Latest news with #META.O
Reuters
01-04-2025
- Business
- Reuters
US Senate committee reviews Meta efforts to gain access to Chinese market
WASHINGTON, April 1 (Reuters) - A U.S. Senate investigative subcommittee on Tuesday is opening a review into Facebook-parent Meta Platforms' (META.O), opens new tab efforts to gain access to the Chinese market and is seeking documents from the company. Senator Ron Johnson, who chairs the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, joined by Senator Richard Blumenthal, the top Democrat, and Senator Josh Hawley, asked Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg about allegations it worked to build censorship tools for the Chinese Communist Party as part of its efforts to gain entry in the Chinese market, according to a letter seen but Reuters. The senators want Meta to disclose extensive records including all Meta communications or records of meetings with Chinese government officials since 2014 by April 21.
Reuters
26-03-2025
- Business
- Reuters
Anthropic wins early round in music publishers' AI copyright case
March 25 (Reuters) - Artificial intelligence company Anthropic convinced a California federal judge on Tuesday to reject a preliminary bid to block it from using lyrics owned by Universal Music Group ( opens new tab and other music publishers to train its AI-powered chatbot Claude. U.S. District Judge Eumi Lee said that the publishers' request was too broad and that they failed to show Anthropic's conduct caused them "irreparable harm." Spokespeople for the labels did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the decision. An Anthropic spokesperson said the company was pleased that the court did not grant the publishers' "disruptive and amorphous request." Music publishers UMG, Concord and ABKCO sued Anthropic in 2023, alleging that it infringed their copyrights in lyrics from at least 500 songs by musicians including Beyoncé, the Rolling Stones and the Beach Boys. The publishers claimed Anthropic used the lyrics without permission to train Claude to respond to human prompts. The lawsuit is one of several arguing that copyrighted works by authors, news outlets, visual artists and others have been misused without consent or payment to develop AI products. Tech companies including OpenAI, Microsoft (MSFT.O), opens new tab and Meta Platforms (META.O), opens new tab have said that their systems make "fair use" of copyrighted material under U.S. copyright law by studying it to learn to create new, transformative content. Fair use is likely to be the determinative question in the lawsuits, though Lee's opinion did not specifically address the issue. Lee rejected the publishers' argument that Anthropic's use of their lyrics caused them irreparable harm by diminishing their licensing market. "Publishers are essentially asking the Court to define the contours of a licensing market for AI training where the threshold question of fair use remains unsettled," Lee said.
Reuters
18-02-2025
- Business
- Reuters
Entergy beats quarterly profit estimates on lower electricity production costs
Feb 18 (Reuters) - Electric utility Entergy (ETR.N), opens new tab beat fourth-quarter profit estimates on Tuesday, benefiting from lower operating expenses and higher electricity demand. Shares of the company rose 1.7% in premarket trading. Power consumption is set to reach record highs in 2024, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) had said in December. Utilities are benefiting from rising electricity usage, including from energy-guzzling data centers needed to scale Big Tech's artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. In December, Entergy Louisiana said it plans to invest in electricity generation and transmission to support the region and Meta Platform's (META.O), opens new tab $10 billion data center in Richland Parish. Entergy's operating expenses for the fourth quarter ended December 31 came in at $2.07 billion, compared with $2.47 billion a year ago. For the quarter, Entergy's total retail sales were at 29,497 gigawatt hours (GWh), higher than 27,320 GWh a year ago. The company posted a quarterly adjusted profit of 66 cents per share, above analysts' average estimate of 64 cents per share, according to data compiled by LSEG. The New Orleans, Louisiana-based Entergy provides electricity to nearly 3 million customers across Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas. It forecast its full-year 2025 profit between $3.75 per share and $3.95 per share. Analysts had estimated a profit of $3.91 per share.
