Elon Musk raced to build Colossus, the world's largest supercomputer, in Memphis, Tennessee. He bragged that construction only took 122 days and expected that his biggest AI rivals would struggle to catch up.

To leap ahead, his firm xAI "removed whatever was unnecessary" to complete the build, questioning "everything" that might delay operations and taking the timeline "into our own hands," xAI's website said.

Now, xAI is facing calls to shut down gas turbines that power the supercomputer, as Memphis residents in historically Black communities—which have long suffered from industrial pollution causing poor air quality and decreasing life expectancy—allege that xAI has been secretly running more turbines than the local government knows, without permits.

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Donald Trump has started signaling that he's ready to slash tariffs on Chinese imports, but economists have warned that the US softening its stance now likely cedes power to China, which perhaps benefits from dragging out trade talks.

On Tuesday, Trump confirmed that he is willing to reduce 145 percent tariffs on all Chinese imports. A senior White House official told The Wall Street Journal that the tariffs may come "down to between roughly 50 percent and 65 percent." Or perhaps the US may use a tiered approach, charging a 35 percent tax on goods that don't threaten national security, while requiring 100 percent tariffs on imports "deemed as strategic to America’s interest," other insiders told the WSJ.

For now, Trump is being vague, only confirming that tariffs "won't be that high" or "anywhere near" 145 percent. Attempting to maintain a tough veneer, Trump warned that China must act quickly to make a deal to end the trade war or else risk making concessions that China may not consider ideal.

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At the Meta monopoly trial, Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom accused Mark Zuckerberg of draining Instagram resources to stifle growth out of sheer jealousy.

According to Systrom, Zuckerberg may have been directly involved in yanking resources after integrating Instagram and Facebook because "as the founder of Facebook, he felt a lot of emotion around which one was better—Instagram or Facebook," The Financial Times reported.

In 2025, Instagram is projected to account for more than half of Meta's ad revenue, according to eMarketer's forecast. Since 2019, Instagram has generated more ad revenue per user than Facebook, eMarketer noted, and today makes Meta twice as much per user as the closest rival that Meta claims it fears most, TikTok.

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After X (formerly Twitter) announced it would be killing its "Support" account, disgruntled users quickly roasted the social media platform for providing "essentially non-existent" support.

"We'll soon be closing this account to streamline how users can contact us for help," X's Support account posted, explaining that now, paid "subscribers can get support via @Premium, and everyone can get help through our Help Center."

On X, the Support account was one of the few paths that users had to publicly seek support for help requests the platform seemed to be ignoring. For suspended users, it was viewed as a lifeline. Replies to the account were commonly flooded with users trying to get X to fix reported issues, and several seemingly paying users cracked jokes in response to the news that the account would soon be removed.

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The semiconductor industry is bracing to potentially lose more than $1 billion once Donald Trump announces chip tariffs.

Two sources familiar with discussions between chipmakers and lawmakers last week told Reuters that Applied Materials, Lam Research, and KLA—three of the largest US chip equipment makers—could each lose about "$350 million over a year related to the tariffs." That adds up to likely more than $1 billion in losses between the three, and smaller firms will likely face similarly spiked costs, estimating losses in the tens of millions.

Some chipmakers are already feeling the pain of Trump's trade war, despite a 90-day pause on reciprocal tariffs and a tenuous exception for semiconductors and other electronics.

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Despite a recent pause on some tariffs, Apple remains in a particularly thorny spot as Donald Trump's trade war spikes costs in the tech company's iPhone manufacturing hub, China.

Analysts predict that Apple has no clear short-term options to shake up its supply chain to avoid tariffs entirely, and even if Trump grants Apple an exemption, iPhone prices may increase not just in the US but globally.

The US Trade Representative, which has previously granted Apple an exemption on a particular product, did not respond to Ars' request to comment on whether any requests for exemptions have been submitted in 2025.

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On Wednesday, Donald Trump, once again, took to Truth Social to abruptly shift US trade policy, announcing a 90-day pause "substantially" lowering reciprocal tariffs against all countries except China to 10 percent.

Because China retaliated—raising tariffs on US imports to 84 percent on Wednesday—Trump increased tariffs on China imports to 125 percent "effective immediately." That likely will not be received well by China, which advised the Trump administration to cancel all China tariffs Wednesday, NPR reported.

"The US's practice of escalating tariffs on China is a mistake on top of a mistake," the Chinese finance ministry said, calling for Trump to "properly resolve differences with China through equal dialogue on the basis of mutual respect."

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Later today, a former Facebook employee, Sarah Wynn-Williams, will testify to Congress that Meta executives "repeatedly" sought to "undermine US national security and betray American values" in "secret" efforts to "win favor with Beijing and build an $18 billion dollar business in China."

In her prepared remarks, which will be delivered at a Senate subcommittee on crime and counterterrorism hearing this afternoon, Wynn-Williams accused Meta of working "hand in glove" with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). That partnership allegedly included efforts to "construct and test custom-built censorship tools that silenced and censored their critics" as well as provide the CCP with "access to Meta user data—including that of Americans."

