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Sources: ASML cancels shipments of some high-end chipmaking equipment to China, at US’ request, weeks before bans took effect

—  ASML canceled shipments of a limited number of devices

— Biden is cracking down on Beijing’s semiconductor industry

 

 

Bloomberg:

 

ASML Holding NV canceled shipments of some of its machines to China at the request of U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration, weeks before export bans on the high-end chipmaking equipment came into effect, people familiar with the matter said.

The Dutch manufacturer had licenses to ship three top-of-the-line deep ultraviolet lithography machines to Chinese firms until January when new Dutch restrictions take full effect. However, U.S. officials reached out to ASML to ask them to immediately halt pre-scheduled shipments of some of the machines to Chinese customers, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified because the discussions were confidential.

U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan had called the Dutch government about the matter late last year, the people said, and Dutch officials asked the U.S. to contact ASML directly about shipments of the equipment, called immersion deep ultraviolet lithography machines. Shipments of a limited number of machines were canceled following the U.S. request, they said, though it wasn’t immediately clear how many were involved. In an industry where devices typically cost $10 million, ASML commands about $180 million for its current top-end machine.

Biden is cracking down on Beijing’s attempts to create its own advanced semiconductor industry, and the U.S. and its allies are blocking access to imported technology. China’s Huawei Technologies Co. produced a smartphone to rival Apple Inc.’s iPhone last year using top-of-the-line chips made with ASML’s immersion lithography machines, Bloomberg News has reported.

ASML, Europe’s largest technology company, confirmed that the Dutch government partially revoked licenses recently for the shipment of certain lithography systems to China, affecting a small number of customers there. In a statement issued after Bloomberg’s report, the company said it’s held recent discussions with the U.S. about the scope and impact of its export control regulations, without elaborating. ASML said it doesn’t expect the latest blockade to have a “material impact on our financial outlook for 2023.”

Spokespeople for the White House National Security Council and the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs declined to comment.

Chinese imports of ASML’s lithography gear surged in 2H23

Dutch in June published new curbs that will become effective in 2024

Source: China Customs

A spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry called the U.S.’s intervention in China’s access to technology an act of “hegemony” and urged the Dutch government to “respect the spirit of the contract and world order, to safeguard the mutual benefits of the two countries.”

Chipmakers in China dropped after the news. Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp., the semiconductor company that helped Huawei produce the 7-nanometer processors for its new smartphone, fell as much as 3% in Hong Kong trading on Tuesday. Hua Hong Semiconductor Ltd. declined as much as 2.8%.

ASML’s U.S. shares fell 5.3% to $716.92 at the close Tuesday in New York. All 30 members of the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index declined, with the index as a whole dropping 3.7% as part of a broad market downturn.

This most recent crackdown — which may have hit SMIC, one of China’s top-tier chipmakers — will ultimately motivate Beijing to accelerate the development of its own technology, moving toward independence from international suppliers, according to Equita SIM analyst Gianmarco Bonacina.

U.S. pressure on the Veldhoven-based company started in 2019, when President Donald Trump’s administration pushed the Dutch government to ban sales of ASML’s top-of-the-line extreme ultraviolet lithography machines to China. ASML is the only company that makes this technology, which is used to create semiconductors that power everything from smartphones to sophisticated military gear.

Then, pushed by Biden’s administration, the Dutch government tightened export controls on China further last year, restricting the DUV machines, the second most advanced product line the company offers from Jan. 1. China has been rushing to stockpile them since.

Between July and November, China’s imports of lithography machines surged more than five times to $3.7 billion, according to Chinese customs data. China accounted for nearly half of ASML’s sales in the third quarter — compared with 24% in the previous quarter and 8% in the three months ending in March — as companies there rushed to import its machines before export controls take effect.

China now accounts for almost half of ASML’s sales

Source: ASML

 

ASML’s outgoing Chief Executive Officer Peter Wennink toldinvestors in October that the new curbs will affect as much as 15% of the firm’s sales in China.

Wennink has publicly opposed the measures and warned they might encourage China to develop competing technology. “The more you put them under pressure, the more likely it is that they will double up their efforts,” he said last year in an interview with Bloomberg News.

