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Philippines condemns Chinese media depicting it as monkey in AI video

BBC News

The Philippines has condemned the dehumanising and racist portrayal of the country as a timid monkey strong-armed by the US and Japan to take Beijing on over the South China Sea . Last week, China Daily posted an AI-generated video featuring a monkey in a Filipino shirt. It screams as arms bearing the Japanese and US flags shove it onto a rickety karaoke stage set up in a boat. After it gets scolded for singing the wrong song, it pulls out a sheet reading South China Sea arbitration award. It is then flung into the sea and blasted by a water cannon.


Chinese fishing 'militia' formations signal rising gray-zone pressure on Taiwan

FOX News

China's People's Armed Forces Maritime Militia deployed thousands of fishing vessels in coordinated formations that could disrupt global shipping lanes, analysts warn.



You've Never Heard of China's Greatest Sci-Fi Novel

WIRED

You've Never Heard of China's Greatest Sci-Fi Novel Thousands of authors. is barely known outside China--but it contains the secret to the country's modernization and malaise. Ma Qianzhu was unsatisfied with Chinese progress. An engineer at a large state-owned enterprise, he belonged to a generation that grew up believing engineering is destiny, that China's future would be built, bolt by bolt, by people like him. Then Ma discovered something extraordinary: a wormhole to the late Ming Dynasty. With more than 500 peers, he commandeered a ship and traveled back in time 400 years, to a preindustrial China wracked by foreign invasion and internal decay. Their mission: trigger an industrial revolution in the past that would, in the future, make modern China great (again).


Musk seeks up to 134 billion damages from OpenAI, Microsoft

The Japan Times

Elon Musk is seeking between $79 billion and $134 billion in damages over his claims that OpenAI defrauded him by abandoning its nonprofit roots and partnering with Microsoft. Elon Musk wants OpenAI and Microsoft to pay him damages in the range of $79 billion to $134 billion over his claims that the generative AI company defrauded him by abandoning its nonprofit roots and partnering with the software giant. Musk's lawyer detailed the damages request in a court filing Friday, a day after a federal judge rejected a final bid by OpenAI and Microsoft to avoid a jury trial set for late April in Oakland, California. Citing calculations by a financial economist expert witness, C. Paul Wazzan, the filing says Musk is entitled to a chunk of OpenAI's current $500 billion valuation after he was defrauded of the $38 million in seed money he donated to OpenAI when he helped found the startup in 2015. OpenAI and Microsoft later disputed the calculations.


How AI Companies Got Caught Up in US Military Efforts

WIRED

Two years ago, companies like Meta and OpenAI were united against military use of their tools. Now all of that has changed. At the start of 2024, Anthropic, Google, Meta, and OpenAI were united against military use of their AI tools. But over the next 12 months, something changed. In January, OpenAI quietly rescinded its ban on using AI for "military and warfare" purposes, and soon after it was reported to be working on "a number of projects" with the Pentagon. In November, in the same week that Donald Trump was reelected US president, Meta announced that the United States and select allies would be able to employ Llama for defense uses.


China military reaches 'war footing' with new missile silos and advanced AI warfare systems

FOX News

A new congressional report warns China's military buildup has reached a war footing with 350 new missile silos and 20% nuclear expansion, threatening U.S. deterrence.


Japan's gaming industry moves to improve accessibility

The Japan Times

Japan's gaming industry moves to improve accessibility A player uses eye movement to play a game during the Tokyo Game Show held in the city of Chiba in September. The Japanese gaming industry is working to improve video game accessibility by developing equipment and systems that allow people with disabilities affecting their hands to play by using other parts of their body, such as their cheeks, feet and eyes. There were people playing games without using their hands at an area dedicated to accessibility set up for the first time at the Tokyo Game Show in the city of Chiba in September. One of items on display was a special gaming controller system developed mainly by Tokyo-based Technotools for Nintendo's Nintendo Switch game console. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.


Chinese robotaxis race Waymo to take driverless cars global

The Japan Times

American companies led by Alphabet's Waymo have drawn much of the limelight with driverless cars deployed almost entirely on home soil. Now that some are beginning to look abroad, they'll have to share roads with Chinese companies quietly making plenty of progress. Baidu's Apollo Go, WeRide and Pony AI are outnumbering their American counterparts with more robotaxi projects progressing from testing to various stages of commercialization, according to a BloombergNEF analysis. While much of that headway is being made domestically, the Chinese companies are standing up operations in places like Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Singapore, and looking to launch in Germany, the U.K. and elsewhere in Europe. Comparing autonomous-vehicles companies' progress isn't a straightforward exercise -- the industry has been synonymous with false dawns and unfulfilled promises. Players that have looked promising and raised billions at rich valuations have been doomed by singular crashes they never recovered from, or been cut off by benefactors that have lost patience.