Latest news with #Silicon Valley
South China Morning Post
10 minutes ago
- Business
- South China Morning Post
Absolute dominance: what China needs to know about the tech elite's role in Trump 2.0
China should factor in the future visions of America's right-wing tech barons to gain a more complete picture of the second Trump administration's policies, a top Chinese strategist has suggested. As the two powers had their latest round of trade talks in Stockholm, another prominent expert in China also called on Beijing to look beyond the present tariff tensions with the United States to understand Washington's broader strategic agenda. The inclusion of Silicon Valley tech elites as a new force on US President Donald Trump 's team had been a major difference in the American leader's second term compared with his first, said Ni Feng, director of the Institute of American Studies under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. 'The interaction between the tech right force and the Maga movement is likely to be a very meaningful point for us to observe the second Trump administration's domestic and foreign policies,' Ni told a webinar about the Make America Great Again wave on Tuesday. While Maga was nostalgic, the tech right was trying to 'shape the future of the US', Ni said at the event, which was organised by the National Academy of Development and Strategy at Renmin University in Beijing. Ni described the American tech right not only as a powerful capital bloc but also as an entity that had its 'unique philosophy' about where the US should be headed – so-called tech accelerationism.
Malay Mail
a day ago
- Business
- Malay Mail
Palantir emerges as Trump-era tech favourite, boasting AI tools that ‘kill enemies'
WASHINGTON, July 29 — Palantir, an American data analysis and artificial intelligence company, has emerged as Silicon Valley's latest tech darling—one that makes no secret of its macho, America-first ethos now ascendant in Trump-era tech culture. The company's reach spans the global economy, with banks, hospitals, the US government, and the Israeli military among its ever-expanding client roster. 'We want and need this country to be the strongest, most important country in the world,' Alex Karp, Palantir's CEO, recently declared at a client conference in Palo Alto, California, where AFP was the only media outlet present. In armed conflicts—most notably in Ukraine—Palantir's tools help evaluate potential targets in real-time, using multiple sources, including biometric data and intercepted phone calls. 'I'm super proud of... what we do to protect our soldiers... (using our AI) to kill our enemies and scare them, because they know they will be killed,' the graying, curly-haired billionaire continued, wearing a tight white T-shirt. Washington has been filling Palantir's coffers. In the first quarter, the company received US$373 million from the US government—a 45 percent jump from the previous year—and it's not all miltary spending. This spring, federal immigration authorities (ICE) awarded the company a US$30 million contract to develop a new platform for tracking deportations and visa overstays. 'Like a drug' The company then secured an investment of nearly US$800 million from the US military, adding to the US$480 million contract signed in May 2024 for its AI platform supporting the Pentagon's 'Project Maven' target identification program. This marked Palantir's first billion-dollar contract, elevating it alongside government contracting stalwarts like Microsoft and Amazon's AWS. However, financial results 'are not and will never be the ultimate measure of the value, broadly defined, of our business,' Karp wrote in his letter to shareholders in early May, where he tossed in quotes from Saint Augustine, the Bible and Richard Nixon. 'We have grander and more idiosyncratic aims.' Palantir was founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel—Silicon Valley's preeminent conservative—Karp, and others with CIA backing. The company takes its name from the magical seeing stones in Tolkien's 'Lord of the Rings.' 'Young people would say we're like pure drugs—very expensive, highly sought after... that make you stronger and better,' Karp boasted on stage. Palantir's expanding footprint at the highest levels of government has raised eyebrows. Several members of the Trump administration's 'DOGE' cost-cutting commission, originally headed by Elon Musk, came from the company. Recent reports from The New York Times, Wired, and CNN have detailed secret government projects to create, with Palantir's help, a central database combining data from different federal agencies. Deeply proud This development has created 'a lot of concerns about how that information might be used,' warned Elizabeth Laird from the Center for Democracy & Technology. Palantir maintains it isn't building 'surveillance technology' or a 'central database on Americans.' Unlike most traditional Silicon Valley companies that have kept military projects discreet, Palantir now embraces its defense work openly. Sasha Spivak, director of strategy, said that when she joined Palantir ten years ago, the company kept its sense of purpose behind closed doors. 