An Yong: After your price cuts, ByteDance was the first to follow, suggesting they felt threatened. How do you view the new competitive landscape between startups and giants?
Liang Wenfeng: To be honest, we don’t really care about it. Lowering prices was just something we did along the way. Providing cloud services isn’t our main goal—achieving AGI is. So far, we haven’t seen any groundbreaking solutions. Giants have users, but their cash cows also shackle them, making them ripe for disruption.
“I’m a propagandist, I’ll twist the truth, I’ll put forward only my version of it if I think that’s going to propagandize people to believe what I need them to believe.” – Palmer Luckey
While J.D. Vance has his own controversies, his close connection to billionaire Peter Thiel, who is poised to have unprecedented influence in a new Trump administration, should deeply unsettle every American who cares about freedom, privacy and reining in the surveillance state.
Maria Ressa is calling for the revocation of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Revoking Section 230 would increase social media censorship and remove competition for Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, and YouTube (Google). Why? Due to threats of being sued, social media companies could ‘hold’ your posts until approved by artificial intelligence or a human. They’d also be inclined to remove more content. As for competition, smaller companies can’t afford the legal teams and/or fees that large companies can. The lawsuits could bankrupt a smaller company. Considering that Rappler is also funded by Big Tech, I’m not surprised that she’s on their side.This isn’t about hate speech, or ‘disinformation’, it’s about controlling the narrative!
In this clip, she complains about being criticized for appearing with Clinton and for being accused of being a CIA agent and a Communist. Of course, she’s not going to mention why she’s been accused of being a CIA agent (because she’s been funded by the CIA-cutout National Endowment for Democracy and other front organizations)!
Some speakers — including Clinton, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Rappler CEO Maria Ressa — also called on Congress to reform Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Ressa, a journalist who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021, also noted it’s hard for people to know what it’s like to be a victim of online harassment or misinformation until they’ve been attacked.
WikiSpooks: Rappler(Sponsored by Facebook, Friedrich Naumann Foundation, Google, Internews, National Endowment for Democracy, Open Society Foundations, Omidyar Network)
Mnuchin said he has discussed his pitch with an assortment of billionaires and big businesses, including the tech giant Oracle and the former head of the Activision Blizzard video game empire Bobby Kotick, the two people said.
…
Dan Wang*, a visiting scholar at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center who studies Chinese tech and policy, said Mnuchin’s proposal would probably hit a dead end in China, which has shown no interest in consenting to a forced sale and could use its “highly discretionary” political system to block the deal.
Bobby Kotick spent 33 years as CEO of Activision, during which time he faced plenty of controversy. His departure from the company in December following Microsoft’s acquisition was met with celebrations from gamers and developers. There were tales of his interference with the development of Activision games over the years and his role in killing off Blizzard titles in China.
Kotick was also accused of leaving a voicemail threatening to kill an assistant in 2006 and was the subject of a flight attendant’s sexual harassment lawsuit in 2007. He faced allegations of incidents involving rape and harassment stretching from the mid-2010s through 2021, and Kotick and Activision had to pay a $35 million settlement last year after failing to maintain adequate controls to report and address misconduct within the company. Activision Blizzard also paid $54 million in 2021 to settle a gender discrimination lawsuit in California.
The alleged $15 million golden parachute Kotick received upon leaving Activision did little to endear him to the public, too.
In the List of Critical and Emerging Technologies released by ASPI, a well-known Australian think tank, China takes the lead in 53 categories of cutting-edge technologies. At the same time, the USA claims the remaining 11. Notably, according to the list, China dominates in areas like advanced materials and manufacturing, energy and environment, and advanced information and communication technologies and enjoys a sizable advantage in defense, space, robotics, transportation, and quantum technology.
The shock sacking of Sam Altman, the founder of OpenAI, by his own board reveals the contradictions emerging in the development of ChatGPT and other ‘generative artificial intelligence’ models driving the AI revolution.
Ms. Cat’s Chronicles 
You must be logged in to post a comment.