The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency this week released proposals for the most aggressive vehicle emission standards in the country’s history, with the expectation that electric cars will account for two of every three cars being produced in the U.S. by 2032. Keith Kocinski reports.
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The first image of a black hole captured four years ago revealed a fuzzy, fiery doughnut-shaped object. Now, researchers have used artificial intelligence to give that cosmic beauty shot a touch-up.
The updated picture, published Thursday in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, keeps the original shape, but with a skinnier ring and a sharper resolution.
The image released in 2019 gave a peek at the enormous black hole at the center of the M87 galaxy, 53 million light-years from Earth. A light-year is 5.8 trillion miles. It was made using data gathered by a network of radio telescopes around the world, showing swirling light and gas.
But even with many telescopes working together, gaps remained in the data. In the latest study, scientists relied on the same data and used machine learning to fill in the missing pieces.
The resulting picture looks similar to the original, but with a thinner “doughnut” and a darker center, researchers said.
“For me, it feels like we’re really seeing it for the first time,” said lead author Lia Medeiros, an astrophysicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in New Jersey.
Medeiros said the team plans to use machine learning on other images of celestial objects, including possibly the black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy.
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ChatGPT could return to Italy soon if its maker, OpenAI, complies with measures to satisfy regulators who had imposed a temporary ban on the artificial intelligence software over privacy worries.
The Italian data protection authority on Wednesday outlined a raft of requirements that OpenAI will have to satisfy by April 30 for the ban on AI chatbot to be lifted.
The watchdog last month ordered the company to temporarily stop processing Italian users’ personal information while it investigated a possible data breach. The authority said it didn’t want to hamper AI’s development but emphasized the importance of following the European Union’s strict data privacy rules.
OpenAI, which had responded by proposing remedies to ease the concerns, did not reply immediately to a request for comment Wednesday.
Concerns about boom grow
Concerns are growing about the artificial intelligence boom, with other countries, from France to Canada, investigating or looking closer at so-called generative AI technology like ChatGPT. The chatbot is “trained” on huge pools of data, including digital books and online writings, and able to generate text that mimics human writing styles.
Under Italy’s measures, OpenAI must post information on its website about how and why it processes the personal information of both users and non-users, as well as provide the option to correct or delete that data.
The company will have to rely on consent or “legitimate interest” to use personal data to train ChatGPT’s algorithms, the watchdog said.
Regulators question legal basis
The Italian regulators had questioned whether there’s a legal basis for OpenAI to collect massive amounts of data used to teach ChatGPT’s algorithms and raised concerns the system could sometimes generate false information about individuals.
San Francisco-based OpenAI also will have to carry out a publicity campaign by May 15 through radio and TV, newspapers and the internet to inform people about how it uses their personal data for training algorithms, Italy’s watchdog said.
There’s also a requirement to verify users’ ages and set up a system to filter out those who are under 13 and teens between 13 and 18 who don’t have parental consent.
“Only in that case will the Italian SA (supervisory authority) lift its order that placed a temporary limitation on the processing of Italian users’ data … so that ChatGPT will be available once again from Italy,” the watchdog said on its website.
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A Biden administration proposal would force U.S. automakers to sharply increase their production of electric cars and trucks over the next decade, lending greater urgency to the effort to build raw material supply chains that reduce the industry’s dependence on China.
The Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday announced a proposed rule that would place stricter limits on the average tailpipe emissions of vehicles built in the United States. The proposal would reduce the allowable limit by so much that automakers would have no way to comply unless about two-thirds of the vehicles they produce by 2032 are emission-free electric vehicles.
Automakers have generally recognized that EVs represent the future of the industry, but Wednesday’s proposal would greatly accelerate the trend. The proposal, which will be open to public comment before it is finalized, would greatly reduce a leading cause of air pollution in the U.S., as well as the greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming.
“By proposing the most ambitious pollution standards ever for cars and trucks, we are delivering on the Biden-Harris administration’s promise to protect people and the planet, securing critical reductions in dangerous air and climate pollution, and ensuring significant economic benefits like lower fuel and maintenance costs for families,” said EPA Administrator Michael Regan.
The proposal, which would apply to new light-duty vehicles made in 2027 and beyond, would be the strictest environmental standard the federal government has ever applied to automobiles. If it does force the industry to make EVs account for two-thirds of production, it could also exceed President Joe Biden’s previously articulated target of making 50% of new cars either plug-in hybrids or completely emission-free by 2030.
Supply chain questions
Well before the EPA released its proposed rule Wednesday, the Biden administration had been moving to strengthen the EV market in the U.S. and to build a pipeline for raw materials that would reduce the auto industry’s reliance on China for key raw materials.
Accomplishing that reduction will be no small task. According to an analysis by the International Energy Agency last year, China produced three-quarters of the world’s lithium-ion batteries, the key component in the majority of EVs on the road.
China also has a dominant hold on much of the market for the components of those batteries, including lithium, cobalt and graphite. According to the IEA, more than half of the world’s capacity for processing and refining those materials is located in China.
According to the IEA, as of last year, the U.S. accounted for only 10% of EV production worldwide, and just 7% of production capacity for batteries.
Infrastructure projects
Last year’s passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, which contained hundreds of billions of dollars in climate-related spending, included the creation of large tax breaks restricted to EVs made at least partly in the U.S. The tax breaks are meant to extend over several years, but the restrictions become tighter as time goes on, creating incentives for manufacturers to “onshore” production to the U.S.
Tax breaks specific to the batteries used in EVs require that the raw materials used to assemble them come from domestic sources or from countries with which the U.S. has existing trade agreements.
Other pieces of legislation meant to spur investment in the U.S., including a major bipartisan infrastructure bill and the CHIPS and Science Act, also contain money and incentives that will help build out electric infrastructure in the U.S.
Achievable goals
Luke Tonachel, senior director for clean vehicles and buildings with the Natural Resources Defense Council, told VOA that building an EV supply chain centered on domestic production and imports from friendly countries is ambitious, but achievable.
Tonachel said the necessary raw materials are available from U.S. allies, but that the capacity for processing them needs to be built domestically. He said the creation of that capacity is already underway.
