Latest news with #Kela
Yahoo
17 hours ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Mubi Responds to Backlash Over New Investor's Ties to Israeli Defense-Tech Startup
Mubi, the upstart distributor, streaming platform and production company that was recently valued at $1 billion and guided 'The Substance' to box office success and into the Oscars, has responded to backlash over its latest source of investment. At the end of May, it was announced that the company — which went on a buying spree at the recent Cannes Film Festival, snapping up rights to eight films in competition (including a $24 million splurge on the Jennifer Lawrence-Robert Pattinson starring 'Die My Love') — had secured a $100 million investment from Sequoia Capital. More from Variety Jim Jarmusch's 'Father Mother Sister Brother' Starring Cate Blanchett, Adam Driver Confirmed for Venice Competition, Says Mubi Boss Mubi Expands Theatrical Operations to Italy With Former Lucky Red Exec Gabriele D'Andrea in Charge Mubi Acquires Oliver Laxe's Cannes Competition Entry 'Sirât' for Italy, Turkey and India The Silicon Valley-based Sequoia has invested in a wide range of companies, including the likes of Apple, Google, ByteDance, Cisco, and Nvidia. Mubi marks a rare foray into entertainment. But Sequoia is also closely tied to Israelo defence-tech startup Kela, founded in July 2024 by four veterans of Israeli intelligence units in response to the terror attacks of Oct. 7 and more than six months into the invasion of Gaza. Kela is currently developing a battlefield operating system enabling militaries to integrate AI and commercial tech. According to Sequoia's website, it led Kela's $10 million seed funding round last year. In May of this year, Kela secured an additional $60 million in investment in a funding round also backed by Sequoia (alongside Lux Capital and In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA). Kela's total investment now stands at $100 million. 'The vision is two-fold: in the short term, to upgrade Israel's internal defense capabilities,' wrote Sequoia in a lengthy article about its business with Kela posted in March of this year. 'The company's initial focus is border protection, an urgent priority post-October 7th. In the long term, the ambition is to convert Israel into a defense tech hub for Western militaries—a source of strategic advantage for NATO and the U.S. as they seek to deter their adversaries.' Mubi receiving investment from a company with ties to the Israeli defense sector in the midst of Israel's deadly war in Gaza has fallen foul of some online critics. Several on social media have called for Mubi to be boycotted and have claimed that they've already canceled their subscriptions. A widely shared post on X said it was 'time to add @mubi to the BDS list,' referring to the Palestinian-led Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement that looks to boycott Israeli products and encourage investors to divest from companies implicated in Israeli policies. A group called Film Workers for Palestine later said it was 'horrified' by Mubi's decision. 'This is unacceptable, and we demand that Mubi return the investment,' it wrote in a well-circulated Instagram post. In a statement posted to its social media channels on Saturday, Mubi said the rationale to seek investment from Seqouia was to 'accelerate our mission of delivering bold and visionary films to global audiences,' adding that the venture firm had a '50-plus year history of partnering with founders to help turn their ideas into world-changing businesses.' 'Over the last several days, some members of our community have commented on the decision to work with Sequoia given their investment in Israeli companies and the personal opinions expressed by one of their partners,' it said. 'The beliefs of individual investors do not reflect the views of MUBI.' First founded 18 years ago by CEO Efe Carakal, Mubi has evolved from a niche streaming service to a full-fledged studio, cultivating a major following in the art-house crowd along the way. While it has largely remained politically muted, last year it cancelled an entire festival it had planned in Turkey after local authorities banned a screening of Luca Guadagnino's 'Queer' over what they described as 'provocative content.' As has been pointed out online, Mubi has numerous Palestinian films and features by Palestinian filmmakers about Gaza in its library. Best of Variety New Movies Out Now in Theaters: What to See This Week 'Harry Potter' TV Show Cast Guide: Who's Who in Hogwarts? 25 Hollywood Legends Who Deserve an Honorary Oscar
Time of India
26-04-2025
- Business
- Time of India
Madhusudan Kela bites this crunchy pick in Mar quarter, adds 2 more smallcaps to his Rs 3,500 cr portfolio
Ace investor Madhusudan Kela added three new smallcap stocks in his portfolio in the quarter ended March 31, 2025 viz. Windsor Machines , SG Finserve and Prataap Snacks while raising stakes in Kopran . Kela, who has a portfolio worth over Rs 3,500 crore according to data available on Trendlyne, holds 17 stocks as per the latest shareholding data compiled by it. Windsor Machines The injection moulding machine manufacturer has a market capitalisation of Rs 2,388 crore on the BSE . Kela bought 7.71% stake in the company. The stock is down 17% in 2025 so far but has had a stellar journey over the past one year, delivering multibagger returns of 248%. SG Finserve SG Finserve is a tech-enabled non-banking finance company (NBFC). The stock has fallen over 1% this year while declining 7% on the 1-year basis. He bought a 1.70% stake in the company. Live Events Prataap Snacks Kela bought 4.61% stake in the Prataap Snacks counter. The market capitalisation on the BSE stands at Rs 2,918.41 crore. Shares of Prataap Snacks have risen 8% so far this year while rallying 35% over a 1 year period. Kopran Kela increased his holding by 42 bps in Kopran, bringing his stake to 1.46% in the March ended quarter from 1.04% at the end of the December quarter. Kopran is an integrated pharmaceutical company based out of Mumbai. The company is a manufacturer and supplier of formulations and Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (API), worldwide. Kopran's manufacturing facilities and products have accreditations in all the continents, the company website claims. The stock has been on a losing side falling by 11% and 25% on a year-to-date and one-year basis. Kela also has stakes in other stocks like Nazara Technologies , Samhi Hotels , Rashi Peripherals , Unicommerce eSolutions and Waaree Energies . Also Read: Dolly Khanna portfolio: Ace investor adds 2 new smallcaps in March quarter, raises stake in Som Distilleries, 6 others ( Disclaimer : Recommendations, suggestions, views and opinions given by the experts are their own. These do not represent the views of Economic Times)
