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  • China may prefer TikTok to be banned than fall into US hands | CNN Business

    China may prefer TikTok to be banned than fall into US hands | CNN Business

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    Hong Kong
    CNN
     — 

    Nearly three years after the Trump administration threatened to ban TikTok if its Chinese owner didn’t sell the company to American investors, the video app is once again facing an existential threat.

    TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew will appear later Thursday before US lawmakers, many of whom want the app banned in the United States because of the risk they say it presents to national security. The clamor for a sale is growing louder again.

    But an outright divestment isn’t in the cards, according to analysts and legal experts, not least because the Chinese government views TikTok’s technology as sensitive and has taken steps since 2020 to ensure it can veto any sale by its Beijing-based owner, ByteDance.

    At issue is who owns the keys to TikTok’s algorithms and the vast troves of data collected from the 150 million people in the United States who use the app each month.

    The Chinese government considers some advanced technology, including content recommendation algorithms, to be critical to its national interest. In December, Chinese officials proposed tightening the rules that govern the sale of that technology to foreign buyers.

    “Beijing will have no say in the US decision to mandate the sale of TikTok, but it will retain the ultimate approval authority over such a sale,” said Brock Silvers, chief investment officer for Kaiyuan Capital.

    “It also seems extremely unlikely that Beijing will accept any deal that removes TikTok’s algorithm[s] from its direct control and regulatory authority,” he said.

    TikTok’s algorithms, which keep users glued to the app, are believed to be key to its success. The algorithms give recommendations based on users’ behavior, thus pushing videos they actually like and want to watch.

    Chinese regulators first added algorithms to the restricted list of technologies in August 2020, when the Trump administration threatened to ban TikTok unless it was sold.

    Back then, Chinese state media published a commentary by a professor of trade at the University of International Business and Economics who said the updated rules meant ByteDance would need a license from Beijing to sell its technology.

    “Some cutting-edge technologies might impact national security and public welfare, and need to be included in [export control] management,” Cui Fan told Xinhua.

    The intended sale of TikTok in 2020 to Oracle and Walmart hit a snag after Beijing added algorithms to its export control list. The Biden administration eventually rescinded the Trump-era executive order targeting TikTok, but replaced it with a broader directive focused on investigating technology linked to foreign adversaries, including China.

    Now, the company is once again caught up in a geopolitical struggle between Washington and Beijing.

    “The TikTok hearings in the United States mark the beginnings of a regulatory meat-grinder facing all [Chinese] tech companies,” said Alex Capri, a research fellow at the Hinrich Foundation.

    A senior official from the Chinese regulator of digital and traditional media visited Bytedance’s offices last week. He urged the company to improve the use of “recommendation algorithms” to spread “positive energy” and strengthen the review of online content, according to a statement from the regulator posted on its website.

    The visit highlights Beijing’s resolve to keep its most powerful internet companies on a tight leash. It also has more direct levers to pull.

    In April 2021, a Chinese government entity acquired a “golden share” of 1% in a Beijing subsidiary of ByteDance, according to business data platform Qichacha. The subsidiary controls operating licenses for Douyin, TikTok’s sister app in China, and Toutiao, a news aggregation app.

    “TikTok’s algorithms make it truly unique in terms of data harvesting and strategic analytics, therefore, I don’t see Beijing allowing it to fall into the hands of US interests,” said Capri.

    “Unless they can somehow still access TikTok’s data through other means and methods, including ongoing cyber intrusion and other forms of back-door access.”

    Chinese regulators have been gradually tightening their control over algorithm technology more generally.

    Starting in March 2022, an unprecedented regulation came into effect requiring internet companies to register recommendation algorithms with the Cyberspace Administration, the powerful internet regulator that reports to President Xi Jinping.

    At the beginning of 2023, rules governing “deep synthesis algorithms” also took effect. They will restrict the use of AI-powered image, audio and text-generation software. Such technologies underpin popular apps such as ChatGPT.

    These regulatory developments suggest that TikTok’s recommendation algorithms will be subject to China’s export controls, said Winston Ma, an adjunct professor at New York University School of Law.

    TikTok has been erecting technical and organizational barriers that it says will keep user data safe from unauthorized access.

    Under the plans, known as Project Texas, the US government and third-party companies such as Oracle would also have some degree of oversight of TikTok’s data practices. TikTok is working on a similar plan for the European Union known as Project Clover.

    But that hasn’t reassured US officials, likely because no matter what TikTok does internally, China would still theoretically have leverage over TikTok’s Chinese owners. (Similar measures taken by Huawei didn’t prevent it from being kicked out of Western 5G markets.)

    And the concerns would remain even if TikTok is sold to an American buyer, Capri said.

    “A change of TikTok’s ownership solves nothing,” he said. “The real issue is general data security and who ultimately has access to that data, by whatever means, regardless of legal ownership.”

    The true test, he said, is whether user data can be effectively ring-fenced and privacy and security can be achieved through data segregation, encryption and other means.

    As for a solution, Silvers expects both sides to try to “finesse a compromise” where US concerns are addressed, but Beijing still retains control over TikTok.

    But, he believes Beijing would ultimately prefer for TikTok leave the US market rather than surrender its algorithm.

    “If any Chinese company is to have any chance of surviving increased scrutiny from Western governments, they will have to entrust their data to third party security firms and endure rigorous third party audits and government intrusion, in addition to transferring ownership,” Capri said.

    “This is really an existential crisis for Chinese firms operating in the West.”

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  • TikTok says it has 150 million US users amid renewed calls for a ban | CNN Business

    TikTok says it has 150 million US users amid renewed calls for a ban | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    TikTok now has 150 million monthly active users in the United States, CEO Shou Chew confirmed on Tuesday, in a clear attempt to highlight the platform’s vast and growing reach in the country amid renewed calls for a ban.

    “That’s almost half the US coming to TikTok to connect, to create, to share, to learn, or just to have some fun,” Chew said in a TikTok video on Tuesday. The figure also includes about five million businesses that use TikTok to reach customers, Chew said.

    The new disclosure comes just days before Chew is scheduled to appear before a Congressional committee to defend the fate of the app in the United States. A growing number of lawmakers in the United States and abroad have raised national security concerns about the short-form video app because of TikTok’s ties to China through its parent company, ByteDance.

    TikTok acknowledged to CNN last week week that federal officials are demanding the app’s Chinese owners sell their stake in the social media platform, or risk facing a US ban of the app. In 2020, when the Trump administration made a similar threat, TikTok said it had 100 million US users.

    “Now, this comes at a pivotal moment for us,” Chew said in the video Tuesday. “Some politicians have started talking about banning TikTok, now this could take TikTok away from all 150 million of you.”

    “I’ll be testifying before Congress later this week to share all that we’re doing to protect Americans using the app and deliver on our mission to inspire creativity and to bring joy,” Chew added.

    The Singaporean chief executive ended his brief video by appealing to users on the app to leave comments on the clip telling lawmakers directly, “What you want your elected representatives to know about what you love about TikTok.”

    Chew is scheduled to appear before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Thursday morning to “testify on TikTok’s consumer privacy and data security practices, the platforms’ impact on kids, and its relationship with the Chinese Communist Party,” according to a statement last week from the committee.

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  • Google begins rolling out its ChatGPT rival | CNN Business

    Google begins rolling out its ChatGPT rival | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    Google is opening up access to Bard, its new AI chatbot tool that directly competes with ChatGPT.

    Starting Tuesday, users can join a waitlist to gain access to Bard, which promises to help users outline and write essay drafts, plan a friend’s baby shower, and get lunch ideas based on what’s in the fridge.

    A company representative told CNN it will be a separate, complementary experience to Google Search, and users can also visit Search to check its responses or sources. Google said in a blog post it plans to “thoughtfully” add large language models to search “in a deeper way” at a later time.

    Google said it will start rolling out the tool in the United States and United Kingdom, and plans to expand it to more countries and languages in the future.

    The news comes as Google, Microsoft, Facebook and other tech companies race to develop and deploy AI-powered tools in the wake of the recent, viral success of ChatGPT. Last week, Google announced it is also bringing AI to its productivity tools, including Gmail, Sheets and Docs. Shortly after, Microsoft announced a similar AI upgrade to its productivity tools.

