9to5Mac: In a surprising move, Apple has announced today that it will adopt the RCS (Rich Communication Services) messaging standard. The feature will launch via a software update "later next year" and bring a wide range of iMessage-style features to messaging between iPhone and Android users. Apple's decision comes amid pressure from regulators and competitors like Google and Samsung. It also comes as RCS has continued to develop and become a more mature platform than it once was.

In a statement to 9to5Mac, an Apple spokesperson said that the company believes RCS will offer better interoperability for cross-platform messages. "Later next year, we will be adding support for RCS Universal Profile, the standard as currently published by the GSM Association. We believe RCS Universal Profile will offer a better interoperability experience when compared to SMS or MMS. This will work alongside iMessage, which will continue to be the best and most secure messaging experience for Apple users."

Lauren Irwin reports via The Hill: Google agreed to pay $8 billion over four years to Samsung to make its apps default on Samsung phones, according to information presented by Epic Games in court. James Kolotouros, vice president for partnerships at Google, testified Monday in a San Francisco trial, saying that the company and Samsung were to share app store revenue to ensure Android mobile devices came with Google Play preinstalled. Epic, the company that makes the popular video game "Fortnite," sued Google in 2020, alleging the company's app marketplace violates antitrust laws.

Epic is trying to show that Google executives have discouraged third-party app stores on Samsung devices so it wouldn't cut into the profit of Google Play, Bloomberg reported. According to Kolotouros's testimony, half or more of Google Play revenue comes from Samsung devices. The trial targets the app store that distributes apps for the company's Android software, which powers virtually all the world's smartphones that aren't made by Apple.

Epic alleges Google has created an illegal monopoly on Android apps so it can boost its profits through commissions, ranging from 15 to 30 percent on purchases made within an app. Google argues it was doing so to compete with Apple and its app store, an argument attacked by Epic attorney Lauren Moskowitz. Earlier in the trial, Google's attorney said the company can't be a monopoly because it faces competition from companies such as Apple. Further reading: Apple Gets 36% of Google Revenue in Search Deal, Witness Says

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: If you've only ever used standard Qi chargers with devices that don't have their own schemes, the Wireless Power Consortium's announcement today of the first Qi 2.0 devices being ready to launch before the holidays, with more than 100 in the queue behind them, is great. Qi2 sports a "Magnetic Power Profile" (MPP), created with help by Apple's MagSafe team, to help align devices and chargers' coils for faster, more efficient charging. Qi2-certified devices set onto Qi2 chargers can achieve 15 W charging, up from 7.5 W in the standard Qi scheme.

That brings Qi2 devices up to the same speed as iPhones on MagSafe chargers, and it clears up some consumer confusion about how fast a device might charge on Qi, MagSafe, or proprietary chargers. Should a phone and charger be Qi2 certified, you can now expect about 15 W out of it, regardless of whatever Google, Apple, or third party is behind them. Android and iPhone users alike are no longer beholden to their primary hardware vendor if they want 15 W of wireless juice. This announcement does not, however, bring the Qi2 standard close to the far-out speeds that proprietary setups now offer. [...]

A number of accessory makers, including stalwarts Anker and Belkin, had already lined up their Qi2-compatible offerings, waiting for the certification to drop. It will be interesting to see if Qi2 brings a wave of magnet mania to Android phones, akin to the MagSafe-induced blitz a few years back. Magnetic charging packs, wallets, wireless charging for a non-wireless-charging phone -- there's a lot to work with, especially at now somewhat more respectable charging speeds. Regarding speed, the WPC told Android Authority back in January that the Qi2 standards group intends to standardize charging speeds above 15 W by mid-2024. If you need a fast charge, plugging in the right cable to a well-powered source is still the most certain route. But with magnetic alignment and a good deal more universal compatibility, Qi2 drags the broader wireless charging market forward.

Microsoft unveiled its first homegrown AI chip and cloud-computing processor in an attempt to take more control of its technology and ramp up its offerings in the increasingly competitive market for AI computing. The company also announced new software that lets clients design their own AI assistants. From a report: The Maia 100 chip, announced at the company's annual Ignite conference in Seattle on Wednesday, will provide Microsoft Azure cloud customers with a new way run AI programs that generate content. Microsoft is already testing the chip with its Bing and Office AI products, said Rani Borkar, a vice president who oversees Azure's chip unit. Microsoft's main AI partner, ChatGPT maker OpenAI, is also testing the processor. Both Maia and the server chip, Cobalt, will debut in some Microsoft data centers early next year.

