Q&A with White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Arati Prabhakar on AI risks, the CHIPS Act, immigration for the STEM fields, and more — President Biden's administration will end within two months, and likely to depart with him is Arati Prabhakar, the top mind for science and technology in his cabinet.
Internal docs: in early 2021, Google's lawyers, policy team, and more worried that its $1.2B Project Nimbus deal with Israel may enable human rights violations — The tech giant, which has defended the deal to employees who oppose supplying Israel's military with technology, feared the project might damage its reputation.
European defense tech startup Helsing unveils its first AI attack drone, which can fly up to 100km and re-identify and engage targets without a data connection — Company says it can produce tens of thousands of weapons a year at lower cost than current autonomous systems
Social media videos documenting layoffs are now commonplace, especially by younger workers, creating headaches for companies; TikTok's #layoff has 32K+ posts — Gen Z workers posting redundancy videos are trending — but can harm their future prospects — An unexpected online meeting appeared …
CoinGecko: Ripple-linked XRP's market cap reaches $137B to become the third-largest cryptocurrency, up from less than $30B on November 5 when Trump won — - The cryptocurrency gained as much as 15% Monday to hit $2.50 — Since the US election it has added over $100 billion in value
The US adds new restrictions on transferring HBM chips to China, the fourth US attempt in three years to curb China, and adds 140 companies to its blacklist — Export of memory chips used in AI applications is restricted, but delayed announcement gives Chinese companies chance to stock up
Meta will require advertisers to be verified before they can run ads targeting Australian users with financial services, starting in early February 2025 — Exclusive: Businesses to require financial services license number to post Facebook ads, while individuals will need government-issued ID
Q&A with Nokia CEO Pekka Lundmark on Nokia's failure in mobile phones, moving from mobile and fixed networks into data centers and defense, 5G, and more — Pekka Lundmark sees opportunities for the Finnish communications company to grow in defense and data centers.
How Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve Native American languages, building speech recognition models for over 200 endangered Indigenous languages — Indigenous languages are rapidly disappearing, and AI could help preserve them, according to Indigenous technologists.
A profile of SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won, who made a highly risky bet to acquire debt-ridden Hynix in 2012 to form SK Hynix, which is now valued at ~$80B — The race to win the AI chip market is akin to Squid Game, quipped an industry insider during a lunch meeting recently. It's intense.
Salesforce says online Black Friday sales hit $74.4B globally, up 5% YoY, and $17.5B in the US, up 7% YoY; Adobe says US online sales hit $10.8B, up 10.2% YoY — The momentum of Thanksgiving — which saw consumers spend a record $33.6 billion spent globally online on the day — looks like it continued into Black Friday, with a bang.
Ex-Meta crypto chief David Marcus says there was no legal or regulatory angle for the government to kill its Libra project and “it was 100% a political kill” — How Libra Was Killed. I never shared this publicly before, but since @pmarca opened the floodgates on @joerogan's pod, it feels appropriate to shed more light on this. As a reminder, Libra (then Diem) was an advanced, high-performance, payments-centric blockchain paired with a
Google, which joined the Open Cloud Coalition, denies its offer of €100M+ in incentives to CISPE was linked to CISPE's antitrust complaint against Microsoft — El Reg has seen the presentation to CISPE members which sources say was intended to keep the lawsuit over licensing alive
The Commonwealth Bank of Australia says generative AI tools have helped it lower frauds by 30% and reduce call center customer wait times by 40% in 2024 — - Customer scam losses at Commonwealth Bank cut in half — CEO Matt Comyn says many more AI use cases in development
Japan allocates another $9.9B to boost its chip, quantum computing, and AI endeavors, with an undisclosed amount going to chip startup Rapidus — - Ishiba promised more than ¥10 trillion in outlays on chips, AI — Some of the funds are seen going to foundry startup Rapidus
Billy Perrigo / Time : An in-depth look at the UK's AI Safety Institute, whose researchers test AI systems for risks and for capabili...
