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According to the Wall Street Journal, Nvidia's French offices were raided this week on suspicion the chipmaker engaged in anticompetitive practices. Reuters reports: The French competition authority, which disclosed the dawn raid on Wednesday, did not say what practices it was investigating or which company it had targeted, beyond saying it was in the "graphics cards sector." The French competition authority said that its operation this week followed a broader inquiry into the cloud-computing sector. The broader inquiry revolves around concerns that cloud-computing companies could use their access to computing power to exclude smaller competitors. This week's operation had targeted Nvidia, which is the world's largest maker of chips used both for artificial intelligence and for computer graphics, the WSJ report added, citing people familiar with the raid. Chips originally made for computer graphics are suited for AI-related computing.

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AI GPU maker suspected of anti-competitive tricks

Nvidia's offices in France were raided this week as part of an investigation by that country's Competition Authority into the graphics card sector.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Canalys has some gruesome new numbers out for the North American smartphone market in Q2 2023, detailing what it's calling the "worst quarterly performance for over a decade." Q2 has plummeted 22 percent, year over year, and with these numbers, Canalys is predicting the smartphone market will be down 12 percent overall in 2023. Apple is down 20 percent for Q2 and still in a dominant position with 54 percent market share. Samsung is down 27 percent, in second place overall with 24 percent market share in Q2 2023. Motorola is next with a 25 percent decline and only 8 percent market share. TCL, a TV company that feels like it only briefly dabbled in smartphones, is the single biggest loser, down 30 percent, with 5 percent market share. Only a single company survived this quarter unscathed, and it's actually Google! The company might be at the bottom of the smartphone charts, but Pixel phone sales are up 59 percent, earning Google 4 percent of the market. It was the same story last year, when Google jumped from 1 to 2 percent. In a few quarters, the company might hit fourth place. The biggest loss on the chart is actually "others," down 43 percent, likely representing the further consolidation of the Android market. These are your OnePluses, your HMD/Nokias, and trashy pre-paid vendors like Blu.

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So, a portable Alexa or Google Home-esque gadget?

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and the former Apple chief design officer Jony Ive are reportedly planning to spin up a startup with backing from Softbank to develop some kind of personal AI-powered hardware device.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: The Cloud Native Computing Foundation has returned to Shanghai for the city's first Kubecon since the pandemic. During a keynote that switched languages several times, demonstrating the challenges faced by both AI and human translators in keeping up, Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, threw out several crowd-pleasing statistics while also highlighting some projects likely to make one or two companies squirm a little. On the statistics front, Zemlin joked that the Linux Foundation was likely the largest software company in the world, noting that if one took an average software developer's salary -- he put the worldwide mean as being $40,000 -- and multiplied it by the number of developers contributing to the foundation, the payroll would come to around $26 billion -- more than Microsoft's $24 billion R&D payroll. The statistic was somewhat tongue in cheek as Zemlin pointed out that none of the developers working on Linux Foundation projects actually work for the Linux Foundation. However, the sheer quantity of engineers involved highlighted another issue noted by Zemlin: the "paradox of choice" when selecting the correct open source project for a given purpose when the number on offer reaches the hundreds, thousands, and beyond. Reflecting the increasing maturity of some elements of the open source world, he also emphasized the opportunities for companies to increase revenues and profits through the use of open source. WeChat, Alibaba, and Huawei all received nods -- unsurprising considering the location -- as Zemlin noted a virtuous circle whereby improvements go back into projects, meaning better profits, meaning more improvements, and so on. It all sounded very utopian, although darkening clouds were signaled by the addition of OpenTofu to the list of projects Zemlin was keen to boast about, including open source efforts around large language models.

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FBI agents ought to get spy court approval before reviewing US persons' chats, board reckons

A privacy panel within the US government today narrowly recommended that Congress reauthorize the Feds' Section 702 spying powers — but with some stronger protections for US citizens only.…

