Technology

➚ MOVE FAST: Comebacks. After a 14-year absence, Meta may be returning to the Chinese market. The potential deal would make gaming company Tencent the exclusive local seller of its virtual reality headsets, The Wall Street Journal reported. And Pico, Meta’s VR rival in China owned by ByteDance, reportedly just laid off hundreds of people.

➘ BREAK THINGS: Setbacks. A Russian-linked hacking group claimed it was behind cyber attacks that forced OpenAI’s ChatGPT offline this week. Meanwhile, China’s largest commercial lender was hit by ransomware, possibly disrupting trading in U.S. Treasury markets.

We may have just witnessed the first consumer hardware launch of the generative AI era. Startup Humane yesterday unveiled its long-awaited device, called the AI Pin, which goes on a user’s shirt and connects to AI models like OpenAI’s GPT-4. It broadcasts green-colored images onto your palm when you place your hand in front of it. Finger gestures can then control the pin. But the more common user interface will be voice commands. (Picture the movie Her.)

Semafor got a peek of the device earlier this week at Humane’s San Francisco headquarters. We weren’t allowed to take pictures or actually put the device on. But the company showed reporters every component laid out on tables, and product managers and engineers answered our questions (that weren’t too prying).

Humane’s founders came from Apple, and the DNA is apparent. The hardware, from the chips inside to the packaging, is extremely elegant. But that isn’t the biggest challenge here. When the product launches in early 2024, I think the company expects AI models to have gotten so good that they will make a lot of what we do on smartphones unnecessary. (Humane has some inside knowledge: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman led the company’s $30 million series A investment in 2020.) But the AI we have today just isn’t good enough.

It’s an all-or-nothing gamble, because the financial commitment required to use the AI Pin is too substantial for anything less than an extraordinary user experience. While Humane expects to sell 100,000 units in the first year, the $699 device won’t work without a monthly $24 subscription that includes T-Mobile service. It can make calls, but at least for now, customers won’t be able to use it with their current number, so no getting rid of your cell phone plan.

Humane co-founder and CEO Bethany Bongiorno told Semafor she gives the additional number she got for the AI Pin out to a small circle of friends and family, and checks her smartphone less regularly.

AI helps singers break down borders

THE SCENE

Singer Lala Sadii, who has five million subscribers on YouTube, wanted to connect with fans in other countries by creating short, karaoke-like lyric videos for her song, Murder my feelings.

Creating lyric videos in English and translating a song’s verses into other languages are fairly simple. The tricky part is lining up the translated words so it’s in sync with the music — a crucial detail for lyric videos.

Sadii’s record label, Downtown Artist & Label Services, turned to a company called AudioShake, which uses AI to separate vocals from background music and timestamp the song so that lyrics from 40 languages can be automatically slotted in the correct spot.

Singers and other creators are starting to dip their toes into artificial intelligence-powered translation tools, opening up content to new audiences that speak other languages.

Tools like Google translate have been improving for years, but more recent advances in generative AI and other technologies have supercharged the field of language translation, allowing companies to capture cultural nuances, tone and timing in ways that weren’t possible even a year ago.

Audiences are “begging for more languages,” said Channing Mitzell, project manager for Downtown Artist. “It helps them feel more at home, more connected to the song, connected to the artist.”

Join us in person on Dec. 7 in Washington, D.C. for a bicoastal discussion about the future of artificial intelligence. We’ll pose the biggest questions to tech leaders and top policymakers about what AI means for the way we work, live, cure disease, wage war, and campaign in democratic elections. RSVP here. We’re looking forward to meeting you!

The amount of electric battery capacity sold worldwide increased 54% in the first half of this year compared to the same period in 2022, according to a new report from the market research firm Counterpoint. A chunk of that growth came from China, where 767,000 electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids were sold last month, a nearly 38% jump from the October prior. Surging sales have helped turn Chinese battery and auto manufacturer BYD — short for “build your dreams” — into a powerhouse for electric vehicles. The company, which is run by two longtime executives rumored to be a couple, has started expanding aggressively into Europe and Southeast Asia.

• Open AI says it’s hungry for more training datasets that reflect human society and are “not already easily accessible online to the public today.” The company is looking to partner with outside organizations and says it will accept data on any topic in any language or format.
• Amazon and Meta are testing a feature that lets shoppers buy Amazon products directly from ads on Instagram and Facebook. The initiative, which requires users to link their Amazon accounts to their social media profiles, could help the e-commerce giant fight off newer Chinese competitors, including TikTok, Shein, and Temu.
• Signal is experimenting with letting people add usernames to their accounts, allowing them to avoid sharing their phone number with their contacts on the encrypted messaging service.

Sam Altman took a swipe Thursday at Grok, the “rebellious” chatbot released by Elon Musk’s startup xAI last week. Altman used OpenAI’s new custom GPT tool to build a chatbot mimicking Grok that “answers questions with cringey boomer humor in a sort of awkward shock-to-get-laughs sort of way.” Musk then posted a response from Grok filled with, well, the same type of jokes Altman was commenting on.

• Wall Street and Hollywood billionaires have discussed a plan to spend as much as $50 million on a media campaign to “define Hamas to the American people as a terrorist organization.”
• Low on cash, African tech braces for an extended wave of startup closures.
• The fuzzy geopolitics of the giant pandas’ return to China.