• Chinese tech companies including Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd., Baidu Inc. and Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. are exploring ways to develop artificial intelligence with less-powerful semiconductors following sanctions that have cut off access to advanced chips made by American companies like Nvidia Corp., according to a Wall Street Journal review of research papers and interviews with employees. The research into new ways to develop and deploy AI tools could be essential for Chinese tech firms to remain competitive given the Biden administration’s signaling that additional sanctions could be issued and further restrict access to American technology. (The Wall Street Journal)
• Spending cuts in the proposed budget bill from House Republicans would worsen the ongoing shortage of air-traffic controllers that has already led to a reduction of flights to New York, according to the Federal Aviation Administration, which also warned that the agency would be forced to furlough thousands of employees and stop work on an air-traffic computer system. The FAA facility that guides planes to and from New York only has 54% of its optimal number of trained controllers, and it can take years for controllers in training to become fully certified. (Bloomberg)
• Amazon.com Inc. is putting together a team that will use artificial intelligence tools to generate photos and videos for merchants to use in advertising campaigns across the company’s platform. The move is intended to diversify the company’s advertising business, which is seeking to expand beyond just selling merchants top positions in search results by also selling spots on its streaming services, music platform and inside its grocery stores, among other efforts. (The Information)

Happening today: 

• Intel Corp. will hold its Intel Vision event, which will focus on the company’s view of the future of cloud computing and software.

Apple’s earnings reveal another “LeBron-like” quarter

Axios

Buffett says Apple is Berkshire portfolio’s best business

Jonathan Stempel and Carolina Mandl, Reuters

Warren Buffett said on Saturday that Apple Inc is a better business than any other in Berkshire Hathaway Inc’s portfolio.

Qualcomm acquires Autotalks to boost Snapdragon’s automotive safety technology, reportedly for $350-400M

Ingrid Luden, TechCrunch

Qualcomm’s longer term bet on the automotive sector as a lucrative customer base for its chips and related communications technology is getting a significant push today: the company announced that it is acquiring Autotalks, a fabless chipmaker out of Israel that builds semiconductor and system-on-a-chip technology to aid in automotive safety.

AMD’s AI Progress Wins Over Traders Seeking More Than Just Promises

Jeran Wittenstein and Ian King, Bloomberg

​​Promises of a future when artificial intelligence drives a surge in sales for chipmakers are no longer cutting it in the stock market. These days, hard evidence of progress toward that is needed.

Broadcom CEO seeks to convince EU on $61 billion VMware deal

Foo Yun Chee, Reuters

U.S. chipmaker Broadcom’s Chief Executive Hock Tan on Friday will try to convince EU antitrust enforcers that his proposed $61 billion bid for cloud computing firm VMware, which has triggered scrutiny on both sides of the Atlantic, is pro-competitive.

Biden subsidies stoke arms race among states to woo projects

Aime Williams and Amanda Chu, Financial Times

Critics question whether generous incentives to attract foreign investment deliver value for money.

Judge Dismisses F.T.C. Lawsuit Against a Location Data Broker

Natasha Singer, The New York Times

The ruling was a blow to the commission’s intensifying efforts to crack down on the sale and use of sensitive personal information.

OpenAI’s regulatory troubles are only just beginning

Jess Weatherbed, The Verge

The European Union’s fight with ChatGPT is a glance into what’s to come for AI services.

Google Plans to Make Search More ‘Personal’ with AI Chat and Video Clips

Miles Kruppa, The Wall Street Journal

Google is shifting the way it presents search results to incorporate conversations with artificial intelligence, along with more short video and social-media posts, a departure from the list of website results that has made it the dominant search engine for decades.

US Spies Should Tap Private AI Models, NSA’s Research Chief Says

Katrina Manson, Bloomberg

A top US spy official said intelligence agencies should use commercially available AI to keep up with foreign adversaries that will do the same — while being sure to address the risks to privacy and broader concerns about misuse of the fast-developing technology.

OpenAI changed its plans and won’t train on customer data, Sam Altman says

Rohan Goswami, CNBC

OpenAI no longer relies on API customer data to train its large-language models and ChatGPT, CEO Sam Altman told CNBC.

Forget ChatGPT. These Are the Best AI-Powered Apps.

Nicole Nguyen, The Wall Street Journal

Chat features built into Duolingo, Expedia and others can be more useful than ask-me-anything bots.

AI pioneer says its threat to world may be ‘more urgent’ than climate change

Martin Coulter, Reuters

Artificial intelligence could pose a “more urgent” threat to humanity than climate change, AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton told Reuters in an interview on Friday.

