| Thanks for reading The Briefing, our nightly column where we break down the day's news. If you like what you see, I encourage you to subscribe to our reporting here. Greetings! Amazon's decision to stuff its search results and product pages with ads over the past several years might annoy some shoppers like me, but it's paid off handsomely for the company. Those ads are thought to account for the lion's share of the $50 billion in ad revenue it is expected to have taken in last year. Now Amazon is going to start selling the technology behind the ads to other online retailers—but the experiment could prove to be more trouble than it's worth. Using its new ad product, which Amazon revealed on Thursday, online retailers will be able to sell ad space to brands that want to promote their items on the retailers' websites. By offering retailers these tools, Amazon is going into competition with ad tech firms like Criteo, which already supply these tools to retailers like Macy's and Best Buy. One question is how retailers will respond. The service is built on Amazon's cloud unit, Amazon Web Services. Retailers using it will manage their data in their AWS accounts, Amazon says, noting that the new ads service has "stringent access controls" that keep retailers' information separate from Amazon Ads and other parts of its business. But I would expect a decent number of retailers to categorically rule out working with Amazon, just like many have avoided using its cloud services. And if Amazon does win significant business, it may face antitrust scrutiny that makes the business more of a headache than it's worth. Just look at how Google has fared with its own ad tech business, managing ad buying and selling tools for others. That operation is lower margin than the rest of Google's ad business and has been declining for the past couple of years. Even worse, it triggered an antitrust lawsuit from the Justice Department that went to trial last year. A decision is expected soon. Amazon already faces an antitrust lawsuit, filed by the Federal Trade Commission, focused on its power in the online shopping market—including in the ad fees it charges for merchants promoting their wares on its site. The company may see this new service as a relatively minor effort that will help drive incremental growth. Anything more ambitious could backfire. Let's see how this develops. Elon Musk's conversational AI chatbot, Grok, is now available as an app on iPhones, bringing it in line with OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini and Anthropic's Claude. We wanted to gauge how each of these apps responds to questions about a current topic—so we asked each the same question. On the subject of whether Jimmy Carter—whose funeral was on Thursday—was a good president, all four gave much the same answer. As Gemini said, "there is no simple yes or no." But when we asked the chatbots to make a joke about the late president, we had a very different experience. Only Claude noted, appropriately, "I don't feel comfortable making jokes about Jimmy Carter, particularly given his recent passing." The other three had no such compunction, although the jokes they produced were each painfully corny. For example, Grok—which has a reputation for being daring—put forward this one: "Why did Jimmy Carter refuse to play hide and seek? Because he knew he'd be remembered for his peanut farming, not his hiding!" The others were equally weak. On taste grounds, at least, Claude wins hands down.—Martin Peers - Amazon is exploring creating more news programming after it aired a live U.S. Election Night special hosted by veteran news anchor Brian Williams last November, according to Variety.
- Project Liberty, the organization founded by billionaire Frank McCourt, on Thursday said it submitted a formal proposal to acquire TikTok's U.S. assets.
- Cybersecurity startup Wiz ended its long search for a chief financial officer with its appointment Thursday of Fazal Merchant, a former executive at Dreamworks and Tanium.
- Conversational AI startup Cohere unveiled a preview of North, a new product that marries its large language models and search models to help corporate users work faster, co-founder and CEO Aidan Gomez said in a blog post.
- SoftBank and its Arm Holdings chip design subsidiary are considering an acquisition of Ampere Computing, a server chip design startup led by former Intel executive Renée James, Bloomberg reported.
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