Government
Trump Administration Considers Large Chip Sale to Emirati A.I. Firm G42
The Trump administration is considering a deal that could send hundreds of thousands of U.S.-designed artificial intelligence chips to G42, an Emirati A.I. firm that the U.S. government has scrutinized in the past for its ties to China, three people familiar with the discussions said. The negotiations, which are ongoing, highlight a major shift in U.S. tech policy ahead of President Trump's visit to the Persian Gulf states this week. The talks have also created tension inside the Trump administration between tech- and business-minded leaders who want to close a deal before Mr. Trump's trip and national security officials who worry that the technology could be misused by the Emiratis. The Trump administration has embraced cutting direct deals for A.I. chips with officials from the Middle East, as it looks to strengthen U.S. ties in the region, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the negotiations are ongoing. The approach marks a break from the Biden administration, which had rejected similar A.I. chip sales over fears that they could give autocratic governments with strong ties to China an edge over the United States in developing the most cutting-edge A.I. models in coming years.
House of Lords pushes back against government's AI plans
The vote came days after hundreds of artists and organisations including Paul McCartney, Jeanette Winterson, Dua Lipa and the Royal Shakespeare Company urged the prime minister not to "give our work away at the behest of a handful of powerful overseas tech companies". The amendment was tabled by crossbench peer Beeban Kidron and was passed by 272 votes to 125. The bill will now return to the House of Commons. If the government removes the Kidron amendment, it will set the scene for another confrontation in the Lords next week. Lady Kidron said: "I want to reject the notion that those of us who are against government plans are against technology.
Trump visits Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE: What to know
United States President Donald Trump will undertake a three-day tour of the Gulf for his first state visit since retaking office in January. The trip begins in Saudi Arabia, followed by Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. It marks Trump's second foreign visit as president after he attended Pope Francis's funeral in Rome in April. Trump will fly out of the US on Monday and start his trip in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, on Tuesday. He is expected to attend a Gulf summit in the city on Wednesday, visit Qatar later that day and conclude his visit in the UAE on Thursday.
Pope Leo dishes advice to journalists, mentions AI challenge in first news conference
OutKick writer Mary Katharine Ham and Democratic strategist Kevin Walling join'MediaBuzz' to discuss the election of Pope Leo XIV, the first American pope in history, and the U.S. trade deal with the U.K. Pope Leo XIV wrapped up his first meeting with Vatican-accredited journalists Monday morning. More than 1,000 members of the media were assembled to hear his remarks, according to the New York Times. Some of them even took their children. The gathering took place in the Vatican's Paul VI Hall, Vatican Media reported. There, the pontiff "thanked reporters in Italian for their tireless work over these intense few weeks."
For Trump, It's a New Era of Deal-Making With Tech's Most-Coveted Commodity
As President Trump tours the Middle East this week, governments that are flush with oil wealth will be focused on a different treasure, found in America's Silicon Valley. Artificial intelligence chips, which are made by U.S. companies like Nvidia and AMD, are highly coveted by governments across the Middle East. Leaders of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates want to pour billions of dollars into the construction of data centers to put their countries at the forefront of a new technology heralded for its power to disrupt businesses and create trillions of dollars in economic value. The Gulf States have plenty of energy and cash to build data centers, which house the supercomputers that run A.I. systems. But they need U.S. government approval to buy the American-designed chips to power them.
How a new type of AI is helping police skirt facial recognition bans
"The whole vision behind Track in the first place," says Veritone CEO Ryan Steelberg, was "if we're not allowed to track people's faces, how do we assist in trying to potentially identify criminals or malicious behavior or activity?" In addition to tracking individuals where facial recognition isn't legally allowed, Steelberg says, it allows for tracking when faces are obscured or not visible. The product has drawn criticism from the American Civil Liberties Union, which--after learning of the tool through MIT Technology Review--said it was the first instance they'd seen of a nonbiometric tracking system used at scale in the US. They warned that it raises many of the same privacy concerns as facial recognition but also introduces new ones at a time when the Trump administration is pushing federal agencies to ramp up monitoring of protesters, immigrants, and students. Veritone gave us a demonstration of Track in which it analyzed people in footage from different environments, ranging from the January 6 riots to subway stations.
'It was just the perfect game': Henk Rogers on buying Tetris and foiling the KGB
When game designer and entrepreneur Henk Rogers first encountered Tetris at the 1988 Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show, he immediately knew it was special. "It was just the perfect game," he recalls. "It looked so simple, so rudimentary, but I wanted to play it again and again and again โฆ There was no other game demo that ever did that to me." Rogers is now co-owner of the Tetris Company, which manages and licenses the Tetris brand. Over the past 30 years, he has become almost as famous as the game itself. The escapades surrounding his deal to buy its distribution rights from Russian agency Elektronorgtechnica (Elorg) were dramatised in an Apple TV film starring Taron Egerton.
Silicon, steel and megawatts: Can America create the infrastructure needed to win the AI race?
Fox News anchor Bret Baier has the latest on the Murdoch Children's Research Institute's partnership with the Gladstone Institutes for the'Decoding Broken Hearts' initiative on'Special Report.' This week's Senate hearing on U.S. competitiveness in artificial intelligence made it clear that we are not just in an AI race with China and the rest of the world. We are in a race to build the foundation of the 21st century global economy while strengthening our national security. That foundation is made of silicon, steel and megawatts. America's ability to lead in AI hinges on a simple but urgent question โ can we build the computing infrastructure fast enough to unleash AI's full potential and drive a competitive advantage? The emerging AI cloud computing infrastructure is not like the general-purpose cloud that still powers most of the digital world.
Trump admin fires top US copyright official days after terminating Librarian of Congress
An AI art lecturer said he believes the U.S. government would encounter difficulty if it attempted to establish a watermark system for AI-generated content. Trump fired Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden, who was the first woman and first African American to be Librarian of Congress, on Thursday. The termination was part of the administration's ongoing purge of government officials who are perceived to be opposed to Trump and his agenda. The White House did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital's requests for comment on the matter. Like Perlmutter, Hayden was notified of her firing in an email, according to The Associated Press.
Steering Large Language Models with Register Analysis for Arbitrary Style Transfer
Yang, Xinchen, Carpuat, Marine
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in rewriting text across various styles. However, effectively leveraging this ability for example-based arbitrary style transfer, where an input text is rewritten to match the style of a given exemplar, remains an open challenge. A key question is how to describe the style of the exemplar to guide LLMs toward high-quality rewrites. In this work, we propose a prompting method based on register analysis to guide LLMs to perform this task. Empirical evaluations across multiple style transfer tasks show that our prompting approach enhances style transfer strength while preserving meaning more effectively than existing prompting strategies.