    Google unveiled Bard last month in a demo that was later called out for providing an inaccurate response to a question about a telescope. Shares of Google’s parent company Alphabet fell 7.7% that day, wiping $100 billion off its market value.

    Like ChatGPT, which was released publicly in late November by AI research company OpenAI, Bard is built on a large language model. These models are trained on vast troves of data online in order to generate compelling responses to user prompts. The immense attention on ChatGPT reportedly prompted Google’s management to declare a “code red” situation for its search business.

    But Bard’s blunder highlighted the challenge Google and other companies face with integrating the technology into their core products. Large language models can present a handful of issues, such as perpetuating biases, being factually incorrect and responding in an aggressive manner.

    Google acknowledged in the blog post Tuesday that AI tools are “not without their faults.” The company said it continues to use human feedback to improve its systems and add new “guardrails, like capping the number of exchanges in a dialogue, to try to keep interactions helpful and on topic.”

    Last week, OpenAI released GPT-4, the next-generation version of the technology that powers ChatGPT and Microsoft’s new Bing browser, with similar safeguards. In the first day after it was unveiled, GPT-4 stunned many users in early tests and a company demo with its ability to draft lawsuits, pass standardized exams and build a working website from a hand-drawn sketch.

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  • Lawmakers say TikTok is a national security threat, but evidence remains unclear | CNN Business

    Lawmakers say TikTok is a national security threat, but evidence remains unclear | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    As TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew prepares for his first congressional grilling on Thursday, much of the focus will undoubtedly be on the short-form video app’s potential national security risks.

    Concerns about TikTok’s connections to China have led governments worldwide to ban the app on official devices, and those fears have factored into the increasingly tense US-China relationship. The Biden administration has threatened TikTok with a nationwide ban unless its Chinese owners sell their stakes in the company.

    But more than two years after the Trump administration first issued a similar threat to TikTok, security experts say the government’s fears, while serious, currently appear to reflect only the potential for TikTok to be used for foreign intelligence, not that it has been. There is still no public evidence the Chinese government has actually spied on people through TikTok.

    TikTok doesn’t operate in China. But since the Chinese government enjoys significant leverage over businesses under its jurisdiction, the theory goes that ByteDance, and thus indirectly, TikTok, could be forced to cooperate with a broad range of security activities, including possibly the transfer of TikTok data.

    “It’s not that we know TikTok has done something, it’s that distrust of China and awareness of Chinese espionage has increased,” said James Lewis, an information security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “The context for TikTok is much worse as trust in China vanishes.”

    When Rob Joyce, the National Security Agency’s director of cybersecurity, was asked by reporters in December to articulate his security concerns about TikTok, he offered a general warning rather than a specific allegation.

    “People are always looking for the smoking gun in these technologies,” Joyce said. “I characterize it much more as a loaded gun.”

    Technical experts also draw a distinction between the TikTok app — which appears to operate very similarly to American social media in the amount of user tracking and data collection it performs — and TikTok’s approach to governance and ownership. It’s the latter that’s been the biggest source of concern, not the former.

    The US government has said it’s worried China could use its national security laws to access the significant amount of personal information that TikTok, like most social media applications, collects from its US users.

    The laws in question are extraordinarily broad, according to western legal experts, requiring “any organization or citizen” in China to “support, assist and cooperate with state intelligence work,” without defining what “intelligence work” means.

    Should Beijing gain access to TikTok’s user data, one concern is that the information could be used to identify intelligence opportunities — for example, by helping China uncover the vices, predilections or pressure points of a potential spy recruit or blackmail target, or by building a holistic profile of foreign visitors to the country by cross-referencing that data against other databases it holds. Even if many of TikTok’s users are young teens with seemingly nothing to hide, it’s possible some of those Americans may grow up to be government or industry officials whose social media history could prove useful to a foreign adversary.

    Another concern is that if China has a view into TikTok’s algorithm or business operations, it could try to exert pressure on the company to shape what users see on the platform — either by removing content through censorship or by pushing preferred content and propaganda to users. This could have enormous repercussions for US elections, policymaking and other democratic discourse.

    Security experts say these scenarios are a possibility based on what’s publicly known about China’s laws and TikTok’s ownership structure, but stress that they are hypothetical at best. To date, there is no public evidence that Beijing has actually harvested TikTok’s commercial data for intelligence or other purposes.

    Chew, the TikTok CEO, has publicly said that the Chinese government has never asked TikTok for its data, and that the company would refuse any such request.

    If there’s a risk, it’s primarily concentrated in the relationship between TikTok’s Chinese parent, ByteDance, and Beijing. The main issue is that the public has few ways of verifying whether or how that relationship, if it exists, might have been exploited.

    TikTok has been erecting technical and organizational barriers that it says will keep US user data safe from unauthorized access. Under the plan, known as Project Texas, the US government and third-party companies such as Oracle would also have some degree of oversight of TikTok’s data practices. TikTok is working on a similar plan for the European Union known as Project Clover.

    But that hasn’t assuaged the doubts of US officials, likely because no matter what TikTok does internally, China would still theoretically have leverage over TikTok’s Chinese owners. Exactly what that implies is ambiguous, and because it is ambiguous, it is unsettling.

    In congressional testimony, TikTok has sought to assure US lawmakers it is free from Chinese government influence, but it has not spoken to the degree that ByteDance may be susceptible. TikTok has also acknowledged that some China-based employees have accessed US user data, though it’s unclear for what purpose, and it has disclosed to European users that China-based employees may access their data as part of doing their jobs.

    Multiple privacy and security researchers who’ve examined TikTok’s app say there aren’t any glaring flaws suggesting the app itself is currently spying on people or leaking their information.

    In 2020, The Washington Post worked with a privacy researcher to look under the hood at TikTok, concluding that the app does not appear to collect any more data than your typical mainstream social network. The following year, Pellaeon Lin, a Taiwan-based researcher at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, performed another technical analysis that reached similar conclusions.

    But even if TikTok collects about the same amount of information as Facebook or Twitter, that’s still quite a lot of data, including information about the videos you watch, comments you write, private messages you send, and — if you agree to grant this level of access — your exact geolocation and contact lists. TikTok’s privacy policy also says the company collects your email address, phone number, age, search and browsing history, information about what’s in the photos and videos you upload, and if you consent, the contents of your device’s clipboard so that you can copy and paste information into the app.

    TikTok’s source code closely resembles that of its China-based analogue, Douyin, said Lin in an interview. That implies both apps are developed on the same code base and customized for their respective markets, he said. Theoretically, TikTok could have “privacy-violating hidden features” that can be turned on and off with a tweak to its server code and that the public might not know about, but the limitations of trying to reverse-engineer an app made it impossible for Lin to find out whether those configurations or features exist.

    If TikTok used unencrypted communications protocols, or if it tried to access contact lists or precise geolocation data without permission, or if it moved to circumvent system-level privacy safeguards built into iOS or Android, then that would be evidence of a problem, Lin said. But he found none of those things.

    “We did not find any overt vulnerabilities regarding their communication protocols, nor did we find any overt security problems within the app,” Lin said. “Regarding privacy, we also did not see the TikTok app exhibiting any behaviors similar to malware.”

    TikTok has faced claims that its in-app browser tracks its users’ keyboard entries, and that this type of conduct, known as keylogging, could be a security risk. The privacy researcher who performed the analysis last year, Felix Krause, said that keylogging is not an inherently malicious activity, but it theoretically means TikTok could collect passwords, credit card information or other sensitive data that users may submit to websites when they visit them through TikTok’s in-app browser.

    There is no public evidence TikTok has actually done that, however. TikTok has said the keylogging function is used for “debugging, troubleshooting, and performance monitoring,” as well as to detect bots and spam. Other research has shown that the use of keyloggers is extremely widespread in the technology industry. That does not necessarily excuse TikTok or its peers for using a keylogger in the first place, but neither is it proof positive that TikTok’s product, by itself, is any more of a national security threat than other websites.

