
Trump Says He Will Set Unilateral Tariff Rates Within Two Weeks
President Donald Trump said he intended to send letters to trading partners in the next one to two weeks setting unilateral tariff rates, ahead of a July 9 deadline to reimpose higher duties on dozens of economies.
'At a certain point, we're just going to send letters out. And I think you understand that, saying this is the deal, you can take it or leave it,' Trump told reporters Wednesday at the Kennedy Center in Washington where he was attending a performance.
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New York Times
10 minutes ago
- New York Times
Meta Invests Nearly $15 Billion in Scale AI to Kick-Start Superintelligence Lab
Meta said on Thursday that it planned to invest nearly $15 billion in Scale AI, a start-up that works with data to train artificial intelligence systems, in a deal that Meta hopes will add needed muscle to its disappointing A.I. division. As a condition of the deal, Alexandr Wang, Scale AI's 28-year-old chief executive, plans to join Meta in a top leadership role in the new division, which Meta is calling its Superintelligence lab. Mr. Wang, whom people inside Meta have taken to calling a visionary leader, will also bring a team of employees from Scale AI to work at Meta. The move to invest billions in Scale AI, an amount equal to about 10 percent of Meta's revenue in 2024, would be Meta's first major minority investment in an outside company. It is Meta's second-largest deal, after the $19 billion acquisition of the messaging app WhatsApp about 11 years ago. Meta is scrambling to catch up with A.I. competitors such as Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic, as industry executives jockey for an edge in what they believe will be the most transformative technology in a generation. 'Meta has finalized our strategic partnership and investment in Scale AI,' a spokesperson for Meta said in a statement. 'As part of this, we will deepen the work we do together producing data for A.I. models, and Alexandr Wang will join Meta to work on our superintelligence efforts.' Meta's investment with Scale AI is unusually structured. Meta will take a minority stake in the start-up and receive little control over its direction. The structure was intentional. Executives at Meta and Scale AI were worried about drawing the attention of regulators. Meta is waiting on a federal judge's decision in an antitrust case scrutinizing its earlier acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp. The Federal Trade Commission under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was skeptical of big technology acquisitions, and Lina Khan, who led the agency at the time, scrutinized multibillion-dollar investments in A.I. companies. The structure of those deals — which included Amazon's investments in Anthropic and Microsoft's backing of OpenAI — allowed the big companies to form close ties with smaller rivals while dodging regulatory issues. It is unclear if the F.T.C. under its new chairman, Andrew Ferguson, will continue down that path. But Mr. Ferguson has shown few signs of changing course. OpenAI kicked off the A.I. movement in late 2022 with the release of its chatbot ChatGPT, compelling companies like Google and Meta to build similar technologies. Meta found an important niche when it chose to open source its systems, freely sharing the underlying tech with developers and businesses. But its latest system, called LLAMA4, has not matched the technologies produced by its biggest rivals. Among technologists, superintelligence is a futuristic goal of A.I. development. OpenAI, Google and others have said their immediate aim is to build artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., a machine that can do anything the human brain can do. Superintelligence, if it can be developed, would go beyond A.G.I.


Bloomberg
15 minutes ago
- Bloomberg
Meta Announces Scale AI Investment, Recruits CEO to AI Unit
Meta Platforms Inc. said it finalized a multibillion-dollar investment in Scale AI and recruited the startup's chief executive officer to help oversee its artificial intelligence efforts — an unusual deal that signals a heightened push by the social media giant to catch up on AI development. Meta said Thursday that it has backed Scale, without including details. The size of the investment was $14.3 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter. The new $29 billion valuation includes the money raised, said the person, who asked not to be idenified discussing private information.
Yahoo
15 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Trump vows to bring together India, Pakistan to 'solve anything'
US President Donald Trump insisted Thursday he would bring India and Pakistan to the table together after recent fighting, saying he can "solve anything." US diplomacy last month helped bring a ceasefire that ended four days of fighting between the nuclear-armed adversaries triggered by an attack on civilians in the Indian part of divided Kashmir. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in announcing the ceasefire that the two nations had agreed to "start talks on a broad set of issues at a neutral site." The statement was welcomed by Pakistan, which has long sought an international role over Kashmir, but India -- which has a warm relationship with the United States -- was more circumspect. Asked whether there remained plans for talks between India and Pakistan a month after the ceasefire, Trump said: "We're going to get those two getting together, you know?" "I told them, India and Pakistan -- they have a longtime rivalry over Kashmir -- I said, I can solve anything. I'll be your arbitrator," he told reporters. India refuses any outside mediation on Kashmir, the scenic Himalayan region which has a Muslim majority but a sizable Hindu minority. "Any India-Pakistan engagement has to be bilateral," Indian foreign ministry spokesman Randhir Jaiswal told reporters on May 29. "At the same time we are clear that talks and terror don't go together." Gunmen on April 22 massacred 26 tourists in Kashmir, most singled out as Hindus, in the deadliest attack on civilians in decades in the region which has seen a long-running insurgency. India has accused Pakistan of backing the assailants and launched military action in response. Pakistan denies involvement and accuses India of escalating tensions. sct/jgc