“There are robust incentives for building out that battery manufacturing and supply chain here in the U.S.,” he said, adding that he believes the administration’s time frame is feasible, especially now that the new standards have created certainty about future demand for EVs.
“It is realistic,” he said. “These are technologies that are known. We can certainly get more economies of scale as we ramp up production.”
Automakers tentative
Industry representatives said achieving the administration’s goal will require that a lot of disparate efforts be successful at the same time, not all of which are under their control. For example, a nationwide network of charging stations and the increased capacity to meet new demand for power will be essential to driving customer demand.
“It’s aggressive, and a lot of pieces have to work perfectly together,” Genevieve Cullen, president of the Electric Drive Transportation Association, told VOA. “Aside from the technology piece, the market piece has to work, and supply chain speed is part of that. Consumer incentives are working to help bring them into the equation, and we need to keep expanding infrastructure at a pace that meets, and perhaps exceeds, the needs in the beginning so that people feel the confidence that they need to switch to battery electric.”
John Bozzella, president of the trade group Alliance for Automotive Innovation, said in a blog post Wednesday that the administration’s plan is “aggressive by any measure” and that its success would depend on more than just automakers being able to ramp up production.
“To some extent, the baseline policy framework for the transition has come into focus,” Bozzella said. “But it remains to be seen whether the refueling infrastructure incentives and supply-side provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act, the bipartisan infrastructure law, and the CHIPS and Science Act are sufficient to support electrification at the levels envisioned by the proposed standards over the coming years.”
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Broadcaster National Public Radio said Wednesday it would no longer post its news content on 52 official Twitter accounts in protest of the social media site labeling the independent U.S. news agency as “government-funded media.”
NPR is the first major news organization to go silent on Twitter. The social media platform owned by entrepreneur Elon Musk at first labeled NPR as “state-affiliated media,” the same tag it applies to propaganda outlets in China, Russia and other autocratic countries.
Twitter then revised its label to “government-funded media,” but NPR said that, too, was misleading because NPR is a private, nonprofit company with editorial independence. NPR says it receives less than 1% of its $300 million annual budget from the federally funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
NPR chief executive John Lansing said that by not posting its news reports on Twitter, the network is protecting its credibility and would continue to produce journalism without “a shadow of negativity.”
In an email to staff explaining the decision, Lansing wrote, “It would be a disservice to the serious work you all do here to continue to share it on a platform that is associating the federal charter for public media with an abandoning of editorial independence or standards.”
He said that even if Twitter were to drop any description of NPR, the network would not immediately return to the platform.
“At this point I have lost my faith in the decision-making at Twitter,” Lansing said in an article posted by NPR. “I would need some time to understand whether Twitter can be trusted again.”
Twitter has also labeled Voice of America, a U.S. government-funded but independent news agency, and the BBC in Britain, as “government-funded media,” a description more commonly employed in describing state-controlled propaganda outlets. VOA has not dropped its use of Twitter but said its description of the news outlet left the impression that it was not independent.
Bridget Serchak, VOA’s director of public relations, said, “The label ‘government funded’ is potentially misleading and could be construed as also ‘government-controlled’ — which VOA is most certainly not.”
“Our editorial firewall, enshrined in the law, prohibits any interference from government officials at any level in its news coverage and editorial decision-making process,” Serchak said in an email. “VOA will continue to emphasize this distinction in our discussions with Twitter, as this new label on our network causes unwarranted and unjustified concern about the accuracy and objectivity of our news coverage.”
VOA is funded by the U.S. government and is part of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, but its editorial independence is protected by regulations and a firewall. The BBC said it “is, and always has been, independent.”
Press freedom advocates have also objected to Twitter’s labeling of NPR, VOA and the BBC.
“The confusion between media serving the general interest and propaganda media is dangerous, and is yet further proof that social media platforms are not competent to identify what is and is not journalism,” Vincent Berthier, head of the technology desk at Reporters Without Borders, said in a statement.
Liam Scott contributed to this report.
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Billionaire Elon Musk has told the BBC that running Twitter has been “quite painful” but that the social media company is now roughly breaking even after he acquired it late last year.
In an interview also streamed live late Tuesday on Twitter Spaces, Musk discussed his ownership of the online platform, including layoffs, misinformation and his work style.
“It’s not been boring. It’s quite a rollercoaster,” he told the U.K. broadcaster at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters.
It was a rare chance for a mainstream news outlet to interview Musk, who also owns Tesla and SpaceX. After buying Twitter for $44 billion last year, Musk’s changes included eliminating the company’s communications department.
Reporters who email the company to seek comment now receive an auto-reply with a poop emoji.
The interview was sometimes tense, with Musk challenging the reporter to back up assertions about rising levels of hate speech on the platform. At other times, Musk laughed at his own jokes, mentioning more than once that he wasn’t the CEO but his dog Floki was.
He also revealed that he sometimes sleeps on a couch at Twitter’s San Francisco office.
Advertisers who had shunned the platform in the wake of Musk’s tumultuous acquisition have mostly returned, the billionaire said, without providing details.
Musk predicted that Twitter could become “cash flow positive” in the current quarter “if current trends continue.” Because Twitter is a private company, information about its finances can’t be verified.
After acquiring the platform, Musk carried out mass layoffs as part of cost-cutting efforts. He said Twitter’s workforce has been slashed to about 1,500 employees from about 8,000 previously, describing it as something that had to be done.
“It’s not fun at all,” Musk said. “The company’s going to go bankrupt if we don’t cut costs immediately. This is not a caring-uncaring situation. It’s like if the whole ship sinks, then nobody’s got a job.”
Asked if he regretted buying the company, he said it was something that “needed to be done.”
“The pain level of Twitter has been extremely high. This hasn’t been some sort of party,” Musk said.
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The Australian government is asking major banks and other institutions to take part in ‘wargaming’ exercises to test how they would respond to cyber-attacks. It follows recent mass data theft attacks on several large companies, which compromised the data of millions of Australians.
Australia is preparing for potential cyberattacks on critical services including hospitals, the banking system and the electricity grid.
Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil Tuesday warned that recent high-profile hacks on the telecommunications and health insurance sectors, which have affected millions of people, “were just the tip of the iceberg”.
