The announcement of tariffs on imports to the US hit Nvidia shares hard, taking them back to September’s level. CC-licensed photo by Laineema on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Pricey. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
UK probes TikTok, Reddit over child data privacy concerns • The Register
Lindsay Clark:
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The UK’s data protection watchdog has launched investigations into three social media platforms following concerns about the protection of privacy among teenage users.
The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) said it has begun reviews into how TikTok, Reddit and image sharing platform Imgur protect the privacy of youger users.
It said TikTok uses personal information belonging to people between the age of 13 and 17 to make recommendations and serve new content, which could lead to young people being served inappropriate or harmful material.
John Edwards, Information Commissioner, said: “My message is simple. If social media and video sharing platforms want to benefit from operating in the UK, they must comply with data protection law.
“The responsibility to keep children safe online lies firmly at the door of the companies offering these services and my office is steadfast in its commitment to hold them to account,” he said.
The ICO is also looking into data use at Imgur and Reddit to find out how they use children’s personal information and look at age assurance measures.
At this stage, the ICO said it was investigating whether there had been any infringements of data protection legislation. If there is sufficient evidence of any legal breach, the ICO said it would get representations from the companies concerned before reaching a final conclusion.
The move reflects growing concerns around access to social media platforms by children and young people. An ICO survey found 42% of British parents felt they had little or no control over the information social media and video sharing platforms collected about their children.
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The report on what they found at TikTok will be interesting: the ICO is insistent that it has the power to access TikTok’s data (and, one presumes, algorithm) that works on what’s shown to children. The only other example I know of is the US, where TikTok set up special centres where nominated people could examine the algorithm.
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AI firms follow DeepSeek’s lead, create cheaper models with “distillation” • Financial Times via Ars Technica
Cristina Criddle and Melissa Heikkilä:
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Leading artificial intelligence firms including OpenAI, Microsoft, and Meta are turning to a process called “distillation” in the global race to create AI models that are cheaper for consumers and businesses to adopt.
The technique caught widespread attention after China’s DeepSeek used it to build powerful and efficient AI models based on open source systems released by competitors Meta and Alibaba. The breakthrough rocked confidence in Silicon Valley’s AI leadership, leading Wall Street investors to wipe billions of dollars of value from US Big Tech stocks.
Through distillation, companies take a large language model—dubbed a “teacher” model—which generates the next likely word in a sentence. The teacher model generates data which then trains a smaller “student” model, helping to quickly transfer knowledge and predictions of the bigger model to the smaller one.
While distillation has been widely used for years, recent advances have led industry experts to believe the process will increasingly be a boon for start-ups seeking cost-effective ways to build applications based on the technology.
“Distillation is quite magical,” said Olivier Godement, head of product for OpenAI’s platform. “It’s the process of essentially taking a very large smart frontier model and using that model to teach a smaller model . . . very capable in specific tasks that is super cheap and super fast to execute.”
Large language models such as OpenAI’s GPT-4, Google’s Gemini and Meta’s Llama require massive amounts of data and computing power to develop and maintain. While the companies have not revealed precise figures for how much it costs to train large models, it is likely to be hundreds of millions of dollars.
Thanks to distillation, developers and businesses can access these models’ capabilities at a fraction of the price, allowing app developers to run AI models quickly on devices such as laptops and smartphones.
Developers can use OpenAI’s platform for distillation, learning from the large language models that underpin products like ChatGPT. OpenAI’s largest backer, Microsoft, used GPT-4 to distill its small language family of models Phi as part of a commercial partnership after investing nearly $14bn into the company.
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On everyone’s phone in a year, at a guess?
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Google cofounder tells AI staff to stop ‘building nanny products’ • The Verge
Alex Heath:
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For the last couple years, it has been evident that Google cofounder Sergey Brin is back in the building. This week, he sent a clear message to hundreds of employees in Google’s DeepMind AI division, known as GDM: the pressure to win the AGI race is on.
“It has been 2 years of the Gemini program and GDM,” begins his note, which The New York Times first reported on yesterday and I’m publishing below [on the full page] in full. “We have come a long way in that time with many efforts we should feel very proud of. At the same time competition has accelerated immensely and the final race to AGI is afoot. I think we have all the ingredients to win this race but we are going to have to turbocharge our efforts.”
Brin goes on to recommend that Google’s AI teams work longer hours (“60 hours a week is the sweet spot of productivity”), come into the office “at least every week day,” prioritize “simple solutions” to problems, and generally move faster (“can’t wait 20 minutes to run a bit of python”). What stuck out the most to me was his last point: that Google’s AI products “are overrun with filters and punts of various kinds.” According to Brin, Google needs to “trust our users” and “can’t keep building nanny products.”
