Why rare earth magnets are central to a US-China trade deal
The US and China move closer to a trade deal as Beijing's export controls on rare earth magnets disrupt supply chains across the globe.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
SBS Australia
3 hours ago
- SBS Australia
US reviewing $350 billion AUKUS security pact to see if it fits Trump's "America First" agenda
US reviewing $350 billion AUKUS security pact to see if it fits Trump's "America First" agenda Published 12 June 2025, 6:13 am There are questions over the future of Australia's multi-billion dollar submarine deal with the US after the White House announced a review of the AUKUS security pact. The Pentagon will review the pact to ensure it aligns with President Donald Trump's America First agenda. Australia's government has tried to downplay the development - rejecting claims AUKUS is now sunk. It says there is no need for a plan B.
News.com.au
4 hours ago
- News.com.au
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese yet to secure critical meeting with Donald Trump ahead of G7 trip
Anthony Albanese will visit Fiji, and the United States prior to heading to Canada to attend the G7 conference where the Prime Minister is facing intense pressure to secure his first face-to-face meeting with Donald Trump. Mr Albanese will fly out of Canberra on Friday morning for Nadi, Fiji where he is set to speak to Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka. The meeting can be seen as a concerted effort for Australia to cement its relationship with its Pacific allies amid increasing aggression from China. It will also canvas the impact of climate change on the region, which island countries in the bloc describe as their biggest existential threat. 'Visiting Fiji so soon after the election is a deliberate decision to reinforce my government's Pacific priorities and to exchange views with my dear friend Prime Minister Rabuka, a respected Pacific statesman,' Mr Albanese said. The Labor leader will then travel to Seattle on the US West Coast to meet with business leaders, with the talks set to focus on emerging technologies such artificial intelligence. His arrival coincides with the end of AI Con, which is being attended by tech giants including Microsoft, Google, and Amazon Web Services. Mr Albanese will back-end the six-day trip by attending the G7 leaders summit in Kananaskis, Canada, where he it is hoped he will finally meet with Mr Trump. Demands for a face-to-face meeting substantially increased on Thursday after the Pentagon announced it would be reviewing the AUKUS defence agreement to ensure it still 'aligned with the President's America First agenda'. Whether Australia will be able to obtain a tariff exemption will be another key discussion point. The US has also made strident calls for Australia to lift defence spending from the current levels of about 2 per cent of GDP to 3.5 per cent, with Labor committing funding to ensure funding increases to 2.5 per cent by 2029/30. While Australia is not a member of the G7 – which includes Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the US, and the European Union – Mr Albanese was invited to attend the summit alongside the likes of India, Indonesia, South Korea and Ukraine. Mr Albanese is also expected to have bilateral talks with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba and South Korean President Lee Jae-myung. Key discussions will include securing global supply chains, the future of advanced technologies like AI and the role of critical minerals, which Australia hopes to be a global player in. Supply of critical minerals could also play a role in securing a tariff exemption with the US, with the Albanese government investing $1.2bn in establishing a Critical Minerals Strategic Reserve, which includes stockpiling critical elements depending on global market. Mr Albanese said he was 'honoured' to have been invited by Mr Carney. 'I look forward to working productively with world leaders to discuss how we tackle some of the most challenging issues facing Australia, our region, and the world,' he said.
News.com.au
4 hours ago
- News.com.au
Meta to announce massive $23 billion move in race towards ‘superintelligence'
Meta is preparing to drop a staggering $15 billion (A$23.09bn) on a stake in AI startup Scale AI, in a bold new play to push beyond current artificial intelligence capabilities and reach so-called 'superintelligence'. The move would give Meta a 49 per cent stake in the company, which is currently led by 28-year-old Alexandr Wang. The deal is yet to be officially confirmed, but multiple reports suggest Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is set to unveil the investment in the coming days. Analysts say this is the behaviour of a 'wartime CEO', referring to the escalating technological arms race taking place between the world's most powerful companies and governments. They all want the same thing, but nobody can tell exactly what happens once they get there. Superintelligence refers to a hypothetical AI system that can outperform humans at all tasks, not just the specific functions currently delegated to today's large language models or image generators. The industry isn't there yet, but given the gargantuan leaps we've witnessed over the past 18 months, it is getting increasingly likely we will see something major before the end of the decade. Even as systems like GPT-4, Claude and Gemini dominate headlines, experts routinely point out their patchy reliability. Several language models still falter on complex reasoning and struggle with logic puzzles that your average Joe could solve. At the moment, AI is about speed. It can effectively eliminate the legwork for a wide rage of everyday tasks performed on a computer. Humans are currently required to prompt their request, but there is still an issue of AI being sycophantic to the user. They are designed to impress, and therefore become confused at times when given a great deal of data, especially if some of it is conflicting. At any rate, Zuckerberg wants in on the party. Meta's attempt to leapfrog the crawl toward artificial general intelligence (AGI) is widely seen as an effort to re-establish dominance in an ecosystem now defined by competitors like OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic. It comes in the wake of Meta's ill-fated Metaverse experiment, which soaked up tens of billions in investment only to be largely shelved and mocked in equal measure. Meanwhile, Scale AI recently made headlines for securing a deal with the US Department of Defense to develop ThunderForge, a military AI platform intended to support strategic planning in the Indo-Pacific and Europe. The company also counts Peter Thiel's Founders Fund among its early backers. Observers say the mega-deal from Meta should reignite conversations in Europe about the need for publicly accountable AI research, something on par with CERN, the European particle physics laboratory. Michael Wooldridge, Professor of the Foundations of AI at Oxford University, argued such an initiative would build trust through openness. 'There's a good argument that there should be a CERN for AI where governments collaborate to develop AI openly and robustly,' Prof Wooldridge said. 'That's not going to happen if it's developed behind closed doors. [AI] seems just as important as CERN and particle accelerators.' Global arms race heats up, but oversight matters With staggering sums of capital, military interest, and corporate strategy all converging, it is clear which way authorities want us to head as they scramble for AGI supremacy. The race has been loosely compared to the frantic efforts in the 1940s to produce the world's first nuclear bomb. Startups are being snapped up at record speed, university research labs are being drained of talent, and AI labs are increasingly moving into secrecy. Global experts have already raised the alarm and called for robust oversight, but for those pessimistic about futurism, it has come as too little, too late. In a report published ahead of the UN's highly anticipated 'Summit of the Future', pundits raised current lack of international oversight on AI. Among the concerns are the very obvious opportunities for misuse, internal biases, and humanity's growing dependence. One man known as the 'godfather of AI' famously quit Google in 2023 over concerns the company was not adequately assessing the risks, warning we could be walking into a 'nightmare'. While the immediate benefits are already being seen in terms of productivity, the main concern is that we are charging full steam ahead towards an event horizon that is impossible to predict the outcome of. What we do know is that those spearheading AI development are becoming absurdly wealthy incredibly quickly and thus hold more and more power over the trajectory of the planet as each day passes. Around 40 experts, spanning technology, law, and data protection, were gathered by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to tackle the existential issue head-on. They say that AI's global, border-crossing nature makes governance a mess, and we're missing the tools needed to address the chaos. The panel's report drops a sobering reminder, warning that if we wait until AI presents an undeniable threat, it could already be too late to mount a proper defence. 'There is, today, a global governance deficit with respect to AI,' the panel of experts warned in their report, stressing that the technology needs to 'serve humanity equitably and safely'.
