China’s latest AI model claims to be even cheaper to use than DeepSeek
[PhilNote: nice URL]
Startup Z.ai, formerly known as Zhipu, announced Monday that its new GLM-4.5 AI model would cost less than DeepSeek to use.
Like DeepSeek, the new model is also open source and can be downloaded for free.
At about half the size of DeepSeek’s model, GLM-4.5 only needs eight Nvidia H20 chips to operate, Z.ai CEO Zhang Peng told CNBC on Monday.
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Z.ai launched in 2019 and is reportedly planning an initial public offering in Greater China.
The startup has raised more than $1.5 billion from investors including Alibaba, Tencent and Qiming Venture Partners, according to PitchBook. Aramco-backed Prosperity7 Ventures as well as municipal funds from the cities of Hangzhou and Chengdu are also among Z.ai’s backers, the database showed.
In the last few weeks, several other Chinese companies have announced new, open-source AI models. During the World AI Conference in Shanghai, Tencent released the HunyuanWorld-1.0 model for generating three-dimensional scenes for game development. Last week, Alibaba announced its Qwen3-Coder model for writing computer code.
See the full story here: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/28/chinas-latest-ai-model-claims-to-be-even-cheaper-to-use-than-deepseek.html
Machine Economy Revolution: How AI and Autonomous Agents Will Transform Trading and Crypto Markets
According to Lex Sokolin, the evolution from roboadvisors and neural networks is ushering in a new machine economy where AI-driven agents can independently earn, trade, create, own, and build assets without human intervention. This emerging economic layer is poised to disrupt traditional market structures and could significantly impact cryptocurrency trading by introducing autonomous systems capable of executing complex strategies at scale. Sokolin highlights that this shift may enable machines to capture a substantial share of global GDP, leading to increased trading volumes and volatility across digital asset markets. ...
In summary, Sokolin's vision isn't just futuristic; it's a call to action for traders to position in AI cryptos, blending stock market insights with blockchain potential for diversified portfolios.
See the full story here: https://blockchain.news/flashnews/machine-economy-revolution-how-ai-and-autonomous-agents-will-transform-trading-and-crypto-markets
Quantum Scientists Have Built a New Math of Cryptography
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Now, a new paper(opens a new tab) by two cryptographers has laid out a path to quantum cryptography without those outlandish assumptions. “This paper is saying that if certain other conjectures are true, then quantum cryptography must exist,” Ma said.
Castle in the Sky
You can think of modern cryptography as a tower with three essential parts. The first part is the bedrock deep beneath the tower, which is made of hard mathematical problems. The tower itself is the second part — there you can find specific cryptographic protocols that let you send private messages, sign digital documents, cast secret ballots and more.
In between, securing those day-to-day applications to mathematical bedrock, is a foundation made of building blocks called one-way functions. They’re responsible for the asymmetry inherent in any encryption scheme. “It’s one-way because you can encrypt messages, but you can’t decrypt them,” said Mark Zhandry(opens a new tab), a cryptographer at NTT Research. ...
Alas, you won’t be able to use Khurana and Tomer’s new approach to send secret messages any time soon. Despite recent progress, quantum computing technology is not yet mature enough to put their ideas into practice. Meanwhile, other researchers have devised quantum cryptography methods that could be used sooner(opens a new tab), though more work will be needed to establish that they’re truly secure. ...
See the full story here: https://www.quantamagazine.org/quantum-scientists-have-built-a-new-math-of-cryptography-20250725/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Trump’s order to block ‘woke’ AI in government encourages tech giants to censor their chatbots
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But one of Trump's three AI executive orders signed Wednesday — the one “preventing woke AI in the federal government” — marks the first time the U.S. government has explicitly tried to shape the ideological behavior of AI. ...
“First off, there’s no such thing as woke AI,” Montoya-Boyer said. “There’s AI technology that discriminates and then there’s AI technology that actually works for all people.”
Molding the behaviors of AI large language models is challenging because of the way they’re built and the inherent randomness of what they produce. They've been trained on most of what’s on the internet, reflecting the biases of all the people who’ve posted commentary, edited a Wikipedia entry or shared images online. ...
The directive has invited comparison to China’s heavier-handed efforts to ensure that generative AI tools reflect the core values of the ruling Communist Party. Secreto said the order resembles China’s playbook in “using the power of the state to stamp out what it sees as disfavored viewpoints.” ...
The method is different, with China relying on direct regulation by auditing AI models, approving them before they are deployed and requiring them to filter out banned content such as the bloody Tiananmen Square crackdown on pro-democracy protests in 1989.
Trump’s order doesn’t call for any such filters, relying on tech companies to instead show that their technology is ideologically neutral by disclosing some of the internal policies that guide the chatbots.
