SED News: Perplexity’s Chrome Play, Meta’s AI Freeze, and Intel Becomes Too Big to Fail

Hi and welcome to SED News. I'm Gregor Vand. And I'm Sean Faulconer. And this is the version of Software Engineering Daily where we just take a spin through the last month's headlines. We go into our main topic in the middle where we go into a bit more depth about something very specific, and then we take a fun look at some hacker news highlights and then just give some predictions for the week ahead. As you may be able to hear, I'm a little bit sick this week. The news must go on though, but I might not be as chatty as usual. So Sean is gonna be doing more of the chatting today, so I thank Sean for that. Yeah. Absolutely. I like to chat. I like to talk. So I'm happy to step in, step up for you. But as you said, podcasting waits for no one. There's no sick days in podcasting. Absolutely. What have you been up to over the last month, Sean? Yeah. So it's been a busy month. I had some vacation time and then the company I work for, we launched my team launched three products recently. And now we're sort of in a sprint from now to the October where we have our big annual conference, current New Orleans this year. So there's gonna be a lot of work between now and getting ready for that with a lot of different travel in between. It's exciting times, but what's going on? How about yourself? Yeah. Well, it's well, it sounds like summer is very much over for you. And, yeah, it feels the same this way. I've managed to actually take a bit of a break over the last three, four weeks, which is very unusual to get up in Scotland. That's probably when I come to Scotland, I always seem to get the flu or something. So that's that. But, yeah, it's been good. But, yeah, likewise, summer is definitely ending. I'm going on to some different projects in the next few weeks, so that's exciting, but definitely ready for a lot of work ahead. So with that, maybe we'll just run into the main news headlines. So these are things that might have popped up on the main news outlets. So, like, Wall Street Journal or Financial Times or, like, TechCrunch, whereas Hacker News is kind of more the niche stuff. So the first one is Perplexity have been making a lot of waves. We've got a couple of things on them. Yeah. I mean, this is kind of a crazy one where Perplexity offered, allegedly, 34,500,000,000.0 to buy Google's Chrome browser, which is almost double perplexity's own valuation and way above what probably most people think Chrome is worth. And then while this is going on, there's a federal judge is weighing in antitrust remedies after ruling Google illegally monopolized search. Perplexity seems to be signaling like, hey, before the sale, we're ready to buy it. And, …