WASHINGTON — Chinese social media users are not impressed by the newly released AI model Grok 3 by Elon Musk’s xAI, retaining their preference and support for DeepSeek, the free China-made AI model that rivals leading Western competitors while costing significantly less to train. Click here for the full story in Mandarin. …

A recent study found doctors were able to detect breast cancer more often when they used artificial intelligence to help read mammogram results. As VOA’s Dora Mekouar reports, AI helped boost the breast cancer detection rate by more than 17%. …

NAIROBI, KENYA — Milk and egg vendor Caroline Mukundi has lost a lot of her stock in her years of selling fresh food at a Nairobi market. Mukundi said she had no way to keep food fresh, and the cost of refrigerating was out of reach. “The food would go bad,” she said, and she would have to throw it away. “It was a big challenge for me.” Mukundi said her situation turned around when she acquired a solar-powered refrigerator. The refrigerators, named Koolboks and manufactured in Kenya, are fitted with ice compartments that can chill food even without a source of power. The devices can keep food cool for up to four days without electricity, even with limited sunlight. Customers can buy the refrigerators on a customized payment model, said Natalie Casey, chief business officer at the Koolboks startup company. “They can be between 1,500 and 3,000 US dollars, because it includes not only the appliances but also the solar panels and battery storage to enable the continuous cooling,” she said. “We’ve decided what might be more accessible to them is to first pay a down payment between 20 and 35% of the total, and the customer can pay in installments of up to 24 months.” Koolboks has sold about 7,000 solar-powered refrigerators. Conventional refrigerators for businesses can cost anywhere from $11,000 to $100,000 or more, said Dorothy Otieno, program manager at the Center for Environmental Justice and Development. “Some businesses, especially small businesses, are not able to afford it,” …

Manila, Philippines — The Philippines has detected foreign attempts to access intelligence data, but its cyber minister said on Tuesday no breaches have been recorded so far. Attempts to steal data are wide-ranging, said minister for information and communications Ivan Uy. Advanced Persistent Threats or APTs have repeatedly attempted but failed to infiltrate government systems, suggesting the country’s cyber-defenses have held firm. APTs are a general term for cyber actors or groups, often state-backed, that engage in malicious cyber activities. “These have been present for quite some time, and threats come from many actors, but a big majority of them are foreign,” Uy told Reuters. Some of these threats, which Uy referred to as “sleepers,” had been embedded in systems before being exposed by government’s cyber security efforts. “Why are these things operating in those systems, without even anybody calling it out?,” he said. So far, the government has not seen any cyberattacks targeting critical infrastructure, he said. “Hopefully it’s because our cyber defenses and cyber security are strong enough,” he said. Uy acknowledged the difficulty of attributing cyber intrusions to specific attackers, as they sometimes leave misleading digital traces. However, the government is working through diplomatic channels and sharing intelligence with the military, including with other countries, to validate threats and strengthen defenses, he said. Last year, the Philippine said it thwarted attempts by hackers operating in China to break into websites and e-mail systems of the Philippine president and government agencies, including one promoting maritime security. Uy described the …

SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA — South Korea’s data protection authority on Monday said new downloads of the Chinese AI app DeepSeek had been suspended in the country after DeepSeek acknowledged failing to take into account some of the agency’s rules on protecting personal data. The service of the app will be resumed once improvements are made in accordance with the country’s privacy law, the Personal Information Protection Commission (PIPC) said in a media briefing. The measure that came into force on Saturday aims to block new downloads of the app, the agency said, though DeepSeek’s web service remains accessible in the country. The Chinese startup appointed legal representatives last week in South Korea and had acknowledged partially neglecting considerations of the country’s data protection law, the PIPC said. Italy’s data protection authority, the Garante, said last month it had ordered DeepSeek to block its chatbot in the country after failing to address the regulator’s concerns over its privacy policy. DeepSeek did not immediately respond to a request for comment. When asked about earlier moves by South Korean government departments to block DeepSeek, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson told a briefing on February 6 that the Chinese government attached great importance to data privacy and security and protected it in accordance with the law. The spokesperson also said Beijing would never ask any company or individual to collect or store data in breach of laws. …

