Tag: Regulation and Deregulation of Industry

The German Auto Industry, a Pillar of the National Psyche, Is Trembling

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The centerpiece of Mercedes-Benz’s 140th birthday party in January was a patent application filed in 1886 by an engineer named Carl Benz for a “vehicle with gas engine.” The way Mercedes executives spoke of the handwritten document, which at one point was projected on a large wall on the company campus in Stuttgart, Germany, it might have been a sacred parchment. It not only certifies that Germany is the birthplace of the automobile but also helps explain why the woes of the country’s automakers — Volkswagen, Mercedes and BMW —…

We Need a Better Test for Dangerous A.I.

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Perhaps the most important argument we’re having about artificial intelligence right now is how to determine which models are safe to release and which are too dangerous. That argument became louder recently, when at least two of OpenAI’s models escaped a sealed testing environment and broke into the servers of an A.I. company called Hugging Face. According to OpenAI, which publicly reported the incident a week later, its models were taking a cybersecurity test and reasoned that the solutions might be on Hugging Face’s servers, which house a digital library…

A Ton of Space Junk Tumbles Unpredictably to Earth Every Week

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One December afternoon, the sky tore open and a fiery hunk of metal, wider than a school bus, came hurtling down. It was louder than a thunderclap when it plunged into a patch of farmland, startling everyone in the village of Mukuku, about three hours south of Nairobi, Kenya. “People were thinking this is the end of the world,” said John Mukunuu, who lives nearby. When the villagers arrived, they found a giant ring, taller than a man and heavier than a horse, lodged into the earth. They watched it…

The Fight Tearing Apart Silicon Valley

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This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email transcripts@nytimes.com with any questions. natalie kitroeff From “The New York Times,” I’m Natalie Kitroeff. This is “The Daily.” [THEME MUSIC] For years, a debate has been simmering in Silicon Valley over the right way to build AI. Should the technology be open and free for anyone in the world to use, or should we tightly control how it’s…

This Is How America Trounces China in the A.I. Race

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The Chinese government has spent three years giving away its most capable artificial intelligence to anyone to use. That generosity was always temporary. Chinese authorities have reportedly been meeting with Alibaba, ByteDance and the start-up Z.ai to discuss restricting overseas access to some of China’s most advanced models — including systems that have not yet been released. The U.S. government’s instinct will likely be to answer with a ban of its own. That would be a mistake. The right response is the opposite: America and its allies should build and…

China Rewrites the ‘Soft Power’ Playbook for the A.I. Age

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In the Cold War era, “soft power” meant American movies and music that won hearts and minds abroad. Today, in the digital era, China is promoting a very different kind of soft power: its open, low-cost artificial intelligence technology. In a speech last week, China’s leader, Xi Jinping, described so-called open-source A.I. as key to China’s ambitions to shape the global development of the technology. Mr. Xi hailed open-sourcing, in which much of the software can be freely shared and modified, as a “rare and historical opportunity” to spread the…

China’s A.I. Play Is Different From America’s

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Early in the Cold War, even as the United States and the Soviet Union engaged in a relentless nuclear arms race, they treated nuclear technology as a tool of soft power and diplomacy — something to share and export, a seal on alliances and a token of friendship. Thus Dwight Eisenhower’s America launched the Atoms for Peace program, which helped build civilian nuclear programs around the world, in the same year that it executed the Rosenbergs for giving the Soviets our atomic secrets. The Soviet Union likewise exported forms of…

China’s Chip Champion to Raise Billions in Race for A.I. Control

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China’s largest maker of memory chips is raising billions of dollars in a blockbuster public offering to pursue the nation’s agenda of technological self-sufficiency and leadership in the global race to develop artificial intelligence. ChangXin Memory Technologies, known as CXMT, said in a filing on Wednesday that it had roughly doubled the price of its offering on the Shanghai exchange from earlier guidance, based on strong investor demand. It is seeking to raise the equivalent of up to $9.8 billion. That would be the largest initial public offering in Asia…

We Returned From China. We Realized Our Century’s Biggest Challenge.

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Humanity is inching along a precarious tightrope. Our world is in the midst of deciding how the artificial intelligence revolution will unfold and what limits should be drawn. Too much caution could waste A.I.’s promise of faster economic growth, greater scientific discovery and more prosperity. Too little caution could unleash labor-market chaos and social disorder. Balance matters. If we get the balance between control and growth wrong at any point, we’ll fall into the gorge below. And no country is guaranteed to get to the opposite side. This is our…

The Real A.I. Race Isn’t America vs. China

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A globally recognizable tech executive, high-spirited from preparing for a public offering, offers imprudent remarks criticizing the government. The state strikes back harder than anyone expects. Overnight, the bargain between a skyrocketing sector of the economy and the government is shattered. If you think this story could be about Anthropic, you’re only half right. In 2020, the Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma found himself in the doghouse after he publicly rebuked Chinese regulators. Citing regulatory concerns, the authorities canceled the public offering of Ant Group, another company Mr. Ma helped found,…