News in brief: UK Ad Spend Rose 10% in Q3 2024; Tables Turn as OpenAI Accuses DeepSeek of Property Theft; Amazon and Microsoft face Cloud Services Probes  

UK Ad Spend Rose 10% in Q3 2024; 

UK Ad Spend rose 9.7% in the third financial quarter of 2024 to reach £10.6bn, according to the latest Expenditure Report from the Advertising Association and WARC. This marks the first time ad spend has exceeded the £10bn barrier in Q3. Overall, the UK ad market is expected to have grown 11.2% by the end of the financial year in April. The channels particularly driving growth include online display, search, broadcaster video on-demand, and out of home. Looking ahead to the rest of 2025, UK ad spend is expected to continue outperforming the UK economy.  

Tables Turn as OpenAI Accuses DeepSeek of Property Theft while Attempting to Block Lawsuit from Indian Media Organisations 

In an interesting turn of events, OpenAI has found itself at the other end of a “potential breach of intellectual property”. OpenAI claims it has found evidence that Chinese AI company DeepSeek used its AI models to train its own open-source competitor, reports the FT. According to OpenAI, DeepSeek used a technique called ‘distillation’, which involves achieving better performance on smaller models by using outputs from larger, more capable ones – effectively allowing them to get similar results at a significantly lower cost. OpenAI says this is a breach of their terms of service, although AI experts have weighed-in that it is common practice for AI labs to use outputs from AI giants, essentially piggy-backing off their work. OpenAI has not provided any evidence to back up its accusation. 

Meanwhile, OpenAI faces a slew of allegations from publishers for using their work to train its AI models. The company is currently attempting to block India's biggest media organisations from joining a lawsuit which accuses it of using their copyrighted material to train its AI models without permission or licence. Ironically, OpenAI believes this case should be dismissed. 

Amazon and Microsoft face Cloud Services Probes  

An investigation by The Competition and Markets Authority into the UK’s cloud services market has found that it “is not working as well as it could”. The regulator’s provisional findings conclude that improvements/interventions could make the market work better for UK businesses “in terms of improved prices, quality and choice.” Both Amazon and Microsoft now face separate probes over whether they have strategic market status in cloud services, which could result in them facing interventions to modify their practices.