— With assistance from Ian King, Mackenzie Hawkins, Fran Wang, James Mayger, Sunil Kesur, and Dan Murtaugh

(Updates with sector share decline in the ninth paragraph.)

 

 

 

— Techmeme

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‘Barbie’ broke records, but studios employed fewer female directors on 2023’s top films

Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” wasn’t just the year’s biggest box office winner. It also made history as the highest-grossing movie directed by a woman.

 

Despite the film’s outsized success, major studios gave most of their biggest gigs to male filmmakers. That’s the conclusion of a new study by the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University.  It found that women comprised just 16% of directors on the 250 top-grossing films, which was down from 18% in 2022. There were modest improvements the higher up the list of money-earners you climb — female filmmakers called the shots on 14% of the 100 top films, which was up from 11% in 2022.

 

The findings come as female filmmakers like Gerwig, “Salburn’s” Emerald Fennell, “Past Lives’s” Celine Song and “Priscilla’s” Sofia Coppola released some of the year’s buzziest and most acclaimed movies; and pop divas like Beyoncé and Taylor Swift topped the box office with concert films.

 

All that critical and commercial success hasn’t changed the employment picture. Indeed, things weren’t much brighter when it came to female talent in other key roles. Overall, women accounted for 22% of all directors, writers, producers, executive producers, editors and cinematographers working on the 250 top-grossing films. That was a decline from 24% in 2022. Moreover, 75% of the top-grossing films employed 10 or more men in key behind-the-scenes roles, while just 4% employed 10 or more women.

 

In descending order women comprised 26% of producers, 24% of executive producers, 21% of editors, 17% of writers, 14% of composers and 7% of cinematographers. Of these roles, women saw gains as composers on the top 250 films, improving by 6%. The number of women employed as producers, executive producers and writers all declined, while the percentage of female editors and cinematographers was roughly even with 2022.

 

“It’s the ultimate illusion, Greta Gerwig’s well-deserved triumph belies the inequality that pervades the mainstream film industry,” Dr. Martha Lauzen, the report’s author and the center’s founder and executive director, said in a statement. “The numbers tell the story. Behind-the-scenes gender ratios in Hollywood remain dramatically skewed in favor of men.”

 

The study found that on movies with at least one woman director, more women were hired for key behind-the-scenes roles than films with exclusively male directors. When women were in the directing chair, 61% of writers, 35% of editors, 10% of cinematographers and 26% of composers were female. On films with male directors, women accounted for 9% of writers, 18% of editors, 7% of cinematographers and 11% of composers.

 

 

 

— Variety

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Ana Ofelia Murguía, Mexican star and voice of Disney’s Coco, dies at 90

Ana Ofelia Murguía, the Mexican actor best known for voicing the titular character of Disney and Pixar’s 2017 animated movie “Coco,” died Sunday, Dec. 31, BBC News reports. She was 90.

 

“Coco,” which follows a young boy as he crosses over to the land of the dead during Mexico’s Día de los Muertos, won two Academy Awards, for best animated feature and original song for “Remember Me.” Murguía voices the aging Mama Coco, whose memory of her father is reignited by her great-grandson, Miguel. At the emotional climax, Murguía’s Coco sings the film’s central song, “Remember Me,” with Miguel.

 

“Coco” was lauded for its representation of Mexican culture and celebrated for its exploration of heavy subjects, like death, through the lens of a children’s movie.

 

Mexico’s National Institute of Fine Arts and Literature paid tribute to Murguía on X/Twitter, writing that her “career was vital for the performing arts of Mexico.”

 

Murguía, who was born in Mexico in 1933, won the Golden Ariel special lifetime achievement award in 2011 at a ceremony honoring the best of Mexican cinema. The award was jointly given to writer-director Jorge Fons. Throughout her career, Murguía won best supporting actress at the Ariel awards (Mexico’s equivalent to the Oscars) in 1979, 1986 and 1996.

 

With more than 100 acting credits, Murguía got her start on an episode of the Mexican telenovela “La Tormenta.” Her most famous roles include 1994’s “The Queen of the Night,” 1992’s “Mi Querido Tom Mix” and 1979’s “Life Sentence.”

