Latest news with #techcompanies
The Verge
10 minutes ago
- The Verge
Google is using AI age checks to lock down user accounts
Google will soon cast an even wider net with its AI age estimation technology. After announcing plans to find and restrict underage users on YouTube, the company now says it will start detecting whether Google users based in the US are under 18. Age estimation is rolling out over the next few weeks and will only impact a 'small set' of users to start, though Google plans on expanding it more widely. The company says it will use the information a user has searched for or the types of YouTube videos they watch to determine their age. Google first announced this initiative in February. If Google believes that a user is under 18, it will apply the same restrictions it places on users who proactively identify as underage. In addition to enabling bedtime reminders on YouTube and limiting content recommendations, Google will also turn off Timeline in Maps, disable personalized advertising, and block users from accessing apps for adults on the Play Store. In case Google incorrectly identifies someone as under 18, users can submit a photo of their government ID or a selfie to verify their age. The move comes amid a global push for age verification, with politicians in the US pressuring tech companies to make their platforms safer for kids, and the UK widely rolling out an age verification requirement affecting platforms like Bluesky, Reddit, Discord, and even Spotify. Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All by Emma Roth Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Google Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All News Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Policy Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Tech
Yahoo
7 hours ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Should You Buy Nvidia (NVDA) Stock Before Aug. 27? Here's What History Says.
Key Points AI developments have boosted Nvidia's valuation, making it the world's most valuable public company. There is no direct correlation between an earnings beat or miss and Nvidia's immediate stock performance. But the high valuation of Nvidia's shares could leave it extra volatile, regardless of its reported results. 10 stocks we like better than Nvidia › With the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) into the mainstream, driven by the popularity of generative AI tools like ChatGPT, numerous tech companies -- as well as those from any industry that utilizes AI -- have seen their valuations skyrocket. No stock has benefited more from recent AI developments than Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA), which is up over 900% in just the past three years and is the world's most valuable public company with a market capitalization of over $4.2 trillion. For perspective, the is "only" up around 60% in that span. On Aug. 27, Nvidia is set to report its fiscal second-quarter earnings. Only time will tell what those earnings reveal, but it's natural for investors to wonder if they should buy Nvidia's stock before the earnings to potentially take advantage of a post-earnings stock price boost. In theory, it sounds like a smart move if you anticipate good results; however, history has shown that this doesn't always work out in investors' favor, regardless of the earnings results. No correlation between earnings and stock performance The first thing to notice in the above chart is that there's no consistency between Nvidia's earnings and the immediate performance of its stock price. Below is how Nvidia's stock price has performed the day after its past four earnings reports: Reporting Date Beat Earnings Per Share Expectations? Next-Day Stock Performance May 2025 No (2.9%) February 2025 Yes (8.5%) November 2024 Yes 0.5% August 2024 Yes (6.4%) Data source: AlphaQuery and YCharts. Even after beating earnings expectations, Nvidia's stock has experienced noticeable declines on the next day. This shows that investors aren't solely concerned about over- or underperformance. They may also be looking at factors like future guidance, valuations, and overall market sentiment. Correlation (or lack thereof) aside, one thing to keep in mind is that trying to time the market is a recipe for disappointment and can often be counterproductive. Even if it seems like a stock's price should move in a certain direction because of results, the stock market doesn't operate on logical cause and effect. Nvidia's high valuation leaves little room for error Nvidia's trailing-12-month price-to-sales (P/S) ratio of 29 is the highest you'll find in an S&P 500 stock and 10 times the S&P 500 average. This ultra-high valuation leaves Nvidia with little room for error -- or what investors may perceive as error -- and can increase volatility. If you like Nvidia as a company, a smart strategy would be to dollar-cost average. This will allow you to slowly but surely accumulate shares and offset some of the volatility risks. Nvidia's stock has shown long-term growth despite short-term drops, and that's what investors should focus on the most and bank on. Should you invest $1,000 in Nvidia right now? Before you buy stock in Nvidia, consider this: The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the for investors to buy now… and Nvidia wasn't one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years. Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $633,452!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $1,083,392!* Now, it's worth noting Stock Advisor's total average return is 1,046% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 183% for the S&P 500. Don't miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join Stock Advisor. See the 10 stocks » *Stock Advisor returns as of July 29, 2025 Stefon Walters has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Nvidia. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. Should You Buy Nvidia (NVDA) Stock Before Aug. 27? Here's What History Says. was originally published by The Motley Fool Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Bloomberg
2 days ago
- Business
- Bloomberg
Citadel Securities' Audacious Market Call Is Spot On
With global stocks hitting record highs and meme trades making a comeback, investors are naturally asking if it's time to take profit. Some institutional managers are going a step further, shorting shares of unprofitable US tech companies that have seen sharp upswings. Before talking about froth, one must ask if we are witnessing a structural change in the market. After all, if a different cohort is dominating trading, lofty valuations by historical standards can no longer predict future pullbacks.
