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TikTok fights its 2025 divestment deadline
TikTok and its parent ByteDance have sued the U.S. government after the Biden administration passed a law compelling the Chinese internet giant to divest ownership of TikTok or see the app banned in the U.S. When India similarly banned TikTok in 2020 due to military clashes with China, YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels tried to fill the void with AI-powered tools and recommendation engines of their own. However, TikTok’s AI-powered features may not be so easy to replicate.
TikTok, YouTube-parent Google, and Instagram-parent Meta have all been accused of violating users’ privacy or pushing potentially harmful and addictive content, but TikTok claimed that it is being targeted with a separate set of standards when compared to other platforms. The viral video app has at least 170 million users in the U.S. alone.
Telangana firm unveils privacy protection tech
A Telangana-based firm introduced a software algorithm intended to support the sharing of personal data between organisations, without breaching the privacy wall.
Posidex Technologies is a deeptech AI and machine learning product company that came out with its ‘Privacy Enhancing Technology’ (PET) to help financial institutions or government departments ‘collaborate’ with regards to coordinating data in a more secure manner. The founders’ algorithm converts plain text data into “Vectorised, Anonymised, Randomised, Encrypted Tokens” or VARE Tokens. An AI/ML model is built on this, to enable data comparison.
Google buys a stake in BlackRock-owned firm
Google has bought a stake in a BlackRock-owned firm as it seeks to buy renewable energy. The firm in question is Taiwan’s New Green Power, as the country is significant to Google’s cloud infrastructure and data centres. Google could buy up to 300 megawatts of renewable energy from New Green Power.
As Big Tech and AI giants tussle with the energy demands and carbon footprints that come from their work with generative AI and multi-modal models, there is more pressure on such firms to bring down their emissions and make the switch to more eco-friendly sources of energy.
