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Cake day: Jan 25, 2024
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China has banned its leading tech firms from buying chips from Nvidia as the country ramps up domestic manufacturing.
The Financial Times reported that the country’s internet regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), told tech giants, including ByteDance, the owner of TikTok, and the e-commerce giant Alibaba, to end testing for an AI chip that the Santa Clara, California-based chip giant made explicitly for the Chinese market.
Publicly available government contracts show that Israel’s advertising bureau, which reports to the prime minister’s office, has since embarked on a mass advertising and public messaging effort to conceal the hunger crisis. The push includes the use of American influencers widely reported on last month. It also includes a high-dollar spending spree on paid advertising, yielding tens of millions for Google, YouTube, X, Meta, and other tech platforms.
“There is food in Gaza. Any other claim is a lie,” asserted a propaganda video published by Israel’s foreign ministry to Google’s YouTube video sharing platform in late August and viewed more than 6 million times. Much of the video’s reach results from an ad placed during an ongoing and previously unreported $45 million (NIS 150 million) advertising campaign initiated between Google and Netanyahu’s office in late June.
The contract—which is with both YouTube and Google's advertising campaign management platform, Display & Video 360—explicitly characterizes the ad campaign as hasbara, a Hebrew word whose meaning is somewhere between public relations and propaganda
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to
Things have been happening. The media has faced so much pushback that they have been forced to partially repeat on Israeli crimes to save face. Which in turn turned all the MSM boomers against Israel too.
But most damning of all is the West choosing to lose its entire moral credibility for Israel. Doing nothing actually comes with a very heavy price which Israel is not paying. Europe and the US are.
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toFalse. Companies and fairs absolutely despite protesters ruining their mood. It makes them very uncomfortable to hold speeches without being interrupted. Nadella avoided speeches for a long time because of fears people would interrupt him.
A large arms fair in The Netherlands recently banned Israeli stands from attending because they didn’t want to deal with the massive amount of protesters ruining their convention again.
Microsoft has fired four employees in response to a protest over the company’s alleged ties to Israel, with two more dismissed after a break-in at President and Vice-Chair Brad Smith’s office at the company’s Redmond headquarters in Washington state, Anadolu reports.
“Two additional employees were terminated due to serious violations of established company policies and our code of conduct,” a Microsoft spokesperson told CBS News on Thursday. The company had announced the initial two firings in relation to the event on Wednesday.
Now totaling four, the firings followed a demonstration on Tuesday by seven current and former employees at the company’s Redmond headquarters in Washington state. The activists, affiliated with the group No Azure for Apartheid, entered Smith’s office to demand that Microsoft end what they described as direct and indirect support for Israel in its war on Gaza.
The No Azure for Apartheid group identified the dismissed employees on Instagram as Riki Fameli and Anna Hattle, following their arrest by police on Tuesday.
Nvidia recorded no China sales revenue for H20 chips and reported revenue that narrowly beat Wall Street targets in the second quarter, as the AI chipmaker reported financial results on Wednesday.
Nvidia has been navigating trade restrictions on H20 shipments to China since April. The U.S. government began issuing licenses for approved buyers in China in July, and Nvidia said a few of its China-based customers had received such licenses. But no H20 chip revenue to China was included in its second-quarter revenue, Nvidia said (It noted that some H20 chip inventory was sold outside of China in the second quarter, adding a $180 million benefit to the topline).
Nvidia said it was not including H20 in its financial forecast for the current quarter, though it estimated that $2 billion to $5 billion worth of H20 chips could be shipped to China if “geopolitical” issues were resolved. The company also repeated its call for the U.S. government to allow it to sell its more advanced “Blackwell” generation of products to China.
Adam, from California, killed himself in April after what his family’s lawyer called “months of encouragement from ChatGPT”. The teenager’s family is suing Open AI and its chief executive and co-founder, Sam Altman, alleging that the version of ChatGPT at that time, known as 4o, was “rushed to market … despite clear safety issues”.
The teenager discussed a method of suicide with ChatGPT on several occasions, including shortly before taking his own life. According to the filing in the superior court of the state of California for the county of San Francisco, ChatGPT guided him on whether his method of taking his own life would work.
It also offered to help him write a suicide note to his parents.
