Friday, December 6, 2024

Uber and Chinese autonomous vehicle company WeRide launch a commercial robotaxi service in Abu Dhabi, marking Uber's first international AV offering (Rebecca Bellan/TechCrunch)

Rebecca Bellan / TechCrunch:
Uber and Chinese autonomous vehicle company WeRide launch a commercial robotaxi service in Abu Dhabi, marking Uber's first international AV offering  —  Ride-hail giant Uber and Chinese autonomous vehicle technology company WeRide have launched a commercial robotaxi service in Abu Dhabi.



FEC filing: Elon Musk poured at least $274M into US political groups in 2024, including $238.5M for his America PAC, making him the biggest US political donor (Bill Allison/Bloomberg)

Bill Allison / Bloomberg:
FEC filing: Elon Musk poured at least $274M into US political groups in 2024, including $238.5M for his America PAC, making him the biggest US political donor  —  - Musk gave at least $274 million to elect Trump, GOP allies  — Trump has tapped Musk to help reshape federal bureaucracy



Industry insiders believe Pat Gelsinger's hasty exit could be a prelude to Intel moving away from manufacturing its chips altogether, in a blow to US ambitions (Financial Times)

Financial Times:
Industry insiders believe Pat Gelsinger's hasty exit could be a prelude to Intel moving away from manufacturing its chips altogether, in a blow to US ambitions  —  The Silicon Valley-based company could scale back its semiconductor manufacturing business in a blow to American ambitions



Monday, December 2, 2024

Social media videos documenting layoffs are now commonplace, especially by younger workers, creating headaches for companies; TikTok's #layoff has 32K+ posts (Cristina Criddle/Financial Times)

Cristina Criddle / Financial Times:
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 (Sidhartha Shukla/Bloomberg)

Sidhartha Shukla / Bloomberg:
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 (Wall Street Journal)

Wall Street Journal:
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



Sunday, December 1, 2024

Meta will require advertisers to be verified before they can run ads targeting Australian users with financial services, starting in early February 2025 (Josh Taylor/The Guardian)

Josh Taylor / The Guardian:
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 (Bloomberg)

Bloomberg:
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 (Iris Kim/NBC News)

Iris Kim / NBC News:
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 (Yoolim Lee/Bloomberg)

Yoolim Lee / Bloomberg:
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.



Arizona's Maricopa County is set to have the second largest concentration of US data centers by 2028, as the state races to increase electricity production (Pranshu Verma/Washington Post)

Pranshu Verma / Washington Post : Arizona's Maricopa County is set to have the second largest concentration of US data centers by 202...