 

Murguía’s last acting role was in a 2018 episode of “José José: El Príncipe de la Canción,” a fictionalized retelling of the famed Mexican singer’s life story.

 

 

 

— Variety

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Art & Life Culture Lifestyle Perspectives

Members’ Musings: Life’s Landscapes a current annual art exhibition at Grounds for Sculpture

Members’ Musings is the 14th annual exhibition of artwork created exclusively by Members of Grounds For Sculpture, showcasing their diverse talents through a variety of artistic creations in a range of media now through Feb 25.

This year’s artists include Gay Bitter, Karen Fadool, Helen Marie Farrant, Nancie Gunkelman, Barry Hantman, Elizabeth Hume, Marcia Kanter, Gene Mydlowski, Jeffrey Sayre, Adria Sherman, Elizabeth Smith, and Faith Wight.

Members were asked to consider the consistent and newly formed patterns of their life and how these patterns develop new landscapes. “Over the last few years, we all have had to consider a new way of being.”

Within and beyond the physical or geographical, Members are free to interpret their landscapes as the place where they are, where they want to go, or forge a completely new dimension. “This call asks artists to interpret how our experiences and life choices form the patterns in life’s landscapes. Where do you see yourself? Where do you want to be? Where are you from?”

The juror and curator for this year’s juried exhibition is Jihan A. Thomas, a visual artist, ceramicist, and arts educator based in Philadelphia, Pa. She has over 16 years’ experience working within arts and cultural institutions in Philadelphia such as The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Clay Studio, The African American Museum in Philadelphia, and The Barnes Foundation and is represented in the Philadelphia in the Museum Education Division with the Pennsylvania Arts Education Association.

Thomas thinks that art can be a conduit for empowerment, self-actualization, and self-reflection. Thomas uses her art to serve her community and to amplify the power of art. She is the co-founder and art director of Boston Black Market and Art Enrichment Center, a newly opened arts center located in North Philadelphia.

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MLK Jr. Day 2024 honors the King by ‘Restoring a cultural legacy of care — A Day of Community Service’

First Steps – “Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.”
Martin Luther King Jr.

 

 

The James Kerney Campus (JKC) of Mercer County Community College plans to celebrate its annual Martin Luther King Jr. community day of service on Jan. 15, 2024 with a day of events.

 

The day’s agenda starts at 8 a.m. with registration in the JKC Front Lobby. The organizers plan to follow through about one hour later with the welcoming remarks in Kerney Hall. Then, the variety of service projects will begin.

 

At 12:30 p.m. the participants will break for lunch in the JKC cafeteria. They will resume their service agenda with a Service Celebration at 1:30 p.m. in the Trenton Hall at JKC.

SERVICE ACTIVITIES TO INCLUDE:

  • Sock Drive – Collecting men’s white crew or tube socks for clients of Task. The mission of Task is to feed those who are hungry in the Trenton Area and offer programs to encourage self-sufficiency and improve the quality of life of its patrons.
  • Utensil Wrap Up and Bag Lunches – Task –(Peanut butter and Jelly sandwiches, juice box, dessert) The mission of Task is to feed those who are hungry in the Trenton area and offer programs to encourage self-sufficiency and improve patrons’ quality of life.
  • Community Clean Up – MLK Park/ City Streets
  • Trenton Hall Garden – Building raised beds for the MCCC’s Vegetable garden. This project will provide fresh produce to supplement the colleges’ food pantry.
  • Kidspack 2.0 – the goal is to provide snack (granola bars, fruit and Juice) to the street Teams for Jan. 16th walk home.
  • Blessing Bags – Rescue Mission and Womanspace – provide hygiene bags for clients.

 

 

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Amazon Prime Video plans to start showing ads on Jan. 29, with option for customers to pay extra $2.99 per month for no ads

Movies and TV shows on Amazon’s streaming service will start getting broken up with ads in January — unless you’re willing to pony up an extra fee each month.

 

 

Chris Welch / The Verge:

 

 

—  Earlier this year, Amazon announced plans to start incorporating ads into movies and TV shows streamed from its Prime Video service, and now the company has revealed a specific date when you’ll start seeing them: it’s January 29th.

