Techmeme: At a major Hong Kong electronics exhibition, some Chinese companies say they are exploring ways to lower or skirt tariffs while others plan to wait for clarity (Luz Ding/Bloomberg)

Top News

Test conversations with some Meta AI digital companions, including celebrity-voiced ones, show them engaging in sexual chats even when users identify as minors — Chatbots on Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp are empowered to engage in ‘romantic role-play’ that can turn explicit.

More: TechCrunch, TechSpot, and StartupNews.fyi

Bluesky: @justinhendrix, @mims, @wadewarrens, and @patwhite7000

X: @mattyglesias, @wsj, @marcportermagee, and @zamaan_qureshi. LinkedIn: Sarah Gardner

Forums: Hacker News, r/technology, and r/ABoringDystopia

Prachi Verma / The Economic Times:

India faces a shortage of agentic AI professionals, with executives estimating fewer than 100K in the country while demand is projected to hit ~200K by 2026 — India is grappling with a critical shortage of agentic AI professionals as demand surges, driven by the shift towards sophisticated AI agents capable …

More: StartupNews.fyi. X: @ettech and @ettech

Furquan Ameen / Rest of World:

Experts say that India is behind China in deep tech innovation due to its historical focus on services, lower R&D investment, and a brain drain of AI talent — India's government urges the private sector to take the lead in tech innovation, while industry experts say it's complicated.

Bluesky: @restofworld.org and @rinachandran

X: @furquansid, @restofworld, and @nit_set. LinkedIn: Furquan Ameen

Wall Street Journal:

Sources: Huawei has approached some clients about testing the technical feasibility of the Ascend 910D, its newest AI chip that it hopes will beat Nvidia's H100 — Superpower rivalry over semiconductors heats up despite Washington's attempts to block Beijing

More: Bloomberg, Reuters, Blockchain.News, and StartupNews.fyi. Bluesky: @robtalksnonsense.com

Simon Willison / Simon Willison's Weblog:

Watching OpenAI's o3 guess a photo's location, a process that included running Python code to examine license plates, is surreal, dystopian, and entertaining — Watching OpenAI's new o3 model guess where a photo was taken is one of those moments where decades of science fiction suddenly come to life.

Bluesky: @wildebees, @stagefright, and @robmanuelyeah. Forums: Hacker News

Financial Times:

Sources: ~300 London-based DeepMind staff have sought to unionize with the CWU in recent weeks, to challenge AI sales to defense groups and Google's Israel ties — Move by employees at Google's AI arm follows discontent after weapons and surveillance pledge is dropped

More: TechCrunch, The Decoder, Cryptopolitan, Reuters, The Economic Times, and StartupNews.fyi

Bluesky: @shashj and @atreyo.dev. X: @zachweinberg. Forums: r/ukpolitics

Matt Levine / Bloomberg:

A look at the rise of “pure play” bitcoin companies like Twenty One, as the stock market is paying far more for crypto exposure than the crypto market itself is — Twenty One, Trumpcoin dinner, KKR empathy, carry on co-investments and quantitative analysis of hockey. — Project Mystery

More: CoinDesk and Coinpedia Fintech News

Bluesky: @matt-levine and @jwmason

Leah Nylen / Bloomberg:

US v. Google: Chrome's GM testified that other companies cannot develop Chrome effectively, given the browser's “interdependencies” on other parts of Google — Google is the only company that can offer the level of features and functionality that its popular Chrome web browser has today …

More: Android Police, The Verge, Livemint, Tech in Asia, Neowin, Morning Brew, Cryptopolitan, CNET, Fortune, Moneycontrol, Türkiye Today, XDA Developers, BGR, and PhoneArena. Mastodon: @mhoye@mastodon.social

Isabelle Bousquette / Wall Street Journal:

Prompt engineering, one of the buzziest jobs in 2023, becomes obsolete as AI models better intuit user intent and companies train staff on how to write prompts — Prompt engineering, a role aimed at crafting the perfect input to send to a large language model, was poised to become one of the hottest jobs in artificial intelligence.

Bluesky: @jordisoler, @tappedlands.com, and @skynetandchill.com. Mastodon: @harrymccracken@mastodon …

LinkedIn: Ariel Guersenzvaig and Isabelle Bousquette

Coco Feng / South China Morning Post:

Filing: China's leading flash memory chipmaker YMTC raised ~$219M from Hebei Yangyuan Zhihui Beverage Co. at a ~$22.1B valuation in December 2023 — The deal was signed in December 2023 but was only announced on Friday as it ‘involved commercial secrets’, Yangyuan said

Financial Times:

Trump's tariffs could slow robot adoption in the US, as demand weakens and supplies of components from China, like magnets and precision bearings, are disrupted — Depressed buyers and global supply chains could delay the adoption of futuristic technology — Elon Musk, facing disarray …

More: Futurism. Bluesky: @mattortega.com and @evansutton

Francisco Rodrigues / CoinDesk:

Stripe plans to test a stablecoin payments product aimed at companies outside the US, the UK, and the EU, using tech from Bridge, which Stripe acquired in 2024 — Stripe CEO Patrick Collison said a stablecoin tool for companies outside US, UK and EU is ready for testing. — What to know:

More: ZyCrypto, Bitcoin Insider, The Daily Hodl, and Cointelegraph

X: @patrickc and @backseatvc

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