Business, Financial & Legal News - Page 11

US President Joe Biden's administration has pushed ASML to cancel shipments of some of its high-end chip-making machines into China, after new US export bans come into effect.

The news is coming from Bloomberg and the usual "people familiar with the matter," who said that the Dutch manufacturer had licenses to ship three of its new high-end deep ultraviolet lithography machines to Chinese firms this month, when new Dutch restrictions will begin taking effect.

US officials reached out to ASML, asking them to immediately stop the pre-scheduled shipments of their new machines to Chinese customers, once again, "according to people familiar with the matter". These people asked not to be identified because the discussions were confidential.

TSMC has shared new plans for its next-gen chip packages, where the company plans over 1 trillion transistors on its next-gen A10 process node by the year 2030... identical to what Intel has planned, and announced last year.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) shared the news during the recent IEDM conference, where it lists its newer N5 and N4 process nodes, as well as N3 and N3E process nodes. N5 and N4 began their lives back in 2020, while N3 and N3E process nodes started out this year in 2023, while N2 and N2P process nodes will be unleashed in 2025.

NVIDIA's upcoming H200 AI GPU is a monolithic chip with 80 billion transistors, while AMD's upcoming Instinct MI300X AI GPU uses a chiplet design with a whopping 153 billion transistors using a blend of 5nm and 6nm IPs on the MI300X. However, TSMC teases it will have 200 billion transistors on a single monolithic chip with its N3 and N3E process nodes very soon.

The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft for alleged unauthorized use of the publication's copyrighted works to train its AI via large language models (LLMs).

The lawsuit (The New York Times Company v. MICROSOFT CORPORATION 1:23-cv-11195) could be a landmark case that establishes precedent for artificial intelligence, namely those fueled by large language models like ChatGPT.

On Wednesday, December 27, the The New York Times filed a complaint against OpenAI and Microsoft for allegedly using its lawfully protected written material to train AI chatbots like ChatGPT. More specifically, NYT is suing both parties for copyright violation. One exhibit (Exhibit J) provided 100 instances where chatbots quoted NYT articles verbatim.

ASML has just officially shipped its very first High-NA EUV lithography scanner to Intel, with the sparkling new Twinscan EXE:5000 extreme ultraviolet (EUV) scanner being the first High-NA scanner from the company and now in the hands of Intel.

Intel placed its order with ASML for the advanced EUV scanner all the way back in 2018, where Team Blue will be playing around with the new High-NA EUV scanner before it uses the commercial-grade Twinscan EXE:5200 tool for high-volume manufacturing (HVM), which is expected to take place in 2025.

An ASML spokesperson said: "We are shipping the first High NA system and announced this in a social media post today. It goes to Intel as planned and announced earlier".

The founder of Amazon and Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos, has sat down for the longest interview he has ever done, where he touched on many different aspects of his long career, including the iconic phone call he made during the early days of Amazon.

Bezos, who has since left his role as CEO of Amazon and moved on to his new concentration of space exploration through Blue Origin, responded to a question from Lex Fridman on the Lex Fridman Podcast where he was asked about the call he made to Amazon's customer service. Bezos first touched on one of his business philosophies: "When the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right."

Bezos continued to explain that typically, when you are faced with this issue, the wrong data is being collected, and there isn't a problem with the way it's being collected. The former Amazon CEO recounted an early problem for the company; internal metrics indicated that Amazon customers were waiting less than a minute to reach a customer service representative. However, Amazon was receiving a lot of complaints about wait times far exceeding the expected 1-minute wait time.

Apple has informed 9to5Mac that it will soon be stopping sales of its flagship Apple Watch models following a recent ruling by the International Trade Commission (ITC).

The ruling by the ITC involves an extensive patent dispute between Apple and medical technology company Masimo, which is debating over the ownership of the Apple Watch's blood oxygen sensor technology. Notably, the ITC announced its ruling back in October, which upheld a judge's decision from January. The case was then sent to the Biden administration, where it will undergo a 60-day Presidential Review Period, and throughout this period, President Biden can veto the ruling. The Presidential Review Period is scheduled to end on December 24, 2023.

As for the Apple Watch's in question, Apple has told the publication that it will no longer be able to sell its Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2 in the United States after 3 pm ET on Thursday, December 21. Additionally, in-store inventory won't be available from Apple stores after December 24. The two affected watches are Apple's only devices using the blood oxygen monitoring technology, hence their imminent removal.

It appears that Elon Musk's rocket company, SpaceX, is worth more than Disney or Comcast, according to recent reports from Bloomberg.

The new report from the publication indicates that SpaceX is considering selling shares at a valuation of $175 billion, which would make Musk's company worth more than Disney or Comcast. Notably, SpaceX officially denied reports that insinuated the company was having an internal consideration about an IPO for its Starlink division next year while also upping its valuation by $25 billion more than it was last summer.

According to unnamed sources in the report, SpaceX is considering a share price of $95, which would generate $500 to $750 million if initiated. For reference, Comcast and Disney are worth about $167 billion, and Musk's rocket company hasn't even released put into place its best product - Starship. The company's newest generation rocket that's designed to land on the moon and Mars.

Following the severing of many notable brands as advertisers on X, the social media platform formerly called Twitter, Elon Musk has continued his tirade of comments aimed directly at Disney CEO Bob Iger.

The latest comments from Musk emerged on his personal X account, where he wrote, "Bob, Iger thinks it's cool to advertise next to child exploitation material. Real stand-up guy." The comment was in reference to a lawsuit filed by Attorney General Raúl Torrez of New Mexico against Meta, which alleges the Mark Zuckerberg-run company isn't doing enough to protect kids on both Instagram and Facebook.

How does this connect to Iger? Musk has pointed out that Disney is still continuing to advertise on Meta despite the allegations against the company. The X owner called for Iger's immediate resignation, writing he should be "fired immediately", and that Walt Disney himself was "turning in his grave over what Bob has done to his company."

In what seemed like a bizarre turn of events in the technology news cycle, with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman being ousted from his position and then rehired, we are starting to learn a little bit more about why Altman was initially let go from his position.

A new report from WIRED has revealed that Altman's personal life played a role in why the board decided to let him go, as the publication reports that Altman was spread too thin among his many entrepreneurial pursuits, and as OpenAI's board wrote in its blog post about Altman's departure, "he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities."

So, what could this mean? Altman wasn't just responsible for his duties at OpenAI; he was also rapidly investing in many startups that he saw potential in. For example, in 2019, OpenAI signed a nonbinding agreement to spend $51 million on AI chips developed by Rain AI, a company that Altman had personally invested $1 million into. "Over four years ago, we signed a nonbinding Letter of Intent with Rain to engage in discussions regarding a written agreement; we have not proceeded with next steps," said OpenAI spokesperson Kayla Wood

In what marks the third time this year, Spotify has announced it will be laying off 1,500 employees that have already been notified of their departure.

The news of the layoffs comes from company CEO Daniel Ek, who explained in a newsroom post that the cuts of 17% of the company's workforce was decidedly made to be immediate instead of incrementally over time. This decision was made by Ek, who wrote that he considered Spotify's financial goal state and its current operational costs, and elected to "right-size our costs" to "accomplish our objective".

Additionally, Ek explained that the workforce reduction of this caliber might come as a surprise to many employees considering the "recent positive earnings report and our performance". However, Spotify's CEO writes that this decision was made to close the gap "between our financial goal state and our current operational costs."