"After years of lagging behind, Chinese AI models — especially open-weight LLMs — seem to have caught up or even pulled ahead of their global counterparts in advanced AI model capabilities and adoption. We profile and compare the capabilities and distinct features of four notable Chinese open-weight language model families, highlighting that China’s ecosystem of open-weight LLMs is driven by a wide range of actors who are prioritizing the development of computationally efficient models optimized for flexible downstream deployment. Diverse commercial strategies for translating open-weight model adoption into business success are emerging, yet their long-term viability remains uncertain. The Chinese government’s support of open-weight model development — while not the sole determinant of its success — has played a substantial role, though there is no guarantee it will continue. The widespread global adoption of Chinese open-weight models may reshape global technology access and reliance patterns, and impact AI governance, safety, and competition. Policymakers should ground their policy actions in a granular understanding of real-world deployment." https://hai.stanford.edu/policy/beyond-deepseek-chinas-diverse-open-weight-ai-ecosystem-and-its-policy-implications #AI #GenerativeAI #China #LLMs #Deepseek #Chatbots #OpenWeights #OpenSource

"Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued five large TV manufacturers yesterday, alleging that their smart TVs spy on viewers without consent. Paxton sued Samsung, the longtime TV market share leader, along with LG, Sony, Hisense, and TCL. “These companies have been unlawfully collecting personal data through Automated Content Recognition (‘ACR’) technology,” Paxton’s office alleged in a press release that contains links to all five lawsuits. “ACR in its simplest terms is an uninvited, invisible digital invader. This software can capture screenshots of a user’s television display every 500 milliseconds, monitor viewing activity in real time, and transmit that information back to the company without the user’s knowledge or consent. The companies then sell that consumer information to target ads across platforms for a profit. This technology puts users’ privacy and sensitive information, such as passwords, bank information, and other personal information at risk.” The lawsuits allege violations of the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, seeking damages of up to $10,000 for each violation and up to $250,000 for each violation affecting people 65 years or older. Texas also wants restraining orders prohibiting the collection, sharing, and selling of ACR data while the lawsuits are pending."

Ars Technica

Texas sues biggest TV makers, alleging smart TVs spy on users without consent

Automated Content Recognition brings “mass surveillance” to homes, lawsuits say.

#USA #Texas #Samsung #SmartTVs #lg #TCL #Sony #Hisense #Surveillance #Privacy #ACR

"TikTok not only tracks its users while they are using the TikTok app itself, but it is increasingly integrated with many other websites and apps. For example, TikTok was able to track a person’s Grindr usage on his smartphone. However, that’s not all: In addition to tracking users across the digital space, TikTok also refuses to provide an interested users with a copy of all of their personal data. Therefore, noyb has therefore filed two complaints against TikTok and its data-sharing partners AppsFlyer and Grindr."

noyb.eu

TikTok unlawfully tracks your shopping habits – and your use of dating apps

TikTok tracks its users even if they're using other apps. The video platform therefore also knows what dating app you use

#EU #SocialMedia #TikTok #Grindr #AppsFlyer #DataProtection #Privacy

Trumponomics is going great!! -> "The unemployment rate, at 4.6 percent, is now at its highest level since September 2021, as the economy was emerging from the pandemic. It’s up from 4 percent in January. One bright spot: The average work week ticked up to 34.3 hours, a sign that employers are not significantly cutting employees’ hours. The number of Americans who have been out of work for more than six months, the typical definition of long-term unemployment, rose to 1.9 million in November, up from 1.7 million a year earlier. The unemployment rate is especially grim for Black workers, up to 8.3 percent. That’s more than two percentage points higher since the beginning of the year. As I wrote following the September data, Black workers are often seen as harbingers of what’s to come in the labor market, and have been buffeted by federal policies over the past year, especially those federal layoffs. Most officials at the central bank forecasted the unemployment rate would peak at 4.5 percent this year before gradually easing in 2026, according to projections released alongside last week’s interest rate decision. So the rise in the unemployment rate in November to 4.6 percent is noteworthy. That said, Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, warned last week that technical distortions in the data suggested it should be viewed with a “skeptical eye,” meaning December’s data to be released in January will likely have more bearing on what the central bank does next with interest rates. The recent projections showed that most officials saw just one quarter-point reduction next year, although there was a wide range of views across the Fed."

U.S. Unemployment Rate Rises, a Warning Sign for the Economy

Employers added 64,000 jobs in November, according to data delayed by the government shutdown. The unemployment rate ticked up to 4.6 percent, the ...