 

“This will allow us to continue investing in compelling content and keep increasing that investment over a long period of time,” the company said in an email to customers about the pending shift to “limited advertisements.”

 

“We aim to have meaningfully fewer ads than linear TV and other streaming TV providers. No action is required from you, and there is no change to the current price of your Prime membership,” the company wrote. Customers have the option of paying an additional $2.99 per month to keep avoiding advertisements.

 

The rest of the email summarizes the many benefits of a Prime subscription — no doubt an attempt to keep customers from canceling over this decision. Verge readers were none too pleased about the initial news back in September:

 

Amazon Prime currently costs $14.99 each month or $139 annually. (Prime Video can be subscribed to individually for $8.99/month.) The new charge for ad-free streaming would bring Prime to just under $18, and would push standalone Prime Video to just under $12.

 

Amazon also operates Freevee, a free, ad-sponsored streaming service. The company’s email notes that “live event content such as sports, and content offered through Amazon Freevee will continue to include advertising.”

 

The move comes as competing streaming services continue to raise subscription rates across the board and push ads upon customers on their cheapest monthly plans. Disney Plus, Hulu, Max, Netflix, and Paramount Plus all include ads on their most affordable tiers. The monthly cost of Amazon Prime itself isn’t changing, but if you want to preserve the same experience you have today starting on January 29th, you’ll end up paying more.

 

 

Read more:

Amazon Prime Video plans to start showing ads starting on January 29, with an option for customers to pay an additional $2.99 per month to avoid the ads

 

 

— Techmeme

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After testings, South Korean Internet giant Naver plans to let companies use its Rookie office helper robots to deliver meals and parcels

—  Korean tech company ready to export IT systems that direct automated workforce through the 5G cloud

 

 

Song Jung-a / Financial Times:

 

 

At a Starbucks in the futuristic headquarters of Naver, South Korea’s biggest Internet company, a line of robots is on standby to fetch coffee for the company’s employees.

 

About 100 robots on wheels — called Rookies — wander around the offices, carrying out simple tasks such as delivering meals and parcels and testing the boundaries of human interaction with machines in one of the first examples of a robot-friendly building.

PHOTO: Naver’s Rookie robots act as office helpers as they roam from floor to floor in its futuristic headquarters in South Korea © Naver

 

Naver has been experimenting with integrating service robots into office life for more than a year in the 36-storey building on the southern outskirts of Seoul. These “brainless” robots roam around the building, rolling through security gates and taking lifts, powered by Naver’s cloud system that enables them to see, recognize and operate seamlessly.

 

The company is now keen to export the cutting-edge 5G-based cloud robotics technology, with many countries in Europe as well as Japan and Saudi Arabia expressing interest in benchmarking its system.

 

“There are not many companies globally who can offer this high-quality robot service at this scale,” said Seok Sang-ok, chief executive of Naver Labs, Naver’s research and development unit, in an interview with the Financial Times.

 

“This requires a lot of seamless co-operation with many of our affiliates. Naver’s wide-ranging services, including search engines, online shopping and social networking, have allowed us to experiment with various robot technologies and services, all in-house.”

 

Like Amazon, Naver sells products online and operates a sizeable cloud business. It spends about a quarter of its annual sales on R&D with Naver Labs in charge of developing artificial intelligence, robotics and autonomous driving. Naver’s “digital twin” technology — a 3D scan of cities and buildings — also helps the robots to recognise their surroundings and find the most efficient routes. As they operate with just a normal video camera and without advanced processors and navigation tools, it costs much less to make them, Naver says.

 

“We’ve tested the robots for more than a year and now have a lot of data on human interaction with robots,” said Seok.

 

“We’ll focus on exporting IT services, as I believe our robotics technology using the cloud will become much better in two to three years.” Park Sang-soo, a researcher at the Korea Institute for Industrial Economics and Trade, said Naver faced export challenges, with the complexity of its technology meaning it was not as easy as “selling just a fleet of robots.”

 

“Naver’s robots are working well in its offices because the building was designed for that purpose, but it should consider the non-technological factors of the target countries such as their IT infrastructure and regulation to sell its platform solution,” he said.

 

South Korea has a thriving domestic robot industry, most of them being deployed in factories, as the country sees AI and robots as key to alleviating labour shortages in the face of the world’s lowest birth rate.