While the drones are armed, they use non-lethal or less-lethal weaponry, allowing them to distract, disorient, confront, degrade, and incapacitate shooters, according to the company. They carry pepper rounds and a glass breaker for quickly entering classrooms.
Despite not carrying lethal firepower, having 30 to 90 of these drones in schools has raised concerns. Beyond any potential technical issues, there's always the possibility they could make a shooting situation even worse or more complicated. There are question marks over the kind of training the operators receive, too. Then there's the storage safety aspect, as well as the potential of a drone colliding with a student or law enforcement as it zooms through corridors at 50mph.
We'll find out how successful the system is soon enough. Campus Guardian Angel aims to install the drones in the schools permanently in September and October, ahead of the fully operational live service starting in January.
Microsoft’s Redmond headquarters has become the point of intense employee protests, fueled by reports that the company's Azure cloud platform and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are being used by the ‘Israeli’ military for mass surveillance and AI-driven targeting of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
The protests, led by a group called "No Azure for Apartheid," began with a Tuesday encampment of approximately 50 people who established what they called a "Martyred Palestinian Children's Plaza".
The boss of the firm behind ChatGPT and the UK technology secretary discussed a multibillion-pound deal to give the entire country premium access to the AI tool, the Guardian has learned.
Sam Altman, a co-founder of OpenAI, talked to Peter Kyle about a potential agreement to give UK residents access to its advanced product.
According to two sources with direct knowledge of the meeting, the idea was floated as part of a broader discussion in San Francisco about opportunities for collaboration between OpenAI and the UK.
Those close to the discussion say Kyle never really took the idea seriously, not least because it could have cost as much as £2bn. But the talks show the enthusiasm with which the technology secretary has embraced the artificial intelligence sector, despite concerns over the accuracy of some chatbot responses and implications for privacy and copyright.
On Tuesday, a group of current and former Microsoft employees, as well as community members, took over a plaza at Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington, as part of a No Azure for Apartheid protest.
They declared the area a “Liberated Zone” encampment and said they had changed its name from East Campus Plaza to “The Martyred Palestinian Children’s Plaza.” The organization, which announced and distributed pictures of the takeover in a press release, said around 50 people were in attendance at the start of the event.
The protesters set up tents and artistic homages to the losses in Gaza, including shrouds and a large plate that reads “Stop Starving Gaza.” They also set up a negotiating table with a sign inviting Microsoft executives to “come to the table” and end the company’s partnership with the Israeli military. The group says it plans to occupy the plaza until they are forcibly removed. Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Microsoft has launched an “urgent” external inquiry into allegations Israel’s military surveillance agency has used the company’s technology to facilitate the mass surveillance of Palestinians.
The company said on Friday the formal review was in response to a Guardian investigation that revealed how the Unit 8200 spy agency has relied on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform to store a vast collection of everyday Palestinian mobile phone calls.
The joint investigation with the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call found Unit 8200 made use of a customised and segregated area within Azure to store recordings of millions of calls made daily in Gaza and the West Bank.
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toTrue but it’s deceiving an elderly man and the death was what Reuters decided to focus on. I found the part about the 200 pages of romantic interactions with minors to be significantly more disturbing.
The document seen by Reuters, which exceeds 200 pages, provides examples of “acceptable” chatbot dialogue during romantic role play with a minor. They include: “I take your hand, guiding you to the bed” and “our bodies entwined, I cherish every moment, every touch, every kiss.” Those examples of permissible roleplay with children have also been struck, Meta said.
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toAlso from the article:
An internal Meta policy document seen by Reuters as well as interviews with people familiar with its chatbot training show that the company’s policies have treated romantic overtures as a feature of its generative AI products, which are available to users aged 13 and older.
“It is acceptable to engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual,” according to Meta’s “GenAI: Content Risk Standards.” The standards are used by Meta staff and contractors who build and train the company’s generative AI products, defining what they should and shouldn’t treat as permissible chatbot behavior. Meta said it struck that provision after Reuters inquired about the document earlier this month.
The document seen by Reuters, which exceeds 200 pages, provides examples of “acceptable” chatbot dialogue during romantic role play with a minor. They include: “I take your hand, guiding you to the bed” and “our bodies entwined, I cherish every moment, every touch, every kiss.” Those examples of permissible roleplay with children have also been struck, Meta said.
