The end of US tax credits for buying electric vehicles has changed the market in ways that are still unfolding.

I spoke this week with people closely monitoring the auto industry to get a sense of what’s next. They said the loss of federal incentives is likely to dampen shoppers’ enthusiasm, but the upcoming arrival of several dozen new or redesigned models could help fuel a comeback.

“I think the dust needs to settle for everyone to figure out what’s going to happen near term,” said Stephanie Valdez Streaty, director of industry insights for Cox Automotive.

Read full article

Comments

Both the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Bank of England are warning of an AI bubble that could burst sooner than later, citing soaring valuations and stock prices. Speaking at the Milken Institute in Washington DC, Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the IMF, said that “uncertainty is the new normal and it is here to stay” and that we should all “buckle up.” In discussing financial conditions, she said that “fired up by optimism about the productivity-enhancing potential of AI, global equity prices are surging.”

The Bank of England, for its part, has said that “the risk of a sharp market correction has increased,” and that “equity market valuations appear stretched, particularly for technology companies focused on artificial intelligence (AI).” It also notes the increasingly common concern that AI might not deliver all that it has promised. A record of a recent Financial Policy Committee meeting at the Bank of England reads, “downside factors included disappointing AI capability/adoption progress or increased competition, which could drive a re-evaluation of currently high expected future earnings.”

The AI craze has been in full swing since the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in 2022 and its explosive growth since then. The chatbot kicked off a flurry of investment, such as Microsoft’s multibillion-dollar deal in 2023. And, of course, the biggest tech companies followed OpenAI’s lead with products like Google’s Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and Apple Intelligence.

Since then, the ChatGPT maker has inked hundreds of billions of dollars in purchasing and investment agreements with the likes of AMD and NVIDIA in the race for AI dominance. Competitors like Anthropic, whose CEO thinks AI will replace half of all white-collar jobs within five years, have found the backing of other tech giants like Google and Amazon.

Integrations for AI tools continue to grow, and the proliferation of the technology keeps entering new spaces, like music. There’s no telling how everything will play out, but in the meantime AI can help us shop for shoes by looking at our feet.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/leading-financial-institutions-are-worried-about-a-looming-ai-bubble-130827642.html?src=rss

They say there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but the press that Intel has generated in the last year has certainly been testing the boundaries of the aphorism.

Is it good when your company posts an annual loss for the first time in almost 40 years? When you’re doing multiple rounds of mass layoffs? When your board pushes your CEO into leaving, and starts arguing with the new CEO about major strategy decisions almost immediately? When you’re either losing or failing to gain market share in areas critical to your bottom line? When you need to explain to the president why your CEO should keep his job, and then explain to investors the many possible downsides of a mercurial president deciding he wants a stake in your company?

I feel like the answer to these questions is “mostly no.” Even Intel’s recent investment from and partnership with Nvidia came with a tacit admission that Intel was mostly failing to make a dent in AI hardware and software and the gaming and workstation GPU markets. (Reports that Intel could start manufacturing chips for AMD would be good news, as bizarre as that arrangement would have been at any other point in the two companies’ history with one another, but those talks could still fall apart.)

Read full article

Comments

If Intel wants to come back as a chip fab, its upcoming Core Ultra series 3 laptop processors will be a crucial part of that. The company has just revealed more information about those processors (codenamed Panther Lake), that will use its 2-nanometer 18A process and be built in the US at its Arizona plant. 

The Core Ultra series 3 system-on-chips will be utilized mainly in high-end laptops along with “gaming devices and edge solutions,” Intel said. The company noted that they’d blend “Lunar Lake-level power efficiency with Arrow Lake-class performance,” though it usually boasts that with all new Core chips.

They’ll offer up to 50 percent more processing performance compared to previous generations, with some versions sporting as many as 16 performance cores (P-cores), along with efficiency cores (E-cores). Chip density will improve by 30 percent, while performance per watt will rise 15 percent. 

Intel’s integrated Arc GPU also sees a 50 percent performance bump compared to the last generation, with a maximum of 12 cores in high-end versions. They’ll also see an updated XPU design for AI acceleration with up to 180 Platform TOPS (trillions of operations per second).

Intel called its 18A architecture “the most advanced semiconductor node developed and manufactured in the United States,” adding that it’s “fully operational and set to reach high-volume production later this year.” As recently as two months ago, however, the company was reportedly struggling with the yields it would need to even start production, let alone make a profit. 