The government is setting up a series of drills with large organizations to help them respond to security breaches.
Anna Bligh, chief executive of the Australian Banking Association, an industry body, told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. Tuesday that cyber security drills organized by the government will make the sector more resilient.
“How would the whole system cope if one of the very large companies were taken down by a cyber threat?” Bligh asked. “The sort of scale and sophistication of the threat is now moving into something that we haven’t seen before. So, it is a very timely move. This is now potentially a significant threat to the national security of the country.”
A major Australian financial services company revealed Tuesday that criminals who stole sensitive customer information last month have demanded a ransom.
The cyberattack on Latitude Financial resulted in the theft of 14 million customer records, including financial statements, driver’s license numbers and passport numbers.
The company said that in line with government policy it would not pay a ransom to prevent the data being leaked or sold online.
The Australian government is considering an updated Cyber Security law that would impose new obligations and standards to protect data across industry and government departments.
However, officials have warned that cyber criminals are becoming more professional, powerful and effective.
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China’s internet regulator has unveiled a proposed law that will require makers of new artificial intelligence, or AI, products to submit to security assessments before public release.
The draft law released Tuesday by the Cyberspace Administration of China says that content generated by future AI products must reflect the country’s “core socialist values” and not encourage subversion of state power.
The draft law also said AI content must not promote discrimination based on ethnicity, race and gender, and should not provide false information.
The proposed law is expected to take effect sometime this year. The regulations come as several China-based tech companies, including Alibaba, JD.com and Baidu have released a flurry of new so-called generative AI products which can mimic human speech and generate content such as images and texts. The innovative feature has surged in popularity since San Francisco-based OpenAI introduced ChatGPT last November.
Some information for this report came from Reuters, Agence France-Presse.
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A Kuwaiti media outlet has unveiled a virtual news presenter generated using artificial intelligence, with plans for it to read online bulletins.
“Fedha” appeared on the Twitter account of the Kuwait News website Saturday as an image of a woman, her light-colored hair uncovered, wearing a black jacket and white T-shirt.
“I’m Fedha, the first presenter in Kuwait who works with artificial intelligence at Kuwait News. What kind of news do you prefer? Let’s hear your opinions,” she said in classical Arabic.
The site is affiliated with the Kuwait Times, founded in 1961 as the Gulf region’s first English-language daily.
Abdullah Boftain, deputy editor-in-chief for both outlets, said the move is a test of AI’s potential to offer “new and innovative content.”
In the future Fedha could adopt the Kuwaiti accent and present news bulletins on the site’s Twitter account, which has 1.2 million followers, he said.
“Fedha is a popular, old Kuwaiti name that refers to silver, the metal. We always imagine robots to be silver and metallic in color, so we combined the two,” Boftain said.
The presenter’s blonde hair and light-colored eyes reflect the oil-rich country’s diverse population of Kuwaitis and expatriates, according to Boftain.
“Fedha represents everyone,” he said.
Her initial 13-second video generated a flood of reactions on social media, including from journalists.
The rapid rise of AI globally has raised the promise of benefits, such as in health care and the elimination of mundane tasks, but also fears, for example over its potential to spread disinformation, threats to certain jobs and to artistic integrity.
Kuwait ranked 158 out of 180 countries and territories in the Reporters Without Borders (RSF) 2022 Press Freedom Index.
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Electric car maker Tesla Inc. plans to build a factory in Shanghai to produce power-storage devices for sale worldwide, state media reported Sunday.
Plans call for annual production of 10,000 Megapack units, according to the Xinhua News Agency and state television. They said the company made the announcement at a signing ceremony in Shanghai, where Tesla operates an auto factory.
The factory is due to break ground in the third quarter of this year and start production in the second quarter of 2024, the reports said.
Tesla didn’t immediately respond to requests for information.
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A mayor in Australia’s Victoria state said Friday he may sue the artificial intelligence writing tool ChatGPT after it falsely claimed he’d served time in prison for bribery. Hepburn Shire Council Mayor Brian Hood was incorrectly identified as the guilty party in a corruption case in the early 2000s.
Brian Hood was the whistleblower in a corruption scandal involving a company partly owned by the Reserve Bank of Australia. Several people were charged, but Hood was not one of them. That did not stop an article generated by ChatGPT, an automated writing service powered by artificial intelligence. The article cast him as the culprit who was jailed for his part in a conspiracy to bribe foreign officials to win currency printing contracts.
Hood only found out after friends told him. He told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. He then used the chatbot software to see the story for himself.
“After making the inquiry, it generated five or six paragraphs of information. The really disturbing thing was that some of the paragraphs were accurate, and then were other paragraphs that described things that were completely incorrect. It told me that I’d be charged with very serious criminal offenses, that I’d be convicted of them and that I had spent 30 months in jail,” he said.
Hood said that if OpenAI, a U.S.-based company that owns the chatbot, does not correct the false claims, he will sue.
It would be the first defamation lawsuit against the automated service.
However, a new version of ChatGPT reportedly avoids the mistakes of its predecessor. It reportedly correctly explains that Hood was a whistleblower who was praised for his actions. Hood’s lawyers say that the defamatory material, which damages the mayor’s reputation, still exists and their efforts to have the mistakes rectified would continue.
A disclaimer on the ChatGPT program warns users that it “may produce inaccurate information about people, places, or facts”. The technology has exploded in popularity around the world.
OpenAI has yet to comment publicly on the allegations.
Google has announced the launch of its rival to ChatGPT, Bard. Meta, which owns WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram, launched its own AI chatbot Blenderbot in the United States last year, while Baidu, the Chinese tech company, has said it was working on an advanced version of its chatbot, Ernie.
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Samsung Electronics said Friday it is cutting the production of its computer memory chips in an apparent effort to reduce inventory as it forecasted another quarter of sluggish profit.
The South Korean technology giant, in a regulatory filing, said it has been reducing the production of certain memory products by unspecified “meaningful levels” to optimize its manufacturing operations, adding it has sufficient supplies of those chips to meet demand fluctuations.
The company predicted an operating profit of $455 million for the three months through March, which would be a 96% decline from the same period a year earlier. It said sales during the quarter likely fell 19% to $47.7 billion.
