Tesla Inc on Monday broke ground on a Texas lithium refinery that CEO Elon Musk said should produce enough of the battery metal to build about 1 million electric vehicles (EVs) by 2025, making it the largest North American processor of the material. 

The facility will push Tesla outside its core focus of building automobiles and into the complex area of lithium refining and processing, a step Musk said was necessary if the auto giant was to meet its ambitious EV sales targets. 

“As we look ahead a few years, a fundamental choke point in the advancement of electric vehicles is the availability of battery grade lithium,” Musk said at the ground-breaking ceremony on Monday, with dozers and other earth-moving equipment operating in the background. 

Musk said Tesla aimed to finish construction of the factory next year and then reach full production about a year later. 

The move will make Tesla the only major automaker in North America that will refine its own lithium. Currently, China dominates the processing of many critical minerals, including lithium. 

“Texas wants to be able to be self-reliant, not dependent upon any foreign hostile nation for what we need. We need lithium,” Texas Governor Greg Abbott said at the ceremony. 

Musk did not specify the volume of lithium the facility would process each year, although he said the automaker would continue to buy the metal from its vendors, which include Albemarle Corp and Livent Corp. 

“We intend to continue to use suppliers of lithium, so it’s not that Tesla will do all of it,” Musk said. 

Albemarle plans to build a lithium processing facility in South Carolina that will refine 100,000 tons of the metal each year, with construction slated to begin next year and the facility coming online sometime later this decade. 

Musk did not say where Tesla will source the rough form of lithium known as spodumene concentrate that will be processed at the facility, although Tesla has supply deals with Piedmont Lithium Inc and others. 

‘Clean operations’

Tesla said it would eschew the lithium industry’s conventional refining process, which relies on sulfuric acid and other strong chemicals, in favor of materials that were less harsh on the environment, such as soda ash. 

“You could live right in the middle of the refinery and not suffer any ill effect. So they’re very clean operations,” Musk said, although local media reports said some environmental advocates had raised concerns over the facility. 

Monday’s announcement was not the first time that Tesla has attempted to venture into lithium production. Musk in 2020 told shareholders that Tesla had secured rights to 10,000 acres in Nevada where it aimed to produce lithium from clay deposits, which had never been done before on a commercial scale. 

While Musk boasted that the company had developed a proprietary process to sustainably produce lithium from those Nevada clay deposits, Tesla has not yet deployed the process. 

Musk has urged entrepreneurs to enter the lithium refining business, saying it is like “minting money.” 

“We’re begging you. We don’t want to do it. Can someone please?” he said during a conference call last month. 

Tesla said last month a recent plunge in prices of lithium and other commodities would aid Tesla’s bruised margins in the second half of the year. 

The refinery is the latest expansion by Tesla into Texas after the company moved its headquarters there from California in 2021. Musk’s other companies, including SpaceX and The Boring Company, also have operations in Texas. 

SEE ALSO: A related video by VOA’s Arash Arabasadi

“We are proud that he calls Texas home,” Abbott said, saying Tesla and Musk are “Texas’s economic juggernauts.” 
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Tracking down accurate information about Philadelphia’s elections on Twitter used to be easy. The account for the city commissioners who run elections, @phillyvotes, was the only one carrying a blue check mark, a sign of authenticity.

But ever since the social media platform overhauled its verification service last month, the check mark has disappeared. That’s made it harder to distinguish @phillyvotes from a list of random accounts not run by the elections office but with very similar names.

The election commission applied weeks ago for a gray check mark — Twitter’s new symbol to help users identify official government accounts – but has yet to hear back from the Twitter, commission spokesman Nick Custodio said. It’s unclear whether @phillyvotes is an eligible government account under Twitter’s new rules.

That’s troubling, Custodio said, because Pennsylvania has a primary election May 16 and the commission uses its account to share important information with voters in real time. If the account remains unverified, it will be easier to impersonate – and harder for voters to trust – heading into Election Day.

Impostor accounts on social media are among many concerns election security experts have heading into next year’s presidential election. Experts have warned that foreign adversaries or others may try to influence the election, either through online disinformation campaigns or by hacking into election infrastructure.

Election administrators across the country have struggled to figure out the best way to respond after Twitter owner Elon Musk threw the platform’s verification service into disarray, given that Twitter has been among their most effective tools for communicating with the public.

Some are taking other steps allowed by Twitter, such as buying check marks for their profiles or applying for a special label reserved for government entities, but success has been mixed. Election and security experts say the inconsistency of Twitter’s new verification system is a misinformation disaster waiting to happen.

“The lack of clear, at-a-glance verification on Twitter is a ticking time bomb for disinformation,” said Rachel Tobac, CEO of the cybersecurity company SocialProof Security. “That will confuse users – especially on important days like election days.”

The blue check marks that Twitter once doled out to notable celebrities, public figures, government entities and journalists began disappearing from the platform in April. To replace them, Musk told users that anyone could pay $8 a month for an individual blue check mark or $1,000 a month for a gold check mark as a “verified organization.”

The policy change quickly opened the door for pranksters to pose convincingly as celebrities, politicians and government entities, which could no longer be identified as authentic. While some impostor accounts were clear jokes, others created confusion.

Fake accounts posing as Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, the city’s Department of Transportation and the Illinois Department of Transportation falsely claimed the city was closing one of its main thoroughfares to private traffic. The fake accounts used the same photos, biographical text and home page links as the real ones. Their posts amassed hundreds of thousands of views before being taken down.

Twitter’s new policy invites government agencies and certain affiliated organizations to apply to be labeled as official with a gray check. But at the state and local level, qualifying agencies are limited to “main executive office accounts and main agency accounts overseeing crisis response, public safety, law enforcement, and regulatory issues,” the policy says.

The rules do not mention agencies that run elections. So while the main Philadelphia city government account quickly received its gray check mark last month, the local election commission has not heard back.

Election offices in four of the country’s five most populous counties — Cook County in Illinois, Harris County in Texas, Maricopa County in Arizona and San Diego County — remain unverified, a Twitter search shows. Maricopa, which includes Phoenix, has been targeted repeatedly by election conspiracy theorists as the most populous and consequential county in one of the most closely divided political battleground states.

Some counties contacted by The Associated Press said they have minimal concerns about impersonation or plan to apply for a gray check later, but others said they already have applied and have not heard back from Twitter.

Even some state election offices are waiting for government labels. Among them is the office of Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows.

In an April 24 email to Bellows’ communications director reviewed by The Associated Press, a Twitter representative wrote that there was “nothing to do as we continue to manually process applications from around the world.” The representative added in a later email that Twitter stands “ready to swiftly enforce any impersonation, so please don’t hesitate to flag any problematic accounts.”

An email sent to Twitter’s press office and a company safety officer requesting comment was answered only with an autoreply of a poop emoji.

“Our job is to reinforce public confidence,” Bellows told the AP. “Even a minor setback, like no longer being able to ensure that our information on Twitter is verified, contributes to an environment that is less predictable and less safe.”

Some government accounts, including the one representing Pennsylvania’s second-largest county, have purchased blue checks because they were told it was required to continue advertising on the platform.

Allegheny County posts ads for elections and jobs on Twitter, so the blue check mark “was necessary,” said Amie Downs, the county’s communications director.

When anyone can buy verification and when government accounts are not consistently labeled, the check mark loses its meaning, Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold said.

Griswold’s office received a gray check mark to maintain trust with voters, but she told the AP she would not buy verification for her personal Twitter account because “it doesn’t carry the same weight” it once did.

Custodio, at the Philadelphia elections commission, said his office would not buy verification either, even if it gets denied a gray check.

“The blue or gold check mark just verifies you as a paid subscriber and does not verify identity,” he said.

Experts and advocates tracking election discourse on social media say Twitter’s changes do not just incentivize bad actors to run disinformation campaigns — they also make it harder for well-meaning users to know what’s safe to share.

“Because Twitter is dropping the ball on verification, the burden will fall on voters to double check that the information they are consuming and sharing is legitimate,” said Jill Greene, voting and elections manager for Common Cause Pennsylvania.

That dampens an aspect of Twitter that until now had been seen as one of its strengths – allowing community members to rally together to elevate authoritative information, said Mike Caulfield, a research scientist at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public.