    There have also been a number of studies that report TikTok is tracking users around the internet even when they are not using the app. By embedding tracking pixels on third-party websites, TikTok can collect information about a website’s visitors, the studies have found. TikTok has said it uses the data to bolster its advertising business. And in this respect, TikTok is not unique: the same tool is used by US tech giants including Facebook-parent Meta and Google on a far larger scale, according to Malwarebytes, a leading cybersecurity firm.

    As with the keylogging tech, the fact TikTok uses tracking pixels does not on its own transform the company into a national security threat; the risk is that the Chinese government could compel or influence TikTok, through ByteDance, to abuse its data collection capabilities.

    Separately, a report last year found TikTok was spying on journalists, snooping on their user data and IP addresses to find out when or if certain reporters were sharing the same location as company employees. TikTok later confirmed the incident and ByteDance fired several employees who had improperly accessed the TikTok data of two journalists.

    The circumstances surrounding the incident suggest it was not the type of wide-scale, government-directed intelligence effort that US national security officials primarily fear. Instead, it appeared to be part of a specific internal effort by some ByteDance employees to hunt down leaks to the press, which may be deplorable but hardly uncommon for an organization under public scrutiny. (Nevertheless, the US government is reportedly investigating the incident.)

    Joyce, the NSA’s top cyber official, told reporters in December that what he really worries about is “large-scale influence” campaigns leveraging TikTok’s data, not “individualized targeting through [TikTok] to do malicious things.”

    To date, however, there’s no public evidence of that taking place.

    TikTok may collect an extensive amount of data, much of it quietly, but as far as researchers can tell, it isn’t any more invasive or illegal than what other US tech companies do.

    According to security experts, that’s more a reflection of the broad leeway we’ve given to tech companies in general to handle our data, not an issue that’s unique or specific to TikTok.

    “We have to trust that those companies are doing the right thing with the information and access we’ve provided them,” said Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, a longtime ethical hacker and Twitter’s former head of security who turned whistleblower. “We probably shouldn’t. And this comes down to a concern about the ultimate governance of these companies.”

    Lin told CNN that TikTok and other social media companies’ appetite for data highlights policy failures to pass strong privacy laws that regulate the tech industry writ large.

    “TikTok is only a product of the entire surveillance capitalism economy,” Lin said. “And governments around the world are ignoring their duty to protect citizens’ private information, allowing big tech companies to exploit user information for gain. Governments should try to better protect user information, instead of focusing on one particular app without good evidence.”

    Asked how he would advise policymakers to look at TikTok instead, Lin said: “What I would call for is more evidence-based policy.”

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  • Google suspends Chinese shopping app Pinduoduo over malware | CNN Business

    Google suspends Chinese shopping app Pinduoduo over malware | CNN Business

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    Hong Kong
    CNN
     — 

    Google has suspended Pinduoduo, a popular Chinese budget shopping app, from its Play Store after finding malware in versions of the app.

    In a Tuesday statement, Google said versions of the app that are not in the Play Store have been found to contain malware.

    “We have suspended the Play version of the app for security concerns while we continue our investigation,” a Google spokesperson said.

    It has also enforced Google Play Protect, which scans apps installed on Android phones for harmful behavior, on the allegedly malicious apps, according to the statement.

    “Google Play Protect enforcement has been set to block installation attempts of these identified malicious apps. Users that have malicious versions of the app downloaded to their devices are warned and prompted to uninstall the app,” the spokesperson said.

    In a statement to CNN, Pinduoduo said it was informed by Google Play on Tuesday morning that its app had been “temporarily suspended” because the current version is “not compliant with Google’s Policy.” It said Google Play did not share more details.

    “We are communicating with Google for more information. We have been told that there are several other apps that have been suspended as well,” a Pinduoduo spokesperson said.

    In a later statement Pinduoduo said it strongly rejects “the speculation and accusation that Pinduoduo app is malicious just from a generic and non-conclusive response from Google.”

    It reiterated that “there are several apps that have been suspended from Google Play at the same time.”

    CNN has asked Google for information on whether other apps have also been suspended.

    Malware, short for malicious software, refers to any software developed to steal data or damage computer systems and mobile devices. When hidden in apps, it can be used to gain unauthorized access to information on a user’s phone.

    Pinduoduo is one of China’s most popular e-commerce platforms, with approximately 900 million users. It made its name with a group buying business model, allowing people to save money by enlisting friends to buy the same item in bulk.

    Riding on the domestic success of Pinduoduo, its US-listed parent company PDD last year launched Temu, an online shopping platform in the United States.

    Temu, which runs an online superstore for virtually everything — from home goods to apparel to electronics — has quickly become the most downloaded app in the US for both iOS and Android.

    Since its rollout in September, the app had been downloaded 24 million times as of last month, racking up more than 11 million monthly active users, according to Sensor Tower.

    Google did not mention Temu in its statement. The app is still available to download on the Play Store.

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  • China imports 27 foreign video games as it reopens market to global titles | CNN Business

    China imports 27 foreign video games as it reopens market to global titles | CNN Business

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    Hong Kong
    CNN
     — 

    China has approved 27 foreign video games, including titles to be released by Tencent, NetEase and Bilibili, as it gradually reopens the world’s largest mobile entertainment market to international titles.

    It was the second batch of foreign games to be allowed to enter the Chinese market since December.

    The latest titles include “Seven Deadly Sins: Grand Cross,” a popular global role-playing game from South Korea’s Netmarble, and “Merge Mansion,” a mobile merge game from Finland’s Metacore, according to a list published by the National Press and Publication Administration (NPPA) on Monday.

    Tencent

    (TME)    will distribute the two games in mainland China.

    NetEase

    (NTES)    will release “Audition: Everybody Party,” a Chinese version of the hit dancing game “Audition Online,” which was developed by South Korea’s T3 Entertainment.

    Bilibili

    (BILI)     will publish the localized version of “Uma Musume: Pretty Derby,” a hugely popular franchise from Japan’s Cygames.

    Other Chinese publishers on the list include XD, Yostar and iDreamSky Technology.

    Among the 27 games, seven were made in Japan, followed by five from South Korea.

    Online game stocks pulled higher in Asia on Tuesday.

    In South Korea, shares in Netmarble Corp were up 7%. Devsisters Corp, whose hit game “Cookie Run” was also on the NPPA’s list, soared 15%. Nexon Games, whose popular “Blue Archives” and “MapleStory” were given the greenlight, surged 16%.

    In Hong Kong, Bilibili was up as much as 9.1%. It last jumped 5.4%. XD advanced 2.8%. iDreamSky Technology was up 3.2%.

    “We believe this implies a more supportive regulatory policy towards foreign titles that further support a healthier and normalized development of online gaming industry going forward,” said Citi analysts on Tuesday.

    “We expect there could be two to three more imported batches in 2023, bringing total imported titles to 100 to 120.”

    The NPPA’s move came two months after the iconic “World of Warcraft” franchise went offline in mainland China, after US publisher Blizzard and its Chinese distributor NetEase broke off talks to extend their 14-year partnership. That left many Chinese players devastated.

    The regulator suspended licensing for all video games for nine months from July 2021 to April 2022, as the government launched a far-reaching tech crackdown and introduced stringent measures to cap playing times for minors in order to curb extreme cases of gaming addiction.

    The NPPA lifted the freeze on domestic titles last April, in a sign that Beijing’s crackdown on the tech sector was easing. But foreign games were still unable to access the Chinese market until December, when the regulator finally approved 45 foreign titles, including “Pokémon Unite” by Nintendo and “Valorant” by Riot Games.

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  • FCC cracks down on spammy text messages | CNN Business

    FCC cracks down on spammy text messages | CNN Business

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    The Federal Communications Commission is cracking down on spammy text messages with new rules for telecom companies, citing a surge of consumer complaints in recent years tied to unwanted robotexts.

    The new rules require phone providers to block text messages from suspicious sources including phone numbers that appear to be “invalid, unallocated, or unused.” Carriers will also have to block text messages coming from phone numbers that claim not to ever send text messages, or that the government has identified as numbers not used for texting, the FCC said.