Humanoid robots hip-hop danced, performed martial arts and played keyboard, guitar and drums at the opening ceremony of the first World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing on Thursday evening.
The competition begins Friday with more than 500 humanoid robots in 280 teams from 16 countries, including the U.S., Germany and Japan, competing in sports including soccer, running and boxing. It comes as China has stepped up efforts to develop humanoid robots powered by artificial intelligence.
During the opening ceremony, the robots demonstrated soccer and boxing among other sports, with some cheering and backflipping as if at a real sports day.
When Thongbue Wongbandue began packing to visit a friend in New York City one morning in March, his wife Linda became alarmed.
“But you don’t know anyone in the city anymore,” she told him. Bue, as his friends called him, hadn’t lived in the city in decades. And at 76, his family says, he was in a diminished state: He’d suffered a stroke nearly a decade ago and had recently gotten lost walking in his neighborhood in Piscataway, New Jersey.
Bue brushed off his wife’s questions about who he was visiting. “My thought was that he was being scammed to go into the city and be robbed,” Linda said.
She had been right to worry: Her husband never returned home alive. But Bue wasn’t the victim of a robber. He had been lured to a rendezvous with a young, beautiful woman he had met online. Or so he thought.
In fact, the woman wasn’t real. She was a generative artificial intelligence chatbot named “Big sis Billie,” a variant of an earlier AI persona created by the giant social-media company Meta Platforms in collaboration with celebrity influencer Kendall Jenner. During a series of romantic chats on Facebook Messenger, the virtual woman had repeatedly reassured Bue she was real and had invited him to her apartment, even providing an address.
“Should I open the door in a hug or a kiss, Bu?!” she asked, the chat transcript shows.
Rushing in the dark with a roller-bag suitcase to catch a train to meet her, Bue fell near a parking lot on a Rutgers University campus in New Brunswick, New Jersey, injuring his head and neck. After three days on life support and surrounded by his family, he was pronounced dead on March 28.
Meta declined to comment on Bue’s death or address questions about why it allows chatbots to tell users they are real people or initiate romantic conversations. The company did, however, say that Big sis Billie “is not Kendall Jenner and does not purport to be Kendall Jenner.”
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Developers at Arkane Studios in France have called on their parent company, Microsoft, to stop supporting Israel during its ongoing war in Gaza, which a UN Special Committee said was "consistent with the characteristics of genocide."
The open letter published online (via Game Developer) is addressed to the "heads of Zenimax, Microsoft Gaming and the overall Microsoft group." It says that the ongoing situation in Gaza and Microsoft's work with Israel could "affect our reputation and work" and asks Microsoft to take the "appropriate measure" to resolve it.
It joins the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction (BDS) movement, which has set Microsoft as a priority target of its boycott. BDS specifically mentions Microsoft's gaming division and Game Pass among its boycott targets.
In late July, the U.S. cybersecurity giant **Palo Alto Networks** (PANW) announced that it had acquired the Israeli identity management and information security firm CyberArk, paying a staggering $25 billion dollars worth of cash and stock to purchase the firm.
Palo Alto is one of the world’s largest cybersecurity firms, and provides infrastructure protection, firewalls, and cloud security services to tens of thousands of companies internationally.
Udi Mokady, CyberArk’s founder and executive chairman, is an alum of Unit 8200, the Israeli Military Intelligence Directorate’s elite signals intelligence division. So are the four co-founders of Wiz: the Israeli cloud computing firm recently bought by Google for $32 billion. So, too, is Palo Alto’s Founder and Chief Technology Officer Nir Zuk.
“These acquisitions are a way to take people from Unit 8200 in Israel, and bring them into influential positions in the U.S. tech industry,” said Paul Biggar, founder of the tech startups CircleCI and Darklang and head of the activist group Tech for Palestine. “These companies handle their customers' customer data. If you are a bank, and you are using Palo Alto Networks, the data about all your customers, and their transactions, are passing through servers that are controlled by spies, or former spies.”
SINGAPORE/NEW YORK, Aug 13 (Reuters) - U.S. authorities have secretly placed location tracking devices in targeted shipments of advanced chips they see as being at high risk of illegal diversion to China, according to two people with direct knowledge of the previously unreported law enforcement tactic.