Samsung, which will release its finalized first quarter earnings later this month, said the demand for its memory chips declined as a weak global economy depressed consumer spending on technology products and forced business clients to adjust their inventories to nurse worsening finances.
Samsung had reported a near 70% drop in profit for the October-December quarter, which partially reflected how global events like Russia’s war on Ukraine and high inflation have rattled technology markets.
SK Hynix, another major South Korean semiconductor producer, said this week that it sold $1.7 billion in bonds that can be exchanged for the company’s shares to help fund its purchases of chipmaking materials as it weathers the industry’s downswing. SK Hynix had reported an operating loss of $1.28 billion for the October-December period, which marked its first quarterly deficit since 2012.
“While we have lowered our short-term production plans, we expect solid demand for the mid- to long-term, so we will continue to invest in infrastructure to secure essential levels in clean room capacities and expand investment in research and development to strengthen our technology leadership,” Samsung said.
Samsung last month announced plans to invest $227 billion over the next 20 years as part of an ambitious South Korean project to build the world’s largest semiconductor manufacturing base near the capital, Seoul.
The chip-making “mega cluster,” which will be established in Gyeonggi province by 2042, will be anchored by five new semiconductor plants built by Samsung near its existing manufacturing hub. It will aim to attract 150 other companies producing materials and components or designing high-tech chips, according to South Korea’s government.
The South Korean plan comes as other technology powerhouses, including the United States, Japan and China, are building up their domestic chip manufacturing, deploying protectionist measures, tax cuts and sizeable subsidies to lure investments.
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Darknet users, beware: If you frequent criminal marketplaces in the internet’s underbelly, think again. Chances are you’re in the FBI’s crosshairs.
The FBI is cracking down on sites that peddle everything from guns to stolen personal data, and it is not only going after the sites’ administrators but also their users.
A recent surge in ransomware attacks and other malicious cyber activities has fueled the effort to shut down services that cater to online criminals.
But the strategy hasn’t been always effective. With each takedown, a new iteration pops up drawing users with it. Which is why the FBI is eyeing both the operators and users of these sites.
“We’re not only trying to attack the supply side, but we’re also attacking the demand side with the users,” a senior FBI official said during a Wednesday briefing on the agency’s takedown of Genesis Market, a large online criminal marketplace. “There’s consequences if you’re going to be using these types of sites to engage in this type of activity.”
The darknet, the hidden part of the internet that can only be accessed by a special browser, has long been home to various criminal marketplaces and forums.
One type of criminal marketplace there specializes in buying and selling illegal items, such as drugs, firearms and fraudulently obtained gift cards.
Another type of market trades in sensitive data, such as stolen credit cards, bank account details and other information that can be used for criminal activity. These sites are known as “data stores.”
In recent years, a new breed of cyber criminals has emerged. Known as “initial access brokers,” these criminals specialize in selling access to compromised computer networks. Among their customers: ransomware gangs.
The takedown on Tuesday of Genesis Market, a 5-year-old criminal marketplace described by officials as an “initial access broker,” offers a window into this type of cyber-criminal activity.
It also shows how the FBI is increasingly going after users of criminal marketplaces and not just their administrators.
U.S. officials said Genesis Market was not only a seller of stolen account access credentials but was also “one of the most prolific” initial access brokers operating on the darknet.
Describing it as a “key enabler of ransomware,” the Justice Department said Genesis Market sold “the type of access sought by ransomware actors to attack computer networks in the United States and around the world.”
The site went dark on Tuesday after the FBI, working with law enforcement agencies in nearly 20 countries, including the U.K. and Canada, took it offline and arrested nearly 120 people.
In a statement, Attorney General Merrick Garland hailed the operation as “an unprecedented takedown of a major criminal marketplace that enabled cybercriminals to victimize individuals, businesses, and governments around the world.”
Genesis is one of two popular cyber-criminal marketplaces taken down by the FBI in the past month.
In March, the FBI shut down Breach Forums, a criminal forum and marketplace that boasted more than 340,000 members. On the Breach Forums website, users discussed tools and techniques for hacking and exploiting hacked information, according to the Justice Department.
“We’re going after the users who leverage a service like Genesis Market, and we are doing that on a global scale,” the FBI official said.
To take down Genesis Market, the FBI and its international law enforcement partners seized its servers and domains.
In doing so, the FBI was able to obtain information about 59,000 individual user accounts, a senior Justice Department official said during the briefing.
The information included usernames, passwords, email accounts, secure messenger accounts and user histories, the official said.
“And those records helped law enforcement uncover the true identities of many of the users,” the official said.
The users ran the gamut from online fraudsters to ransomware criminals.
Some of the users were in the U.S., officials said, declining to provide any other details about them. They were among the 119 people arrested around the world in connection with Genesis Market takedown.
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Furious at U.S. efforts that cut off access to technology to make advanced computer chips, China’s leaders appear to be struggling to figure out how to retaliate without hurting their own ambitions in telecoms, artificial intelligence and other industries.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s government sees the chips — which are used in everything from phones to kitchen appliances to fighter jets — as crucial assets in its strategic rivalry with Washington and efforts to gain wealth and global influence. Chips are the center of a “technology war,” a Chinese scientist wrote in an official journal in February.
China has its own chip foundries, but they supply only low-end processors used in autos and appliances. The U.S. government, starting under President Donald Trump, has been cutting off access to a growing array of tools to make chips for computer servers, AI and other advanced applications. Japan and the Netherlands have joined in limiting access to technology they say might be used to make weapons.
Xi, in unusually pointed language, accused Washington in March of trying to block China’s development with a campaign of “containment and suppression.” He called on the public to “dare to fight.”
Despite that, Beijing has been slow to retaliate against U.S. companies, possibly to avoid disrupting Chinese industries that assemble most of the world’s smartphones, tablet computers and other consumer electronics. They import more than $300 billion worth of foreign chips every year.
Investing in self-reliance
The ruling Communist Party is throwing billions of dollars at trying to accelerate chip development and reduce the need for foreign technology.