Microsoft's multi-year investment shows how critical chips have become to gaining an edge in both AI and the cloud. Making them in-house lets companies wring performance and price benefits from the hardware. The initiative also could insulate Microsoft from becoming overly dependent on any one supplier, a vulnerability currently underscored by the industrywide scramble for Nvidia's AI chips. Microsoft's push into processors follows similar moves by cloud rivals. Amazon.com Inc. acquired a chip maker in 2015 and sells services built on several kinds of cloud and AI chips. Google began letting customers use its AI accelerator processors in 2018.

Ever wanted to add your own annotations to search results you find on Google? With Google's new "Notes" experiment, launching Wednesday as an opt-in feature through Search Labs, you'll be able to. From a report: If you've opted in to Notes, buttons to add and see notes will appear under search results and under articles on Discover in the Google app. When you create a note, you can add colorful fonts and images. During a briefing, Google showed me a note for an article about different kinds of frosting that had green text, an image of a cake, and a heart sticker. (At the bottom of the note, there was a link to the article the note was about.)

If you post a note, it should show up "within minutes," unless it's flagged for human review, Google VP Cathy Edwards said in an interview with The Verge. When you look at all of the notes for a link, what's shown will be ranked dynamically based on things like the user's query and a note's relevance to the content on the page.

Emma Roth reports via The Verge: Meta, ByteDance, Alphabet, and Snap must proceed with a lawsuit alleging their social platforms have adverse mental health effects on children, a federal court ruled on Tuesday. US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers rejected the social media giants' motion to dismiss the dozens of lawsuits accusing the companies of running platforms "addictive" to kids. School districts across the US have filed suit against Meta, ByteDance, Alphabet, and Snap, alleging the companies cause physical and emotional harm to children. Meanwhile, 42 states sued Meta last month over claims Facebook and Instagram "profoundly altered the psychological and social realities of a generation of young Americans." This order addresses the individual suits and "over 140 actions" taken against the companies.

Tuesday's ruling states that the First Amendment and Section 230, which says online platforms shouldn't be treated as the publishers of third-party content, don't shield Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Snapchat from all liability in this case. Judge Gonzalez Rogers notes many of the claims laid out by the plaintiffs don't "constitute free speech or expression," as they have to do with alleged "defects" on the platforms themselves. That includes having insufficient parental controls, no "robust" age verification systems, and a difficult account deletion process.

"Addressing these defects would not require that defendants change how or what speech they disseminate," Judge Gonzalez Rogers writes. "For example, parental notifications could plausibly empower parents to limit their children's access to the platform or discuss platform use with them." However, Judge Gonzalez Rogers still threw out some of the other "defects" identified by the plaintiffs because they're protected under Section 230, such as offering a beginning and end to a feed, recommending children's accounts to adults, the use of "addictive" algorithms, and not putting limits on the amount of time spent on the platforms.

Fitbit is active in only 23 countries after leaving Mexico, South Africa, and all Latin American countries. "We communicated that we will stop selling Fitbit products in select countries in order to align our hardware portfolio to map closer to Pixel's regional availability," a Google spokesperson confirmed to Cord Cutters News via email. From the report: The move marks a phasing out of Fitbit products after the Big Tech company acquired wearable company in 2021. Last month, Fitbit said it would remove itself from Asian markets Hong Kong, Korea, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines, along with European markets Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Poland, Portugal, Romania, and Slovakia. It's possible Google is removing Fitbit and Nest from the European markets because they don't have a Google Store support. If that changes, Fitbit products and Nest Aware subscriptions could return. New products like the Pixel Watch could also arrive for the first time. "We remain committed to our customers and have not made any changes that impact the existing Fitbit devices they already own. Existing Fitbit customers will continue to have access to the same customer support, warranties will still be honored, and products will continue to receive software and security updates," the Google spokesperson said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Intel on Tuesday pushed microcode updates to fix a high-severity CPU bug that has the potential to be maliciously exploited against cloud-based hosts. The flaw, affecting virtually all modern Intel CPUs, causes them to "enter a glitch state where the normal rules don't apply," Tavis Ormandy, one of several security researchers inside Google who discovered the bug, reported. Once triggered, the glitch state results in unexpected and potentially serious behavior, most notably system crashes that occur even when untrusted code is executed within a guest account of a virtual machine, which, under most cloud security models, is assumed to be safe from such faults. Escalation of privileges is also a possibility.