'Today we're not ashamed, we're not afraid, and we're deeply proud of what we do and our clients,' said Spivak. Some employee groups are pushing back. In early May, 13 former Palantir employees published a letter accusing tech giants of helping to 'normalize authoritarianism under the cover of a 'revolution' led by oligarchs.' They argue that by supporting the Trump administration and DOGE, Palantir has betrayed its stated values of ethics, transparency, and defending democracy. 'When I joined the company... there were many smart, motivated people—that's pretty rare,' said one of the letter's signatories, who wishes to remain anonymous, for fear of reprisal. After months of seeking management explanations about Palantir's collaboration with Israel and ICE, several of these employees resigned. 'They said, 'We're a company that's very responsive to employees,' but people asking about Israel were quickly shut down and told, 'That's what we do—if you don't like it, you can leave,'' the former staffer recalled. Jeremy David, co-director of the Health division, plays down the controversies. 'My daily life is more about nurses and doctors who often hate us at first and are very grateful at the end,' he told AFP at the conference. On stage, Joe Bonanno, head of data analysis at Citibank, celebrated how one operation that previously required 'nine days and sometimes 50 people' now 'takes just a few minutes for one person.' 'Like I said, and like Alex said, I came to dominate, crush and annihilate. So if you're JPMorgan, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, sorry,' he concluded with a broad smile. Some potential clients quietly admit they don't appreciate the war-like rhetoric, but they see no alternative to Palantir's capabilities. — AFP
TechCrunch
a day ago
- Business
- TechCrunch
Harmonic, the Robinhood CEO's AI math startup, launches an AI chatbot app
Harmonic, an AI startup co-founded by Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev, announced Monday the beta launch of an iOS and Android chatbot app where users can access its AI model, Aristotle. With this launch, the company aims to broaden access to Aristotle, which Harmonic claims to offer 'hallucination-free' answers for questions involving mathematical reasoning — a bold claims given the reliability problems of today's AI models. Harmonic is focused on creating 'mathematical superintelligence' or MSI; the startup eventually wants to help users with all fields that rely on math, including physics, statistics, and computer science. '[Aristotle] is the first product available to people that does reasoning and formally verifies the output,' said Harmonic CEO and co-founder Tudor Achim in an interview with TechCrunch. 'Within the domains that Aristotle supports, which are quantitative reasoning domains, we actually do guarantee that there's no hallucinations.' Eventually, Harmonic says it also plans to release an API to let enterprises access Aristotle, as well as a web app for consumers. The beta launch comes just a few weeks since Harmonic raised $100 million in a Series B round led by Kleiner Perkins at an $875 million valuation. Achim claims that Harmonic is 'advancing very rapidly along' its path to achieving MSI, and that investors believed that was a fair valuation given the scope of his startup's ambition. Achim says that Harmonic achieves its hyper-accurate solutions by having Aristotle produce responses in the open-source programming language Lean. Before Aristotle gives an answer to users, he says the model double checks that the solution is correct through an algorithmic process that doesn't involve AI. Harmonic's CEO notes that similar technology is used to verify outputs in high stakes fields such as medical devices and aviation. Even in a narrow domain, achieving hallucination-free performance from an AI model is an incredibly difficult task. Studies have found that even leading AI models hallucinate a lot, and the problem doesn't appear to be getting better. OpenAI's latest AI reasoning models hallucinate more than its older ones. Techcrunch event Tech and VC heavyweights join the Disrupt 2025 agenda Netflix, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Sequoia Capital — just a few of the heavy hitters joining the Disrupt 2025 agenda. They're here to deliver the insights that fuel startup growth and sharpen your edge. Don't miss the 20th anniversary of TechCrunch Disrupt, and a chance to learn from the top voices in tech — grab your ticket now and save up to $675 before prices rise. Tech and VC heavyweights join the Disrupt 2025 agenda Netflix, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Sequoia Capital — just a few of the heavy hitters joining the Disrupt 2025 agenda. They're here to deliver the insights that fuel startup growth and sharpen your edge. Don't miss the 20th anniversary of TechCrunch Disrupt, and a chance to learn from the top voices in tech — grab your ticket now and save up to $675 before prices rise. San Francisco | REGISTER NOW Harmonic says Aristotle achieved gold medal performance on the 2025 International Math Olympiad through a formal test (meaning the problems were translated into a machine‑readable format.) Google and OpenAI also developed AI models that achieved gold medal performance on this year's IMO, but through informal tests taken in natural language.
