US chip exports controls have been a "failure", the head of Nvidia, Jensen Huang, told a tech forum on Wednesday, as the Chinese government separately slammed US warnings to other countries against using Chinese tech. Successive US administrations have imposed restrictions on the sale of hi-tech AI chips to China, in an effort to curb China's military advancement and protect US dominance of the AI industry. But Huang told the Computex tech forum in Taipei that the controls had instead spurred on Chinese developers. "The local companies are very, very talented and very determined, and the export control gave them the spirit, the energy and the government support to accelerate their development," Huang told media the Computex tech show in Taipei. "I think, all in all, the export control was a failure."

Since Donald Trump launched his chaotic trade war earlier this year, it has become a truism to say he has plunged the world economy into crisis. At last month's spring meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in Washington, where policymakers and finance ministers from all over congregated, the attenders were "shellshocked", the economist Eswar Prasad, a former senior IMF official who now teaches at Cornell, told me. "The sense is that the world has changed fundamentally in ways that cannot easily be put back together. Every country has to figure out its own place in this new world order and how to protect its own interests." Trump's assault on the old global order is real. But in taking its measure, it's necessary to look beyond the daily headlines and acknowledge that being in a state of crisis is nothing new to capitalism. It's also important to note that, as Karl Marx wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon: "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please."

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia – China's President Xi Jinping has arrived in Malaysia as part of a Southeast Asian tour which is seen as delivering a personal message that Beijing is a more reliable trading partner than the United States amid a bruising trade war with Washington. Xi arrived in the capital, Kuala Lumpur, on Tuesday evening in what is his first visit to Malaysia since 2013. He flew in from Vietnam where he had signed dozens of trade cooperation agreements in Hanoi on everything from artificial intelligence to rail development. On touching down, Xi said that deepening "high-level strategic cooperation" was good for the common interests of both China and Malaysia, and good for peace, stability and prosperity in the region and the world", according to the official Malaysian news agency Bernama. Xi's three-country tour and his "message" that Beijing is Southeast Asia's better friend than the truculent administration of US President Donald Trump comes as many countries in the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) bloc are unhappy with their treatment after the US imposed huge tariffs on countries around the world. "This is a very significant visit.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) could face a penalty of 1 billion or more to settle a U.S. export control investigation over a chip it made that ended up inside a Huawei artificial intelligence processor, according to two people familiar with the matter. The U.S. Department of Commerce has been investigating the world's biggest contract chipmaker's work for China-based Sophgo, the sources said. The design company's TSMC-made chip matched one found in Huawei's high-end Ascend 910B artificial intelligence processor, according to the people, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the matter. Huawei -- a company at the center of China's AI chip ambitions that has been accused of sanctions busting and trade secret theft -- is on a U.S. trade list that restricts it from receiving goods made with U.S. technology. TSMC made nearly 3 million chips in recent years that matched the design ordered by Sophgo and likely ended up with Huawei, according to Lennart Heim, a researcher at RAND's Technology and Security and Policy Center in Arlington, Virginia, who is tracking Chinese developments in AI.

Chips themselves, the key computing hardware inside AI datacenters, are exempt from Trump's tariffs--but only if they are imported to the U.S. as standalone products. However, most chips are not imported into the U.S. as raw materials; instead, they arrive already-packaged inside products like servers, which are subject to tariffs. Worried AI investors received good news on Monday in a note circulated by analyst Stacy Rasgon, who pointed out that most Nvidia servers are likely to escape the bite of Trump's tariffs. That's because most appear to be assembled in Mexico, and therefore benefit from a tariff exemption under a free trade agreement. That's a "silver lining" to the news, says Rasgon, a semiconductor industry analyst at Bernstein Research.