Japan Times
2 days ago
- Politics
- Japan Times
Trump is trying to build a far-right international alliance
Until recently, the specter of an international far-right alliance of populist parties in democracies around the world has been just that: any appearance of cooperation was a form of self-promotion, rather than an expression of true solidarity. Few far-right figures have made any sacrifices for one another or seriously interfered in other countries' internal affairs to prop up allies. And efforts to unite the far right in the European Parliament have fallen dismally short. But that may be changing. U.S. President Donald Trump's threat to impose punitive tariffs on Brazil, with the explicit goal of protecting its far-right former president, Jair Bolsonaro, from a 'witch hunt,' marks a significant shift in tactics. What's more, Trump's meddling in other democracies in the name of 'free speech' serves powerful interests in the United States: tech companies that do not want to be regulated by foreign governments. The international far right is often said to be a contradiction in terms. After all, every far-right leader is a nationalist, which would seem to preclude, by definition, an international alliance. But this view shows little philosophical sophistication or, for that matter, historical awareness. In 19th-century Europe, liberals like Giuseppe Mazzini helped one another in their various struggles for freedom and independence from imperial powers. At the time, no one complained that there was a deep contradiction embedded in a liberal international alliance devoted to national self-determination. By the same token, today's far-right populists can claim that they form a united front against 'globalists' and supposedly illegitimate 'liberal elites.' This rhetoric — and the attendant conspiracy theories, often tinged with anti-Semitism — has easily crossed borders. Far-right politicians have also copied from one another what scholars have called 'worst practices' for undermining democracies. Just think of the proliferation of laws that force civil-society organizations to register as 'foreign agents,' or other thinly veiled repressive tactics. The far right also has a transnational ideological infrastructure. To be sure, there is no populist Comintern issuing binding interpretations of doctrine. But collaboration is real: for instance, Hungarian institutes lavishly endowed by Viktor Orban's government are now allied with the Heritage Foundation in the U.S. So far, though, there has been a lack of concrete solidarity among populist leaders. When Trump fraudulently claimed to have won the 2020 U.S. presidential election, his international allies, from Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, could have refused to recognize Joe Biden as president. Instead, they congratulated Biden on his victory, choosing pragmatism over ideological affinity. But Trump is changing that in his second term, embracing an ideologically driven approach to confronting other countries that obviously undermines long-standing international norms. In the case of Brazil, he is using the threat of a 50% tariff to pressure the government into ending the federal criminal trial against Bolsonaro for seeking to engineer a coup after losing the 2022 presidential election. Unlike Trump, who was never held accountable for his role in the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, Bolsonaro — often called the 'Trump of the Tropics' — has already been banned from running for office until 2030. In his letter to the Brazilian government announcing the levy, Trump also accused it of 'insidious attacks on ... the fundamental Free Speech Rights of Americans,' including the censorship of 'U.S. Social Media platforms.' This highlights another dimension of Trump's economic bullying: his administration's crusade against efforts to prohibit hate speech and regulate the digital sphere. In February, Vice President JD Vance berated Europeans for their supposed lack of respect for 'free speech.' Meanwhile, the State Department has reportedly targeted the prominent Brazilian judge Alexandre de Moraes, who at one point blocked Elon Musk's X in Brazil and is taking the lead in holding Bolsonaro criminally accountable for his conduct. Big Tech is clearly displeased with the extensive regulations that the European Union and Brazil have placed on its industry. As in other areas — notably its attacks on higher education — the Trumpists are weaponizing free speech to exert power over supposed political adversaries. The hypocrisy is apparent: while advocating for deregulation of platforms ostensibly to protect free speech, the U.S. government is snooping around in the social-media accounts of foreign nationals for speech it dislikes (and then refusing a visa or entry on this basis). Pious talk of defending democracy as a shared Western value sits uneasily with the abject disrespect for other countries' right to determine their own approach to platform regulation. Whereas far-right leaders of smaller countries are limited by realpolitik, Trump can use America's might to advance his punitive-cum-populist agenda at will. After all, a pliant Republican Party will not question his abuse of the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act. True, the courts may ultimately decide that his desire for political revenge hardly constitutes an 'emergency,' but the damage will have been done. As in other areas where his administration has taken plainly illegal actions, many of those being targeted will seek a deal rather than a fight. Solidarity is costly, but not for Trump. [/bio]Jan-Werner Mueller, professor of politics at Princeton University, is the author, most recently, of "Democracy Rules" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021). © Project Syndicate, 2025[/bio]
ABC News
3 days ago
- Business
- ABC News
The US and China will go head-to-head in the battle to bring about artificial general intelligence
