Victoria Fox's Blog, page 195
July 26, 2023
Samsung blames Q3’s drop in revenue to decline in smartphone shipments
Samsung has reported KRW 0.67 trillion ($527 million) in operating profit for the second quarter of 2023, which is just slightly higher than last quarter’s, thanks to its memory business posting a narrower loss. That figure is also, however, much, much smaller than the KRW 14.1 trillion ($10.8 billion) operating profit it posted in July 2022. In its latest earnings report, the tech giant also revealed a consolidated revenue of KRW 60.01 trillion ($47 billion), which represents a 6 percent decline from the previous quarter’s and a far cry from last year’s record-breaking KRW 77.2 trillion ($59.4 billion).
The company blames the drop in revenue mostly to a decline in smartphone shipments “as the effect of the Galaxy S23 launch” in the first quarter faded. If you’ll recall, Samsung’s mobile division performed well the previous earning period due to the strong sales of the Galaxy S23 series, specifically the Galaxy S23 Ultra. Now, the division’s consolidated revenue has slipped from KRW 31.82 trillion ($23.7 billion) to KRW 25.55 trillion ($20 billion), while its operating profit dropped by $500 billion.
Samsung expects the overall smartphone market to pick back up in the second half of the year, especially in the premium market. Unsurprisingly, it plans to focus its efforts on the newly launched Galaxy Z Flip 5 and Galaxy Z Fold 5 series. The Galaxy Z Flip 5 boasts a 3.6-inch external display — the previous model had a 1.9-inch one — while the Galaxy Z Fold 5 has a new hinge that gets rid of the gap between the two screen halves.
Meanwhile, Samsung’s DS Division or memory business experienced a slight recovery in revenue from KRW 13.73 trillion ($10.2 billion) in Q1 to KRW 14.73 trillion ($11.53 billion). Its operating loss, while still massive at KRW 4.58 trillion ($3.4 billion), is at least a bit smaller at KRW 4.36 trillion ($3.4 billion). Going forward, the company plans to focus on the sale of what it calls “high-value-added products,” such as DDR5 and LPDDR5x components.
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Checkout.com teams with NetEase Games on international game payments
Missed the GamesBeat Summit excitement? Don’t worry! Tune in now to catch all of the live and virtual sessions here.
Checkout.com, a global payment solution provider, has partnered with NetEase Games, the online games division of NetEase.
With this strategic collaboration, Checkout.com will support NetEase Games’ international payment operations and accelerate its global and commercial expansion.
NetEase Games is a global developer and publisher of video game intellectual property. With this partnership, Checkout.com will provide acquiring for international credit card networks such as VISA and Mastercard, along with optimization solutions to drive payment success rates and improve user experience.
The company will also assist NetEase Games in creating payment pages to enable convenient credit top-ups for international players across a range of NetEase Games.
According to data released by Sensor Tower, in May 2023, 43 Chinese game developers ranked in the top 100 highest-earning global mobile publishers, generating a combined revenue of $2.1 billion.
Brian Sze, head of Asia Pacific at Checkout.com, said in a statement, “We are thrilled to collaborate closely with NetEase Games, one of the global leading game industry leaders. Leveraging our valuable experience in addressing challenges such as fragmented payment methods, and fraud prevention encountered by enterprises in their international expansion, Checkout.com is enabling NetEase Games to achieve worldwide business development and penetration.”
Checkout.com said its modular payments platform is ideal for enterprise businesses looking to seamlessly integrate better payment solutions.
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Ecosia adds a train travel search tool powered by Omio
Looking to ride the tracks of increasing demand for longer distance train travel that’s being fuelled by climate-concerned consumers seeking to shrink the environmental impact of their trips, tree-planting search engine Ecosia and multimodal travel booking platform Omio have partnered to launch what they’re billing as a “tree-planting rail travel booking tool”.
The idea is to make it easier for environmentally conscious Ecosia users who are searching the web for travel options to find and book low carbon train routes for their trips — helping to reduce carbon emissions from less environmentally friendly transport options (like flights) and fund not-for-profit Ecosia’s climate friendly tree-planting projects (and other decarbonization efforts) along the way.