The bug, tracked under the common name Reptar and the designation CVE-2023-23583, is related to how affected CPUs manage prefixes, which change the behavior of instructions sent by running software. Intel x64 decoding generally allows redundant prefixes -- meaning those that don't make sense in a given context -- to be ignored without consequence. During testing in August, Ormandy noticed that the REX prefix was generating "unexpected results" when running on Intel CPUs that support a newer feature known as fast short repeat move, which was introduced in the Ice Lake architecture to fix microcoding bottlenecks. The unexpected behavior occurred when adding the redundant rex.r prefixes to the FSRM-optimized rep mov operation. [...]

Intel's official bulletin lists two classes of affected products: those that were already fixed and those that are fixed using microcode updates released Tuesday. An exhaustive list of affected CPUs is available here. As usual, the microcode updates will be available from device or motherboard manufacturers. While individuals aren't likely to face any immediate threat from this vulnerability, they should check with the manufacturer for a fix. People with expertise in x86 instruction and decoding should read Ormandy's post in its entirety. For everyone else, the most important takeaway is this: "However, we simply don't know if we can control the corruption precisely enough to achieve privilege escalation." That means it's not possible for people outside of Intel to know the true extent of the vulnerability severity. That said, anytime code running inside a virtual machine can crash the hypervisor the VM runs on, cloud providers like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and others are going to immediately take notice.

In research published in Science today, Google DeepMind's model, GraphCast, was able to predict weather conditions up to 10 days in advance, more accurately and much faster than the current gold standard. From a report: GraphCast outperformed the model from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) in more than 90% of over 1,300 test areas. And on predictions for Earth's troposphere -- the lowest part of the atmosphere, where most weather happens -- GraphCast outperformed the ECMWF's model on more than 99% of weather variables, such as rain and air temperature. Crucially, GraphCast can also offer meteorologists accurate warnings, much earlier than standard models, of conditions such as extreme temperatures and the paths of cyclones. In September, GraphCast accurately predicted that Hurricane Lee would make landfall in Nova Scotia nine days in advance, says Remi Lam, a staff research scientist at Google DeepMind. Traditional weather forecasting models pinpointed the hurricane to Nova Scotia only six days in advance.

[...] Traditionally, meteorologists use massive computer simulations to make weather predictions. They are very energy intensive and time consuming to run, because the simulations take into account many physics-based equations and different weather variables such as temperature, precipitation, pressure, wind, humidity, and cloudiness, one by one. GraphCast uses machine learning to do these calculations in under a minute. Instead of using the physics-based equations, it bases its predictions on four decades of historical weather data. GraphCast uses graph neural networks, which map Earth's surface into more than a million grid points. At each grid point, the model predicts the temperature, wind speed and direction, and mean sea-level pressure, as well as other conditions like humidity. The neural network is then able to find patterns and draw conclusions about what will happen next for each of these data points.

An anonymous reader writes: Two men who allegedly used 65 Google accounts to bombard Google with fraudulent DMCA takedown notices targeting up to 620,000 URLs, have been named in a Google lawsuit filed in California on Monday. Google says the men weaponized copyright law's notice-and-takedown system to sabotage competitors' trade, while damaging the search engine's business and those of its customers.

Google pays Apple 36% of the revenue it earns from search advertising made through the Safari browser, the main economics expert for the Alphabet unit said Monday. From a report: Kevin Murphy, a University of Chicago professor, disclosed the number during his testimony in Google's defense at the Justice Department's antitrust trial in Washington. John Schmidtlein, Google's main litigator, visibly cringed when Murphy said the number, which was supposed to remain confidential.

Both Google and Apple had objected to revealing details publicly about their agreement. In a court filing last week, Google argued that revealing additional information about the deal "would unreasonably undermine Google's competitive standing in relation to both competitors and other counterparties."