See the full story here: https://apnews.com/article/trump-woke-ai-executive-order-bias-f8bc08745c1bf178f8973ac704299bf4
Trump is undermining his own ‘action plan’ for AI, experts say
- China and the United States are the only powers with competitive AI capabilities.
- Scholars believe that whichever country loses the AI race will be unable to catch up with the exponential growth of the winner.
WASHINGTON — President Trump revealed an “action plan” for artificial intelligence on Wednesday ostensibly designed to bolster the United States in its race against China for AI superiority.
But experts in the field warn the administration is sidestepping safety precautions that sustain public trust, and is ignoring the impacts of research funding cuts and visa restrictions for scientists that could hold America back. ...
The plan also calls for AI to be integrated more thoroughly across the federal government, including at the Pentagon, and includes a directive targeting “woke” bias in large language models. ...
“Our openness to ideas and people, combined with steadiness of funding, drew bright talents from around the globe and science prospered,” Jasanoff said. “That achievement is in a precarious state through the Trump administration’s unpredictable and exclusionary policies that have created an atmosphere in which young scientists are much less comfortable coming to do their science in America.”
“Why would a talented young person wish to invest in a U.S. graduate program if there is a risk their visa could be canceled overnight on poorly articulated and unprecedented grounds? It’s clear that other countries, including China, are already trying to benefit from our suddenly uncertain and chaotic research environment,” she added. “We seem to be heading into an era of self-inflicted ignorance.” ...
“His policies thus far convince me that the future of the U.S. will certainly have more AI,” Svoronos said, “but I don’t see a coherent strategy around creating more effective or more aligned AI.” ...
“It’s not clear that technology development prospers without guardrails that protect scientists and engineers against accidents, overreach and public backlash,” she added. “The U.S. biotech industry, for example, has actively sought out ethical and policy clarification because missteps could endanger entire lines of research.” ...
See the full story here: https://www.latimes.com/politics/newsletter/2025-07-24/trumps-action-plan-for-ai-has-some-glaring-omissions-experts-say
De-aged stars, cloned voices, resuscitated dead icons: AI is changing the art and business of acting
- While AI boosters celebrate new creative frontiers, critics like Justine Bateman argue digitally manipulating a performance erases what makes acting human.
- “AI is not going anywhere,” says producer Jerry Bruckheimer, who used a clone of Brad Pitt’s voice as a temporary workaround during post-production on “F1.”
- After seeing himself digitally recreated as a young Luke Skywalker, Mark Hamill says, “I don’t know the full impact AI will have but I find it very ominous.”
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A few years earlier, he had been dismayed by how a German dub of his 2015 thriller “Heist” flattened the performances, including a key scene with Robert De Niro, to match stiff, mistranslated dialogue. That frustration led Mann to co-found Flawless, an AI startup aimed at preserving the integrity of an actor’s performance across languages. As a proof of concept, he used the company’s tech to subtly reshape De Niro’s mouth movements and restore the emotional nuance of the original scene.
On “Fall,” Mann applied that same technology to clean up the profanity without reshoots, digitally modifying the actors’ mouths to match PG-13-friendly lines like “freaking” — at a fraction of the cost.
Still, Mann doesn’t see AI as a threat so much as a misunderstood tool — one that, used carefully, can support the artists it’s accused of replacing. Flawless’ DeepEditor, for example, lets directors transfer facial expressions from one take to another, even when the camera angle or lighting changes, helping actors preserve their strongest moments without breaking continuity.
“Plenty of actors I’ve worked with have had that moment where they see what’s possible and realize, ‘Oh my God, this is so much better,’” Mann says. “It frees them up, takes off the pressure and helps them do a better job. Shutting AI out is naive and a way to end up on the wrong side of history. Done right, this will make the industry grow and thrive.”
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“The allowances in the contract are pretty astounding,” Bateman says by phone, her voice tight with exasperation. “If you can picture the Teamsters allowing self-driving trucks in their contract — that’s on par with what SAG did. If you’re not making sure human roles are played by human actors, I’m not sure what the union is for.”
To Bateman, the idea that AI expands access to filmmaking — a central tenet of its utopian sales pitch — is a dangerous myth, one that obscures deeper questions about authorship and the value of creative labor.
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“Suddenly you can write a scene — a woman is walking down the street, she looks like this, she’s wearing that, it’s raining, whatever — and AI can create a video for you,” Cronenberg says. “To me, this is all exciting. It absolutely can threaten all kinds of jobs and that has to be dealt with, but every technological advance has done that and we just have to adapt and figure it out.”
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When Luke returned again in a 2022 episode of “The Book of Boba Fett,” the process was even more synthetic. Hamill was minimally involved on camera and the character was built almost entirely from digital parts: a de-aged face mapped onto a body double with an AI-generated voice delivering his lines. Hamill was credited and compensated, though the exact terms of the arrangement haven’t been made public.