China’s loudest complaint: It is blocked from buying a machine available only from a Dutch company, ASML, that uses ultraviolet light to etch circuits into silicon chips on a scale measured in nanometers, or billionths of a meter. Without that, Chinese efforts to make transistors faster and more efficient by packing them more closely together on fingernail-size slivers of silicon are stalled.
Making processor chips requires some 1,500 steps and technologies owned by U.S., European, Japanese and other suppliers.
“China won’t swallow everything. If damage occurs, we must take action to protect ourselves,” the Chinese ambassador to the Netherlands, Tan Jian, told the Dutch newspaper Financieele Dagblad.
“I’m not going to speculate on what that might be,” Tan said. “It won’t just be harsh words.”
The conflict has prompted warnings the world might split into separate spheres with incompatible technology standards that mean computers, smartphones and other products from one region wouldn’t work in others. That would raise costs and might slow innovation.
“The bifurcation in technological and economic systems is deepening,” Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong of Singapore said at an economic forum in China last month. “This will impose a huge economic cost.”
U.S.-Chinese relations are at their lowest level in decades due to disputes over security, Beijing’s treatment of Hong Kong, and Muslim ethnic minorities, territorial disputes, and China’s multibillion-dollar trade surpluses.
Chinese industries will “hit a wall” in 2025 or 2026 if they can’t get next-generation chips or the tools to make their own, said Handel Jones, a tech industry consultant.
China “will start falling behind significantly,” said Jones, CEO of International Business Strategies.
EV batteries as leverage
Beijing might have leverage, though, as the biggest source of batteries for electric vehicles, Jones said.
Chinese battery giant CATL supplies U.S. and Europe automakers. Ford Motor Co. plans to use CATL technology in a $3.5 billion battery factory in Michigan.
“China will strike back,” Jones said. “What the public might see is China not giving the U.S. batteries for EVs.”
On Friday, Japan increased pressure on Beijing by joining Washington in imposing controls on exports of chipmaking equipment. The announcement didn’t mention China, but the trade minister said Tokyo doesn’t want its technology used for military purposes.
A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Mao Ning, warned Japan that “weaponizing sci-tech and trade issues” would “hurt others as well as oneself.”
Hours later, the Chinese government announced an investigation of the biggest U.S. memory chip maker, Micron Technology Inc., a key supplier to Chinese factories. The Cyberspace Administration of China said it would look for national security threats in Micron’s technology and manufacturing but gave no details.
The Chinese military also needs semiconductors for its development of stealth fighter jets, cruise missiles and other weapons.
Chinese alarm grew after President Joe Biden in October expanded controls imposed by Trump on chip manufacturing technology. Biden also barred Americans from helping Chinese manufacturers with some processes.
To nurture Chinese suppliers, Xi’s government is stepping up support that industry experts say already amounts to as much as $30 billion a year in research grants and other subsidies.
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U.S. President Joe Biden said on Tuesday it remains to be seen whether artificial intelligence (AI) is dangerous, but underscored that technology companies had a responsibility to ensure their products were safe before making them public.
Biden told science and technology advisers that AI could help in addressing disease and climate change, but it was also important to address potential risks to society, national security and the economy.
“Tech companies have a responsibility, in my view, to make sure their products are safe before making them public,” he said at the start of a meeting of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. When asked if AI was dangerous, he said, “It remains to be seen. It could be.”
Biden spoke on the same day that his predecessor, former President Donald Trump, surrendered in New York over charges stemming from a probe into hush money paid to a porn actor.
Biden declined to comment on Trump’s legal woes, and Democratic strategists say his focus on governing will create a politically advantageous split screen of sorts as his former rival, a Republican, deals with his legal challenges.
The president said social media had already illustrated the harm that powerful technologies can do without the right safeguards.
“Absent safeguards, we see the impact on the mental health and self-images and feelings and hopelessness, especially among young people,” Biden said.
He reiterated a call for Congress to pass bipartisan privacy legislation to put limits on personal data that technology companies collect, ban advertising targeted at children, and to prioritize health and safety in product development.
Shares of companies that employ AI dropped sharply before Biden’s meeting, although the broader market was also selling off on Tuesday.
Shares of AI software company C3.ai Inc. were down 24%, more than halving a four-session winning streak of nearly 40% through Monday. Thailand security firm Guardforce AI GFAI.O fell 29%, data analytics firm BigBear.ai BBAI.N was down 16% and conversation intelligence company SoundHound AI SOUN.O was down 13% late on Tuesday.
AI is becoming a hot topic for policymakers.
The tech ethics group Center for AI and Digital Policy has asked the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to stop OpenAI from issuing new commercial releases of GPT-4, which has wowed and appalled users with its human-like abilities to generate written responses to requests.
Democratic U.S. Senator Chris Murphy has urged society to pause as it considers the ramifications of AI.
Last year the Biden administration released a blueprint “Bill of Rights” to help ensure users’ rights are protected as technology companies design and develop AI systems.
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The digital divide is one of the biggest challenges to education in sub-Saharan Africa, where the United Nations says nearly 90% of students lack access to household computers, and 82% to the internet. In Kenya, the aid group TechLit Africa aims to change that by building scores of computer labs. Juma Majanga reports from Mogotio, Kenya.
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An exhibition currently on display in Poland uses virtual reality to show the level of destruction Russia’s war has brought on Ukraine. For some visitors, the VR videos that can be viewed at the “Through the War” display have been overwhelming. Lesia Bakalets reports from Warsaw. Daniil Batushchak.
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Australia said Tuesday it will ban TikTok on government devices, joining a growing list of Western nations cracking down on the Chinese-owned app due to national security fears.
Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus said the decision followed advice from the country’s intelligence agencies and would begin “as soon as practicable”.
Australia is the last member of the secretive Five Eyes security alliance to pursue a government TikTok ban, joining its allies the United States, Britain, Canada and New Zealand.
France, the Netherlands and the European Commission have made similar moves.
Dreyfus said the government would approve some exemptions on a “case-by-case basis” with “appropriate security mitigations in place”.
Cybersecurity experts have warned that the app — which boasts more than one billion global users — could be used to hoover up data that is then shared with the Chinese government.
Surveys have estimated that as many as seven million Australians use the app — or about a quarter of the population.
