Google has put limits on Meta’s use of its Gemini AI models after the social media company sought more computing capacity than the rival tech group could provide, the Financial Times reported on Sunday.

Google, owned by Alphabet, told Meta around March it could not meet the full Gemini capacity the company had sought to purchase, the newspaper said, adding that the shortfall disrupted and delayed some of Meta’s internal AI projects.

Several other Google clients have also been affected, though to a lesser extent, according to the report. Meta has been particularly impacted due to its exceptionally high demand for Google’s models, the FT said.

Reuters could not immediately verify the report, which cited people familiar with the matter. Google and Meta did not immediately respond to requests for comment outside business hours.

Due to the restrictions, Meta has encouraged staff to be more efficient with AI tokens, the units that measure AI usage, the FT report said.

Even as companies continue to spend billions on chips and data centers, they are still struggling to secure enough computing power to support the growing demand for AI services.

Revenue at Google Cloud grew to $20 billion in the first quarter ended March, but CEO Sundar Pichai said computing power constraints prevented even higher growth and contributed to the cloud unit’s backlog nearly doubling quarter on quarter.

This story originally appeared on NYPost

This story originally appeared on NYPost

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-NY, revealed that she believes Congress should look to break up companies like Apple amid news that the tech giant might soon raise its prices on phones and laptops due to a strained processing chip supply chain.

“We need to break up a lot of these companies that are far, far too big and we need to be instituting consumer protections for people,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

Her statements reveal one of the many ways lawmakers are grappling with the realities of the AI race as companies feel the squeeze of global demand for processing power and as local communities wrestle with the costs of their use.

Like many other progressives, Ocasio-Cortez has advocated for a more government-led response, citing a distrust of corporate influence.

“The problem that we have is that these big companies think they are governments. They want to be governments. They want to have totally unchecked power,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

In recent weeks, Apple’s outgoing CEO Tim Cook signaled that the company might soon have no choice but to pass some of its climbing costs off to consumers.

“Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable,” Cook said in a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal.

“We’re doing our best to mitigate the huge increases that are being passed to us, and we’ve been trying to shield our customers from the increases, but the situation has become unsustainable.”

For years, companies like Apple have dominated demand for the processing chip market, the part of a computer that acts as the brain of a device.

These chips, which require highly sophisticated production, allow computers to perform calculations, process data and execute commands.

Now that AI companies are also adding to demand, Apple finds itself competing for a dwindling supply of processors, driving the company’s costs up.

Beyond her views on the relationship between the government and business, Ocasio-Cortez said that she believes it’s time Congress re-visit ways it can mitigate costs of the AI-race that have climbed on a local level.

In particular, she believes it’s time for lawmakers to address the energy strain of data centers.

When asked if she believed Congress should consider something beyond the Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) Act, President Joe Biden’s signature technology investment bill that became law in 2022, Ocasio-Cortez said she thought so.

“The CHIPS Act was passed before we saw this huge development in AI, so the CHIPS Act was really passed before data centers were a thing, so it wasn’t designed to anticipate the huge amount of supply that these centers are sucking up,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

Among other provisions, the CHIP act included $11.2 billion to modernize the country’s energy grid, created clean energy innovation programs and included $39 billion in domestic semiconductor production incentives.

The bill did not address the energy consumption strain caused by data centers.

“We are subsidizing a lot of these pieces of these AI data centers,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

This story originally appeared on NYPost

Scott Pelley is reportedly preparing for the post-CBS phase of his career — signing with powerhouse talent agency CAA just weeks after his dramatic firing from “60 Minutes.”

CAA will represent Pelley “in all areas” as the longtime correspondent explores opportunities following his 37-year run at CBS News, according to the New York Times.

The agency also represents “60 Minutes” correspondent Lesley Stahl. CAA confirmed the Times report when reached by The Post.

The move comes as another central figure in the network’s recent upheaval, former “60 Minutes” executive producer Bill Owens, is also plotting his next chapter.

Breaker Media recently reported that Owens is shopping a memoir about his decades-long career at CBS News through CAA literary agent Sloan Harris, raising the prospect of dueling insider accounts from two of the biggest names caught up in the network’s civil war.

Pelley’s departure capped weeks of extraordinary turmoil at CBS News.

The veteran correspondent was fired after publicly confronting newly installed “60 Minutes” executive producer Nick Bilton during a staff meeting, accusing CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss of “murdering” the iconic newsmagazine and claiming she had been “brought in to kill it.”

Bilton responded the following day, accusing Pelley of having “hijacked” his first staff meeting and informing him that his employment was being terminated “for cause.”

Since leaving CBS News, Pelley has repeatedly accused management of undermining the show’s editorial independence.