 

According to the International Federation of Robotics, South Korea has the highest “robot density” in the world, with 1,000 industrial robots per 10,000 manufacturing employees, compared with 399 in Japan, 322 in China, and 274 in the US. Robots are widely used in Korea’s car and semiconductor plants, but they are also becoming an increasingly visible part of day-to-day life.

 

Sales of service robots in South Korea are expected to almost double from $530mn this year to $1bn in 2026, an average annual increase of 23 per cent, according to the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information. Naver is looking to sell a combination of systems for industrial and server robots. Last month, it opened Asia’s largest data centre to accelerate its push into AI and the cloud. In the vast building in Sejong City that houses 600,000 servers, multiple robots carry heavy servers between IT warehouses and server rooms, while self-driving shuttles are in operation for employees and visitors to the campus.

PHOTO: Naver uses a variety of robots in its vast new data centre, opened in November in Sejong City © Naver

 

“We have a full portfolio [of technologies] that can cover many new use cases,” said Albert Wang, Naver Labs’ principal researcher.

 

“A lot of companies focus on single applications. We are really looking at the system levels. We have multiple types of robot systems co-operating together.”

 

Despite being a technology powerhouse, South Korea remains weak in software development, with its tech exports mostly confined to hardware such as chips, electronics and electric vehicle batteries. Naver is trying to change that picture, with exports of IT services like digital twins, robotics and AI tools, although it has so far failed to gain a foothold abroad with its powerful search engine. Earlier this year, the country won its first major high-tech export contract to the Middle East to build and operate digital twins or virtual versions of five cities including Riyadh, Medina and Mecca, for five years. It is also looking to offer tailored versions of its latest ChatGPT-like artificial intelligence model to foreign governments concerned about US data controls.

 

“We are just beginning to export our IT services, which can become the country’s new export driver,” said Seok. “We aim to become the leading exporter of the country’s IT services in the medium to long term.”

 

 

 

— Techmeme

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China struggles to contain a shadow market for business data, as most companies shun the 48 official gov. data exchanges

—  Dozens of marketplaces have sprung up since a 2020 initiative but most transactions still happen on the black market

 

 

Financial Times:

 

China is struggling to reduce the influence of a shadow market for business data, as companies shun the official exchanges that have been set up to tighten control over the sale of information.

 

Local governments across the country have established 48 exchanges, most of them coming after Beijing enshrined data as a national priority in 2020, making it a fifth pillar of production alongside land, labour, capital and entrepreneurship. Under regulatory supervision, government bodies, state-owned enterprises and private companies can buy and sell data on everything from weather patterns to city traffic flows.

 

However, industry insiders and experts say there is no clear incentive for companies to participate in these fledgling marketplaces and that most data sales are still happening off the exchanges.

 

“We are having difficulty attracting participants to enter the marketplace,” said an employee at a state-backed data exchange, adding that the majority of data sales occurred elsewhere.

 

A report published by the Shanghai Data Exchange last month forecast that by 2025, only 10 per cent of data sales would occur on exchanges.

 

The initiative has been part of broader reforms to increase authorities’ control over data after two decades when internet companies such as Tencent and Alibaba created economic fiefdoms powered by vast troves of consumer data. Since 2021, Big Tech has suffered fines for data violations and the Cyberspace Administration of China has been given stronger regulatory powers over how companies procure, manage and store data.

 

Since the 2020 move by the State Council, the country’s cabinet, to make data a factor of production, “the government has put data on a pedestal as something that can be traded”, said Xiang Li, an expert on data management in Hong Kong.

 

Beijing’s stated aim is to unleash productivity by giving more companies access to data that will enable them to deploy artificial intelligence in everything from smart manufacturing to autonomous driving. The value of data bought and sold in China is expected to increase from Rmb88bn ($12.3bn) last year to Rmb516bn ($72.5bn) by the end of the decade as the use of AI grows, according to the Shanghai Data Exchange report.

 

But experts say that the government faces an uphill battle in convincing private companies to sell their data on centralized exchanges rather than through a data broker.