Nvidia, the world's most valuable chipmaker, is updating its H100 artificial intelligence processor, adding more capabilities to a product that has fueled its dominance in the AI computing market. From a report: The new model, called the H200, will get the ability to use high-bandwidth memory, or HBM3e, allowing it to better cope with the large data sets needed for developing and implementing AI, Nvidia said Monday. Amazon's AWS, Alphabet's Google Cloud and Oracle's Cloud Infrastructure have all committed to using the new chip starting next year.

The current version of the Nvidia processor -- known as an AI accelerator -- is already in famously high demand. It's a prized commodity among technology heavyweights like Larry Ellison and Elon Musk, who boast about their ability to get their hands on the chip. But the product is facing more competition: AMD is bringing its rival MI300 chip to market in the fourth quarter, and Intel claims that its Gaudi 2 model is faster than the H100. With the new product, Nvidia is trying to keep up with the size of data sets used to create AI models and services, it said. Adding the enhanced memory capability will make the H200 much faster at bombarding software with data -- a process that trains AI to perform tasks such as recognizing images and speech.

Google is suing scammers who are trying to use the hype around generative AI to trick people into downloading malware, the company has announced. From a report: In a lawsuit filed today in California, the company says individuals believed to be based in Vietnam are setting up social media pages and running ads encouraging users to "download" its generative AI service Bard. The download actually delivers malware to the victims, which steals social media credentials for the scammers to use. "Defendants are three individuals whose identities are unknown who claim to provide, among other things, 'the latest version' of Google Bard for download," the lawsuit reads.

"Defendants are not affiliated with Google in any way, though they pretend to be. They have used Google trademarks, including Google, Google AI, and Bard to lure unsuspecting victims into downloading malware onto their computers." The lawsuit notes that scammers have specifically used promoted Facebook posts in an attempt to distribute malware. Similar to crypto scams, the lawsuit highlights how interest in an emerging technology can be weaponized against people who may not fully understanding how it operates.

Started in 2013, "Hour of Code" is an annual tradition started by the education non-profit Code.org (which provides free coding lessons to schools). Its FAQ describes the December event for K-12 students as "a worldwide effort to celebrate computer science, starting with 1-hour coding activities," and over 100 million schoolkids have participated over the years.

This year's theme will be "Creativity With AI," and the "computer vision" lesson includes a short video (less than 7 minutes) featuring a Tesla Autopilot product manager from its computer vision team. "I build self-driving cars," they say in the video. "Any place where there can be resources used more efficiently I think is a place where technology can play a role. But of course one of the best, impactful ways of AI, I hope, is through self-driving cars." (The video then goes on to explain how lots of training data ultimately generates a statistical model, "which is just a fancy way of saying, a guessing machine.")

The 7-minute video is part of a larger lesson plan (with a total estimated time of 45 minutes) in which students tackle a fun story problem. If a sports arena's scoreboard is showing digital numbers, what series of patterns would a machine-vision system have to recognize to identify each digit. (Students are asked to collaborate in groups.) And it's just one of seven 45-minute lessons, each one accompanied by a short video. (The longest video is 7 minutes and 28 seconds, and all seven videos, if watched back-to-back, would run for about 31 minutes.)

Not all the lessons involve actual coding, but the goal seems to be familiarizing students (starting at the 6th grade level) with artificial intelligence of today, and the issues it raises. The second-to-last lesson is titled "Algorithmic Bias" — with a video including interviews with an ethicist at Open AI and professor focused on AI from both MIT and Stanford. And the last lesson — "Our AI Code of Ethics" — challenges students to assemble documents and videos on AI-related "ethical pitfalls," and then pool their discoveries into an educational resource "for AI creators and legislators everywhere."

This year's installment is being billed as "the largest learning event in history." And it's scheduled for the week of December 4 so it coincides with "Computer Science Education Week" (a CS-education event launched in 2009 by the Association for Computing Machinery, with help from partners including Intel, Microsoft, Google, and the National Science Foundation).

An anonymous reader shared this report from security research Brian Krebs: In the summer of 2022, KrebsOnSecurity documented the plight of several readers who had their accounts at big-three consumer credit reporting bureau Experian hijacked after identity thieves simply re-registered the accounts using a different email address. Sixteen months later, Experian clearly has not addressed this gaping lack of security. I know that because my account at Experian was recently hacked, and the only way I could recover access was by recreating the account...

