Tag: big tech

Apple Trains Custom AI Model For China With Alibaba’s Help

Apple has trained a custom large language model specifically for the Chinese market, utilizing technical support from Alibaba Group, according to Reuters. 

This arrangement would make Apple the first foreign company cleared by Beijing to offer a proprietary AI model in China.

The custom model is expected to power portions of Apple Intelligence when the AI suite rolls out to mainland China via an upcoming iOS update.

This marks a strategic shift from Apple’s earlier plan to rely solely on third-party Chinese models for its regional generative AI features. According to the report, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude – which Apple pairs with its own technology in Western markets – are unavailable in China.

In July, China’s Cyberspace Administration officially registered Apple’s generative AI service, clearing the primary regulatory hurdle that had kept Apple Intelligence off local devices.

Under this approved framework, Alibaba’s Qwen model will integrate into Apple Intelligence across compatible iPhones, iPads, Macs, and Vision Pro headsets sold in China, while Baidu’s technology will separately support search-related features.

It remains unclear exactly how Apple’s proprietary model will divide tasks with Qwen and Baidu, as the technical breakdown between the systems has not yet been disclosed.

China remains one of Apple’s most crucial markets. Until now, the lack of native AI capabilities on Chinese iPhones has put Apple at a distinct competitive disadvantage against domestic rivals like Huawei, which have aggressively marketed AI-equipped handsets.

Apple Intelligence began rolling out globally in October 2024, but Apple said at the iPhone 16 launch that September that mainland China availability was “subject to regulatory approval.” The CAC’s July 15 registration came roughly 22 months later, clearing Apple alongside six other on-device generative AI services from Huawei, Samsung, OPPO, vivo, Xiaomi and ZTE.

The wait proved costly in a market Apple has been winning back. IDC put Apple’s China smartphone share at 18.1 percent in the second quarter, up from 13.9 percent a year earlier on 24.4 percent shipment growth – the strongest gain of any major brand, and enough to move Apple from fifth place to second. Huawei held the lead at 22.6 percent. They were the only two vendors to grow at all as overall shipments fell 4.3 percent to roughly 66 million units, a fifth straight quarterly decline driven by rising memory costs and fading government subsidies.

Apple’s gains came from holding iPhone 17 pricing steady while Android rivals raised theirs, and from signaling second-half price increases that pulled demand forward – mechanics that flatter one quarter rather than establishing a trend. Domestic rivals shipped on-device generative AI features throughout the wait.

Reporting has indicated Apple evaluated Baidu, ByteDance’s Doubao and DeepSeek before settling on Alibaba as its primary model provider. Apple has said nothing publicly about the arrangement – every confirmation to date has come from Alibaba and Baidu, or from the regulator’s own filing. No mainland launch date has been announced.

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Tech Bros Run the Marxist Playbook

Can Marxism offer a framework for understanding artificial intelligence (AI) and the tech bros behind it?

This is not to suggest that Marxism is a viable economic system or a practical alternative to capitalism. It’s not. But Karl Marx was a heterodox economist before he became an ideologue, and some of his ideas are powerful tools for understanding economics, even if his overall program was a failure.

Let’s use some of those tools to understand the rise of AI oligarchs and the future of AI.

We begin with Marx’s main idea: the abolition of private property. How do tech bros feel about private property? They steal it. If you can simply take private property, then it’s not private. Marx would approve.

The AI gang does this by scraping vast amounts of internet content for use in training their large language models (LLMs). That material includes copyrighted books, magazine articles, academic papers, images, music and countless other forms of intellectual property (IP).

Do tech bros pay royalties? Do they pay licensing fees? Sometimes, but often they don’t. They take what they want like internet pirates, or the Bolsheviks after the Russian Revolution in 1917.

In fact, AI models have used my nine books in their training sets. Google, Apple, Microsoft, OpenAI and Meta have paid me nothing. Anthropic offered to pay me $37,000 for some (not all) of my books. I accepted the offer, but I still haven’t received the payment. Maybe I’ll call my lawyer about that before their IPO.

The point is that much of the AI crowd behaves no differently than the imperialists of the 19th and early 20th centuries, who exploited land, resources and human capital, including slavery, while paying little or nothing in return.

V. I. Lenin called imperialism “the highest stage of capitalism.” But Lenin never met a tech bro. They put imperialists to shame.

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X Warns Australia’s Censor Wants Reach Beyond Australia

X has told the Australian Senate committee that a proposal expanding the powers of the nation’s top censor would let the regulator demand documents from people outside of Australia. The only connection that would be required for X to have to hand over documents to Australia’s eSafety Commissioner is that the person is “affiliated” with a platform.