The tie-up works by responding to Ecosia users’ travel keyword searches — in cases where the route can be served by train, such as “London to Cologne” or “Munich to Berlin” — by popping up the “Ecosia Trains” tool (pictured below). The integration lets users search for basic parameters of their journey directly within Ecosia. If they like the results the search returns and decide they do want to take the train the tool will then redirect them to a check-out page on Omio’s platform to make a booking.
Image credit: Ecosia
Given there’s an extra step of being passed from Ecosia’s site to Omio’s to actually do the booking, the tool is perhaps better described as a “tree-planting rail travel search tool”. Certainly it’s not ‘seamless’ one-click booking. But the basic idea is to boost discoverability of low carbon intercity and long haul transport options and ease train trip booking for climate conscious Ecosia users without them having to do the leg work of browsing to Omio’s website (or, indeed, another train trip booking platform such as Trainline) first.
Ecosia said it receives more than two million search enquiries per month for train booking phrases across Europe — which it suggests highlights “clear user demand for easy-to-use, train travel booking tools”.
Globally it notes that around 2.4% of CO2 emissions come from aviation — which it suggests puts an onus on making longer-distance rail journeys easier to book, since taking the train is 90% less carbon intensive on average so switching trips from air to rail can have a major impact in shrinking transport emissions.
“Unfortunately, the broader train booking market remains fragmented and by contrast much more straightforward to book a flight knowing you are paying the lowest possible price for your travel,” it also suggests, describing Omio as “one of the only platforms providing consumers with a holistic overview of rail travel options and their price”.
The train search tool is being made available to Ecosia users in 15 countries initially: The UK, Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Finland, Norway, USA, Canada, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and Ukraine — which are the markets where Omio has inked partnerships with train providers.
Rail providers whose tickets can be booked via the Omio integration include Amtrak in the US, LNER, GWR, Avanti in the UK, SNCF in France, OBB in Austria and Eurostar for cross-channel services, among others.
Ecosia is a not-for-profit so 100% of the profits from the commission it receives from Omio for successful bookings will go directly into its green initiatives — such as tree-planting projects in biodiversity hotspots and areas affected by deforestation, regenerative agriculture projects and investments into renewable energy.
The pair said they hope to expand the tie-up in future — giving the example of the tool also being able to showcase connection options and other more complex travel add-ons directly within Ecosia. “This partnership will hopefully expand in the future,” an Ecosia spokesperson told us, adding: “Omio and Ecosia share views on the importance of promoting train travel.”
It’s worth noting that Omio is a multi-modal travel booking platform which means it spans a range of different transport modes — including enabling users to book flights (which are the opposite of a low carbon travel option). So some might suggest it’s a touch hypocritical for a travel booking platform that helps the aviation industry sell tickets to be piggybacking on climate concern while its own platform directly monetizes travel by air.
That said, the European startup did have an early focus on championing train travel as a more sustainable choice for long haul trips. So there’s an element of this tie-up circling back to its roots (back when it was known as GoEuro) — given its founder’s early conviction on the value of getting more travellers onto Europe’s extensive network of railways by taking the legacy pain out of booking train tickets.
Fast forward a decade or so and scores of rail, bus, airline and ferry companies are now on-board with Omio’s booking platform, thanks to its success at inking partnerships with transport firms to populate its digital platform with their ticket inventory. And the company essentially has a full focus on providing transport-mode agnostic utility for travellers — making it easy for them to compare and book possible intercity or long haul travel options to get to their destination. (Albeit, it will default to surfacing available flight options when you search for long haul routes, even though rail is positioned first in the tabbed list of transport modes.)
But you can at least say it’s never been easier for travellers in Europe and North America to book a long haul trips by train thanks to the road-paving efforts of travel booking platforms like Omio.
With the Omio-Ecosia tie-up rail trip discoverability is getting a touch easier for climate-concerned consumers. While, for Omio, the tie-up means it gets to have its brand positioned in proximity to an eye-catching “sustainable travel” label displayed on the Ecosia tool — which its marketing team will surely be pointing back to as an example of how it’s encouraging “conscious travel”.