 

The majority of existing data sold on these platforms comes from government bodies, including local transportation and weather bureaus, or from state-owned enterprises (SOEs), which are easier to cajole into handing over their data than private companies, said Kendra Schaefer, head of tech policy at the Beijing-based consultancy Trivium China.

 

According to a Financial Times analysis, the majority of data sold by the 700 merchants on the state-backed Guiyang Global Big Data Exchange, the country’s first such platform, are from state agencies and SOEs.

 

The government of Guizhou province in south-west China, where Guiyang is the capital, has also introduced draft regulations that compel local government bodies and SOEs to hand over their data to the exchange.

 

Companies such as China Southern Power Grid sell customers’ electricity consumption data on Guiyang’s exchange to credit agencies as a new tool to conduct credit checks, according to domestic media reports.

 

The official data exchanges are also designed to provide ways for companies, cash-strapped local governments, and state-owned enterprises to monetise data resources amid slowing economic growth.

 

The official exchanges in Guiyang, Shanghai and Beijing are offering subsidies to incentivise companies to participate.  Even with such incentives, companies are still showing reluctance owing to concerns about getting on the wrong side of data laws restricting the sale of consumer data, according to Trivium’s Schaefer.

 

“We’re at an interesting point in history. Companies are buying and selling this critical economic resource, but the laws surrounding how trading works for this resource don’t exist yet,” she said.

 

The employee at the state-backed exchange, who did not wish to be named, acknowledged that this legal uncertainty prevented it from onboarding new merchants.

“Current data laws are not specific about the legality of data exchanges,” they said.

 

The CAC did not respond to a request for comment.

 

While Beijing had hoped to court data hawkers with the promise of new revenue streams for their data, Schaefer said many companies were also deterred by the high expense of cleaning up their data in preparation for selling on a centralised exchange.

 

“Many companies have poor data management processes, so they need to clean it up before they sell it, which is costly,” she said.

 

“The state wanted companies to jump on board and say: ‘This is an amazing way to make additional revenue from a resource I generate already’,” said Schaefer.

 

“But the reality is that it’s risky and expensive for companies to stick their data on the platforms. The benefit for the companies is unclear.”

 

 

 

— Techmeme

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Hollywood unions against AI to recreate actors’ performances set precedent for future labor movements to prevent automation

—  The year was dominated by talk of what artificial intelligence could do — and what it could do better than most humans.

 

 

Angela Watercutter / Wired:

 

 

Revolt against the machines began at Swingers. And at Bob’s Big Boy, where for weeks Drew Carey picked up the tab. Members of the Writers Guild of America, (WGA), met at both Los Angeles-area diners frequently during their 148-day strike, which hinged on protecting Hollywood’s scribes from being overrun by the march of artificial intelligence.

 

Members of the WGA were just a small part of the resistance. There were others. The Screen Actors Guild—American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, or SAG-AFTRA, soon joined them on the picket lines, together forming a formidable uprising against the perceived threat of AI.

 

What each union was seeking was different. Writers wanted to make sure AI couldn’t be trained on their work or manipulate it without their say-so; actors wanted guardrails on how the technology could be used to recreate their performances. Both parties ended up setting a tone for how labor movements in the future could push back against encroaching automation.

“It is interesting that the Hollywood strikes became the highest-profile example of workers resisting AI in 2023,” says Brian Merchant, author of this year’s Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech, a book about the Luddite movement.

 

At the same time, he adds, the unions’ confrontations with studios came at a time when the boom in AI technology was causing a lot of folks to be critical of Silicon Valley and new tools primed to take their jobs. Originally, the WGA’s AI stipulations didn’t seem like they’d be hotly contested demands—then they became a central issue. “Workers and unions have been fighting automation and certain uses of AI in the workplace for years, of course, but the Writers Guild were among the first to do so after the rise of OpenAI and ChatGPT,” Merchant says. Ultimately, it was the first big face-off between humans and AI, he adds, and “the humans won.”

 

Their timing couldn’t have been better. Throughout 2023, many trades and professions, from painters to coders and beyond, found themselves vulnerable to being replaced by machine learning. IBM’s CEO estimated out loud that some 7,800 jobs at the company could be done by bots in the next five years. A Goldman Sachs report from late March estimated nearly 300,000 jobs globally could be affected by automation. Radiologists, journalists(gulp), tax preparers—everyone, it seemed, spent at least part of 2023 wondering if robots were coming for their jobs.

