Technology

➚ MOVE FAST: Fight. The European Union says the trade surplus with the US should include services, and not just goods. Europeans may not want American beef, but they consume a lot of America’s digital offerings. If the trade war continues, the EU is prepared to impose tariffs on those products.

➘ BREAK THINGS: Flight. Apple chartered planes to carry 600 tons of iPhones from India before the tariffs went into effect, adding up to about 1.5 million iPhones. Still, that’s a drop in the bucket for a company that sells about 200 million of the high-priced handsets every year.

Colossal Biosciences has resurrected the dire wolf, an extinct canine that found its way into popular culture via Game of Thrones. Colossal, which has been taking advantage of advances in AI to make genetic leaps, used the DNA of modern gray wolves and made some edits to give them the characteristics of actual dire wolves.

The technological breakthrough isn’t quite Jurassic Park, although one of the company’s co-founders did inspire the original book. But it shows the company is progressing toward its more ambitious goals, like bringing back the woolly mammoth. Here is my interview with Colossal co-founder and CEO Ben Lamm from last year.

That’s how much data-center electricity consumption is expected to increase globally by 2030, to around 945 terawatt-hours, according to a report by the International Energy Agency. Reliance on fossil fuels for power generation may threaten global decarbonization goals, and data centers aren’t the only culprits in the AI supply chain. Last year, emissions generated by chip manufacturing increased fourfold, a Greenpeace analysis says.

OpenAI announced improvements to its memory feature Thursday, allowing Plus and Pro customers to use all of their history to inform how the chatbots work.

The announcement was a big deal in the AI world because memory is a key unlock for AI products. Without memory, there’s a limit on AI’s utility.

The holy grail is some combination of infinite context and memory. In other words, a bot that doesn’t just remember previous chats, but can hold in its memory extremely large pieces of data, like entire software code bases.

Today, if you want to use AI for a complex software project, you need to come up with a plan and then break each piece into discrete parts. But this requires humans to oversee every aspect of the project, and still takes a lot of time and knowledge about how to build software.

It’s a fundamental limitation that still isn’t solved, but AI companies are chipping away at the problem.

In a deep dive from Fortune’s Sharon Goldman, former employees of Meta’s Fundamental AI Research team say the organization is being starved of compute resources as the company shifts away from their type of work to productizing generative AI developments.

While Meta denies this, the trend at big tech companies has been to publish less open research on AI and to focus on commercialization, now that the generative AI race has changed the landscape.

The biggest breakthroughs in the technology have come from federal research grants in academia (not just in the US, but also in places like Canada and the UK). While the private sector has undoubtedly driven AI research forward in the last decade, that time period may end up being an outlier.

Abu Dhabi’s G42 is ramping up an international expansion through its unit Presight, with a focus on the US, Central and Southeast Asia, and the Middle East, a senior executive told Semafor’s Kelsey Warner.

The Abu Dhabi-listed unit of G42 — the AI company that last year took a $1.5 billion investment from Microsoft — has also inked government contracts in Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Albania, and Jordan and looks to do more deals in the US, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, its COO Adel Alsharji said.

The Emirati company’s expansion plans are yet another sign of the UAE’s ambitions in the AI industry, and its increasingly tight relationship with the US: G42 has been training AI models in data centers in Texas and California, it secured Washington’s approval to obtain cutting-edge Nvidia chips in 2024, and has also tapped a longtime Microsoft executive to lead its US business late last year, Ali Dalloul, who shuttles between San Francisco and Abu Dhabi, a spokesperson told Semafor.

When the president whipped out his chart of worldwide tariffs last week, Democrats wanted their party to go to war. They didn’t know what to make of Chris Deluzio. In a short video, shared by House Democrats, the western Pennsylvania congressman defended the use of tariffs.

Shortly before Trump reversed himself on many of the levies, Semafor’s David Weigel sat down with Deluzio to understand what he was advising, and figure out if the Democratic Party would actually cohere around a position — probably one more complicated than “orange man bad.”