Bloomberg found that Huawei was the sole funder of a research competition that has awarded millions of dollars since 2022 and attracted hundreds of proposals from scientists. Some of these scientists are at top US universities that have banned researchers from working with the company.

What’s the big deal? The fear is that this research could lead to innovations that give China a leg up with regard to both defense contracting and commercial interests, according to Kevin Wolf, a partner at the business-focused law firm Akin who specializes in export controls. Optica, the foundation behind all of this, has posted online that it is interested in “high-sensitivity optical sensors and detectors," among other categories of research.

“It’s a bad look for a prestigious research foundation to be anonymously accepting money from a Chinese company that raises so many national security concerns for the US government,” said James Mulvenon, a defense contractor who has worked on research security issues and co-authored several books on industrial espionage.

It’s worth noting that this money funneling operation doesn’t look to be illegal, as research intended for publication doesn’t fall under the purview of the ban. Huawei operates similar competitions in other parts of the world, though openly. People who participated in the US-based research competition didn’t even know that Huawei was involved, believing the money to come from Optica. The competition awards $1 million per year and Optica didn’t give any indication that Huawei was supplying the cash.

A Huawei spokesperson told Bloomberg that the company and the Optica Foundation created the competition to support global research and promote academic communication, saying that it remained anonymous to keep from being seen as a promotion of some kind. Optica’s CEO, Liz Rogan, said in a statement that many foundation donors “prefer to remain anonymous” and that “there is nothing unusual about this practice.” She also said that the entire board knew about Huawei’s involvement and that everyone signed off on it. Bloomberg did note that the Huawei-backed competition was the only one on Optica’s website that didn’t list individual and corporate financial sponsors.

Huawei has been wrapped in a web of US restrictions these past several years. We can’t buy the vast majority of Huawei products in America, as the company’s been effectively banned. This all started in 2019 when President Trump signed an executive order that banned the sale and use of telecom equipment that posed “unacceptable" risks to national security. At the time, Trump said that “foreign adversaries” were exploiting security holes that would eventually lead to "potentially catastrophic effects.” Wait, Trump used the words “potentially catastrophic effects?” Wild.

To that end, the company has faced numerous claims that it installs backdoors in networks for the purpose of data theft, though there’s no proof of actual theft and the company denies the accusations. Huawei has also been accused of employing Chinese spies to influence an investigation and documents seem to indicate Huawei’s involvement in China’s surveillance efforts.

Some expected President Biden to reverse Trump’s executive order when it expired in 2021, but he headed in the opposite direction. Not only does the order stand, but Biden signed a law that blocked Huawei from obtaining an FCC license and he banned American investments in China’s high tech industries. We aren’t cozying up to China anytime soon, so Huawei will continue to be persona non grata on this side of the pond (the company still does booming business in Europe.)

The post Huawei has been secretly funding research in America after being blacklisted appeared first on Best News.

In addition to those non-binding targets, the White House is meeting on Wednesday with stakeholders from the commercial vehicle, shipping and infrastructure industries to help execute its agenda. The roundtable is designed to advance the Biden Administration’s goal of “supercharging the buildout of the infrastructure necessary to make a zero-emissions freight ecosystem a reality in the United States.”

Unsurprisingly, the freight industry uses a lot of energy and produces a lot of pollution to match. Bloomberg notes that the transportation sector emits about 29 percent of US greenhouse gas emissions, and freight (including shipping, trucking and trains) makes up about a third of that figure. So, you can ballpark that the American freight industry is responsible for roughly 10 percent of the country’s carbon emissions.

As part of the election-year rollout, the Biden Administration plans to ask the public to comment on charging infrastructure for heavy-duty vehicles, signaling that the specifics of the plan aren’t yet finalized. The White House wants to avoid a fragmented industrial EV charging system without a universally agreed-upon standard. The industry has seemingly settled on Tesla’s NACS as the de facto choice in the lightweight consumer sector.

Alongside the newly announced industrial goals, the Biden Administration’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is opening up about $1 billion in Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) funding to replace Class 6 and 7 vehicles (school buses, garbage trucks and delivery trucks) with electric equivalents.

The IRA requires that at least $400 million of that funding goes to local communities hit the hardest by industrial pollution. The White House says 72 million Americans live near truck freight routes and bear the brunt of their short-term output. Sadly but unsurprisingly (given the nation’s history), people of color and those from low-income households are most likely to be heavily affected by high environmental toxin levels.

