Elon Musk and Apple Go Head to Head in the Skies
13:32 Share

With leading networking and connectivity, advanced cybersecurity and expert partnership, Comcast Business helps turn today's enterprises into engines of modern business. Powering the engine of modern business. Powering possibilities. Restrictions apply.

Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Wednesday, April 2nd. I'm Victoria Craig for The Wall Street Journal. New York's gig economy workers could soon have a faster option to see a doctor, thanks to, you guessed it, AI. Then there's a battle among tech titans brewing above our heads.

actually way above our heads, for coveted airwaves that eliminate dreaded cell phone dead zones. We'll talk to our reporter in a WSJ exclusive about how Apple and Elon Musk are going head-to-head over satellites.

First, humans are leveraging artificial intelligence to make nearly every aspect of life easier and more convenient. And that now includes visits to the doctor. At least that could be the case for some gig economy workers like drivers for ride-sharing services. Brian Gormley covers venture capital and health care for WSJ Pro. He exclusively reports that L.A.-based Akito Labs is bringing its Scope AI technology

So Brian, talk us through what Aikido is and how it works. Aikido is setting up doctors around New York City, starting in Queens, who are using an artificial intelligence technology to help them diagnose and identify treatments for patients. Drivers would stop in at one of Aikido's locations, and they would take them to a doctor.

They would talk to a medical assistant who is prompted to ask questions by Scope AI through artificial intelligence. The artificial intelligence system would respond

take the patient's history and symptoms and develop a diagnosis or diagnoses and treatment recommendations. And a doctor would later accept or modify or reject those recommendations. Aikido trained Scope AI on historical data on patient visits so that it could accurately predict diagnoses and treatments. It's been aided by the development of large language models

And the technology is going to reach the point where they are ready to introduce it into actual medical practice, which they started last year and initially in cardiology in keto's own patients. But now the company plans to extend that technology to other specialties in its medical practices as well. So it's designed not necessarily to be a cost saver for doctor's offices necessarily, but just an easier to access way for people who are...

strapped for time or you don't want to take unpaid time off of their job to try to get help for ailments? The idea is to make it easier for patients to get care

in a timely manner, and for doctors to extend their reach, see more patients, review more patients than they could if they had to go through the more conventional approach of seeing each person individually one-on-one. Tell us about Aikido's history, because it started out life as a software company, but then became a healthcare provider. That's right. Aikido launched in 2015, and originally its business model was to sell software to help its customers understand

proactively identify cases where people were about to become sick so they could intervene accordingly. But then in 2022, Aikido shifted its strategy and acquired a multi-specialty medical practice and became a healthcare provider itself.

And along the way, it's been developing this artificial intelligence system that it is beginning to deploy in its own patients. And I suppose, as with all things AI, since this is an AI-assisted platform, the biggest potential concern for people using it is around the accuracy of diagnoses or treatment plans. And it's interesting, you point out in your story that Scope AI doesn't have FDA approval. The company says it does not need FDA approval because...

The artificial intelligence system is providing support to the doctors, but the doctors make the final call. And the system is new. It's introduced by Aikido back in August of 2024, originally. And so far, the company says it has not had any misdiagnoses, but the technology is being rolled out now, and we'll see how it goes.

It works as it becomes deployed more and more widely, in this instance in New York City, with rideshare drivers. That was Brian Gormley, WSJ Pro's venture capital and healthcare reporter. Coming up, three words that instantly make you roll your eyes with dread and frustration, cell phone dead space. Two of America's tech titans are taking on that problem and battling each other in the process. That's after the break.

With leading networking and connectivity, advanced cybersecurity and expert partnership, Comcast Business helps turn today's enterprises into engines of modern business. Powering the engine of modern business. Powering possibilities. Restrictions apply.

Cell phone dead zones. They're an annoying, but sometimes deadly problem for people, particularly in rural areas and in places struck by natural disasters. Elon Musk's SpaceX has been duking it out with Apple for years to eliminate that problem by using satellites in space.

The two companies are locked in a heated battle now for the rights to airwaves that carry signals from those satellites to people in dead zones around the world. WSJ telecom reporter Drew Fitzgerald has the exclusive story on that one.