On that front, here’s Tommaso del Re, Omio’s VP of partnerships, with some prepared remarks:
Omio’s goal is to make travel seamless and accessible for everyone, anywhere at any time. We are especially thrilled to partner with Ecosia, as we believe in the importance of creating a more conscious travel future, and therefore want to foster partnerships that prioritise the planet. Flying is an important aspect of the travel ecosystem but we also want to empower travellers to choose more sustainable options, such as train travel, by surfacing all rail travel options in one place, making intercity and cross-border journeys effortless. Our partnership with Ecosia is another way we encourage conscious travel — and are looking forward to developing our partnership further.
Other Omio tie-ups include a partnership with Uber last year which saw it injecting train and coach travel options into the ride-hailing app in the U.K.
Samuel L. Jackson Sounds Off On A Time To Kill Cutting An Oscar-Worthy Scene
In a wide-ranging, must-read interview with Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri, Jackson, who, despite being one of our greatest living actors, has never won a competitive Oscar (he received an honorary Academy Award in 2022), revealed that the filmmakers turned Hailey into a more calculating killer to, presumably, heighten the dramatic stakes. In doing so, they travestied his character’s righteous motivation. As Jackson told Ebiri:
“In ‘A Time to Kill,’ when I kill those guys, I kill them because my daughter needs to know that those guys are not on the planet anymore and they will never hurt her again — that I will do anything to protect her. That’s how I played that character throughout. And there were specific things we shot, things I did to make sure that she understood that, but in the editing process, they got taken out. And it looked like I killed those dudes and then planned every move to make sure that I was going to get away with it. When I saw it, I was sitting there like, ‘What the f***?'”
Jackson went on to state, in his wonderfully blunt fashion, “The things they took out kept me from getting an Oscar. Really, motherf***ers? You just took that s*** from me?” This included a monologue that, when he performed it on set, left everyone in tears. Why did they cut this scene? “Because it wasn’t my movie,” he said. “[T]hey weren’t trying to make me a star.”
Hugh Grant’s ‘Wonka’ Casting as Oompa Loompa Criticized by Actor With Dwarfism: “We Aren’t Getting Offered Those Roles”
An actor with dwarfism isn’t pleased that Hugh Grant was cast as an Oompa Loompa in Warner Bros.’ forthcoming film Wonka, which stars Timothée Chalamet as the titular candymaker.
During an interview with the BBC that published Wednesday, George Coppen said that many actors with dwarfism “feel like we are being pushed out of the industry we love.” The 26-year-old performer is known for roles in Disney+’s Willow series and Netflix’s The School for Good and Evil.
“A lot of people, myself included, argue that dwarfs should be offered everyday roles in dramas and soaps, but we aren’t getting offered those roles,” Coppen said. “One door is being closed, but they have forgotten to open the next one.”
Related StoriesPaul King’s film is a prequel to the 1971 feature Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, which is adapted from Roald Dahl’s 1964 novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The trailer was released earlier this month and shows Chalamet’s Willy Wonka — portrayed in the footage as an aspiring chocolatier — talking to Grant’s Oompa Loompa, who is trapped in a glass case.
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That 1971 film — in addition to Tim Burton’s 2005 adaptation of the book, titled Charlie and the Chocolate Factory — cast actors with dwarfism to play the Oompa Loompas, who work at Wonka’s factory.
“They’ve enlarged his head so his head looks bigger,” Coppen said about Grant’s role. “[I thought,] ‘what the hell have you done to him’?”
A representative for Warner Bros. declined to comment.
During a previous interview with The Hollywood Reporter, King explained why he thought of Grant as the best fit for the Oompa Loompa, who is depicted in the previously screened footage as being around 20 inches tall.
“I was really just thinking about that character; somebody who could be a real shit, and then — ah! Hugh!” King said. “Because he’s the funniest, most sarcastic shit I’ve ever met.”
Wonka’s cast includes Keegan-Michael Key, Matt Lucas, Sally Hawkins, Rowan Atkinson and Olivia Colman. It hits theaters Dec. 15.
Box Office: ‘Sound of Freedom’ to Play in Movie Theaters Overseas
The faith-based political thriller Sound of Freedom is headed for cinemas overseas.
Angel Studios on Wednesday announced release dates for 21 markets, including the U.K., Australia, Spain, South Africa and a host of countries in Latin America. It begins its foreign run next month. At the U.S. box office, the movie crossed the $100 million mark on July 19, a little over two weeks after its release on July Fourth. And it finished Tuesday of this week with a cume north of $130 million.