While his note was intended for a small audience of AI researchers at DeepMind and not all of Google, it’s still remarkable in a couple of ways. For one, it came from Brin, who technically has no formal role these days besides being a board member, and not Demis Hassabis, who runs Google DeepMind.
As some employees have poined out to me, there’s also irony in Brin recommending that employees work 12-hour days when he and cofounder Larry Page arguably left Google rudderless when they retired in 2019 — just before this AI boom cycle began in earnest. Finally, it’s telling that Brin, who attended President Donald Trump’s inauguration with CEO Sundar Pichai, is now using his power to seemingly push for removing Gemini’s guardrails.
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Brin, the former wünderkind, is now 51 years old. Hassabis is 48. (Mark Zuckerberg is still only 40.) There was certainly a time when Brin would have thought staff who worked 60-hour weeks were slackers.
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Apple’s M4 MacBook Air coming this week with six new features • 9to5Mac
Ryan Christoffel:
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Apple has been having fun mixing it up with recent product launches. After teasing the iPhone 16e launch on X, now Tim Cook has shared news of another product launch in the same way. The launch is happening this week, and is widely assumed to be the M4 MacBook Air. Here’s everything the new model is expected to offer.
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I like the confidence with which this is stated. In short: 13in and 15in screens, M4 chip (obvs), 16GB minimum, battery life. And new iPads to follow. Would like to see a refreshed Mac Studio: that’s long overdue.
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Nvidia shares fall 9% on tariff fears • CNBC
Kif Leswing:
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Nvidia shares fell nearly 9% on Monday after President Donald Trump confirmed that tariffs from Canada and Mexico will go into effect on Tuesday.
The chipmaker’s shares retreated on a bad day for the market. The Dow, of which Nvidia is a component, tumbled 800 points, or 1.8%, and the Nasdaq Composite slid more than 3%.
Nvidia shares are now trading at the same price they were in September, before the U.S. presidential election. The company, having shed its $3 trillion market cap, is worth $2.79 trillion after Monday’s slide knocked another $265bn off Nvidia’s valuation.
Nvidia is down over 13% since Wednesday, when the company reported earnings that topped analysts’ estimates across the board. The company’s revenue jumped 78% from a year earlier to $39.33bn.
During Nvidia’s earnings report, analysts asked about the company’s response to U.S. tariffs.
“Tariffs at this point, it’s an unknown until we understand further what the U.S. government’s plan is,” Nvidia Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress told investors.
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As a reminder, a company’s market capitalisation is the stock market’s evaluation of the net present value of its total future earnings. When the market cap falls, the stock market is saying it thinks those profits will be smaller. (Of course for every seller there has to be a buyer. But the buyers pay a lower price than the sellers originally wanted.)
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Struggling with errors, DOGE deletes billions more from list of savings • The New York Times
David A. Fahrenthold, Emily Badger and Jeremy Singer-Vine:
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Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has deleted hundreds more claims from its mistake-plagued “wall of receipts,” erasing $4bn in additional savings that the group said it had made for U.S. taxpayers.
Late Sunday night, the group erased or altered more than 1,000 contracts it had claimed to cancel, representing more than 40% of all the contracts listed on its site last week. The deleted items included five of the seven largest savings that it had claimed credit for just last week. At the same time, the group added about 1,000 additional canceled contracts, worth smaller total savings.
It was the second time in a week that DOGE had deleted some of its greatest claims of success. Early last week, it erased all five of the largest savings it had claimed when the wall of receipts, which is what the group is calling its list of cancelled contracts, was originally posted on Feb. 19.
Since that first posting, the total amount of savings that the initiative has claimed from cutting contracts has steadily declined, from $16bn at first to less than $9bn now.
The “wall” shows only some of the cuts Mr. Musk has imposed on government, making it difficult to assess the claim that his initiative has saved taxpayers more than $100bn. But the site is the only place where the group has given a detailed public accounting of its work, providing a rare look at its basic competence and familiarity with government data.
Contracting and budget experts say that look has been worrisome.
From its start, the list has been full of errors: claims that confused billions with millions, triple-counted the same cancellation, or claimed credit for contracts that had ended years or even decades before. Contracting experts said these mistakes raised questions about DOGE’s basic understanding of the federal government, at a time when Mr. Musk’s group is attempting to rapidly overhaul it.
“Overall, there’s a certain randomness to it,” said Jessica Riedl, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank.