The White House’s goals are admirable, given the urgency of the global climate crisis and the freight industry’s role. However, one significant problem remains: These are voluntary, non-binding resolutions that could — and, given public comments, almost certainly would — be undone by a second Trump Administration, should the serial napper return to office next year. As with many other aspects of the nation’s and world’s future, US voters will decide the outcome this November.

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Topics

The US TikTok ban is signed into law, what happens now? – 0:57

Devindra and Cherlynn’s take on whether bad product reviews hurt tech companies – 20:42

Meta opening QuestOS to third party hardware developers – 31:39

Apple ‘Let Loose’ virtual event scheduled for May 5 – 33:48

Leading AI companies pledge to keep kids safe (though harm is already evident) – 41:48

Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses add multimodal AI – 43:58

X is allegedly working on a smart TV app – 47:01

Working on – 48:02

Pop culture picks – 56:29

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Hosts: Cherlynn Low and Devindra Hardawar Guest: Karissa BellProducer: Ben Ellman Music: Dale North and Terrence O’Brien

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The memo directs NASA to work with the Departments of Commerce, Defense, State, and Transportation to plan a strategy to put LTC into practice by December 31, 2026. International cooperation will also play a role, especially with signees of the Artemis Accords. Established in 2020, they’re a set of common principles between a growing list of (currently) 37 countries that govern space exploration and operating principles. China and Russia are not part of that group.

“As NASA, private companies, and space agencies around the world launch missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond, it’s important that we establish celestial time standards for safety and accuracy,” OSTP Deputy Director for National Security Steve Welby wrote in a White House press release. “A consistent definition of time among operators in space is critical to successful space situational awareness capabilities, navigation, and communications, all of which are foundational to enable interoperability across the U.S. government and with international partners.”

Einstein’s theories of relativity dictate that time changes relative to speed and gravity. Given the Moon’s weaker gravity (and movement differences between it and Earth), time moves slightly faster there. So an Earth-based clock on the lunar surface would appear to gain an average of 58.7 microseconds per Earth day. As the US and other countries plan Moon missions to research, explore and (eventually) build bases for permanent residence, using a single standard will help them synchronize technology and missions requiring precise timing.

“The same clock that we have on Earth would move at a different rate on the moon,” NASA space communications and navigation chief Kevin Coggins told Reuters. “Think of the atomic clocks at the U.S. Naval Observatory (in Washington). They’re the heartbeat of the nation, synchronizing everything. You’re going to want a heartbeat on the moon.”

The White House wants LTC to coordinate with Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), the standard by which all of Earth’s time zones are measured. Its memo says it wants the new time zone to enable accurate navigation and scientific endeavors. It also wants LTC to maintain resilience if it loses contact with Earth while providing scalability for space environments “beyond the Earth-Moon system.”

NASA’s Artemis program aims to send crewed missions back to the Moon for the first time since the Apollo missions of the 1960s and 70s. The space agency said in January that Artemis 2, which will fly around the Moon with four people onboard, is now set for a September 2025 launch. Artemis 3, which plans to put humans back on the Moon’s surface, is now scheduled for 2026.

In addition to the US, China aims to put astronauts on the Moon before 2030 as the world’s two foremost global superpowers take their race to space. Although no other countries have announced crewed missions to the lunar surface, India (which put a module and rover on the Moon’s South Pole last year), Russia (its mission around the same time didn’t go so well), the United Arab Emirates, Japan, South Korea and private companies have all demonstrated lunar ambitions in recent years.

In addition to enabling further scientific exploration, technological establishment and resource mining, the Moon could serve as a critical stop on the way to Mars. It could test technologies and provide fuel and supply needs for eventual human missions to the Red Planet.

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About 60 billion yuan ($8 billion) is expected to come from China's finance ministry. The other contributors aren't yet known, though past backers included China Telecom and China National Tobacco Corporation. Much of the fund itself will specifically focus on creating instruments for chip manufacturing.

The news comes only a few days after Huawei, a Chinese electronics company, announced its new smartphone, the Mate 60 Pro, complete with homegrown chips. Huawei partnered with chipmaker Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC) to create a new Kirin 9000s chip, according to a report from analysis firm TechInsights. SMIC's high-level 7nm technology appears to provide the Mate 60 Pro with download speeds beyond those seen in typical 5G phones.

