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Mar 14, 2025
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TGIF! The Trump family is in deal talks with Binance's U.S. arm. Tesla expresses concerns about the impact of Trump’s tariffs on the electric car maker’s business. OpenAI attacks China's DeepSeek in its policy proposal to the Trump administration.
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Representatives of President Donald Trump’s family held talks to take a stake in Binance.US., the American entity of crypto exchange Binance, while Binance founder Changpeng Zhao has been pushing for a pardon, the Wall Street Journal reported. Binance reached out to Trump’s allies last year offering to strike a deal as part of a plan to return to the U.S. market, the outlet said. A pardon for Zhao, who served a four-month sentence last year for pleading guilty to violating anti-money laundering law, could pave the way to combine Binance and its U.S. entity. Zhao remains the majority shareholder of Binance and lives in Abu Dhabi. Binance announced yesterday that it received a $2 billion investment from MGX, the Abu Dhabi-based sovereign wealth fund. In a X post, Zhao said he has had no discussions of any Binance.US
deal, and “no felon would mind a pardon.”
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Elon Musk’s Tesla submitted a letter to the U.S. trade representative expressing concerns about the impact of President Donald Trump’s tariffs on the electric vehicle maker’s business. According to the Financial Times, a Tesla associate general counsel, Miriam Eqab, submitted the unsigned letter earlier this week after the trade office solicited feedback from U.S. companies on foreign trade policies. The letter said the Trump administration’s trade war could result in retaliatory tariffs on Tesla vehicles it ships overseas and increases in costs of minerals like lithium and cobalt that Tesla needs to make the batteries in its cars, the FT reported. Musk was one of President Trump’s biggest financial backers during his campaign and is at the center of the administration’s efforts to shake up the federal
government. But the new administration and Musk’s support for it could hurt Tesla in a variety of ways, from vandalism aimed at Tesla vehicles to the president’s efforts to cancel an EV tax credit.
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OpenAI on Thursday submitted a policy proposal to the Trump administration that included attacks on Chinese artificial intelligence developer DeepSeek. OpenAI described DeepSeek as “state-controlled” and argued there is a risk that the Chinese government could force DeepSeek to manipulate its models to cause harm. “As with Huawei, there is significant risk in building on top of DeepSeek models in critical infrastructure and other high-risk use cases,”
the proposal said. DeepSeek’s AI models “also more willingly generate how-to’s for illicit and harmful activities such as identity fraud and intellectual property theft,” it said. In the proposal, OpenAI also called for a ban on Chinese-made AI chips and models that “violate user privacy and create security risks,” without specifically mentioning DeepSeek. OpenAI’s allegations against DeepSeek come after DeepSeek’s chatbot app surged in popularity last month, posing a new threat to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Many businesses around the world have also started adopting DeepSeek’s open-source AI models. According to Chinese corporate records, the Chinese government doesn’t own an equity stake in DeepSeek or its parent company, quantitative hedge
fund High-Flyer Capital Management. DeepSeek didn’t respond to an emailed request for comment about OpenAI’s proposal.
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BuzzFeed revenue fell 20% to $56.2 million in the fourth quarter, driven by a 19% decline in advertising revenue and a 59% drop in its content revenue segment, which includes videos and other content the media company makes on behalf of advertisers. Commerce and other revenues were up 39%. BuzzFeed posted a net loss of $3.8 million during the quarter, compared to a net profit of $4.4 million during the same quarter in 2023. BuzzFeed CFO Matt Omer said on the company’s earnings call that the ad declines were due to BuzzFeed cutting its ad salesforce and relying more on automated ad sales. Meanwhile, Peretti talked up the company’s development of a new social media app that will allow people to use artificial intelligence tools to create, post and share content. Peretti has previously said this social media app is
meant to be an antidote to Instagram, TikTok and other top social apps today which use algorithms to maximize usage over a healthy user experience. He said BuzzFeed is investing about $10 million into the new app, primarily on the engineering side.
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Former Plaid CTO Jean-Denis Greze and former Google artificial intelligence and machine learning director Tony Vincent have co-founded Town, which connects small businesses with tax advisory services. The San Francisco-based startup has raised a $18 million seed round, led by First Round Capital with participation from early-stage venture firms Conviction Partners, Alt Capital and WndrCo, as well as angel investors such as Mercury CEO Immad Akhund and Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo. In an interview, Greze said that the startup is seeking to avoid the pitfalls of most services businesses, which require human personnel to scale up. Instead, he’s betting that AI can make tax advisory at least 90% more efficient. Town is also using artificial intelligence internally to do customer support, such as auto-drafting responses to clients before a human sends an email, and to look
through customer’s tax returns to find ways to save money. Town uses a number of foundational models, such as OpenAI and Anthropic, as well as some of the top open-source large language models, such as Llama. Right now, the months-old startup has 10 employees, and will look to grow to 13 this year – and plans to stay that way until it hits “the right level of automation.” Greze is an example of how founders are again trying to transform a high-touch services business like accounting or taxes. This time they’re using generative AI, which they say will help them write their own code faster and automate human tasks, keeping costs low. “It’s an example of a new breed of companies that attack services but have AI-doing-work as the foundation,” said Conviction founder Sarah Guo, whose investment partner Mike Vernal led the investment into Town. Conviction
has also backed Harvey, an AI startup that aims to take the grunt work out of law firms.
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Foxconn, the Taiwanese manufacturer that makes most of the world’s iPhones, said its net profit in the fourth quarter of 2024 fell 13% year on year. It was the first decline in Foxconn’s quarterly earnings since the second quarter of 2023, when net profit slipped 0.9%. The decline in Foxconn’s fourth-quarter earnings to around $77 billion comes amid slowing sales of the iPhone, which fell about 1% on year in the quarter ending Dec. 28, according to Apple’s financial statements. Still, Foxconn said it expects its revenue from consumer electronics to grow in the current quarter and that sales from its cloud and networking products could also grow significantly. The growing adoption of artificial intelligence models and applications is boosting demand for
servers and networking products, the company said.
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Google announced an experimental feature on Thursday that gives users more tailored responses and personalized recommendations from Google’s Gemini chatbot by connecting it to their Google Search history. Users have to opt in to the feature for now, but it shows how Google could leverage its wealth of user data to offer a more personalized chatbot experience than startup rivals like OpenAI, whose ChatGPT so far dwarfs Gemini in terms of site traffic. Google’s search chief Liz Reid and early employee Marissa Mayer said at an event organized by The Information last fall that Google’s data would give it a leg up in AI-powered search and personal assistants. However, such changes could raise alarms with antitrust regulators. U.S. district judge Amit Mehta ruled last fall that Google had an illegal monopoly in search. The Justice Department, which is currently seeking to break Google up, has indicated that it doesn’t want Google to use its power in search to dominate AI.
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