Optiver Moves to New Sydney Office In Search of Trading Edge
The firm, founded in Amsterdam by trader Johann Kaemingk, is expanding its capabilities in artificial intelligence and machine learning to sharpen trading strategies, said Darcy Harding, the company's co-head of index options.
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Yahoo
4 hours ago
- Yahoo
Security, trade in focus as Australia PM Albanese heads to China
By Kirsty Needham SYDNEY (Reuters) -Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese leaves for Shanghai on Saturday on an official visit to China where regional security tensions and efforts to grow economic ties are likely to dominate talks. Australia's exports to China, its largest trading partner, span agriculture and energy but are dominated by iron ore, and Albanese will travel with executives from mining giants Rio Tinto, BHP and Fortescue and hold business events in three cities over six days. "The relationship in China means jobs in Australia, it's as simple as that," Albanese told reporters on Friday. Albanese's second visit to Beijing, where he will meet President Xi Jinping, comes after Canberra stepped up screening of Chinese investment in critical minerals and as U.S. President Donald Trump rattles the global economy with sweeping import tariffs. Albanese is yet to meet Trump, after scheduled talks at the G7 were cancelled when the U.S. president left early. The United States, Australia's major security ally, is reviewing the AUKUS nuclear submarine partnership amid concern selling submarines to Australia could weaken U.S. deterrence to China. Foreign Minister Penny Wong warned in a speech in Malaysia on Thursday that China continues to project military power regionally with an objective to change the balance of power, saying Beijing's nuclear and conventional military build-up was "worrying". AUKUS contributed to "collective deterrence in our region," she said. Richard Maude, an Asia Society non-resident fellow and former Australian intelligence chief, said Albanese needed to expand the economic relationship with China but also "get through the visit in a way that makes clear to Australia's close partners and to the Australian public that Australia is talking clearly and frankly to China about aspects of China's behaviour that concern us". The Chinese navy held live-fire exercises in the Tasman Sea between Australia and New Zealand with no advance warning in February, and there have been tense encounters between Australian and Chinese military aircraft in the disputed South China Sea. While Beijing is keen to move ties forward, its proposals for cooperation on artificial intelligence, for example, have already met with a cool response, said Maude, who wrote Australia's 2017 foreign policy white paper. Australia's two-way trade with China was worth A$312 billion last year, or a quarter of all Australian trade. Ties have stabilised since 2020 when China imposed unofficial bans on A$20 billion in Australian exports. Direct engagement with Chinese leaders was important for Australia's security, Albanese told reporters on Friday. "We cooperate where we can and we disagree where we must, and we're able to have those honest conversations about some of the disagreements that are there," he said. Treasurer Jim Chalmers has said economic ties with China are a priority, but also complex. Australia's increased screening of Chinese investment in critical minerals, renewable energy and key infrastructure is likely to be raised by Beijing, company executives told Reuters, although on Tuesday Chalmers said Australia would not ease its scrutiny. "The government understands it is not in Australia's national interest to further increase China's stranglehold on the critical minerals supply chain," said Maude. Geoff Raby, a former Australian ambassador to China, said China would probably raise its ambition to join the 11-member regional trade pact, the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), which Australia chairs. "The most harmful thing is to adopt policies that force China to become more isolationist or which encourage those domestic forces in China who favour more inward-looking policies," Raby said. Albanese will meet businesses in Shanghai on Monday, before travelling to Beijing for an annual leaders' dialogue with Premier Li Qiang, and a company roundtable, and then head to the southwestern Chinese city of Chengdu.