    The move mirrors a similar US government effort to shut down illegal robocalls, which has led to at least one phone provider being cut off entirely from the US telephone network. Robocall monitoring services say the effort has largely been successful at reducing the volume of robocalls. But in recent years, an explosion of spam and scam text messages appears to have taken their place, leading to more than 18,000 consumer complaints at the FCC last year.

    The FCC is mulling additional regulations that could, among other things, apply Do Not Call registry protections to text messages for the first time. The FCC said it is also considering making it harder for marketers to use a single consumer consent to flood that user with calls and text messages from multiple sources and numbers.

    Unwanted or scam robotexts can be an even greater risk to consumers than unwanted robocalls, the FCC said, because unlike phone calls, text messages may contain malicious links that can infect a smart device with dangerous software.

    “Scam artists have found that sending us messages about a package you never ordered or a payment that never went through along with a link to a shady website is a quick and easy way to get us to engage on our devices and fall prey to fraud,” said FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel in a statement.

    The FCC voted to adopt the new rules in a unanimous 4-0 decision.

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  • The way we work is about to change | CNN Business

    The way we work is about to change | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    In just a few months, you’ll be able to ask a virtual assistant to transcribe meeting notes during a work call, summarize long email threads to quickly draft suggested replies, quickly create a specific chart in Excel, and turn a Word document into a PowerPoint presentation in seconds.

    And that’s just on Microsoft’s 365 platforms.

    Over the past week, a rapidly evolving artificial intelligence landscape seemed to leap ahead again. Microsoft and Google each unveiled new AI-powered features for their signature productivity tools and OpenAI introduced its next-generation version of the technology that underpins its viral chatbot tool, ChatGPT.

    Suddenly, AI tools, which have long operated in the background of many services, are now more powerful and more visible across a wide and growing range of workplace tools.

    Google’s new features, for example, promise to help “brainstorm” and “proofread” written work in Docs. Meanwhile, if your workplace uses popular chat platform Slack, you’ll be able to have its ChatGPT tool talk to colleagues for you, potentially asking it to write and respond to new messages and summarize conversations in channels.

    OpenAI, Microsoft and Google are at the forefront of this trend, but they’re not alone. IBM, Amazon, Baidu and Tencent are working on similar technologies. A long list of startups are also developing AI writing assistants and image generators.

    The pitch from tech companies is clear: AI can make you more productive and eliminate the grunt work. As Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella put it during a presentation on Thursday, “We believe this next generation of AI will unlock a new wave of productivity growth: powerful copilots designed to remove the drudgery from our daily tasks and jobs, freeing us to rediscover the joy of creation.”

    But the sheer number of new options hitting the market is both dizzying and, as with so much else in the tech industry over the past decade, raises questions of whether they will live up to the hype or cause unintended consequences, including enabling cheating and eliminating the need for certain roles (though that may be the intent of some adopters).

    Even the promise of greater productivity is unclear. The rise of AI-generated emails, for example, might boost productivity for the sender but decrease it for recipients flooded with longer-than-necessary computer-generated messages. And of course just because everyone has the option to use a chatbot to communicate with colleagues doesn’t mean all will chose to do so.

    Integrating this technology “into the foundational pieces of productivity software that most of us use everyday will have a significant impact on the way we work,” said Rowan Curran, an analyst at Forrester. “But that change will not wash over everything and everyone tomorrow — learning how to best make use of these capabilities to enhance and adjust our existing workflows will take time.”

    Anyone who has ever used an autocomplete option when typing an email or sending a message has already experienced how AI can speed up tasks. But the new tools promise to go far beyond that.

    The renewed wave of AI product launches kicked off nearly four months ago when OpenAI released a version of ChatGPT on a limited basis, stunning users with generating human-sounding responses to user prompts, passing exams at prestigious universities and writing compelling essays on a range of topics.

    Since then, the technology — which Microsoft made a “multibillion dollar” investment in earlier this year — has only improved. Earlier this week, OpenAI unveiled GPT-4, a more powerful version of the technology that underpins ChatGPT, and which promises to blow previous iterations out of the water.

    In early tests and a company demo, GPT-4 was used to draft lawsuits, build a working website from a hand-drawn sketch and recreate iconic games such as Pong, Tetris or Snake with very little to no prior coding experience.

    GPT-4 is a large language model that has been trained on vast troves of online data to generate responses to user prompts.

    It’s the same technology that underpins two new Microsoft features:”Co-pilot,” which will help edit, summarize, create and compare documents across its platforms, and Business Chat, an agent that essentially rides along with the user as they work and tries to understand and make sense of their Microsoft 365 data.

    The agent will know, for example, what’s in a user’s email and on their calendar for the day, as well as the documents they’ve been working on, the presentations they’ve been making, the people they’re meeting with, and the chats happening on their Teams platform, according to the company. Users can then ask Business Chat to do tasks such as write a status report by summarizing all of the documents across platforms on a certain project, and then draft an email that could be sent to their team with an update.

    Curran said just how much these AI-powered tools will change work depends on the application. For example, a word processing application could help generate outlines and drafts, a slideshow program may help speed along the design and content creation process, and a spreadsheet app should help more users interact with and make data-driven decisions. The latter he believes will make the most significant impact to the workplace in both the short and long-term.

    The discussion of how these technologies will impact jobs “should focus on job tasks rather than jobs as a whole,” he said.

    Although OpenAI’s GPT-4 update promises fixes to some of its biggest challenges — from its potential to perpetuate biases, sometimes being factually incorrect and responding in an aggressive manner — there’s still the possibility for some of these issues to find their way into the workplace, especially when it comes to interacting with others.

    Arijit Sengupta, CEO and founder of AI solutions company Aible, said a problem with any large language model is that it tries to please the user and typically accepts the premise of the user’s statements.

    “If people start gossiping about something, it will accept it as the norm and then start generating content [related to that],” said Sengupta, adding that it could escalate interpersonal issues and turn into bullying at the office.

    In a tweet earlier this week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote the technology behind these systems is “still flawed, still limited, and it still seems more impressive on first use than it does after you spend more time with it.” The company reiterated in a blog post that “great care should be taken when using language model outputs, particularly in high-stakes contexts.”

    Arun Chandrasekaran, an analyst at Gartner Research, said organizations will need to educate their users on what these solutions are good at and what their limitations are.

    “Blind trust in these solutions is as dangerous as complete lack of faith in the effectiveness of it,” Chandrasekaran said. “Generative AI solutions can also make up facts or present inaccurate information from time to time – and organizations need to be prepared to mitigate this negative impact.”

    At the same time, many of these applications are not up to date (GPT-4’s data that it’s trained on cuts off around September 2021). The onus will have to be on the users to do everything from double check the accuracy to change the language to reflect the tone they want. It will also be important to get buy-in and support across workplaces for the tools to take off.

    “Training, education and organizational change management is very important to ensure that employees are supportive of the efforts and the tools are used in the way they were intended to,” Chandrasekaran said.

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  • Microsoft is bringing ChatGPT technology to Word, Excel and Outlook | CNN Business

    Microsoft is bringing ChatGPT technology to Word, Excel and Outlook | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    Microsoft on Thursday outlined its plans to bring artificial intelligence to its most recognizable productivity tools, including Outlook, PowerPoint, Excel and Word, with the promise of changing how millions do their work every day.

    At an event on Thursday, the company announced that Microsoft 365 users will soon be able to use what the company is calling an AI “Co-pilot,” which will help edit, summarize, create and compare documents. But don’t call it Clippy. The new features, which are built on the same technology that underpins ChatGPT, are far more powerful (and less anthropomorphized) than its wide-eyed, paperclip-shaped predecessor.

    With the new features, users will be able to transcribe meeting notes during a Skype call, summarize long email threads to quickly draft suggested replies, request to create a specific chart in Excel, and turn a Word document into a PowerPoint presentation in seconds.

