It is a warehouse the size of 12 football pitches that promises to create much-needed jobs and development in Caucaia city, north-east Brazil. But it won’t have shelves stocked with products. This vast building will be a datacentre, believed to be earmarked for TikTok, the Chinese-owned video-sharing app, as part of a 55bn reais (£7.3bn) project to expand its global datacentre infrastructure. As the demand for supercomputer facilities rises, fuelled by the AI boom, Brazil is attracting more and more tech companies. The choice of Caucaia is no accident. Several…
Tag: Computing
In Taiwan and China, young people turn to AI chatbots for ‘cheaper, easier’ therapy
In the pre-dawn hours, Ann Li’s anxieties felt overwhelming. She’d recently been diagnosed with a serious health problem, and she just wanted to talk to someone about it. But she hadn’t told her family, and all her friends were asleep. So instead, she turned to ChatGPT. “It’s easier to talk to AI during those nights,” the 30-year-old Taiwanese woman, tells the Guardian. In China, Yang*, a 25-year-old Guangdong resident, had never seen a mental health professional when she started talking to an AI chatbot earlier this year. Yang says it…
Trump says he has a ‘little problem’ with Tim Cook over Apple’s India production
Donald Trump has admonished Apple and its chief executive over the tech firm’s reported plans to source production of US-bound iPhones from India. The US president said he had a “little problem” with Apple’s Tim Cook, after reports that the company is planning to switch assembly of handsets for the US market from China to India. “I had a little problem with Tim Cook yesterday,” said Trump, speaking in Qatar on Thursday. Referring to Apple’s recent promise to spend $500bn (£375bn) in the US, he added: “I said to him:…
Nvidia’s CEO makes surprise visit to Beijing after US restricts chip sales to China
The chief executive of the American chip maker Nvidia visited Beijing on Thursday, days after the US issued fresh restrictions on sales of the only AI chip it was still allowed to sell to China. Jensen Huang’s surprise visit was on the invitation of a trade organisation, according to a social media account affiliated with state media. The official broadcaster China Central Television said Huang met Ren Hongbin, the head of the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade, where he said he hopes “to continue to cooperate with…
Apple to pay $490m to settle claims it misled investors over sales in China
Apple has agreed to pay $490m to settle a class-action lawsuit alleging chief executive Tim Cook misled investors about a steep downturn in iPhone’s sales in China that culminated in a jarring revision to the company’s revenue forecast. The preliminary settlement filed Friday in Oakland, California, federal court stems from a shareholder lawsuit focused on the way Apple relayed information about how iPhone models released in September 2018 were performing in China, one of the company’s biggest markets. Cook signaled that the new iPhones were off to a good start…
ASML halts hi-tech chip-making exports to China reportedly after US request
A Dutch manufacturer has cancelled shipments of hi-tech microchip machinery to China after pressure from the US government, it has been reported. ASML, which is a key firm in the global semiconductor manufacturing supply chain, was due to export three chip-making machines to China but had its export licences revoked by the Dutch government before they were shipped. The company is one of the only manufacturers of extreme ultraviolet lithography systems (EUVs), which use lasers to help create the circuits for chips. The advanced technology is used by leading chip…
Chinese influencers using AI digital clones of themselves to pump out content
In September, Chen Yiru, a Taiwanese influencer with nearly nine million fans on Weibo, livestreamed footage of himself eating chicken feet for a jaw-grinding 15 hours. His followers were suitably wowed – until some started to question if such a feat was humanly possible. The small print on the video stream confirmed their suspicions: “For display purposes only, not a real person.” Many of Chen’s fans were outraged, and he reportedly lost more than 7,000 followers between 24 and 26 September. Even the legal community weighed in. Quoted in Chinese…
The great powers signed up to Sunak’s AI summit – while jostling for position
Sitting in a purpose-built hut in the grounds of the historic Bletchley Park country estate, British officials believed they had pulled off a diplomatic coup. On stage in front of them was the UK’s technology secretary, Michelle Donelan, and behind her were high-level representatives from the US and China, together for the first time to discuss the international regulation of artificial intelligence. Even better, both countries were among 28 signatories to the “Bletchley declaration”,an agreement to work together on safety standards that may prevent AI systems turning on humanity. Rishi…
UK, US, EU and China sign declaration of AI’s ‘catastrophic’ danger
The UK, US, EU and China have all agreed that artificial intelligence poses a potentially catastrophic risk to humanity, in the first international declaration to deal with the fast-emerging technology. Twenty-eight governments signed up to the so-called Bletchley declaration on the first day of the AI safety summit, hosted by the British government. The countries agreed to work together on AI safety research, even amid signs that the US and UK are competing to take the lead over developing new regulations. Rishi Sunak welcomed the declaration, calling it “quite incredible”…
US orders immediate halt to some AI chip exports to China, says Nvidia
The chip designer Nvidia has said the US has told it to bring in new curbs on the export of some of its high-end artificial intelligence chips to China immediately as regulators advanced the deadline. The restrictions were supposed to come into play 30 days after 17 October, when the Joe Biden administration announced measures to stop countries, including China, Iran and Russia, from receiving advanced AI chips designed by Nvidia and others. Nvidia did not say why the US government had accelerated the timing but does not expect a…