Chinese automaker stuns industry with new electric car breakthrough: 'Elevating the game to another dimension'
The company began selling these EVs this month, and they are "capable of providing around 400 kilometers (249 miles) of range in five minutes in tests on its new Han L sedan," as Bloomberg explained.
Lei Xing, an independent China auto analyst, told Bloomberg that the release of these vehicles means BYD is "elevating the game to another dimension."
Analysts believe the company is looking to leverage its technologies to stand out in the competitive automobile industry.
"By directly addressing one of the key hurdles to BEV adoption (charging speed), the company is offering customers a clearer path to switch from [internal combustion engines] to EVs," Macquarie Capital analysts wrote, per Bloomberg.
As the company expands its offerings and EV infrastructure such as charging stations continues to grow, the popularity of these vehicles is rising. BYD has committed to installing more than 4,000 charging stations across China that will support the sale of its EVs.
China emits the largest amount of planet-warming carbon in the world, which reached 11,903 million metric tons in 2023. Most of this comes from the burning of coal; however, it has said it will reduce pollution in large cities by utilizing electric and nuclear technologies.
The country promotes the purchase of EVs through subsidies and infrastructure investments, which have grown sales by 40% year-on-year. These subsidies have been responsible for significant savings among consumers, and the absence of gas and maintenance costs means they can save even more.
"This could mark the beginning of a new wave of model rollouts, propelling BYD's battery-electric vehicle sales to catch up with hybrids after they fell behind in 2024," Joanna Chen, a China auto analyst with Bloomberg Intelligence, said. In other words, more EVs are bound to hit the market — and reduce global car pollution.
If you were going to purchase an EV, which of these factors would be most important to you?
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Battery range
Power and speed
The way it looks
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The Hill
27 minutes ago
- The Hill
Nvidia walks tightrope on US-China tensions
Nvidia is navigating an increasingly tenuous relationship between the U.S. and China, as the company seeks to sell its artificial intelligence (AI) chips to both countries while they engage in a high-stakes race to dominate the technology. The chipmaker, whose graphics processing units (GPUs) are considered the backbone of the AI boom, has seen a meteoric rise over the past few years, becoming the most valuable company in the world and the first to cross the $4 trillion threshold. However, as the U.S. and China compete for control, its chips have become a key target, creating a complex balancing act for the firm. 'They're doing a spectacular job of walking that tightrope right now,' said Stacy Rasgon, a senior analyst at Bernstein Research. 'I hope they can stay up on the rope,' he added. 'Jensen's been doing a really good job of balancing what are some fairly opposing concerns from both sides. He's been doing a good job of walking that line.' Nvidia's chips have become highly sought after, as companies and countries alike race to develop AI. This has also made the chips a key chokepoint, as the U.S. seeks to limit China's abilities to develop the technology. 'The entire chip industry has been having to learn how to reengage with Washington after a couple of decades in which the products they sold weren't seen as particularly politically sensitive. Over the past decade, that's changed dramatically,' said Chris Miller, an international history professor at Tufts University. While Nvidia isn't the only chipmaker facing restrictions, it sits in a unique position as the dominant market player. 'Nvidia's the one that's supplying the bulk of the merchant AI infrastructure that everything's running on. Clearly, it's imperative everywhere and probably doubly so in China,' Rasgon said. 'To the extent that China's been building out their AI infrastructure, largely they've been building it out or desiring to build it out on Nvidia.' In a statement to The Hill, a Nvidia spokesperson said, 'Trying to cobble together datacenters from smuggled products is a nonstarter, both technically and economically. Datacenters are massive and complex systems, making smuggling extremely difficult and risky, and we do not provide any support or repairs for restricted products.' 