In a farewell statement posted after his dismissal, Pelley alleged that CBS News executives had attempted to inject “falsehoods and bias” into reporting and argued that Paramount’s new ownership was weakening “60 Minutes” while “apparently” seeking “to curry favor with the Trump administration.”

Owens voiced similar concerns.

In the memoir proposal, Owens describes Paramount’s settlement of President Trump’s lawsuit over a “60 Minutes” interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris as “perhaps the worst legal strategy ever employed by the worst-run media company in the history of America.”

Owens, who resigned last year after saying corporate interference had made it impossible for him to preserve the editorial independence of “60 Minutes,” also reportedly accuses Paramount of creating an internal “spy ring” that routinely circulated scripts and story plans to senior executives.

The Post has sought comment from Pelley, CAA, CBS News and Paramount.

This story originally appeared on NYPost

Last week, JPMorgan Chase startled Wall Street with an abrupt disclosure that two of its senior bankers — Troy Rohrbaugh and Doug Petno — had been named co-presidents, setting up what looks like a definitive horse race to replace 70-year-old Jamie Dimon.

The announcement is indicative of interesting developments inside the House of Dimon even if there’s nothing definitive about this ­bake-off.

First, despite Dimon’s embrace of constructs like DEI over the years, the place is at bottom a meritocracy.

The spinout of JPM is that Rohrbaugh and Petno were chosen after a long and deliberate board decision. That left no room for Marianne Lake, the perceived front-runner for Dimon’s job and one of the highest ranking women on Wall Street.

She had been running a unit — consumer and community banking — nearly as big and complex as the other guys’. Rohrbaugh took her slot. Thursday, 56-year-old Lake “retired,” declining to supply a comment for the press release that announced the big reshuffle.

Based on my reporting, it hasn’t gone unnoticed inside the top echelons of JPM that two white dudes were chosen to succeed Dimon over a glass-ceiling-busting woman. Dimon was once fixated on constructs like Diversity Equity and Inclusion, so much so that his bank kept touting its benefits well after the Trump administration and the Supreme Court began reminding big companies that doling out jobs based on race or gender is unconstitutional.

But the year is 2026 and times are a-changing. Lake wasn’t happy with last week’s reshuffle, I am told, and I can understand why: She is a good executive, well-liked and smart. The DEI-obsessed business media anointed her as Dimon’s successor, but it was her performance that earned her a place at the top of JPM — though maybe not at the very top.

Dimon and his board are getting the message that the country has moved well past the time when race and gender should matter more than your record of achievement.

Still, the future of JPM remains murky — and don’t be surprised if a woman eventually makes it to the top of the bank. The spin is that Rohrbaugh and Petno are the heir apparents to Dimon, who is expected to relinquish the CEO spot in about three years and remain as executive chairman of the bank for years after that.

Solid records

To be sure, Rohrbaugh’s and Petno’s records have been solid. You don’t read much lately about big trading losses or scandals, and JPM always seems to be in the middle of the most high-profile IPOs (see SpaceX). What is needed is competence, and by all accounts both Rohrbaugh, a former options trader, and Petno, an investment banker by training, have that in ­spades.

But somehow, I can’t see either of them being the second coming of Dimon, one of corporate America’s most voluble leaders. That Rohrbaugh and Petno could conceivably be running the nation’s largest bank — taking over for a CEO who defined American finance for decades — is a little shocking. They are not exactly household names, as Dimon was even when he worked with Sandy Weill creating Citigroup long before becoming Chase CEO in 2006. That alone is enough to make me and others who follow this stuff entertain some doubts about whether either of them actually will.

Also, I’ve seen this act before. There have been too many would-be successors to Dimon to count, only to see them ushered out of JPM’s Midtown HQ when Dimon grew tired of their quirks and questioned their abilities.

It was an especially weird case of déjà vu for those of us who were around in 2021, recalling how ­Dimon had staged a strikingly similar race — only that time with two top female bankers, Jennifer Piep­szak and Lake.

Piepszak took herself out of the race early last year, saying she didn’t want the top job.

So what does last week’s decidedly odd news add up to? From my perspective, things could get even weirder — that is to say, there’s a better-than-even chance Dimon and JPMorgan’s board will ditch these two dudes for yet somebody else to lead the bank. There’s also a chance that somebody could turn out to be a woman.

I also couldn’t help but notice that in last week’s management shakeup, Mary Erdoes, the long-time head of the JPM asset and wealth management division, is sticking around. So is Piepszak, Dimon’s chief operating officer. Both of them received $20 million so-called retention awards.

Erdoes, it was noted to me, operates one of the most important and public-facing businesses in the company; she brings a degree of Dimonesque swagger to the job.

She’s had some miscues. She didn’t cut off ties with Jeffrey Epstein fast enough, some critics say, although she wasn’t alone in that regard. But Dimon knows talent. That’s why he’s paying big bucks to keep both her and Piepszak onboard — and possibly to reopen the race to succeed him.