It would be an understatement to say that Intel needs the new node to succeed. In August President Donald Trump said that the company’s new CEO Lip-Bu Tan should resign before walking that back after a successful meeting between the two. Later, Trump announced that the US government was taking a 9.9 percent ($8.9 billion stake in Intel) and last month, NVIDIA said it was throwing Intel a $5 billion lifeline to the company forPC and data center CPUs. In its July Q2 earnings report, Intel said it lost $2.9 billion and would lay off up to 20 percent of its workforce. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/computing/intel-gives-us-a-glimpse-of-its-panther-lake-core-ultra-chips-130010879.html?src=rss

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Discord has identified approximately 70,000 users that may have had their government ID photos exposed as part of a customer service data breach announced last week, spokesperson Nu Wexler tells The Verge. A tweet by vx-underground said that the company was being extorted over a breach of its Zendesk instance by a group claiming to have “1.5TB of age verification related photos. 2,185,151 photos.” In its announcement last week, Discord said that information like names, usernames, emails, the last four digits of credit cards, and IP addresses also may have been impacted by the breach. “All affected users globally have been contacted and we continue to work closely with law enforcement, data protection authorities, and external security experts,” said Wexler. “We’ve secured the affected systems and ended work with the compromised vendor. We take our responsibility to protect your personal data seriously and understand the concern this may cause.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Back in January, Netflix co-chief executive officer Gregory Peters said the service is rolling out party and couch co-op games that you can stream online in the future. Now, Peters has announced that several party game titles that you can play on your TV are coming this holiday season at the Bloomberg Screentime conference in Los Angeles. “We’re creating a completely new way to play games — one that’s as easy as streaming a show on a Friday night,” the service said in its announcement. 

The new games, which you can play with friends for free, include Lego: Party, a title that will typically cost you $40. You’ll also be able to play Boggle Party, wherein you compete with friends by finding words in a jumbled-up letter grid within a time limit, and Pictionary: Game Night that will have you guessing what your friends are drawing. In Tetris Time Warp, you and your friends can play different eras of of the game, from the 1984 original to the classic Gameboy version. Finally, in Party Crashers: Fool Your Friends, you’ll have to play detective and deduce which friend is the “party crasher.” To play the games, you can turn your phone into a controller by scanning a QR code. 

Netflix’s gaming push showed signs of trouble earlier this year when its canceled release plans for six titles that were already announced and removed 20 titles from its library, including popular ones like Hades. The company then chose to prioritize specific categories for a more focused library, namely party games, games for kids, well-known titles like Grand Theft Auto and games based on its shows like Stranger Things. 

Some people have been seeing the Games tab on their TV for a while now, but it only contained the same games you can play on mobile. These new party games will initially be “available on select TVs,” such as on devices powered by Roku, and only “in certain countries” only. In its announcement, though, the company said it “plans to roll out [games on TV] further over time.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/streaming/netflix-is-bringing-party-games-to-tvs-123034128.html?src=rss

California has passed three new bills designed to boost privacy for internet users, governor Gavin Newsom’s office announced. The biggest one, AB 566, builds on a 2018 law by requiring web browsers to let users universally opt-out of allowing third parties to sell their data.

The original California Consumer Privacy Act from 2018 only let Californians opt out third-party data sharing one site at a time. However, AB 566 signed into law yesterday by Newsom requires web browsers like Chrome, Firefox and Safari to allow users to opt out of all third-party tracking with a single setting. “This law will help people protect their personal data by allowing them to simply switch a toggle that tells businesses they can’t sell or share it,” said Consumer Reports policy analyst Matt Schwartz. 

The bill was originally passed by the California legislature last month, but its signing by the governor wasn’t necessarily a done deal. Newsom vetoed a similar bill last year for being overly broad as it also applied to smartphone operating systems. He also said that major browsers already offer one-click opt out for third-party data sharing, though Consumer Watchdog said at the time that none offer a universal way to decline data sharing. 

Two other bills will also help internet users keep their data to themselves. SB 361 boosts the Data Broker Registration Law (Delete Act) signed into law in October 2023 by giving consumers more information about which personal information is collected by data brokers and who else might have it. AB 656, meanwhile, requires social media companies to make canceling an account straightforward and clear while it triggers full deletion of the user’s personal data.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/california-just-passed-three-bills-to-boost-internet-privacy-120031025.html?src=rss