The entire Mate 60 Pro announcement and subsequent proof of its power stands in direct contrast to the efforts made by the US, Japan and the Netherlands to restrict China's chip access and limit their production abilities. As recently as August, President Biden signed an executive order further limiting investments in Chinese firms working with technology like semiconductors. Previous restrictions have specifically targeted Huawei, including a January ban on licenses for exporting US tech to the Chinese company.

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Republican state attorneys that were against the new proposed policies said that the call for new inspections could overwhelm state regulators. The attorney generals of Arkansas, Iowa and Missouri all sued the EPA – claiming the agency had no authority to set these requirements. This led to the EPA’s proposal being temporarily blocked back in June. While it's unclear if any cybersecurity regulations will be put in motion to protect the public moving forward, the EPA said it plans to continue working with the industry to “lower cybersecurity risks to clean and safe water.“ It encourages all states to “voluntarily review” the cybersecurity of their water systems, nothing that any proactive actions might curb the potential public health impacts if a hack were to take place.Ever since the highly publicized Solarwinds hack in 2020 that exposed government records and the 2021 Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack that temporarily shut down operations for the oil pipeline system, it's been abundantly clear that government entities and public agencies are hackable and prime targets for bad actors. The Biden administration has initiated a national strategy focused on public-private alliances to shift the burden of cybersecurity onto the organizations that are “best-positioned to reduce risks for all of us.”

The post The EPA won't force water utilities to inspect their cyber defenses appeared first on Best News.

The initiative is a crucial step towards achieving President Biden’s goal of reaching net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. But it is also expected to bolster the economy, creating thousands of jobs for the states involved in the project. Collectively, the hubs will create more than 300,000 direct jobs.

The seven hubs named include: the Mid-Atlantic Hydrogen Hub, Appalachian Hydrogen Hub, the California Hydrogen Hub, the Gulf Coast Hydrogen Hub, Heartland Hydrogen Hub, Midwest Hydrogen Hub and the Pacific Northwest Hydrogen Hub. Some regions that applied for the hub program together through the Department of Energy will require cross-state collaboration. For example, the Mid-Atlantic Hydrogen Hub is made up of Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey.

The Biden administration said that it expects two-thirds of total project investments will be associated with green (electrolysis based) production. The hydrogen hubs are expected to eliminate 25 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions through its projects—which the Biden administration likens to the annual emissions of over 5.5 million gasoline-powered cars. The hubs will focus on offsetting and creating alternatives to heavy-duty transportation, chemical, steel and cement manufacturing.

This program is just one part of the Biden administration's efforts to slow climate change and make a lasting impact on the nation’s carbon footprint. The White House has previously pushed similar initiatives, including an executive order that requires half of all new vehicles sold in 2030 to have some form of zero-emissions driving and its plans to allocate billions in funding to decarbonize the country’s power grid by 2035.

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The administration hopes to use these hubs to “catalyze investment in technologies critical to economic growth, national security and job creation” with an end goal of helping “communities across the country become centers of innovation critical to American competitiveness.” Additionally, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo told reporters that the program seeks to diversify the country’s tech interests, moving away from traditional hubs like Silicon Valley, Seattle and Boston, as reported by Yahoo.

To that end, these hubs will focus on everything under the sun, from artificial intelligence, biotech, clean energy, semiconductors, quantum computing and more. Examples include a hub in Washington state that’s developing new materials for next-gen fuel-efficient aircraft, a Wisconsin program seeking to make advancements in personalized medicine and a New York organization researching new battery technologies, among 28 others. It’s worth noting that many of these hubs are in small or medium-sized cities, with Raimondo saying that “people shouldn't have to move to get a good job.”

There’s one caveat. Snagging one of these coveted hub designations doesn’t guarantee federal funding. The Commerce Department will follow each program throughout the next year, with funding to follow. Raimondo says that five to 10 hubs will receive up to $75 million. With 31 hub areas and just $500 million to disperse, that could leave many locations in the financial cold.

Additionally, the CHIPS and Science Act is a robust piece of legislation that drops more than $280 billion into various sectors, so these hubs represent less than 1/500th of the allocated funding set aside by the bill. There’s $52 billion in tax credits and funding for US chipmakers to expand domestic production, $7 billion for clean hydrogen and $1.5 billion to “boost US leadership in wireless technologies and their supply chains.” The bill also sets aside $10 billion to “invest in regional innovation and technology” which is the exact point of these hubs, so maybe more money is coming down the line.

