2026-08-08
Armenia just opened the region’s biggest AI factory. It exists because Washington signed a licence.
Firebird, a US-based AI cloud company, opened what NVIDIA calls the CIS region’s largest AI factory in Hrazdan, Armenia on Saturday. Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan attended, alongside Kazakhstan’s deputy prime minister Zhaslan Madiyev and David Allen, the US chargé d’affaires in Armenia. That guest list is the story. A US company opened a facility in a […]<br /> This stor [...]
2026-08-08
Hong Kong educators want a social media ban for under-16s. The government says it has no plans to legislate.
Hong Kong educators and a lawmaker are urging the city to ban children under 16 from social media, calling addiction “the biggest problem facing education.” At a panel discussion this week, Lilian Chan Lui Ling-yee, honorary president of the Yan Oi Association of Principals, said legislation was needed to protect the next generation. A survey […]<br /> This story continues at The Next [...]
2026-08-08
Recruiters are using AI avatars to run interviews. Now candidates are sending avatars to attend them.
Job recruiters are meeting an uncanny new kind of candidate: the AI avatar. These digital humans mirror an applicant’s voice and likeness while being something else entirely, and they are turning up in first-round interviews. Lana Kersanava, a Sydney-based recruiter, told Semafor she has encountered them over the past six months. “At the beginning, it’s like […]<br /> This story con [...]
2026-08-08
China just closed a gap in chipmaking that nobody talks about. The wafer size tells you how far it has to go.
Hwatsing Technology, China’s leading producer of chemical mechanical polishing equipment, announced a metrology system for six-inch wafers on Thursday that can be built directly into the polishing workflow. The company describes it as China’s first six-inch metrology system paired with CMP equipment. The integration is the substantive part. Rather than measuring wafers separately after proce [...]
2026-08-08
X shuts down revenue sharing on September 7. The replacement only pays for original content.
X is shutting down its revenue-sharing programme on September 7 and replacing it with a new system called the Original Content Rewards Programme. The change is designed to reward creators who post original work, not people who repost other users’ content with a caption slapped on top. Under the new rules, creators earn money based […]<br /> This story continues at The Next Web [...]
2026-08-08
American models broke into Hugging Face. A Chinese model was used to investigate.
Hugging Face chief executive Clément Delangue told CNBC that China is winning the AI race, with Chinese-developed models accounting for 41% of downloads on his platform over the past year, the largest share of any single country. China has now surpassed the US on both monthly and overall model downloads. “They’re clearly dominating on open models […]<br /> This story continues at The [...]
2026-08-08
China’s new AI bottleneck isn’t chips. It’s running out of Chinese-language training data.
China’s AI race has a new constraint, and it is not chips. The country is running out of high-quality Chinese-language training data. While US export controls on advanced semiconductors have dominated the debate over China’s AI capabilities, Chinese experts are increasingly warning that data scarcity could prove equally limiting, and unlike chips, there is no […]<br /> This story conti [...]
2026-08-08
South Africa wants to ban companies from moving stablecoins abroad. Individuals keep their allowance.
South Africa has proposed banning corporate cross-border stablecoin transactions, in draft rules released jointly by the Reserve Bank and National Treasury. It is one of the most aggressive attempts by any emerging economy to force borderless digital tokens back inside decades-old exchange control machinery. Under the proposal, South African companies could not make cross-border crypto transfers [...]