The Utah-based Angel Studios, which prides itself on working outside of the Hollywood studio system, offers a unique “pay it forward” option whereby consumers can donate tickets. Sound of Freedom has stayed high up on the domestic chart since its debut, and is even outpacing Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One, which launched July 12 and finished Tuesday with a North American total of $124.2 million.
Related StoriesDirected and written by Alejandro Monteverde, Sound of Freedom stars The Passion of the Christ’s Jim Caviezel as the real-life Tim Ballard, who worked as an agent for the Department of Homeland Security before embarking on his own quest to bring child traffickers to justice (Ballard founded his own anti-trafficking organization, dubbed Operation Underground Railroad).
Mira Sorvino, Bill Camp, José Zúñiga and Eduardo Verástegui co-star (Verástegui is also a producer).
Angel Studios says it is bringing the conservative-leaning movie directly to theaters overseas in Latin American countries and the U.K./Ireland. In other markets, it will partner with local distributors.
“Since Sound of Freedom launched in the U.S., demand has been building around the world in dozens of regions and languages,” said Jared Geesey, Angel’s senior vp of gobal distribution. “Child trafficking is a global issue, and we hope to build on the incredible momentum here in the states and share the film’s powerful message worldwide.”
The film opens Aug. 18 in South Africa, followed by Australia and New Zealand on Aug. 24. It rolls out across Latin America on Aug. 31, including in Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Belize, Panama, Colombia and Venezuela. It goes out Sept. 1 in the U.K./Ireland and on Oct. 11 in Spain.
Movies and series from Angel Studios, also home of The Chosen, are crowdfunded in part by the Angel Guild, a community of over 100,000 people who vote on all eligible films submitted to Angel Studios.
While Sound of Freedom has been discussed on QAnon message boards, Angel says it isn’t a QAnon movie. Yet in late 2021, Caviezel spoke at a QAnon convention in Las Vegas, where he invoked the QAnon slogan, “The storm is upon us.”
Bo Goldman, Oscar-Winning Screenwriter on ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ and ‘Melvin and Howard,’ Dies at 90
Bo Goldman, the late-blooming guru of screenwriting who received Academy Awards for his work on One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Melvin and Howard, has died. He was 90.
Goldman died Tuesday in Helendale, California, his son-in-law, Tár director Todd Field, told The New York Times.
Goldman’s first screenplay was, years after he wrote it, directed by Alan Parker for Shoot the Moon (1982), which featured Diane Keaton and Albert Finney in a raw, seriocomic drama about a disintegrating marriage.
Related StoriesHe also co-wrote the Mark Rydell-directed rock drama The Rose (1979), starring Bette Midler in an Oscar-nominated turn, and Martin Brest’s Scent of a Woman (1992), which netted him his third Academy Award nom (and Al Pacino the best actor Oscar, too).
Goldman was one of the handful of screenwriters — Paddy Chayefsky, Francis Ford Coppola, Horton Foote, William Goldman, Billy Wilder and Joel and Ethan Coen among them — to win Academy Awards for both original and adapted screenplay.
Early in his career, the New Yorker wrote lyrics for a Broadway musical produced by Jule Styne and directed by Abe Burrows and served as an associate producer and script editor alongside Fred Coe, his mentor, on the prestigious CBS anthology series Playhouse 90.
His characters, Goldman once said, are “people who have a kind of courage and a kind of aristocracy of the heart,” and he created many of them on a Hermes typewriter that he bought in Malibu for $99.
In 1998, the Writers Guild of America honored him with its Laurel Award for career achievement, and Vulture in 2017 placed him 28th on its list of the best screenwriters of all time.
“If there is a train of thought that runs through my work,” he told The Washington Post in 1982, “it is a yearning, a longing to make the people real and capture their lives on the screen. I think there is nothing more fulfilling in the world than to see your view of life realized in art. For me, film is unique; it has a peculiar quality for re-creating life. I find life so wonderful, that to try to capture it in art is like trying to catch starlight.”
Heavily in debt, a desperate Goldman left his wife and six children behind in 1974 to come to Los Angeles to try to salvage his career.