“The first rule of a good online community user interface is to ‘help the helpers.’ This is the opposite of that,” Caulfield said. “It takes a community of people who want to help boost good information, and robs them of the tools to make fast, accurate decisions.”
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Google is planning to make its search engine more “visual, snackable, personal and human,” with a focus on serving young people globally, The Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday, citing documents.

The move comes as artificial intelligence (AI) applications such as ChatGPT are rapidly gaining in popularity, highlighting a technology that could upend the way businesses and society operate.

The tech giant will nudge its service further away from “10 blue links,” which is a traditional format of presenting search results and plans to incorporate more human voices as part of the shift, the report said.

At its annual I/O developer conference in the coming week, Google is expected to debut new features that allow users to carry out conversations with an AI program, a project code-named “Magi,” The Wall Street Journal added, citing people familiar with the matter.

Generative AI has become a buzzword this year, with applications capturing the public’s fancy and sparking a rush among companies to launch similar products they believe will change the nature of work.

Google, part of Alphabet Inc., did not immediately respond to Reuters’ request for comment.
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Billionaire Warren Buffett said artificial intelligence may change the world in all sorts of ways, but new technology won’t take away opportunities for investors, and he’s confident America will continue to prosper over time.

Buffett and his partner Charlie Munger are spending all day Saturday answering questions at Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting inside a packed Omaha arena.

“New things coming along doesn’t take away the opportunities. What gives you the opportunities is other people doing dumb things,” said Buffett, who had a chance to try out ChatGPT when his friend Bill Gates showed it to him a few months back.

Buffett reiterated his long-term optimism about the prospects for America even with the bitter political divisions today.

“The problem now is that partisanship has moved more towards tribalism, and in tribalism you don’t even hear the other side,” he said.

Both Buffett and Munger said the United States will benefit from having an open trading relationship with China, so both countries should be careful not to exacerbate the tensions between them because the stakes are too high for the world.

“Everything that increases the tension between these two countries is stupid, stupid, stupid,” Munger said. And whenever either country does something stupid, he said the other country should respond with incredible kindness.

The chance to listen to the two men answer all sorts of questions about business and life attracts people from all over the world to Omaha, Nebraska. Some of the shareholders feel a particular urgency to attend now because Buffett and Munger are both in their 90s.

“Charlie Munger is 99. I just wanted to see him in person. It’s on my bucket list,” said 40-year-old Sheraton Wu from Vancouver. “I have to attend while I can.”

“It’s a once in a lifetime opportunity,” said Chloe Lin, who traveled from Singapore to attend the meeting for the first time and learn from the two legendary investors.

One of the few concessions Buffett makes to his age is that he no longer tours the exhibit hall before the meeting. In years past, he would be mobbed by shareholders trying to snap a picture with him while a team of security officers worked to manage the crowd. Munger has used a wheelchair for several years, but both men are still sharp mentally.

But in a nod to the concerns about their age, Berkshire showed a series of clips of questions about succession from past meetings dating back to the first one they filmed in 1994. Two years ago, Buffett finally said that Greg Abel will eventually replace him as CEO although he has no plans to retire. Abel already oversees all of Berkshire’s noninsurance businesses.

Buffett assured shareholders that he has total confidence in Abel to lead Berkshire in the future, and he doesn’t have a second choice for the job because Abel is remarkable in his own right. But he said much of what Abel will have to do is just maintain Berkshire’s culture and keep making similar decisions.

“Greg understands capital allocation as well as I do. He will make these decisions on the same framework that I use,” Buffett said.

Abel followed that up by assuring the crowd that he knows how Buffett and Munger have handled things for nearly six decades and “I don’t really see that framework changing.”

Although not everyone at the meeting is a fan. Outside the arena, pilots from Berkshire’s NetJets protested over the lack of a new contract and pro-life groups carried signs declaring “Buffett’s billions kill millions” to object to his many charitable donations to abortion rights groups.

Berkshire Hathaway said Saturday morning that it made $35.5 billion, or $24,377 per Class A share, in the first quarter. That’s more than 6 times last year’s $5.58 billion, or $3,784 per share.

But Buffett has long cautioned that those bottom line figures can be misleading for Berkshire because the wide swings in the value of its investments — most of which it rarely sells — distort the profits. In this quarter, Berkshire sold only $1.7 billion of stocks while recording a $27.4 billion paper investment gain. Part of this year’s investment gains included a $2.4 billion boost related to Berkshire’s planned acquisition of the majority of the Pilot Travel Centers truck stop company’s shares in January.

Buffett says Berkshire’s operating earnings that exclude investments are a better measure of the company’s performance. By that measure, Berkshire’s operating earnings grew nearly 13% to $8.065 billion, up from $7.16 billion a year ago.

The three analysts surveyed by FactSet expected Berkshire to report operating earnings of $5,370.91 per Class A share.

Buffett came close to giving a formal outlook Saturday when he told shareholders that he expects Berkshire’s operating profits to grow this year even though the economy is slowing down and many of its businesses will sell less in 2023. He said Berkshire will profit from rising interest rates on its holdings, and the insurance market looks good this year.

This year’s first quarter was relatively quiet compared to a year ago when Buffett revealed that he had gone on a $51 billion spending spree at the start of last year, snapping up stocks like Occidental Petroleum, Chevron and HP. Buffett’s buying slowed through the rest of last year with the exception of a number of additional Occidental purchases.

At the end of this year’s first quarter, Berkshire held $130.6 billion cash, up from about $128.59 billion at the end of last year. But Berkshire did spend $4.4 billion during the quarter to repurchase its own shares.

Berkshire’s insurance unit, which includes Geico and a number of large reinsurers, recorded a $911 million operating profit, up from $167 million last year, driven by a rebound in Geico’s results. Geico benefitted from charging higher premiums and a reduction in advertising spending and claims.

But Berkshire’s BNSF railroad and its large utility unit did report lower profits. BNSF earned $1.25 billion, down from $1.37 billion, as the number of shipments it handled dropped 10% after it lost a big customer and imports slowed at the West Coast ports. The utility division added $416 million, down from last year’s $775 million.

Besides those major businesses, Berkshire owns an eclectic assortment of dozens of other businesses, including a number of retail and manufacturing firms such as See’s Candy and Precision Castparts.

Berkshire again faces pressure from activist investors urging the company to do more to catalog its climate change risks in a companywide report. Shareholders were expected to brush that measure and all the other shareholder proposals aside Saturday afternoon because Buffett and the board oppose them, and Buffett controls more than 30% of the vote.

But even as they resist detailing climate risks, a number of Berkshire’s subsidiaries are working to reduce their carbon emissions, including its railroad and utilities. The company’s Clayton Homes unit is showing off a new home design this year that will meet strict energy efficiency standards from the Department of Energy and come pre-equipped for solar power to be added later.
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When Greg Brockman, the president and co-founder of ChatGPT maker OpenAI, was recently extolling the capabilities of artificial intelligence, he turned to “Game of Thrones.”

Imagine, he said, if you could use AI to rewrite the ending of that not-so-popular finale. Maybe even put yourself into the show.

“That is what entertainment will look like,” said Brockman.

Not six months since the release of ChatGPT, generative artificial intelligence is already prompting widespread unease throughout Hollywood. Concern over chatbots writing or rewriting scripts is one of the leading reasons TV and film screenwriters took to picket lines earlier this week.

Though the Writers Guild of America is striking for better pay in an industry where streaming has upended many of the old rules, AI looms as rising anxiety.

“AI is terrifying,” said Danny Strong, the “Dopesick” and “Empire” creator. “Now, I’ve seen some of ChatGPT’s writing and as of now I’m not terrified because Chat is a terrible writer. But who knows? That could change.”

AI chatbots, screenwriters say, could potentially be used to spit out a rough first draft with a few simple prompts (“a heist movie set in Beijing”). Writers would then be hired, at a lower pay rate, to punch it up.

Screenplays could also be slyly generated in the style of known writers. What about a comedy in the voice of Nora Ephron? Or a gangster film that sounds like Mario Puzo? You won’t get anything close to “Casablanca” but the barest bones of a bad Liam Neeson thriller isn’t out of the question.

The WGA’s basic agreement defines a writer as a “person” and only a human’s work can be copyrighted. But even though no one’s about to see a “By AI” writers credit at the beginning a movie, there are myriad ways that regenerative AI could be used to craft outlines, fill in scenes and mockup drafts.

