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The australiabusinessblog.com Top 3

• And we’re back!: That’s what Microsoft is saying after some of its services, such as Outlook, Xbox Live and Teams, went down during a “change made to the Microsoft Wide Area Network”, Ivan reports.
• What you text is what you will see: We’ve been hearing a lot about text-to-image lately, and today is no different. Remember when Shutterstock and OpenAI teamed up in October to add artificial intelligence to Shutterstock’s libraries? Well, today the stock photo giant shows us the fruits of that labor with a generative AI toolkit to create images from text prompts. Ingrid has more.
• Plugged in: BMW i Ventures gets a reload of one of its latest investments, pumping $13 million into Bulgaria-based Ampeco, a company that provides an electric vehicle charging management platform, Mike reports. As he points out, you may recall that BMW was an early investor in the abandoned ChargePoint and ChargeMaster companies.

Startups and VC

Injective, a layer-1 blockchain focused on building financial applications, has launched a $150 million ecosystem initiative, the platform’s CEO and co-founder Eric Chen said. Jaquelyn in its article, Injective is launching a $150 million ecosystem fund to accelerate interoperable infrastructure and DeFi adoption.

One of the most remarkable things about construction robotics is the sheer volume of tasks that can potentially be automated, Brian writes. He believes the entire category is a prime target for robotics startups as it addresses the three big D’s of automation: boring, dirty, and (often) dangerous. It is therefore logical that Built buys fellow construction robotics company Roin.

Fun stuff. There are five more:

When it comes to large language models, should you build or buy?

Image Credits: Jenny Detrick (Opens in a new window) /Getty Images

Americans spent nearly $20 billion on pizza delivery in 2021. Most people could probably bake one at home, but speed and convenience are powerful incentives at dinner time.

The same goes for machine learning algorithms: should companies select open source models, license large language models without modification, or modify them and pay much higher usage rates?

“While building looks extremely attractive in the long run, it requires leadership with a strong risk appetite over an extended period of time,” writes ML engineer Tanmay Chopra.

Three more from the TC+ team:

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Big Tech Inc.

Frederick watched what Google was doing at this year’s Flutter Forward event and found the open source framework gaining some new graphics capabilities, launching its first attempts to compile Flutter to WebAssembly and working on some RISC-V -support. He writes, “Virtually all of these capabilities are still in canaries and behind experiment flags, but they do show where Google plans to take this project in the coming months.”

Here are five more for you: