Theo on A.I. · June 18th

From storyflo. This is your daily audio brief for June 17th.

It's Theo. June 17th, tech roundup — five stories, here's number one.

Let's get into it.

First, from AI News. Google Cloud generative AI automates council planning operations.

Government ministries are deploying Google Cloud generative AI across municipal agencies to automate council planning operations. Public sector administration handles vast volumes of unstructured data that delay infrastructure development. The UK central government established a target to construct 1.5 million new homes by 2029.

I’ve been thinking about how the token‑maxxing craze fizzled out faster than anyone expected. CEOs were practically shouting “push the AI button,” but once the quarterly bills arrived, the enthusiasm hit a wall.

Uber, for instance, burned through its whole AI budget in a few months, and other firms started pulling back—Claude licenses got trimmed, Meta even killed its internal leaderboard. It’s the classic “we’ll see the magic, then we see the cost” moment, and it’s reshaping how companies treat AI spend.

Tiffany Luck at NEA is now zeroing in on the next wave: AI IPOs that revolve around personal agents, but with a hard look at ROI. Investors want clear value, not just hype, so the focus is shifting to sustainable, measurable returns rather than endless experimentation.

Tokenmaxxing was the hottest trend in Silicon Valley earlier this year, with CEOs encouraging employees to push AI usage as far as it would go. Then the bill came due. Uber reportedly blew through its annual AI budget in a few months, some companies cut Claude licenses for parts of their org, and Meta killed its internal leaderboard.  This tension between […]

Midjourney CEO David Holz just showed off the company's first hardware product and plans to build a San Francisco spa, which he admitted is a bit different from the "cat pictures" produced by its AI image generator. Dubbed The Midjourney Scanner, it's an ultrasound-based full-body scanner that uses a ring of sensors to capture vertical slices of the inside of your body, looking at the composition of your muscle, fat, bone, and organs to start. Holz said ideally, you could do this once a year or every single day, as it "aims for image quality comparable to MRI in many ways." He mentioned that one way he'd like to use it would be to see how h …

Microsoft has quietly become the main supplier of OpenAI models in China, selling the technology to the country’s largest internet companies even as OpenAI and Anthropic keep their own models out of the market on intellectual-property and misuse grounds. The arrangement, detailed this week by Bloomberg, hands Microsoft a position no other American AI vendor holds: it sells the GPT series to Chinese firms that the model’s own creator will not deal with directly. The scale is not trivial. ByteDance has been Microsoft’s largest AI customer in recent years, running largely on OpenAI models, and is on track to spend more than US$1 billion a year on Microsoft’s AI and cloud services, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg. Ant Group, Meituan and Tencent also buy AI models through Azure, though Ant says it develops its own models and that its core products do not rely on outside systems. Inside Microsoft, the growth has been celebrated rather than played down. Azure’s AI revenue in China expanded faster than in any other sales territory, roughly tripling in the financial year to June 2025 after climbing about 400% the year before, then-chief commercial officer Judson Althoff told staff at a July 2025 sales meeting, according to a transcript reviewed by Bloomberg. Althoff described Microsoft as the one company “bringing those two places together,” meaning the AI hubs of the US West Coast and China’s east. President Brad Smith has separately told US lawmakers that the China business accounted for roughly 1.5% of the company’s revenue in 2024. The reason comes down to Microsoft’s singular contract with OpenAI, which lets it set its own terms for selling GPT models abroad. Both OpenAI and Anthropic have declined to sell into China directly, and Anthropic’s models are absent from Microsoft’s China line-up altogether. That leaves Microsoft acting as the intermediary for models whose makers have decided the Chinese market is too risky to serve. Risk is the recurring tension. OpenAI has privately pressed Microsoft to do more to stop Chinese customers from “distilling” its models, Bloomberg reported, a technique that uses one model’s outputs to train another. Microsoft points to automated monitoring and a rule that it sells only to established companies rather than individual developers. Yet sources told Bloomberg that Chinese buyers face no heightened scrutiny, and synthetic data generated from the models is difficult to police. To limit its exposure, Microsoft does not host the OpenAI models on Chinese soil; customers reach them over the internet from data centres elsewhere, Singapore among them. The contradiction sharpens when you look at what Microsoft hosts alongside GPT. It added DeepSeek’s R1 to Azure AI Foundry in January 2025, and this month confirmed to Axios that it is testing a fine-tuned, Azure-hosted version of DeepSeek-V4 as a cheaper option for Copilot Cowork, the enterprise agent currently powered by OpenAI and Anthropic models. So Microsoft is selling a Chinese model into Western businesses while selling American models into Chinese ones, taking the margin on both legs of the trade. Whether the balancing act survives the politics is another matter. The China business is contentious in Washington, where lawmakers have cast the country’s AI push as a threat to American industry, and OpenAI’s private objections could grow louder. For now, Microsoft owns the market for OpenAI models in China, and it is the only player being paid by both sides. See also: China’s DeepSeek V3.2 AI model achieves frontier performance on a fraction of the computing budget Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out AI & Big Data Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. The comprehensive event is part of TechEx and is co-located with other leading technology events, click here for more information. AI News is powered by TechForge Media. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars here. The post Microsoft sells OpenAI models in China. OpenAI and Anthropic won’t. appeared first on AI News.

