Hard Numbers: Harvard’s books, A whistleblower’s tragic end, Broadcom’s boom, Getting brainworms

December 17, 2024

The Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library is pictured in Harvard yard at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S., December 7, 2023

REUTERS/Faith Ninivaggi

1 million: Harvard Law School's Library Innovation Lab has launched the Institutional Data Initiative to make public domain data from Harvard and other institutions available for training AI models, including 1 million books scanned at Harvard.

26: A former OpenAI researcher-turned-whistleblower named Suchir Balaji was found dead in his apartment from an appartent suicide. Balaji, who was only 26, left OpenAI earlier this year and went public with concerns that the company had violated US copyright laws in training ChatGPT.

1 trillion: The chipmaker Broadcom is now a $1 trillion company after its stock surged 20% on Dec. 13 following positive news about its AI business. The company told investors in its quarterly earnings call that its AI chip business was rapidly growing, as a result boosting Broadcom to the ninth-most-valuable company in the world.

250 million: The startup Liquid AI is closing in on a new $250 million fundraising round that would value it at $2.3 billion. Fascinatingly, the company is building “liquid foundation models” that, instead of being modeled off of neural connections in the human brain, are based off of the inner workings of worm brains.

Budget clash puts South African government on brink of collapse

African National Congress (ANC) members of parliament react after South African lawmakers passed the budget's fiscal framework in Cape Town, South Africa, April 2, 2025.

REUTERS/Esa Alexander

The second largest party in South Africa’s coalition, the business-friendly Democratic Alliance, launched a legal challenge on Thursday to block a 0.5% VAT increase in the country’s new budget, raising concerns that the fragile government could collapse.

Hard Numbers: Harvard’s books, A whistleblower’s tragic end, Broadcom’s boom, Getting brainworms

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Canadians take aim at US businesses

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Hard Numbers: Harvard’s books, A whistleblower’s tragic end, Broadcom’s boom, Getting brainworms

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Subscribe to GZERO Media's newsletter: Signal

More from GZERO Media

The second largest party in South Africa’s coalition, the business-friendly Democratic Alliance, launched a legal challenge on Thursday to block a 0.5% VAT increase in the country’s new budget, raising concerns that the fragile government could collapse.

Remember the TikTok ban? The new deadline President Donald Trump set for the app to find an American buyer or be banned from US app stores, midnight Saturday, is rapidly approaching.

Overnight, the US moved to having the world’s highest tariffs by a long margin. Here is Ian Bremmer's Quick Take on the near and long-term fallout

Have you stayed atop GZERO’s news coverage this week? Here's your chance to prove it.

GZEROMEDIA

Subscribe to GZERO Media's newsletter: Signal

Someone needs to take National Security Advisor Michael Waltz’s phone out of his hand.

Donald Trump’s much-anticipated “liberation day” tariff announcement on Wednesday is the biggest disruption to global trade in decades, so the political, diplomatic, and economic impacts will take time to become clear.

Donald Trump is reportedly telling people that he and Elon Musk have agreed that Musk’s work in the US government will soon be done. Politico’s story broke just as Musk seems to have discovered the electoral limits of his charm.

What's going to be the reaction to the Trump trade war against Europe but also against the rest of the world? Carl Bildt, former prime minister of Sweden and co-chair of the European Council on Foreign Relations, shares his perspective on European politics from Stockholm, Sweden.

Even before Trump’s tariff announcement on Wednesday, Canadian consumers were engaged in a grassroots trade war aimed at hurting American companies. The “Buy Canadian” movement is having a moment.