An anonymous reader shares a story: Almost two years ago, Mark Zuckerberg rebranded his company Facebook to Meta -- and since then, he has been focused on building the "metaverse," a three-dimensional virtual reality. But the metaverse has lost some of its luster since 2021. Companies like Disney have closed down their metaverse divisions and deemphasized using the word, while crypto-based startup metaverses have quietly languished or imploded. In 2022, Meta's Reality Labs division reported an operational loss of $13.7 billion. But at Meta Connect 2023, Zuckerberg still hasn't given up on the metaverse -- he's just shifted how he talks about it. He once focused on the metaverse as a completely digital new world. Now, he aims to convince the public that the future is a blend of the digital and the physical. At Connect this year, Zuckerberg emphasized that the modern "real world" combines the physical world and the digital world still being built -- and that it all builds up to "this concept we call the metaverse." He added: "Pretty soon, I think we're going to be at a point where you're going to be there physically with some of your friends, and others will be there digitally as avatars or holograms, and they'll feel just as present as everyone else. Or you'll walk into a meeting and sit down at a table. There will be people who are there physically and people who are there digitally as holograms, but also sitting around the table with you are going to be a bunch of AI guys who are embodied as holograms and are helping you get different stuff done too."

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That partial victory against Apple is seeming more pyrrhic by the day

Fortnite founder Epic Games said on Thursday that it intends to lay off 16 percent of its staff, around 830 people, and has also sold its stake in Bandcamp and a marketing company focused on appealing to children. …

Swiss glaciers have lost 10% of their volume in just two years, a report has found. From a report: Scientists have said climate breakdown caused by the burning of fossil fuels is the cause of unusually hot summers and winters with very low snow volume, which have caused the accelerating melts. The volume lost during the hot summers of 2022 and 2023 is the same as that lost between 1960 and 1990. The analysis by the Swiss Academy of Sciences found 4% of Switzerland's total glacier volume vanished this year, the second-biggest annual decline on record. The largest decline was in 2022, when there was a 6% drop, the biggest thaw since measurements began. Experts have stopped measuring the ice on some glaciers as there is essentially none left. Glacier Monitoring in Switzerland (Glamos), which monitors 176 glaciers, recently halted measurements at the St Annafirn glacier in the central Swiss canton of Uri since it had mostly melted.

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So much for that free speech, huh?

Yelp has sued Texas' Attorney General Ken Paxton to prevent him from punishing the reviews website for labeling Crisis Pregnancy Centers (CPCs) to indicate that they do not actually offer abortion services.…

Astronomers have captured the first direct evidence of a black hole spinning, providing new insights into the universe's most enigmatic objects. From a report: The observations focus on the supermassive black hole at the centre of the neighbouring Messier 87 galaxy, whose shadow was imaged by the Event Horizon Telescope. Like many supermassive black holes, M87 features powerful jets that are launched from the poles at close to the speed of light into intergalactic space. Scientists have predicted that the rotation of a black hole powers these cosmic jets, but until now direct evidence was elusive. "After the success of black hole imaging in this galaxy with the Event Horizon Telescope, whether this black hole is spinning or not has been a central concern among scientists," said Dr Kazuhiro Hada, of the national astronomical observatory of Japan and co-author. "Now anticipation has turned into certainty. This monster black hole is indeed spinning." M87 is located 55m light years from the Earth and harbours a black hole 6.5bn times more massive than the Sun. Just beyond the black hole is an accretion disk of gas and dust, swirling on the precipice of the cosmic sinkhole. Some of this material is destined to fall into the black hole, disappearing for ever. But a fraction will be ejected out from the poles of the black hole at more than 99.99% of the speed of light. The paper: Precessing jet nozzle connecting to a spinning black hole in M87 (Nature).

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samleecole writes: A food delivery robot company that delivers for Uber Eats in Los Angeles provided video filmed by one of its robots to the Los Angeles Police Department as part of a criminal investigation, 404 Media has learned. The incident highlights the fact that delivery robots that are being deployed to sidewalks all around the country are essentially always filming, and that their footage can and has been used as evidence in criminal trials. Emails obtained by 404 Media also show that the robot food delivery company wanted to work more closely with the LAPD, which jumped at the opportunity.

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Autonomous sub should recharge and resupply in perfect stealth, hopefully

DARPA's extended-duration unmanned undersea vehicle (UUV) is having its first aquatic excursion to test if this naval drone has wings, er, fins.…

In an arXiv research paper titled "Language Modeling Is Compression," researchers detail their discovery that the DeepMind large language model (LLM) called Chinchilla 70B can perform lossless compression on image patches from the ImageNet image database to 43.4 percent of their original size, beating the PNG algorithm, which compressed the same data to 58.5 percent. For audio, Chinchilla compressed samples from the LibriSpeech audio data set to just 16.4 percent of their raw size, outdoing FLAC compression at 30.3 percent. From a report: In this case, lower numbers in the results mean more compression is taking place. And lossless compression means that no data is lost during the compression process. It stands in contrast to a lossy compression technique like JPEG, which sheds some data and reconstructs some of the data with approximations during the decoding process to significantly reduce file sizes. The study's results suggest that even though Chinchilla 70B was mainly trained to deal with text, it's surprisingly effective at compressing other types of data as well, often better than algorithms specifically designed for those tasks. This opens the door for thinking about machine learning models as not just tools for text prediction and writing but also as effective ways to shrink the size of various types of data.

