Author: Jaxon Bennett

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Baidu has unveiled artificial intelligence-powered smart glasses as Chinese tech groups race with global rivals to capitalise on AI-integrated hardware.Li Ying, head of Baidu’s hardware brand Xiaodu, said its smart glasses would “become a private assistant” during a Baidu event in Shanghai on Tuesday.The glasses are run on Baidu’s large language model Ernie and will enable wearers to track calorie consumption, ask questions about their environment, play music and shoot videos, said the company.While China is lagging behind the US in developing…

Amazon is poised to roll out its newest artificial intelligence chips as the Big Tech group seeks returns on its multibillion-dollar semiconductor investments and reduce its reliance on market leader Nvidia.Executives at Amazon’s cloud computing division are spending big on custom chips in the hopes of boosting the efficiency inside its dozens of data centres, ultimately bringing down its own costs as well as those of Amazon Web Services’ customers. The effort is spearheaded by Annapurna Labs, an Austin-based chip start-up that Amazon acquired in early 2015 for $350mn. Annapurna’s latest work is expected to be showcased next month when…

Japanese gaming giants Nintendo and Sony are heading into this year’s crucial holiday season with little to offer mass-market consumers — one relying on sales of a seven-year-old console and the other appealing only to hardcore players with a new premium offering that critics say is overpriced.As Sony released the $700 PlayStation 5 Pro last week to mixed reviews, Nintendo put a damper on the industry’s biggest quarter, lowering its guidance on sales of its ageing Switch console from 13.5mn to 12.5mn for its fiscal year ending in March. Traditionally, Nintendo roughly doubles its revenues in the December quarter compared…

Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Indian business & finance myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Trading in Indian food delivery app Swiggy begins on Wednesday in a $1.3bn initial public offering that investors have already given a lukewarm reception, as it tries to grow in a fiercely competitive sector.On Friday, institutional investors shored up Swiggy’s listing on its final subscription day as the Bengaluru-based company chased a valuation of about $11.2bn.Swiggy’s listing — India’s second-largest this year — received bids more than three times the shares on offer, with the retail portion just covered. It…

Elon Musk’s role in delivering the US presidency for Donald Trump has given the world’s richest man a unique opportunity to reshape the federal government by placing his acolytes and allies inside the incoming administration.The billionaire’s influence continues after the election, with him joining Trump during a call with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, president of Ukraine, on Wednesday to discuss the war there. Now Musk is preparing to wield new power in Washington having been promised a wide remit as head of a new Department of Government Efficiency. He has spoken of slashing $2tn from the US budget and firing hundreds of…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund is buying a large stake in data analytics software company Qlik at a valuation of about $10bn, as appetite grows among Middle Eastern investors for businesses owned by the world’s biggest buyout groups.The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (Adia), the Emirati sovereign wealth fund, will invest about $1bn into Qlik as part of a deal that will see its private equity owner Thoma Bravo sell on the US based software group among its other funds, according to three people briefed…

At first sight, the outcome of last December’s COP28 summit promised to give a major boost to the world’s clean energy companies and their investors. Negotiators from nearly 200 countries agreed to pursue a tripling of global renewable power capacity by 2030 and to double the rate of efficiency improvement.Meeting these targets would mean a surge in growth for the companies developing, and deploying, technology to lower global energy emissions.Yet this upswing has proved slow to materialise. The iShares Global Clean Energy exchange-traded fund, which holds a broad basket of climate tech stocks, declined 6.5 per cent in the 12…

Tech groups are rushing to redesign how they test and evaluate their artificial intelligence models, as the fast advancing technology surpasses current benchmarks.OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta and Anthropic have all recently announced plans to build AI agents that can execute tasks for humans autonomously on their behalf. To do this effectively, the systems must be able to perform increasingly complex actions, using reasoning and planning. Companies conduct “evaluations” of AI models by teams of staff and outside researchers. These are standardised tests, known as benchmarks, that assess models’ abilities and the performance of different groups’ systems or older versions.However, recent advances in AI…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company has notified Chinese chip design companies that it will suspend production of their most advanced artificial intelligence chips, as Washington continues to impede Beijing’s AI ambitions.TSMC, the world’s largest contract chipmaker, told Chinese customers it would no longer manufacture AI chips at advanced process nodes of 7 nanometres or smaller as of this coming Monday, three people familiar with the matter said. Two of the people said any future supplies of such semiconductors by TSMC to Chinese customers would…

Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for freeYour guide to what the 2024 US election means for Washington and the worldWhen Donald Trump was first elected to the White House in 2016, Silicon Valley recoiled in horror. His nativism and open trolling of liberal pieties were an affront to the ultra liberal values of many in the industry, forged in the San Francisco Bay area.There were also good business reasons for concern. The populism promoted by Trump stood in clear opposition to the internationalist, free-trade agenda that US tech had ridden to global dominance since the mid-1990s. The prospect of…