Technology

➚ MOVE FAST: Oracle. Co-founder Larry Ellison’s close relationship with Donald Trump is already bringing in wins for the company. The White House AI infrastructure plug put Oracle in the spotlight over rivals, and the president said he would be open to Ellison, or Elon Musk, buying TikTok.

➘ BREAK THINGS: Microsoft. The tech giant is one of the key partners in the Stargate project already underway in Texas. But it wasn’t a part of the Trump press event, and it will lose its perch as the exclusive cloud provider for OpenAI for any new capacity it needs.

Sound and fury. The director of the Oscar-buzzy film The Brutalist addressed the backlash against using AI tools to enhance the Hungarian accents of its lead actors, Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones. “Adrien and Felicity’s performances are completely their own,” Brady Corbet told the Hollywood Reporter. “The aim was to preserve the authenticity of Adrien and Felicity’s performances in another language, not to replace or alter them and done with the utmost respect for the craft.”

Much of the 3.5-hour film, which won the Golden Globe for best motion picture (drama), is spoken in Hungarian, the native tongue of the movie’s editor Dávid Jancsó. The actors worked with dialect coaches, but there were still small inconsistencies in certain letter sounds that are difficult for non-native speakers. So they recorded their voices with Ukrainian AI company Respeecher, as did Jancsó. What came out was more authentic Hungarian dialogue that locals could more closely recognize. No English lines were changed.

“Most of their Hungarian dialogue has a part of me talking in there,” Jancsó told filmmaking news site RedShark in an interview that sparked the backlash. “We were very careful about keeping their performances. It’s mainly just replacing letters here and there.”

The Brutalist, which follows an architect and his wife escaping post-war Europe to rebuild their lives in America, is expected to be a front-runner this awards season. Its use of AI, however, has led some to argue it should be disqualified from the Oscar race altogether. But that ignores how AI can enhance what humans do, instead of replacing them, whether in film, art, or music. Emilia Pérez, the Spanish-language thriller that took home four Golden Globes, also used Respeecher, the company said in a Facebook post.

After a 12-hour hiatus, TikTok is back online for its US users, but there’s a perceived shift in what they are now seeing. Shortly after creators regained access on Sunday, they began posting videos complaining that their recommendations algorithm felt different. They weren’t seeing the kinds of videos that would typically be suggested to them, they said, and some US users claimed their primary feed, search function, and comments were being censored. Posts calling attention to the matter have racked up millions of likes.

TikTok denied any difference on its part. “Our policies and algorithms did not change over the weekend,” a company spokesperson told Semafor. An in-app notification told users “some TikTok features may be temporarily unstable or unavailable” while the company works to restore service in the US.

Such technical snags may have caused the alleged censorship, but as it scrambles to keep the app in the US permanently operating, TikTok faces a new challenge — convincing users its service remains the same even as its CEO Shou Chew cozies up to Trump, including attending his inauguration.

When the platform returned online, American users were pointed to its savior: “As a result of President Trump’s efforts, TikTok is back in the U.S.!”

It’s smart for the company to laud Trump, but TikTokers don’t like interference in their social media. And the perception of it could erode some of the trust the platform has built with users at a time when it needs their advocacy.

Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang exclusively told Semafor why his firm took out a full-page ad in The Washington Post on Tuesday with a succinct message for the new US commander-in-chief: “Dear President Trump, America must win the AI war.”

The ad also pointed readers to a five-point plan that would revamp the federal government’s tech investments and overhaul priorities for that funding. Wang said he was motivated to make his recommendations to the new White House. “They’re listening,” he said. “This incoming administration wants to move fast and take a lot of action and really be quite ambitious about a lot of these issues.”

He joins a long list of tech executives scrambling to win over Trump and his team, leading to a constant reading of tea leaves to assess who is gaining traction. For example, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman got a prime spot at the president’s AI infrastructure announcement, even though he is a big rival of First Buddy Elon Musk. (The X owner replied “they don’t actually have the money” in response to OpenAI’s post on the project.)

And it was Tim Cook who got the best seat out of the many tech CEOs at Trump’s inauguration, near Melania Trump and just a few feet from the president as he was being sworn in. The Apple chief’s savvy dealings with the president in his first term won the iPhone maker key exemptions in an escalating trade war.

The AI infrastructure boom presents a conundrum: how to power it. Some major tech companies have rallied around nuclear as a solution. But at a Semafor event in Davos, Ricardo Manuel Falú, executive vice president at energy giant AES, said nuclear is only a small part of the answer because of construction costs that often run over budget, the long permitting process, and other challenges. And while Microsoft has teamed up with Constellation to restart one of the Three Mile Island reactors, Falú said there aren’t enough of those cases to power the generative AI revolution — which requires the US to add roughly the same amount of energy that powers France each year.

East Africa is likely to see increased interest from mining companies, many of which are smarting from disputes with military governments around the Sahel, Semafor’s Alexis Akwagyiram reported.

Several companies have launched arbitration cases against authorities in Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger in recent weeks. East African countries, meanwhile, “have plenty to offer Western miners in the coming years, notably the relative absence of strongarm tactics,” Akwagyiram wrote.