The European Union on Tuesday announced plans to better protect its complex technologies from foreign espionage that could threaten its economy and security, following repeated warnings that the bloc will have to “reduce risks” in its relations with China.
“Lately technology is at the heart of the geopolitical festival and the EU needs to be an actor and a playground,” said European Commission Vice-President Vera Jourova.
To better protect its open market, the European Commission wants member states to immediately conduct risk tests in their most sensitive industries, adding complex semiconductors, synthetic intelligence, quantum intelligence and biotechnology.
These have “the highest probability of providing the most sensitive and rapid risks, such as technological security and technological leaks” and enjoy the highest level of protection.
Although the European Commission has refrained from transferring responsibilities to any specific country, the EU itself has continuously stated that it wishes to be more prepared to extend measures to industry and investment that China could simply exploit for its own security and military purposes.
“China is indeed an elephant in general terms, but in our recommendation we are agnostic about the country,” Jourova said.
Thierry Breton, the EU’s internal market commissioner, said the measures would reach beyond Beijing.
“We need to take risks, but not just with China, but with everyone, including, if necessary, some of our like-minded partners,” he said.
It is not entirely transparent how threat testing would be tracked through action.
These measures are the latest example of the struggle of the 27 countries to identify relations with Beijing. The EU said that despite rare basic differences over human rights and state involvement in the economy, it was not imaginable to completely dissociate relations with such a country. superpower.
This is why the EU has sought to reduce dangers in its relations and protect its important economic sectors from unjustified interference.
HMD Global, licensee of Nokia-branded smartphones, has the first major smartphone manufacturer to manufacture devices in Europe, with its first 5G model made in Hungary, aimed at data-conscious consumers, now available for purchase.
Dutch festival watchdog ACM said on Monday it rejected Apple’s objections to the 50 million euro ($52. 9 million) fines it had imposed on the company for failing to comply with regulations aimed at restricting the dominant position of Apple’s App Store.
The ACM said Apple has complied with most of its requests to open its App Store to other payment methods for dating apps in the Netherlands, but has complied with a third undisclosed detail of the conditions of the fines.
The 2021 ACM claimed that Apple violated Dutch festival legislation in the dating app market and demanded that Apple allow dating app developers to use third-party payment processors.
It fined Apple 5 million euros per week, up to a maximum of 50 million euros, for the period in which it did not comply with those orders.
Apple objected to the fines, saying the regulator had misdefined the applicable markets and overstated the dominant position of its position in the dating app market and the extent to which it could have abused that position.
The regulator rejected all of Apple’s objections in a July 13, 2023 ruling on Monday.
Apple appealed the decision, the ACM said.
Meta’s head of leadership generation is quick to refute claims that the company has lost competition like ChatGPT in the explosive rise of generative AI in the tech industry.
“The majority of the world’s population will experience generative AI with us for the first time,” Bosworth told AFP at the company’s Connect developer conference.
Meta featured AI-powered chatbots with personalities to be provided at the meeting, as well as equipment to create photographs or voicemails of written content.
The company that owns Facebook and Instagram is seen as a lagging rival like Microsoft and Google, which have introduced generative AI products and invested heavily in technology seen as a future-proof force.
Bosworth insisted that Meta was not far behind, its global platforms with AI even before ChatGPT was introduced to the lagging public last year.
“There are a lot of compelling tools, like Stable Diffusion, for generating images,” Bosworth said of rumors surrounding companies’ AI offerings.
But the executive is quick to point out that mastering many of those new platforms requires time and skilled IT skills.
“We looked for the effects to be wonderful and fast, even on smartphones,” Bosworth said, noting that the Meta generation allows users to simply request the symbol of a “hedgehog on a bike” or “happy birthday to a marathon runner,” for example. example.
Facts or lies?
Meta has chosen the most cautious technique for generative AI.
Two weeks before ChatGPT’s November 2022 presentation, Meta launched a generative AI chatbot “Galactica,” which specializes in clinical research.
Galactica may have limited herself to writing articles and solving math problems, but she managed to come up with answers.
Meta temporarily scrapped the tool, a decision Bosworth told AFP he considered a mistake.
“If it had been up to me, I would have left him,” Bosworth said.
“We noticed that our chatbot was capable of saying anything” and that users keep this in mind.
AI products from Meta’s competitors remain available despite the possibility of so-called “hallucinations” answers that have ridiculed companies.
But after years of controversy over content moderation on the world’s major social media platforms, Meta is likely to be wary of setting security settings for its own creations.
While the other giants were launching their AI products, Meta meanwhile took a step forward in its internal AI model, releasing Llama 2 earlier this year as open source, developers can simply play around with it to create their own chatbots.
Metaverse
A Facebook employee since 2006, Bosworth most recently led the augmented truth and virtual truth innovation department at generation company Meta.
Facebook’s call update in 2021 is touted as a reflection of Zuckerberg’s confidence that the metaverse would be the next big computing platform.
Critics argued the move was part of a strategy to burnish its symbol after resisting accusations that Facebook put profits ahead of users’ protection and well-being.