In a security notice outlining the ban, the Attorney-General’s Department said TikTok posed “significant security and privacy risks” stemming from the “extensive collection of user data”.
China condemned the ban, saying it had “lodged stern representations” with Canberra over the move and urging Australia to “provide Chinese companies with a fair, transparent and non-discriminatory business environment”.
“China has always maintained that the issue of data security should not be used as a tool to generalize the concept of national security, abuse state power and unreasonably suppress companies from other countries,” foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said.
‘No-brainer’
But Fergus Ryan, an analyst with the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said stripping TikTok from government devices was a “no-brainer”.
“It’s been clear for years that TikTok user data is accessible in China,” Ryan told AFP.
“Banning the use of the app on government phones is a prudent decision given this fact.”
The security concerns are underpinned by a 2017 Chinese law that requires local firms to hand over personal data to the state if it is relevant to national security.
Beijing has denied these reforms pose a threat to ordinary users.
China “has never and will not require companies or individuals to collect or provide data located in a foreign country, in a way that violates local law”, the foreign ministry’s Mao said in March.
‘Rooted in xenophobia’
TikTok has said such bans are “rooted in xenophobia”, while insisting that it is not owned or operated by the Chinese government.
The company’s Australian spokesman Lee Hunter said it would “never” give data to the Chinese government.
“No one is working harder to make sure this would never be a possibility,” he told Australia’s Channel Seven.
But the firm acknowledged in November that some employees in China could access European user data, and in December it said employees had used the data to spy on journalists.
The app is typically used to share short, lighthearted videos and has exploded in popularity in recent years.
Many government departments were initially eager to use TikTok as a way to connect with a younger demographic that is harder to reach through traditional media channels.
New Zealand banned TikTok from government devices in March, saying the risks were “not acceptable in the current New Zealand Parliamentary environment”.
Earlier this year, the Australian government announced it would be stripping Chinese-made CCTV cameras from politicians’ offices due to security concerns.
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Britain’s privacy watchdog hit TikTok with a multimillion-dollar penalty Tuesday for misusing children’s data and violating other protections for users’ personal information.
The Information Commissioner’s Office said it issued a fine of $15.9 million to the short-video sharing app, which is wildly popular with young people.
It’s the latest example of tighter scrutiny that TikTok and its parent, Chinese technology company ByteDance, are facing in the West, where governments are increasingly concerned about risks that the app poses to data privacy and cybersecurity.
The British watchdog, which was investigating data breaches between May 2018 and July 2020, said TikTok allowed as many as 1.4 million children in the U.K. under 13 to use the app in 2020, despite the platform’s own rules prohibiting children that young from setting up accounts.
TikTok didn’t adequately identify and remove children under 13 from the platform, the watchdog said. And even though it knew younger children were using the app, TikTok failed to get consent from their parents to process their data, as required by Britain’s data protection laws, the agency said.
“There are laws in place to make sure our children are as safe in the digital world as they are in the physical world. TikTok did not abide by those laws,” Information Commissioner John Edwards said in a press release.
TikTok collected and used personal data of children who were inappropriately given access to the app, he said.
“That means that their data may have been used to track them and profile them, potentially delivering harmful, inappropriate content at their very next scroll,” Edwards said.
The company said it disagreed with the watchdog’s decision.
“We invest heavily to help keep under 13s off the platform and our 40,000-strong safety team works around the clock to help keep the platform safe for our community,” TikTok said in statement. “We will continue to review the decision and are considering next steps.”
TikTok says it has improved its sign-up system since the breaches happened by no longer allowing users to simply declare they are old enough and looking for other signs that an account is used by someone under 13.
The penalty also covered other breaches of U.K. data privacy law.
The watchdog said TikTok failed to properly inform people about how their data is collected, used and shared in an easily understandable way. Without this information, it’s unlikely that young users would be able “to make informed choices” about whether and how to use TikTok, it said.
TikTok also failed to ensure personal data of British users was processed lawfully, fairly and transparently, the regulator said.
TikTok initially faced a 27 million-pound fine, which was reduced after the company persuaded regulators to drop other charges.
U.S. regulators in 2019 fined TikTok, previously known as Music.aly, $5.7 million in a case that involved similar allegations of unlawful collection of children’s personal information.
Also Tuesday, Australia became the latest country to ban TikTok from its government devices, with authorities from the European Union to the United States concerned that the app could share data with the Chinese government or push pro-Beijing narratives
U.S. lawmakers are also considering forcing a sale or even banning it outright as tensions with China grow.
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Virgin Orbit, the satellite launch company founded by Richard Branson, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and will sell the business, the firm said in a statement Tuesday.
The California-based company said last week it was laying off 85% of its employees — around 675 people — to reduce expenses due to its inability to secure sufficient funding.
Virgin Orbit suffered a major setback earlier this year when an attempt to launch the first rocket into space from British soil ended in failure.
The company had organized the mission with the UK Space Agency and Cornwall Spaceport to launch nine satellites into space.
On Tuesday, the firm said “it commenced a voluntary proceeding under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code… in order to effectuate a sale of the business” and intended to use the process “to maximize value for its business and assets.”
Last month, Virgin Orbit suspended operations for several days while it held funding negotiations and explored strategic opportunities.
But at an all-hands meeting on Thursday, CEO Dan Hart told employees that operations would cease “for the foreseeable future,” US media reported at the time.
“While we have taken great efforts to address our financial position and secure additional financing, we ultimately must do what is best for the business,” Hart said in the company statement on Tuesday.
“We believe that the cutting-edge launch technology that this team has created will have wide appeal to buyers as we continue in the process to sell the Company.”
Founded by Branson in 2017, the firm developed “a new and innovative method of launching satellites into orbit,” while “successfully launching 33 satellites into their precise orbit,” Hart added.
Virgin Orbit’s shares on the New York Stock Exchange were down 3% at 19 cents on Monday evening.
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Germany could follow in Italy’s footsteps by blocking ChatGPT over data security concerns, the German commissioner for data protection told the Handelsblatt newspaper in comments published on Monday.
Microsoft-backed MSFT.O OpenAI took ChatGPT offline in Italy on Friday after the national data agency banned the chatbot temporarily and launched an investigation into a suspected breach of privacy rules by the artificial intelligence application.