TAIPEI, TAIWAN — There is no need for one country to control the semiconductor industry, which is complex and needs a division of labor, Taiwan’s top technology official said on Saturday after U.S. President Donald Trump criticized the island’s chip dominance. Trump repeated claims on Thursday that Taiwan had taken the industry and he wanted it back in the United States, saying he aimed to restore U.S. chip manufacturing. Wu Cheng-wen, head of Taiwan’s National Science and Technology Council, did not name Trump in a Facebook post but referred to Taiwan President Lai Ching-te’s comments on Friday that the island would be a reliable partner in the democratic supply chain of the global semiconductor industry. Wu wrote that Taiwan has in recent years often been asked how its semiconductor industry had become an internationally acclaimed benchmark. “How did we achieve this? Obviously, we did not gain this for no reason from other countries,” he said, recounting how the government developed the sector from the 1970s, including helping found TSMC, now the world’s largest contract chipmaker, in 1987. “This shows that Taiwan has invested half a century of hard work to achieve today’s success, and it certainly wasn’t something taken easily from other countries.” Each country has its own specialty for chips, from Japan making chemicals and equipment to the United States, which is “second to none” on the design and application of innovative systems, Wu said. “The semiconductor industry is highly complex and requires precise specialization and division of labor. Given …

TAIPEI — Taiwan President Lai Ching-te pledged on Friday to talk with the United States about President Donald Trump’s concerns over the chip industry and to increase U.S. investment and buy more from the country, while also spending more on defense. Trump spoke critically about Taiwan on Thursday, saying he aimed to restore U.S. manufacturing of semiconductor chips and repeating claims about Taiwan having taken away the industry he wanted back in the United States. Speaking to reporters after holding a meeting of the National Security Council at the presidential office, Lai said that the global semiconductor supply chain is an ecosystem in which the division of work among various countries is important. “We of course are aware of President Trump’s concerns,” Lai said. “Taiwan’s government will communicate and discuss with the semiconductor industry and come up with good strategies. Then we will come up with good proposals and engage in further discussions with the United States,” he added. Democratic countries including the United States should come together to build a global alliance for AI chips and a “democratic supply chain” for advanced chips, Lai said. “While admittedly we have the advantage in semiconductors, we also see it as Taiwan’s responsibility to contribute to the prosperity of the international community.” Taiwan is home to the world’s largest contract chipmaker, TSMC, a major supplier to companies including Apple and Nvidia, and a crucial part of the developing AI industry. TSMC is investing $65 billion in new factories in the U.S. state of …

Technology company Google recently broke with its long-standing policy against developing AI weapons. VOA’s Matt Dibble has more from Silicon Valley. …

At this week’s Artificial Intelligence Action Summit in Paris, world leaders and technologists gathered to discuss the rapidly evolving field of generative artificial intelligence. Many are eager to join the global AI race, while others are proceeding with caution. Tina Trinh reports. …

Seoul — As a high school junior in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, Daneel Kutsenko never gave much thought to China. Last month, though, as the U.S. government prepared to ban TikTok – citing national security concerns about its Chinese ownership – Kutsenko downloaded RedNote, another Chinese video-sharing app, which he felt gave him a new perspective on China. “It just seems like people who live their life and have fun,” Kutsenko told VOA of RedNote, which reportedly attracted hundreds of thousands of U.S. users in the leadup to the now-paused TikTok ban. Kutsenko’s move is part of a larger trend. Even as U.S. policymakers grow louder in their warnings about Chinese-owned apps, they have become a central part of American life. TikTok, owned by China’s ByteDance, boasts 170 million U.S. users. China’s AI chatbot DeepSeek surged to the top of Apple’s App Store rankings, including those in the United States, for several days after its release last month. Another major shift has come in online shopping, where Americans are flocking to digital Chinese marketplaces such as Temu and Shein in search of ultra-low prices on clothes, home goods, and other items. According to a 2024 survey by Omnisend, an e-commerce marketing company, 70% of Americans shopped on Chinese platforms during the past year, with 20% doing so at least once a week. Multifaceted threat U.S. officials warn that Chinese apps pose a broad range of threats – whether to national security, privacy, human rights, or the economy. TikTok has been …

U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance on Tuesday vowed that the United States would maintain its leadership position in the development of advanced artificial intelligence and warned leaders of other countries not to adopt regulatory standards that might “kill” the new technology “just as it’s taking off.”  “The United States of America is the leader in AI, and our administration plans to keep it that way,” Vance told an audience of world leaders at an AI summit in Paris. He said the administration of President Donald Trump “will ensure that the most powerful AI systems are built in the U.S. with American-designed and manufactured chips.”  Vance said that the U.S. is open to collaboration with its allies. “But,” he said, “to create that kind of trust, we need international regulatory regimes that foster the creation of AI technology rather than strangles it, and we need our European friends in particular to look to this new frontier with optimism rather than trepidation.”  Regulations criticized  The vice president criticized the European Union’s regulatory structure, in particular the privacy-focused General Data Protection Regulation and the misinformation-focused Digital Services Act, and he said the Trump administration will not accept foreign governments “tightening the screws on U.S. tech companies with international footprints.”  Vance also appeared to criticize the effort in Europe to replace power generated by burning fossil fuels with more sustainable sources, saying that countries are “chasing reliable power out of their nations” at a time when AI systems demand ever-greater access to electricity.  “The …