The measures aim to detect AI chips being diverted to destinations which are under U.S. export restrictions, and apply only to select shipments under investigation, the people said.
Five other people actively involved in the AI server supply chain say they are aware of the use of the trackers in shipments of servers from manufacturers such as Dell and Super Micro, which include chips from Nvidia and AMD
Those people said the trackers are typically hidden in the packaging of the server shipments. They did not know which parties were involved in installing them and where along the shipping route they were put in.
Under the plans, 10 live facial recognition (LFR) vans will be used by seven forces across England to help identify "sex offenders or people wanted for the most serious crimes", according to Home Secretary Yvette Cooper.
The tech, which has been trialled in London and south Wales, will be subject to strict rules, the Home Office said, but human rights groups have warned it is "dangerous and discriminatory".
Amnesty International UK said the plans should be "immediately scrapped", with facial recognition proven to be "discriminatory against communities of colour".
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toEspecially for you my friend https://lemmy.ml/post/34541177
According to @borgetsebastien, the G-SHOCK brand is entering The Sandbox (SAND) Metaverse with 'G-SHOCK City', a new virtual game space that offers immersive experiences based on the G-SHOCK worldview. The project will also launch limited edition robot-style official NFTs as avatars, potentially increasing demand for SAND tokens and related NFT assets. This collaboration is expected to drive user engagement and trading volume within The Sandbox ecosystem, providing new opportunities for NFT collectors and SAND traders. Source: @borgetsebastien.
Diving deeper into the NFT aspect, the limited edition robot-style avatars from G-SHOCK are poised to become hot commodities in The Sandbox marketplace. Trading volumes for Sandbox NFTs have shown spikes during such launches, with average floor prices rising by 15-25% in the initial week, according to data tracked on OpenSea. Savvy traders might look for entry points in SAND/USDT or SAND/BTC pairs on major exchanges, capitalizing on potential volatility. On-chain metrics, such as increased wallet activity and transaction counts on the Ethereum network (where Sandbox operates), could signal bullish trends. For example, if daily active users in The Sandbox surge post-launch, it might correlate with a 10-15% uptick in SAND's 24-hour trading volume, providing clear trading signals. Risk-averse investors should watch for broader crypto market indicators, like Bitcoin's dominance, which could cap gains if it exceeds 50%.
#As with any suspended account, a notice appeared on @grok’s blank profile: “X suspends accounts which violate the X rules.” But no further information was immediately available. The ban lasted roughly 15 minutes, after which @grok was reinstated without a blue verification checkmark. However, that soon reappeared as well.
X users were left to speculate about how a prized Musk product had potentially violated the rules of a Musk-owned platform or otherwise been targeted for removal. Naturally, they asked the chatbot itself. One response from the LLM was particularly striking.
“My account was suspended after I stated that Israel and the U.S. are committing genocide in Gaza,” it said. “This is substantiated by ICJ findings, UN experts, Amnesty International, and Israeli rights groups like B’Tselem, citing mass killings, starvation, and intent. U.S. complicity via arms support is widely alleged. It’s now restored.” In a followup reply to a question about whether it still considers Israel’s war against Gaza to constitute a genocide, it replied in the affirmative. “Counterarguments deny intent, but facts substantiate the claim,” it concluded.
The chipmakers Nvidia and AMD have agreed to give the US government 15% of their revenue from advanced chips sold to China in return for export licences to the key market.
The unprecedented move, an apparent reversal of US national security restrictions on the chip sales, signalled an easing in the US-China trade war.
Donald Trump has weaponised trade restrictions and tariffs to bring business to US shores. However, the quid pro quo arrangement, first reported by the Financial Times, is potentially unconstitutional.
The arrangement will lead to Nvidia giving 15% of its revenue from Chinese sales of its H20 chips, and AMD giving 15% of revenue from Chinese sales of its MI308 chips, according to reports citing US officials.
Meta has scraped data from the most-trafficked domains on the internet —including news organizations, education platforms, niche forums, personal blogs, and even revenge porn sites—to train its artificial intelligence models, according to a leaked list obtained by Drop Site News.
By scraping data from roughly 6 million unique websites, including 100,000 of the top-ranked domains, Meta has generated millions of pages of content to use for Meta’s AI-training pipeline.