Wynn-Williams worked as Facebook's Director of Global Public Policy from 2011 to 2017. She left at the height of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, just before Mark Zuckerberg got grilled by Congress over misinformation and election interference on its platform.

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Twitch has struck a deal with Elon Musk's X (formerly Twitter) to eject itself from a lawsuit over an ad boycott shortly following Musk's takeover of Twitter in October 2022.

In a court filing Monday, X lawyers provided no details on the deal but explained that "X and Twitch have entered into a memorandum of understanding resolving the action as to Twitch," so long as "certain conditions" are met by December 31.

Musk has called for "criminal prosecution" of anyone involved in the ad boycott. But while Twitch was one of about a dozen companies that X directly accused of conspiring to withhold billions in ad revenue from then-Twitter, it was not part of X's initial complaint. The livestreaming service was only added to the lawsuit after X amended its complaint in November to pull in more advertisers, and since then, Twitch has never responded to any of X's accusations. Instead, in its filing, X speaks for Twitch.

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After The New York Times sued OpenAI in December 2023—alleging that ChatGPT outputs violate copyrights by regurgitating news articles—the ChatGPT maker tried and failed to argue that the claims were time-barred.

According to OpenAI, the NYT should have known that ChatGPT was being trained on its articles and raised its lawsuit in 2020, partly because of the newspaper's own reporting. To support this, OpenAI pointed to a single November 2020 article, where the NYT reported that OpenAI was analyzing a trillion words on the Internet. But on Friday, US district judge Sidney Stein disagreed, denying OpenAI's motion to dismiss the NYT's copyright claims partly based on one NYT journalist's reporting.

In his opinion, Stein confirmed that it's OpenAI's burden to prove that the NYT knew that ChatGPT would potentially violate its copyrights two years prior to its release in November 2022. And so far, OpenAI has not met that burden.

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When Francesca Mani was 14 years old, boys at her New Jersey high school used nudify apps to target her and other girls. At the time, adults did not seem to take the harassment seriously, telling her to move on after she demanded more severe consequences than just a single boy's one or two-day suspension.

Mani refused to take adults' advice, going over their heads to lawmakers who were more sensitive to her demands. And now, she's won her fight to criminalize deepfakes. On Wednesday, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy signed a law that he said would help victims "take a stand against deceptive and dangerous deepfakes" by making it a crime to create or share fake AI nudes of minors or non-consenting adults—as well as deepfakes seeking to meddle with elections or damage any individuals' or corporations' reputations.

Under the law, victims targeted by nudify apps like Mani can sue bad actors, collecting up to $1,000 per harmful image created either knowingly or recklessly. New Jersey hopes these "more severe consequences" will deter kids and adults from creating harmful images, as well as emphasize to schools—whose lax response to fake nudes has been heavily criticized—that AI-generated nude images depicting minors are illegal and must be taken seriously and reported to police. It imposes a maximum fine of $30,000 on anyone creating or sharing deepfakes for malicious purposes, as well as possible punitive damages if a victim can prove that images were created in willful defiance of the law.

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Critics are questioning if Donald Trump's administration possibly used chatbots to calculate reciprocal tariffs announced yesterday that Trump claimed were "individualized" tariffs placed on countries that have " the largest trade deficits" with the US.

Those tariffs are due to take effect on April 9 for 60 countries, with peak rates around 50 percent. That's in addition to a baseline 10 percent tariff that all countries will be subject to starting on April 5. But while Trump expressed intent to push back on anyone supposedly taking advantage of the US, some of the countries on the reciprocal tariffs list puzzled experts and officials, who pointed out to The Guardian that Trump was, for some reason, targeting uninhabited islands, some of them exporting nothing and populated with penguins.

Some overseas officials challenged Trump's math, such as George Plant, the administrator of Norfolk Island, who told the Guardian that "there are no known exports from Norfolk Island to the United States and no tariffs or known non-tariff trade barriers on goods coming to Norfolk Island."

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US experts who work in artificial intelligence fields seem to have a much rosier outlook on AI than the rest of us.

In a survey comparing views of a nationally representative sample (5,410) of the general public to a sample of 1,013 AI experts, the Pew Research Center found that "experts are far more positive and enthusiastic about AI than the public" and "far more likely than Americans overall to believe AI will have a very or somewhat positive impact on the United States over the next 20 years" (56 percent vs. 17 percent). And perhaps most glaringly, 76 percent of experts believe these technologies will benefit them personally rather than harm them (15 percent).

The public does not share this confidence. Only about 11 percent of the public says that "they are more excited than concerned about the increased use of AI in daily life." They're much more likely (51 percent) to say they're more concerned than excited, whereas only 15 percent of experts shared that pessimism. Unlike the majority of experts, just 24 percent of the public thinks AI will be good for them, whereas nearly half the public anticipates they will be personally harmed by AI.

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