Episode Transcript
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(00:02):
Apple beats the tariff with planeloads of iPhones fed workers.
Fear that AI is monitoring whatthey say about Trump, and a whack
of major AI innovations announced.
Welcome to hashtag Trending.
I'm your host, Jim Love.
Let's get into it.
It wasn't exactly a spy thriller,but it was a mission on a deadline,
(00:23):
apple quietly airlifted five cargoplanes full of iPhones and other
devices into the US in the daysbefore the new tariffs took effect.
The shipments flown in from factoriesin India and China in late March.
Were part of a rush to stockAmerican warehouses ahead
of the April 5th deadline.
(00:44):
. The reason for the covert styleoperation, products from China were
scheduled to face a 54% tariff, Vietnam,a 46% tariff, and India a 26% tariff.
Now, if you probably have beenlistening to the news over the
past little while, you find outthat that's all up in the air.
Although , now the tariffs againstChina have more than doubled, but.
(01:07):
For Apple whose global supply chain runsstraight through all of these countries,
there was serious money on the line.
According to PC Magazine, the move wouldhelp avoid immediate price hikes on
devices like the iPhone 16 Pro Max, whichalready retails for as much as 1599 US
(01:28):
with the new tariffs, analysts warned thatthe price could shoot up to 2300 US if
Apple passes the full cost onto consumers.
Apple hasn't commented publiclyon the shipments, but sources
say the flights were part of abroader strategy to buy time.
The company is racing to shift moreproduction to India and other lower
tariff countries, but that's a long-termstrategy and will take time to execute.
(01:53):
In the short term, Apple may havedodged the tariff bullet and stocked
its warehouses for the next few months.
But if trade tensions continue, evensecret airlifts may not be enough.
For as much as the Trump administrationdemands that iPhone production be
moved to the US Apple has alwaysmaintained this is not possible.
(02:14):
And it's not as some havesuggested, because China uses
an army of peasant labor.
Steve Jobs had this argument withBarack Obama as far back as 2010.
Jobs explained that it's not cheaplabor, it's the trained workforce.
That's the issue.
(02:35):
Apple needs to supply 30,000 properlytrained engineers to support a workforce
of 700,000 workers they employ in China.
You can't find that many inAmerica to hire, and the situation
hasn't changed as Tim Cook in2017 at the Fortune Global Forum.
(02:55):
Bluntly put it.
The truth is that China stopped being alow labor cost country many years ago,
and that's not the reason to come to Chinafrom a supply point of view, the reason is
because of the skill and quality of skillin one location and the type of skill.
(03:15):
We require really advanced tooling andthe precision that you have to have in
tooling and working with the materialsthat we do, those are state of the art
and tooling skills are very deep here.
You know, in the US you can have ameeting of tooling engineers, and I'm
not sure we could fill a room in China.
(03:36):
You could fill multiple football fields.
. Federal employees in the US are raisingalarms about being monitored by AI
tools trained to flag criticism ofPresident Donald Trump and Elon Musk.
Several workers inside theEnvironmental Protection Agency,
the EPA, and other departments say,an AI system developed under the
(03:59):
Department of Government Efficiency.
Doge, now led by Musk, is analyzinginternal chats and emails for
signs of political disloyalty.
According to a Reuters investigation,the AI monitors platforms like Microsoft
teams scanning for key phrases orsentiments deemed anti administration.
(04:21):
While the EPA has publicly statedthat AI is being used to optimize
agency functions, insiders say morethan 600 employees have already
been placed on leave under unclearcircumstances with broader cuts expected.
The monitoring appears tobe part of a larger pattern.
Doge.
Staff reportedly use encrypted appslike Signal where messages disappear
(04:45):
shortly after being read and frequentlycollaborate on shared Google Docs leaving
little paper trail legal experts warnthis may skirt federal transparency
laws and suppress protected speech.
Adding to the tension.