The homepage said I needed to provide a Social Security number and mobile phone number, and that I'd soon receive a link that I should click to verify myself. The site claims that the phone number you provide will be used to help validate your identity. But it appears you could supply any phone number in the United States at this stage in the process, and Experian's website would not balk.
One user said they recreated their account this week — even though the phone number they'd input was a random number. "The only difference: it asked me FIVE questions about my personal history (last time it only asked three) before proclaiming, 'Welcome back, Pete!,' and granting full access," @PeteMayo wrote. "I feel silly saving my password for Experian; may as well just make a new account every time."

And Krebs points out that "Regardless, users can simply skip this step by selecting the option to 'Continue another way.'" Experian then asks for your full name, address, date of birth, Social Security number, email address and chosen password. After that, they require you to successfully answer between three to five multiple-choice security questions whose answers are very often based on public records. When I recreated my account this week, only two of the five questions pertained to my real information, and both of those questions concerned street addresses we've previously lived at — information that is just a Google search away...

Experian will send a message to the old email address tied to the account, saying certain aspects of the user profile have changed. But this message isn't a request seeking verification: It's just a notification from Experian that the account's user data has changed, and the original user is offered zero recourse here other than to a click a link to log in at Experian.com. And of course, a user who receives one of these notices will find that the credentials to their Experian account no longer work. Nor do their PIN or account recovery question, because those have been changed also. Your only option at this point is recreate your account at Experian and steal it back from the ID thieves!
Experian's security measures "are constantly evolving," insisted Experian spokesperson Scott Anderson — though Krebs remains unsatisfied. Anderson said all consumers have the option to activate a multi-factor authentication method that's requested each time they log in to their account. But what good is multi-factor authentication if someone can simply recreate your account with a new phone number and email address?

In Chrome, JavaScript (and WebAssembly) code are both executed by Google's open source V8 engine — which already has garbage-collecting capabilities. "This means developers making use of, for example, PHP compiled to Wasm, end up shipping a garbage collector implementation of the ported language (PHP) to the browser that already has a garbage collector," writes Google developer advocate Thomas Steiner, "which is as wasteful as it sounds."

"This is where WasmGC comes in." WebAssembly Garbage Collection (or WasmGC) is a proposal of the WebAssembly Community Group [which] adds struct and array heap types, which means support for non-linear memory allocation... In simplified terms, this means that with WasmGC, porting a programming language to WebAssembly means the programming language's garbage collector no longer needs to be part of the port, but instead the existing garbage collector can be used.
Sometime on Halloween, Steiner wrote that in Chrome, WebAssembly garbage collection is now enabled by default. But then he explored what this means for high-level programming languages (with their own built-in garbage collection) being compiled into WebAssembly: To verify the real-world impact of this improvement, Chrome's Wasm team has compiled versions of the Fannkuch benchmark (which allocates data structures as it works) from C, Rust, and Java. The C and Rust binaries could be anywhere from 6.1 K to 9.6 K depending on the various compiler flags, while the Java version is much smaller at only 2.3 K! C and Rust do not include a garbage collector, but they do still bundle malloc/free to manage memory, and the reason Java is smaller here is because it doesn't need to bundle any memory management code at all. This is just one specific example, but it shows that WasmGC binaries have the potential of being very small, and this is even before any significant work on optimizing for size.
The blog post includes two examples of WasmGC-ported programming languages in action:

• "One of the first programming languages that has been ported to Wasm thanks to WasmGC is Kotlin in the form of Kotlin/Wasm."

• "The Dart and Flutter teams at Google are also preparing support for WasmGC. The Dart-to-Wasm compilation work is almost complete, and the team is working on tooling support for delivering Flutter web applications compiled to WebAssembly."

Does Gmail want to be an instant messaging client? From a report: Last month the popular webmail app shipped an emoji reactions bar in the mobile app, where a single tap would send a new email with your emoji response. Now, a wild new UI experiment spotted by Android Police goes another step further: a quick reply bar that looks just like instant messaging input. Rather than the usual input block you get for writing paragraphs of overly formal text, this new Gmail experiment has a one-line input bar at the bottom for replies. A drop-down menu just above it lets you pick from the usual "reply," "reply all," or "forward" options. Besides that, you get an attachment and send button. An "expand" button will presumably launch the usual compose interface.

