Africa pushes to join age of AI

Hi, you’re receiving our free Tech In Brief newsletter because you had been getting one of Bloomberg’s technology newsletters that are now subscriber-only. You can manage your subscriptions here.

Tech Across the Globe

ByteDance value: The owner of TikTok was valued at $480 billion in the bidding for a block of shares won by Chinese investment firm Capital Today.

Battlefield 6 is number one: EA’s Battlefield 6 surged to the top of this year’s video game sales charts in the US, according to market tracker Circana. Outside of Nintendo’s historic Switch 2 debut, this is the strongest new release this year.

Robot deliveries: Uber will offer sidewalk robot deliveries in the UK beginning in December in a partnership with Starship Technologies.

Revalued

Physical Intelligence, a startup developing AI software to help robots learn, was valued at $5.6 billion in its latest fundraising round. Alphabet’s independent growth fund, CapitalG, led the $600 million round for the startup, founded in 2014 by former Google DeepMind researchers and academics from Stanford University and UC Berkeley.

Must Read

While billions is being spent by US companies from Meta to OpenAI on artificial intelligence development, Africans are aching to get a start in the race to use the technology, Loni Prinsloo and Yinka Ibukun report in today’s Tech In Depth. The pair write about the Bloomberg Africa Business Summit, where a variety of speakers from the private sector and government addressed the need for the continent to join the age of AI.

Get the Tech In Depth newsletter for analysis and scoops about the business of technology from Bloomberg’s journalists around the world.

This Week in Q&AI

The agreement announced this week by Microsoft and Nvidia to invest as much as $15 billion in Anthropic, while the AI company pledged to use  $30 billion of computing capacity from Microsoft’s cloud service, spurred renewed fears that AI spending is circular in nature, Shirin Ghaffary reports in this week’s Q&AI. These deals, which have become the new normal for the AI sector, are among the reasons for talk of an AI bubble, she writes.

You’ve got questions about AI. We’ve got answers. Sign up for Bloomberg Technology’s weekly Q&AI newsletter.

Get Tech In Depth and more Bloomberg Tech newsletters in your inbox:

• Cyber Bulletin for coverage of the shadow world of hackers and cyber-espionage
• Game On for diving deep inside the video game business
• Power On for Apple scoops, consumer tech news and more
• Screentime for a front-row seat to the collision of Hollywood and Silicon Valley
• Soundbite for reporting on podcasting, the music industry and audio trends
• Q&AI for answers to all your questions about AI