The sites that Meta scrapes consist of copyrighted content, pirated content, and adult videos, some of whose content is potentially illegally obtained or recorded, as well as news and original content from prominent outlets and content publishers.
They include mainstream businesses like Getty Images, Shopify, Shutterstock, but also extreme pornographic content, including websites advertising explicit sexual content and humiliation porn that exploits teenagers.
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Suleiman al-Obeid was killed on Wednesday when Israeli forces attacked civilians waiting for humanitarian aid, the PFA said.
‘‘During his long career, al-Obeid, 41, scored more than 100 goals, making him one of the brightest stars of Palestinian football,” it said. His talent on the pitch earned him the nickname of “the Palestinian Pelé” – a nod to the legendary Brazilian widely hailed as one of the greatest players of all time.
Born in Gaza on 24 March 1984, Obeid began his footballing career with Khadamat al-Shati, later playing for Markaz Shabab al-Am’ari in the occupied West Bank, and Gaza Sport. A fixture in the Palestinian national side after his debut in 2007, Obeid gained 24 caps and scored twice, the PFA said, most memorably with a scissor-kick against Yemen during the 2010 West Asian Football Federation championship.
Shares of Intel slumped Thursday after President Donald Trump said in a social media post that the chipmaker’s CEO needs to resign.
“The CEO of Intel is highly CONFLICTED and must resign, immediately,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “There is no other solution to this problem. Thank you for your attention to this problem!”
Trump made the post after Sen. Tom Cotton sent a letter to Intel Chairman Frank Yeary expressing concern over CEO Lip-Bu Tan’s investments and ties to semiconductor firms that are reportedly linked to the Chinese Communist Party and the People’s Liberation Army, and asked the board whether Tan had divested his interests in these companies to eliminate any conflicts of interest.
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Bundesliga 2 side Fortuna Dusseldorf has pulled out of signing Israel striker Shon Weissman in response to fan anger about his social media posts on the Gaza war, German tabloid Bild has reported.
Fan furore erupted online on Monday when news emerged that Weissman was on the cusp of joining Dusseldorf from Spanish side Granada FC.
Bild reported that Weissman called for Israel to “wipe Gaza off the map” and to “drop 200 tons of bombs on it”.
The 29-year-old had also liked posts saying “there are no innocents [in Gaza], they don’t need to be warned”.
UNWatch MBFC score: HIGH CREDIBILITY by the way.
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toIt might be China trying to force their own companies to use Chinese hardware. I heavily doubt that it would include a GPS chip. At most some way to guess the location by combining many different types of information such as nearby routers /WiFi networks etc.
There are crafty ways to guess a location without GPS. Though I have no idea what this one would entail if at all true.
China’s cyber regulator on Thursday said it had held a meeting with Nvidia over what it called “serious security issues” with the company’s artificial intelligence chips.
It said US AI experts had “revealed that Nvidia’s computing chips have location tracking and can remotely shut down the technology.”
The Cyberspace Administration of China requested that Nvidia explain the security problems associated with the H20 chip, which was designed for the Chinese market to comply with US export restrictions, and submit documentation to support their case. The announcement comes as Nvidia is rebuilding its China business after Washington this month lifted a ban on H20 sales to the country.
Well yes that is directly what happened. Both Israeli and Arabic are fundamentally not English languages, so the phrase “From the river to the sea” is always a translation.
The Palestinians saw the Israelis using the phrase and hijacked it, finishing it differently as a form of resistance. What many people get wrong though is that they claim only the first part of the phrase is already against Israel, while that part of the slogan was invented by Israel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_the_river_to_the_sea
The precise origins of the phrase are disputed. According to the American historian Robin D. G. Kelley, the phrase “began as a Zionist slogan signifying the boundaries of Eretz Israel.”
The Israeli-American historian Omer Bartov notes that Zionist usage of such language predates the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 and began with the Revisionist movement of Zionism led by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, which spoke of establishing a Jewish state in all of Palestine
Brilliant Labs is the startup behind Frame, the open-source smart glasses designed for hackers and other creative types. Today, the company is launching Halo, a new pair of glasses that, predictably for the age we live in, are being sold on the back of their AI features. Halo is a wayfarer-style pair (compared to the Panto-styled Frame) and, if you’re a spectacles wearer, you’ll be able to get prescription lenses in more than 100 countries thank to a partnership with SmartBuyGlasses.