Biden has asked Congress for an additional $4 billion to fund even more regional tech hubs, but, well, that would be part of the full-year budget and you may have noticed that the House still lacks a speaker with a government shutdown on the horizon.

The post Biden administration designates 31 new 'tech hubs' to encourage innovation appeared first on Best News.

“The President several months ago directed his team to pull every lever,” a senior administration official told reporters on a recent press call. “That’s what this order does, bringing the power of the federal government to bear in a wide range of areas to manage AI’s risk and harness its benefits … It stands up for consumers and workers, promotes innovation and competition, advances American leadership around the world and like all executive orders, this one has the force of law.”

These actions will be introduced over the next year with smaller safety and security changes happening in around 90 days and with more involved reporting and data transparency schemes requiring nine to 12 months to fully deploy. The administration is also creating an “AI council,” chaired by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Bruce Reed, who will meet with federal agency heads to ensure that the actions are being executed on schedule.

Public safety

“In response to the President’s leadership on the subject, 15 major American technology companies have begun their voluntary commitments to ensure that AI technology is safe, secure and trustworthy before releasing it to the public,” the senior administration official said. “That is not enough.”

The EO directs the establishment of new standards for AI safety and security, including reporting requirements for developers whose foundation models might impact national or economic security. Those requirements will also apply in developing AI tools to autonomously implement security fixes on critical software infrastructure.

By leveraging the Defense Production Act, this EO will “require that companies developing any foundation model that poses a serious risk to national security, national economic security, or national public health and safety must notify the federal government when training the model, and must share the results of all red-team safety tests,” per a White House press release. That information must be shared prior to the model being made available to to the public, which could help reduce the rate at which companies unleash half-baked and potentially deadly machine learning products.

In addition to the sharing of red team test results, the EO also requires disclosure of the system’s training runs (essentially, its iterative development history). “What that does is that creates a space prior to the release… to verify that the system is safe and secure,” officials said.

Administration officials were quick to point out that this reporting requirement will not impact any AI models currently available on the market, nor will it impact independent or small- to medium-size AI companies moving forward, as the threshold for enforcement is quite high. It’s geared specifically for the next generation of AI systems that the likes of Google, Meta and OpenAI are already working on with enforcement on models starting at 10^26 petaflops, a capacity currently beyond the limits of existing AI models. “This is not going to catch AI systems trained by graduate students, or even professors,” the administration official said.

What’s more, the EO will encourage the Departments of Energy and Homeland Security to address AI threats “to critical infrastructure, as well as chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and cybersecurity risks,” per the release. “Agencies that fund life-science projects will establish these standards as a condition of federal funding, creating powerful incentives to ensure appropriate screening and manage risks potentially made worse by AI.” In short, any developers found in violation of the EO can likely expect a prompt and unpleasant visit from the DoE, FDA, EPA or other applicable regulatory agency, regardless of their AI model’s age or processing speed.

In an effort to proactively address the decrepit state of America’s digital infrastructure, the order also seeks to establish a cybersecurity program, based loosely on the administration’s existing AI Cyber Challenge, to develop AI tools that can autonomously root out and shore up security vulnerabilities in critical software infrastructure. It remains to be seen whether those systems will be able to address the concerns of misbehaving models that SEC head Gary Gensler recently raised.

AI watermarking and cryptographic validation

We’re already seeing the normalization of deepfake trickery and AI-empowered disinformation on the campaign trail. So, the White House is taking steps to ensure that the public can trust the text, audio and video content that it publishes on its official channels. The public must be able to easily validate whether the content they see is AI-generated or not, argued White House officials on the press call.

The Department of Commerce is in charge of the latter effort and is expected to work closely with existing industry advocacy groups like the C2PA and its sister organization, the CAI, to develop and implement a watermarking system for federal agencies. “We aim to support and facilitate and help standardize that work [by the C2PA],” administration officials said. “We see ourselves as plugging into that ecosystem.”

Officials further explained that the government is supporting the underlying technical standards and practices that will lead to digital watermarking’ wider adoption — similar to the work it did around developing the HTTPS ecosystem and in getting both developers and the public on-board with it. This will help federal officials achieve their other goal of ensuring that the government’s official messaging can be relied upon.

Civil rights and consumer protections

The first Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights that the White House released last October directed agencies to “combat algorithmic discrimination while enforcing existing authorities to protect people’s rights and safety,” the administration official said. “But there’s more to do.”