Director Milos Forman had read his yet-to-be-shot script for Shoot the Moon and asked to meet with him about One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Producers had been trying for years to make Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel into a movie, and the director and star Jack Nicholson, fresh off Chinatown, were unhappy with the screenplay, written by Lawrence Hauben, that they had.
“The first thing I remember saying is I think McMurphy [Nicholson’s character] should come in and kiss the admitting officers [at the mental hospital],” Goldman recalled in a wonderful 2000 interview for the Writers Guild Foundation.
Forman hired him on the spot, and they began their collaboration the following day. “We worked at the Sunset Marquis hotel next to the pool there,” he said. “Milos worked in a maroon bathing suit with a 1964 World’s Fair T-shirt; this was 1970-something, mind you.
“I knew it was going to be good the first day. It was something I sensed. … I knew he had a movie in his head; my thing was to find a way to make it work.”
‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ Universal/Courtesy Everett Collection In 1976, Goldman’s first produced film — his first work to be published or produced in more than 15 years, in fact — won the five top Oscars: for best picture, screenplay (adapted), director, actor (Nicholson) and actress (Louise Fletcher).
Only two other pictures have accomplished that feat: Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night (1934) and Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991).
Goldman was paid $8,000 for the gig. After he was asked to return for rewrites, he requested a bonus and was told he would get another $50,000 if the film passed the $20 million mark at the box office. That happened in no time.
While doing research for Melvin and Howard (1980), Goldman spent three weeks in Utah with service station owner Melvin Dummar, who was left millions in a will by a hitchhiker, Howard Hughes, followed by a week with Dummar’s ex-wife, Linda.
“You can’t learn enough, and you must stay with it until you no longer can,” he said in 2012. “‘Research’ is an enervating word; I would call it ‘discovery,’ which, interestingly enough, is a legal term.”
Demme saw Goldman’s script and “begged to do it,” he said, after Mike Nichols had pushed to get Nicholson to star as Melvin and was fired. It wound up starring Paul Le Mat as Dummar, Jason Robards as Hughes and Mary Steenburgen, in an Oscar-winning turn, as Linda.
One of five children, Robert Goldman was born in Manhattan on Sept. 10, 1932. His father, Julian Goldman, owned a chain of retail stores, was a Broadway producer and had Franklin Roosevelt as his attorney, but he lost his fortune during the Depression.
Goldman’s parents were never married, and his dad had several kids with another woman, facts Bo did not learn until years later.
Even though the family was broke, they lived in a 12-room apartment on Park Avenue as Goldman attended the Dalton School, Phillips Exeter Academy and Princeton. He believed that his Uncle Samuel, who owned liquor stores, insurance agencies and Bronx tenements, put him “through all my fancy schools.”
Goldman worked as an assistant to legendary Broadway composer Styne and on a CBS morning show hosted by Will Rogers Jr. (the head writer there was future 60 Minutes commentator Andy Rooney), then served in the U.S. Army.
Goldman landed on Playhouse 90 as an associate producer and script editor alongside Coe, whom he called the “D.W. Griffith of dramatic television.”
They worked on live versions of Days of Wine and Roses, which would become the Jack Lemmon-Lee Remick movie, and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the basis for Apocalypse Now, and with luminaries including Foote, Arthur Penn, Delbert Mann and John Frankenheimer.
“Fred taught me all I was ever going to know about story and character,” he said.
In 1959, Goldman made it to Broadway with First Impressions, a musical comedy based on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice that starred Hermione Gingold, Polly Bergen and Farley Granger and ran for 92 performances.
For the next decade or so, Goldman fought to mount a Civil War musical he called Hurrah, Boys, Hurrah but never succeeded despite having Coe, Penn and Jerome Robbins attached at various times.
Goldman wrote for the Sunday afternoon NBC News show Update, for Theatre ’62 at NBC and for PBS while struggling to make ends meet. “I kind of bottomed out,” he said.
He took a crack at the script for the movie Starting Over but was fired, he noted, because he couldn’t make the movie about divorce funny.
Thankfully for him, Shoot the Moon became his calling card and led him to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. He said he identified with McMurphy as “an outsider, tolerated perhaps but not really equipped to cope with life as it presents itself.”