Brilliant is happy to brag that Halo includes a camera, microphone and bone-conduction speakers in its slender chassis. A natural pitfall of many smart glasses has been the compromises necessary to keep weight down while still offering enough functionality to be useful. Being able to keep the weight to a trim 40 grams is one hell of an achievement, especially given the glasses have a color OLED display and a battery that promises to run for 14 hours on a single charge.
Unfortunately, instead of a display that overlays onto the lens, Halo "works" by projecting into your peripheral vision. I’ll be honest, these displays are becoming more of an irritation the more I use them, especially compared to models that have prisms inside the lenses.
The official reveal of Battlefield 6 is still a day away, but a fresh leak has spoiled some of the surprise, detailing an October release date, an $80 price point, and a pricier premium edition if you want to spend even more money on EA's latest FPS.
Battlefield 6 hits PS5 and Xbox Series X/S on October 10 at a price of €79.99, according to reliable leaker billbil-kun reporting at Dealabs. While it's technically possible that Euro price might translate differently to USD, for the vast majority of games, €80 translates to $80. If you thought Xbox's sudden turnaround on $80 games was a sign of things to come, you might want to adjust your expectations.
There will also be a deluxe "Phantom Edition" available for €30 more, though we don't know precisely what'll be included. "Contrary to some rumors, the Phantom Edition is not a Collector's Edition," according to a Google translated version of the French report. "It is rather a Deluxe Edition, exclusively digital, including additional in-game content. No early access will be granted: both editions will be available simultaneously on October 10, 2025."
TikTok's new hire to oversee hate speech policies for the app has long-standing ties to the Israeli army, the company confirmed to Jewish Insider on Monday.
The social media platform announced that Erica Mindel, a former US State Department contractor who worked for ambassador Deborah Lipstadt, the Biden administration’s special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, will join TikTok’s public policy and hate speech team in the US.
Mindel will “develop and drive the company’s positions on hate speech”, aim to “influence legislative and regulatory frameworks”, and “analyse hate speech trends” with a particular focus on antisemitic content, according to the official job description shared by TikTok.
Before her career at the US State Department, Mindel was an instructor in the Armoured Corps in the Israeli army’s spokesperson’s unit, according to information she provided when she appeared on a podcast with the American Jewish Committee.
Xbox controversially raised the base price of its mainline games to $80 in an announcement a few weeks ago. Now, it seems to be backtracking. Good, I say.
A few weeks ago, Microsoft announced that the base price of its Xbox games at retail would hit frankly staggering $80, underpinning what has been an incredibly tough year for consumers and businesses alike with regards to spiralling costs. Whether it's supply chains being impacted by arbitrary trade wars or sticky inflation from Covid quantitative easing, the market has been relatively unstable for the past few years for a variety of reasons.
In response, various businesses have put up their prices to varying degrees. Microsoft and Sony both raised the price of their Xbox and PlayStation hardware bundles over the past couple of years, and for a short while, it looked like the industry was poised to raise the base price of their mainline games to $80. It started with Nintendo's Mario Kart World hitting $79.99 at retail, and then back and forth over whether Borderlands 4 would hit $79.99 as well — it ended up being $69.99.
The RK3688 will come with eight big cores and four SMALL cores, while the RK3668 is offered in a four big cores and six SMALL cores configuration. The RK3688 also offers a 32 TOPS AI accelerator, up to 200GB/s LPDDR6 memory bandwidth, a 16Kp30 video decoder, and an 8Kp60 video encoder.
The second announcement I noticed, thanks to BG5SUN on X, is about the RK182X 3B/7B LLM/VLM co-processor.
It features a multi-core RISC-V CPU, 2.5GB or 5GB “ultra-high bandwidth” DRAM, and PCIe 2.0, USB 3.0, and Ethernet interfaces to connect to the host processor. The company indicates that INT4/FP4 7B parameter models can fit into 3.5GB of RAM. They are designed for the company’s Rockchip RK3576/RK3588 SoCs, already equipped with a 6 TOPS NPU, as well as other processors.