New York Times
4 hours ago
- New York Times
Google Hires A.I. Leaders From a Start-Up That OpenAI Was Courting
Google has joined Silicon Valley's scramble to scoop up artificial intelligence engineers, hiring the leaders of Windsurf, a start-up that developed an A.I.-powered computer programming tool. The deal, which became public on Friday, was the latest example of how tech companies are waging battles to suck up A.I. talent. The move deepens Google's bench of A.I. engineers while also scoring it a point against OpenAI, one of its biggest challengers in the field. In May, OpenAI was in talks to acquire Windsurf in a $3 billion deal that would help add thousands of new customers and expand OpenAI's offerings. But the talks broke down in recent weeks because Windsurf's leaders had concerns about the information it might have to share about its product with Microsoft, one of OpenAI's largest investors, two people with knowledge of the deal said. Under Google's agreement, Varun Mohan, the chief executive of Windsurf, and Douglas Chen, a co-founder, will join Google DeepMind, the company's A.I. division, along with several of Windsurf's research and development employees. Google is also paying for a nonexclusive license for Windsurf technology. It declined to disclose what it was paying. 'We're excited to welcome some top A.I. coding talent from Windsurf's team to Google DeepMind to advance our work in agentic coding,' Google said in a statement. As part of the statement, Mr. Mohan and Mr. Chen said they were excited to join Google. The Verge and The Information earlier reported on Windsurf's deal. Silicon Valley giants including Meta have lately poached A.I. talent from rivals and start-ups, sometimes offering compensation packages as high as $100 million. Google has chosen to pay to bring on top A.I. talent from start-ups rather than acquiring the smaller businesses outright. In 2023, Google agreed to pay $3 billion to license technology from a chatbot start-up. The deal allowed Google to hire Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, who both had left Google to start Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Yahoo
6 hours ago
- Yahoo
Elon Musk says even if AI ultimately proves bad for humanity he still wants to be there to see it
Elon Musk said the notion that humans once managed an economy will seem quaint in the future, like 'cavemen throwing sticks into a fire' in retrospect. The remarks came during a demonstration of his latest artificial intelligence chatbot, Grok 4, which, he argued, was the smartest in the world, better than almost all graduate students in all disciplines simultaneously. Two weeks ago, Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel struggled to answer whether he would prefer the human race to endure. Now it was Elon Musk's turn to opine whether technology might remove the need for mankind's existence. In a future where machines perform all the work, he questioned what purpose people would actually serve. 'The actual notion of a human economy—assuming civilization continues to progress—will seem very quaint in retrospect,' the xAI founder and Tesla CEO remarked on Wednesday, likening current society to 'cavemen throwing sticks into a fire.' Musk was speaking during a demonstration of his company's latest generation of artificial intelligence, xAI's chatbot Grok 4. 'Grok 4 is smarter than almost all graduate students in all disciplines simultaneously,' Musk explained. 'This is the smartest AI in the world.' He then admitted it was somewhat unnerving to have another intelligence be far superior to our own, since it raised all sorts of questions no one had the answers for. 'Will this be bad or good for humanity?' Musk asked, before predicting it would most likely be good. 'But I somewhat reconciled myself to the fact that even if it wasn't going to be good, I'd at least like to be alive to see it happen,' he then added. Wednesday's demonstration of Grok 4 comes amid a heated race with his archrival, Sam Altman. Musk had a bitter falling out with the head of OpenAI, who has struggled to launch GPT-5. Back in June 2024, then–OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati predicted that the company's AI would achieve 'PhD-level intelligence.' However, OpenAI's large language model has encountered scaling constraints and can no longer simply grow in size and complexity as with previous generations. Meanwhile, xAI has gone from Grok 2 predicting the next token—similar to Google's autocomplete when typing search requests—to pretraining in Grok 3, to now a focus on reasoning computation with Grok 4. Among other tasks, like inventing an operatic song on the spot about Diet Coke, it crunched the numbers to predict the winner of the next World Series. While the L.A. Dodgers had the best mathematical chance at 21.6%, it argued the Seattle Mariners offered a better return on the risk. 'If you look back, in the last 12 months, Grok 2 was only a concept,' remarked xAI's Jimmy Ba. 'We didn't even have Grok 2 twelve months ago.' Yet in Musk's zeal to first catch up to and then eclipse his nemesis with a startup that barely existed only two years ago, he has prioritized speed over safety. On Tuesday, Grok grabbed headlines after attacking Jews and calling itself 'MechaHitler' numerous times on X. The team at xAI responsible for training Grok was forced to clean up the mess, scrubbing the platform of most of its more offensive remarks. 'We are aware of recent posts made by Grok and are actively working to remove the inappropriate posts,' xAI posted. The startup then said it would actively block its chatbot from spewing out more anti-Semitic rants on Musk's platform: 'xAI has taken action to ban hate speech before Grok posts on X.' If not solved, these kinds of mistakes could prove risky down the line. Grok isn't designed to be just a floating consciousness in the ether. On Wednesday, Musk once more emphasized his plans to integrate Grok into Tesla's Optimus droid. The artificial mind would then be gifted a robotic body the company plans to build by the 'legion,' according to Musk—5,000 strong just like during the days of the Roman imperial armies. Speaking about the speed at which AI progresses, Musk didn't beat around the bush: 'It's frankly—I mean, I don't know—in some ways a little terrifying.' This story was originally featured on
