Ring founder Jamie Siminoff returned to Amazon this week, coming back to the company just about two years after he left, Bloomberg reports. He’s now a vice president at the company, and he will be heading up the Ring, Blink, Amazon Key, and Sidewalk teams.
Siminoff is replacing Liz Hamren, who had taken over following Siminoff’s initial departure. Hamren and the team “have done an awesome job driving the business, delivering strong results, and bringing a lot of delightful experiences to neighbors,” Siminoff says in an Amazon Q&A. He adds that the “AI transformation happening right now” is a “once-in-a-generation opportunity.”
In the Q&A, Siminoff also says that he and Panos Panay, Amazon’s SVP of devices and services, have talked “a lot” about “experiences we can create with devices that are awesome on their own, but even better together. I think you’ll continue to see a lot of that from us moving forward – helping customers stay safe, connected, and informed as part of a magical connected experience.”
The day after Siminoff originally left Amazon, Siminoff sold a new company, Honest Day’s Work, to Latch, which he helped rebrand to Door.com. The company announced late last year that he would be moving into an advisory role in 2025.
Nice economy you have there, said President Donald Trumpâs administration. It would be a shame if something happened to it.
The something, announced earlier this week, is a set of globally applied tariffs that make no sense on their face. No sane economist would endorse this. Through a combination of stupidity, incompetence and sheer gangsterism, the Trump administration has decided to levy a series of taxes that encourage blatant corruption, entirely fail to encourage American manufacturing growth, and leave people and companies poorer. That is, assuming that the taxes come into play at all.
âThis is the craziest of the crazy things weâve seen thus far.â
The central, persistent thing Trump seems to misunderstand about tariffs is that they are paid in the US by people in the US. A reasonable person might also remember that he tried them a few years ago in a trade war, to negative effect. We have, as a nation, shot ourselves in the dick. But donât take my word for it! Here are some actual experts:
âThis is the craziest of the crazy things weâve seen thus far,â says Chris Barrett, professor of economics at Cornell Universityâs SC Johnson School of Business.
President Trump announced this week a series of tariffs imposed on the import of products from other countries, which will end up hitting many US companies like Apple – since most of its products come from China. Now it seems that Apple is considering expanding the assembly of iPhones in Brazil to get around the US tariffs.
AI image generator Midjourney released its first new model in quite some time today; dubbed V7, it's a ground-up rework that is available in alpha to users now.
There are two areas of improvement in V7: the first is better images, and the second is new tools and workflows.
Starting with the image improvements, V7 promises much higher coherence and consistency for hands, fingers, body parts, and "objects of all kinds." It also offers much more detailed and realistic textures and materials, like skin wrinkles or the subtleties of a ceramic pot.
President Donald Trump’s additional 75 day delay to TikTok’s sale-or-ban deadline leaves service providers like Apple, Google, and Oracle on shaky ground, and, according to one influential Democrat, is straight-up “against the law.”
After Trump announced the extension on Friday, 12 Republican members of the House Select Committee on China, including Chair John Moolenaar (R-MI), released a joint statement in response. The statement did not address legal concerns with the second extension, but it said that “any resolution must ensure that U.S. law is followed, and that the Chinese Communist Party does not have access to American user data or the ability to manipulate the content consumed by Americans.” The letter says signatories “look forward to more details” on a proposed deal.
In a separate statement, three Republican members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, including Chair Brett Guthrie (R-KY) struck a similar note, saying that, “any deal must finally end China’s ability to surveil and potentially manipulate the American people through this app.”
“The whole thing is a sham if the algorithm doesn’t move from out of Beijing’s hands”
Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chair Mark Warner (D-VA) was more critical in a phone interview with The Verge. “The whole thing is a sham if the algorithm doesn’t move from out of Beijing’s hands,” Warner said. “And close to 80 percent of Republicans knew this was a national security threat — will they find their voice now?”
Trump signed an executive order on his first day in office delaying enforcement of the TikTok divestiture law, a move legal experts already found questionable. Then, he failed to announce a deal before the new April 5th deadline amid chaos over new global tariffs. Letting the delay expire would have put US companies that serviced TikTok after the deadline at even greater risk of hefty penalties.
The original Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act was passed with overwhelming bipartisan support to address what lawmakers insisted was a pressing national security threat, then upheld by the Supreme Court in January. TikTok has long denied that the Chinese government could access US user data or put its thumb on the scales of the recommendation feed through ByteDance, but many lawmakers have consistently doubted that defense.
As the Trump administration has opted to effectively ignore the law, however, Congress has been relatively quiet.
“Trump’s unilateral extension is illegal and forces tech companies to once again decide between risking ruinous legal liability or taking TikTok offline”
A few Senate Democrats, including Ed Markey (D-MA), recently warned Trump that another extension would only introduce more legal uncertainty, and some expressed doubt that some of the reported deal scenarios could even resolve the app’s legal concerns. In a statement after Trump’s second extension, Markey says while he’d like to see the deadline pushed, “Trump’s unilateral extension is illegal and forces tech companies to once again decide between risking ruinous legal liability or taking TikTok offline.” He called the move “unfair to those companies and unfair to TikTok’s users and creators.” Instead, Trump should go through Congress to pass Markey’s bill to the extend the deadline, he says.
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), a member of the China Committee who’s criticized the law and warned it will harm free expression and creators’ livelihoods, also wants to see a solution go through Congress, but is seeking a full repeal of the law. Still, he called Trump’s delay a “good step.”
The new statements from China Committee and E&C Republicans appear to be the first coordinated moves to put a firm line in the sand on the topic. Some Republicans who support the divest-or-ban law have previously urged Trump’s compliance in one-off statements or writings. Moolenaar previously warned in an op-ed that an adequate deal must fully break ties with ByteDance after reports that Trump was considering a deal with Oracle that would potentially leave some ties intact. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) told reporters earlier this week that if a deal doesn’t comply with the statute, he “would advise the President against it.” If he can’t get a deal to sell the company in a way that fully complies, Hawley thinks Trump “ought to enforce the statute and ban TikTok. This middle way, I don’t think is viable.”
Warner maintains that lawmakers want a TikTok sale that keeps the app in the US, and he says the Biden administration should have been more aggressive in getting negotiations started. He remains concerned that TikTok’s ownership structure could allow a foreign adversary government to influence young Americans.
“During the negotiations, we saw the enormous bias in TikTok on things like the Uyghurs, the Hong Kong protests, the conflict in Gaza,” says Warner. “That was how we got 80 percent of the vote.” Warner says he remains concerned about the security of US user data, but sees the potential for TikTok to be used to “shape public opinion” as the more serious threat. Still, lawmakers seem unlikely to do much beyond (maybe) trying to pass a new law should Trump continue to flout the existing one. “Congress,” says Hawley, “we don’t have an enforcement arm of our own.”
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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