As the Gulf region gains growing strategic importance for the tech war between the U.S. and China, Microsoft makes a big move into one of its richest oil countries.
The minority stake will give Brad Smith, Microsoft’s vice chair and president, a seat on G42’s board of directors.
The funding comes amid U.S. politicians’ escalating concerns over G42’s ties with China.
Given the two countries’ increasing economic ties, it’s no surprise that G42, the AI poster child of the UAE, has also forged ties with Chinese firms.
Under the agreement, the Emirati company’s data platform and other key technology infrastructure will migrate to Microsoft Azure, which will power G42’s AI product development.
The U.K. government has blamed China for a 2021 cyberattack that compromised the personal information of millions of U.K. voters.
The data breach began as early as 2021 but wasn’t detected until a year later.
Dowden said that a separate attempted cyberattack by a China-backed hacking group targeted the email accounts of U.K. lawmakers in 2021, but that parliamentary authorities mitigated the attempted breaches before any email accounts were compromised.
The Norwegian government previously attributed a 2018 data breach on its systems to APT31.
In 2020, Google security researchers linked APT31 to the targeting of email accounts belonging to the Trump and Biden presidential campaigns.
When some American users opened TikTok on Thursday morning, they were met with a full-screen message encouraging them to call Congress and say no to a TikTok ban.
“Let Congress know what TikTok means to you and tell them to vote NO.”Below the message, users can click a red “call now” button.
Last year, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew testified before Congress for five hours, addressing lawmakers’ concerns about Chinese authorities accessing American data (TikTok, an American company, is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company).
Chew has repeatedly stated that TikTok and ByteDance are not conduits for the Chinese government.
The bill’s sponsors are urging TikTok to sever its ties with ByteDance to avoid this fate, or else it could lose its 170 million American users.
Chinese tech companies are gathering all sorts of resources and talent to narrow their gap with OpenAI, and experiences for researchers on both sides of the Pacific Ocean can be surprisingly similar.
The parallel glimpse into their typical day reveals striking similarities, with wake-up times at 9 a.m. and bedtime around 1 a.m.
Both start the day with meetings, followed by a period of coding, model training and brainstorming with colleagues.
Besides building its own LLM in-house, Alibaba has been aggressively investing in startups such as Moonshot AI, Zhipu AI, Baichuan and 01.AI.
Facing competition, Alibaba has been trying to carve out a niche, and its multilingual move could become a selling point.
Over the weekend, someone posted a cache of files and documents apparently stolen from the Chinese government hacking contractor, I-Soon.
This leak gives cybersecurity researchers and rival governments an unprecedented chance to look behind the curtain of Chinese government hacking operations facilitated by private contractors.
Since then, observers of Chinese hacking operations have feverishly poured over the files.
Also, an IP address found in the I-Soon leak hosted a phishing site that the digital rights organization Citizen Lab saw used against Tibetans in a hacking campaign in 2019.
Cary highlighted the documents and chats that show how much — or how little — I-Soon employees are paid.
After a few years of funding frenzy, autonomous driving companies in China are experiencing a slowdown in investment.
Haomo.ai, an autonomous driving startup backed by Chinese automaker Great Wall Motor, has raised 100 million yuan, or $14 million, from a fresh round of funding, it said today.
Four-year-old Haomo has raised over $200 million worth of equity funding, according to startup database ITJuzi, and all of that money was denominated in Chinese yuan.
Chinese food delivery giant Meituan and Qualcomm Ventures, the corporate venture arm of Qualcomm, are among Haomo’s past investors.
Haomo is competing with a rank of Chinese AV upstarts that raised money from Western VCs and, such as Pony.ai, WeRide, Momenta, Deeproute.
If accurate, this latest injection of capital would value Moonshot AI at $2.5 billion – the largest single funding round for Chinese LLM developers on public record.
Co-leading the round are e-commerce giant Alibaba and HongShan – the VC firm formerly known as Sequoia China, according to South China Morning Post.
Other in the round included Chinese “super app” Meituan and Xiaohongshu (sometimes called China’s answer to Instagram), according to Chinese tech blog LatePost.
Pink Floyd Fan turned AI trailblazerYang Zhilin had a long list of achievements to his credit even before starting Moonshot.
The total amount raised by China’s AI firms amounted to roughly $2 billion, 70% less than the year before.
Working to apply artificial intelligence to molecular simulations, DP, short for “Deep Potential”, believes that the unifying power of “scientific research for humanity” will pave the way for its global expansion.
Areas that can benefit from scientific computing range from biopharmaceutical research and car design to semiconductor development.
The London-based AI powerhouse reported £44 million ($60 million) profit in 2020, up from a whopping £477 million ($650 million) loss in 2019.
In the meantime, DP’s international ambitions might encounter roadblocks from the ongoing decoupling that’s dividing the U.S. and China across many areas, including scientific research.
“Both the fields of basic science and biopharmaceuticals are shared by all of humanity, and they are relatively open and inclusive.
The Chinese Ministry of Transport recently unveiled a set of trial guidelines for autonomous vehicle services like robotaxis, self-driving trucks and robobuses.
The rules also specify the requirements for safety operators at various degrees of automation.
Autonomous cargo trucks should “in principle” be equipped with in-car safety operators.
Robotaxis with advanced automation should have one in-car safety operator.
They should also establish an agreement with the vehicle manufacturers and safety operators on the respective party’s scope of responsibilities.
The Chinese Ministry of Transport recently unveiled a set of trial guidelines for autonomous vehicle services like robotaxis, self-driving trucks and robobuses.
The rules also specify the requirements for safety operators at various degrees of automation.
Autonomous cargo trucks should “in principle” be equipped with in-car safety operators.
Robotaxis with advanced automation should have one in-car safety operator.
They should also have an agreement with the vehicle manufacturers and safety operators on the respective party’s scope of responsibilities.