Some sources say that Musk's AIassistant grok is being deployed
inside government systems, though itsspecific role remains undisclosed.
(05:10):
Whether grok is helping schedulemeetings or screening, dissent is
unclear, but the silence from officialsis making some federal workers nervous.
As one EPA staffer put it, you startsecond guessing everything you type.
It's not just big brother watching.
It's grok and the AI race shows.
(05:34):
No sign of slowing with major companies.
Again, continuing to makeannouncements of new features.
Microsoft has introduced copilotvision, a feature that allows its AI
assistant to interact with contentacross applications on a user's pc.
But as the tech journal, The Registersaid in an article today, Copilot Vision
(05:54):
takes the memory creepiness up a notch.
The mobile app versions for Androidand iOS can identify and answer
questions about items withinthe view of the phone's camera.
But the Native Windows Desktopversion also branded under
Copilot Vision is more unsettling.
It will read the screen andinteract with the content according
(06:17):
to Microsoft and Copilot will beable to change settings, organize
files, and collaborate on projects.
The article of The Register wonders whatthis application, which as recently as
last week thought there were 25 years anda half Century will do to users desktops.
Members of the Windows insiderswill be the first to see
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what this new Copilot can do.
At Cloud Next 2025, Google UnveiledWorkspace flows, a tool designed to
automate complex multi-step processes.
Using AI users can create custom versionsof Google's AI known as Gems by simply
describing their needs in plain language.
(07:01):
Workspace flows then designs and buildssophisticated logic driven workflows
without the need for complex coding.
The feature aims to streamlinetasks such as customer support
requests and policy document reviews.
Google is slowly pulling all ofthese functions together into what
could be a highly integrated setof apps and productivity tools.
(07:26):
And finally, deep seek AI in collaborationwith Singhai University has unveiled some
new research on what they have termedself principled critique tuning SPCT, A
novel method that enables AI models todevelop their own guiding principles and
critiques during information processing.
(07:48):
This approach enhances the effectivenessof self-evaluation across various tasks,
marking a significant advancement inwhat's called reward modeling techniques.
Now the papers still new, and althoughthey report success against a number
of benchmarks, the techniques probablystill need to be proven, but they would
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be a big advancement in what is termed.
Inference time training, which usesfar less compute and far less data.
To enhance the results of AI models,but this is not all just theory.
The team has integrated this into a newmodel called Deep Seek, GRMA 27 billion
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parameter open source model based onGoogle's Gemma 2 27 B, and has noted, has
gotten some great results on benchmarks.
But that's not all.
Deep Seek has alsoreleased two other models.
Their R3 model, which is whatthey call an open weights model.
'cause you can download not just acode that would make it open source,
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but you also get the weightings, theessence of the trained model as well.
Now artificial analysis.
\ AI models has stated that this is thefirst time that an open weights model
is the leading non reasoning modelmarking a milestone for open source.
The model scored the highest pointsamong all non reasoning models on
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the platform's intelligence index.
\ and in terms of the reasoning models,the models that are quite expensive in
terms of processing but can go back andre-look at what they've done and have
incredible accuracy and intelligence.
Reuters has reported that Deep Seekis planning to launch the next version
of their reasoning model they callR two R one being the first one.
(09:39):
Deep Seek was an enormous breakthroughfor open source and open weights.
Ai.
They challenged the leadershipof proprietary models from open
AI and Google, and it looks likethey're gonna continue to drive
that open source competition.
Just to give you some perspective on this,from recent comments from Sam Altman,
there's no doubt that he and others regardDeepSeek as a real competitive threat.
(10:06):
So that was an amazing amount ofannouncements, or as those of us
who watch AI would call it Thursday.
If you wanna follow more in-depthdiscussion on AI and its impact, join
us on the weekend for Project Synapsewhere we do a deeper dive into AI and
its impacts on our work and our lives.
(10:27):
But that's the show for today.
I'm your host, Jim Love.
Have a Thrilling Thursday,