The submission, published Tuesday, targets the Online Safety Amendment (Strengthening Enforcement for the Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2026. The bill cleared the House of Representatives on July 1 and hit the Senate Environment and Communications Legislation Committee on the same day. That committee will report on August 25.

The changes would “compel any person outside Australia…to provide information and documents merely because they are ‘affiliated’ with a company,” X said in a filing.

X described that as being “in clear conflict” with international legal principles, warning that the amendment “raises potential for a severe impact on international comity.”

X said the plans gave no “due regard to procedural fairness, privacy, the broader impacts on online services, and Australia’s digital economy.”

A company that fails to take “reasonable” steps to keep under-16s off its platform currently faces a penalty of up to A$49.5 million or 30,000 penalty units. The bill doubles that to A$99 million, around US$69 million, for systematic breaches.

Under the bill, eSafety could also compel the records from the third-party digital ID vendors that platforms hire, as well as from app store operators.

Those vendors hold face scans, ID document images, and inference data drawn from Australians who handed over sensitive data in order to stay on the platform after Australia banned social media for under 16s.

The bill would give the government regulator a legal route into all of that data that it recently mandated to be collected.

eSafety complained to the panel that its current authority to compel documents lags behind that of other regulators and that it’s left to depend on “representations from providers about their own compliance.”

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Instagram to Ban Creeps Filming Harassment Videos with Meta Smart Glasses

Instagram has announced a new policy prohibiting videos captured with Meta smart glasses that feature harassment of strangers in public spaces, targeting creeps who film pranks and pickup attempts without clear consent. Meta’s smart glasses have picked up the nickname “pervert glasses” due to their misuse.

Business Insider reports that Instagram head Adam Mosseri revealed the platform’s crackdown on certain types of content filmed using Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses in a recent Instagram story response. The new policy specifically targets videos showing harassment of unsuspecting individuals in public locations, including the controversial pickup artist videos and prank content that have proliferated on social media platforms.

“If you’re posting content that is taking advantage of people and harassing them, like a lot of these pickup line kind of videos that we’ve heard of and seen, then we’re going to take the content down,” Mosseri stated. “We don’t want people to be surreptitiously taking videos of other people and harassing them and then posting them on our platform. So we’re trying to fight that every way we can.”

The policy change comes after increasing concerns about the misuse of Meta’s smart glasses technology for creating questionable content. There is a growing trend of videos appearing on TikTok and Instagram Reels where content creators film themselves executing pranks on service industry workers while wearing the glasses. These pranks often cross the line into harassment territory, with examples including incidents where creators spray fart spray into candles at retail stores and then ask employees to smell them.

Following the policy announcement, Business Insider discovered that at least two major accounts belonging to pickup artists who filmed themselves approaching women while wearing Meta glasses had been deactivated. Both accounts previously boasted followings exceeding one million users. A Meta spokesperson confirmed to Business Insider that these accounts were removed for violating the new policy regarding harassing content filmed with the smart glasses.

However, details about the policy’s enforcement mechanisms remain unclear. Meta has not provided specific information about what exactly constitutes a violation under the new rules or how the company plans to systematically identify and remove offending content.

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“USA Isn’t A PiggyBank For Europe”: Trump Launches Section 301 Probe Into EU Over Big Tech Fines

Trump Says US Begins Section 301 Investigation on Europe 

President Trump wrote on Truth Social that the US will launch a Section 301 investigation into the European Union for “robbing American companies, in turn, the American Taxpayer.” 

Trump said Brussels is using America as a “PIGGYBANK” by fining Big Tech companies billions and billions of dollars.

Trump listed the technology companies that have been fined a combined billions of dollars:

After having fined Apple, for no reason at all, 15 Billion Dollars, Meta, 3 Billion Dollars, Amazon 2.5 Billion Dollars, and many others, we have just been informed that Google, a truly advanced and amazing group, has been fined yet another 1 Billion Dollars, without explanation. This brings the Google total to over 18 Billion Dollars!

Trump continued:

This illegal and highly discriminatory practice started at these high levels during the first year of the Sleepy Joe Biden Administration, but it’s not going to continue during the Trump Administration.

He added:

The United States of America is not a “PIGGYBANK” for Europe, nor will we allow it to be!

Please let this TRUTH serve to represent that we will immediately initiate a 301 Investigation into the practice of “ROBBING” American Companies and, in turn, the American Taxpayer.

The European Union will pay a very big price for this illegal and highly unethical conduct, which I have consistently warned them about.

The penalties will be entirely reversed and, we anticipate, a substantial TARIFF to be placed on them at the earliest possible moment.