“We’re not totally against AI,” says Michael Winship, president of the WGA East and a news and documentary writer. “There are ways it can be useful. But too many people are using it against us and using it to create mediocrity. They’re also in violation of copyright. They’re also plagiarizing.”

The guild is seeking more safeguards on how AI can be applied to screenwriting. It says the studios are stonewalling on the issue. The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains on the behalf of production companies, has offered to annually meet with the guild to go over definitions around the fast-evolving technology.

“It’s something that requires a lot more discussion, which we’ve committed to doing,” the AMPTP said in an outline of its position released Thursday.

Experts say the struggle screenwriters are now facing with regenerative AI is just the beginning. The World Economic Forum this week released a report predicting that nearly a quarter of all jobs will be disrupted by AI over the next five years.

“It’s definitely a bellwether in the workers’ response to the potential impacts of artificial intelligence on their work,” says Sarah Myers West, managing director of the nonprofit AI Now Institute, which has lobbied the government to enact more regulation around AI. “It’s not lost on me that a lot of the most meaningful efforts in tech accountability have been a product of worker-led organizing.”

AI has already filtered into nearly every part of moviemaking. It’s been used to de-age actors, remove swear words from scenes in post-production, supply viewing recommendations on Netflix and posthumously bring back the voices of Anthony Bourdain and Andy Warhol.

The Screen Actors Guild, set to begin its own bargaining with the AMPTP this summer, has said it’s closely following the evolving legal landscape around AI.

“Human creators are the foundation of the creative industries, and we must ensure that they are respected and paid for their work,” the actors union said.

The implications for screenwriting are only just being explored. Actors Alan Alda and Mike Farrell recently reconvened to read through a new scene from “M(asterisk)A(asterisk)S(asterisk)H” written by ChatGPT. The results weren’t terrible, though they weren’t so funny, either.

“Why have a robot write a script and try to interpret human feelings when we already have studio executives who can do that?” deadpanned Alda.

Writers have long been among notoriously exploited talents in Hollywood. The films they write usually don’t get made. If they do, they’re often rewritten many times over. Raymond Chandler once wrote “the very nicest thing Hollywood can possibly think to say to a writer is that he is too good to be only a writer.”

Screenwriters are accustomed to being replaced. Now, they see a new, readily available and inexpensive competitor in AI — albeit one with a slightly less tenuous grasp of the human condition.

“Obviously, AI can’t do what writers and humans can do. But I don’t know that they believe that, necessarily,” says screenwriter Jonterri Gadson (“A Black Lady Sketchshow”). “There needs to be a human writer in charge and we’re not trying to be gig workers, just revising what AI does. We need to tell the stories.”

Dramatizing their plight as man vs. machine surely doesn’t hurt the WGA’s cause in public opinion. The writers are wrestling with the threat of AI just as concern widens over how hurriedly regenerative AI products have been thrust into society.

Geoffrey Hinton, an AI pioneer, recently left Google in order to speak freely about its potential dangers. “It’s hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things,” Hinton told The New York Times.

“What’s especially scary about it is nobody, including a lot of the people who are involved with creating it, seem to be able to explain exactly what it’s capable of and how quickly it will be capable of more,” says actor-screenwriter Clark Gregg.

The writers find themselves in the awkward position of negotiating on a newborn technology with the potential for radical effect. Meanwhile, AI-crafted songs by “Fake Drake” or “Fake Eminem” continue to circulate online.

“They’re afraid that if the use of AI to do all this becomes normalized, then it becomes very hard to stop the train,” says James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell University. “The guild is in the position of trying to imagine lots of different possible futures.”

In the meantime, chanting demonstrators are hoisting signs with messages aimed at a digital foe. Seen on the picket lines: “ChatGPT doesn’t have childhood trauma”; “I heard AI refuses to take notes”; and “Wrote ChatGPT this.”
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White House Mulls AI Oversight, Protections with Industry Leaders
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Good news for all the password-haters out there: Google has taken a big step toward making them an afterthought by adding “passkeys” as a more straightforward and secure way to log into its services. 

Here’s what you need to know: 

What are passkeys?  

Passkeys offer a safer alternative to passwords and texted confirmation codes. Users won’t ever see them directly; instead, an online service like Gmail will use them to communicate directly with a trusted device such as your phone or computer to log you in. 

All you’ll have to do is verify your identity on the device using a PIN unlock code, biometrics such as your fingerprint or a face scan or a more sophisticated physical security dongle. 

Google designed its passkeys to work with a variety of devices, so you can use them on iPhones, Macs and Windows computers, as well as Google’s own Android phones. 

Why are passkeys necessary?  

Thanks to clever hackers and human fallibility, passwords are just too easy to steal or defeat. And making them more complex just opens the door to users defeating themselves. 

For starters, many people choose passwords they can remember — and easy-to-recall passwords are also easy to hack. For years, analysis of hacked password caches found that the most common password in use was “password123.” A more recent study by the password manager NordPass found that it’s now just “password.” This isn’t fooling anyone. 

Passwords are also frequently compromised in security breaches. Stronger passwords are more secure, but only if you choose ones that are unique, complex and non-obvious. And once you’ve settled on “erVex411$%” as your password, good luck remembering it. 

In short, passwords put security and ease of use directly at odds. Software-based password managers, which can create and store complex passwords for you, are valuable tools that can improve security. But even password managers have a master password you need to protect, and that plunges you back into the swamp. 

In addition to sidestepping all those problems, passkeys have one additional advantage over passwords. They’re specific to particular websites, so scammer sites can’t steal a passkey from a dating site and use it to raid your bank account. 

How do I start using passkeys?  

The first step is to enable them for your Google account. On any trusted phone or computer, open the browser and sign into your Google account. Then visit the page g.co/passkeys and click the option to “start using passkeys.” Voila! The passkey feature is now activated for that account. 

If you’re on an Apple device, you’ll first be prompted to set up the Keychain app if you’re not already using it; it securely stores passwords and now passkeys, as well. 

The next step is to create the actual passkeys that will connect your trusted device. If you’re using an Android phone that’s already logged into your Google account, you’re most of the way there; Android phones are automatically ready to use passkeys, though you still have to enable the function first. 

On the same Google account page noted above, look for the “Create a passkey” button. Pressing it will open a window and let you create a passkey either on your current device or on another device. There’s no wrong choice; the system will simply notify you if that passkey already exists. 

If you’re on a PC that can’t create a passkey, it will open a QR code that you can scan with the ordinary cameras on iPhones and Android devices. You may have to move the phone closer until the message “Set up passkey” appears on the image. Tap that and you’re on your way. 

And then what?  

From that point on, signing into Google will only require you to enter your email address. If you’ve gotten passkeys set up properly, you’ll simply get a message on your phone or other device asking you to for your fingerprint, your face or a PIN.

Of course, your password is still there. But if passkeys take off, odds are good you won’t be needing it very much. You may even choose to delete it from your account someday. 
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A computer scientist often dubbed “the godfather of artificial intelligence” has quit his job at Google to speak out about the dangers of the technology, U.S. media reported Monday.

Geoffrey Hinton, who created a foundation technology for AI systems, told The New York Times that advancements made in the field posed “profound risks to society and humanity”.

“Look at how it was five years ago and how it is now,” he was quoted as saying in the piece, which was published on Monday. “Take the difference and propagate it forwards. That’s scary.”

Hinton said that competition between tech giants was pushing companies to release new AI technologies at dangerous speeds, risking jobs and spreading misinformation.

“It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things,” he told The Times.

Jobs could be at risk

In 2022, Google and OpenAI — the startup behind the popular AI chatbot ChatGPT — started building systems using much larger amounts of data than before.

Hinton told The Times he believed these systems were eclipsing human intelligence in some ways because of the amount of data they were analyzing.

“Maybe what is going on in these systems is actually a lot better than what is going on in the brain,” he told the paper.

While AI has been used to support human workers, the rapid expansion of chatbots like ChatGPT could put jobs at risk.

AI “takes away the drudge work” but “might take away more than that,” he told The Times.

Concern about misinformation

The scientist also warned about the potential spread of misinformation created by AI, telling The Times that the average person will “not be able to know what is true anymore.”

Hinton notified Google of his resignation last month, The Times reported.

Jeff Dean, lead scientist for Google AI, thanked Hinton in a statement to U.S. media.