'Rather than risk using smuggled products, the market will turn to widely available competitors such as Huawei, undercutting U.S. leadership in China and worldwide,' the spokesperson said. The Biden administration initially limited some advanced chip sales to China in October 2022, prompting Nvidia to develop separate chips with slower processing speeds for sale on the Chinese market. However, the A800 and H800, alternatives to its A100 and H100 chips, were soon targeted in another round of export controls in October 2023. In response, Nvidia developed a new option for China, the H20 chip. The Trump administration initially cracked down on H20 sales to China in April, as tensions spiked between Washington and Beijing over the president's expansive tariff regime. However, shortly after a visit by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang to the White House in July, the chipmaker said it had received assurances from the U.S. government that its H20 licenses would be approved. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said the decision was part of a rare earth deal with Beijing, arguing China is only receiving the company's 'fourth best' chip. The controversial move has faced pushback from both Democrats and Republicans, who contend the H20 can still boost China's AI capabilities. The decision represented a key win for Huang, who also received a shoutout from Trump just days later as he unveiled his AI Action Plan. The president reminisced on how he had at one point considered breaking up Nvidia. 'I found out it's not easy in that business. I said, 'Suppose, we put the greatest minds together. They work hand in hand for a couple of years.' He said, 'No, it would take at least 10 years to catch [Huang] if he ran Nvidia totally incompetently from now on,'' Trump said. Nvidia's unique position in the GPU market and the broader AI race gives the company a 'powerful voice' in Washington, Miller noted. 'So long as it's an absolutely central player in AI technology that it's been over the past couple of years, I think it's not surprising that its voice is also heeded and taken seriously by governments as well,' he said. 'It's also not surprising that governments, both the United States and China and others, are trying to shape the market for Nvidia chips and other AI accelerators, given how central they seem to be both for the future of technology but also for prosperity and political power,' he added. Huang has made three trips to China this year to simultaneously manage relations with Beijing amid the shifting export controls in the U.S. He has largely been able to keep the peace so far, albeit with some hiccups. China's Cyberspace Administration reportedly summoned Nvidia last week to explain 'backdoor security risks' with its H20 chips. The chipmaker responded by releasing a blog post Tuesday, saying its chips 'do not and should not have kill switches and backdoors.' Kill switches are built-in mechanisms that would allow companies to remotely deactivate chips. 'Embedding backdoors and kill switches into chips would be a gift to hackers and hostile actors,' David Reber Jr., Nvidia's chief security officer, wrote. 'It would undermine global digital infrastructure and fracture trust in U.S. technology. Established law wisely requires companies to fix vulnerabilities — not create them.' The concerns about backdoors come as some American lawmakers have pushed to add location tracking to chips in order to prevent them from ending up in the hands of foreign adversaries. Even with export controls, there has been widespread concern about chip smuggling. The Justice Department on Tuesday accused two Chinese nationals of illegally shipping tens of millions of dollars' worth of chips, including Nvidia H100s, to China. In a letter to lawmakers Thursday, Americans for Responsible Innovation, an AI policy group, called for an investigation into the 'large-scale smuggling' of advanced AI chips into China and whether Nvidia took 'sufficient measures' to prevent or report it. Despite these concerns, Nvidia remains in a fairly strong position with both the U.S. and China. Its situation stands in sharp contrast to that of Intel, which has come under fire in recent days over CEO Lip-Bu Tan's reported ties to China. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) pressed Intel earlier this week over Tan's Chinese investments and his previous role as CEO of Cadence Design Systems, which recently pleaded guilty to violating export controls by selling chip design technology to a Chinese military university. On Thursday, Trump called for Tan to resign, suggesting he is 'highly conflicted.' 'It does not appear that Lip-Bu has cultivated that personal relationship with Trump, and maybe that's biting him now,' Rasgon noted. However, there are still factors that could derail Nvidia's careful balancing act. China hawks within the administration could push back on the less restrictive approach toward AI, while Beijing will likely continue to develop its own technology. 'Even if the Chinese can use Nvidia chips, they're probably going to still be putting more effort into local alternatives,' Rasgon added. 'They have no choice, right, because we've shown we have the ability to cut them off at the knees when we want to.'