Washington Post
2 days ago
- Business
- Washington Post
Trump's retreat on China chip ban triggers policy spat
Democratic lawmakers took Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and his team to task for 'the administration's abrupt and inexplicable decision to reverse course and allow the sale of certain advanced semiconductors' to China, reflecting concerns within both parties that the administration's concessions in trade talks could have longer-term security ramifications. The criticism was conveyed in letters sent to Lutnick on Sunday night and Monday morning. U.S. and Chinese officials are meeting in Stockholm this week for another round of trade talks amid indications that pro-business Silicon Valley voices are winning out over security hawks in steering the Trump administration's China policy.
Digital Trends
2 days ago
- Digital Trends
Web browsers are entering a new era where AI skills take over from extensions
'The browser is bigger than chat. It's a more sticky product, and it's the only way to build agents. It's the only way to build end-to-end 'workflows,' these were the comments of Perplexity CEO, Aravind Srinivas, in a recent interview. The Perplexity co-founder was talking about the future of web browsers, AI agents, and automations in web browsers. Srinivas was bullish on the prospects, partly because his company is already testing a buzzy new browser called Comet. Currently in an invite-only beta phase, the browser comes with an agent that can handle complex and time-consuming tasks on your behalf. Recommended Videos Think of it like an AI tool such as ChatGPT or Gemini, but one that lives exclusively in your browser. The agent-in-browser approach, as Srinivas argues, is more familiar and flexible. You don't have to deal with the usual local permission and cross-app workflow restrictions. Plus, browsers will work just the way we're used to, with products like Chrome or Safari. But the undercurrents are wildly different, and the biggest change could be the sunsetting of browser extensions in favor of AI skills and user-generated agents. Interestingly, the foundation tools were laid over a year ago, but we are only hearing about them with the arrival of AI-first browsers like Dia and Comet. AI skills are the new work champions All the talk of AI agents and skills sounds like a bunch of tech jargon, so let me break it down for you. In the Dia browser, I recently created a skill called 'expand.' How did I do it, even though I didn't write a single line of code? I simply described it in the following words: 'When I use this skill and paste a snippet, do a deep web search, and pull up the entire history in the form of an article in a timely order. Pull information only from reliable news outlets.' I read and write articles for a living, and I often come across snippets and events in articles that I am not familiar with. For such scenarios, all I have to do is select the relevant text (or copy-paste it in the chat sidebar) and use a '/' command to summon the 'expand' skill. As described above, the AI agent in the Dia browser will search the mentions of my target in top news outlets and create a brief report about it in chronological order. This saves me a lot of precious time that would otherwise be spent on wild Google Search attempts. But more importantly, I don't even have to open another tab, and I can ask follow-up questions in the same chat box within the active reading tab. It's quick and convenient. I don't know an extension that can do exactly what this 'expand' skill does for me. It's not possible either. I created it with a specific purpose and intent. And I can create as many as I want, or fine-tune it further to suit my workflow. I've created another one called 'research' that references a work (or phrase) and performs web research by looking exclusively at peer-reviewed science papers. The Dia user community is even saving some money by creating skills that hunt for coupon codes available on products right before checkout. For my Amazon shopping, I've created one that combines the reviews, ratings, and features of products across different Amazon tabs, creates a comparison table, and helps me make the best choice. All of that happens by typing a single word! Another one quickly looks up for grammatical errors and style guide clarity in my emails. There's one that creates a quiz-based reading material for kids I teach at a nearby non-profit institution, based on the learning material I have prepared. Just made a @diabrowser skill that instantly saved me money — Egor (@eg0rev) July 23, 2025 The students love the fun and playful tone in their multiple-choice questions that test their current affairs knowledge. There's even an official Dia gallery where you can find skills created by Dia users, and a crowd-sourced web dashboard where you can find even more. But here's the main reason why I think browser skills are a bigger deal than extensions. Anyone can create them by simply