Month: February 2024

Enlarge (credit: Narumon Bowonkitwanchai | Moment)

India's plan to let a moratorium on imposing customs duties on cross-border digital e-commerce transactions expire may end up hurting India's more ambitious plans to become a global chip leader in the next five years, Reuters reported.

It could also worsen the global chip shortage by spiking semiconductor industry costs at a time when many governments worldwide are investing heavily in expanding domestic chip supplies in efforts to keep up with rapidly advancing technologies.

Early next week, world leaders will convene at a World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting, just before the deadline to extend the moratorium hits in March. In place since 1998, the moratorium has been renewed every two years since—but India has grown concerned that it's losing significant revenues from not imposing taxes as demand rises for its digital goods, like movies, e-books, or games.

Enlarge / Mining operations start right at the edge of Bulqizë, Albania. (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

“The search for geologic hydrogen today is where the search for oil was back in the 19th century—we’re just starting to understand how this works,” said Frédéric-Victor Donzé, a geologist at Université Grenoble Alpes. Donzé is part of a team of geoscientists studying a site at Bulqizë in Albania where miners at one of the world’s largest chromite mines may have accidentally drilled into a hydrogen reservoir.

The question Donzé and his team want to tackle is whether hydrogen has a parallel geological system with huge subsurface reservoirs that could be extracted the way we extract oil. “Bulqizë is a reference case. For the first time, we have real data. We have a proof,” Donzé said.

Greenish energy source

Water is the only byproduct of burning hydrogen, which makes it a potential go-to green energy source. The problem is that the vast majority of the 96 million tons of hydrogen we make each year comes from processing methane, and that does release greenhouse gases. Lots of them. “There are green ways to produce hydrogen, but the cost of processing methane is lower. This is why we are looking for alternatives,” Donzé said.

Enlarge (credit: Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Reddit filed to go public on Thursday (PDF), revealing various details of the social media company's inner workings. Among the revelations, Reddit acknowledged the threat of future user protests and the value of third-party Reddit apps.

On July 1, Reddit enacted API rule changes—including new, expensive pricing —that resulted in many third-party Reddit apps closing. Disturbed by the changes, the timeline of the changes, and concerns that Reddit wasn’t properly appreciating third-party app developers and moderators, thousands of Reddit users protested by making the subreddits they moderate private, read-only, and/or engaging in other forms of protest, such as only discussing John Oliver or porn.

Protests went on for weeks and, at their onset, crashed Reddit for three hours. At the time, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said the protests did not have “any significant revenue impact so far.”

Enlarge / "Reddit Gold" takes on a whole new meaning when AI training data is involved. (credit: iStock / Getty Images)

The last week saw word leak that Google had agreed to license Reddit's massive corpus of billions of posts and comments to help train its large language models. Now, in a recent Securities and Exchange Commission filing, the popular online forum has revealed that it will bring in $203 million from that and other unspecified AI data licensing contracts over the next three years.

Reddit's Form S-1—published by the SEC late Thursday ahead of the site's planned stock IPO—says the company expects $66.4 million of that data-derived value from LLM companies to come during the 2024 calendar year. Bloomberg previously reported the Google deal to be worth an estimated $60 million a year, suggesting that the three-year deal represents the vast majority of its AI licensing revenue so far.

Google and other AI companies that license Reddit's data will receive "continuous access to [Reddit's] data API as well as quarterly transfers of Reddit data over the term of the arrangement," according to the filing. That constant, real-time access is particularly valuable, the site writes in the filing, because "Reddit data constantly grows and regenerates as users come and interact with their communities and each other."

Enlarge / Tyler Perry in 2022. (credit: Getty Images)

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter published Thursday, filmmaker Tyler Perry spoke about his concerns related to the impact of AI video synthesis on entertainment industry jobs. In particular, he revealed that he has suspended a planned $800 million expansion of his production studio after seeing what OpenAI's recently announced AI video generator Sora can do.

"I have been watching AI very closely," Perry said in the interview. "I was in the middle of, and have been planning for the last four years... an $800 million expansion at the studio, which would’ve increased the backlot a tremendous size—we were adding 12 more soundstages. All of that is currently and indefinitely on hold because of Sora and what I’m seeing. I had gotten word over the last year or so that this was coming, but I had no idea until I saw recently the demonstrations of what it’s able to do. It’s shocking to me."

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, revealed a preview of Sora's capabilities last week. Sora is a text-to-video synthesis model, and it uses a neural network—previously trained on video examples—that can take written descriptions of a scene and turn them into high-definition video clips up to 60 seconds long. Sora caused shock in the tech world because it appeared to dramatically surpass other AI video generators in capability. It seems that similar shock also rippled into adjacent professional fields. "Being told that it can do all of these things is one thing, but actually seeing the capabilities, it was mind-blowing," Perry said in the interview.

Enlarge / Cellular towers in Redondo Beach, California on February 22, 2024. (credit: Getty Images | Eric Thayer )

AT&T said a botched update related to a network expansion caused the wireless outage that disrupted service for many mobile customers yesterday.

"Based on our initial review, we believe that today's outage was caused by the application and execution of an incorrect process used as we were expanding our network, not a cyber attack," AT&T said on its website last night. "We are continuing our assessment of today's outage to ensure we keep delivering the service that our customers deserve."

While "incorrect process" is a bit vague, an ABC News report that cited anonymous sources said it was a software update that went wrong. AT&T hasn't said exactly how many cellular customers were affected, but there were over 70,000 problem reports on the DownDetector website yesterday morning.