Tag: Artificial Intelligence

Meta Deal Reversal Deepens Split Between China and Silicon Valley

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Manus, an artificial intelligence start-up, began with an idea among three engineers in Wuhan, China, united by an obsession with A.I. and a shared ambition to build a global venture. From the outset, they looked beyond China. Their big break came in March last year. Manus had drawn the attention of Silicon Valley investors with an A.I. agent capable of carrying out tasks on its own. By year’s end, Meta had agreed to acquire Manus. It looked like a clean breakout from China’s crowded, tightly regulated market and a path…

China Will Require Meta to Unwind Acquisition of AI Start-Up Manus

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The Chinese government said on Monday that it would require the unwinding of Meta’s acquisition of Manus, a Singapore-based artificial intelligence company with Chinese founders, in a move that could chill other Chinese entrepreneurs from seeking tie-ups with foreign partners. Chinese officials had said in January that they were investigating whether Meta’s acquisition of Manus in December violated the country’s rules on foreign investment. They were also assessing whether the deal violated China’s requirements that companies obtain approval for the export of certain technologies. The National Development and Reform Commission,…

5 Tall Tasks for John Ternus, Apple’s Next C.E.O.

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Apple said this week that Tim Cook, its chief executive since 2011, would step down and become its executive chairman in September. John Ternus, the company’s head of hardware engineering, will succeed Mr. Cook in the corner office. Mr. Ternus, who has worked at Apple for 25 years, will take over a moneymaking behemoth facing a series of pressing questions, including geopolitical threats, an unpredictable man in the White House, artificial intelligence, and the search for new ideas. Here are some of the challenges confronting Mr. Ternus: Navigating Apple’s ties…

DeepSeek’s Sequel Set to Extend China’s Reach in Open-Source A.I.

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When the Chinese start-up DeepSeek published details about one of its artificial intelligence models last year, it sent shock waves through the tech industry. The company said it had built its system by spending far less on computer chips than American rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic. It marked the start of what became known as China’s “DeepSeek moment,” shorthand for the belief that Chinese A.I. companies were ready to showcase their technical capabilities to the world. The DeepSeek moment reflected a shift in the global A.I. landscape. The change was…

Babies, Robots and Climate Change

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One statistic that stopped me recently is that China’s population is projected by some experts to halve by the end of the century. Halve! China was the most populous country in the world until only three years ago. Birthrates in Italy, Germany and Japan have been low for as long as I can remember. They’re now falling across the world. So what does it mean for humanity when humanity is shrinking? Will it solve climate change by reducing the human footprint? Reduce the disruption of artificial intelligence taking human jobs?…

Gaming Out the Price of a Trump Trade Deal With China

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Andrew here. We’re digging deeper into President Trump’s tariff talks with China, which have been postponed for another 90 days. (Some critics are calling it another TACO — short for “Trump Always Chickens Out” — moment.) We’re also still thinking about the implications of the deal Trump reached in which Nvidia will pay 15 percent of revenue from A.I. chip sales to China. Will Beijing view this as state-sponsored capitalism? Will Nvidia — and by extension companies like Apple and Tesla — no longer be viewed as independent businesses but…

A.I. Leaders Press Advantage With Congress as China Tensions Rise

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In recent weeks, American lawmakers have moved to ban the Chinese-owned app TikTok. President Biden reinforced his commitment to overcome China’s rise in tech. And the Chinese government added chips from Intel and AMD to a blacklist of imports. Now, as the tech and economic cold war between the United States and China accelerates, Silicon Valley’s leaders are capitalizing on the strife with a lobbying push for their interests in another promising field of technology: artificial intelligence. On May 1, more than 100 tech chiefs and investors, including Alex Karp,…

In One Key A.I. Metric, China Pulls Ahead of the U.S.: Talent

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When it comes to the artificial intelligence that powers chatbots like ChatGPT, China lags behind the United States. But when it comes to producing the scientists behind a new generation of humanoid technologies, China is pulling ahead. New research shows that China has by some metrics eclipsed the United States as the biggest producer of A.I. talent, with the country generating almost half the world’s top A.I. researchers. By contrast, about 18 percent come from U.S. undergraduate institutions, according to the study, from MacroPolo, a think tank run by the…

Chinese National Accused of Stealing AI Secrets From Google

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A Chinese citizen who recently quit his job as a software engineer for Google in California has been charged with trying to transfer artificial intelligence technology to a Beijing-based company that paid him secretly, according to a federal indictment unsealed on Wednesday. Prosecutors accused Linwei Ding, who was part of the team that designs and maintains Google’s vast A.I. supercomputer data system, of stealing information about the “architecture and functionality” of the system, and of pilfering software used to “orchestrate” supercomputers “at the cutting edge of machine learning and A.I.…