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There's no denying geopolitics is making it hard for multinationals in Beijing

IBM services spinoff Kyndryl is reportedly preparing to separate its China-based business in the face of ongoing geopolitical tensions between Beijing and Washington.…

Microsoft weighed investing multiple billions in a deal with Apple in 2016 to make its Bing search engine the default on the Safari browser and better compete with Alphabet's dominant Google search, a Microsoft vice president testified Thursday in court. From the report: Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella met with Apple CEO Tim Cook as part of the talks, said Jon Tinter, a Microsoft business development vice president who is on the stand during the US Justice Department's antitrust trial in Washington against Alphabet. Microsoft would have taken a multi-billion dollar loss on the terms of the deal, Tinter said, but it would have bolstered Bing, eventually gaining more share and revenue. Microsoft had secured a deal for Apple to use Bing in Siri and Spotlight, an Apple feature to help find apps on iPhones from 2013 to 2017, but wanted to expand to Safari. Instead, Google wound up expanding its own deal with Apple to the products that had used Bing.

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One says it's dead, the other says it's growing, and we all know how grumpy Elon gets when contradicted

It's only been a day since rumors began swirling that X, formerly Twitter, had disabled features allowing users to report election misinformation, and the confusion hasn't been cleared up by dueling statements from platform owner Elon Musk and CEO Linda Yaccarino.…

OpenAI is in advanced talks with former Apple designer Sir Jony Ive and SoftBank's Masayoshi Son to launch a venture to build the "iPhone of artificial intelligence," FT reported Thursday, fuelled by more than $1bn in funding from the Japanese conglomerate. From the report: Sam Altman, OpenAI's chief, has tapped Ive's company LoveFrom, which the designer founded when he left Apple in 2019, to develop the ChatGPT creator's first consumer device, according to three people familiar with the plan. Altman and Ive have held brainstorming sessions at the designer's San Francisco studio about what a new consumer product centred on OpenAI's technology would look like, the people said. They hope to create a more natural and intuitive user experience for interacting with AI, in the way that the iPhone's innovations in touchscreen computing unleashed the mass-market potential of the mobile internet. The process of identifying a design or device remains at an early stage with many different ideas on the table, they said. Son, SoftBank's founder and chief executive, has also been involved in some of the discussions, pitching a central role for Arm -- the chip designer in which the Japanese conglomerate holds a 90 per cent stake -- as well as offering financial backing.

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Apple said it has asked the US Supreme Court to review a judge's ruling from two years ago that could diminish the billions of dollars in revenue its App Store generates by letting app developers direct users to alternative payment methods. From a report: Apple's request to the high court on Thursday is its latest salvo in a drawn-out battle with Epic Games over how the iPhone maker runs its app marketplace. App Store revenue is lucrative for Apple, with developers charged a commission of as much as 30% for sales of digital goods and services -- a fee that the maker of the popular Fortnite game is trying to avoid paying. At the same time, years of complaints from app developers and scrutiny from governments globally have already forced Apple to rewrite some of the rules protecting its dominance in the $160 billion app distribution marketplace. Apple's request comes a day after Epic petitioned the Supreme Court to review a separate part of the ruling, that App Store policies don't violate federal antitrust laws. Apple's filing couldn't immediately be confirmed in court records. The Supreme Court, per its regular schedule, could decide by the end of the year or early next year whether it will take up either or both of the petitions. In a mixed ruling in September 2021 following a trial, a federal judge in Oakland, California, largely rejected Epic's claims that Apple's online marketplace policies violated federal law by barring third-party app marketplaces on its operating system. But she also found that Apple flouted California state law by blocking developers from letting consumers know about alternative payment methods. The 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the trial judge's decision in April.

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ServiceNow and SAP join the genAI frenzy, but users advised to 'keep a human in the loop'

There was barely a beat before he responded. "The simple answer is no," said Jon Sigler, ServiceNow Now Platform senior vice president.…