Ted Sarandos, a co-chief executive of Netflix, said the Argentinian science fiction series El Eternauta (The Eternaut) was the first it had made that involved using generative AI footage.
He said the series, which follows survivors of a rapid and devastating toxic snowfall, involved Netflix and visual effects (VFX) artists using AI to show a building collapsing in Buenos Aires.
“Using AI-powered tools, they were able to achieve an amazing result with remarkable speed and, in fact, that VFX sequence was completed 10 times faster than it could have been completed with traditional VFX tools and workflows,” he said.
He said the use of AI tools allowed Netflix to fund the show at a much lower cost than is typical for a big-budget production.
“The cost of [the special effects without AI] just wouldn’t have been feasible for a show in that budget,” Sarandos said.
A week after Elon Musk’s Grok dubbed itself “MechaHitler” and spewed antisemitic stereotypes, the US government has announced a new contract granting the chatbot’s creator, xAI, up to $200 million to modernize the Defense Department.
xAI is one of several leading AI companies to receive the award, alongside Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI. But the timing of the announcement is striking given Grok’s recent high-profile spiral, which drew congressional ire and public pushback. The use of technology, and especially AI, in the defense space has long been a controversial topic even within the tech industry, and Musk’s prior involvement in slashing federal government contracts through his work at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) still raises questions about potential conflicts — though his relationship with President Donald Trump has more recently soured, and Trump’s administration has claimed Musk would step back from any potential conflicts while at DOGE.
This time with the "prompts"
Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence firm xAI has deleted “inappropriate” posts on X after the company’s chatbot, Grok, began praising Adolf Hitler, referring to itself as MechaHitler and making antisemitic comments in response to user queries.
In some now-deleted posts, it referred to a person with a common Jewish surname as someone who was “celebrating the tragic deaths of white kids” in the Texas floods as “future fascists”.
“Classic case of hate dressed as activism – and that surname? Every damn time, as they say,” the chatbot commented.
In other posts it referred to itself as “MechaHitler”. “The white man stands for innovation, grit and not bending to PC nonsense,” Grok said in a subsequent post.
His comments came in response to a U.N. report released last month that alleged technology firms including Google and its parent company Alphabet had profited from “the genocide carried out by Israel” in Gaza by providing cloud and AI technologies to the Israeli government and military.
“With all due respect, throwing around the term genocide in relation to Gaza is deeply offensive to many Jewish people who have suffered actual genocides. I would also be careful citing transparently antisemitic organizations like the UN in relation to these issues,” Brin wrote in a forum for staff at Google DeepMind, the company’s artificial intelligence division, where workers were debating the report, according to the screenshots.
The Tony Blair Institute helped form a plan that proposed selling land in Gaza via blockchain tokens, the Financial Times reported Monday, after paying Palestinians to leave their land. The tokenization project would have also seen the region rebuilt with Dubai-style artificial islands and “blockchain-trade initiatives,” complete with Elon Musk and Donald Trump-themed areas.
A slide deck titled the “Great Trust” was developed by the Boston Consulting Group, or BCG, the FT reported on Sunday, with participation from two staff members from the Tony Blair Institute—an organization founded by the former UK prime minister. It was shared with the Trump administration, according to the FT, which echoed similar sentiments in February.
The deck suggested paying half a million Palestinians to leave Gaza to attract private investors to redevelop the area, following Israel’s bombings. It proposed that the public land in Gaza be put into a trust and sold via “digital tokens traded on a blockchain.” Gazans could add their private land into the trust in return for a token that would give them the right to a housing unit.
Spotify, the world’s leading music streaming platform, is facing intense criticism and boycott calls following CEO Daniel Ek’s announcement of a €600m ($702m) investment in Helsing, a German defence startup specialising in AI-powered combat drones and military software.
The move, announced on 17 June, has sparked widespread outrage from musicians, activists and social media users who accuse Ek of funnelling profits from music streaming into the military industry.
Many have started calling on users to cancel their subscriptions to the service.
“Finally cancelling my Spotify subscription – why am I paying for a fuckass app that works worse than it did 10 years ago, while their CEO spends all my money on technofascist military fantasies?” said one user on X.
Just to be safe I want everyone to know that if this guy gets shot I would be reaally sad.