“As one of the first companies to publish AI Principles, we remain committed to a responsible approach to AI,” the statement added.

“We’re continually learning to understand emerging risks while also innovating boldly.”

In March, tech billionaire Elon Musk and a range of experts called for a pause in the development of AI systems to allow time to make sure they are safe.

An open letter, signed by more than 1,000 people. including Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, was prompted by the release of GPT-4, a much more powerful version of the technology used by ChatGPT.

Hinton did not sign that letter at the time, but told The New York Times that scientists should not “scale this up more until they have understood whether they can control it.”
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The European Union is likely to reach a political agreement this year that will pave the way for the world’s first major artificial intelligence (AI) law, the bloc’s tech regulation chief, Margrethe Vestager, said on Sunday.

This follows a preliminary deal reached on Thursday by members of the European Parliament to push through the draft of the EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act to a vote on May 11. Parliament will then thrash out the bill’s final details with EU member states and the European Commission before it becomes law.

At a press conference after a Group of Seven digital ministers’ meeting in Takasaki, Japan, Vestager said the EU AI Act was “pro-innovation” since it seeks to mitigate the risks of societal damage from emerging technologies.

Regulators around the world have been trying to find a balance where governments could develop “guardrails” on emerging artificial intelligence technology without stifling innovation.

“The reason why we have these guardrails for high-risk use cases is that cleaning up … after a misuse by AI would be so much more expensive and damaging than the use case of AI in itself,” Vestager said.

While the EU AI Act is expected to be passed by this year, lawyers have said it will take a few years for it to be enforced. But Vestager said businesses could start considering the implication of the new legislation.

“There was no reason to hesitate and to wait for the legislation to be passed to accelerate the necessary discussions to provide the changes in all the systems where AI will have an enormous influence,” she told Reuters in an interview.

While research on AI has been going on for years, the sudden popularity of generative AI applications such as OpenAI’S ChatGPT and Midjourney have led to a scramble by lawmakers to find ways to regulate any uncontrolled growth.

An organization backed by Elon Musk and European lawmakers involved in drafting the EU AI Act are among those to have called for world leaders to collaborate to find ways to stop advanced AI from creating disruptions.

Digital ministers of the G-7 advanced nations on Sunday also agreed to adopt “risk-based” regulation on AI, among the first steps that could lead to global agreements on how to regulate AI.

“It is important that our democracy paved the way and put in place the rules to protect us from its abusive manipulation – AI should be useful but it shouldn’t be manipulating us,” said German Transport Minister Volker Wissing.

This year’s G-7 meeting was also attended by representatives from Indonesia, India and Ukraine.
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British antitrust regulators on Wednesday blocked Microsoft’s $69 billion purchase of video game maker Activision Blizzard, thwarting the biggest tech deal in history over worries that it would stifle competition for popular titles like Call of Duty in the fast-growing cloud gaming market.

The Competition and Markets Authority said in its final report that “the only effective remedy” to the substantial loss of competition “is to prohibit the Merger.” The companies have vowed to appeal.

The all-cash deal faced stiff opposition from rival Sony, which makes the PlayStation gaming system, and also was being scrutinized by regulators in the U.S. and Europe over fears that it would give Microsoft and its Xbox console control of hit franchises like Call of Duty and World of Warcraft.

The U.K. watchdog’s concerns centered on how the deal would affect cloud gaming, which streams to tablets, phones and other devices and frees players from buying expensive consoles and gaming computers. Gamers can keep playing major Activision titles, including mobile games like Candy Crush, on the platforms they typically use.

Cloud gaming has the potential to change the industry by giving people more choice over how and where they play, said Martin Colman, chair of the Competition and Markets Authority’s independent expert panel investigating the deal.

“This means that it is vital that we protect competition in this emerging and exciting market,” he said.

The decision underscores Europe’s reputation as the global leader in efforts to rein in the power of Big Tech companies. A day earlier, the U.K. government unveiled draft legislation that would give regulators more power to protect consumers from online scams and fake reviews and boost digital competition.

The U.K. decision further dashes Microsoft’s hopes that a favorable outcome could help it resolve a lawsuit brought by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. A trial before FTC’s in-house judge is set to begin Aug. 2. The European Union’s decision, meanwhile, is due May 22.

Activision lashed out, portraying the watchdog’s decision as a bad signal to international investors in the United Kingdom at a time when the British economy faces severe challenges.

The game maker said it would “work aggressively” with Microsoft to appeal, asserting that the move “contradicts the ambitions of the U.K.” to be an attractive place for tech companies.

“We will reassess our growth plans for the U.K. Global innovators large and small will take note that — despite all its rhetoric — the U.K. is clearly closed for business,” Activision said.

Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft also signaled it wasn’t ready to give up.

“We remain fully committed to this acquisition and will appeal,” President Brad Smith said in a statement. The decision “rejects a pragmatic path to address competition concerns” and discourages tech innovation and investment in Britain, he said.

“We’re especially disappointed that after lengthy deliberations, this decision appears to reflect a flawed understanding of this market and the way the relevant cloud technology actually works,” Smith said.

It’s not the first time British regulators have flexed their antitrust muscles on a Big Tech deal. They previously blocked Facebook parent Meta’s purchase of Giphy over fears it would limit innovation and competition. The social media giant appealed the decision to a tribunal but lost and was forced to sell off the GIF sharing platform.

When it comes to gaming, Microsoft already has a strong position in the cloud computing market, and regulators concluded that if the deal went through, it would reinforce the company’s advantage by giving it control of key game titles.

In an attempt to ease concerns, Microsoft struck deals with Nintendo and some cloud gaming providers to license Activision titles like Call of Duty for 10 years — offering the same to Sony.

The watchdog said it reviewed Microsoft’s remedies “in considerable depth” but found they would require its oversight, whereas preventing the merger would allow cloud gaming to develop without intervention.
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Twitter accounts operated by authoritarian governments in Russia, China and Iran are benefiting from recent changes at the social media company, researchers said Monday, making it easier for them to attract new followers and broadcast propaganda and disinformation to a larger audience. 

The platform is no longer labeling state-controlled media and propaganda agencies, and will no longer prohibit their content from being automatically promoted or recommended to users. Together, the two changes, both made in recent weeks, have supercharged the Kremlin’s ability to use the U.S.-based platform to spread lies and misleading claims about its invasion of Ukraine, U.S. politics and other topics. 

Russian state media accounts are now earning 33% more views than they were just weeks ago, before the change was made, according to findings released Monday by Reset, a London-based non-profit that tracks authoritarian governments’ use of social media to spread propaganda. Reset’s findings were first reported by The Associated Press. 

The increase works out to more than 125,000 additional views per post. Those posts included ones suggesting the CIA had something to do with the September 11, 2001, attacks on the U.S., that Ukraine’s leaders are embezzling foreign aid to their country, and that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was justified because the U.S. was running clandestine biowarfare labs in the country. 

State media agencies operated by Iran and China have seen similar increases in engagement since Twitter quietly made the changes. 

The about-face from the platform is the latest development since billionaire Elon Musk purchased Twitter last year. Since then, he’s ushered in a confusing new verification system and laid off much of the company’s staff, including those dedicated to fighting misinformation, allowed back neo-Nazis and others formerly suspended from the site, and ended the site’s policy prohibiting dangerous COVID-19 misinformation. Hate speech and disinformation have thrived. 

Before the most recent change, Twitter affixed labels reading “Russia state-affiliated media” to let users know the origin of the content. It also throttled back the Kremlin’s online engagement by making the accounts ineligible for automatic promotion or recommendation—something it regularly does for ordinary accounts as a way to help them reach bigger audiences. 

The labels quietly disappeared after National Public Radio and other outlets protested Musk’s plans to label their outlets as state-affiliated media, too. NPR then announced it would no longer use Twitter, saying the label was misleading, given NPR’s editorial independence, and would damage its credibility. 

Reset’s conclusions were confirmed by the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRL), where researchers determined the changes were likely made by Twitter late last month. Many of the dozens of previously labeled accounts were steadily losing followers since Twitter began using the labels. But after the change, many accounts saw big jumps in followers. 

RT Arabic, one of Russia’s most popular propaganda accounts on Twitter, had fallen to less than 5,230,000 followers on January 1, but rebounded after the change was implemented, the DFRL found. It now has more than 5,240,000 followers. 

