China rules on AI and Vietnam draws chip designers

Hello from Yifan in California, your #techAsia host this week. It has been an usually busy summer in Silicon Valley, partly because of the ongoing AI race between Big Tech and start-ups, but the upcoming US presidential election has also raised chaos among techies.

A group of tech heavyweights, including Tesla chief executive Elon Musk, have led the charge in tech circles to endorse Donald Trump for president. It would be a stretch to say Silicon Valley is turning Republican, as many in the traditionally liberal area are supporting the Democrat candidate and former California attorney-general, vice-president Kamala Harris.

However, it is undeniable that Musk has an unmatched audience base compared to other tech leaders. This was evidenced by the millions of people he and Trump attracted to X, formerly known as Twitter, on Monday.

The two insisted on calling the highly anticipated live broadcast on X a “conversation” or “chat”, not an interview. That makes sense. Musk didn’t ask the Republican candidate any real questions, instead the two spent the two hours bashing the Biden administration and rehashing some of the typical Trump talk points regarding illegal immigration, the Ukraine war, Middle East tensions and the former president’s view on the leaders of Russia, China and North Korea.

Hardly anything in the two-hour exchange came as a surprise to me, except maybe the 40-minute delay due to X’s technical issues at the beginning. While I, and many others, were trying to figure out how to listen to the two talk, scammers were attempting to make big bucks.

In searching for a recast of the X livestream on YouTube, I came across an imposter account called “Tesla US” which played a video using the “live” label that showed an AI-altered version of Musk saying he and Trump would double users’ crypto holdings if they transferred their assets to a designated digital wallet. The fake livestream had gathered more than 100,000 viewers before YouTube took the account down.

It is not an isolated incident. Similar crypto scams have been popping up on YouTube since Musk endorsed Trump and the latter spoke at a bitcoin conference in July.

Both men have a significant amount of support among crypto users, as many believe a Trump administration would be friendlier towards digital assets than a Harris administration would. But I wonder, how would he protect them from crypto scams like this?

China rules

The dispute between Scarlett Johansson and OpenAI over the ChatGPT developer’s alleged use of the actress’ voice without her consent in one of their latest models has brought public attention to the dark side of artificial intelligence.

The Hollywood star threatened to sue OpenAI, but it is hard to say how the case would have played out, as there is no legal framework in place in the US for infringement involving AI like this yet.

Maybe China can offer some lessons on this. In April, a Beijing court made China’s first ruling on a person’s right to their voice. A voice actor had sued several companies for AI-replicated voice infringement. The court found that some of the companies had indeed infringed on the plaintiff’s rights and ordered them to pay 250,000 renminbi ($35,000) in damages.

It’s not the only ruling with landmark implications in governing artificial intelligence, Nikkei’s Maki Sagami writes. Chinese courts have been handing down a series of judgments related to generative AI, indicating how Beijing views the technology and aims to take the lead in setting standards.

False alarms

TikTok has been sending news-style push alerts that include inaccurate and misleading information, including a conspiracy theory about Taylor Swift and a weeks-old tsunami warning, writes the Financial Times’ Stephanie Stacey.

Researchers say the notification format — which the viral video-sharing platform uses to boost engagement through personalised content recommendations — may give a false “stamp of authority” to misinformation, making users less critical of what they’re consuming.

One false alert seen by the FT might have been particularly alarming to Swifties in the Sunshine State. It read, inaccurately, “Taylor Swift Cancelled All Tour Dates in What She Called ‘Racist Florida.’”

That’s untrue — Swift is still scheduled to perform in Miami three times in October — but at least one commenter on the underlying video, which was linked in the alert, said they initially thought the notification “was a news article”.

The alerts appear to automatically scrape the descriptions of posts that are receiving, or are likely to receive, high levels of engagement on TikTok — including some that are weeks old. One incident included a post originally uploaded as an April Fools’ Day prank that was flagged to users, without context, in mid-April.

Winning design

Vietnam is becoming a new chip hub in Asia, not for manufacturing but for R&D, thanks to its affordable, quality talent pool. Companies from the US, Taiwan and South Korea are racing to build research facilities in the south-east Asian country, write Nikkei Asia’s Lien Hoang, Cheng Ting-Fang, Kim Jaewon and Lauly Li.

The artificial intelligence boom and supply chain shifts sparked by the US-China tensions are driving up demand for local talent in Vietnam. Meanwhile, severe shortages of labour in traditional chip economies like South Korea and Taiwan, as well as the US, mean companies are looking further afield for engineers.

Compared with Taiwan or South Korea, the productivity and salary levels for engineers in Vietnam make the country attractive for companies, while the government’s aggressive push to make its tech economy more sophisticated has helped enlarge and improve the candidate pool.

Overseas overtures

One of Japan’s highest-valued AI unicorns, Preferred Networks (PFN), is looking to court overseas investors for the first time as it accelerates chip development, Nikkei Asia’s Ryohtaroh Satoh reports.

Chief executive Toru Nishikawa said in an interview that Preferred Networks aims to raise tens of billions of yen in the next year or two and will seek funding from overseas investors.

PFN is among the country’s biggest unicorns, with a valuation of around ¥347bn ($2.1bn), according to Nikkei analysis as of 2023. PFN and its partners are currently working to develop a next-generation AI accelerator by 2027, which is aimed to be more powerful but less energy-hungry than Nvidia’s latest B200 chipset for some workloads.

“Big tech companies can buy huge numbers of Nvidia’s GPUs, but it’s more difficult for companies in less-developed nations to do so,” Nishikawa said. “That is why we’re trying to show that we can develop processors that can be bought at a much more realistic price.”

Suggested reads

1. China’s Hesai to be removed from US defence department blacklist (FT)

2. Foxconn ‘on track’ to ship latest Nvidia AI servers next quarter (Nikkei Asia)

3. SoftBank sets out buyback plans after market rout (FT)

4. As lithium slump drags on, some Australian miners look to grow (Nikkei Asia)

5. Japan resale app Mercari delivers record profit amid US troubles (Nikkei Asia)

6. Chipmakers face a labour crisis (FT)

7. South Korea’s Naver to maintain ownership of Line app operator (Nikkei Asia)

8. SoftBank’s buyback is just buying time (FT)

9. Trump campaign blames Iran for hacked emails (FT)

10. Shares in Indian e-scooter maker Ola close up 20% after tepid debut (Nikkei Asia)