And while Meta has invested billions of dollars in its vision of the metaverse, it’s far from a reality.
Bosworth admitted that adoption of Meta’s immersive social networking platform called Horizon Worlds has been slower than expected, until recently.
“We’ve had legs before,” Bosworth joked, referring to adding limbs to avatars in the virtual world.
At Connect, Meta didn’t talk much about the metaverse and highlighted products like Ray-Ban glasses that allow users to livestream what they see.
“Mixed reality” devices, such as its VR headsets, overlay virtual content onto what surrounds the user rather than immersing them entirely in virtual realms.
The ability to transfer from virtual truth to augmented truth was also added to the new Quest 3 headset that will be available in October.
People may still not be able to see a Quest user’s eyes.
“We’ve tried, the result can be discouraging,” Bosworth said, noting that building the hull comes with compromises.
The tech world is eagerly awaiting the Apple Vision Pro to hit the market early next year, with a hefty price tag of $3500, to $500 for the Quest 3.
“There’s nothing in these headphones that we can’t make,” Bosworth said of Apple’s luxury offering.
But Meta never imagined that building something so expensive “was going to make our developers succeed in an audience huge enough to make sense. “
Iran is interpreting the use of artificial intelligence in its religious seminaries as part of an initiative focused on the city of Qom, home to Shiite clerics, according to the Financial Times newspaper.
The Qom seminars hope that the complex generation will be able to analyze Islamic texts more temporarily and allow religious decisions, known as fatwas, to keep pace with the immediate evolution of Iranian society, the newspaper added.
“Robots can’t update high-level religious leaders, but they can be a reliable assistant that can help them draft a fatwa in five hours out of 50 days,” said Mohammad Ghotbi, who heads a state-linked organization in Qom that promotes the progress of religion. religion. technology companies.
The city’s main AI study center, the Noor Computer Center for Research in Islamic Sciences, is affiliated with the seminary and has centuries-old manuscripts and other ancient knowledge resources that can be used in algorithms.
Ghotbi affirmed this approach, arguing that clergy are not opposed to Iranians’ preference for percentages of global technological advances. “Today’s society is conducive to acceleration and progress,” he said.
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei also suggested clergy pay more attention to the odds of AI.
“The seminar will have to focus on the use of modern and progressive technologies and synthetic intelligence,” Iranian seminar director Alireza Arafi said in July.
Like any revolutionary technology, AI presents demanding opportunities and situations. Traditional corporations are likely to face more demanding situations when leveraging AI.
Research conducted through Oxford Islamic Studies suggests that interpretations of devout teachings require only linguistic knowledge, but also historical, sociological and theological understanding. There are fears that AI will oversimplify or misinterpret nuanced devout teachings.
According to experts from the Brookings Institution, one of the most demanding situations when integrating AI into classical societies is the cultural and ethical erosion related to it.
Intel expects to get its first next-generation extreme ultraviolet lithography machine, the High-NA EUV, from Dutch manufacturer ASML later this year, a senior official at the U. S. chipmaker told Reuters on Friday.
It may be desirable to watch the post-retirement careers of the most important sports stars (Viagra commercials, real estate projects, crypto projects), but one option is a sure winner: put your face in the canopy of a video game.
And death is no impediment to that specific race, with two popular games this year opting for legends of the sport who are no longer with us, AFP claimed.
LA Lakers basketball star Kobe Bryant, who died in a helicopter crash in 2020, appears in “NBA 2K24. “
And two of the world’s greatest footballers of bygone eras, Pele and Johan Cruyff, earn posthumous respect with their figures engraved on EA Sports’ “FC 24”.
They are joined in the EA game canopy through a galaxy of living stars from the most recent afterlife: Zinedine Zidane and Ronaldinho, and Erling Haaland and Alexia Putellas.
French legend Zidane told AFP in June that many youngsters knew him largely thanks to his appearance in the EA game, formerly known as “FIFA”.
“Children between 8 and 10 years old don’t know me unless their parents told them what I was doing at the time,” the World Cup winner said.
“It’s more like PlayStation, so it’s pretty fun. I’m used to it. “
The main football video game series is named after a former player, John Madden, who retired in 1978 as a sportscaster.
Julien Pillot, an economist specializing in cultural industries, told AFP that adhering to true legends is obviously a difficult marketing tool.
And the massive cost of getting their approval, he said, is “more than offset” through the sales they generate, either from the games themselves or from the ubiquitous game “cards,” needed to unlock more content.
It plays on the “intergenerational aspect” and adds “a touch of nostalgia,” says Pillot.
This is a feature that leaders are hesitant to highlight.
“My seven-year-old son knows who Pele is just from his incredible FC score,” David Jackson, vice president of EA Sports FC brand, told AFP.
He said the game made enthusiasts feel a bit of the magic of the stars of past generations.
And it works both ways, according to some of the stars involved, even those who don’t score as high as Pele.
“People of a certain generation know me for what I’ve done on the field,” World Cup winner Robert Pires said at the launch of the EA game in Paris.
But a 12-year-old boy recently told Pires he only knew who the French star was through acting.