Nvidia at centre of US-China trade war, memory feature added to xAI’s Grok chatbot
Computer chip giant Nvidia has once again found itself at the centre of US-China tensions over trade and technology. On Thursday Nvidia’s chief executive Jensen Huang flew to Beijing to meet senior Chinese officials, just after the US imposed new export controls on its chips. The California-based company will require licenses to export its H20 AI chip to China, a move which the US Commerce Department said was designed to safeguard “national and economic security”. Nvidia said federal officials had told them the requirement will be in force for the “indefinite future”. BBC
Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, is slowly bringing its Grok chatbot to parity with top rivals like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. On Wednesday night, xAI announced a “memory” feature for Grok that enables the bot to remember details from past conversations with a user. Now if you ask Grok for recommendations, it’ll give more personalized responses, assuming you’ve used it enough to allow it to “learn” your preferences. ChatGPT has long had a similar memory feature, which was recently upgraded to reference a user’s entire chat history. Gemini, too, has persistent memory to tailor its replies to individual people. Tech Crunch
OpenAI is working on its own X-like social network, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter. While the project is still in early stages, we’re told there’s an internal prototype focused on ChatGPT’s image generation that has a social feed. CEO Sam Altman has been privately asking outsiders for feedback about the project, our sources say. It’s unclear if OpenAI’s plan is to release the social network as a separate app or integrate it into ChatGPT, which became the most downloaded app globally last month. The Verge
Horse, the engine-making joint venture of Geely and the Renault Group, has revealed a hybrid powertrain designed to be retrofitted into electric cars. It contains the internal combustion engine, electric motor, gearbox and related electronics in a single unit that, Horse said, can be squeezed into the same space as an EV’s main drive motor. This means manufacturers could retrofit an electric car with the unit without needing to comprehensively re-engineer the car or having to set up a new production line. The powertrain can be fuelled using petrol, E85 ethanol-petrol mix, pure methanol and synthetic fuels, Horse said. Autocar
Laws may need to be strengthened to crack down on the exploitation of child “influencers”, a senior Labour MP has warned. Chi Onwurah, chair of the science, technology and innovation committee, said parts of the Online Safety Act – passed in October 2023 – may already be “obsolete or inadequate”. Experts have raised concerns that there is a lack of provision in industry laws for children who earn money through brand collaborations on social media when compared to child actors and models. This has led to some children advertising in their underwear on social media, one expert has claimed. Sky News
Yesterday a deep dive into the latest release of Google Play Services revealed that it’s coming with a new security feature, which auto-restarts your phone if it’s been locked for three consecutive days. However, Google has now clarified that this isn’t live yet, as it doesn’t have a user interface at the moment. That will arrive with a later update, and when it does finally become available, it will be an opt-in feature, so it won’t be turned on by default, you will have to go into Settings and manually do it yourself if you want it. GSM Arena
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