#USA #Trump #Unemployment #Economy

"All told, more than half of Parkinson’s research dollars in the past two decades have flowed toward genetics. But Parkinson’s rates in the US have doubled in the past 30 years. And studies suggest they will climb another 15 to 35 percent in each coming decade. This is not how an inherited genetic disease is supposed to behave. Despite the avalanche of funding, the latest research suggests that only 10 to 15 percent of Parkinson’s cases can be fully explained by genetics. The other three-quarters are, functionally, a mystery. “More than two-thirds of people with PD don’t have any clear genetic link,” says Briana De Miranda, a researcher at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. “So, we’re moving to a new question: What else could it be?” “The health you enjoy or don’t enjoy today is a function of your environment in the past,” says Ray Dorsey, a physician and professor of neurology at the University of Rochester. Your “environment” could be the refinery a town over, the lead in the paint of your mother’s home, the plastic sheath of the Hot Pocket you microwaved in 1996. It is air pollution and PFAS and pesticides and so much more. And this environment of yours—the sum of all your exposures, from conception to the grave—could be making you sicker than you realize. In a study of half a million Britons, Oxford researchers determined that lifestyle and the environment is 10 times more likely to explain early death than genetics. But that also offers a tantalizing prospect. If Parkinson’s is an environmental disease, as Dorsey and a small band of researchers emphatically believe, then maybe we can end it."

WIRED

Scientists Thought Parkinson’s Was in Our Genes. It Might Be in the Water

New ideas about chronic illness could revolutionize treatment, if we take the research seriously.

#Parkinsons #ParkinsonsDisease #ParkinsonsResearch #Genetics

David James AKA @funkentechno always puts out great AOFT lists. This year's list is no exception, I think. "What a year, huh? Sometimes it seems like almost everything on earth is getting worse every single day, but we’ve also had an outrageous abundance of truly dazzling music, more than any of us could ever hear in a lifetime. The news sure looks bad most days, but you know who’s got our back? All the hardworking artists who create incredible work every single year, all while living in the same conditions that are making all of our lives collectively tougher. It’s a miracle, really, that despite everything going on, I can confidently state once again: Every year is a great year for music. In 2025, it’s easier than ever to just coast on whatever some corporation decides to put into your feed, consume the music that they paid to put in your ears, stay comfortably inside those guardrails that always seem to get narrower every year. So I applaud anyone going out of their way to discover something truly new, take a recommendation from a friend or even a stranger, roll the dice on an artist they never would’ve otherwise encountered. For some folks, I am that stranger. But I’m not special. I’m just a regular guy who spends a lot of time talking with artists and labels, scouring Bandcamp and reading music journalism, and mostly just spending time with great people who fill my life with magic every day. I’m forever grateful that I’ve found a community online where I can share it all and spread the love. I wouldn’t be here without all the great recommendations that have been shared with me all year long. So, here we are with my ever-growing annual album list. Twenty five of them are singled out at the end as the best of the best – especially masterful, poignant, mindmelting pieces of music that affected me more deeply than anything else I heard this year."

Optimistic Underground

100 Best Albums of 2025

What a year, huh? Sometimes it seems like almost everything on earth is getting worse every single day, but we’ve also had an outrageous abun...

#Music #AOFT #AOFT2025

"OpenAI is facing increasing scrutiny over how it handles ChatGPT data after users die, only selectively sharing data in lawsuits over ChatGPT-linked suicides. Last week, OpenAI was accused of hiding key ChatGPT logs from the days before a 56-year-old bodybuilder, Stein-Erik Soelberg, took his own life after “savagely” murdering his mother, 83-year-old Suzanne Adams. According to the lawsuit—which was filed by Adams’ estate on behalf of surviving family members—Soelberg struggled with mental health problems after a divorce led him to move back into Adams’ home in 2018. But allegedly Soelberg did not turn violent until ChatGPT became his sole confidant, validating a wide range of wild conspiracies, including a dangerous delusion that his mother was part of a network of conspirators spying on him, tracking him, and making attempts on his life. Adams’ family pieced together what happened after discovering a fraction of ChatGPT logs that Soelberg shared in dozens of videos scrolling chat sessions that were posted on social media."

Ars Technica

Murder-suicide case shows OpenAI selectively hides data after users die

OpenAI accused of hiding full ChatGPT logs in murder-suicide case.

