Author: admin

TSMC CEO announced the plan with US president, the latest firm to make investment commitments since Donald Trump took office.Chip giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co plans to invest $100bn in the United States and build five additional factories in the coming years, it has said. TSMC CEO CC Wei announced the plan on Monday in a meeting at the White House with US President Donald Trump. “We must be able to build the chips and semiconductors that we need right here,” Trump said. “It’s a matter of national security for us.” TSMC, the world’s largest contract chipmaker, is a leading…

The author of California’s SB 1047, the nation’s most controversial AI safety bill of 2024, is back with a new AI bill that could shake up Silicon Valley. California state Senator Scott Wiener introduced a new bill on Friday that would protect employees at leading AI labs, allowing them to speak out if they think their company’s AI systems could be a “critical risk” to society. The new bill, SB 53, would also create a public cloud computing cluster, called CalCompute, to give researchers and startups the necessary computing resources to develop AI that benefits the public. Wiener’s last AI…

Chipmaker TSMC said that it aims to invest “at least” $100 billion in chip manufacturing plants in the U.S. over the next four years as part of an effort to expand the company’s network of semiconductor factories. President Donald Trump announced the news during a press conference Monday. TSMC’s cash infusion will fund the construction of several new facilities in Arizona, C. C. Wei, chairman and CEO of TSMC, said during the briefing. “We are going to produce many AI chips … to support AI progress,” Wei said. TSMC previously pledged to pour $65 billion into U.S.-based fabrication plants and has…

Google has open sourced an AI model, SpeciesNet, designed to identify animal species by analyzing photos from camera traps. Researchers around the world use camera traps — digital cameras connected to infrared sensors — to study wildlife populations. But while these traps can provide valuable insights, they generate massive volumes of data that take days to weeks to sift through. In a bid to help, Google launched Wildlife Insights, an initiative of the company’s Google Earth Outreach philanthropy program, around six years ago. Wildlife Insights provides a platform where researchers can share, identify, and analyze wildlife images online, collaborating to…

WASHINGTON (AP) — Legislation that aimed to bar transgender women and girls nationwide from participating in school athletic competitions designated for female athletes failed to advance Monday night in a divided Senate as Democrats stood united against an issue that Republicans leveraged in last year’s elections.A test vote on the bill failed to gain the 60 votes needed to advance in the chamber as senators stuck to party lines in a 51-45 vote tally.The bill sought to determine Title IX protections “based solely on a person’s reproductive biology and genetics at birth.” The vote came as Republicans have homed in…

Podcast recording and editing platform Podcastle is now joining other companies in the AI-powered, text-to-speech race by releasing its own AI model called Asyncflow v1.0. An API for developers will also be available, allowing them to directly integrate the text-to-speech model in their apps. Thanks to the new model, the company is able to offer more than 450 AI voices that can narrate your text. The startup said that it developed the technology and model in such a way that its training and inference costs are low, giving it an advantage against competitors. With the move, Podcastle joins a number…

SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic (AP) — Dominicans on Monday celebrated Zoe Saldaña’s Oscar win for best supporting actress for her role in “Emilia Pérez,” marking a moment of immense national pride.Dominican President Luis Abinader took to X immediately after the actress received the award Sunday night, thanking her for being a worthy representative of Dominican culture.“I congratulate you, Zoe Saldaña, for becoming the first Dominican to win an Oscar,” he wrote. “Your talent and dedication exalt our nation, thank you for carrying our flag high. You are a Dominican pride,” Abinader said.Minister of Culture Roberto Ángel Salcedo, a former film…

Google Colab, Google’s cloud-based notebook tool for coding, data science, and AI, is gaining a new “AI agent” tool, Data Science Agent, to help Colab users quickly clean data, visualize trends, and get insights on their uploaded data sets. First announced at Google’s I/O developer conference early last year, Data Science Agent was initially launched as a stand-alone project. However, Google decided to integrate it into Colab with the goal of helping users access the agent directly from a Colab notebook, said Kathy Korevec, director of product at Google Labs, in an interview. Data Science Agent is available for free…

“There’s scarcely a part of the company that is unaffected by AI,” said Vishal Sharma, Amazon’s VP of Artificial General Intelligence, on Monday at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. He dismissed the idea that open source models might reduce compute needs and deflected when asked whether European companies would change their generative AI strategies in light of geopolitical tensions with the U.S. Sharma said onstage at the startup conference that Amazon was now deploying AI through its own foundational models across Amazon Web Services — Amazon’s cloud computing division — the robotics in its warehouses, and the Alexa consumer product, among…

The US government’s cybersecurity agency CISA says there is no change to its stance detecting and disrupting Russian APTs , even as a recent directive from the Trump administration pauses offensive cyber operations against Russia amid high-stakes negotiations. “There has been no change in our posture. Any reporting to the contrary is fake and undermines our national security,” the agency said in a post on the X social media platform.  The public clarification follows reports that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has directed a temporary halt to cyber and information operations against Moscow, a decision intended to keep negotiations on the…