Elon Musk and his company Tesla witnessed new heights in their respective valuation. While the company soared past $700 billion, the company’s chief saw his net worth eclipsing that of Jeff Bezos and making him the richest person on the planet.

China Says No To “AWS”

In what is possibly a weird demand for Amazon, the Chinese authorities have banned the e-commerce giant from using its AWS logo in the country. According to reports, The Beijing Municipal High People’s Court ruled that the trademark for the term “AWS” belonged to ActionSoft, a Chinese software and data services company. The court ordered Amazon to stop using the term AWS or any similar logos in China and pay compensation equivalent to $11.8 million, to ActionSoft. “Amazon was the first to use the AWS logo in China to sell cloud services for many years. We strongly disagree with the court’s ruling and have appealed the case to the Supreme People’s Court,” responded AWS’ spokesperson to this ruling.

OpenAI’s New Toys

OpenAI has released a 12-billion parameter version of GPT-3, called DALL.E, to generate images from text prompts.

The name is a play on surrealist painter Salvador Dali and Pixar movie, WALL.E. DALL.E is a transformer language model built to receive both the text and the image as a single stream of data packing up to 1280 ‘tokens’.

Simply put, a token refers to a particular symbol from a vocabulary. For example, every letter from A-Z in the English alphabet is a token. However, in DALL.E terms, token stands for both the text and the image input.

DALL.E can render an image from scratch and also alter aspects of an image using text prompts. Read more about it here.

Whatsapp Faces An Exodus

On Monday, WhatsApp updated its terms of use and privacy policy, primarily to expand on its practices around how WhatsApp business users can store their communications. A pop-up has been notifying users that as of February 8, the app’s privacy policy will change and they must accept the terms to keep using the app.

This news surprised the users around the world who have already been sceptical about the privacy practices of the parent company Facebook. Tesla CEO, Elon Musk who had expressed his concerns about Facebook in the past tweeted in support of the Signal messenger app. Signal is an open-sourced nonprofit organization whose business model eliminates the need for personal data in any way.

Musk’s tweet was followed by a surge in downloads of the Signal app. “We are currently having a record level of downloads for the Signal app around the world. Between WhatsApp announcing they would be sharing everything with the Facebook mothership and the Apple privacy labels that allowed people to compare us to other popular messengers, it seems like many people are interested in private communication,” wrote the company.

Big Tech Blockades

The events that followed the ruckus at the US Capitol Hill, might set a new precedent in the history of the internet. While Twitter and Facebook announced that they are suspending the President of the United States from using their platforms, Google has temporarily banned Twitter’s alter-ego Parler from their Play Store.

Tesla Lives Upto The Hype

Intel Looks East

According to reports, Intel is in talks with chip giants TSMC(Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.) and Samsung Electronics in an attempt to revamp its production. If the deal comes through, TSMC will assist Intel in manufacturing 4nm and 5nm chips. For Intel, 2020 has been underwhelming. Competitors like NVIDIA and AMD moved ahead in the race relatively. Whereas Apple has announced its departure from Intel to make its own chips, a move that is predicted to become more common among other companies. Last month, Amazon introduced two of its own chips built in-house.

Apple In Talks With Hyundai?

On Thursday, reports of a potential Apple-Hyundai partnership on driverless, electric vehicles sent Hyundai’s shares soaring. Apple, which has announced its autonomous vehicle project, a couple of weeks ago is reportedly in talks with the South Korean giant Hyundai for a cooperation on its car project. According to WSJ, Apple has been reaching out to suppliers about the possibility of doing its own car, potentially starting production as soon as 2024.

Nvidia-ARM Deal Runs Into Trouble

Britain’s Competition and Markets Authority said Wednesday it was inviting third parties to comment on the merger, ahead of a formal antitrust probe later this year. The investigation will assess the deal’s possible effects on competition in the U.K. and won’t consider national security, though other British-government arms could intervene on that matter.

Google Employees Form A Union

According to reports, a group of Google employees has formed a union to organize workers across the technology company’s sprawling global operations, a rare move within Silicon Valley and one that reflects growing employee activism in the sector. According to people familiar with the proceedings, the Google union’s main goal is to have a say in how Alphabet does business and how its products are used. The group intends to speak out about problems its members see at Google, including pay discrepancies and retaliatory firings. Google recently fired its AI co-lead Timnit Gebru.

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