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A logo of the autonomous driving technology startup Pony.ai is seen on a screen during an event in Beijing, China, in 2021.
Hard Numbers: Pony time, Book deals, ByteDance sues an intern, Japan’s investment, Your death clock is ticking
13: Pony AI, a Chinese robotaxi company debuted on the Nasdaq stock exchange, the latest Chinese tech company to enter the US public markets. The company issued an initial public offering at $13 per share on Nov. 27 about two years after China started a high-profile crackdown on its companies listing on US markets. It raised $260 million during its IPO, with Bloomberg remarking that it signaled “strong investor interest” in the company.
8,000: A venture-backed startup named Spines plans to publish 8,000 books next year, charging authors $1,200–$5,000 for the production process, including AI-assisted proofreading, design, and distribution. While Spines says it can offer opportunities to would-be writers and save them weeks of labor, traditional publishing houses have criticized the startup for trying to make money off of these writers with technology that makes many in the industry uncomfortable.
1.1 million: ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok, is suing a former intern in a Beijing court for $1.1 million, alleging that the intern deliberately sabotaged its generative AI training model by manipulating and modifying its code. The company said, however, that rumors that it lost millions of dollars and thousands of powerful graphics processors were exaggerated.
9.9 billion: The Japanese government is earmarking an extra $9.9 billion for its semiconductor and artificial intelligence ambitions. Some of that money will likely go to Rapidus, the homegrown chipmaking initiative that’s been heavily funded by the Japanese government, which aims to achieve mass production by 2027.
1,200: Want to know when you’ll die? Death Clock, an AI-powered longevity app trained on 1,200 life expectancy studies with 53 million participants, promises to tell users exactly when they’re going to perish. The app costs $40 a year and suggests lifestyle changes to users so they can delay their ticking countdown.
The H1N1 flu virus (red) is pictured in this handout photograph taken on July 9, 2009 and released on July 13, 2009. The new H1N1 influenza virus bears a disturbing resemblance to the virus strain that caused the 1918 flu pandemic, with a greater ability to infect the lungs than common seasonal flu viruses, researchers reported Monday.
Hard Numbers: Viruses everywhere, TikTok content moderation cuts, Nevada’s “at-risk” student saga, TSMC on the rise
70,500: Researchers used artificial intelligence to identify 70,500 new viruses using metagenomics, in which scientists sequence entire environments based on individual samples. This research, led by University of Toronto researchers, uses a machine learning tool developed by Meta to find new viruses and predict their protein structures.
700: TikTok reportedly cut 700 jobs, including many in Malaysia, and will transition much of its content moderation work to artificial intelligence. This change only affects .6% of the social media company’s 110,000-person global workforce. Social media companies have long used a mix of human and automated systems to monitor user-generated content posted on their platforms.
200,000: Last year, the state of Nevada used an AI system to help it better identify what students in the state are “at risk” for falling behind academically and socially. But the AI, run by an outside contractor, developed a much higher bar for that determination, incorporating factors far beyond income levels, formerly the most important metric, and the number of “at-risk” students plummeted by about 200,000, leading the state to cut funding to many districts in need.
40: Stock analysts expect Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company to report a 40% profit increase when the chip fabrication giant reports its third-quarter earnings on Oct. 17. TSMC’s stock has already surged 77% this year due to surging demand from chip designers hungry to sell their products to AI companies.
A ban sign displayed on a laptop screen and TikTok logo displayed on a phone screen are seen in this multiple exposure illustration photo taken in Poland on March 17, 2024.
TikTok lawsuit the latest in big-tech backlash
Fourteen US states are suing TikTok, alleging that the platform is addictive and harms the mental health of young people. The attorneys general come from states led by both Democrats and Republicans, and the coalition is headed by California and New York, home to millions of TikTok users.
The suits are the latest in a string of moves aimed at bringing large tech firms to heel. The US federal government is considering the breakup of Google and its anti-competitive search engine service as the firm faces a series of antitrust cases. The Federal Trade Commission is suing Meta, and the Department of Justice is suing Apple over an alleged monopoly on smartphones.
In Canada, the Trudeau government has launched a 3% Digital Services Tax on big tech firms in the country for revenue earned on “certain digital services that rely on engagement, data, and content contributions of Canadian users.” The Competition Bureau is also investigating Google over its advertising practices. School boards in the country’s most populous province, Ontario, have launched their own lawsuits against Meta, Snapchat, and TikTok, alleging that the social media giants run platforms that inhibit student learning.