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Meta worker who developed ‘digital experiences for kids’ admits to trying to sext child in undercover NYC sting

A New York City engineer who said he created “digital experiences for kids” at social media giant Meta was busted after he admitted to trying to sext a 13-year-old during an undercover sting.

Josh Felker, 44, who’s now on leave from the Facebook parent company, admitted he had been grooming and sexting someone he thought was a teen girl during a sting by Predator Poachers Long Island, a vigilante group that seeks to catch would-be pervs.

“Even though inappropriate things had already gone on, I just almost wish I could be her dad,” Felker, who is married and has a small child, shockingly told a member of the group posing as his would-be victim’s grandmother on the phone, according to video of the encounter set to be released Monday.

Felker, who listed his job on a now-deleted LinkedIn account as an Engineering Manager who built “digital experiences for kids” for Meta reached out to the group’s 13-year-old “decoy account” in May and has been messaging them regularly since, the group said. 

It didn’t take long before Felker allegedly started making a slew of sick remarks — including trying to teach the girl how to masturbate — while sending multiple photos and videos of himself doing the same and even trying to set up days to meet her in person, Mike Villani, one of the predator catchers who led the poach, told The Post. 

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Google just had its first negative cash flow quarter due to massive AI spending

Google has reported its financial results for the second quarter of 2026 (PDF), and as usual, the search giant raked in an unfathomable amount of money. Google saw total revenue of $119.8 billion, beating analyst expectations by a comfortable margin. Despite that, the company’s stock has taken a hit. Along with all that revenue, Google has announced a further increase in its AI-fueled capital expenditures (or capex). The company is actually spending so much on AI infrastructure that it has negative cash flow for the first time.

Search was the largest chunk of Google’s income, accounting for $63.3 billion. Google Cloud pulled in $24.8 billion, a significant 23.8 percent increase from the first quarter. This shows there is massive demand for Google’s AI services. Google also earned $12.9 billion from its subscriptions, platforms, and devices portfolio, as well as $11.1 billion from YouTube ads. The company managed to goose that last one by more than 12 percent since last quarter as it made YouTube ads even longer.

A significant chunk of Google’s revenue comes from investments. When you subtract those non-cash earnings, Google’s operating cash flow for Q2 2026 was about $39.1 billion. That’s not the most the company has ever seen, but it’s a healthy 40 percent increase from Q2 2025. The problem is that Google’s spending has also gone up—a lot.

Before this latest round of financial updates, Google told investors it was expecting $180 billion to $190 billion in capital expenditures for 2026. Like other AI-obsessed tech behemoths, Google is burning cash on building and running the data centers powering its AI models. These numbers were already well above the $91 billion Google spent in 2025. The company now says it’s planning to spend as much as $205 billion on infrastructure in 2026.

As a result of its increasing AI demands, Google reports it spent $44.9 billion expanding its AI footprint in the second quarter, and you don’t need an accounting degree to know which number is larger. With $39.1 billion in cash income, this spending left Google with -$5.8 billion free cash flow.

To be clear, Google is still profitable—wildly so. It’s also sitting on a war chest of more than $100 billion. But free cash flow is an important metric that goes to the overall health of a business. This is the actual money a company takes in to fund its operations without selling investments or taking out new loans. So it’s notable that Google’s free cash flow has dipped into negative territory for the first time since going public.

Google’s stock price took a hit overnight on the news, dropping about 4.5 percent. It has continued to trend downward today.

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Google’s New Recovery Option Stores a Clip of Your Face

Google’s newest account-recovery option asks for something no password ever required: a moving image of the account holder’s face, kept on the company’s servers.

Selfie video sign-in, launched July 23, records a short clip of the user turning their head on cue. When someone is locked out, Google matches a fresh clip against the stored one to decide whether to let them in.

The head movements are the security pitch.

They let Google’s systems tell a live face from a photograph or a prerecorded loop, the same trick it uses to turn away deepfakes.

Those checks all serve the accuracy of the match.

They say nothing about how much of the face Google stores, or for how long.

The company’s assurance covers only the storage. In its words, the video is “encrypted at rest, meaning it’s securely stored even when it’s not being used.”

Encryption at rest is a claim about how the file is stored. It says nothing about who can open it.

Its systems have to read the enrolled video to check any new face against it, so Google can decrypt the footage on demand. Encryption that only the account holder could open would rule that out, and Google has not claimed it.

Passkeys, hardware keys, and authenticator apps already restore a locked account with no biometric anywhere in the process.

Google added the face scan on top of them.

By default, the company says the clip stays with verification and recovery. A separate setting asks the user to release the same data toward developing Google’s products.

The feature is opt-in and reversible. Eligible accounts around the world can switch it on, and account holders can delete the stored clip at any time.

The company has not said how long it keeps that clip while the feature runs, or where the footage is handled.

