🙃 CrowdStrike offers $10 Uber Eats gift cards as an apology for the outage

👀 Reddit blocking all search engines except Google, as it implements AI paywall

• Reddit has begun blocking search engines from accessing recent posts and comments, except for Google, which has a $60 million agreement to train its AI models using Reddit's content.

• This move is part of Reddit's strategy to monetize its data and protect it from being freely used by popular search engines like Bing and DuckDuckGo.

• To enforce this policy, Reddit updated its robots.txt file, signaling to web crawlers without agreements that they should not access Reddit’s data.

🙃 CrowdStrike offers $10 Uber Eats gift cards as an apology for the outage

• CrowdStrike sent $10 Uber Eats gift cards to partners to apologize for a global IT outage caused by a defect in a Windows update.

• Some partners experienced issues with redeeming the gift cards because Uber flagged them as fraudulent due to high redemption rates.

• Screenshots and reports from various sources showed multiple email exchanges from CrowdStrike addressing the gift card issues and reinstating the vouchers.

🚨 Mistral’s Large 2 is its answer to Meta and OpenAI’s latest models

• French AI company Mistral AI launched its Mistral Large 2 language model just one day after Meta's release of Llama 3, highlighting the intensifying competition in the large language model (LLM) market.

• Mistral Large 2 aims to set new standards in performance and efficiency, boasting significant improvements in logic, code generation, and multi-language support, with a particular focus on minimizing hallucinations and improving reasoning capabilities.

• The model, available on multiple platforms including Azure AI Studio and Amazon Bedrock, outperforms its predecessor with 123 billion parameters and supports extensive applications, signaling a red ocean of competition in the AI landscape.

💸 OpenAI could lose $5B this year and run out of cash in 12 months

• OpenAI could lose up to $5 billion in 2024, risking running out of cash within 12 months, according to an analysis by The Information.

• The AI company is set to spend $7 billion on artificial intelligence training and $1.5 billion on staffing this year, far exceeding the expenses of rivals.

• OpenAI may need to raise more funds within the next year to sustain its operations, despite having already raised over $11 billion through multiple funding rounds.

🗺️ Apple Maps launches on the web to take on Google

• Apple Maps is now accessible on the web through a beta version launched on Wednesday afternoon, offering driving and walking directions, ratings, and reviews via desktop or mobile browsers.

• The web-based Apple Maps is currently available in English and works with Safari and Chrome on Mac and iPad, as well as Chrome and Edge on Windows PCs, with future support for additional languages and platforms planned.

• Apple's official web rollout of Maps, previously accessible via developer APIs, marks a significant expansion aimed at competing with Google Maps, which has long been available through web browsers.