This story originally appeared on NYPost

Billionaire investor Leon Black was hit with subpoenas from the House Oversight Committee midway through testimony on his relationship with late financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

The move came after Black, the co-founder of Apollo Global Management, refused to answer lawmakers’ questions about whether there are any non-disclosure deals between him and women connected to Epstein, lawmakers said.

Black is now set to come back to Congress for videotaped testimony under oath on July 16, per one of the subpoenas. The other one demands the NDAs.

“We need the NDAs to be able to move forward with the investigation,” Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) told reporters, mentioning that they concerned “women” possibly in Epstein’s orbit.

“We want to know: Was Jeffrey Epstein involved in the NDAs? Was he involved in writing? Was he involved in awarding funds to the women for the NDAs? What was the reason for the NDAs? We want to know everything about the NDAs,” added Comer.

The investor earlier told the committee in a closed-door deposition that he’d played no part in Epstein’s sex-trafficking scheme.

A lawyer for Black voiced outrage over the subpoenas.

“Mr. Black came here voluntarily to assist the Committee. This was nothing more than a planned political stunt. Mr. Epstein had no involvement with any NDA’s, whether they exist or not,” attorney Susan Estrich said in a statement.

“Let me reiterate, the Committee did not ask a single question about the legitimate payments to Epstein for professional services on tax and estate matters.”

One of Epstein’s biggest clients, Black told the committee he’d been deceived by a man he had hired for tax advice.

“I have never abused a woman,” he said. “I have never been with an underage woman. I have never engaged in sex trafficking.”

Black also denied paying Epstein for access to women, insisting he had never been blackmailed.

“I was not involved with, and had no knowledge of, any of Epstein’s heinous conduct,” he said.

The 74-year-old — worth an estimated $13.5 billion, according to Forbes — paid Epstein $158 million over five years for estate and tax planning.

He told the committee that he thought he was paying far less. Black’s drafted testimony claimed that Epstein falsely promised the fees were tax-deductible, or “60-cent dollars.”

What Black believed was $95 million in net fees turned out to be $158 million, he said, while admitting that the late pedophile “solved a massive estate problem” that lawyers could not.

He fired the financier in 2018 after a dispute over fees and an unpaid $30 million loan. Black stepped down as Apollo’s chief executive in 2021. The company is now led by Marc Rowan.

Black’s testimony cited a review by the law firm Dechert, which found he paid Epstein the massive sum but uncovered no evidence he took part in any crimes. Black said Dechert examined 60,000 documents and interviewed 20 people over three months.

He called himself the only figure in Epstein’s orbit to commission an independent investigation and make the results public.

The Wall Street bigwig said he met Epstein in the mid-1990s and gave him a second chance after his 2008 conviction for soliciting a minor.

He said Epstein told him the case was an isolated incident involving a fake ID.

“I knew Jekyll,” Black said. “I didn’t know Hyde.”

He said he did not learn of Epstein’s sex trafficking of minors until the financier was charged for the crime in July 2019.

The Justice Department alleged that Epstein created a vast network of girls, some as young as 14, for him to sexually abuse between 2002 and 2005.

FBI files released by the Trump administration over the past year have deepened the scrutiny of Epstein’s ties to the elite of US finance, politics and media.

One Epstein victim told agents in 2019 that Epstein directed her to give massages to Black and others. But New York prosecutors examined the claim and never charged him.

Black devoted much of his Friday statement to three civil suits brought by the Wigdor law firm, calling them “baseless” and “fabricated.”

The first two were dismissed with prejudice. In the third, the ex-Apollo CEO said a federal judge issued a 76-page ruling last month sanctioning the plaintiff, her lawyer and the firm for submitting false evidence.

He said the plaintiff testified she bore four of Epstein’s children, three of them kidnapped at birth.

“As a result of this torrent of lies and misrepresentations, I have received death threats, and my family now feels unsafe. For the first time in my life, I’ve had to deploy a bodyguard,” Black said, according to the prepared remarks.

Before the session began, Comer told reporters he believed it might be the most “groundbreaking” hearing yet in the committee’s nearly year-old Epstein probe.

“This could be a pretty significant deposition as we try to get answers,” he said.

The committee is investigating how the federal government handled Epstein and his associate Ghislaine Maxwell, the socialite daughter of a British newspaper tycoon.

Epstein died by suicide in jail in August 2019 while awaiting trial. His British madam Maxwell is serving a 20-year sentence for crimes including sex trafficking of minors.

The panel previously interviewed former President Bill Clinton and billionaire Bill Gates, who both denied wrongdoing. Black and his family own about 14% of Apollo.

Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), the top Dem on the Oversight Committee, voiced support of subpoenaing Black.