DEF CON to set thousands of hackers loose on LLMs

Jessica Lyons Hardcastle, The Register

This year’s DEF CON AI Village has invited hackers to show up, dive in, and find bugs and biases in large language models (LLMs) built by OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and others.

NY Democrat unveils bill to criminalize sharing deepfake porn

Jared Gans, The Hill

Rep. Joseph Morelle (D-N.Y.) has unveiled a bill to make the sharing of deepfake pornography without consent illegal, a response to the accelerated advancement of artificial intelligence and digitally manipulated content. 

Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb proposes legislation for citywide affordable internet access

Ben Axelrod, WYKC

Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb is issuing two proposals aimed at providing citywide affordable internet access.

Apple Connects Through Economic Jitters

Dan Gallagher, The Wall Street Journal

Apple Inc. managed to sell a decent number of iPhones this winter. That was hardly a foregone conclusion. 

Apple Quietly Taps Korean Web Comics to Revive its Books App

Min Jeong Lee and Youkyung Lee, Bloomberg

Apple Inc. is betting on Korean web comics to give a jolt of life to its Books app. The Cupertino, California-based firm signed a three-year exclusive contract with South Korean startup Kenaz in December to supply online comics known as webtoons. The new content was rolled out in Japan last month and will expand to cover all 51 countries where Books is available, according to the firm. 

Chatroom trade: inside the online marketplace for US secrets

Mehul Srivastava and Felicia Schwartz, Financial Times

Hackers and conspiracy theorists use platforms such as Telegram to exchange leaks for cash and bragging rights.

Cybercrime fighters look to AI to fill talent gap

Hope King and Sam Sabin, Axios

Cybercrime fighters may soon rely more heavily on AI to plug growing gaps in the industry’s workforce.

Western Digital Customer Data, Credit Cards Accessed in Hack

Ian King, Bloomberg

Western Digital Corp. said hackers got access to an internal database for its online store which contained personal information such as names, addresses and partial credit card details of customers. 

Hacked verified Facebook pages impersonating Meta are buying ads from Meta

Taylor Hatmaker, TechCrunch

A handful of verified Facebook pages were hacked recently and spotted slinging likely malware through ads approved by and purchased through the platform. But the accounts should be easy to catch — in some cases, they were impersonating Facebook itself.

Hands Up, This Is a (Virtual) Robbery!

Lauren Tara LaCapra, The Information

Bank of America and other large U.S. corporations are slowly turning to the metaverse to train employees on safety, sell new products and connect teams.

Threat of TikTok ban has creators scrambling to build followings on Instagram, YouTube

Ashley Capoot, CNBC

With U.S. officials threatening a nationwide TikTok ban, creators and small business owners who rely on the app are growing concerned.

Twitter Criticized for Allowing Texas Shooting Images to Spread

Benjamin Mullin, The New York Times

Graphic images of the attack went viral on the platform, which has made cuts to its moderation team. Some users said the images exposed the realities of gun violence.

Elon Musk’s Goal for Twitter: ‘Unregretted User-Minutes’

Tim Higgins, The Wall Street Journal

Six months into running the social-media company, the billionaire is talking about his own metric of success.

Why Teens Say Location Sharing Is the Greatest—and the Worst

Julie Jargon, The Wall Street Journal

They can see when they’re being excluded in real-time by tracking each other on apps.

Jack Dorsey: Twitter’s co-founder makes his move against Musk

Hannah Murphy, Financial Times

The tech entrepreneur has turned his attention to rival social media platforms Bluesky and Nostr.

Bluesky says no ‘heads of state’ allowed on its Twitter-like platform for now

Kylie Robison, Fortune

Bluesky, the buzzy social media platform that’s emerging as a Twitter competitor, said on Friday that it will not allow “heads of state” on the service yet, as the fledgling company seeks to control its growth during its beta testing phase.

Tech Workers Aren’t as Rich as They Used to Be

Rachel Louise Ensign, The Wall Street Journal

Stock declines wipe out billions of dollars of paper gains meant for big-ticket expenses.

ChatGPT is powered by these contractors making $15 an hour

David Ingram, NBC News

Two OpenAI contractors spoke to NBC News about their work training the system behind ChatGPT.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says the remote work ‘experiment’ was a mistake—and ‘it’s over’

Steve Mollman, Fortune

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman isn’t averse to change—he helped kickstart the current A.I. race with chatbot ChatGPT, after all, threatening to upend multiple industries—but he still thinks startups are most effective when employees work together in an office.