He worked on a week-to-week contract revising Bill Kerby’s original script for The Rose and wrote a screenplay for a King Kong movie before embarking on Melvin and Howard.
After Shoot the Moon was finally made, New Yorker critic Pauline Kael remarked that “the characters [in the film] aren’t taken from the movies, or from books, either. They’re torn — bleeding — from inside Bo Goldman and Alan Parker and the two stars.”
Jason Robards (left) and Paul Le Mat in 1980’s ‘Melvin and Howard’ Universal/Courtesy Everett Collection “Somebody once said about me, ‘When in doubt, Bo goes for the pain,’ ” he told The New York Times in a 1993 interview. “It’s a painful profession, with all this tension. And if you’re lucky enough to get recognition and be good at it, then this tension gets tighter and tighter between you and the studio and the director. You’re fighting for your work all the time. That’s the pain. The pain comes from that tension. And they hold all the cards. And to them it’s shoes. They’re selling shoes.”
Goldman found it hard to keep going after his eldest son, Jesse, then 22, was killed when a driver ran a stop sign and struck him in a Santa Monica crosswalk in 1981. “I didn’t work very well after that for a long time,” he said. “I don’t think I came out of it until the end of the decade.”
The ’80s saw him co-write Richard Benjamin’s Little Nikita (1988), starring Sidney Poitier and River Phoenix, and do uncredited work on the screenplays for Forman’s Ragtime (1981), Demme’s Swing Shift (1984) and Garry Marshall‘s The Flamingo Kid (1984).
He roared back with Scent of a Woman (1992) — Brest “brought him back into the world,” he said — which was adapted from a 1974 Italian movie of the same name. (Goldman said he signed on because the star of that film, Vittorio Gassman, reminded him of a brother who had hit a rough patch.)
Goldman followed with another Pacino topliner, Harold Becker’s City Hall (1996), and Brest’s Meet Joe Black (1998), starring Brad Pitt and Anthony Hopkins.
Goldman also polished the scripts for Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy (1990), Wolfgang Petersen‘s The Perfect Storm (2000) and Forman’s Goya’s Ghosts (2006) and received story credit on Beatty’s Rules Don’t Apply (2016).
Survivors include his children, Mia, Amy, Diana, Serena (Field’s wife) and Justin; seven grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. He lived in Rockport, Maine.
His wife of 63 years, Mab Ashforth, died in 2017. In the late ’60s and early ’70s, she ran a Long Island food store called Loaves and Fishes that helped the family stay afloat.
“The sweat will always show, the labor will always show,” he said about writing. “If it flows, if you let yourself go, it’s like a love affair, it’s like a moment with your children, it’s like anything that comes naturally. You say to yourself, ‘Thank God I’m alive,’ that’s what the writing process must be. But before I make it sound too glorious, I hate getting there. I love it, but to me, it’s absolute toil and turmoil to have to think about writing a movie.”
GitHub and others call for more open-source support in EU AI law
In a paper sent to EU policymakers, a group of companies, including GitHub, Hugging Face, Creative Commons, and others, are encouraging more support for the open-source development of different AI models as they consider finalizing the AI Act. EleutherAI, LAION, and Open Future also cosigned the paper.
Their list of suggestions to the European Parliament ahead of the final rules includes clearer definitions of AI components, clarifying that hobbyists and researchers working on open-source models are not commercially benefiting from AI, allowing limited real-world testing for AI projects, and setting proportional requirements for different foundation models.
Github senior policy manager Peter Cihon tells The Verge the goal of the paper is to provide guidance to lawmakers on the best way to support the development of AI. He says once other governments come out with their versions of AI laws, companies want to be heard. “As policymakers put pen to paper, we hope that they can follow the example of the EU.”
Regulations around AI have been a hot topic for many governments, with the EU among the first to begin seriously discussing proposals. But the EU’s AI Act has been criticized for being too broad in its definitions of AI technologies while still focusing too narrowly on the application layer.
“The AI Act holds promise to set a global precedent in regulating AI to address its risks while encouraging innovation,” the companies write in the paper. “By supporting the blossoming open ecosystem approach to AI, the regulation has an important opportunity to further this goal.”
The Act is meant to encompass rules for different kinds of AI, though most of the attention has been on how the proposed regulations would govern generative AI. The European Parliament passed a draft policy in June.