Before the change, users interested in seeking out Kremlin propaganda had to search specifically for the account or its content. Now, it can be recommended or promoted like any other content. 

“Twitter users no longer must actively seek out state-sponsored content in order to see it on the platform; it can just be served to them,” the DFRL concluded. 

Twitter did not respond to questions about the change or the reasons behind it. Musk has made past comments suggesting he sees little difference between state-funded propaganda agencies operated by authoritarian strongmen and independent news outlets in the west.

“All news sources are partially propaganda,” he tweeted last year, “some more than others.”
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The AI bot ChatGPT has passed exams, written poetry, and deployed in newsrooms, and now politicians are seeking it out — but experts are warning against rapid uptake of a tool also famous for fabricating “facts.”

The chatbot, released last November by U.S. firm OpenAI, has quickly moved center stage in politics — particularly as a way of scoring points.

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida recently took a direct hit from the bot when he answered some innocuous questions about health care reform from an opposition MP.

Unbeknownst to the PM, his adversary had generated the questions with ChatGPT. He also generated answers that he claimed were “more sincere” than Kishida’s.

The PM hit back that his own answers had been “more specific.”

French trade union boss Sophie Binet was on-trend when she drily assessed a recent speech by President Emmanuel Macron as one that “could have been done by ChatGPT.”

But the bot has also been used to write speeches and even help draft laws. 

“It’s useful to think of ChatGPT and generative AI in general as a cliche generator,” David Karpf of George Washington University in the U.S. said during a recent online panel. 

“Most of what we do in politics is also cliche generation.”

‘Limited added value’

Nowhere has the enthusiasm for grandstanding with ChatGPT been keener than in the United States.

Last month, Congresswoman Nancy Mace gave a five-minute speech at a Senate committee enumerating potential uses and harms of AI — before delivering the punchline that “every single word” had been generated by ChatGPT.

Local U.S. politician Barry Finegold had already gone further though, pronouncing in January that his team had used ChatGPT to draft a bill for the Massachusetts Senate.

The bot reportedly introduced original ideas to the bill, which is intended to rein in the power of chatbots and AI.

Anne Meuwese from Leiden University in the Netherlands wrote in a column for Dutch law journal RegelMaat last week that she had carried out a similar experiment with ChatGPT and also found that the bot introduced original ideas.

But while ChatGPT was to some extent capable of generating legal texts, she wrote that lawmakers should not fall over each other to use the tool.

“Not only is much still unclear about important issues such as environmental impact, bias and the ethics at OpenAI … the added value also seems limited for now,” she wrote.

Agitprop bots

The added value might be more obvious lower down the political food chain, though, where staffers on the campaign trail face a treadmill of repetitive tasks.

Karpf suggested AI could be useful for generating emails asking for donations — necessary messages that were not intended to be masterpieces.

This raises an issue of whether the bots can be trained to represent a political point of view.

ChatGPT has already provoked a storm of controversy over its apparent liberal bias — the bot initially refused to write a poem praising Donald Trump but happily churned out couplets for his successor as U.S. President Joe Biden.

Billionaire magnate Elon Musk has spied an opportunity. Despite warning that AI systems could destroy civilization, he recently promised to develop TruthGPT, an AI text tool stripped of the perceived liberal bias.

Perhaps he needn’t have bothered. New Zealand researcher David Rozado already ran an experiment retooling ChatGPT as RightWingGPT — a bot on board with family values, liberal economics and other right-wing rallying cries.

“Critically, the computational cost of trialling, training and testing the system was less than $300,” he wrote on his Substack blog in February.

Not to be outdone, the left has its own “Marxist AI.”

The bot was created by the founder of Belgian satirical website Nordpresse, who goes by the pseudonym Vincent Flibustier.

He told AFP his bot just sends queries to ChatGPT with the command to answer as if it were an “angry trade unionist.”

The malleability of chatbots is central to their appeal but it goes hand-in-hand with the tendency to generate untruths, making AI text generators potentially hazardous allies for the political class.

“You don’t want to become famous as the political consultant or the political campaign that blew it because you decided that you could have a generative AI do [something] for you,” said Karpf. 
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The Biden administration announced more than $80 million in funding Thursday in a push to produce more solar panels in the U.S., make solar energy available to more people, and pursue superior alternatives to the ubiquitous sparkly panels made with silicon.

The initiative, spearheaded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and known as Community solar, encompasses a variety of arrangements where renters and people who don’t control their rooftops can still get their electricity from solar power. Two weeks ago, Vice President Kamala Harris announced what the administration said was the largest community solar effort ever in the United States.

Now it is set to spend $52 million on 19 solar projects across a dozen states, including $10 million from the infrastructure law, as well as $30 million on technologies that will help integrate solar electricity into the grid.

The DOE also selected 25 teams to participate in a $10 million competition designed to fast-track the efforts of solar developers working on community solar projects.

The Inflation Reduction Act already offers incentives to build large solar generation projects, such as renewable energy tax credits. But Ali Zaidi, White House national climate adviser, said the new money focuses on meeting the nation’s climate goals in a way that benefits more communities.

“It’s lifting up our workers and our communities. And that’s, I think, what really excites us about this work,” Zaidi said. “It’s a chance not just to tackle the climate crisis, but to bring economic opportunity to every zip code of America.”

The investments will help people save on their electricity bills and make the electricity grid more reliable, secure, and resilient in the face of a changing climate, said Becca Jones-Albertus, director of the energy department’s Solar Energy Technologies Office.

Jones-Albertus said she’s particularly excited about the support for community solar projects, since half of Americans don’t live in a situation where they can buy their own solar and put in on the roof.

Michael Jung, executive director of the ICF Climate Center agreed. “Community solar can help address equity concerns, as most current rooftop solar panels benefit owners of single-family homes,” he said.

In typical community solar projects, households can invest in or subscribe to part of a larger solar array offsite. “What we’re doing here is trying to unlock the community solar market,” Jones-Albertus said.

The U.S. has 5.3 gigawatts of installed community solar capacity currently, according to the latest estimates. The goal is that by 2025, five million households will have access to it — about three times as many as today — saving $1 billion on their electricity bills, according to Jones-Albertus.

The new funding also highlights investment in a next generation of solar technologies, intended to wring more electricity out of the same amount of solar panels. Currently only about 20% of the sun’s energy is converted to electricity in crystalline silicon solar cells, which is what most solar panels are made of. There has long been hope for higher efficiency, and today’s announcement puts some money towards developing two alternatives: perovskite and cadmium telluride (CdTe) solar cells. Zaidi said this will allow the U.S. to be “the innovation engine that tackles the climate crisis.”

Joshua Rhodes, a scientist at the University of Texas at Austin said the investment in perovskites is good news. They can be produced more cheaply than silicon and are far more tolerant of defects, he said. They can also be built into textured and curved surfaces, which opens up more applications for their use than traditional rigid panels. Most silicon is produced in China and Russia, Rhodes pointed out.

Cadmium telluride solar can be made quickly and at a low cost, but further research is needed to improve how efficient the material is at converting sunlight to electrons.

Cadmium is also toxic and people shouldn’t be exposed to it. Jones-Albertus said that in cadmium telluride solar technology, the compound is encapsulated in glass and additional protective layers.

The new funds will also help recycle solar panels and reuse rare earth elements and materials. “One of the most important ways we can make sure CdTe remains in a safe compound form is ensuring that all solar panels made in the U.S. can be reused or recycled at the end of their life cycle,” Jones-Albertus explained.

Recycling solar panels also reduces the need for mining, which damages landscapes and uses a lot of energy, in part to operate the heavy machinery. Eight of the projects in Thursday’s announcement focus on improving solar panel recycling, for a total of about $10 million.

Clean energy is a fit for every state in the country, the administration said. One solar project in Shungnak, Alaska, was able to eliminate the need to keep making electricity by burning diesel fuel, a method sometimes used in remote communities that is not healthy for people and contributes to climate change.

“Alaska is not a place that folks often think of when they think about solar, but this energy can be an economic and affordable resource in all parts of the country,” said Jones-Albertus.
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Competition between the U.S. and China in artificial intelligence has expanded into a race to design and implement comprehensive AI regulations.

The efforts to come up with rules to ensure AI’s trustworthiness, safety and transparency come at a time when governments around the world are exploring the impact of the technology on national security and education.