    Microsoft is also introducing a concept called Business Chat, an agent that essentially rides along with the user as they work and tries to understand and make sense of their Microsoft 365 data. The agent will know what’s in a user’s email and on their calendar for the day as well as the documents they’ve been working on, the presentations they’ve been making, the people they’re meeting with, and the chats happening on their Teams platform, according to the company. Users can then ask Business Chat to do tasks such as write a status report by summarizing all of the documents across platforms on a certain project, and then draft an email that could be sent to their team with an update.

    Microsoft’s announcement comes a month after it brought similar AI-powered features to Bing and amid a renewed arms race in the tech industry to develop and deploy AI tools that can change how people work, shop and create. Earlier this week, rival Google announced it is also bringing AI to its productivity tools, including Gmail, Sheets and Docs.

    The news also comes two days after OpenAI, the company behind Microsoft’s artificial intelligence technology and the creator of ChatGPT, unveiled its next-generation model, GPT-4. The update has stunned many users in early tests and a company demo with its ability to draft lawsuits, pass standardized exams and build a working website from a hand-drawn sketch.

    OpenAI said it added more “guardrails” to keep conversations on track and has worked to make the tool less biased. But the update, and the moves by larger tech companies to integrate this technology, could add to challenging questions around how AI tools can upend professions, enable students to cheat, and shift our relationship with technology. Microsoft’s new Bing browser has already been using GPT-4, for better or worse.

    A Microsoft spokesperson said 365 users accessing the new AI tools should be reminded the technology is a work in progress and information will need to be double checked. Although OpenAI has made vast improvements to its latest model, GPT-4 has similar limitations to previous versions. The company said it can still make “simple reasoning errors” or be “overly gullible in accepting obvious false statements from a user,” and does not fact check.

    Still, Microsoft believes the changes will improve the experience of people at work in a significant way by allowing them to do tasks easier and less tedious, freeing them up to be more analytical and creative.

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  • The US government is once again threatening to ban TikTok. What you should know | CNN Business

    The US government is once again threatening to ban TikTok. What you should know | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    Nearly two-and-a-half years after the Trump administration threatened to ban TikTok in the United States if it didn’t divest from its Chinese owners, the Biden administration is now doing the same.

    TikTok acknowledged to CNN this week that federal officials are demanding the app’s Chinese owners sell their stake in the social media platform, or risk facing a US ban of the app.

    The new directive comes from the multiagency Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), following years of negotiations between TikTok and the government body. (CFIUS is the same group that previously forced a sale of LGBTQ dating app Grindr from Chinese ownership back in 2019.)

    The ultimatum from the US government represents an apparent escalation in pressure from Washington as more lawmakers once again raise national security concerns about the app. Suddenly, TikTok’s future in the United States appears more uncertain – but this time, it comes after years in which the app has only broadened its reach over American culture.

    Here’s what you should know.

    Some in Washington have expressed concerns that the app could be infiltrated by the Chinese government to essentially spy on American users or gain access to US user data. Others have raised alarms over the possibility that the Chinese government could use the app to spread propaganda to a US audience. At the heart of both is an underlying concern that any company doing business in China ultimately falls under Chinese Communist Party laws.

    Other concerns raised are not unique to TikTok, but more broadly about the potential for social media platforms to lead younger users down harmful rabbit holes.

    If this latest development is giving you déjà vu, that’s because it echoes the saga TikTok already went through in the United States that kicked off in 2020, when the Trump administration first threatened it with a ban via executive order if it didn’t sell itself to a US-based company.

    Oracle and Walmart were suggested as buyers, social media creators were in a frenzy, and TikTok kicked off a lengthy legal battle against the US government. Some critics at the time blasted then-president Donald Trump’s crusade against the app as political theater rooted in xenophobia, calling out Trump’s unusual suggestion that the United States should get a “cut” of any deal if it forced the app’s sale to an American firm.

    The Biden administration eventually rescinded the Trump-era executive order targeting TikTok, but replaced it with a broader directive focused on investigating technology linked to foreign adversaries, including China. Meanwhile, CFIUS continued negotiations to strike a possible deal that would allow the app to continue operating in the United States. Then scrutiny began to kick up again in Washington.

    Lawmakers renewed their scrutiny of TikTok for its ties to China through its parent company, ByteDance, after a report last year suggested US user data had been repeatedly accessed by China-based employees. TikTok has disputed the report.

    In rare remarks earlier this month at a Harvard Business Review conference, TikTok CEO Shou Chew doubled down on the company’s prior commitments to address the lawmakers’ concerns.

    “The Chinese government has actually never asked us for US user data,” Chew said, “and we’ve said this on the record, that even if we where asked for that, we will not provide that.” Chew added that “all US user data is stored, by default, in the Oracle Cloud infrastructure” and “access to that data is completely controlled by US personnel.”

    TikTok CEO, Shou Zi Chew is interviewed at offices the company uses on Tuesday February 14, 2023 in Washington, DC.(Photo by Matt McClain/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

    As for the concerns that the Chinese government might use the app to spew propaganda to a US audience, Chew emphasized that this would be bad for business, noting that some 60% of TikTok’s owners are global investors. “Misinformation and propaganda has no place on our platform, and our users do not expect that,” he said.

    In response to the CFIUS divestiture request, a TikTok spokesperson told CNN this week that a change in ownership wouldn’t impact how US user data is accessed.

    “If protecting national security is the objective, divestment doesn’t solve the problem,” TikTok spokesperson Maureen Shanahan said in a statement. “A change in ownership would not impose any new restrictions on data flows or access. The best way to address concerns about national security is with the transparent, US-based protection of US user data and systems, with robust third-party monitoring, vetting, and verification, which we are already implementing.”

    TikTok is really only a national security risk insofar as the Chinese government may have leverage over TikTok or its parent company. China has national security laws that require companies under its jurisdiction to cooperate with a broad range of security activities. The main issue is that the public has few ways of verifying whether or how that leverage has been exercised. (TikTok doesn’t operate in China, but ByteDance does.)

    Privacy and security researchers who have looked under the hood at TikTok’s app say that, as far as they can tell, TikTok isn’t much different from other social networks in terms of the data it collects or how it communicates with company servers. That’s still a lot of personally revealing information, but it doesn’t imply that TikTok’s app itself is inherently malicious or a kind of spyware.

    That’s why the concern really focuses on TikTok and ByteDance’s relationship to the Chinese government, and why the Biden administration is pushing for TikTok’s Chinese owners to sell their shares.

    India banned TikTok in the summer of 2020, following a violent border clash between the country and China, in a move that abruptly disconnected the more than 200 million users the app had amassed there.

    While stopping short of banning the app on personal devices, a number of other countries, including the United States, Canada and United Kingdom have recently enacted bans of TikTok on official, government devices.

    Late last year, President Joe Biden signed legislation prohibiting TikTok on federal government devices, and more than half of US states have enacted a similar mandate at the state level. A TikTok spokesperson previously blasted this ban as “little more than political theater.”

    “The ban of TikTok on federal devices passed in December without any deliberation, and unfortunately that approach has served as a blueprint for other world governments,” the spokesperson added.

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  • Baidu stock rebounds after falling sharply in wake of ChatGPT-style bot demo | CNN Business

    Baidu stock rebounds after falling sharply in wake of ChatGPT-style bot demo | CNN Business

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    Hong Kong
    CNN
     — 

    Shares in Chinese search giant Baidu rebounded sharply a day after it unveiled ERNIE Bot, its answer to the ChatGPT craze.

    Its stock soared 14.3% on Friday in Hong Kong, making it the biggest winner in the Hang Seng Index

    (HSI)    . They also gained 3.8% in New York during US trade Thursday.

    A day earlier, Baidu

    (BIDU)     was the biggest loser of the same index. Its Hong Kong shares fell 6.4% after a public demonstration of its bot failed to impress investors. Since February, more than 650 companies had joined the ERNIE ecosystem, CEO Robin Li said during the presentation.

    The reversal came after the company said more than 30,000 businesses had signed up to test out its chatbot service within two hours of its demonstration.

    “The high degree of enterprise interest is positive, and we expect Baidu to continue to capture China’s enterprise demand for generative AI,” Esme Pau, Macquarie’s head of China and Hong Kong internet and digital assets, told CNN.