The suits and taxes reveal a struggle between governments and tech giants over the social and economic responsibilities of massive companies that dominate not just their respective markets, but our behavior. As governments seek to extract more from the companies and bring them to heel over the effects of their products, the legal and legislative efforts are likely to continue to pile up – and yield results.
Satellite image of Hurricane Milton as of 8 p.m., on Oct. 8, 2024.
Hard Numbers: Florida braces for Milton, First survey of transgender US students, TikTok faces new legal challenges, BJP defeated in Kashmir, Dominican Republic escalates deportations
9: Millions have boarded up, sandbagged, and evacuated their homes in Florida this week as Hurricane Milton barrels through the Gulf of Mexico toward the Sunshine State. Deemed a Category 5 storm on Tuesday, with winds reaching speeds of up to 180 mph, Milton is expected to weaken slightly but still bring an "extremely life-threatening situation" when it makes landfall Wednesday night. Meanwhile, the Federal Emergency Management Agency – still busy with the impact of last month’s Hurricane Helene – reported this week that only 9% of its personnel, or 1,217 staffers, were available to help with new disaster relief efforts.
3.3: About 3.3% of US high school students identify as transgender, according to a new survey. The first-of-its-kind study also revealed 2.2% of students are questioning their gender identity. About 10% of transgender students reported suicide attempts, 10 times that of cisgender boys. Transgender issues are at the center of America’s culture wars – while most Americans favor discrimination protections for transgender people, support for restrictions on transgender care and education is significantly higher among Republicans than among Democrats.
13: TikTok is in legal hot water again as 13 US states and the District of Columbia have filed a lawsuit against the short-form video platform alleging that it breaks US consumer protection laws and has exacerbated a mental health crisis among teenagers. The suit comes as TikTok faces the prospect of being banned outright in the US next January unless it cuts ties with its China-based parent company ByteDance.
42: An alliance committed to restoring Kashmir’s autonomy within India won the region’s elections, which culminated on Oct. 8, taking 48 of the local legislature’s 90 seats. The vote was the first since Kashmir was stripped of its special status in 2019 by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose Hindu nationalist BJP party won just 29 seats in the Kashmir election. However, the BJP also looked set to win a surprise victory in the state of Haryana – a result that the opposition Congress party is contesting.
7,000: The Dominican Republic has deported at least 4,900 Haitians since last Thursday alone. The move is part of a new policy in which the Dominican government says it will deport up to 10,000 undocumented migrants weekly amid rising concerns about crime and lawlessness. The government of Haiti, which is currently mired in a severe political, economic, and humanitarian crisis, has blasted the deportations as “an affront to human dignity.”
A drone view shows an ancient geoglyph depicting a tree at the Nazca Lines archaeological area in Nazca, Peru, January 18, 2024.
Hard Numbers: Geoglyph spotting, AI revenue surge, CAPTCHAS solved, ByteDance’s chip hoard, Helene’s chip damage
303: Archaeologists have discovered 303 giant symbols carved into Peru’s Nazca Desert, thanks to artificial intelligence. The famous and mysterious Nazca geoglyphs are giant drawings in the ground, easily visible from high up — some are nearly 2,000 years old. The research team, led by Japan’s Yamagata University with help from IBM’s Watson Research Center, trained an AI model on existing geoglyphs to identify potentially undiscovered symbols.
11: AI companies are making money more quickly than previous waves of hyped-up software companies, according to a new data analysis from the payments company Stripe. It found that it took only 11 months for the top 100 highest-grossing privately held AI companies to make $1 million in annualized revenue as opposed to software-as-a-service companies in 2018, which took 15 months to hit that mark.
100: AI bots are now smart enough to solve 100% of those pesky traffic-image CAPTCHA — the ones put it in place to make sure you’re, you know, human. Thankfully, those images, known as Google’s ReCAPTCHA v2, are no longer industry standard. The newest version, reCAPTCHA v3, is an “invisible” test that tries to prove humanity based on how you interact with a given web page.
100,000: ByteDance reportedly has ordered 100,000 Ascend 910B chips from Huawei to aid the training of a new AI model. TikTok’s parent company also depends on Nvidia chips and Microsoft cloud services, but the new model will be mostly trained with chips from Huawei, a fellow Chinese tech giant. A ByteDance spokesperson refuted the report from Reuters, saying, “The entire premise here is wrong. No new model is being developed.”