#AI #OpenAI #GenerativeAI #ChatGPT #Chatbots #MentalHealth

"A wealthy bitcoin investor wants to set up his own court system within a libertarian community on a Caribbean island as part of the tech-backed “network state” movement. Olivier Janssens’ company, South Nevis Ltd, is buying up land on Nevis for his proposed “Destiny” development — the first scheme of its kind on the island, which has been enabled by a new Nevisian law. Destiny, which the island’s government has called a multibillion-dollar project, is due to involve a massive reshaping of the south coast of the island, including villas and medical clinics. Speaking via video link to a panel of islanders in late November, Janssens criticised Nevis’s court system for lacking “efficiency . . . And if we’re just going to copy that, it’s not attractive to people to come.” Instead, he said Destiny could “propose that for certain matters we have our own efficient court systems”, but would ultimately “still abide by” the national legal system. The scheme, a series of lush green terraces and pools, has been designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, the architects behind 7 World Trade Center in New York and the Broadgate Tower in London. Janssens declined to comment on its cost or the price of homes within the development. Destiny is part of a trend in which wealthy figures in technology and crypto try to establish their own, more libertarian, territories, known as the “network state” movement. A few have collectively received hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital from funds backed by the likes of investors Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, OpenAI founder Sam Altman and Brian Armstrong, Coinbase chief executive. Many remain theoretical at this point."

Client Challenge

#Cyberlibertarianism #NetworkState #Crypto #Cryptocurrencies #Nevis #Destiny

"Over the past few years, bloggers who have not secured their sites behind a paywall have seen their carefully developed and tested recipes show up, often without attribution and in a bastardized form, in ChatGPT replies. They have seen dumbed-down versions of their recipes in AI-assembled cookbooks available for digital downloads on Etsy or on AI-built websites that bear a superficial resemblance to an old-school human-written blog. Their photos and videos, meanwhile, are repurposed in Facebook posts and Pinterest pins that link back to this digital slop. Recipe writers have no legal recourse because recipes generally are not copyrightable. Although copyright protects published or recorded work, they do not cover sets of instructions (although it can apply to the particular wording of those instructions). Without this essential IP, many food bloggers earn their living by offering their work for free while using ads to make money. But now they fear that casual users who rely on search engines or social media to find a recipe for dinner will conflate their work with AI slop and stop trusting online recipe sites altogether. “There are a lot of people that are scared to even talk about what’s going on because it is their livelihood,” says Jim Delmage who, with his wife, Tara, runs the blog and YouTube channel Sip and Feast."

the Guardian

Google AI summaries are ruining the livelihoods of recipe writers: ‘It’s an extinction event’

AI Mode is mangling recipes by merging instructions from multiple creators – and causing them huge dips in ad traffic

#AI #GenerativeAI #AISearch #Google #AIOverviews #Recipes #FoodRecipes #FoodBloggers

"We are in the dynasty of bullshit, a deceptive epoch where analysts and journalists who are ostensibly burdened with telling the truth feel the need to continue pushing the Gospel According To Jensen. When all of this collapses there must be a reckoning with how little effort was made to truly investigate the things that executives are saying on the television, in press releases, in earnings filings and even on social media, all because the market consensus demanded that The Number Must Continue Going Up. The AI era is one of mythology, where billions in GPUs are bought to create supply for imaginary demand, where software is sold based on things it cannot reliably do, where companies that burn billions of dollars are rewarded with glitzy headlines and not an ounce of cynicism, and where those that have pushed back against it have been treated with more skepticism and ire than those who would benefit the most from the propagation of propaganda and outright lies. So today I'm giving you Mythbusters — AI Edition. This is the spiritual successor to How To Argue With An AI Booster, where I address the technical, financial and philosophical myths that underpin the endless sales of GPUs and ever-increasing valuation of OpenAI. This is going to be fun, because I truly believe that both the financial and tech press take this all a little too seriously, in the sense that everything is so dull. With a handful of exceptions (The Register being the best example), most publications treat financial reporting as something that must be inherently separate from any kind of analysis or criticism. And so, that’s why, if a publication calls bullshit on something insane, that call is almost always segmented away in its own little piece."

Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At

Premium: Mythbusters - AI Edition

I keep trying to think of a cool or interesting introduction to this newsletter, and keep coming back to how fucking weird everything is getting. ...

#AI #GenerativeAI #Nvidia #Oracle #AIBubble #AIHype #OpenAI