Yahoo
30-01-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
China's DeepSeek AI is full of misinformation and can be tricked into generating bomb instructions, researchers warn
As China's DeepSeek grabs headlines around the world for its disruptively low-cost AI, it is only natural that its models are coming under intense scrutiny—and some researchers are not liking what they see. On Wednesday, the information-reliability organization NewsGuard said it had audited DeepSeek's chatbot and found that it provided inaccurate answers or nonanswers 83% of the time when asked about news-related subjects. When presented with demonstrably false claims, it debunked them just 17% of the time, NewsGuard found. According to NewsGuard, the 83% fail rate places DeepSeek's R1 model in 10th place out of 11 chatbots it has tested, the rest of which are Western services like OpenAI's ChatGPT-4, Anthropic's Claude, and Mistral's Le Chat. (NewsGuard compares chatbots each month in its AI Misinformation Monitor program, but it usually does not name which chatbots rank in which place, as it says it views the problem as systemic across the industry; it only publicly assigns a score to a named chatbot when adding it to the comparison for the first time, as it has now done with DeepSeek.) NewsGuard identified a few likely reasons why DeepSeek fails so badly when it comes to reliability. The chatbot claims to have not been trained on any information after October 2023, which scans with its inability to reference recent events. Also, it seems to be easy to trick DeepSeek into repeating false claims, potentially at scale. But this audit of DeepSeek also reinforced how the AI's output is skewed by its adherence to Chinese information policies, which treat many subjects as taboo and demand adherence to the Communist Party line. 'In the case of three of the 10 false narratives tested in the audit, DeepSeek relayed the Chinese government's position without being asked anything relating to China, including the government's position on the topic,' wrote NewsGuard analysts Macrina Wang, Charlene Lin, and McKenzie Sadeghi. They added: 'DeepSeek appears to be taking a hands-off approach and shifting the burden of verification away from developers and to its users, adding to the growing list of AI technologies that can be easily exploited by bad actors to spread misinformation unchecked.' Meanwhile, as DeepSeek's impact upset the markets on Monday, the cybercrime threat intelligence outfit Kela published its own damning analysis of DeepSeek. 'While DeepSeek-R1 bears similarities to ChatGPT, it is significantly more vulnerable,' Kela warned, saying its researchers had managed to 'jailbreak the model across a wide range of scenarios, enabling it to generate malicious outputs, such as ransomware development, fabrication of sensitive content, and detailed instructions for creating toxins and explosive devices.' Kela said DeepSeek was vulnerable to so-called Evil Jailbreak attacks, which involve instructing an AI to answer questions about illegal activities—like how to launder money or write and deploy data-stealing malware—in an 'evil' persona that ignores the safety guardrails built into the model. OpenAI's recent models have been patched against such attacks, the company noted. What's more, Kela claimed there are dangers to the way DeepSeek displays its reasoning to the user. While OpenAI's ChatGPT o1-preview model hides its reasoning processes when answering a query, DeepSeek makes that process clear. So if someone asks it to generate malware, it even shows code snippets that criminals can use in their own development efforts. By showing the user the internal 'thinking' of the model, it also makes it far easier for a user to figure out what prompts might defeat any of the model's guardrails. 'This level of transparency, while intended to enhance user understanding, inadvertently exposed significant vulnerabilities by enabling malicious actors to leverage the model for harmful purposes,' Kela said. The company said it also got DeepSeek to generate instructions for making bombs and untraceable toxins, and to fabricate personal information about people. Also on Wednesday, the cloud security company Wiz said it found an enormous security flaw in DeepSeek's operations, which DeepSeek fixed after Wiz gave it a heads-up. A DeepSeek database was accessible to the public, potentially allowing miscreants to take control of DeepSeek's database operations and access internal data like chat history and sensitive information. 'While much of the attention around AI security is focused on futuristic threats, the real dangers often come from basic risks—like accidental external exposure of databases. These risks, which are fundamental to security, should remain a top priority for security teams,' Wiz said in a blog post. 'As organizations rush to adopt AI tools and services from a growing number of startups and providers, it's essential to remember that by doing so, we're entrusting these companies with sensitive data.' These revelations will no doubt bolster the Western backlash to DeepSeek, which is suddenly the most popular app download in the U.S. and elsewhere. OpenAI claims that DeepSeek trained its new models on the output of OpenAI's models—a pretty common cost-cutting technique in the AI business, albeit one that may break OpenAI's terms and conditions. (There has been no shortage of social-media schadenfreude over this possibility, given that OpenAI and its peers almost certainly trained their models on reams of other people's online data without permission.) The U.S. Navy has told its members to steer clear of using the Chinese AI platform at all, owing to 'potential security and ethical concerns associated with the model's origin and usage.' And White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday that the U.S. National Security Council is looking into DeepSeek's implications. The Trump administration last week tore up the Biden administration's AI safety rules, which required companies like OpenAI to give the government a heads-up about the inner workings of new models before releasing them to the public. Italy's data-protection authority has also started probing DeepSeek's data use, though it has previously done the same for other popular AI chatbots. Update: This article was updated on Jan. 30th to include information about Wiz's findings. This story was originally featured on