ChatGPT, a chatbot that mimics human conversation, has received massive attention since its debut in November. Its ability to give sophisticated answers to complex questions with a language fluency comparable to that of humans has caught the world by surprise. Yet its many flaws, including its ostensibly coherent responses laden with misleading information and apparent bias, have prompted tech leaders in the U.S. to sound the alarm.

“What happens when something vastly smarter than the smartest person comes along in silicon form? It’s very difficult to predict what will happen in that circumstance,” said Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk in an interview with Fox News. He warned that artificial intelligence could lead to “civilization destruction” without regulations in place.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai echoed that sentiment. “Over time there has to be regulation. There have to be consequences for creating deep fake videos which cause harm to society,” Pichai said in an interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes” program.

Jessica Brandt, policy director for the Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology Initiative at the Brookings Institution, told VOA Mandarin, “Business leaders understand that regulators will be watching this space closely, and they have an interest in shaping the approaches regulators will take.”

US grapples with regulations

AI regulation is still nascent in the U.S. Last year, the White House released voluntary guidance through a Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights to help ensure users’ rights are protected as technology companies design and develop AI systems.

At a meeting of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology this month, President Joe Biden expressed concern about the potential dangers associated with AI and underscored that companies had a responsibility to ensure their products were safe before making them public.

On April 11, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, a Commerce Department agency that advises the White House on telecommunications and information policy, began to seek comment and public input with the aim of crafting a report on AI accountability.

The U.S. government is trying to find the right balance to regulate the industry without stifling innovation “in part because the U.S. having innovative leadership globally is a selling point for the United States’ hard and soft power,” said Johanna Costigan, a junior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis.

Brandt, with Brookings, said, “The challenge for liberal democracies is to ensure that AI is developed and deployed responsibly, while also supporting a vibrant innovation ecosystem that can attract talent and investment.”

Meanwhile, other Western countries have also started to work on regulating the emerging technology.

The U.K. government published its AI regulatory framework in March. Also last month, Italy temporarily blocked ChatGPT in the wake of a data breach, and the German commissioner for data protection said his country could follow suit.

The European Union stated it’s pushing for an AI strategy aimed at making Europe a world-class hub for AI that ensures AI is human-centric and trustworthy, and it hopes to lead the world in AI standards.

Cyber regulations in China

In contrast to the U.S., the Chinese government has already implemented regulations aimed at tech sectors related to AI. In the past few years, Beijing has introduced several major data protection laws to limit the power of tech companies and to protect consumers.

The Cybersecurity Law enacted in 2017 requires that data must be stored within China and operators must submit to government-conducted security checks. The Data Security Law enacted in 2021 sets a comprehensive legal framework for processing personal information when doing business in China. The Personal Information Protection Law established in the same year gives Chinese consumers the right to access, correct and delete their personal data gathered by businesses. Costigan, with the Asia Society, said these laws have laid the groundwork for future tech regulations.

In March 2022, China began to implement a regulation that governs the way technology companies can use recommendation algorithms. The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) now supervises the process of using big data to analyze user preferences and companies’ ability to push information to users.

On April 11, the CAC unveiled a draft for managing generative artificial intelligence services similar to ChatGPT, in an effort to mitigate the dangers of the new technology.

Costigan said the goal of the proposed generative AI regulation could be seen in Article 4 of the draft, which states that content generated by future AI products must reflect the country’s “core socialist values” and not encourage subversion of state power.

“Maintaining social stability is a key consideration,” she said. “The new draft regulation does some good and is unambiguously in line with [President] Xi Jinping’s desire to ensure that individuals, companies or organizations cannot use emerging AI applications to challenge his rule.”

Michael Caster, the Asia digital program manager at Article 19, a London-based rights organization, told VOA, “The language, especially at Article 4, is clearly about maintaining the state’s power of censorship and surveillance.

“All global policymakers should be clearly aware that while China may be attempting to set standards on emerging technology, their approach to legislation and regulation has always been to preserve the power of the party.”

The future of cyber regulations

As strategies for cyber and AI regulations evolve, how they develop may largely depend on each country’s way of governance and reasons for creating standards. Analysts say there will also be intrinsic hurdles linked to coming up with consensus.

“Ethical principles can be hard to implement consistently, since context matters and there are countless potential scenarios at play,” Brandt told VOA. “They can be hard to enforce, too. Who would take on that role? How? And of course, before you can implement or enforce a set of principles, you need broad agreement on what they are.”

Observers said the international community would face challenges as it creates standards aimed at making AI technology ethical and safe.
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U.S. homeland security officials are launching what they describe as two urgent initiatives to combat growing threats from China and expanding dangers from ever more capable, and potentially malicious, artificial intelligence.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced Friday that his department was starting a “90-day sprint” to confront more frequent and intense efforts by China to hurt the United States, while separately establishing an artificial intelligence task force.

“Beijing has the capability and the intent to undermine our interests at home and abroad and is leveraging every instrument of its national power to do so,” Mayorkas warned, addressing the threat from China during a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington.

The 90-day sprint will “assess how the threats posed by the PRC [People’s Republic of China] will evolve and how we can be best positioned to guard against future manifestations of this threat,” he said.

“One critical area we will assess, for example, involves the defense of our critical infrastructure against PRC or PRC-sponsored attacks designed to disrupt or degrade provision of national critical functions, sow discord and panic, and prevent mobilization of U.S. military capabilities,” Mayorkas added.

Other areas of focus for the sprint will include addressing ways to stop Chinese government exploitation of U.S. immigration and travel systems to spy on the U.S. government and private entities and to silence critics, and looking at ways to disrupt the global fentanyl supply chain.

 

AI dangers

Mayorkas also said the magnitude of the threat from artificial intelligence, appearing in a growing number of tools from major tech companies, was no less critical.

“We must address the many ways in which artificial intelligence will drastically alter the threat landscape and augment the arsenal of tools we possess to succeed in the face of these threats,” he said.

Mayorkas promised that the Department of Homeland Security “will lead in the responsible use of AI to secure the homeland and in defending against the malicious use of this transformational technology.”

 

The new task force is set to seek ways to use AI to protect U.S. supply chains and critical infrastructure, counter the flow of fentanyl, and help find and rescue victims of online child sexual exploitation.

The unveiling of the two initiatives came days after lawmakers grilled Mayorkas about what some described as a lackluster and derelict effort under his leadership to secure the U.S. border with Mexico.

“You have not secured our borders, Mr. Secretary, and I believe you’ve done so intentionally,” the chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, Republican Mark Green, told Mayorkas on Wednesday.

Another lawmaker, Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene, went as far as to accuse Mayorkas of lying, though her words were quickly removed from the record.

Mayorkas on Friday said it might be possible to use AI to help with border security, though how exactly it could be deployed for the task was not yet clear.

“We’re at a nascent stage of really deploying AI,” he said. “I think we’re now at the dawn of a new age.”

But Mayorkas cautioned that technologies like AI would do little to slow the number of migrants willing to embark on dangerous journeys to reach U.S. soil.

“Desperation is the greatest catalyst for the migration we are seeing,” he said.

FBI warning

The announcement of Homeland Security’s 90-day sprint to confront growing threats from Beijing followed a warning earlier this week from the FBI about the willingness of China to target dissidents and critics in the U.S.

and the arrests of two New York City residents for their involvement in a secret Chinese police station.

China has denied any wrongdoing.

“The Chinese government strictly abides by international law, and fully respects the law enforcement sovereignty of other countries,” Liu Pengyu, the spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, told VOA in an email earlier this week, accusing the U.S. of seeking “to smear China’s image.”

Top U.S. officials have said they are opening two investigations daily into Chinese economic espionage in the U.S.

“The Chinese government has stolen more of American’s personal and corporate data than that of every nation, big or small combined,” FBI Director Christopher Wray told an audience late last year.

More recently, Wray warned of Chinese’ advances in AI, saying he was “deeply concerned.”

Mayorkas voiced a similar sentiment, pointing to China’s use of investments and technology to establish footholds around the world.

“We are deeply concerned about PRC-owned and -operated infrastructure, elements of infrastructure, and what that control can mean, given that the operator and owner has adverse interests,” Mayorkas said Friday.

“Whether it’s investment in our ports, whether it is investment in partner nations, telecommunications channels and the like, it’s a myriad of threats,” he said.
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Twitter has removed labels describing global media organizations as government-funded or state-affiliated, a move that comes after the Elon Musk-owned platform started stripping blue verification checkmarks from accounts that don’t pay a monthly fee.

