The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is moving to put Google under formal federal supervision…something that could hit the company with the same inspections the government does on major banks. Techcrunch.com reports that the CFPB has been in talks with Google for months about the supervision order, which hasn’t yet been made final. Now that a second Trump term is coming up, it may be that his administration will put the brakes on the CFPB, or even stop it somehow from proceeding against Google.

AI companies are hitting a wall of sorts in their rush to build out newer AI models. According to macrumors.com, OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic are facing what they are calling ‘diminishing returns’ for their expensive efforts to build out the new models. Over at Apple, they are using what they are calling a ‘phased rollout’ of Apple Intelligence. OpenAI’s Orion, their latest and greatest, is falling short of their performance expectations. Google is also feeling headwinds with their next iteration of Gemini, and Anthropic has delayed its release of Claude 3.5 Opus. According to Bloomberg, the problem is attributed the challenges to the increasing difficulty in finding “new, untapped sources of high-quality, human-made training data” and the enormous costs associated with developing and operating new models concurrently with existing ones.

Meta is planning to start ‘monitizing’ Threads, with a plan to begin running ads as soon as January 2025. Engadget.com says Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg  had previously claimed making money off the app would be a ‘multi-year’ effort. Meta plans a slow rollout…just a ‘small number’ of advertisers will start appearing in January. Threads now has 275 million monthly users, and is getting over a million new sign ups a day according to Zuck. The much smaller Bluesky app, which is now #1 at Apple’s App Store, got a million new users just in the last week. They have grown from 9 to 15 million users in a very short time. Bluesky has said it may experiment with subscription based features instead of ads. Read between the lines…a premium service for subscription, and they’ll do ads in addition!

Tesla’s Cybertruck has now put out the 6th recall this year. Arstechnica.com notes that only about 2431 are affected, but this recall can’t be fixed by pushing out a software update. Those trucks have a faulty drive unit inverter. At least 5 trucks have had a failure of the part, and Tesla says the problem was a bad batch of inverters made between November 6, 2023 and July 30, 2024. Owners will have to take the trucks in to have a technician work on the recalled trucks.

I’m Clark Reid and you’re ‘Technified’ for now.