The new EO will require guidance be extended to “landlords, federal benefits programs and federal contractors” to prevent AI systems from exacerbating discrimination within their spheres of influence. It will also direct the Department of Justice to develop best practices for investigating and prosecuting civil rights violations related to AI, as well as, according to the announcement, “the use of AI in sentencing, parole and probation, pretrial release and detention, risk assessments, surveillance, crime forecasting and predictive policing, and forensic analysis.”

Additionally, the EO calls for prioritizing federal support to accelerate development of privacy-preserving techniques that would enable future large language models to be trained on large datasets without the current risk of leaking personal details that those datasets might contain. These solutions could include “cryptographic tools that preserve individuals’ privacy,” developed with assistance from the Research Coordination Network and National Science Foundation. The executive order also reiterates its calls for bipartisan legislation from Congress addressing the broader privacy issues that AI systems present for consumers.

In terms of healthcare, the EO states that the Department of Health and Human Services will establish a safety program that tracks and remedies unsafe, AI-based medical practices. Educators will also see support from the federal government in using AI-based educational tools like personalized chatbot tutoring.

Worker protections

The Biden administration concedes that while the AI revolution is a decided boon for business, its capabilities make it a threat to worker security through job displacement and intrusive workplace surveillance. The EO seeks to address these issues with “the development of principles and employer best practices that mitigate the harms and maximize the benefit of AI for workers,” an administration official said. “We encourage federal agencies to adopt these guidelines in the administration of their programs.”

The EO will also direct the Department of Labor and the Council of Economic Advisors to both study how AI might impact the labor market and how the federal government might better support workers “facing labor disruption” moving forward. Administration officials also pointed to the potential benefits that AI might bring to the federal bureaucracy including cutting costs, and increasing cybersecurity efficacy. “There’s a lot of opportunity here, but we have to to ensure the responsible government development and deployment of AI,” an administration official said.

To that end, the administration is launching on Monday a new federal jobs portal, AI.gov, which will offer information and guidance on available fellowship programs for folks looking for work with the federal government. “We’re trying to get more AI talent across the board,” an administration official said. “Programs like the US Digital Service, the Presidential Innovation Fellowship and USA jobs — doing as much as we can to get talent in the door.” The White House is also looking to expand existing immigration rules to streamline visa criteria, interviews and reviews for folks trying to move to and work in the US in these advanced industries.

The White House reportedly did not brief the industry on this particular swath of radical policy changes, though administration officials did note that they had already been collaborating extensively with AI companies on many of these issues. The Senate held its second AI Insight Forum event last week on Capitol Hill, while Vice President Kamala Harris is scheduled to speak at the UK Summit on AI Safety, hosted by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on Tuesday.

At an event hosted by The Washington Post on Thursday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) was already arguing that the executive order did not go far enough and could not be considered an effective replacement for congressional action, which to date, has been slow in coming.

“There’s probably a limit to what you can do by executive order,” Schumer told WaPo, “They [the Biden Administration] are concerned, and they’re doing a lot regulatorily, but everyone admits the only real answer is legislative.”

The post Sweeping White House executive order takes aim at AI's toughest challenges appeared first on Best News.

"The U.S. government has a significant role to play in setting the standards and developing the tools we need to mitigate the risks and harness the immense potential of artificial intelligence," Raimondo said in a statement.

Biden’s October executive order was far-reaching, so this consortium will focus on developing guidelines for “red-teaming, capability evaluations, risk management, safety and security, and watermarking synthetic content.”

Red-teaming is a cybersecurity term that dates back to the Cold War. It refers to simulations in which the enemy was called the “red team.” In this case, the enemy would be an AI hellbent on behaving badly. Those engaged in this practice will try to trick the AI into doing bad things, like exposing credit card numbers, via prompt hacking. Once people know how to break the system, they can build better protections.

Watermarking synthetic content is another important aspect of Biden’s original order. Consortium members will develop guidelines and actions to ensure that users can easily identify AI-generated materials. This will hopefully decrease deepfake trickery and AI-enhanced misinformation. Digital watermarking has yet to be widely adopted, though this program will “facilitate and help standardize” underlying technical specifications behind the practice.

The consortium’s work is just beginning, though the Commerce Department says it represents the largest collection of testing and evaluation teams in the world. Biden’s executive order and this affiliated consortium are pretty much all we’ve got for now. Congress keeps failing to pass meaningful AI legislation of any kind.

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