Some developers of generative AI models embraced the open-source ethos of sharing access to the models and allowing the larger AI community to play around with it and enable trust. Stability AI released an open-sourced version of Stable Diffusion, and Meta kinda sorta released its large language model Llama 2 as open source. Meta doesn’t share where it got its training data and also restricts who can use the model for free, so Llama 2 technically doesn’t follow open-source standards.
Open-source advocates believe AI development works better when people don’t need to pay for access to the models, and there’s more transparency in how a model is trained. But it has also caused some issues for companies creating these frameworks. OpenAI decided to stop sharing much of its research around GPT over the fear of competition and safety.
The companies that published the paper said some current proposed impacting models considered high-risk, no matter how big or small the developer is, could be detrimental to those without considerable financial largesse. For example, involving third-party auditors “is costly and not necessary to mitigate the risks associated with foundation models.”
The group also insists that sharing AI tools on open-source libraries does not fall under commercial activities, so these should not fall under regulatory measures.
Rules prohibiting testing AI models in real-world circumstances, the companies said, “will significantly impede any research and development.” They said open testing provides lessons for improving functions. Currently, AI applications cannot be tested outside of closed experiments to prevent legal issues from untested products.
Predictably, AI companies have been very vocal about what should be part of the EU’s AI Act. OpenAI lobbied EU policymakers against harsher rules around generative AI, and some of its suggestions made it to the most recent version of the act.
Twitter’s official handle is now @X
Twitter has changed its official handle from @Twitter to @X, as Engadget’s intrepid reporter Kris Holt noticed (“Oof,” he observed). If you attempt to access @Twitter, it now states: “This account is no longer active. Follow @X for updates.” All past @Twitter tweets, (or X’s, or whatever they’re now called), are henceforth available in the @X account.
That’s not all. The Twitter Blue subscription service is now called @XBlue (Blue subscription) in the main description page. That means the majority of X née Twitter’s handles have dumped the Twitter name or replaced it with X. For instance, @TwitterSupport, @TwitterDev and @TwitterAPI are now @Support, @Xdevelopers, and @API.
Twitter didn’t possess the @X handle yesterday, as it was in the hands of a user named Gene X Hwang, from a photography/video studio called Orange Photography, as Techcrunch reported. That changed as of today, though, and Hwang tweeted from a new handle “all’s well that ends well,” so hopefully he was compensated in some way for relinquishing the name.
X has been working hard to remove all vestiges of Twitter branding, including partially taking down the Twitter sign at its San Francisco HQ before police intervened to due a lack of a permit. Twitter may still have to deal with IP issues, since Microsoft has owned an Xbox related X trademark for 20 years and Meta owns another trademark covering the letter X.
July 25, 2023
The Honda E compact electric car might not get a follow-up
Honda’s E electric car went on sale in the summer of 2020 in Europe and Japan, offering those who want a cute and compact vehicle a zero-emission option. The retro-styled EV could be the only model in its line, though, because the automaker apparently has no plans to produce more cars of the same size. At the launch event of e:Ny1, Honda’s new electric SUV, Honda UK executive Rebecca Adamson told Autocar: “There won’t be more cars the size of the Honda E. I can say that confidently.”
Adamson also said that Honda chose to focus on electric SUVs, because that’s where the market demand in the UK is. “It’s a market-led product line-up. As long as that’s where the market is, we will continue to be SUV driven,” the executive said. Indeed, the car has several SUVs in its current lineup, which will soon include the e:Ny1. At a business briefing in April, Honda also said that it’s building a mid-to-large-size EV based on its e:Architecture platform that will go on sale in North America in 2025. As another clue that Honda was going to put its focus on electric SUVs, it said it was further developing its vehicle OS for use with mid-to-large-size EVs.
The Honda E was relatively well-received for its stylish looks, but it has a small battery and has a pretty short range at 137 miles. It was meant for city and suburban use only, not for long stretches of road with no charging stations in sight. As for the e:Ny1, it’s a compact SUV with a range of 256 miles and a fast charging capability that enables it to go from 10 to 80 percent in 45 minutes. It’s only the brand’s second pure EV after Honda E meant for release in the European market.
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