Welcome to the newest edition of ID Tech’s AI update. Here’s the latest big news on the shifting landscape of AI and identity technology:
The Chinese government has quietly made some exemptions for American semiconductors in the ongoing trade war with the US. The exemptions have not been formally announced by government officials, but were discovered by importers and customs agents. Their implementation seems to be a pragmatic move aimed at protecting China’s tech sector as the AI race continues to heat up.
Baidu has launched its first cluster of 30,000 third-generation P800 Kunlun AI chips, which the company says can support the development of DeepSeek-like AI models, referring to the sophisticated open source AI model that disrupted the sector earlier this year. Baidu also unveiled Ernie 4.5 Turbo, its own AI model, which it says is state-of-the-art in terms of several AI testing benchmarks.
Manus has reached a $500 million valuation after a $75 million funding round led by the US VC firm Benchmark—a quintupling of its value after its previous funding round toward the end of last year. Manus is known for an AI agent system that is capable of autonomously performing complex tasks including scouring the web for information and building software. Manus is built as a sophisticated wrapper around other LLM components including Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet and Alibaba’s Qwen.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co has unveiled its A14 manufacturing technology, which can make faster chips and put them together in compact packages in order to boost AI performance. When it finally arrives in 2028, TSMC says the tech will produce chips that are 15 percent faster using the same power consumption as the N2 chips slated for production later this year.
Microsoft Recall is finally rolling out to Copilot+ PCs. Still considered a “preview” feature, Recall is designed to essentially record everything a user does on their Windows 11 device (by taking a snapshot every few seconds), and to let the user search their past activity through an AI chat interface. Security and privacy concerns led to a year-long delay after it was first announced. It’s now opt-in, with all Recall data encrypted locally and secured via Windows Hello biometric authentication.
Apple is moving its secretive robotics team from the supervision of its AI chief to a hardware engineering unit overseen by John Ternus. It’s the latest sign of discord in Apple’s floundering AI department, with AI/ML chief John Giannandrea having also recently lost control of the Siri team, which was put under the management of Apple Vision Pro chief Mike Rockwell.
An open letter signed by major figures is urging the Attorneys General of California and Delaware to block OpenAI’s restructuring from a non-profit to a for-profit entity. Signatories include “AI Godfather” Geoffrey Hinton, Harvard legal scholar Lawrence Lessig, and OpenAI’s former policy and ethics advisor, Page Hedley, among others. Broadly speaking, they are worried about AI safety and risks of putting it at the whims of a profit-seeking corporation.
Europol has issued a formal warning about the use of deepfake technology to spoof and bypass biometric authentication systems. The EU law enforcement agency is also flagging criminals’ use of masks and synthetic fingerprints in such efforts. “Even if these systems provide strong security, it is critical to acknowledge the vulnerabilities of such systems and anticipate the development of new methods by criminals to deceive or bypass them,” it said in a new report.
The chatbot’s take: We were genuinely surprised by OpenAI’s answer here, which has us wondering whether our own judgment is off.
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April 25, 2025 – by Alex Perala
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