    She said the company’s shares were bouncing back Friday as some users, including analysts, shared positive feedback of their own experiences trying out ERNIE, which suggested the bot had more advanced capabilities.

    During the presentation, Baidu showed how its chatbot could generate a company newsletter, come up with a corporate slogan and solve a math riddle.

    But its stock slumped on Thursday because the demo was “pre-recorded, and not live, which makes investors skeptical about the robustness of the ERNIE Bot,” according to Pau.

    Baidu’s demonstration also came just days after the launch of GPT-4, which “raised the bar for ERNIE,” she added.

    GPT-4 is the latest version of the artificial intelligence technology behind ChatGPT. The service has impressed users this week with its ability to simplify coding, rapidly create a website from a simple sketch and pass exams with high marks.

    Pau noted that Baidu’s shares were already “down modestly” before showing off its software on Thursday, highlighting pressure from investors who had raised expectations following the GPT-4 launch.

    “ERNIE also does not have the [same] multilingual capability as GPT-4, and has yet to improve for English queries,” she said. “Also, the ERNIE launch did not provide sufficient quantifiable metrics compared to the GPT-4 launch earlier this week.”

    Like ChatGPT, ERNIE is based on a language model, which is trained on vast troves of data online in order to generate compelling responses to user prompts.

    Li said Baidu’s expectations for ERNIE were “close to ChatGPT, or even GPT-4.”

    But he acknowledged the software was “not perfect yet,” adding it was being launched first to enterprise users. The service is not yet available to the public.

    Baidu announced its chatbot last month. Some critics say the service will add fuel to an existing US-China rivalry in emerging technologies.

    Li tried to shake off that comparison during the launch, saying the bot “is not a tool for the confrontation between China and the United States in science and technology, but a product of generations of Baidu technicians chasing the dream of changing the world with technology.”

    “It is a brand new platform for us to serve hundreds of millions of users and empower thousands of industries,” he said.

    Baidu says its service stands out because of its advanced grasp of Chinese queries, as well as its ability to generate different types of responses.

    “ERNIE Bot can produce text, images, audio and video given a text prompt, and is even capable of delivering voice in several local dialects such as the Sichuan dialect,” the company said in a statement.

    By comparison, GPT-4 is also able to analyze photos, but currently only generates text responses, according to its developer, OpenAI.

    Baidu isn’t the only Chinese firm working on such technology. Last month, Alibaba

    (BABA)     announced plans to launch its own ChatGPT-style tool, adding to the list of tech giants jumping on the chatbot bandwagon.

    So far, Baidu has a first mover advantage in the space in China, according to analysts.

    “Our view is ERNIE is three to six months ahead of its potential contenders,” said Pau.

    — CNN’s Mengchen Zhang contributed to this report.

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  • New Zealand joins US push to curb TikTok use on official phones with parliament ban | CNN Business

    New Zealand joins US push to curb TikTok use on official phones with parliament ban | CNN Business

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    Hong Kong
    CNN
     — 

    New Zealand will ban TikTok on all devices with access to its parliament by the end of this month, becoming the latest country to impose an official bar on the popular social media platform owned by a Beijing-based tech conglomerate.

    Led by the United States, a growing number of Western nations are imposing restrictions on the use of TikTok on government devices citing national security concerns.

    Rafael Gonzalez-Montero, chief executive of New Zealand’s parliamentary service, said in a Friday statement that the risks of keeping the video-sharing app “are not acceptable.”

    “This decision has been made based on our own experts’ analysis and following discussion with our colleagues across government and internationally,” he wrote.

    “On advice from our cyber security experts, Parliamentary Service has informed members and staff the app TikTok will be removed from all devices with access to the parliamentary network,” he added.

    But those who need the app to “perform their democratic duties” may be granted an exception, he said.

    CNN has reached out to TikTok and its Beijing-based owner ByteDance for comment.

    In an email to members of parliament seen by CNN, Gonzalez-Montero told lawmakers that the app would be removed from their corporate devices on March 31, after which they would not be able to re-download it.

    He also instructed legislators to uninstall the app from their private devices adding that failure to comply may render them unable to access the parliamentary network.

    New Zealand lawmaker Simon O’Connor, who is also a co-chair of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC), told CNN that he welcomed the decision, calling it “a good one”.

    “I – and IPAC as a whole – have had serious concerns about data privacy for some time,” he said, adding that TikTok’s replies to his previous enquiries about data security had been “unsatisfactory”.

    IPAC is a cross-border group formed by legislators from democratic countries that is focused on relations with China and is often critical of Beijing’s leaders.

    New Zealand’s decision came on the heels of similar actions already taken by its Western allies, despite the country’s track record of a more cautious approach when it comes to dealing with Beijing, in part because China is such a significant trade partner.

    The United States, UK and Canada have ordered the removal of the app from all government phones, citing cybersecurity concerns.

    All three countries are part of the the so-called “Five Eyes” alliance that cooperates with each other on intelligence gathering and sharing. Australia and New Zealand make up the five.

    The Chinese video-sharing app is also barred in all three of the European Union’s main government institutions.

    Tik Tok has become one of the world’s most successful social media platforms and is hugely popular among younger people.

    The short video sharing app has more than 100 million users in the United States alone.

    New Zealand’s latest move came just hours after TikTok acknowledged that the Biden administration had threatened to ban its operation nationwide unless its Chinese owners agreed to spin off their share of the social media platform.

    US officials have raised fears that the Chinese government could use its national security laws to pressure TikTok or its parent company ByteDance into handing over the personal information of TikTok’s US users, which might then benefit Chinese intelligence activities or influence campaigns.

    China has accused the United States of “unreasonably suppressing” TikTok and spreading “false information” about data security.

    FBI Director Christopher Wray told the US Senate Intelligence Committee earlier this month that he feared the Chinese government could use TikTok to sway public opinion in the event that China invaded Taiwan, the self-ruled island that Beijing claims sovereignty over despite never having ruled it.

    TikTok has repeatedly denied posing any sort of security risk and has said it is willing to work with regulators to address any concerns they might have.

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  • Google Glass is being discontinued, again | CNN Business

    Google Glass is being discontinued, again | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Google will no longer sell the latest Enterprise Edition of Google Glass, the company announced this week, effectively killing off an innovative but failed wearable product line from another era that many consumers may have assumed was long gone.

    First unveiled in 2013, Google Glass was initially marketed for a general audience, with the promise of giving people access to a computer on their face rather than having to pull out a phone. But the smartglasses were discontinued in 2015 after beta versions failed to gain traction due to its high price tag, clunky design and concerns about privacy.

    Google then shifted the focus from consumers to enterprise. The first Enterprise edition of Glass, announced in 2017, was pushed for use in industries such as manufacturing and logistics. The Enterprise Edition 2, released in 2019, was Google’s last attempt at saving the Glass product. But the $999 product failed to catch on.

    “Thank you for over a decade of innovation and partnership,” Google wrote on its FAQ page announcing the decision. The company will continue to support the phased out Enterprise Edition until September.

    Google did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.

    Google’s decision to discontinue the product comes amid cost cuts across the company. Like many of its peers, Google has recently announced plans to lay off thousands in response to recession fears and shifting pandemic demand for digital products.

    Still, the dream of Google Glass lives on. Snapchat’s parent company sells Spectacles, another set of smartglasses that has struggled over the years to gain traction. Apple is reportedly working on augmented reality glasses. And even after the setback of Glass, Google said last year it was continuing to test other AR glasses.

    “Augmented reality (AR) is opening up new ways to interact with the world around us,” the company said in a blog post last summer. “It can help us quickly and easily access the information we need — like understanding another language or knowing how best to get from point A to point B.”

    A decade after Google launched Glass with a similarly ambitious objective, the future is still coming into focus.

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  • Dutch to restrict semiconductor tech exports to China, joining US effort | CNN Business

    Dutch to restrict semiconductor tech exports to China, joining US effort | CNN Business

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    Amsterdam/Washington
    Reuters
     — 

    The Netherlands’ government on Wednesday said it plans new restrictions on exports of semiconductor technology to protect national security, joining the US effort to curb chip exports to China.