Among those no longer labeled was National Public Radio in the U.S., which announced last week that it would stop using Twitter after its main account was designated state-affiliated media, a term also used to identify media outlets controlled or heavily influenced by authoritarian governments, such as Russia and China.

Twitter later changed the label to “government-funded media,” but NPR — which relies on the government for a tiny fraction of its funding — said it was still misleading.

Canadian Broadcasting Corp. and Swedish public radio made similar decisions to quit tweeting. CBC’s government-funded label vanished Friday, along with the state-affiliated tags on media accounts including Sputnik and RT in Russia and Xinhua in China.

Many of Twitter’s high-profile users on Thursday lost the blue checks that helped verify their identity and distinguish them from impostors.

Twitter had about 300,000 verified users under the original blue-check system — many of them journalists, athletes and public figures. The checks used to mean the account was verified by Twitter to be who it says it is.

High-profile users who lost their blue checks Thursday included Beyoncé, Pope Francis, Oprah Winfrey and former President Donald Trump.

The costs of keeping the marks range 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, as was the case with the previous blue check doled out during the platform’s pre-Musk administration.

Celebrity users, from basketball star LeBron James to author Stephen King and Star Trek’s William Shatner, have balked at joining — although on Thursday, all three had blue checks indicating that the account paid for verification.

King, for one, said he hadn’t paid.

“My Twitter account says I’ve subscribed to Twitter Blue. I haven’t. My Twitter account says I’ve given a phone number. I haven’t,” King tweeted Thursday. “Just so you know.”

In a reply to King’s tweet, Musk said “You’re welcome namaste” and in another tweet he said he’s “paying for a few personally.” He later tweeted he was just paying for King, Shatner and James.

Singer Dionne Warwick tweeted earlier in the week that the site’s verification system “is an absolute mess.”

“The way Twitter is going anyone could be me now,” Warwick said. She had earlier vowed not to pay for Twitter Blue, saying the monthly fee “could (and will) be going toward my extra hot lattes.”

On Thursday, Warwick lost her blue check (which is actually a white check mark in a blue background).

For users who still had a blue check Thursday, a popup message indicated that the account “is verified because they are subscribed to Twitter Blue and verified their phone number.” Verifying a phone number simply means that the person has a phone number and they verified that they have access to it — it does not confirm the person’s identity.

It wasn’t just celebrities and journalists who lost their blue checks Thursday. Many government agencies, nonprofits and public-service accounts around the world found themselves no longer verified, raising concerns that Twitter could lose its status as a platform for getting accurate, up-to-date information from authentic sources, including in emergencies.

While Twitter offers gold checks for “verified organizations” and gray checks for government organizations and their affiliates, it’s not clear how the platform doles these out.

The official Twitter account of the New York City government, which earlier had a blue check, tweeted on Thursday that “This is an authentic Twitter account representing the New York City Government This is the only account for @NYCGov run by New York City government” in an attempt to clear up confusion.

A newly created spoof account with 36 followers (also without a blue check), disagreed: “No, you’re not. THIS account is the only authentic Twitter account representing and run by the New York City Government.”

Soon, another spoof account — purporting to be Pope Francis — weighed in too: “By the authority vested in me, Pope Francis, I declare @NYC_GOVERNMENT the official New York City Government. Peace be with you.”

Fewer than 5% of legacy verified accounts appear to have paid to join Twitter Blue as of Thursday, according to an analysis by Travis Brown, a Berlin-based developer of software for tracking social media.

Musk’s move has riled up some high-profile users and pleased some right-wing figures and Musk fans who thought the marks were unfair. But it is not an obvious money-maker for the social media platform that has long relied on advertising for most of its revenue.

Digital intelligence platform Similarweb analyzed how many people signed up for Twitter Blue on their desktop computers and only detected 116,000 confirmed sign-ups last month, which at $8 or $11 per month does not represent a major revenue stream. The analysis did not count accounts bought via mobile apps.

After buying San Francisco-based 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.

Twitter began tagging profiles with a blue check mark starting about 14 years ago. Along with shielding celebrities from impersonators, one of the main reasons was to provide an extra tool to curb misinformation coming from accounts impersonating people. Most “legacy blue checks,” including the accounts of politicians, activists and people who suddenly find themselves in the news, as well as little-known journalists at small publications around the globe, are not household names.

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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The CEO of TikTok tried to calm critics’ fears about the security of his company’s app during an appearance Thursday.

Shou Chew was asked at a TED2023 Possibility conference if he could guarantee Beijing would not use the TikTok app, owned by the Chinese tech company ByteDance, to interfere in future U.S. elections.

“I can say that we are building all the tools to prevent any of these actions from happening,” Chew said. “And I’m very confident that with an unprecedented amount of transparency that we’re giving on the platform, we can, how we can reduce this risk to as low as zero as possible.”

Chew made the comments in Vancouver at the TED organization’s annual convention, where artificial intelligence and safeguards were discussed.

U.S. lawmakers and officials are ratcheting up threats to ban TikTok, saying the Chinese-owned video-sharing app used by millions of Americans poses a threat to privacy and U.S. national security.

U.S. lawmakers have grilled Chew over concerns the Chinese government could exploit the platform’s user data for espionage and influence operations in the United States.

U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy tweeted in March, “It’s very concerning that the CEO of TikTok can’t be honest and admit what we already know to be true — China has access to TikTok user data.”

U.S. Representative Michael McCaul, chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, was even more blunt in February, telling the committee, “Make no mistake, TikTok is a national security threat. … It’s a spy balloon in your phone.”

He was referencing a Chinese surveillance balloon that drifted across the United States in early February before being shot down off the southeastern U.S. coast.

Several governments, including Canada and the U.S., have banned the TikTok app from government-issued smartphones, citing concerns the Chinese government could exploit the platform’s user data for espionage and influence operations in the United States.

Chew says TikTok has never stored data from Americans on servers in China.

“All new U.S. data is already stored in the Oracle Cloud infrastructure. So it’s in this protected U.S. environment that we talked about in the United States,” he said. “We still have some legacy data to delete in our own servers in Virginia and in Singapore. Our data has never been stored in China.”

“It’s going to take us a while to delete them, but I expect it to be done this year,” he said.

Chew also emphasized TikTok’s efforts to moderate content. When asked how many people are reviewing content posted to the platform, Chew said the numbers and cost are huge.

“The group is based in Ireland and it’s a lot of people. It’s tens of thousands of people,” Chew said. “It’s one of the most important cost items. And I think it’s completely worth it.”

Speaking to a TED conference dominated by discussions of artificial intelligence, Chew said a lot of moderation on TikTok is done by machines.

“The machines are good, they’re quite good, but they’re not as good as you know, they’re not perfect at this point. So you have to complement it with a lot of human beings today,” he said.

VOA’s Masood Farivar contributed to this report. 
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While artificial intelligence, or AI, is not new, the speed at which the technology is developing and its implications for societies are, for many, a cause for wonder and alarm.

ChatGPT recently garnered headlines for doing things like writing term papers for university students.

Tom Graham and his company, Metaphysic.ai, have received attention for creating fake videos of actor Tom Cruise and re-creating Elvis Presley singing on an American talent show. Metaphysic was started to utilize artificial intelligence and create high-quality avatars of stars like Cruise or people from one’s own family or social circle.

Graham, who appeared at this year’s TED Conference in Vancouver, which began Monday and runs through Friday, said talking with an artificially created younger self or departed loved one can have tremendous benefits for therapy.

He added that the technology would allow actors to appear in movies without having to show up on set, or in ads with AI-generated sports stars.

“So, the idea of them being able to create ads without having to turn up is – it’s a match made in heaven,” Graham said. “The advertisers get more content. The sports people never have to turn up because they don’t want to turn up. And everyone just gets paid the same.”

Sal Khan, founder of Khan Academy, a nonprofit organization that provides free teaching materials, sees AI as beneficial to education and a kind of one-on-one instruction: student and AI.

His organization is using artificial intelligence to supplement traditional instruction and make it more interactive.

“But now, they can talk to literary characters,” he said. “They can talk to fictional cats. They can talk to historic characters, potentially even talk to inanimate objects, like, we were talking about the Mississippi River. Or talk to the Empire State Building. Or talk to … you know, talk to Mount Everest. This is all possible.”