So Drew, Apple and SpaceX seem to be getting on like oil and water at the moment. Tell us the central issue to this ongoing feud between these tech titans. The main issue at stake is really the future of satellite communications because it's unclear except to maybe very few people where each of these companies is going with this. Just as a reminder now, if you are in the United States and you want to call for help in a dead spot where there's absolutely no cell phone service,

You may have two options. If you're signed up to a beta test, which is quickly opening up to the general public, you can connect through T-Mobile to a Starlink satellite that's run by Elon Musk's company, SpaceX, and you can send a text message and you can call for help or you can just communicate with anybody you might want to get in touch with.

Or you can use an older service that was debuted by Apple nearly three years ago that will send a text message in some parts of the world or in many other countries. It's up to 17 countries now. You can at least send a signal to call for help. It's called Emergency SOS via Satellite. And it's essentially like calling 911. You may not be able to get on a full phone call and have a conversation with someone, but you can at least call for help.

That's the state of play now, but it's very clear that both companies, SpaceX and Apple, are trying to go bigger with this. As you point out, this is not a new thing for Apple, and it's also not really a new thing for SpaceX either. But they don't really want to play nice with each other. It seems that SpaceX is not really looking at Apple as a competitor, but another company to overtake. And it's appealing to the FCC for help in doing this.

They may not be direct competitors, but they're certainly treating each other as rivals at this point. And part of the reason is because they are competing for resources. This satellite service is very expensive to put into place. You need hundreds of satellites to make it work.

And you need wireless spectrum to send those signals in a clear way because they're always going up into space and connecting to satellites that are hundreds of miles away as opposed to a few miles away at a cell tower on the ground. So that costs a lot of money. And it also requires clear airwaves to be able to send the signals and not have it lost in transit.

SpaceX and Apple are vying for these resources to be able to launch satellites, which requires approvals, not just in the U.S., but in many countries around the world. And it requires regulatory approval for the airwaves that send these signals.

The latest turn of the screw here has been SpaceX seeking to stall the effort that Apple started when it debuted its emergency SOS service. Apple got a head start because at first there was a plan to possibly build its own satellites using Boeing, and that went nowhere. And instead, Apple chose to partner with a satellite company called Global Star that already had satellites in the sky.

What that did was allowed the company to start connecting its customers, any iPhone user with a compatible iPhone, really quickly. But the downside of that approach was that it was using a Global Star satellite network that was a little long in the tooth. So what Apple has done recently has not only paid to replenish some of the older satellites that Global Star had in the sky, but it's actually funding companies

a new build of a more advanced satellite constellation that would be able to do much more than just send text messages. It could be a lot more full-featured. It could possibly send text messages with images or even make voice calls. That is the promise of this investment of more than a billion dollars on top of what Apple has already invested in Global Star to make its satellite service more powerful.

And so what Elon Musk wants to do is just quash that effort with the FCC. Is that the right way to think about it? What SpaceX is trying to do with its FCC proceedings is basically get in the way of this expansion of

of Global Star that Apple is funding. Starlink is not just a broadband internet provider, which is its main business. It allows you to buy a dish, attach it to your home, and get home internet fixed on the ground in many parts of the world. But it's getting into cell phone connectivity. Now, to do that, Starlink is actually partnering with wireless providers in the U.S. The FCC has not yet made a final decision on

how Apple's expansion will be treated, and also how Starlink's many requests to expand its service into new spectrum services

and to launch new satellites will be treated. There's many, many proceedings going on that affect how both companies will be allowed to expand. All we can say for sure is that this FCC and its chairman, Brendan Carr, have said that they like to move quickly. They like to dispense with a lot of the rules and standards

steps that often slow down regulatory proceedings. So whatever the decision is, we may not have to wait long for it. Is there a world where SpaceX could work with Apple rather than seeing each other as rivals? I mean, don't they sort of need each other in this space to be successful?

Well, it's unclear if they need each other, but they have talked about it. Elon Musk actually tweeted about it a few years ago saying that they had held talks. But there's a long history of rivalry between these two companies, and it's unclear if they'll ever strike a direct partnership that would involve satellite communications.

That was WSJ Telecom reporter Drew Fitzgerald. And that's it for Tech News Briefing. Today's show was produced by Jess Jupiter and Julie Chang with supervising producer Matthew Walls. I'm Victoria Craig for The Wall Street Journal. We'll be back this afternoon with TNB Tech Minute. Thanks for listening.

Restrictions apply.