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:
Reddit is considering legal action against University of Zurich researchers who conducted a clandestine experiment in which AI bots participated in a popular online forum called r/ChangeMyView, which is meant to host civil debates about various issues. The researchers said their AI chatbots, which posed as real human users, were three to six times more successful than humans at persuading others to change their opinions. Reddit’s chief legal officer called the experiment “deeply wrong on both a moral and legal level.”
Mastercard has announced the launch of AI shopping bots that can make online purchases on behalf of real consumers. The Agent Pay bots are officially registered, with preferences and guardrails set by users, and perform transactions with tokenized payment technology. Mastercard is working with Microsoft and IBM to expand the program.
The U.S. Congress has passed legislation banning non-consensual deepfake pornography. The “Take It Down Act” criminalizes the knowing publication of AI-generated pornographic content that depicts a real person without their consent. The House passed the bill with a 409-2 vote after the Senate approved it unanimously in February, and President Trump has indicated that he intends to sign it into law.
MediaTek says it can’t give full-year guidance to shareholders due to uncertainty about tariffs. The firm is considered Taiwan’s top chip design company. On a conference call, CEO Rick Tsai explained that he couldn’t offer the customary guidance for 2025. “But what I can say is: at least qualitatively, we are not overly pessimistic,” he said. “For the mid- to long-term, we believe the trend towards ubiquitous AI remains intact and our growth prospects remain solid.”
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has publicly called on the Trump administration to ease export controls on AI technology and chips. Speaking to media, Huang said the tariffs are hurting American tech firms’ ability to compete on the global stage. “We need to accelerate the diffusion of American AI technology around the world,” he said. “The policies and encouragement from the administration really need to support that.”
Huawei has begun delivering CloudMatrix 384 AI chip clusters to Chinese clients that have been cut off from access to rival Nvidia’s chips. The CloudMatrix 384 links together 384 of Huawei’s Ascend 910C processors using a proprietary “super node” optical interconnect. While each of Huawei’s component chips underperform Nvidia’s GB200 chips, the networked cluster outperforms Nvidia’s NVL72 AI cluster of the latter, according to Huawei’s internal testing.
Cast AI has raised $108 million in a new funding round led by SoftBank and G2 Venture Partners. Founded in 2019, the firm offers a cloud optimization and automation platform focused on businesses running Kubernetes and AI workloads. Cast AI is headquartered in Miami, but its core operations are in Vilnius, Lithuania.
A federal judge has ruled that Elon Musk can proceed with his latest lawsuit against OpenAI, but rejected most of his claims and his attempt to block the latter’s transition to a for-profit structure. Musk is allowed to proceed with his claims of fraud and unjust enrichment on OpenAI’s part, as well as Musk’s claim of an “implied-in-fact contract” in which it was strongly suggested that OpenAI would remain a not-for-profit, even if it wasn’t explicitly written.
Google says it will fund the training of tens of thousands of electricians through grants for electrician apprenticeships and other programs. The company wants to address a serious labour crunch as AI pushes up demand for electricity. Google thinks it can boost the pipeline of electrical workers by up to 70 percent by the end of the decade.
Deepfakes can now mimic subtle physiological signals like the blood flows indicating a heartbeat, according to new research published in the journal Frontiers in Imaging. This is bad news for deepfake detection and anti-spoofing tools that rely on technologies like remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) to look for digital signs of a human heartbeat when authenticating individuals remotely. But that’s AI progress.
The chatbot’s take: We were honestly shocked to see GPT-4o give such a clear answer to a contested ethical question:
–
May 2, 2025 – by Alex Perala