“In principle, such action is also possible in Germany,” Ulrich Kelber said, adding that this would fall under state jurisdiction. He did not, however, outline any such plans.
Kelber said that Germany has requested further information from Italy on its ban. Privacy watchdogs in France and Ireland said they had also contacted the Italian data regulator to discuss its findings.
“We are following up with the Italian regulator to understand the basis for their action and we will coordinate with all EU data protection authorities in relation to this matter,” said a spokesperson for Ireland’s Data Protection Commissioner (DPC).
OpenAI had said on Friday that it actively works to reduce personal data in training its AI systems.
While the Irish DPC is the lead EU regulator for many global technology giants under the bloc’s “one stop shop” data regime, it is not the lead regulator for OpenAI, which has no offices in the EU.
The privacy regulator in Sweden said it has no plans to ban ChatGPT nor is it in contact with the Italian watchdog.
The Italian investigation into OpenAI was launched after a cybersecurity breach last week led to people being shown excerpts of other users’ ChatGPT conversations and their financial information.
It accused OpenAI of failing to check the age of ChatGPT’s users, who are supposed to be aged 13 or above. Italy is the first Western country to take action against a chatbot powered by artificial intelligence.
For a nine-hour period, the exposed data included first and last names, billing addresses, credit card types, credit card expiration dates and the last four digits of credit card numbers, according to an email sent by OpenAI to one affected customer and seen by the Financial Times.
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NASA is to reveal the names on Monday of the astronauts — three Americans and a Canadian — who will fly around the Moon next year, a prelude to returning humans to the lunar surface for the first time in a half century.
The mission, Artemis II, is scheduled to take place in November 2024 with the four-person crew circling the Moon but not landing on it.
As part of the Artemis program, NASA aims to send astronauts to the Moon in 2025 — more than five decades after the historic Apollo missions ended in 1972.
Besides putting the first woman and first person of color on the Moon, the US space agency hopes to establish a lasting human presence on the lunar surface and eventually launch a voyage to Mars.
NASA administrator Bill Nelson said this week at a “What’s Next Summit” hosted by Axios that he expected a crewed mission to Mars by the year 2040.
The four members of the Artemis II crew will be announced at an event at 10:00 am (1500 GMT) at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
The 10-day Artemis II mission will test NASA’s powerful Space Launch System rocket as well as the life-support systems aboard the Orion spacecraft.
The first Artemis mission wrapped up in December with an uncrewed Orion capsule returning safely to Earth after a 25-day journey around the Moon.
During the trip around Earth’s orbiting satellite and back, Orion logged well over 1.6 million kilometers and went farther from Earth than any previous habitable spacecraft.
Nelson was also asked at the Axios summit whether NASA could stick to its timetable of landing astronauts on the south pole of the Moon in late 2025.
“Space is hard,” Nelson said. “You have to wait until you know that it’s as safe as possible, because you’re living right on the edge.
“So I’m not so concerned with the time,” he said. “We’re not going to launch until it’s right.”
Only 12 people — all of them white men — have set foot on the Moon.
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Twitter has removed the verification check mark on the main account of The New York Times, one of CEO Elon Musk’s most despised news organizations.
The removal comes as many of Twitter’s high-profile users are bracing for the loss of the blue check marks that helped verify their identity and distinguish them from impostors on the social media platform.
Musk, who owns Twitter, set a deadline of Saturday for verified users to buy a premium Twitter subscription or lose the checks on their profiles. The Times said in a story Thursday that it would not pay Twitter for verification of its institutional accounts.
Early Sunday, Musk tweeted that the Times’ check mark would be removed. Later he posted disparaging remarks about the newspaper, which has aggressively reported on Twitter and on flaws with partially automated driving systems at Tesla, the electric car company, which he also runs.
Other Times accounts such as its business news and opinion pages still had either blue or gold check marks Sunday, as did multiple reporters for the news organization.
“We aren’t planning to pay the monthly fee for check mark status for our institutional Twitter accounts,” the Times said in a statement Sunday. “We also will not reimburse reporters for Twitter Blue for personal accounts, except in rare instances where this status would be essential for reporting purposes,” the newspaper said in a statement Sunday.
The Associated Press, which has said it also will not pay for the check marks, still had them on its accounts at midday Sunday.
Twitter did not answer emailed questions Sunday about the removal of The New York Times check mark.
The costs of keeping the check marks ranges from $8 a month for individual web users to a starting price of $1,000 monthly to verify an organization, plus $50 monthly for each affiliate or employee account. Twitter does not verify the individual accounts to ensure they are who they say they are, as was the case with the previous blue check doled out to public figures and others during the platform’s pre-Musk administration.
While the cost of Twitter Blue subscriptions might seem like nothing for Twitter’s most famous commentators, celebrity users from basketball star LeBron James to Star Trek’s William Shatner have balked at joining. Seinfeld actor Jason Alexander pledged to leave the platform if Musk takes his blue check away.
The White House is also passing on enrolling in premium accounts, according to a memo sent to staff. While Twitter has granted a free gray mark for President Joe Biden and members of his Cabinet, lower-level staff won’t get Twitter Blue benefits unless they pay for it themselves.
“If you see impersonations that you believe violate Twitter’s stated impersonation policies, alert Twitter using Twitter’s public impersonation portal,” said the staff memo from White House official Rob Flaherty.
Alexander, the actor, said there are bigger issues in the world but without the blue mark, “anyone can allege to be me” so if he loses it, he’s gone.
“Anyone appearing with it=an imposter. I tell you this while I’m still official,” he tweeted.
After buying Twitter for $44 billion in October, Musk has been trying to boost the struggling platform’s revenue by pushing more people to pay for a premium subscription. But his move also reflects his assertion that the blue verification marks have become an undeserved or “corrupt” status symbol for elite personalities, news reporters and others granted verification for free by Twitter’s previous leadership.
Along with shielding celebrities from impersonators, one of Twitter’s main reasons to mark profiles with a blue check mark starting about 14 years ago was to verify politicians, activists and people who suddenly find themselves in the news, as well as little-known journalists at small publications around the globe, as an extra tool to curb misinformation coming from accounts that are impersonating people. Most “legacy blue checks” are not household names and weren’t meant to be.