Europe says it will ease regulations on artificial intelligence at a key AI summit in Paris on Feb. 11, 2025, that brought together the U.S. and other global tech giants and politicians. But some experts see bigger challenges stalling the bloc’s ambitions to be an AI heavyweight, from the need to pool resources to attracting more investment and talent. After U.S. President Donald Trump’s massive Stargate investment project and China’s DeepSeek startup, Europe wants to get a share of the artificial intelligence pie. Among other announcements at the Paris summit, co-host French President Emmanuel Macron outlined plans for $113 billion in private AI investment. The two-day summit underscored tensions between fears of too much AI regulation and not enough. “At this moment, we face the extraordinary prospect of a new Industrial Revolution, one on par with the steam engine or Bessemer steel,” U.S. Vice President JD Vance told summit attendees Tuesday. “But it will never come to pass if overregulation deters innovators from taking the risks necessary to advance the ball.” Macron, who’s been nicknamed France’s startup president, outlined caveats. He said advancing international governance of AI will enable the consolidation of trust, acceleration and innovation in order to set the rules for AI, which are necessary to move forward. Currently, Europe’s AI industry lags behind those of the U.S. and China. But the right policies, some experts believe, can help close the gap. “Europe really has pretty much everything else it needs to lead in AI or other complex …

Paris — U.S. Vice President JD Vance told Europeans on Tuesday their “massive” regulations on artificial intelligence could strangle the technology, and rejected content moderation as “authoritarian censorship.” The mood on AI has shifted as the technology takes root, from one of concerns around safety to geopolitical competition, as countries jockey to nurture the next big AI giant. Vance, setting out the Trump administration’s America First agenda, said the United States intended to remain the dominant force in AI and strongly opposed the European Union’s far tougher regulatory approach. “We believe that excessive regulation of the AI sector could kill a transformative industry,” Vance told an AI summit of CEOs and heads of state in Paris. “We feel very strongly that AI must remain free from ideological bias and that American AI will not be co-opted into a tool for authoritarian censorship,” he added. Vance criticized the “massive regulations” created by the EU’s Digital Services Act, as well as Europe’s online privacy rules, known by the acronym GDPR, which he said meant endless legal compliance costs for smaller firms. “Of course, we want to ensure the internet is a safe place, but it is one thing to prevent a predator from preying on a child on the internet, and it is something quite different to prevent a grown man or woman from accessing an opinion that the government thinks is misinformation,” he said. European lawmakers last year approved the bloc’s AI Act, the world’s first comprehensive set of rules governing the …

PARIS — Europe will invest an additional $51.5 billion to bolster the bloc’s artificial intelligence ambition, European Commission Ursula von der Leyen said on Tuesday. It will come on top of the European AI Champions Initiative, that has already pledged 150 billion euros from providers, investors and industry, von der Leyen told the Paris AI Summit. “Thereby we aim to mobilize a total of 200 billion euros for AI investments in Europe,” she said. Von der Leyen said investments will focus on industrial and mission-critical technologies. Companies which have signed up to the European AI Champions initiative, spearheaded by investment company General Catalyst, include Airbus, ASML, Siemens, Infineon, Philips, Mistral and Volkswagen. …

French President Emmanuel Macron wants Europe to become a leader in the artificial intelligence (AI) sector, he told a global summit of AI and political leaders in Paris Monday where he announced that France’s private sector has invested nearly $113 billion in French AI. Financial investment is key to achieving the goal of Europe as an AI hub, Macron said in his remarks delivered in English at the Grand Palais. He said the European bloc would also need to “adopt the Notre Dame strategy,” a reference to the lightning swift rebuilding of France’s famed Notre Dame cathedral in five years after a devastating 2019 fire, the result of simplified regulations and adherence to timelines. “We showed the rest of the of the world that when we commit to a clear timeline, we can deliver,” the French leader said. Henna Virkkunen, the European Union’s digital head, indicated that the EU is in agreement with simplifying regulations. The EU approved the AI Act last year, the world’s first extensive set of rules designed to regulate technology. European countries want to ensure that they have a stake in the tech race against an aggressive U.S. and other emerging challengers. European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen is scheduled to address the EU’s ability to compete in the tech world Tuesday. Macron’s announcement that the French private sector will invest heavily in AI “reassured” Clem Delangue, CEO of Hugging Face, a U.S. company with French co-founders that is a hub for open-source AI, that …