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“A certain randomness” is one way of putting it. “Total mess” would be another. Musk’s successful projects – Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink – have a clear, describable goal: cars, rockets, satellites. His unsuccessful ones – X, notably – are trying to make existing things change. DOGE is the latter.
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DOGE actions may cause Social Security benefit ‘interruption’, say ex-agency head • CNBC
Lorie Konish:
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Social Security has never missed a benefit payment since the program first began sending individuals monthly benefits more than eight decades ago.
But the recent actions at the U.S. Social Security Administration by Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency are putting monthly benefit checks for more than 72.5 million Americans at risk, former commissioner and former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley told CNBC.com.
“Ultimately, you’re going to see the system collapse and an interruption of benefits,” O’Malley said. “I believe you will see that within the next 30 to 90 days.”
Ahead of any interruption in benefits, “people should start saving now,” O’Malley said.
The Social Security Administration uses multiple systems and technologies that Musk has criticized for leading to errors. As commissioner, O’Malley told Congress the agency needed more funding for information technology modernization.
O’Malley said DOGE leaders are now making changes at the agency, and significant staff cuts have already led to system outages. Those intermittent IT outages may happen more frequently and for more extended periods of time until there is a “system collapse and an interruption of benefits,” he said.
Neither the Social Security Administration nor the White House responded to requests for comment by press time.
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Well, that gives us something to look forward to. From a distance, at least.
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Antiscientific vandalism • Quillette
Evan Morris is a professor of radiology and biomedical imaging at Yale University:
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To understand how biomedical scientists feel as they watch Donald Trump and Elon Musk aim their bazookas at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), recall how you felt when the Taliban aimed their bazookas at the 1,500-year-old Bamiyan Buddhas of Afghanistan. “Senseless” may be one word that springs to mind. “Permanent” might be another.
But the destruction of NIH is in many ways worse than the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas. The Buddhas were an astounding feat of architecture and sculpture and devotion. But there were just two of them. NIH contains 27 institutes and centres, each of which specialises in the research and cure of a whole class of diseases. The work of these institutes occurs, in part, at NIH proper, but the bulk of the work occurs at universities (the so-called “extramural” program) funded through grants.
This collective research builds on continuing advances in every field of medicine as well as chemistry, physics, mathematics, computer science, biology, and more. The American biomedical science enterprise, which has eradicated polio, created artificial organs, and mapped the genome to identify the root causes of disease, is the greatest collective accomplishment of human beings in the history of the world. Once derailed, it will take a very long time to recover.
Musk has pointed his bazookas at two longstanding practices, the disruption of which is causing a great deal of havoc and despair among university-based scientists: the indirect costs and the grant-review committees (also known as “Study Sections”).
Indirect costs are negotiated between the individual universities and the federal government. These rates account for the federal monies that accompany each grant but do not go to the scientist. Rather, they go to the universities to create and maintain the environments that host and facilitate the research. Colloquially, but inadequately, they are said to be for “keeping the lights on.”
Morris explains how this is going to lead to harm that will take years and years to repair – if it ever is. One could almost make an argument for tearing down the NIH if you had a plan for how to replace it with something better. Of course, no such plan exists.
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A crypto mogul who invested millions into Trump coins is getting a reprieve on civil fraud charges • CNN Business
Allison Morrow:
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A businessman who pumped $75m into the Trump family-backed crypto token finds himself in a fortunate position this week as federal securities regulators are hitting pause on their civil fraud case against him.
On Wednesday, lawyers for the Securities and Exchange Commission and Justin Sun, a 34-year-old Chinese crypto entrepreneur, asked a federal judge to put the agency’s case on hold, citing the interests of both sides and “the public’s interest.”
The pause is a 180 for the SEC, America’s top financial regulator, which two years ago charged Sun and his companies — Tron, BitTorrent and Rainberry — with selling unregistered securities and fraudulently manipulating the price of digital token Tronix. Sun and his companies sought to have the case dismissed.
Sun is a polarizing figure within the world of crypto, in which he has become one of the most prominent investors in the World Liberty Financial crypto project, backed by the Trump family. Sun’s $75m purchase of World Liberty tokens, which he’s touted in social media posts, could set the Trump family up to eventually collect tens of millions of dollars, as the family is entitled to 75% of the tokens’ revenues, according to the company. Sun is also an official adviser to World Liberty, which lists President Donald Trump as its “chief crypto advocate” and his son Barron as its “DeFi visionary.”
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Filed under: new American kleptocracy. Subcategory: crypto.
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 