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Facebook Verified: Meta Now Wants a Video Selfie of Your Face

Meta is rolling out a badge on Facebook that requires users to record a video of their own face.

The feature, massively accelerating the normalization of face scanning and biometric data collection, is called Facebook Verified, and asks a user to record a short video selfie, which the company checks against the photos already on their profile to confirm a match.

The process is free and takes a few minutes.

The company, which has been aggressively lobbying for “age verification” digital ID laws, presents the badge as a way to confirm a real person is behind an account. “As AI makes it easier to generate content, profiles, and messages,” it said, it wants users “to know there is a real person on the other side of a profile.”

The badge is open to Facebook users who are 18 or older and in good standing with Meta’s Community Standards on fraud, scams, and deceptive practices, and who show “no evidence of inauthentic behavior.” It is not available for Pages or ProMode accounts, which limits it to personal profiles.

Once a user completes the one-time check, the badge appears on Marketplace, Dating, Groups, and Profile. Meta said it plans to extend it to Feed posts over time.

Facebook Verified is separate from Meta Verified, the company’s paid subscription, which bundles a badge with impersonation protection and account support. Facebook Verified charges no fee.

Meta has not said how long it keeps the selfie video, where it stores it, or when it deletes it.

The launch materials describe the match and say nothing about the video afterward.

The scan arrives the same month Google added a selfie-video sign-in that records a user’s face to recover a locked account. Age-check laws in several US states and in Britain already require a face or an ID scan to open some accounts.

Meta is now asking hundreds of millions of Facebook users for a face scan too.

Facebook Verified is rolling out in phases, starting in select markets, and Meta plans to expand it worldwide.

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Google’s €890m EU Fine and the Wrong Fight in Washington

Today the European Commission fined Google €890 million for breaking the Digital Markets Act, the law the bloc wrote to pry open its largest online platforms.

€460 million was for self-preferencing in search: the Commission concluded that Google had given its own shopping, hotel, and travel results the prominent placement and the richer display that rival services could not get.

The other €430 million was for the rules Google Play imposes on the developers who sell through it, rules that kept them from telling their own customers about cheaper offers available elsewhere while charging a steering fee above what the law allows.

The Commission ordered Google to stop and to rank outside services on the same terms as its own.

The reaction from Washington arrived before the fine did. Days earlier, twenty-five Republican members of Congress, seven of them on the House trade subcommittee and one its chairman, wrote to President Trump urging him to treat European enforcement as an act of aggression against American business, a tool, they said, of “economic extraction and regulatory coercion.”

They asked him to reach for Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, the statute that lets Washington answer unfair practices with tariffs, and reminded the bloc that “the EU’s access to the U.S. market is not guaranteed.”

The lawmakers also caught the Commission in an awkward inconsistency: Apple, Meta, and Amazon wear the gatekeeper label that pulls them under the law, while the Chinese marketplaces Temu and AliExpress, which reach just as far into European pockets, so far don’t.

The timing sharpened the suspicion, the fine landing hours before a batch of the President’s global tariffs was due to expire. Between the inconsistency and the timing, the charge of persecution has something under it. And yet the conduct Europe fined is the conduct American courts have already condemned, in cases brought by an American company, tried before American judges and an American jury, with no connection to Brussels.

Apple spent the past two years losing to Epic Games in a federal courtroom in California. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers found that the company had willfully violated her 2021 order forbidding it to stop developers from steering customers to cheaper payment options outside the App Store. She threw out the commission Apple had tried to charge on those outside sales and referred the matter to federal prosecutors for possible criminal contempt. “That it thought this Court would tolerate such insubordination was a gross miscalculation,” she wrote; “the cover-up made it worse.” Fortnite was back in the American App Store within days.

Google lost the same fight on the same ground when a California jury decided in December 2023 that the Play Store and its billing system formed an illegal monopoly, and in July 2025 the Ninth Circuit upheld both the verdict and the order that came with it; Google must let rival app stores operate, permit alternative billing, and stop paying companies to keep out of app distribution. Epic’s chief executive called it a total victory. Anti-steering in the App Store, self-preferencing and a closed till in the Play Store; take the European postmark off the charges and they are the same ones a jury in San Francisco already returned.

In May the Supreme Court refused to pause Judge Gonzalez Rogers’s order but in June it agreed to hear Apple’s appeal of the contempt finding, so the question of how far Apple defied the order is still open.

What isn’t open, and what the appeal does not reach, is the 2021 injunction against blocking steering, or the jury’s monopoly verdict against Google that the Ninth Circuit affirmed. The core findings stand. American law looked at what these companies do and called it unlawful; the only live dispute is over how thoroughly Apple flouted the remedy.

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