Axios
27 minutes ago
- Axios
Behind the Curtain: Your smarter fake friends
Your fake friends are getting a lot smarter ... and realer. Why it matters: If you think those make-believe people on Facebook, Instagram and X — the bots — seem real and worrisome now, just wait. Soon, thanks to AI, those fake friends will analyze your feeds, emotions, and habits so they can interact with the same savvy as the realest of people. The next generation of bots will build psychological profiles on you — and potentially billions of others — and like, comment and interact the same as normal people. This'll demand even more vigilance in determining what — and who — is real in the digital world. A taste of the future: Brett Goldstein and Brett Benson — professors at Vanderbilt University who specialize in national and international security — show in vivid detail, in a recent New York Times op-ed, the looming danger of the increasingly savvy fake world. They dug through piles of documents uncovered by Vanderbilt's Institute of National Security, exposing how a Chinese company — GoLaxy — optimizes fake people to dupe and deceive. "What sets GoLaxy apart," the professors write, "is its integration of generative A.I. with enormous troves of personal data. Its systems continually mine social media platforms to build dynamic psychological profiles. Its content is customized to a person's values, beliefs, emotional tendencies and vulnerabilities." They add that according to the documents, AI personas "can then engage users in what appears to be a conversation — content that feels authentic, adapts in real-time and avoids detection. The result is a highly efficient propaganda engine that's designed to be nearly indistinguishable from legitimate online interaction, delivered instantaneously at a scale never before achieved." Between the lines: This makes Russia's bot farms look like the horse and buggy of online manipulation. We're talking real-time adaptations to match your moods, or desires, or beliefs — the very things that make most of us easy prey. The threat of smarter, more realistic fake friends transcends malicious actors trying to warp your sense of politics — or reality. It hits your most personal inner thoughts and struggles. State of play: AI is getting better, faster at mimicking human nuance, empathy and connection. Some states, including Utah and Illinois, are racing to limit AI therapy. But most aren't. So all of our fake friends are about to grow lots more plentiful. A Harvard Business Review study ($) earlier this year found the number one use case of chat-based generative AI is therapy ("structured support and guidance to process psychological challenges") and companionship ("social and emotional connection, sometimes with a romantic dimension"). AI-based therapy, the article notes, is "available 24/7, it's relatively inexpensive (even free to use in some cases), and it comes without the prospect of judgment from another human being." That research is congruent with what the biggest AI companies are finding: Humans are increasingly turning to AI to be buddies and shrinks. That brings a passel of possible problems — from unregulated robots offering bad advice, to unhealthy human attachment to an artificial thing. The Wall Street Journal found by examining public chat transcripts that bots sometimes egg on users' false premises. To go along with AI hallucination, clinicians are informally calling this phenomenon " AI psychosis" or "AI delusion." There's obvious upside, too: Loneliness can be deadly, and good therapy can do great things for someone struggling. Meta, as Axios reported in May, envisions chatbots as " more social" — potentially an extension of your friend network, and antidote to the " loneliness epidemic." What you can do: Be vigilant. This is all happening now. It's safe to assume AI only gets better, and bad actors more clever. Don't assume every person online is real — much less a real friend.
Tom's Guide
27 minutes ago
- Tom's Guide
Apple's big Siri 'overhaul' looks set for spring 2026 — here's what it'll be able to do
Apple's long-suffering Siri upgrade seems to be edging closer to that promised spring 2026 launch date. According to a new report from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple is making progress, but there's still some concern inside the company. Gurman claims that Apple is preparing an "overhauled" Siri to debut alongside its App Intents feature that will allow it to take actions on the user's behalf. For example, Siri will be able to read your weather app, notice it's going to rain and put a reminder in your reminders app to grab a jacket before you head out the door to your next appointment. These were all promises made back at WWDC 2024 when Apple first revealed its plans for a Siri upgraded through Apple Intelligence. Since then, it's been a whole lot of nothing, and, according to Gurman, that's because making App Intents play nice with other software is the sticking point. "Engineers have been struggling to ensure that the system works with a sufficient number of apps and is accurate enough to handle high-stakes scenarios," Gurman wrote (via 9to5Mac). "There are worries about the software failing in categories where precision is nonnegotiable, like in health or banking apps." Apple is reportedly working with a number of companies to test the integration before it starts rolling it out to beta testers. These features were initially planned to launch with iOS 18, although Gurman believes they will land somewhere around the iOS 26.4 update. According to Gurman, Apple wants to ship App Intents "alongside a broader Siri infrastructure overhaul in the spring and market it heavily." Get instant access to breaking news, the hottest reviews, great deals and helpful tips. However, due to those concerns around the importance of App Intents not failing on something like health or financial assistance, we may not get the feature in full at launch. Apple is reportedly considering "sharply limiting" what Siri will be able to do with sensitive categories. Therefore, even if a smarter, more robust Siri appears in 2026, it could still find itself hamstrung when compared to rivals. In 2024, Tim Cook laid out what set Apple's AI plans apart: 'Our unique approach combines generative AI with a user's personal context to deliver truly helpful intelligence." Which sounds a lot like what ChatGPT Agent is already able to accomplish for you right now in 2025. Here are a few other examples of what it'll be able to do: Is Apple too late to the AI game to make a difference? Or will iPhone owners using ChatGPT or Gemini be happy to switch to Siri 2.0 when it does appear next spring? Let us know in the comments below. Follow Tom's Guide on Google News to get our up-to-date news, how-tos, and reviews in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button.
