Bytes: What’s new in tech
Asking AI developers to pay up
Several major publishers are formalizing a coalition against AI companies, said Ben Smith in Semafor. Barry Diller’s IAC and two industry pillars, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, are gathering allies that “could lead a lawsuit as well as press for legislative action.” Determined not to repeat “the mistakes of the social media era, in which they gave away their content for free,” publishers want tech companies to pay “billions, not millions” to license content used to train their AI models. The “most immediate threat is a shift at Google from sending traffic to web pages to simply answering users’ questions with a chatbot.” Tech executives say their AI systems don’t yet have any profits to share.
FTX’s plan to buy an island nation
The brother of failed crypto tycoon Sam Bankman-Fried allegedly wanted to buy a tiny, impoverished Pacific island nation to establish an emergency base in case of an apocalyptic event, said Hannah Miller in Bloomberg. A lawsuit filed last week against the failed crypto firm FTX said that the company’s nonprofit arm pursued “dystopian” projects. One of them, apparently, was floated by Gabe Bankman-Fried—the younger brother of FTX founder Sam—and involved purchasing the island nation of Nauru, where the leaders of the “effective altruism movement” would live in a bunker and build a lab devoted to human genetic enhancement. Nauru has a population of about 12,000 and is located roughly 2,100 miles from Australia. The memo noted that “probably there are other things it’s useful to do with a sovereign country, too.”
Delays for key Arizona chip plant
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. blamed a lack of skilled workers for its decision to delay the production start dates of its new Arizona plants until 2025, said Nicholas Gordon in Fortune. In December, the world’s biggest chip company announced it was doubling its investment in Arizona, where it broke ground on a new plant in 2021. But TSMC still “needs to hire thousands of workers” to operate its plants. The company has grown so worried about the American workforce that it is “currently negotiating with the U.S. government to offer accelerated non-immigrant visas to about 500 Taiwanese engineers,” whom it would fly in “to train the local workers.” TSMC is “known for a tough and domineering working culture,” where 12-hour days and weekend shifts are “common.”