Author: Jaxon Bennett

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Is it worse to be disliked or ignored? Nvidia is too big for the latter, so the former will have to do. The chipmaker that dominates the market for artificial intelligence hardware is in the crosshairs of Chinese antitrust regulators, other chipmakers, and maybe even its own customers. These mounting challenges are a nuisance, but also a compliment.The company founded by Jensen Huang is virtually the only game in town for high-performance AI chips known as GPUs. The exceptionalism extends to its…

Foreign semiconductor companies investing billions of dollars in the US now face an uncertain future — just two years after Congress triggered a boom in the sector by passing the Chips and Science Act to rebuild the country’s long-neglected chip manufacturing industry.The impending return of Donald Trump to the White House has raised concerns that America’s pitch to become the best place in the world for chipmaking, and reduce its dependence on plants in Asia, could soon ring hollow. Concerns rose over the future of the programme when the president-elect described the legislation — which includes a historic $39bn subsidy package…

Cultural and technological developments in recent years have given rise to a new array of legal risks for businesses in the US. Now, in response, law firms are expanding their products and services to cover anything from cyber crime and generative AI to cultural disagreements in the workplace.“Historically, law firms have been organised around what the lawyers do, such as litigation, corporate or regulatory work,” says Gerry Stegmaier, a partner in the emerging technologies group at Reed Smith.But this is changing, as lawyers adapt to offer clients legal advice beyond the more traditional practice areas.As existing legal risks, such as…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.In July this year, Bridgewater Associates launched a macro fund — one that aims to profit from macroeconomic shifts — that primarily uses machine learning to make its investment decisions.Precise details of the fund’s operation, investors and initial performance remain undisclosed. But the launch signals a commitment by one of the world’s largest hedge fund operators to move beyond its existing investment systems and embrace more fully the potential of artificial intelligence.The fund is the result of work by Bridgewater’s Artificial Investment…

As artificial intelligence extends its reach into corporate offices worldwide, young lawyers are being forced to prepare for the adoption of the new tools.Younger lawyers are generally more technologically savvy, says Brendan Gutierrez McDonnell, a partner at K&L Gates — even if concerns about the technology’s accuracy in professional applications mean they have, so far, been “tepid” on its use at work.However, when used correctly, AI has the potential to transform the work of junior lawyers. And technology companies are betting big on AI becoming an integral part of the legal profession.The legal industry’s estimated $26.7bn spend on technology this…

While “intrapreneur” is rarely a formal job description, finding individuals who can enable continual change has become a strategic aim in law firms.Such intrapreneurs tend to take up a new idea, often from scratch; win backing within the firm; and have an effect on both practical approaches to getting things done and on the organisational mindset. US law firms, in particular, celebrate generators of revenue, but these innovators’ work in the background is increasingly recognised as crucial to the business’s overall success.With that in mind, the panel of judges in the intrapreneur award category of the FT Innovative Lawyers awards…

US law firms’ use of generative artificial intelligence tools for training lawyers, automating workflows and tackling complex tasks highlights the technology’s growing significance two years on from the launch of OpenAI’s groundbreaking ChatGPT.The release of the chatbot gave the public its first real demonstration of the power of generative AI tools and their ability to produce code, text or image responses to natural language prompts.But, since then, the legal sector has faced a similar quandary to other industries: how to capitalise on the new technology without cannibalising existing jobs or compromising quality?“We see huge potential for generative AI to make…

Dechert’s Brenda Sharton is no stranger to litigating issues at the edge of technological innovation.In the 1990s, while on maternity leave, she read about the internet attracting millions of users and soon became an expert on its intersection with privacy law.In the past couple of years, she has had a sense of déjà vu, after winning the dismissal of two of the first lawsuits brought against a generative AI company in the US, while getting up to speed on the nascent technology and explaining it to the courts.Sharton, managing partner of Dechert’s Boston office and chair of the firm’s cyber,…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.European regulators have asked Google to provide more information about a secret advertising partnership with Meta which skirted the search company’s own rules on how minors should be treated online, raising the prospect of a formal investigation into the tech giant.Officials from the European Commission have been looking into a series of ad campaigns promoting Instagram to teenagers on YouTube.In October, commission regulators ordered lawyers for Alphabet, Google’s parent company, to review and collate data, presentations, internal chats and emails related to…

One of the biggest remaining technical hurdles in the race to build practical quantum computers has been cleared, according to experts in the field, potentially opening the way for the first full-scale systems by the end of this decade.The latest sign of the growing optimism in the decades-long pursuit of practical computers based on the principles of quantum mechanics follows a claim by Google that it had passed an important milestone in overcoming the inherent instability of quantum systems. The findings have been attracting attention in the quantum computing world since they were first published informally in August. On Monday, they…