The visual effect was notably improved from earlier efforts, thanks in part to a viral deepfake artist known as Shamook, whose YouTube video improving the VFX in “The Mandalorian” finale had racked up millions of views. He was soon hired by Industrial Light & Magic — a rare case of fan-made tech critique turning into a studio job. ...
See the full story here: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2025-07-24/hollywood-tomorrow-acting-jobs-ai-mark-hamill
Trump’s AI Action Plan Is a Crusade Against ‘Bias’—and Regulation
... The Office of Science and Technology Policy drafted the plan, which focuses on three key “pillars” for AI strategy: accelerating AI innovation, building infrastructure, and leading international diplomacy and security. ...
...encouraging the Federal Communications Commission to “evaluate whether state AI regulations interfere with the agency’s ability to carry out its obligations and authorities under the Communications Act of 1934.” ...
Shortly after Trump took office, Vice President JD Vance gave a speech at a major AI meeting in Paris where he laid out the new administration’s priorities. “We believe that excessive regulation of the AI sector could kill a transformative industry just as it's taking off, and we'll make every effort to encourage pro-growth AI policies,” Vance said, adding, “we feel strongly that AI must remain free from ideological bias, and that American AI will not be co-opted into a tool for authoritarian censorship.”
The AI Action Plan continues this crusade against “woke” AI, recommending that federal procurement guidelines are updated so that only AI companies that “ensure that their systems are objective and free from top-down ideological bias” are given contracts. ...
Last week, the US government reversed restrictions on certain cutting-edge Nvidia and AMD chip sales to China, apparently shifting its focus towards helping US companies compete globally.
A variety of tech, consumer protection, and civil society organizations are already speaking out with concerns about the action plan. Sarah Myers West and Amba Kak, the co-executive directors of the AI Now Institute, characterized the plan in a statement to WIRED as “written by Big Tech interests invested in advancing AI that's used on us, not by us.”
See the full story here: https://www.wired.com/story/trumps-ai-action-plan-crusade-against-bias-regulation/
Amazon Buying Startup Bee, Maker of the Pioneer AI Bracelet
Amazon has agreed to purchase AI wearables firm Bee, it was announced via a LinkedIn post by the San Francisco-based startup. Bee’s principal product is a $50 wrist device called the Pioneer that records all audio within range unless manually muted. Combined with a $19 per month subscription the device records and transcribes “daily memories” to create to-do lists and reminders based on what it hears. It can also answer questions. Bee’s website says the product is backordered due to “high demand” with shipments resuming in September. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. ...
See the full story here: https://www.etcentric.org/amazon-buying-startup-bee-maker-of-the-pioneer-ai-bracelet/
and
Amazon acquires Bee, the AI wearable that records everything you say
Sony Pictures Television Leaning Into Creator Economy With Hire Of Digital Boss Matt Ford
The International Production group has hired ex-BBC Studios exec Matt Ford in a newly-created digital role to “engage with UK content creators, create digital originals and build creator partnerships.” He will “supercharge the group’s work on creating digital-first original content for streaming, digital, social, and audio platforms,” Sony said.
Rather than working for specific Sony-owned indies, the VP, Commercial, Digital role is a centralized one and Ford is reporting into EVP, UK & Europe Matthew Justice. He will work closely with Hannah Smith (VP, Operations, SPT) and President, International Production, Wayne Garvie. ...
See the full story here: https://deadline.com/2025/07/sony-pictures-television-hires-matt-ford-digital-role-1236466982/
Silicon Valley AI Startups Are Embracing China’s Controversial ‘996’ Work Schedule
... These companies are embracing an intense schedule, first popularized in mainland China, known as “996,” or 9 am to 9 pm, six days a week. In other words, it’s a 72-hour work week.
The 996 phenomenon in China gave rise to major protests and accusations of “modern slavery,” with critics blaming the schedule for a spate of worker deaths. Despite the negative connotations overseas, US firms, many of them working on artificial intelligence, are adopting both the schedule and its nickname as they race to compete against each other—and with China. Adrian Kinnersley, a serial entrepreneur who runs both a staffing and recruitment company and an employment compliance startup, has been surprised by how many startups are going all-in on 996. “It's becoming increasingly common,” he says. “We have multiple clients where a prerequisite for screening candidates before they go for an interview is whether they are prepared to work 996.” ...
It echoes Elon Musk’s "extremely hardcore" ultimatum to X employees, which encouraged them to work punishing hours. ...
Companies aren’t having trouble finding willing employees, and some frame it as core to their work culture. ...
See the full story here: https://www.wired.com/story/silicon-valley-china-996-work-schedule/
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