Hours after I published our Friday newsletter, debating the price of Nintendo's new console, the company announced it would delay US pre-orders for the Switch 2 as it wrestled with a new set of tariffs introduced by President Trump. "Pre-orders for Nintendo Switch 2 in the US will not start April 9, 2025, in order to assess the potential impact of tariffs and evolving market conditions," Nintendo told Engadget. It added that the console is still set to launch on June 5, however. Last week, the Trump administration announced a set of new tariffs on a swath of countries, including Japan (Nintendo's base of operations), China and Vietnam. Those last two countries, where Nintendo manufactures much of its hardware, will be subject to import duties of 54 percent and 46 percent.

Standard language model evaluations can fail to capture risks that emerge only at deployment scale. For example, a model may produce safe responses during a small-scale beta test, yet reveal dangerous information when processing billions of requests at deployment. To remedy this, we introduce a method to forecast potential risks across orders of magnitude more queries than we test during evaluation. We make forecasts by studying each query's elicitation probability -- the probability the query produces a target behavior -- and demonstrate that the largest observed elicitation probabilities predictably scale with the number of queries. We find that our forecasts can predict the emergence of diverse undesirable behaviors -- such as assisting users with dangerous chemical synthesis or taking power-seeking actions -- across up to three orders of magnitude of query volume. Our work enables model developers to proactively anticipate and patch rare failures before they manifest during large-scale deployments.

President Xi Jinping's embrace of Chinese tech bosses in a rare public meeting is fueling hope Beijing is shifting its stance to give the private sector a freer hand as it fights a trade war with U.S. President Donald Trump. Four years after launching a regulatory crackdown that plunged the tech sector into turmoil, China's top leader sat down publicly for the first time with Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma, whose firm bore the brunt of that campaign. Also on the guest list Monday were rising stars from robotics start-up Unitree, electric car giant BYD and AI newcomer DeepSeek -- firms rolling out world-beating innovations despite U.S. export controls. While a similar show of support from Xi in 2018 proved fleeting, developing national tech champions is core to Beijing's plan for boosting the economy as it deflates a bubble in the property market that once drove about a quarter of growth. Underscoring the importance of spurring innovation, high-tech industries contributed to 15% of gross domestic product last year and are set to overtake the housing sector in 2026, according to Bloomberg Economics.

Automatically summarizing large text collections is a valuable tool for document research, with applications in journalism, academic research, legal work, and many other fields. In this work, we contrast two classes of systems for large-scale multi-document summarization (MDS): compression and full-text. Compression-based methods use a multi-stage pipeline and often lead to lossy summaries. Full-text methods promise a lossless summary by relying on recent advances in long-context reasoning. To understand their utility on large-scale MDS, we evaluated them on three datasets, each containing approximately one hundred documents per summary. Our experiments cover a diverse set of long-context transformers (Llama-3.1, Command-R, Jamba-1.5-Mini) and compression methods (retrieval-augmented, hierarchical, incremental). Overall, we find that full-text and retrieval methods perform the best in most settings. With further analysis into the salient information retention patterns, we show that compression-based methods show strong promise at intermediate stages, even outperforming full-context. However, they suffer information loss due to their multi-stage pipeline and lack of global context. Our results highlight the need to develop hybrid approaches that combine compression and full-text approaches for optimal performance on large-scale multi-document summarization.

But now it appears that access to large quantities of advanced compute resources is no longer the defining or sustainable advantage many had thought it would be. In fact, the capability gap between leading US and Chinese models has essentially disappeared, and in one important way the Chinese models may now have an advantage: They are able to achieve near equivalent results while using only a small fraction of the compute resources available to the leading Western labs. The AI competition is increasingly being framed within narrow national security terms, as a zero-sum game, and influenced by assumptions that a future war between the US and China, centered on Taiwan, is inevitable. The US has employed "chokepoint" tactics to limit China's access to key technologies like advanced semiconductors, and China has responded by accelerating its efforts toward self-sufficiency and indigenous innovation, which is causing US efforts to backfire. Recently even outgoing US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, a staunch advocate for strict export controls, finally admitted that using such controls to hold back China's progress on AI and advanced semiconductors is a "fool's errand."