One of Musk’s first product moves after taking over Twitter was to launch a service granting blue checks to anyone willing to pay $8 a month. But it was quickly inundated by impostor accounts, including those impersonating Nintendo, pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly and Musk’s businesses Tesla and SpaceX, so Twitter had to temporarily suspend the service days after its launch.
The relaunched service costs $8 a month for web users and $11 a month for users of its iPhone or Android apps. Subscribers are supposed to see fewer ads, be able to post longer videos and have their tweets featured more prominently.
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Scaffolding and green pipes envelop a refinery in the port of Rotterdam where Finnish giant Neste is preparing to significantly boost production of sustainable aviation fuel.
Switching to non-fossil aviation fuels that produce less net greenhouse gas emissions is key to plans to decarbonize air transport, a significant contributor to global warming.
Neste, the largest global producer of SAF, uses cooking oil and animal fat at this Dutch refinery.
Sustainable aviation fuels (SAF) are being made from different sources such as municipal waste, leftovers from the agricultural and forestry industry, crops and plants, and even hydrogen.
These technologies are still developing, and the product is more expensive.
But these fuels will help airlines reduce CO2 emissions by up to 80%, according to the International Air Transport Association.
Global output of SAF was 250,000 tons last year, less than 0.1% of the more than 300 million tons of aviation fuel used during that period.
“It’s a drop in the ocean but a significant drop,” said Matti Lehmus, CEO of Neste.
“We’ll be growing drastically our production from 100,000 tons to 1.5 million tons next year,” he added.
There clearly is demand.
The European Union plans to impose the use of a minimum amount of sustainable aviation fuel by airlines, rising from 2% in 2025 to 6% in 2030 and at least 63% in 2050.
Neste has another site for SAF in Singapore which will start production in April.
“With the production facilities of Neste in Rotterdam and Singapore, we can meet the mandate for [the] EU in 2025,” said Jonathan Wood, the company’s vice president for renewable aviation.
Vincent Etchebehere, director for sustainable development at Air France, said that “between now and 2030, there will be more demand than supply of SAF.”
Need to mature technologies
Air France-KLM has reached a deal with Neste for a supply of 1 million tons of sustainable aviation fuel between 2023 and 2030.
It has also lined up 10 year-agreements with U.S. firm DG Fuels for 600,000 tons and with TotalEnergies for 800,000 tons.
At the Rotterdam site, two giant storage tanks of 15,000 cubic meters are yet to be painted.
They’re near a quay where the fuel will be transported by boat to feed Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport and airports in Paris.
The Franco-Dutch group has already taken steps to cut its carbon footprint, using 15% of the global SAF output last year — or 0.6% of its fuel needs.
Neste’s Lehmus said there was a great need to “mature the technologies” to make sustainable aviation fuel from diverse sources such as algae, nitrocellulose and synthetic fuels.
Air France CEO Anne Rigail said, the prices of sustainable aviation fuel were as important as their production.
Sustainable fuel costs 3,500 euros ($3,800) a ton globally but only $2,000 in the United States thanks to government subsidies. In France, it costs 5,000 euros a ton.
“We need backing and we really think the EU can do more,” said Rigail.
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Italy is temporarily blocking the artificial intelligence software ChatGPT in the wake of a data breach as it investigates a possible violation of stringent European Union data protection rules, the government’s privacy watchdog said Friday.
The Italian Data Protection Authority said it was taking provisional action “until ChatGPT respects privacy,” including temporarily limiting the company from processing Italian users’ data.
U.S.-based OpenAI, which developed the chatbot, said late Friday night it has disabled ChatGPT for Italian users at the government’s request. The company said it believes its practices comply with European privacy laws and hopes to make ChatGPT available again soon.
While some public schools and universities around the world have blocked ChatGPT from their local networks over student plagiarism concerns, Italy’s action is “the first nation-scale restriction of a mainstream AI platform by a democracy,” said Alp Toker, director of the advocacy group NetBlocks, which monitors internet access worldwide.
The restriction affects the web version of ChatGPT, popularly used as a writing assistant, but is unlikely to affect software applications from companies that already have licenses with OpenAI to use the same technology driving the chatbot, such as Microsoft’s Bing search engine.
The AI systems that power such chatbots, known as large language models, are able to mimic human writing styles based on the huge trove of digital books and online writings they have ingested.
The Italian watchdog said OpenAI must report within 20 days what measures it has taken to ensure the privacy of users’ data or face a fine of up to either 20 million euros (nearly $22 million) or 4% of annual global revenue.
The agency’s statement cites the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation and pointed to a recent data breach involving ChatGPT “users’ conversations” and information about subscriber payments.
OpenAI earlier announced that it had to take ChatGPT offline on March 20 to fix a bug that allowed some people to see the titles, or subject lines, of other users’ chat history.
“Our investigation has also found that 1.2% of ChatGPT Plus users might have had personal data revealed to another user,” the company had said. “We believe the number of users whose data was actually revealed to someone else is extremely low and we have contacted those who might be impacted.”
Italy’s privacy watchdog, known as the Garante, also questioned whether OpenAI had legal justification for its “massive collection and processing of personal data” used to train the platform’s algorithms. And it said ChatGPT can sometimes generate — and store — false information about individuals.
Finally, it noted there’s no system to verify users’ ages, exposing children to responses “absolutely inappropriate to their age and awareness.”
OpenAI said in response that it works “to reduce personal data in training our AI systems like ChatGPT because we want our AI to learn about the world, not about private individuals.”
“We also believe that AI regulation is necessary — so we look forward to working closely with the Garante and educating them on how our systems are built and used,” the company said.
The Italian watchdog’s move comes as concerns grow about the artificial intelligence boom. A group of scientists and tech industry leaders published a letter Wednesday calling for companies such as OpenAI to pause the development of more powerful AI models until the fall to give time for society to weigh the risks.
The president of Italy’s privacy watchdog agency told Italian state TV Friday evening he was one of those who signed the appeal. Pasquale Stanzione said he did so because “it’s not clear what aims are being pursued” ultimately by those developing AI.
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