looking at you IBM, Intel, Google, Boeing etc…

The conversation discusses the rising costs of technology and the impact on customers. It highlights examples of companies increasing prices to drive profits, such as Broadcom's acquisition of VMware and Microsoft's price hikes and introduction of ads in Windows 11. The conversation also touches on the financing strategies of companies, including using their own assets as collateral for loans. The potential bubble in the AI and GPU market is explored, as well as the challenges faced by customers in managing costs and navigating vendor pricing. The conversation concludes with a discussion on the role of open source and the need for alternative solutions.