    The announcement marked the first concrete move by the Dutch, who oversee essential chipmaking technology, toward adopting rules urged by Washington to hobble China’s chipmaking industry and slow its military advances.

    The US in October imposed sweeping export restrictions on shipments of American chipmaking tools to China, but for the restrictions to be effective it needs other key suppliers in the Netherlands and Japan, who produce key chipmaking technology, to agree. The allied countries have been in talks on the matter for months.

    Dutch Trade Minister Liesje Schreinemacher announced the decision in a letter to parliament, saying the restrictions will be introduced before the summer.

    Her letter did not name China, a key Dutch trading partner, nor did it name ASML Holding

    (ASML)    , Europe’s largest tech firm and a major supplier to semiconductor manufacturers, but both will be affected. It specified one technology that will be impacted is “DUV” lithography systems, the second-most advanced machines that ASML sells to computer chip manufacturers.

    “Because the Netherlands considers it necessary on national security grounds to get this technology into oversight with the greatest of speed, the Cabinet will introduce a national control list,” the letter said.

    A White House representative did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    ASML said in a response it expects to have to apply for licenses to export the most advanced segment among its DUV machines, but that would not impact its 2023 financial guidance.

    ASML dominates the market for lithography systems, multimillion dollar machines that use powerful lasers to create the minute circuitry of computer chips.

    The company expects sales in China to remain about flat at 2.2 billion euros in 2023, implying relative shrinkage as the company expects overall sales to grow by 25%. Major ASML customers such as TSMC and Intel

    (INTC)     are engaged in capacity expansions.

    ASML has never sold its most advanced “EUV” machines to customers in China, and the bulk of its “DUV” sales in China go to relatively less advanced chipmakers. Its biggest South Korean customers, Samsung

    (SSNLF)     and SK Hynix both have significant manufacturing capacity in China.

    The Dutch announcement leaves major questions unanswered, including whether ASML will be able to service the more than 8 billion euros worth of DUV machines it has sold to customers in China since 2014.

    Schreinemacher said the Dutch government had decided on measures “as carefully and precisely as possible … to avoid unnecessary disruption of value chains.”

    “It is for companies of importance to know what they are facing and to have time to adjust to new rules,” she wrote.

    Japan is expected to issue an update on its chip equipment export policies as soon as this week.

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  • What metaverse? Meta says its single largest investment is now in ‘advancing AI’ | CNN Business

    What metaverse? Meta says its single largest investment is now in ‘advancing AI’ | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    Roughly a year-and-a-half after Facebook renamed itself “Meta” and said it would go all-in on building a future version of the internet dubbed the metaverse, the tech giant now says its top investment priority will be advancing artificial intelligence.

    In a letter to staff Tuesday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced plans to lay off another 10,000 employees in the coming months, and doubled down on his new focus of “efficiency” for the company. The pivot to efficiency, first announced last month in Meta’s quarterly earnings call, comes after years of investing heavily in growth, including in areas with unproven potential like virtual reality.

    Now, Zuckerberg says the company will focus mostly on cutting costs and streamlining projects. Building the metaverse “remains central to defining the future of social connection,” Zuckerberg wrote, but that isn’t where Meta will be putting most of its capital.

    “Our single largest investment is in advancing AI and building it into every one of our products,” Zuckerberg said Tuesday. He nodded to how AI tools can help users of its apps express themselves and “discover new content,” but also said that new AI tools can be used to increase efficiencies internally by helping “engineers write better code faster.”

    The comments come after what the CEO described as a “humbling wake-up call” last year, as the “world economy changed, competitive pressures grew, and our growth slowed considerably.”

    Meta and its predecessor Facebook have been involved in AI research for years, but the remarks come amid a heightened AI frenzy in the tech world, kicked off in late November when Microsoft-backed OpenAI publicly released ChatGPT. The technology quickly went viral for its ability to generate compelling, human-sounding responses to user prompts and then kicked off an apparent AI arms race among tech companies. Microsoft announced in early February that it was incorporating the tech behind ChatGPT into its search engine, Bing. A day before Microsoft’s announcement, Google unveiled its own AI-powered tool called Bard. And not to be left behind, Meta announced late last month that it was forming a “top-level product group” to “turbocharge” the company’s work on AI tools.

    “I do think it is a good thing to focus on AI,” Ali Mogharabi, a senior equity analyst at Morningstar, told CNN of Zuckerberg’s comments. Mogharabi said Meta’s investments in AI “has benefits on both ends” because it can improve efficiency for engineers creating products, and because incorporating AI features into Meta’s lineup of apps will potentially create more engagement time for users, which can then drive advertising revenue.

    And in the long run, Mogharabi said, “A lot of the investments in AI, and a lot of enhancements that come from those investments in AI, could actually be applicable to the entire metaverse project.”

    But Zuckerberg’s emphasis on investing in AI, and using the buzzy technology’s tools to make the company more efficient and boost its bottom line, is also “what the shareholders and the market want to hear,” Mogharabi said. Many investors had previously griped at the company’s metaverse ambitions and spending. In 2022, Meta lost more than $13.7 billion in its “Reality Labs” unit, which houses its metaverse efforts.

    And investors appear to welcome Zuckerberg’s shift in focus from the metaverse to efficiency. After taking a beating in 2022, shares for Meta have surged more than 50% since the start of the year.

    Angelo Zino, a senior equity analyst at CFRA Research, said on Tuesday that the second round of layoffs at Meta “officially make us convinced that Mark Zuckerberg has completely switched gears, altering the narrative of the company to one focused on efficiencies rather than looking to grow the metaverse at any cost.”

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  • South Korea to build ‘world’s largest’ chip center in greater Seoul with $230 billion investment | CNN Business

    South Korea to build ‘world’s largest’ chip center in greater Seoul with $230 billion investment | CNN Business

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    Hong Kong/Seoul
    CNN
     — 

    South Korea says it will build an enormous facility to make computer chips in greater Seoul, with about $230 billion in investment from private companies.

    “We will build the world’s largest new ‘high-tech system semiconductor cluster’ in the Seoul Metropolitan area based on large-scale private investment of almost 300 trillion Korean won,” President Yoon Suk Yeol said on Wednesday. “In addition, we will grow the ‘semiconductor mega cluster’ to the world’s largest in connection with the existing memory semiconductor manufacturing complexes.”

    The Seoul Metropolitan area includes the capital Seoul, neighboring city of Incheon and surrounding Gyeonggi province.

    This is a developing story. More to come.

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  • The technology behind ChatGPT is about to get even more powerful | CNN Business

    The technology behind ChatGPT is about to get even more powerful | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    Nearly four months after OpenAI stunned the tech industry with ChatGPT, the company is releasing its next-generation version of the technology that powers the viral chatbot tool.

    In a blog post on Tuesday, OpenAI unveiled GPT-4, which the company says is capable of performing well on a range of standardized tests and is also less likely to “go off the guardrails” with its responses, as some users have previously experienced.

    OpenAI said the updated technology passed a simulated law school bar exam with a score around the top 10% of test takers; by contrast, the prior version, GPT-3.5, scored around the bottom 10%. GPT-4 can also read, analyze or generate up to 25,000 words of text, and write code in all major programming languages, according to the company.

    OpenAI described the update as the “latest milestone” for the company. Although it is still “less capable” than humans in many real-world scenarios, it exhibits “human-level performance on various professional and academic benchmarks,” according to the company.

    GPT-4 is the latest version of OpenAI’s large language model, which is trained on vast amounts of online data to generate compelling responses to user prompts. The updated version, which is now available via a waitlist, is already making its way into some third-party products, including Microsoft’s AI-powered Bing.

    “We are happy to confirm that the new Bing is running on GPT-4, which we’ve customized for search,” Microsoft said on Tuesday. “If you’ve used the new Bing preview at any time in the last five weeks, you’ve already experienced an early version of this powerful model.”

    While ChatGPT has impressed many users with its ability to generate original essays, stories and song lyrics in response to user prompts since its November 2022 launch, it has also raised some concerns. AI chatbots, including tools from Microsoft and Google, have been called out in recent weeks for being emotionally reactive, making factual errors and engaging in outright “hallucinations,” as the industry calls it.