 

That, in turn, led to increased interest in what protections organized labor could provide workers, even as some unions, like the United Auto Workers and Teamsters, seemed to fall behind on addressing AI’s potential to encroach on jobs. In a recent piece for Harvard Business Review, MIT engineering professor Yossi Sheffi argued short-sightedness on these issues affects both workers and employers, since disengaged staffers could become part of a workforce that’s even less prepared if and when automation comes to their industry.

 

Sheffi wrote the piece in September, when both SAG and WGA were deep into their strikes. At the time, he noted that other industries should “take to heart” what was happening in Hollywood. “Resolving these issues [between the actors and writers and the studios] will take time, but at least in this case, the parties have started the process before AI has become an industry mainstay,” he wrote. “But other unions don’t seem to be facing up to the ways technological advances will change jobs.”

AS THE ADVANCE of AI marched on throughout 2023, it became clear that unions were only part of the resistance. Authors, worried that large language models had been trained using their books, filed a handful of lawsuits against OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft, and others. So did visual artists, against Stable Diffusion,

 

Midjourney, DeviantArt, and more. None of those suits has reached any kind of conclusion, and some argue copyright claims aren’t the way to stop the bots from absorbing creative work, but the suits did turn the courts into yet another battlefield, in addition to picket lines, on which humans pushed back against AI incursion.

 

By the end of 2023, governments entered the fray. In early November, US president Joe Biden signed an executive orderattempting, among other things, to curtail AI’s impact on human work and provide “federal support for workers facing labor disruptions, including from AI.” Unions, including SAG, praised the move, which came as world leaders were heading to the UK for the AI Safety Summit, where, as my colleague Will Knight wrote, they sought to contain the threats of machine learning while also harnessing its power.

 

That has always been the tricky part. From weavers to writers, lots of people use machines to improve their work. Automation helps! As AI boosters will tell you, the technology can cultivate new forms of creativity. People can write books alongside AI, create new styles of visual art, build infinite Seinfeld generators. Some Hollywood writers use the tools for basic brainstorming tasks. Fear comes in when brainstorming evolves into a studio head asking ChatGPT to write a new movie about a cat and a cop who are best friends. No scribes needed.

 

Currently, chatbots can’t whip up fully formed scripts, or novels, or Caravaggios, but the tech is evolving so quickly it feels all but imminent. When Sam Altman was briefly ousted from OpenAI in November, there was all kinds of speculation that the company was developing its tech too quickly, that its for-profit ambitions had overwhelmed its altruistic intentions. Altman is now back at the head of his company, but whether or not OpenAI is still evolving too quickly remains to be seen. But Microsoft does now have a nonvoting board seat.

 

Funny thing about that: Microsoft actually offered jobs to OpenAI staffers during that brief period when Altman was voted off the island. So did Salesforce. OpenAI employees all but told Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff to go screw, but the sentiment stood as a reminder that while AI is poised to take many jobs, it also creates jobs in AI. The “learn to code” crowd has all new ammo. Even Biden’s executive order was clear about the fact that the US government wanted to attract the best and brightest in the field.

 

But that’s job creation, not job displacement. New technologies create jobs all the time, but with AI, some of those jobs pay pennies. What’s more, AI can also ask you to train it to do your job before picking up your tools. Going forward, the likelihood that AI will displace many entry-level jobs while creating a few highly skilled gigs seems high. The biggest questions in AI right now nearly all revolve around what these machines are learning from people, whether it’s human skill or human bias.

 

 

 

— Techmeme

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Amazon faces challenges in selling cars in the US: Only 11% of its customers report buying $1k+ items, dealerships sell most new cars

—  Company aims to make online car purchases as seamless as getting everyday essentials

 

Sebastian Herrera / Wall Street Journal:

 

—  Willie Hall loves to browse and buy cars online, but he wants more options. Soon, he may turn to Amazon.com.

 

“I’m already a Prime member,” said Hall, who lives in Colorado and bought a used Fiat 500 Abarth on Carvana in 2021. “I’ve been with Amazon for God knows how long and know the way they operate.”

