ByteDance plans to spend $7 billion on the chips in 2025, according to reporting from The Information, citing inside sources. If ByteDance follows through, it will become one of the world's top owners of Nvidia chips, despite U.S. efforts to restrict Chinese companies from buying U.S. AI chips like these. In 2022, the U.S. announced export restrictions on certain kinds of AI chips to countries, including China, where ByteDance is headquartered. These restrictions have gotten tighter multiple times since. ByteDance is technically adhering to these restrictions by using a loophole: The company isn't bringing the chips directly to China and is instead storing them in data centers located in other regions like Southeast Asia, according to The Information's reporting. This doesn't technically violate U.S. restrictions....
25K likes, 424 comments - taskapp.ai on December 11, 2024: "IBM wrote processes. Steve broke them. Turns out, breaking them pays better."....
In areas from humanoid coworker bots to AI robot brains, startups developing some of the most scifi-esque applications of the technology scored the year's largest rounds. Big deals skewed early stage as well, indicating the cycle is likely just getting started. Illustrative of the trend is Figure, a 2-year-old startup dedicated to 'bringing a general purpose humanoid to life.' Founded in 2022, the Silicon Valley startup pulled in $675 million in Series B funding in February to further its vision of building robots to perform unsafe and undesirable jobs. Another example is the year's second-biggest round, which went to robot brain developer Physical Intelligence. The San Francisco startup, founded just this year, pulled in $400 million at a $2 billion valuation last month. Altogether, robotics-related startups secured around $7.2 billion in seed- through growth-stage investments in 2024, per Crunchbase data. That's slightly above year-ago levels, but still well below the 2021 market peak, as charted below....
The all-electric Ford Explorer has had a tough time of it. Back in 2022, WIRED was invited to a secret look at the Europe-only, all-electric Explorer which the company had been working on for some time. In March of 2023, the wraps were finally taken off, and it was announced that the US might get a version of the midsize crossover too, such was the enthusiastic response of dealers stateside to the winning design. A brand-new factory was opened in Germany in June 2023, the Cologne EV Center, Ford's dedicated 'home of a new generation of electric vehicles.' Then, just two months later, it was announced that the sale of the Explorer EV was to be delayed until summer 2024'not ideal when the pace of advancement in EVs these days is rampant, with tech being superseded so quickly that residual values of electric cars are disastrous. By the time Ford's EV Explorer eventually hit the roads in 2024 perhaps its biggest threat, the Kia EV3, was no longer on the horizon but just about to arrive. In July, Ford Europe plowed on with the reveal of the Capri, a 'relaunch' of the classic 1960s car that is remembered fondly for being Europe's version of the original Mustang. If fact it was exactly the same car as the Explorer, just with a different exterior design. It seemed half-hearted, somehow, especially as both the Capri and Explorer sit on Volkswagen Group's MEB platform'the result of a technology-sharing deal that apparently shaved two years off Ford's development time....