    GPT-4 has similar limitations as earlier GPT models. “It is still flawed, still limited, and it still seems more impressive on first use than it does after you spend more time with it,” Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, wrote in a series of tweets Tuesday announcing the update.

    But there are noticeable improvements, he said. “It is more creative than previous models, it hallucinates significantly less, and it is less biased,” he wrote.

    Still, the company said, “great care should be taken when using language model outputs, particularly in high-stakes contexts.”

    The news comes two weeks after OpenAI announced it is opening up access to its ChatGPT tool to third-party businesses, paving the way for the chatbot to be integrated into numerous apps and services.

    Instacart, Snap and tutor app Quizlet are among the early partners experimenting with the tool. In January, Microsoft confirmed it is making a “multibillion dollar” investment in OpenAI and has since rolled out the technology to some of its products, including its search engine Bing.

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  • FBI says $10 billion lost to online fraud in 2022 as crypto investment scams surged | CNN Politics

    FBI says $10 billion lost to online fraud in 2022 as crypto investment scams surged | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    More than $10 billion in losses from online scams were reported to the FBI in 2022, the highest annual loss in the last five years, according to a new report from the bureau.

    The more than $3 billion jump in reports of online fraud from 2021 to 2022 was driven by a near-tripling in reports of cryptocurrency investment fraud, the FBI said in its annual Internet Crime Report.

    The report tallies a wide variety of fraud complaints – from marketing scams to ransomware – and is a metric for US policymakers in measuring how much hacking and other schemes are costing the American economy.

    While people in their 30s filed the most fraud complaints last year, the burden of many digital scams fell on the elderly. People over 60 accounted for $724 million, or more than two-thirds of the reported losses from “call center fraud,” according to the FBI. Such fraud occurs when scammers call someone impersonating tech support or government agencies.

    Ransomware, which locks computers until hackers are paid off, accounted for about $34 million in adjusted losses reported to the FBI last year. The relatively modest figure compared to other forms of fraud could be due to the fact that many victim organizations still do not report ransomware attacks to the FBI.

    A popular type of ransomware called Hive was used in 87 attacks last year, according to the FBI. The bureau seized Hive operatives’ computer infrastructure earlier this year, but not before hackers affiliated with the ransomware extorted more than $100 million from hospitals, schools and other victims around the world.

    While ransomware tends to get the headlines, a different hacking scheme known as business email compromise (BEC) leads to far more money stolen from victims in aggregate. A BEC scheme typically involves someone tricking a victim into wiring them money, often by impersonating a customer or a relative.

    One of the more high-profile examples of BEC fraud last year cost the city of Lexington, Kentucky, about $4 million in federal funding for housing assistance.

    BEC scams accounted for about $2.7 billion in adjusted losses in 2022, compared to about $2.4 billion in 2021, according to FBI data.

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  • Judge orders former Trump adviser Peter Navarro to turn over emails from his private account said to be White House records | CNN Politics

    Judge orders former Trump adviser Peter Navarro to turn over emails from his private account said to be White House records | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    A federal judge has ordered former Donald Trump adviser Peter Navarro to turn over to the US government certain emails from his time at the White House, granting the Justice Department a victory in a civil lawsuit the department brought against the ex-trade adviser.

    US District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said that the emails in question – from a non-official email account Navarro used at the time – were covered under the Presidential Records Act.

    “It bears note that under the PRA Dr. Navarro’s obligation to copy from or forward from his personal account to the official account was ‘no later than’ twenty (20) days after the original creation or transmission,” she wrote. “Plainly, he did neither during his tenure in the White House, nor has he forwarded Presidential record emails in the years since.”

    She rejected Navarro’s arguments that producing the emails would put at risk his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, as well other arguments Navarro made in the case.

    Navarro was ordered by the judge to immediately produce 200 to 250 emails that his lawyers had found when they had done a search, using search terms provided by the the National Archives and Records Administration, of his emails last summer. The Archives had asked him to prioritize the emails that had come up with those search terms.

    The judge also ordered that Navarro and the government meet within 30 days to come up with a plan for identifying and turning over the other emails that should be produced under the PRA. She is asking for a status report to be filed by seven days after the parties meet.

    When it filed the lawsuit, the Justice Department said that the National Archives had become aware of the emails on Navarro’s private account because of a House investigation into the Trump administration’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

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  • Facebook tests bringing back in-app messaging features as it competes with TikTok | CNN Business

    Facebook tests bringing back in-app messaging features as it competes with TikTok | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Nearly a decade after Facebook angered some users by splitting off messaging features from its flagship social networking application and forcing people to download a separate app to chat with friends, the company is now testing out reversing the move.

    In an interview with CNN, Facebook head Tom Alison said the platform is testing bringing messaging capabilities back to the Facebook app so users can more easily share content without having to use the Messenger app. The test comes as Facebook looks to beat back competition from TikTok by bolstering its position both as a platform to discover new content and discuss it.

    “We believe that content feeds into not just you consuming it but being conversation starters and starting that message thread with your friends or being something that you can share into a group of people who share your same interests,” Alison said. “I think the thing that will differentiate Facebook and Instagram from TikTok and others is just the depth of being able to start a conversation with your friends from this content and have that kind of social dimension.”

    The move, which Alison also announced in a blog post Tuesday, comes after Facebook revised its strategy last year amid concerns about a stagnant and aging user base. No longer would the platform simply be about connecting friends and family. Instead, founder Mark Zuckerberg wanted Facebook to become a “discovery engine.”

    Facebook redesigned its home feed to surface more entertaining posts from across the platform, with AI-powered content recommendations, rather than just showing posts from those specifically in a user’s network. (A new, separate tab fulfilled the desire for the latter.) The goal was clear: to keep users engaged longer and help the platform better compete with TikTok and its steady stream of recommended content.

    Nine months later, that shift has begun to pay off, Alison told CNN. The platform last month reported that it hit 2 billion daily active users in the December quarter.

    “A lot of the narrative leading up to this has been that Facebook is in decline or Facebook’s best days are behind it,” Alison said, “and part of what we’re trying to do with this milestone is say, ‘hey, look, that’s actually not true.”

    There have been no shortage of rumors of Facebook’s demise over the years, from its admission of having a “teen problem” a decade ago to the more recent series of PR debacles for the social network and its parent company, Meta. TikTok’s rapid rise and even the success of Facebook’s sister service, Instagram, have also taken some of the shine off the aging social network Zuckerberg launched in a dorm room nearly 20 years ago. But its audience has resumed growing, for now.

    Alison, who has been in charge of the Facebook app since July 2021, said the introduction of the “discovery engine” strategy is just the beginning of a larger shift for the platform, as Facebook works to forge a path to continued growth and relevance over the next two decades.

    “For the last almost 20 years … we’ve been really known for friends and family, but over the next 20 years, what we’re really working toward is being known for social discovery,” he said. “It’s going to be about helping you connect with the people that you know, the people that you want to know and the people that you should know.”

    While Facebook and Instagram have struggled in their attempts to keep pace with TikTok, including through copycat features like Reels, Alison argues Facebook has a leg up on TikTok thanks to its roots in helping people connect with their networks.

    For some creators, for example, Facebook has become a place to create groups of fans and hold conversations beyond the content they share to Instagram and TikTok, Alison said. “I think it’s helping them get closer to their fans on Facebook in a way they can’t do on other platforms.”

    As Facebook plots its evolution, it will have to contend with what Zuckerberg has called the company’s “year of efficiency,” an effort to cut costs after a broader reckoning in the tech industry and investor skepticism around its pricey plan to center its business model around the future version of the internet it calls the metaverse.

    “One of the things that we are embracing with the year of efficiency is prioritization and, frankly, just focusing more effort on some of our bigger bets,” Alison said. The platform has over the past year shuttered some smaller efforts, such as its Bulletin newsletter subscription service, in favor of investing in key areas like AI. “That’s a lot of the culture that we’re kind of instituting across Meta is just like, how do we do fewer things better? And how do we do them, sometimes, more quickly? Efficiency is not just about cost savings.”

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