For Chris Anderson, who is in charge of TED – a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization whose mission is to spread ideas, usually in the form of short speeches – conversations about artificial intelligence are the most important ones we can have at the moment. He said the organization’s role this year is to bring different parts of this rapidly emerging technology together.

“And the conversation can’t just be had by technologists,” he said. “And it can’t just be heard by politicians. And it can’t just be held by creatives. Everyone’s future is being affected. And so, we need to bring people together.”

For all of AI’s promise, there are growing calls for safeguards against misuse of the technology.

Computer scientist Yejin Choi at the University of Washington said policies and regulations are lagging because AI is moving so fast.

“And then there’s this question of whose guardrails are you going to install into AI,” she said. “So there’s a lot of these open questions right now. And ideally, we should be able to customize the guardrails for different cultures or different use cases.”

Another TED speaker this year, Eliezer Yudkowsky, has been studying AI for 20 years and is currently a senior research fellow at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute in California. He has a more pessimistic view of artificial intelligence and any type of safeguards.

“This eventually gets to the point where there is stuff smarter than us,” he said. “I think we are presently not on track to be able to handle that remotely gracefully. I think we all end up dead.”

Ready or not, societies are confronting the need to adapt to AI’s emergence.
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This time it’s for real. 

Many of Twitter’s high-profile users are losing the blue check marks that helped verify their identities and distinguish them from impostors on the Elon Musk-owned social media platform. 

After several false starts, Twitter began making good on its promise Thursday to remove the blue checks from accounts that don’t each pay a monthly fee to keep them. Twitter had about 300,000 verified users under the original blue-check system—many of them journalists, athletes and public figures. The checks began disappearing from these users’ profiles late morning Pacific time. 

High-profile users who lost their blue checks Thursday included Beyonce, Pope Francis and former President Donald Trump.

The costs of keeping the marks range 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 the users are who they say they are, as was the case with the previous blue check doled out during the platform’s pre-Musk administration. 

Celebrity users, from basketball star LeBron James to “Star Trek’s” William Shatner, have balked at joining — although on Thursday, James’ blue check indicated that the account paid for verification. “Seinfeld” actor Jason Alexander pledged to leave the platform if Musk took his blue check away. 

‘Anyone could be me’

“The way Twitter is going anyone could be me now. The verification system is an absolute mess,” Dionne Warwick tweeted Tuesday. She had earlier vowed not to pay for Twitter Blue, saying the monthly fee “could [and will] be going toward my extra hot lattes.” 

On Thursday, Warwick lost her blue check. 

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 premium subscriptions. But his move also reflects his assertion that the blue verification marks have become undeserved or “corrupt” status symbols for elite personalities, news reporters and others granted verification for free by Twitter’s previous leadership. 

Twitter began tagging profiles with blue check marks about 14 years ago. One main reason for doing so was to provide an extra tool to curb misinformation coming from accounts impersonating people. Most “legacy blue checks,” including the accounts of politicians, activists and people who suddenly find themselves in the news, as well as little-known journalists at small publications around the globe, are not household names. 

One of Musk’s first product moves after taking over Twitter was to launch a service granting a blue check 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 suspend the service days after its launch. 

The relaunched service costs $8 a month for web users and $11 a month for users of Twitter’s 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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SpaceX’s giant new rocket blasted off on its first test flight Thursday but exploded minutes after rising from the launch pad and crashed into the Gulf of Mexico.

Elon Musk’s company was aiming to send the nearly 400-foot (120-meter) Starship rocket on a round-the-world trip from the southern tip of Texas, near the Mexican border. It carried no people or satellites.

The plan called for the booster to peel away from the spacecraft minutes after liftoff, but that didn’t happen. The rocket began to tumble and then exploded four minutes into the flight, plummeting into the gulf. After separating, the spacecraft was supposed to continue east and attempt to circle the world, before crashing into the Pacific near Hawaii.

Throngs of spectators watched from South Padre Island, several miles away from the Boca Chica Beach launch site, which was off limits. As it lifted off, the crowd screamed: “Go, baby, go!”

The company plans to use Starship to send people and cargo to the moon and, eventually, Mars. NASA has reserved a Starship for its next moonwalking team, and rich tourists are already booking lunar flybys.

It was the second launch attempt. Monday’s try was scrapped by a frozen booster valve.

At 394 feet and nearly 17 million pounds of thrust, Starship easily surpasses NASA’s moon rockets — past, present and future. The stainless steel rocket is designed to be fully reusable with fast turnaround, dramatically lowering costs, similar to what SpaceX’s smaller Falcon rockets have done soaring from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Nothing was to be saved from the test flight.

The futuristic spacecraft flew several miles into the air during testing a few years ago, landing successfully only once. But this was to be the inaugural launch of the first-stage booster with 33 methane-fueled engines.
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A growing number of startups are using artificial intelligence to replicate human voices. A company is creating synthetic voices for organizations to use for advertising, marketing and training. Phil Dierking reports.
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Apple Inc. opened its first flagship store in India in a much-anticipated launch Tuesday that highlights the company’s growing aspirations to expand in the country it also hopes to turn into a potential manufacturing hub.

The company’s CEO Tim Cook posed for photos with a few of the 100 or so Apple fans who had lined up outside the sprawling 20,000-square-foot store in India’s financial capital, Mumbai, its design inspired by the iconic black-and-yellow cabs unique to the city. A second store will open Thursday in the national capital, New Delhi.

“India has such a beautiful culture and an incredible energy, and we’re excited to build on our long-standing history,” Cook said in a statement earlier.

The tech giant has been operating in India for more than 25 years, selling its products through authorized retailers and the website it launched a few years ago. But regulatory hurdles and the pandemic delayed its plans to open a flagship store.

The new stores are a clear signal of the company’s commitment to invest in India, the second-largest smartphone market in the world where iPhone sales have been ticking up steadily, said Jayanth Kolla, analyst at Convergence Catalyst, a tech consultancy. The stores show “how much India matters to the present and the future of the company,” he added.

For the Cupertino, California-based company, India’s sheer size makes the market especially encouraging.

About 600 million of India’s 1.4 billion people have smartphones, “which means the market is still under-penetrated and the growth prospect is huge,” said Neil Shah, vice president of research at technology market research firm Counterpoint Research.

Between 2020 and 2022, the Silicon Valley company has gained some ground in the smartphone market in the country, going from just about 2% to capturing 6%, according to Counterpoint data.

Still, the iPhone’s hefty price tag puts it out of reach for the majority of Indians.

Instead, iPhone sales in the country have thrived among the sliver of upper-middle-class and rich Indians with disposable incomes, a segment of buyers that Shah says is rising. According to Counterpoint data, Apple has captured 65% of the “premium” smartphone market, where prices range up from 30,000 rupees ($360).

In September, Apple announced it would start making its iPhone 14 in India. The news was hailed as a win for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government, which has pushed for ramping up local manufacturing ever since he came to power in 2014.

Apple first began manufacturing from India in 2017 with its iPhone SE and has since continued to assemble a number of iPhone models from the country.

Most of Apple’s smartphones and tablets are assembled by contractors with factories in China, but the company started looking at potentially moving some production to Southeast Asia or other places after repeated shutdowns to fight COVID-19 disrupted its global flow of products.

“Big companies got a jolt, they realized they needed a backup strategy outside of China — they couldn’t risk another lockdown or any geopolitical rift affecting their business,” said Kolla.

Currently, India makes close to 13 million iPhones every year, up from less than 5 million three years ago, according to Counterpoint Research. This is about 6% of iPhones made globally — and only a small slice in comparison to China, which still produces around 90% of them.

Last week, India’s Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal said the government was in regular touch with Apple to support their business here and that the company had plans to have 25% of their global production come out of India in the next five years.

The challenge for Apple, according to Shah of Counterpoint, is that the raw materials are still coming from outside India so the tech company will need to either find a local supplier or bring their suppliers, based in countries like China, Japan and Taiwan, closer to drive up production.

Still, he’s optimistic this target could be met, especially with labor costs being lower in India and the government wooing companies with attractive subsidies to boost local manufacturing.

“For Apple, everything is about timing. They don’t enter a market with full flow until they feel confident about their prospects. They can see the opportunity here today — it’s a win-win situation,” Shah said.
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