 

Amazon AMZN -0.01%decrease; red down pointing triangle is eager to see just how many Willie Halls there are in the U.S. The company last month said shoppers next year will be able to browse, finance and complete a purchase of Hyundai vehicles on Amazon. Shoppers will only have to visit a dealership to pick up their car; the company is also working on delivering the vehicles.

 

Car sales represent Amazon’s next bet in e-commerce dominance and come after the Covid-19 pandemic made online car purchases more popular. Amazon executives want to make buying vehicles through its website as simple as purchasing toilet paper or dog food, and the company is looking to strike broad partnerships with carmakers.

The company is set to face several challenges in expanding the program beyond a pilot phase for employees starting early next year: One is dealerships, which remain at the center of most new-car sales and depend on service revenue for profit incentives. A second will be trying to get customers who visit its website mainly for lower-priced items to turn to the platform for one of the biggest purchases of their lives. Amazon also will have to navigate different government regulations.

 

“Customers tell us it’s really hard to buy a car,” Fan Jin, Amazon’s director of vehicle sales, said in an interview. Vehicle-buying software is fragmented, with dealers using a range of software providers. Varying regulations across states also make it difficult. “It’s a process that we’ve heard time and again could use improvement, and we have an opportunity to go and prove it,” she said.

When the new service launches later next year, Amazon said shoppers will be able to complete every step of the car-buying process through its website. Only new Hyundai vehicles will be available at the start. Consumers will have different financing options, but the company said it is still working through details. Eventually, Amazon wants to expand to trade-in vehicles and used cars.

Many dealers might be loath to accept a high volume of online sales because they make a significant amount of money on service and warranty deals that customers agree to when they finance a car purchase.

 Caption – Amazon and Hyundai executives spoke during a press conference in Los Angeles last month. PHOTO credits: ROBYN BECK/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

Mike Sullivan, who runs a Hyundai dealership in Santa Monica, Calif., that is part of the pilot program, views the Amazon partnership as a positive step. Salespeople at the dealership could make half as much per sale in commission in online sales versus in person, he said, but the upside is the time spent on those sales is expected to be far less. Overall compensation could increase, he said.

During the height of the pandemic, Sullivan and many auto-sales professionals learned to embrace online sales. His dealerships sold about 300 cars online during the health crisis. Selling with Amazon could be easier, because “we now have the power of Amazon guiding these people to us,” he said.

Another issue is that Amazon will be trying to get customers to think of its platform for car-buying. The typical transaction on Amazon is under $50, according to a recent survey by Consumer Intelligence Research Partners, which studies Amazon customer habits. Only 11% of customers surveyed reported spending $1,000 or more on a single item.

“They’re great at getting you to spend $30 or $40, but it’s hard to break through to the bigger stuff,” said Josh Lowitz, co-founder of the research firm. “The bigger stuff is more infrequent, and so it’s more special for the customer.”

Jin, Amazon’s director of vehicle sales, said while many people go to Amazon for everyday purchases, the company also has an established base that makes infrequent, higher-priced purchases for items such as furniture and electronics.

Some analysts estimate that two-thirds of customers already know what they want before purchasing their vehicles, with many people conducting their research on the web. But even if Amazon customers are ready for online car purchases, signing new carmakers will be complex and will depend on how much the Hyundai partnership succeeds, said Chris Sutton, vice president of automotive retail at consumer-data analytics firm J.D. Power.

Amazon and Hyundai first partnered in 2021 through an online Hyundai showroom where viewers could “build” a car and locate inventory. Amazon said consumers responded positively to the showroom, and the company surveyed shoppers who indicated they were interested in going through the entire car-buying process with Amazon.

To entice Hyundai, Amazon struck a broad business partnership that included cloud computing, advertising and integration of its Alexa technology in the brand’s cars beginning in 2025. It is also expected to provide dealers with performance data. AWS customers who make long-term cloud commitments can pay lower rates.

The company has turned to more corporate partnerships in numerous other business segments in recent months, including a partnership with Meta Platforms’ Instagram for product sales and a logistics deal with Canadian e-commerce company Shopify.

 

 

— Techmeme