HSBC has entered a multi-year partnership with Google Cloud to develop and deploy artificial intelligence tools across its global operations. Announced at Google Cloud Summit London 2026, the agreement covers work in wealth management, financial crime risk management, and internal decision support. HSBC will work with Google Cloud and Google DeepMind engineering teams on AI tools and programmes using Gemini models and the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform. HSBC expects the partnership to support more than 200 AI use cases over the next two years. Selected initiatives could each return more than US$100 million through direct revenue gains or efficiency improvements, according to the bank. HSBC had existing AI deployments before the Google Cloud agreement. In its 2025 Strategic Report, the bank said it had more than 100 active generative AI use cases and was increasing AI partnerships. HSBC says it has more than 600 AI use cases across the group. These include fraud detection, cyber security, transaction monitoring, customer service, and risk assessment. More than 600 HSBC applications already run on Google Cloud. A 2026 Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance report found that 71% of surveyed industry respondents were adopting generative AI, while 52% were adopting agentic AI. HSBC announced a separate multi-year partnership with Mistral AI in December 2025. The agreement gives the bank access to Mistral AI’s commercial models. HSBC said the models would support internal tools, financial analysis, multilingual reasoning, translation, and prototyping. HSBC has listed other generative AI uses in credit analysis, customer support, document analysis, and text assistance. CIO Dive reported in February that 85% of HSBC employees had access to generative AI tools. The report also said the bank was assessing the technology across 50 processes, including fraud detection and credit applications. The Google Cloud agreement follows earlier AI work between HSBC and Google in financial crime detection. HSBC has previously said it partnered with Google to co-develop Dynamic Risk Assessment, an AI system used to check for financial crime. HSBC said the system was piloted in 2021 and found two to four times more financial crime than previous methods. Google Cloud has said HSBC screens more than 1.2 billion transactions each month for signs of financial crime. Under the new partnership, HSBC will use generative AI and agentic AI in financial crime risk management. The bank expects the tools to help it intervene twice as fast when risk is detected across the nearly one billion transactions it monitors each month. In wealth management, HSBC plans to combine AI-generated insights with the work of relationship managers. The bank said the tools are intended to support financial advice and client service. HSBC said it will expand an AI-powered decision assistant already used by thousands of employees. The tool has reduced administrative work and client meeting preparation from hours to minutes, according to the bank. HSBC has applied generative AI in software development. More than 20,000 developers are using coding assistants, with a 15% efficiency gain in time spent coding, according to the bank. HSBC plans to use AI to organise regulatory procedures into a structured format. The bank said this would provide employees with options and analysis for decision-making while keeping human judgement involved. In March, HSBC announced that David Rice would become its first Chief AI Officer, effective 1 April. HSBC said the role was created to oversee AI adoption across the group. Georges Elhedery, Group CEO of HSBC, said the bank is using AI to create more personalised customer experiences while retaining human judgement and accountability. Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, said the partnership would support HSBC’s AI work through Gemini, the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, and Google DeepMind’s research expertise. See also: Visa ChatGPT integration enables AI agent retail purchasing Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out AI & Big Data Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. The comprehensive event is part of TechEx and is co-located with other leading technology events, click here for more information. AI News is powered by TechForge Media. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars here. The post HSBC expands AI banking partnership with Google Cloud appeared first on AI News.

Noam Shazeer, co-author of the landmark "Attention Is All You Need" paper and former co-lead of Google's Gemini models, is joining OpenAI. He only returned to Google from Character.AI in 2024 as part of a $2.7 billion deal. After Karpathy's move to Anthropic, it's the second major AI hiring shake-up this year. The article Google's Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer joins OpenAI after two-year return stint appeared first on The Decoder.