Reuters
07-02-2025
- Business
- Reuters
AI chip firm Cerebras partners with France's Mistral, claims speed record
Feb 6 (Reuters) - Cerebras Systems, an artificial intelligence chip firm backed by UAE tech conglomerate G42, said on Thursday it has partnered with France's Mistral and has helped the European AI player achieve a speed record. Mistral, a maker of open-source AI technology, is aiming to challenge fellow open-source contenders Meta Platforms (META.O), opens new tab and China's DeepSeek, which rocked global markets late last month with claims of cutting-edge performance at low cost. All three compete with ChatGPT creator OpenAI. On Thursday, Mistral released an app called Le Chat that it said can respond to user questions with 1,000 words per second. Cerebras said it is providing the computer power behind those results, which it claimed makes Mistral the world's fastest AI assistant, ahead of both OpenAI and DeepSeek. Silicon Valley-based Cerebras, which has filed for an initial public offering that is delayed while U.S. officials review G42's involvement with the firm, is one of the few challengers to Nvidia (NVDA.O), opens new tab for training AI models. But the partnership with Mistral on Thursday is for serving an app based on its model to users, a step called "inference" in the AI industry. As rivals have closed in on matching OpenAI's models, the speed of delivering answers to users has become more of a priority, said Cerebras Chief Executive Andrew Feldman. "You want better answers. And to get better answers, you need more compute at inference time," Feldman told Reuters. "It was our first announced major win at a tier-one model maker, and so we're really proud of that."
USA Today
31-01-2025
- USA Today
Meta's WhatsApp says Israeli spyware company Paragon targeted users
Meta's WhatsApp says Israeli spyware company Paragon targeted users Show Caption Hide Caption WhatsApp, OpenAI team for new talk, text ChatGPT feature OpenAI introduced a new WhatsApp feature, 1-800-CHATGPT, that allows users to talk to and text ChatGPT. An official with Meta Platforms' META.O popular WhatsApp chat service said Israeli spyware company Paragon Solutions had targeted scores of its users, including journalists and members of civil society. The official said on Friday that WhatsApp had sent Paragon a cease-and-desist letter following the hack. In a statement, WhatsApp said the company "will continue to protect people's ability to communicate privately." Paragon declined to comment. The WhatsApp official told Reuters it had detected an effort to hack approximately 90 users. The official declined to say who, specifically, was targeted. But he said those targeted were based in more than two dozen countries, including several people in Europe. He said WhatsApp users were sent malicious electronic documents that required no user interaction to compromise their targets, a so-called zero-click hack that is considered particularly stealthy. The official said WhatsApp had since disrupted the hacking effort and was referring targets to Canadian internet watchdog group Citizen Lab. The official declined to discuss how it determined that Paragon was responsible for the hack. He said law enforcement and industry partners had been informed, but declined to give details. The FBI did not immediately return a message seeking comment. Citizen Lab researcher John Scott-Railton said the discovery of Paragon spyware targeting WhatsApp users "is a reminder that mercenary spyware continues to proliferate and as it does, so we continue to see familiar patterns of problematic use." Privacy tips: Which apps offer encrypted messaging? How to switch and what to know after feds' warning Spyware merchants such as Paragon sell high-end surveillance software to government clients and typically pitch their services as critical to fighting crime and protecting national security. But such spy tools have repeatedly been discovered on the phones of journalists, activists, opposition politicians, and at least 50 U.S. officials, raising concerns over the unchecked proliferation of the technology. Paragon - which was reportedly acquired by Florida-based investment group AE Industrial Partners last month - has tried to position itself publicly as one of the industry's more responsible players. Its website advertises "ethically based tools, teams, and insights to disrupt intractable threats," and media reports citing people familiar with the company say Paragon only sells to governments in stable democratic countries. Natalia Krapiva, senior tech-legal counsel at the advocacy group Access Now, said Paragon had the reputation of being a better spyware company, "but WhatsApp's recent revelations suggest otherwise." "This is not just a question of some bad apples — these types of abuses (are) a feature of the commercial spyware industry." AE did not immediately return a message seeking comment. Reporting by Raphael Satter in Washington and James Pearson in London; Editing by Jan Harvey and Rod Nickel