70: Hurricane Helene has ravaged North Carolina, including a small town called Spruce Pine, which is home to 70% of the naturally occurring high-purity quartz. This kind of quartz is critical to the global semiconductor trade — used for crucibles, containers that can hold high-temperature materials, and other parts of chips themselves. The two companies there, Quartz Corp and Unimin, have temporarily halted operations — if they can’t get back up and running soon, delays could afflict the global chip supply chain.
Republican presidential candidate and former U.S. President Donald Trump gestures as he speaks during a press conference at Trump Tower in New York City, U.S., May 31, 2024.
Hard Numbers: Trump takes to TikTok, Mexican mayor murdered, Shootout outside US Embassy in Beirut, A criminal epoch?, Spain’s menstrual law misses mark
5.2: From president to felon to social media influencer? Donald Trumpposted his first TikTok from a UFC fight last Saturday. He has already amassed over 5.2 million followers, beating Biden at his own game, who in 3 months has failed to even reach half a million followers. The app Trump once sought to ban as president has now become a part of his campaign for presidency as he hopes to woo the younger vote.
19: Within hours of Claudia Sheinbaum’s monumental presidential victory in Mexico, the mayor of Cotija, a town in western Mexico, was shot 19 times in an attack that killed her and her bodyguard. No arrests have been made since the assassination – another tragic example of Mexico’s rampant political violence.
1: A shootout involving one assailant occurred outside the US Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, on Wednesday. The gunman, identified by the Lebanese military as a Syrian national, was shot and wounded by Lebanese soldiers before being taken into custody and transferred to a local hospital for treatment. The motive is unknown, but the incident occurred amid simmering tensions along the Israel-Lebanon border that have led the Jewish state to warn it could soon launch an offensive against the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah.
67: Weidong Guan, CFO of the Epoch Times, has been charged with one count of conspiring to commit money laundering and two counts of bank fraud in an alleged $67 million, four-year-long scheme involving cryptocurrency and prepaid credit cards. If convicted, Guan faces up to 80 years in prison.
1,559: On June 1, Spain celebrated the first anniversary of Europe’s first paid menstrual leave law. Surprisingly, it has only been taken 1,559 times, according to the country’s Ministry of Inclusion, Social Security, and Migration. While hailed as a step forward for feminism, the law has limited applicability – as it can only be used by those with previously diagnosed conditions like endometriosis.Graphic Truth: Who wants to drop TikTok?
Is TikTok facing a ticking time bomb in the US and Canada? Last Wednesday, as part of a foreign-aid package that included funding for allies, President Joe Biden signed a law that requires TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, to sell the popular video-sharing app to an American buyer within a year or face a ban in the US. Analysts believe that Canada isn’t far behind.
Despite the momentum among legislators, public opinion on a ban is sharply divided, and the largest divides break down across age groups.
The main concern centers on national security. American and Canadian authorities are wary of the app's potential for data privacy breaches and spreading the influence of the Chinese Communist Party. However, TikTok's user base, which skews younger, tends to see things differently. In the US and Canada, adults between the ages of 18 and 34 are more likely to oppose a ban, arguing the app remains a significant platform for entertainment and expression, especially for Gen Z.
Protesters, mainly Houthi supporters, rally to show support to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, in Sanaa, Yemen April 26, 2024.
Hard Numbers: Houthis widen strike zone, Americans sour on TikTok, Warsaw synagogue targeted, Russia shows off US tank
300: A Houthi drone launched from Yemen last Friday struck the MSC Orion, a cargo vessel transiting the Indian Ocean, over 300 nautical miles away from the Red Sea, where Houthis have constrained their attacks until now. Striking targets in the Indian Ocean presents a serious escalation, and experts told the Guardian that ships linked to Israel, the US, or the UK would likely need to be rerouted even further from normal shipping lanes to stay safe.
58: A 58% majority of Americans said they believe China is using the social video-sharing app TikTok to “influence American public opinion,” according to a new poll from Reuters and Ipsos. The same poll found that a slim 50% majority also supported banning the app, which the Biden administration may do if parent company ByteDance can’t find a buyer.
3: An unknown perpetrator hurled three firebombs into Warsaw’s main synagogue Tuesday night, drawing major condemnations from Polish political figures but causing little damage. Before the Holocaust, Poland had Europe’s largest Jewish population, over three million, which was so thoroughly expelled or exterminated by the Nazis that today the country has only a few thousand practicing Jews.
30: A Moscow exhibition is displaying over 30 pieces of Western military equipment captured on the battlefield in Ukraine, including an American M1 Abrams tank, a German Leopard 2, and a French AMX-10RC. The Russian government is using the exhibition to show that “the West destroys peace on the planet,” according to Russian foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova.