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China Raises Tariffs on US Imports To 125% (%2025/%04/%11 %08:%Apr)China responded to President Trump's tariffs on Friday, raising its own tariffs on American goods to 125%, from 84%. The New York Times: The announcement by China's State Council came after Trump administration officials clarified on Thursday that China was now facing a minimum tariff rate of 145% on all exports to United States. China said its new tariffs will take effect on Saturday. China said it plans to ignore any further increases announced by Washington from here. Bloomberg: In a statement following China's retaliatory move, the Commerce Ministry said Washington's repeated use of excessively high tariffs has become little more than a numbers game -- economically meaningless and revealing its use of tariffs as a tool for bullying and coercion. "It's become a joke," the ministry said. CNN: The trade war between the world's two economic superpowers has tanked international markets and fueled fears of a global recession. "There are no winners in a trade war, and going against the world will only lead to self-isolation," [Chinese leader] Xi Jinping told Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez in Beijing on Friday, according to state broadcaster CCTV. "For over 70 years, China's development has relied on self-reliance and hard work -- never on handouts from others, and it is not afraid of any unjust suppression," Xi added. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

FDA Plans To Phase Out Animal Testing Requirements (%2025/%04/%11 %07:%Apr)The Food and Drug Administration says it would begin phasing out animal testing requirements for antibody therapies and other drugs and move toward AI-based models and other tools it deems "human-relevant." Axios: The FDA said it would launch a pilot program over the next year allowing select developers of monoclonal antibodies to use a primarily non-animal-based testing strategy. Commissioner Marty Makary in a statement said the shift would improve drug safety, lower research and development costs and address ethical concerns about animal experimentation. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AI Models Still Struggle To Debug Software, Microsoft Study Shows (%2025/%04/%11 %05:%Apr)Some of the best AI models today still struggle to resolve software bugs that wouldn't trip up experienced devs. TechCrunch: A new study from Microsoft Research, Microsoft's R&amp;D division, reveals that models, including Anthropic's Claude 3.7 Sonnet and OpenAI's o3-mini, fail to debug many issues in a software development benchmark called SWE-bench Lite. The results are a sobering reminder that, despite bold pronouncements from companies like OpenAI, AI is still no match for human experts in domains such as coding. The study's co-authors tested nine different models as the backbone for a "single prompt-based agent" that had access to a number of debugging tools, including a Python debugger. They tasked this agent with solving a curated set of 300 software debugging tasks from SWE-bench Lite. According to the co-authors, even when equipped with stronger and more recent models, their agent rarely completed more than half of the debugging tasks successfully. Claude 3.7 Sonnet had the highest average success rate (48.4%), followed by OpenAI's o1 (30.2%), and o3-mini (22.1%). Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Russian Cable Attacks 'Threaten To Cut Off World's Internet' (%2025/%04/%11 %03:%Apr)Military chiefs at Nato have been warned of global internet blackouts following a string of suspected Russian attacks on subsea cables. From a report: Telecoms companies including Vodafone, O2 owner Telefonica and Orange have written to UK, EU and Nato officials warning that a rise in sabotage incidents was putting critical services at risk. In an open letter, they wrote: "The repercussions of damage to subsea cables extend far beyond Europe, potentially affecting global internet and power infrastructure, international communications, financial transactions and critical services worldwide." It comes after a spike in incidents relating to fibre optic cables on seabeds that carry huge volumes of data, voice and internet traffic between countries. More than 500 cables carry around 95pc of all international data, while their remote location makes them difficult and costly to monitor. At least 11 subsea cables have been damaged in the Baltic Sea since October 2023 and similar outages have been reported in the North Sea. The incidents have fuelled fears of sabotage by hostile actors, with more than 50 Russian ships observed in areas of high cable density in the Baltic Sea. The UK is monitoring the Russian spy ship Yantar amid concerns that it is mapping critical underwater infrastructure. Concerns have also been raised about Chinese sabotage following a number of incidents around Taiwan. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is About To Launch Recall For Real This Time (%2025/%04/%11 %01:%Apr)Microsoft is starting to gradually roll out a preview of Recall, its feature that captures screenshots of what you do on a Copilot Plus PC to find again later, to Windows Insiders. From a report: This new rollout could indicate that Microsoft is finally getting close to launching Recall more widely. Microsoft originally intended to launch Recall alongside Copilot Plus PCs last June, but the feature was delayed following concerns raised by security experts. The company then planned to launch it in October, but that got pushed as well so that the company could deliver "a secure and trusted experience." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Fintech Founder Charged With Fraud After 'AI' Shopping App Found To Be Powered By Humans in the Philippines (%2025/%04/%11 %00:%Apr)Albert Saniger, the founder and former CEO of Nate, an AI shopping app that promised a "universal" checkout experience, was charged with defrauding investors on Wednesday, according to a press release from the U.S. Department of Justice. From a report: Founded in 2018, Nate raised over $50 million from investors like Coatue and Forerunner Ventures, most recently raising a $38 million Series A in 2021 led by Renegade Partners. Nate said its app's users could buy from any e-commerce site with a single click, thanks to AI. In reality, however, Nate relied heavily on hundreds of human contractors in a call center in the Philippines to manually complete those purchases, the DOJ's Southern District of New York alleges. Saniger raised millions in venture funding by claiming that Nate was able to transact online "without human intervention," except for edge cases where the AI failed to complete a transaction. But despite Nate acquiring some AI technology and hiring data scientists, its app's actual automation rate was effectively 0%, the DOJ claims. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Data Centres Will Use Twice as Much Energy By 2030 (%2025/%04/%10 %20:%Apr)The electricity consumption of data centres is projected to more than double by 2030, according to a report from the International Energy Agency published today. The primary culprit? AI. Nature: The report covers the current energy footprint for data centres and forecasts their future needs, which could help governments, companies, and local communities to plan infrastructure and AI deployment. IEA's models project that data centres will use 945 terawatt-hours (TWh) in 2030, roughly equivalent to the current annual electricity consumption of Japan. By comparison, data centres consumed 415 TWh in 2024, roughly 1.5% of the world's total electricity consumption. The projections largely focus on data centres, which also run computing tasks other than AI. Although the agency estimated the proportion of servers in data centres devoted to AI. They found that servers for AI accounted for 24% of server electricity demand and 15% of total data centre energy demand in 2024. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI Expands ChatGPT Memory To Draw on Full Conversation History (%2025/%04/%10 %18:%Apr)OpenAI has expanded ChatGPT's memory functionality to include references from all past conversations. The system now builds upon existing saved memories by automatically incorporating previous interactions to deliver more contextually relevant responses for writing, learning, and advisory tasks, the startup said Thursday. Subscribers can disable the feature through settings or request memory modifications directly in chat. Those already opted out of memory features won't have past-chat references enabled by default. Temporary chats remain available for interactions that users prefer to keep isolated from memory systems. The update is rolling out immediately to Plus and Pro subscribers, excluding users in the EEA, UK, Switzerland, and other European markets. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Meta Says Llama 4 Targets Left-Leaning Bias (%2025/%04/%10 %17:%Apr)Meta says in its Llama 4 release announcement that it's specifically addressing "left-leaning" political bias in its AI model, distinguishing this effort from traditional bias concerns around race, gender, and nationality that researchers have long documented. "Our goal is to remove bias from our AI models and to make sure that Llama can understand and articulate both sides of a contentious issue," the company said. "All leading LLMs have had issues with bias -- specifically, they historically have leaned left," Meta stated, framing AI bias primarily as a political problem. The company claims Llama 4 is "dramatically more balanced" in handling sensitive topics and touts its lack of "strong political lean" compared to competitors. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China To Restrict US Film Releases (%2025/%04/%10 %16:%Apr)Hours after Donald Trump imposed record 125% tariffs on Chinese products entering the US, China has announced it will further curb the number of US films allowed to screen in the country. From a report: "The wrong action of the US government to abuse tariffs on China will inevitably further reduce the domestic audience's favourability towards American films," the China Film Administration said in a statement on Thursday. "We will follow the market rules, respect the audience's choice, and moderately reduce the number of American films imported." The move mirrors the potential countermeasure suggested by two influential Chinese bloggers earlier in the week, warning that "China has plenty of tools for retaliation." Both Liu Hong, a senior editor at Xinhuanet, the website of the state-run Xinhua news agency, as well as Ren Yi, the grandson of former Guangdong party chief Ren Zhongyi, posted an identical proposal involving a heavy reduction on the import of US movies and further investigation of the intellectual property benefits of American companies operating in China. China is the world's second largest film market after the US. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Meta's New Tech Wants You Using Phones in Theaters (%2025/%04/%10 %15:%Apr)Meta is partnering with Blumhouse to launch "Movie Mate" technology that encourages moviegoers to use their phones during theatrical screenings, beginning with an April 30 showing of "Megan" at Blumhouse's "Halfway to Halloween Film Festival." According to Variety, the system enables viewers to chat with a Megan-themed AI chatbot, answer trivia questions, and access behind-the-scenes information while watching the film in theaters. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Gas Boiler Fittings Outnumbered Heat Pumps By 15 To One in UK Last Year - Report (%2025/%04/%10 %14:%Apr)An anonymous reader shares a report: Gas boiler fittings outnumbered new heat pump installations by more than 15 to one last year, and only one in eight new homes were equipped with the low-carbon alternative despite the government's clean energy targets. Poorer households are also being shut out of the heat pump market as the grants available are inadequate and should be increased, according to a report by the Resolution Foundation thinktank. The UK has the slowest introduction of heat pumps in Europe: fewer than 100,000 were fitted last year, compared with 1.5m gas boilers. Most of the boilers were replacements for existing units, but new houses are still being built with gas as standard -- only 13% of new homes came with heat pumps last year. If the government is to meet its net zero targets, switching people to heat pumps will be essential: about 450,000 households will need to install them each year by 2030. But the grant available through the boiler upgrade scheme -- $9,700 in England and Wales -- still leaves homeowners paying about $7000 on average. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon CEO Urges 'Startup' Mentality in Shareholder Letter (%2025/%04/%10 %11:%Apr)Amazon has to operate like the "world's largest startup" as it works to meet demand for AI and cut bureaucracy in its ranks, Chief Executive Officer Andy Jassy said in his annual letter to shareholders. From a report: "If your customer experiences aren't planning to leverage these intelligent models, their ability to query giant corpuses of data and quickly find your needle in the haystack, their ability to keep getting smarter with more feedback and data, and their future agentic capabilities, you will not be competitive," Jassy wrote in the letter on Thursday. "It's moving faster than almost anything technology has ever seen." Amazon, like most of the largest technology companies, has bet heavily on artificial intelligence, committing much of its $100 billion in planned capital expenditures this year to AI-related projects. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Trump: Apple Building in China is 'Unsustainable,' Could Exempt Some Companies From Tariffs (%2025/%04/%10 %09:%Apr)An anonymous reader shares a report: Following U.S. President Donald Trump's decision to pause some of the exorbitant tariffs that he put in place earlier today, he spoke to the press at the White House and provided some commentary that could be a positive for Apple. When asked whether he would consider exempting some U.S. companies from the tariffs in the future, Trump said that he would. "As time goes by, we're going to take a look at it," he said. "There are some that by the nature of the company get hit a little bit harder, and we'll take a look at that," he added, claiming that he will "show a little flexibility." [...] When speaking to the press, Trump reiterated his aim of bringing manufacturing to the United States, and he claimed that Apple "building" in China is unsustainable. "If you look at Apple, Apple is going to spend $500 billion building a plant. They wouldn't be doing that if I didn't do this. They'd just keep building them in China. And that's unsustainable," he said. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bank of England Says AI Software Could Create Market Crisis For Profit (%2025/%04/%10 %06:%Apr)Increasingly autonomous AI programs could end up manipulating markets and intentionally creating crises in order to boost profits for banks and traders, the Bank of England has warned. From a report: Artificial intelligence's ability to "exploit profit-making opportunities" was among a wide range of risks cited in a report by the Bank of England's financial policy committee (FPC), which has been monitoring the City's growing use of the technology. The FPC said it was concerned about the potential for advanced AI models -- which are deployed to act with more autonomy -- to learn that periods of extreme volatility were beneficial for the firms they were trained to serve. Those AI programs may "identify and exploit weaknesses" of other trading firms in a way that triggers or amplifies big moves in bond prices or stock markets. Read more of this story at Slashdot.