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SUQIAN, CHINA - MARCH 4, 2024 - Illustration Mistral AI, March 4, 2024, Suqian, Jiangsu Province, China.
Hard Numbers: Mistral gets money, Amazon’s investments, Disco time!, Wary of AI news
6 billion: Europe has just one major player in the generative AI space: Mistral. The French startup raised a new $640 million funding round last week that boosts its overall value to $6 billion. While OpenAI, Anthropic, and other startups have largely proprietary or closed-source models, Mistral has focused on open-source models, marking a more open approach that might suit regulators in Brussels better.
230 million: On Thursday,Amazon pledged $230 million to invest in generative AI startups. That number includes $80 million for its second Amazon Web Services Generative AI Accelerator program, designed to incentivise AI startups to use Amazon’s cloud services.
5: Disco Corp., a Japanese semiconductor company, has seen its stock quintuple since 2022 on increased demand for chip packaging services. The profit margins are thinner for packaging compared with other facets of the chip industry, but increasingly in demand with ever-shrinking chip sizes.
52: Roughly half of Americans are okay with news written by AI. Some 52% of US respondents told surveyors at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism that they’re uncomfortable with news largely written by AI. Even more respondents felt uncomfortable in the UK, with 63% shaking their heads at AI-written news. Trust in the media is at historic lows in the US, and ambivalence to whether it’s written by humans or machines may be the clearest sign yet.Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban and Luxembourg Prime Minister Luc Frieden attend a European Union summit in Brussels, Belgium February 1, 2024.
The EU stares down Orban
Serial political blackmailer Viktor Orban, Hungary’s prime minister, upset other EU leaders in December by vetoing a plan meant to provide Ukraine with a multi-year €50 billion EU aid package. The EU must, Orban insisted, pledge to revisit the plan each year the money was scheduled for disbursement – with any member retaining the right to veto the plan midstream.
This is money Kyiv needs to keep the lights on, and to pay pensions and salaries, as its war with Russia grinds on. Growing uncertainty over the future of US aid for Ukraine tied to America’s November elections added urgency to the request.
Leaders of the other 26 EU member states had decided that Orban wanted to use future veto threats to give himself more long-term negotiating leverage to win new EU concessions, and at a summit meeting on Thursday, they drew a line. Possibly in exchange for quicker disbursement of the remainder of €20 billion in EU funds already earmarked for Hungary – money currently locked up over corruption and human rights concerns – Orban accepted a plan that allows for future reviews of the Ukraine plan, but without a future veto.
In short, the EU played hardball, and Orban caved.
FILE PHOTO: A truck, marked with United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) logo, crosses into Egypt from Gaza, at the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and the Gaza Strip, during a temporary truce between Hamas and Israel, in Rafah, Egypt, November 27, 2023.
A dozen countries suspend UNRWA funding over Oct.7 allegations
On Sunday, France, Austria and Japan announced they were joining the US, Germany, Canada, Italy, the UK, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Australia and Finland in pausing their funding for the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees. At least a dozen employees of UNRWA allegedly cooperated with Hamas in planning the Oct. 7 attacks.
Together, the countries that have pulled their money made up well over 60% of the funds for UNRWA in 2022, and representatives of the organization say they will not be able to function long without the support. Norway and Ireland, however, agreed to continue funding UNRWA, saying their work supporting the displaced and devastated population of Gaza is too important.
What happens now? UNRWA has fired nine of the 12 employees accused of cooperating with Hamas, though the details of their alleged collaboration are not publicly known. The US did frame its suspension of funding as temporary, leaving the door open to resumption. But UNRWA is already regarded with deep distrust within Israel, and the Biden administration may face pressure from its ally not to resume funding.
In the meantime, however, over 2 million Gazans are in desperate straits, displaced from their homes and reliant on UNRWA for what food and medicine they can get. Some are calling for the Gulf states to step in with funding to replace what the West has withdrawn, but no signs yet the money is forthcoming.