A consortium led by Elon Musk said Monday it has offered $97.4 billion to buy the nonprofit that controls OpenAI, another salvo in the billionaire’s fight to block the artificial intelligence startup from transitioning to a for-profit firm. Musk’s bid is likely to ratchet up longstanding tensions with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman over the future of the startup at the heart of a boom in generative AI technology. Altman on Monday promptly posted on X: “no thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want.” Musk cofounded OpenAI with Altman in 2015 as a nonprofit, but left before the company took off. He founded the competing AI startup xAI in 2023. Musk, the CEO of Tesla and owner of tech and social media company X, is a close ally of President Donald Trump. He spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars to help elect Trump, and leads the Department of Government Efficiency, a new arm of the White House tasked with radically shrinking the federal bureaucracy. Musk recently criticized a $500 billion OpenAI-led project announced by Trump at the White House. OpenAI is now trying to transition into a for-profit from a nonprofit entity, which it says is required to secure the capital needed for developing the best AI models. Musk sued Altman and others in August last year, claiming they violated contract provisions by putting profit ahead of the public good in the push to advance AI. In November, he asked a U.S. …

PARIS — In front of political and tech leaders gathered at a summit in Paris, French President Emmanuel Macron called for a strategy on Monday to make up for the delay in France and Europe in investing in artificial intelligence (AI) but was faced with a “counter-summit” that pointed out the risks of the technology.  The use of chatbots at work and school is destroying jobs, professions and threatening the acquisition of knowledge, said union representatives gathered at the Theatre de la Concorde located in the Champs-Elysees gardens, less than a kilometer from the venue of the Summit for Action on Artificial Intelligence.  Habib El Kettani, from Solidaires Informatique, a union representing IT workers, described an “automation already underway for about ten years,” which has been reinforced with the arrival of the flagship tool ChatGPT at the end of 2022.  “I have been fighting for ten years to ensure that my job does not become an endangered species,” said Sandrine Larizza, from the CGT union at France Travail, a public service dedicated to the unemployed.  She deplored “a disappearance of social rights that goes hand in hand with the automation of public services,” where the development of AI has served, according to her “to make people work faster to respond less and less to the needs of users, by reducing staff numbers.”  Loss of meaning  “With generative AI, it is no longer the agent who responds by email to the unemployed person but the generative AI that gives the answers with …

PARIS — Major world leaders are meeting for an AI summit in Paris, where challenging diplomatic talks are expected as tech titans fight for dominance in the fast-moving technology industry. Heads of state, top government officials, CEOs and scientists from around 100 countries are participating in the two-day international summit from Monday. High-profile attendees include U.S. Vice President JD Vance, on his first overseas trip since taking office, and Chinese Vice Premier Zhang Guoqing. “We’re living a technology and scientific revolution we’ve rarely seen,” French President Emmanuel Macron said Sunday on national television France 2. France and Europe must seize the “opportunity” because AI “will enable us to live better, learn better, work better, care better and it’s up to us to put this artificial intelligence at the service of human beings,” he said. Vance’s debut abroad The summit will give some European leaders a chance to meet Vance for the first time. The 40-year-old vice president was just 18 months into his time as Ohio’s junior senator when Donald Trump picked him as his running mate. Vance was joined by his wife Usha and their three children — Ewan, Vivek and Mirabel — for the trip to Europe. They were greeted on French soil Monday morning by Manuel Valls, the minister for Overseas France, and the U.S. Embassy’s charge d’affaires, David McCawley. On Tuesday, Vance will have a working lunch with Macron, with discussions on Ukraine and the Middle East on the menu. Vance, like President Donald Trump, has questioned …

U.S. President Donald Trump says he wants to make the United States the cryptocurrency capital of the world. He is putting his plan into place in the early weeks of his second presidential term. VOA’s Michelle Quinn has the story. …