describing what they want. With extensions, you need coding knowledge and basic skills of how the web and its browsing architecture work. Security is another reason that I would put more faith in browser skills than extensions. There is a long history of browser extensions being weaponized but bad actors to seed malware. An average user can't look or make sense of an extension's inner workings, and only realizes the folly when the damage has been done. The situation with AI skills in browsers is as transparent as it gets. How exactly a skill works is described in detail, in natural language, and without any hidden caveats. You just need to read it thoroughly, or just copy-paste it and create your own with extra modifications. That approach is flexible, a lot safer, and gives the whole power in users' hands. Browser agents are here to stay Next, we have browser agents. Opera browser has already implemented one, and it is already offering a more advanced version called Operator. Then you can have tools like ChatGPT Agent, and Perplexity's Comet browser. Think of it as Siri, but for web browsing. Agents are more suited for complex, time-consuming tasks. And they work best when they get access to the services you visit on a daily basis, like your email and Calendar. For example, this is what I did in Perplexity's Comet browser last night: 'Check my inbox and give me an update on all the interview requests with a scientist or company executive that I intended to proceed with. Focus on conversations where I expressed the possibility of virtual interviews, instead of an in-person meeting.' Without opening another tab, the built-in Assistant went through my Gmail inbox, looked up the relevant emails, and then provided me with a list of such interactions in a well-formatted view. For added convenience, it even included one-click Gmail links so that I can directly open that email chain without having to manually dig in. It's great for a lot of other things. For example, during a Twitter AMA, I simply asked it to pick the responses by the speaker and list them as bullet points. That saved me a lot of back-and-forth time opening and closing X conversation chains. For travel planning, shopping, or even consuming videos, the assistant in Comet browser works fine. The only 'ick' is that if you need it to get more personal work done, you will need to provide access to connectors. For example, to handle your Gmail, Calendar, and Drive, you will need to enable access. I did it for my WhatsApp account, as well, and it worked really well in the Comet browser. Not everyone will feel easy doing that, and the caution is totally warranted. For such scenarios, Google and OpenAI offer similar agentic features for Gemini and ChatGPT, respectively. There is no going back Just the way you create skills in Dia by simply typing or narrating your requirements, Gemini and ChatGPT also let you create custom agents for specific tasks. Google calls them Gems, while OpenAI refers to them as GPTs. And yes, you can share them just like skills. Using them is free, but to create them, you'll need a subscription that costs $20 per month. I've created numerous Gems and custom GPTs to speed up my mundane chores. For personal social posting, I've created a Gem that breaks down articles I've written into smaller bits, which are then posted as a chain on X. Likewise, I've created custom agents to handle my emails. One of the Gems simply needs me to type 'yes' or 'no,' and it will accordingly write a polite response while picking up all the context from the email. With connectors coming into the picture, you can link them to as many services as you want. The best part about these gems is that you can effortlessly use them across a desktop browser and mobile apps, as well. Extensions require you to stick with a desktop browser. Some mobile browsers do support extensions, but they are rare. Moreover, they don't offer the same flexibility and peace of mind as custom browser skills or agents created by users. ChatGPT Agent and Google's Project Mariner are a new breed of AI assistants that are tailor-made for web-based tasks, just like the assistant built within Perplexity's Comet browser. Unlike an extension, they can handle multi-step workflows, and you can take over at any stage. Furthermore, you can modify the inner workings of your web browsing automation and tailor the AI skills to your exact specifications, something that's not possible with extensions. Of course, they are not perfect. At the same time, you can take over it and complete the things when it's not able to do it because no AI agent is foolproof, especially when we are at a time when reasoning models are still far from perfection,' admits Perplexity's CEO. But the shift is clearly evident. Browser extensions are not going to vanish overnight, but browsing agents and AI skills created by users are going to take over. It's only a matter of time before the barriers (read: subscription fee) come down!