Google -- under fire in court for allegedly resting on its laurels thanks to its 90% market dominance -- only made an effort to beef up the quality of its search engine in the European Union after being hit by a record antitrust fine, according to internal documents revealed in the US Justice Department's monopolization case against the tech giant. From a report: The Justice Department is arguing at a trial in Washington that Google's failure to improve its products -- unless put under pressure -- proves that it's illegally maintaining its monopoly. Alphabet's Google planned to improve its European search results only after a record 2018 European antitrust fine, according to the documents, which revealed that Google executives discussed a plan dubbed "Go Big in Europe."

The plan aimed to improve results in France and Germany in 2019 and 2020 with changes such as adding post-game soccer video highlights, more local content and news, pronunciation practice for different languages and more information on local television options available for streaming. The catalyst was a 2018 EU antitrust order that forced Google to offer a choice screen giving Android phone users five search engine options to choose from, according to US antitrust enforcers trying the case.

Google has confirmed in court that Epic was offered a $147 million deal to launch its hit game Fortnite on Android's Google Play Store. From a report: The deal, which Google's VP of Play partnerships, Purnima Kochikar, says was approved and presented to Epic but not accepted, would have seen the money dispensed over a three-year period of "incremental funding" (ending in 2021) to the games publisher. It was meant to stem a potential "contagion" of popular apps bypassing Android's official store and, with it, Google's lucrative in-app purchase fees.

Epic launched Fortnite on Android in 2018 directly through its website, avoiding the Play Store. That allowed it to sell Fortnite's in-game currency, V-Bucks, without paying the commission required of Play Store apps. It relented in 2020, saying that "scary, repetitive security pop-ups" and other factors had put it at a severe disadvantage. But in an antitrust lawsuit filed later that year -- and currently being argued before a jury -- it alleged its initial decision had thrown Google into a panic. It cited internal documents claiming Google feared a "contagion risk" if other game developers (including Blizzard, Valve, Sony, and Nintendo) followed Epic's lead, and it claimed Google attempted to forestall it by offering special benefits or even buying Epic.

After months of high-level meetings and discussions, government officials and Big Tech leaders have agreed on one thing about artificial intelligence: The potentially world-changing technology needs some ground rules. But many in Silicon Valley are skeptical. WashingtonPost: A growing group of tech heavyweights -- including influential venture capitalists, the CEOs of midsize software companies and proponents of open-source technology -- are pushing back, claiming that laws for AI could snuff out competition in a vital new field. To these dissenters, the willingness of the biggest players in AI, such as Google, Microsoft and ChatGPT maker OpenAI to embrace regulation is simply a cynical ploy by those firms to lock in their advantages as the current leaders, essentially pulling up the ladder behind them. These tech leaders' concerns ballooned last week, when President Biden signed an executive order laying out a plan to have the government develop testing and approval guidelines for AI models -- the underlying algorithms that drive "generative" AI tools such as chatbots and image-makers.

"We are still in the very early days of generative AI, and it's imperative that governments don't preemptively anoint winners and shut down competition through the adoption of onerous regulations only the largest firms can satisfy," said Garry Tan, the head of Y Combinator, a San Francisco-based start-up incubator that helped nurture companies including Airbnb and DoorDash when they were just starting. The current discussion hasn't incorporated the voices of smaller companies enough, Tan said, which he believes is key to fostering competition and engineering the safest ways to harness AI. Companies like influential AI start-up Anthropic and OpenAI are closely tied to Big Tech, having taken huge amounts of investment from them.

"They do not speak for the vast majority of people who have contributed to this industry," said Martin Casado, a general partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which made early investments in Facebook, Slack and Lyft. Most AI engineers and entrepreneurs have been watching the regulatory discussions from afar, focusing on their companies instead of trying to lobby politicians, he said. "Many people want to build, they're innovators, they're the silent majority," Casado said. The executive order showed those people that regulation could come sooner than expected, he said. Casado's venture capital firm sent a letter to Biden laying out its concerns. It was signed by prominent AI start-up leaders including Replit CEO Amjad Masad and Mistral's Arthur Mensch, as well as more established tech leaders such as e-commerce company Shopify's CEO Tobi Lutke, who had tweeted "AI regulation is a terrible idea" after the executive order was announced.