AI Update: The Geo-strategic Investments Continue

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:

SoftBank will become the first company to get Nvidia’s Blackwell AI chips, which will be sent to SoftBank’s telecommunications arm. SoftBank is planning to use the chips, each of which have 208 billion transistors, to build Japan’s most advanced pair of supercomputers that will support AI services for research and enterprise use.

Nvidia is planning to launch AI-powered computers for robots in the first half of 2025. The company wants its Jetson Thor computers to serve as the underlying technology for humanoid robots, offering a kind of basic operating system.

Baidu is preparing to launch AI-integrated smartglasses, which will use its proprietary Ernie AI system for things like real-time translation and navigation assistance. It’s looking to rival Meta’s AI-infused Ray-Bans, and will launch the smartglasses next year with an anticipated $299 price tag.

Elon Musk has added Microsoft as a defendant in his latest lawsuit against OpenAI. The lawsuit alleges that OpenAI, which he co-founded as a nonprofit, worked with its biggest investor, Microsoft, to monopolize the generative AI market. Musk now has his own, rival AI firm, xAI. OpenAI called the latest lawsuit “baseless and overreaching”.

Another OpenAI co-founder, Greg Brockman, has returned to work after a three-month leave of absence. This is after a number of other high-ranking executives, including former CRO Mira Murati and co-founders John Schulman and Ilya Sutskever, officially departed from the company. Brockman posted on Elon Musk’s X social media platform that he is coming back from the “longest vacation of my life.”

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s U.S. arm will get a $6.6 billion subsidy through the CHIPS Act, the U.S. Department of Commerce has confirmed. It’s the first major award completed through the Biden administration’s $52.7 billion program. TSMC says it will make its most sophisticated chips in its Arizona facilities.

Tencent plans to invest $500 million in cloud infrastructure in Indonesia by 2030, with a focus on building its third data center in the country. It’s part of a collaboration with Indonesia’s GoTo Group and Alibaba. Tencent is closely tied to the Chinese Communist Party, with CCP members making up almost a quarter of its workforce.

New Jersey-based CoreWeave has reached a valuation of $23 billion after closing a $650 million secondary share sale to investors. Jane Street, Magnetar, Fidelity Management and Macquarie Capital led the investment round, eyeing AI-driven growth for the cloud computing specialist. CoreWeave was reportedly valued at just (!) $7 billion a year ago.

The U.S. Department of Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) is warning financial institutions about the growing threat of deepfakes. Among other things, it’s urging them to secure their onboarding processes and implement deepfake detection tools. And it is requiring them to reference “FIN-2024-DEEPFAKEFRAUD” in suspicious activity reports thought to involve deepfakes.

The chatbot’s take: We’re just asking questions! Glad to clarify the whole one-party state affiliation issue…

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November 15, 2024 – by Alex Perala