Artificial intelligence is no longer just a race among a group of over-valued American tech companies and over-yachted billionaires. It's still that, but it's now also part of the great contest between the US and China. That means it's less about profits and return on investment, and more about geopolitics — national machismo, security and defence. It also means the coming transition from AI to AGI or artificial general intelligence — where machines theoretically surpass human intelligence — will be brought forward and will be much more significant for the world. It will be as momentous as the discovery of nuclear fission in 1938, which led to the development of nuclear weapons and the United States's first atom bomb test in July 1945, followed a month later by the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and then four years later by the Soviet Union's first test, followed by 30 years of Cold War. It's not clear which of the US or China will get to AGI first, but the loser won't be four years behind and won't be relying on slow pre-Internet espionage as the Soviets had to. But it looks like the US is playing catch-up: last week China's Unitree Robotics began selling a humanoid robot with artificial intelligence, including voice and image recognition, for just US$5,900, the first in what's expected to be a flood of well-priced AI machines for both the home and workplace (this one doesn't look like it can do the dishes yet, but it won't be long). US President Donald Trump recently launched "AI Action Day". The plan that he presented started with these words: "The United States is in a race to achieve global dominance in artificial intelligence (AI)." Note: dominance, not leadership, and not US companies, but "the United States". Next sentence: "Whoever has the largest AI ecosystem will set global AI standards and reap broad economic and military benefits." Note: "military". Yes, AGI will transform warfare, as nuclear weapons did 80 years ago. The Chinese government had much the same idea as Trump exactly eight years ago. Its AI plan was released on July 20, 2017, with the following ambition: "By 2030, China's AI theories, technologies, and applications should achieve world-leading levels, making China the world's primary AI innovation centre". Meanwhile, in the US, a company called Nvidia had just discovered that the chips it was making for video games could work nicely for artificial intelligence. In July 2017, at the same time as the Chinese government was launching its AI strategy, Nvidia and the Chinese equivalent of Google, Baidu, announced a partnership in which Baidu would use Nvidia's chips for AI, and the American company would get access to the Chinese market. On that day in 2017, Nvidia was worth a pretty handy $US100 billion ($152 billion); today it's worth $US4.2 trillion and is the world's most valuable company, after a three-year frenzy that has seen its share price increase 14-fold. The Nvidia-Baidu partnership doesn't seem to have been formally terminated, but it petered out a couple of years ago, around the same time as the US non-profit outfit OpenAI launched ChatGPT, kicking off the next era of AI. Since then, the US government under Joe Biden has been mainly concerned with regulating AI, partly prompted by the "Statement on AI Risk", published on May 30, 2023, by hundreds of AI experts, who declared: "Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war." But now, with Donald Trump, it's no more regulation — none (not that those worried AI experts in 2023 stopped what they were doing or even slowed the development of AI at breakneck speed, as if the need for regulations and the "risk of extinction" didn't exist). The first part of the Trump administration's AI plan involves "removing red tape and onerous regulation". The second part instructs the National Institute of Standards and Technology to "eliminate references to misinformation, diversity, equity, and inclusion, and climate change", and as he signed the executive order on stage at the Mellon Auditorium, Trump said they would be removing "woke Marxist lunacy in the AI models. Once and for all, we are getting rid of woke. OK?" You've got to get your priorities in the right order: deregulation comes before de-woking, but only just. What the US plan does NOT involve is government money, but there is plenty of that available in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street, so no need for the government to abandon tax cuts for the billionaires. Estimates of how much has been spent developing AI by the big US tech companies range from $US800 billion to $US1 trillion, and there is no sign of that slowing. If anything, it's speeding up as the companies approach the much more profitable (they think) singularity of AGI. The Chinese government, meanwhile, is estimated to have spent about $US150 billion developing its AI industry. It was done more cheaply because they were able to use open-source software from the US, a lot of it from OpenAI. No espionage required. Earlier this year, a Chinese company named DeepSeek galvanised the AI world and the US government by releasing an AI model called R1, which is as good as the American ones, much cheaper, and open source. Another Chinese company, Moonshot AI, has released another, better, open-source model called Kimi K2, capable of autonomously doing complex tasks, prompting some commentators to call it another DeepSeek moment, and a significant step towards AGI. But now, as standard AI starts to infiltrate every corner of life and become an explicit source of geopolitical competition between America and China, the question on the minds of everyone involved in the industry is, when will AGI happen? And when (not if) it does happen, what will that mean? For the first question, I asked ChatGPT. It replied: "My best evidence-based guess — based on current trends, expert forecasts, and technical bottlenecks — is that a true AGI tipping point could plausibly occur sometime between 2030 and 2040, but not before 2027, and quite possibly not until 2050 or later." So, between five and 15 years — not long. What will it mean? Plenty, both good and not good. Human-level cognition and autonomy in machines will be profoundly disruptive to humanity. The risks are obvious: the elimination of white-collar jobs leading to high levels of permanent unemployment, collapse of aggregate demand, along with inflation and interest rates, more effective cyber-attacks, autonomous weapons, more sophisticated propaganda and surveillance. And then there's that thing they were warning about in May 2023 — extinction. If the machines are smarter and better-informed than us, can we control them? What if they do to us what we did to the Neanderthals? The benefits are potentially enormous as well: better, more personalised healthcare, an exponential acceleration in science and research, improved productivity, less mundane work, and more leisure. That's why the Productivity Commission's overview for its "five pillars" report in preparation for the productivity roundtable in two weeks says its recommendations will "aim to give people and businesses the confidence and certainty they need to safely adopt powerful new AI tools," although it doesn't specifically talk about AGI. The 25 great and good at the roundtable will probably talk about that for half an hour before getting back to arguing about tax and human industrial relations. Alan Kohler is a finance presenter and columnist on ABC News, and he also writes for Intelligent Investor.