“There are numerous allegations of real abuse — by women, by survivors — against Mr. Black,” Garcia said. “We understand that Mr. Black may have also connected and had a relationship with President Trump.

This story originally appeared on NYPost

Google is reportedly looking to bleed publishers yet again — threatening to exclude them from a lucrative new artificial-intelligence partnership unless they allow the tech giant to train its AI bots on their valuable content.

In recent months, Google has been pitching news and entertainment publishers on a new pilot program that would promote their content in Google’s AI Overviews – a big boost to organizations that have faced significant declines in web traffic, the Information reported.

But in exchange, Google wants broad access to the publishers’ content, including the right to potentially use it to train AI bots, a person familiar with the project told the Information.

Google, which launched its Gemini chatbots in 2023, is driving a hard bargain.

It warned publishers that if they don’t agree to the new program, they will eventually lose out on payments from the current content-licensing arrangement, known as Showcase. Showcase is being ended, Google reportedly told some companies.

“This is Google’s game. They’re gonna dominate here,” said Jason Kint, chief executive of Digital Content Next, a trade group that represents online publishers including the New York Times, the Washington Post and News Corp, The Post’s owner.

“There’s no fair deal discussions that can happen with Google. It’s really a matter of how much money they want to drop on an individual organization,” Kint told The Post.

A spokesperson for Google told The Post: “As people’s news preferences change, we’ve been expanding our partnerships through our News AI pilot program, working with a wide range of publishers to explore how AI can drive more engaged audiences.”

The spokesperson added that Google has been “testing features” to “help people cut through information overload, easily decide where to click out, and connect with news in different formats.” 

Publishers have complained that traffic to their websites from search results has already plummeted – some by as much as half – since Google launched its AI Overview tool in 2024, which supplies an AI-generated summary of search results at the top of the page.

A Pew Research Center study found that when people see an AI Overview, they are half as likely to ever click a link from Google, and when they find an answer in an AI Overview, they are more likely to end their browsing session altogether.

Google has said it continues to send billions of clicks to websites every day and that the Pew study’s methodology was flawed.

One year after Google launched its AI Overview tool to the public, CNN saw traffic to its website fall by 30%, while Business Insider and HuffPost’s sites saw traffic plunge about 40%, according to an NPR report citing data from Similarweb.

That is a big hit to news publishers, who are heavily dependent on advertising – which is tied to how many clicks they can drive to their website – as well as audience revenue streams, like subscriptions and other paywalls.

Meanwhile, several publishers have filed lawsuits accusing tech companies of scraping data from their sites for use in training their AI bots – which has sent AI giants racing to secure content-licensing agreements.

In 2023, the New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging the ChatGPT-maker had stolen content from its website to train its AI models. 

OpenAI has since signed more than a dozen content-licensing deals with news and entertainment publishers.

Kint said tech giants have been holding the reins in these discussions — Google controls 90% of the search-engine market and was ruled a monopoly in a landmark antitrust case in 2024.

Google asked a federal appeals court to reverse the decision in May.

The company first announced the new AI pilot program in December, with initial partners including the Washington Post and the Guardian.

“They bundled the opt-out from AI training with the Search opt-out. So publishers, if they wanted to say, ‘Hey, you can’t train on my content for AI Overviews,’ then they had to opt out of Search,” Kint told The Post. 

“If you’re opting out of Search, then you’re opting out of the internet.”

Publishers that currently participate in Google’s Showcase program, which highlights their content across Google News features, receive a flat annual fee.

If partners do not sign on to the new pilot program, they will continue to receive annual payments as long as Showcase remains in place, but these will end if the program does, according to the Information. 

Google said it has been renewing Showcase agreements.

Those who sign up for the new pilot will be agreeing to broader content-use terms for the same flat annual fee, which is giving some publishers pause, the Information reported.

This story originally appeared on NYPost

The wealthy husband and wife co-founders of the plant-based supplement brand Cymbiotika and their young children came face to face with armed home invaders in Cannes who escaped with cash and jewelry, The California Post has learned.

Shahab Elmi, Durana Elmi and their two minor children had rented a home in France for the Cannes Lions International Festival.

Three armed masked men broke into their rental home early Thursday morning, holding the family at gunpoint and stealing several items.

Among the items reportedly stolen: valuable watches, jewelry, cash and luxury goods.

“Cymbiotika proudly brought wellness to Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity this week, creating meaningful conversations around health, innovation, and longevity with some of the world’s most influential voices. Cymbiotika Co-Founder and CXO/CCO lived her childhood dream by meeting her hero Oprah,” a rep for the family told The Post.

“Unfortunately, after an evening of meetings at Cannes Lions, the Elmi family was targeted in a frightening home invasion at gunpoint. Thankfully, the family is safe. At this time, the Elmi family asks for privacy as they process and heal from this traumatic incident,” they continued.