Greetings from Yifan in California, your #techAsia host this week. It's been an unusually busy summer in Silicon Valley, partly due to the continued AI race between Big Tech and startups, but in addition the upcoming US presidential election has caused chaos amongst tech geeks.
A bunch of tech heavyweights, including Tesla CEO Elon Musk, have led the campaign in tech circles for Donald Trump to run for president. It can be an exaggeration to say that Silicon Valley goes Republican, as many within the traditionally liberal area are supporting Democratic candidate and former California Attorney General and Vice President Kamala Harris.
However, there isn’t a denying that Musk has an unmatched audience base in comparison with other technology leaders. This was demonstrated by the Millions of individuals he and Trump drew to Xformerly referred to as Twitter, on Monday.
The two insisted on calling the highly anticipated live broadcast on X a “conversation” or “chat” quite than an interview. That is smart. Musk didn't ask the Republican candidate any actual questions, however the two spent the 2 hours denigrating the Biden administration and repeating a number of the typical Trump arguments, comparable to illegal immigration, the Ukraine war, tensions within the Middle East and the previous president's views on the leaders of Russia, China and North Korea.
Hardly anything concerning the two-hour exchange surprised me, except perhaps the 40-minute delay attributable to X's technical problems firstly. While I and plenty of others tried to determine easy methods to pay attention to the 2 of them, scammers were attempting to make big money.
While trying to find a re-creation of the X livestream on YouTube, I got here across a fraudulent account called “Tesla US” that played a video labeled “Live” that featured an AI-altered version of Musk saying he and Trump would double users' crypto holdings in the event that they transferred their assets to a certain digital wallet. The fake livestream had greater than 100,000 viewers before YouTube suspended the account.
This shouldn’t be an isolated case. Similar crypto scams have been popping up on YouTube since Musk endorsed Trump and Trump spoke at a Bitcoin conference in July.
Both men enjoy considerable support amongst crypto users, as many imagine that a Trump administration can be more friendly to digital assets than a Harris administration. But I’m wondering how he would protect them from crypto scams like this one?
China rules
The dispute between Scarlett Johansson and OpenAI over developer ChatGPT's alleged use of the actress' voice without her consent in one in every of its latest models has drawn public attention to the dark side of artificial intelligence.
The Hollywood star threatened to sue OpenAI. However, the end result of the case is difficult to predict, as there continues to be no legal framework within the US for such copyright infringements related to AI.
Maybe China can offer some lessons on thisIn April, a Beijing court issued the primary ruling in China on an individual's right to their voice. A voice actor had sued several firms for violating the precise to artificial voice reproduction. The court found that a number of the firms had indeed violated the plaintiff's rights and ordered them to pay 250,000 renminbi (US$35,000) in damages.
It shouldn’t be the one ruling with groundbreaking implications for the regulation of artificial intelligence, Nikkei Maki Sagami writes. Chinese courts have issued a series of rulings related to generative AI that show how Beijing views the technology and the way it desires to take the lead in setting standards.
False alarms
TikTok has been sending news-style push notifications containing inaccurate and misleading information, including a conspiracy theory about Taylor Swift and a weeks-old tsunami warning, the Financial Times writes Stephanie Stacey.
Researchers say the notification format — which the viral video-sharing platform uses to spice up engagement through personalized content recommendations — could give misinformation a false “stamp of authority,” tricking users into being less critical of what they devour.
A false report leaked to the FT could have particularly apprehensive Swifties within the Sunshine State. It falsely stated: “Taylor Swift has cancelled all tour dates in Florida, which she describes as 'racist.'”
That's not true—Swift continues to be scheduled to perform 3 times in Miami in October—but at the least one commenter on the underlying video referenced within the alert said he initially thought the notification was “a news article.”
The alerts appear to robotically scan the descriptions of posts that receive, or are more likely to receive, high levels of engagement on TikTok — including some which can be weeks old. One incident involved a post originally uploaded as an April Fools' joke that was shown to users in mid-April with none context.
Winning design
Vietnam is emerging as a brand new chip hub in Asia, not for manufacturing but for research and development, because of its reasonably priced, high-quality talent pool. Companies from the US, Taiwan and South Korea are racing to construct research facilities within the Southeast Asian country, writes Nikkei Asia's Lien Hoang, Cheng Ting-Fang, Kim Jaewon And Liane Lauly.
The boom in artificial intelligence and the shifts in the availability chain triggered by tensions between the US and China are Increase demand for local talent in Vietnam. At the identical time, severe labor shortages in traditional chip countries comparable to South Korea and Taiwan, in addition to the United States, are causing firms to look further afield for engineers.
Compared to Taiwan or South Korea, Vietnam's productivity and salary levels for engineers make the country attractive to firms. At the identical time, the federal government's aggressive efforts to further develop the tech economy have helped expand and improve the candidate pool.
Overseas moments
One of Japan’s highest-rated AI unicorns, Preferred Networks (PFN), wants to win the favor of foreign investors for the primary time because it accelerates chip development, Nikkei Asia's Ryohtaroh Satoh reports.
Chairman Toru Nishikawa said in an interview that Preferred Networks goals to boost tens of billions of yen in the following one to 2 years and can seek financing from foreign investors.
PFN is one in every of the country's largest unicorns and is valued at around 347 billion yen ($2.1 billion) in 2023, in accordance with a Nikkei evaluation. PFN and its partners are currently working to develop a next-generation AI accelerator by 2027 that is anticipated to be more powerful for some workloads but less power-hungry than Nvidia's latest B200 chipset.
“Big technology firms can purchase huge quantities of Nvidia's GPUs, but it surely's harder for firms in less developed countries,” Nishikawa said. “So we're trying to indicate that we are able to develop processors that might be bought at a rather more realistic price.”
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