Sunday, May 7, 2023

Research papers and staff interviews detail the workarounds of Chinese companies like Huawei, Baidu, and Alibaba to develop AI systems without the latest chips (Wall Street Journal)

Wall Street Journal:
Research papers and staff interviews detail the workarounds of Chinese companies like Huawei, Baidu, and Alibaba to develop AI systems without the latest chips  —  Research in China on workarounds, such as using software to leverage less powerful chips, is accelerating



Emerging markets like India, where iPhone has a low market share, are starting to take off for Apple, attracting a lot of switchers to its ecosystem (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Emerging markets like India, where iPhone has a low market share, are starting to take off for Apple, attracting a lot of switchers to its ecosystem  —  Apple is turning its attention to emerging markets at a time when growth is slowing at home.  Also: Power On is now on Discord …



Two OpenAI contractors, one of them earning $15 per hour, speak about their work labeling the training data used for the company's products, like ChatGPT (David Ingram/NBC News)

David Ingram / NBC News:
Two OpenAI contractors, one of them earning $15 per hour, speak about their work labeling the training data used for the company's products, like ChatGPT  —  Two OpenAI contractors spoke to NBC News about their work training the system behind ChatGPT.  —  Alexej Savreux, a 34-year-old in Kansas City …



Saturday, May 6, 2023

Scammers appear to be hacking verified Meta accounts to impersonate the company and run Facebook ads asking users to download shady tools likely with malware (Taylor Hatmaker/TechCrunch)

Taylor Hatmaker / TechCrunch:
Scammers appear to be hacking verified Meta accounts to impersonate the company and run Facebook ads asking users to download shady tools likely with malware  —  Sketchy Facebook pages impersonating businesses are nothing new, but a flurry of recent scams is particularly brazen.



An in-depth look at the regulatory risks for OpenAI under GDPR, including questions around future data scraping and handling "right to be forgotten" requests (Jess Weatherbed/The Verge)

Jess Weatherbed / The Verge:
An in-depth look at the regulatory risks for OpenAI under GDPR, including questions around future data scraping and handling “right to be forgotten” requests  —  The European Union's fight with ChatGPT is a glance into what's to come for AI services.



Bluesky says it can't "accommodate heads of state" as it seeks to control growth during its beta; Bluesky currently has ~60K users and a waitlist of 1.2M people (Kylie Robison/Fortune)

Kylie Robison / Fortune:
Bluesky says it can't “accommodate heads of state” as it seeks to control growth during its beta; Bluesky currently has ~60K users and a waitlist of 1.2M people  —  Bluesky, the buzzy social media platform that's emerging as a Twitter competitor, said on Friday that it will not allow …



Discord says it will let "high-visibility users" secure usernames to minimize the risk of impersonation, as some users criticize its plans to change usernames (Umar Shakir/The Verge)

Umar Shakir / The Verge:
Discord says it will let “high-visibility users” secure usernames to minimize the risk of impersonation, as some users criticize its plans to change usernames  —  A race to reserve usernames is kicking off on Discord.  —  Starting in the next couple of weeks …



AI text generators are quietly authoring more of the internet; more AI-generated books and personalized articles mean fewer clients buying human-written content (Will Oremus/Washington Post)

Will Oremus / Washington Post:
AI text generators are quietly authoring more of the internet; more AI-generated books and personalized articles mean fewer clients buying human-written content  —  From recipes to product reviews to how-to books, artificial intelligence text generators are quietly authoring more and more of the internet.



Binance may face US probe for violating Russian sanctions: Report

The inquiry by the Justice Department's national security division is looking at whether Binance or company officials ran afoul of sanctions related to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the report said, citing five people. https://ift.tt/ygu4K1i

A journalist recounts discovering that ByteDance surveilled her in 2022 after reporting on TikTok's staff troubles in London and wonders why she was targeted (Cristina Criddle/Financial Times)

Cristina Criddle / Financial Times:
A journalist recounts discovering that ByteDance surveilled her in 2022 after reporting on TikTok's staff troubles in London and wonders why she was targeted  —  The FT's Cristina Criddle on discovering she'd been surveilled by the controversial social media company



Friday, May 5, 2023

Google Messages rolls out “Send photos faster” to more users

The Google Messages feature "Send photos faster" was introduced last month and is now being more widely released. The "Send photos faster" feature can be found as a new toggle in the settings menu of the Google Messages app. It is specifically labelled as "Send photos faster" and comes with the description "Resolution is reduced for faster sending." https://ift.tt/yV7za1m

Sources: Ant Group's transformation into a fully regulated company has been on hold for over a year as China reshuffles its regulatory system (Wall Street Journal)

Wall Street Journal:
Sources: Ant Group's transformation into a fully regulated company has been on hold for over a year as China reshuffles its regulatory system  —  Powerful new regulator will have to approve the fintech giant's application to become a financial-holding company



Google, Sonos head to trial in contentious smart speaker patent fight

The case is part of a sprawling intellectual property dispute between the former business partners that includes other lawsuits in the U.S., Canada, France, Germany and the Netherlands. https://ift.tt/flR4JaU

Airbus, Eutelsat, SES, Thales, and other European satellite companies plan to bid for the IRIS² satellite constellation, hoping to rival SpaceX's Starlink (Eric Berger/Ars Technica)

Eric Berger / Ars Technica:
Airbus, Eutelsat, SES, Thales, and other European satellite companies plan to bid for the IRIS² satellite constellation, hoping to rival SpaceX's Starlink  —  The bid includes large players such as Airbus Defence and Space, Eutelsat, and SES.  —  A consortium of nearly every major …



Amazon plans to bring ChatGPT-like technology to Alexa: Report

Amazon calls its LLM Alexa Teacher Model but a company spokesperson echoed Jassy's comments saying that Amazon is building larger “more generalised and capable” LLMs to make Alexa “more proactive and conversational.” The spokesperson also said that Alexa has been using the Teacher model for several years. Just like Amazon, Google also relies on its own language models. https://ift.tt/AJwFkP6

Electricians are flocking to regions around the US to build data centers, as AI shapes up to be an economy-bending force that creates boom towns (New York Times)

New York Times : Electricians are flocking to regions around the US to build data centers, as AI shapes up to be an economy-bending force...