Several governments, including the U.S., Taiwan and Australia, have banned the use of China’s AI software DeepSeek on official devices. Analysts say these restrictions are justified, as tests show DeepSeek not only collects excessive user data but also filters sensitive topics and promotes Chinese government narratives more aggressively than Baidu and WeChat. This raises concern that it could become a powerful tool for controlling speech and public opinion.  Click here for the full story in Mandarin. …

Robots with reasoning power are becoming a reality thanks to massive amounts of training data and breakthroughs in artificial intelligence. VOA’s Matt Dibble visits a lab where robots are learning to solve problems themselves. Cameras: Matt Dibble, Tina Trinh. …

WASHINGTON — A bipartisan duo in the U.S. House is proposing legislation to ban the Chinese artificial intelligence app DeepSeek from federal devices, similar to the policy already in place for the popular social media platform TikTok. Lawmakers Josh Gottheimer, a Democrat from New Jersey, and Darin LaHood, a Republican from Illinois, on Thursday introduced the “No DeepSeek on Government Devices Act,” which would ban federal employees from using the Chinese AI app on government-owned electronics. They cited the Chinese government’s ability to use the app for surveillance and misinformation as reasons to keep it away from federal networks. “The Chinese Communist Party has made it abundantly clear that it will exploit any tool at its disposal to undermine our national security, spew harmful disinformation, and collect data on Americans,” Gottheimer said in a statement. “We simply can’t risk the CCP infiltrating the devices of our government officials and jeopardizing our national security.” The proposal comes after the Chinese software company in January published an AI model that performed at a competitive level with models developed by American firms like OpenAI, Meta, Alphabet and others. DeepSeek purported to develop the model at a fraction of the cost of its American counterparts. The announcement raised alarm bells and prompted debates among policymakers and leading Silicon Valley financiers and technologists. The churn over AI is coming at a moment of heightened competition between the U.S. and China in a range of areas, including technological innovation. The U.S. has levied tariffs on Chinese goods, …

U.S. prosecutors on Tuesday unveiled an expanded 14-count indictment accusing former Google software engineer Linwei Ding of stealing artificial intelligence trade secrets to benefit two Chinese companies he was secretly working for.  Ding, 38, a Chinese national, was charged by a federal grand jury in San Francisco with seven counts each of economic espionage and theft of trade secrets.  Each economic espionage charge carries a maximum 15-year prison term and $5 million fine, while each trade secrets charge carries a maximum 10-year term and $250,000 fine.  The defendant, also known as Leon Ding, was indicted last March on four counts of theft of trade secrets. He is free on bond. His lawyers did not immediately respond to requests for comment.  Ding’s case was coordinated through an interagency Disruptive Technology Strike Force created in 2023 by the Biden administration.  The initiative was designed to help stop advanced technology from being acquired by countries such as China and Russia or potentially threatening national security.  Prosecutors said Ding stole information about the hardware infrastructure and software platform that lets Google’s supercomputing data centers train large AI models.  Some of the allegedly stolen chip blueprints were meant to give Google an edge over cloud computing rivals Amazon and Microsoft, which design their own, and reduce Google’s reliance on chips from Nvidia.  Prosecutors said Ding joined Google in May 2019 and began his thefts three years later when he was being courted to join an early-stage Chinese technology company.  Ding allegedly uploaded more than 1,000 …

PARIS — France hosts top tech players next week at an artificial intelligence summit meant as a “wake-up call” for Europe as it struggles with AI challenges from the United States and China. Players from across the sector and representatives from 80 nations will gather in the French capital on February 10 and 11 in the sumptuous Grand Palais, built for the 1900 Universal Exhibition. In the run-up, President Emmanuel Macron will on Feb. 4 visit research centers applying AI to science and health, before hosting scientists and Nobel Prize winners at his Elysee Palace residence on Wednesday. A wider science conference will be held at the Polytechnique engineering school on Thursday and Friday. “The summit comes at exactly the right time for this wake-up call for France and Europe, and to show we are in position” to take advantage of the technology, an official in Macron’s office told reporters. In recent weeks, Washington’s announcement of $500 billion in investment to build up AI infrastructure and the release of a frugal but powerful generative AI model by Chinese firm DeepSeek have focused minds in Europe. France must “not let this revolution pass it by,” Macron’s office said. Attendees at the summit will include Sam Altman, head of OpenAI — the firm that brought generative models to public consciousness in 2022 with the launch of ChatGPT. Google boss Sundar Pichai and Nobel Prize winner Demis Hassabis, who leads the company’s DeepMind AI research unit, will also come, alongside Arthur Mensch, founder of …