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Deepfaked Robocall of President Biden Tells Voters to ‘Save Your Vote’ for November

The Story: On Monday, New Hampshire’s Attorney General John Formella announced the state had begun investigations into a report of possible voter suppression before the Tuesday primary.

Residents of New Hampshire reported to have received phone calls from an “artificially generated” voice mimicking Joe Biden, which asked voters to not participate in the primaries. The call includes a request for voters to “Save your vote for the November election.”

The intention of the fake call appeared to be to dupe democrat voters into forgoing participation in the New Hampshire primary.

According to researchers, the rise of audio deepfakes that mimic politicians will continue to spread as cases have already occurred in the UK, India, Nigeria, Sudan, Ethiopia and Slovakia.

In an interview with Hannah Murphy from the Financial Times, Henry Adjer, an expert on deepfakes, says the scary part about audio deepfakes is that “there’s much less awareness about how audio material can be manipulated.”

Social media platforms also struggle with identifying and regulating audio deepfakes. Meta has banned posting manipulated videos but does not enforce bans on deepfaked audio. TikTok is finding ways to label audio content that is manipulated but has not yet been able to find a long-term solution.

Expert Take: Will misinformation and even attempts of voter suppression grow as America gets closer to the November election? Bradley Tusk, founder and CEO of Tusk Venture Partners, believes deepfake stories are mostly overblown by the media, but does say that “the risk is real.”

Tusk believes the only solution to curb the growing risk of deepfakes is to suppress them with the law:

Tusk offers his proposal for how the government should enforce the prevention of deepfaked content on social media: “The platforms need to be responsible for identifying what’s real and what’s fake… they should be legally liable if they don’t deem the content correctly. Some might say, ‘Well [the platforms] don’t know either.’ If [the platforms] don’t know, don’t post it, don’t let it go up. But the only way [platforms] would limit the content and limit the risk is if they have legal liability for getting it wrong and that needs to be applied to them.”

Fintech Decacorn Brex Cuts 20% of Staff

The Story: On Tuesday, fintech startup Brex announced layoffs of 282 employees—about 20% of its staff. The decacorn (meaning a private company valued at over $10 billion) is reported to be facing stalled growth and high burn as 2024 begins.

In addition to the layoffs, Brex also shared that COO Michael Tannenbaum and CTO Cosmin Nicolaescu will be stepping away from their roles. Tannenbaum will become a board member and Nicolaescu will become an advisor.

Brex’s co-founder and co-CEO Pedro Franceschi wrote to employees stating that the company’s comp structure is now, “emphasizing long-term thinking and ownership over short-term gains.”

This isn’t Brex’s first time announcing a large layoff, however. A company restructure in October of 2022 led to 136 employees being let go, more than 10% of staff.

Related to this most recent slew of layoffs could be the reported $17 million per month Brex burned in Q4 of 2023. The Information reports that the company claimed to only have “enough cash to last through March 2026.”

A spokesperson for Brex disputes this, however, telling TechCrunch that the company’s cash runway is actually now four years and that “...cherry picking certain months for financial burn is not the correct way to look at burn.”

Expert Take: Ansaf Kareem, founding and managing partner of Latitude Capital, does not see Brex’s burn rate as a particularly worrying outlier in the fintech space.

He says, “There’s nothing in particular here that says that this is a bigger outlier than any other company… Obviously $17 million seems like a big number, but it’s hard to really understand that number without a broader context around the company profile, revenue, scale, cost-per-user, et cetera.”

Kareem believes Brex’s reduction and leadership restructure is likely for the purpose of “trying to make sure they can continue to guide the company towards a path for a successful IPO.”

The AI Industrial Complex: The Cost of Developing AI Infrastructure on US Soil

The Story: The AI revolution relies on computing power and a lot of it. Large language models get that computing power from microchips powered by semiconductors. The tech is complicated and very expensive to make, and today, Taiwan produces over 60% of the world’s semiconductors and over 90% of the advanced semiconductors.

Naturally, this concentration of manufacturing has created supply chain bottlenecks that are slowing the distribution of chips to top bidders around the world. Those top bidders include Meta, OpenAI, and Microsoft. Last week, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta purchased 340,000 H100 GPUs from Nvidia, the world’s leading AI computing company that, you guessed it, relies on Taiwan’s TSMC to build 90% of its chips.

There’s growing fear that dependence on Taiwan to buttress the AI revolution is becoming increasingly risky. The threat of an invasion from China is not out of the question, and would very likely halt the production and delivery of Taiwan’s chips.

The US wants to reduce this dependence. America’s solution is creating factories that design semiconductor chips on US soil. And the plans have already begun. Taiwan’s biggest chip provider TSMC is building two factories in Arizona, a project that will cost over $40 billion. The original plan was for the factories to be operational by 2026, but TSMC chairman Mark Liu has announced the project is delayed until at least 2027 or 2028 due to labor and licensing issues.

While many American building projects are experiencing similar delays to the Arizona factories, over $200 billion dollars in total has been committed by many investors to support new chip manufacturing infrastructure across the country.

In November, GlobalWafer, another Taiwan-based chipmaker, began building a $5 billion dollar plant in Sherman, Texas. The Biden Administration has also announced funding for 25 National AI Research Institutes.

As the US government gets more involved in supporting American companies to build the AI infrastructure necessary to meet the growing demand for chip tech in the US and around the world, there is also a question that has arisen. Will this lead to a new problem for the US, what has been coined the “AI Industrial Complex?”

Expert Take: Doug Clinton, co-founder and managing partner at Deepwater Asset Management, believes it is “only a matter of time” before the US will be able to rival Taiwan’s semiconductor manufacturing dominance.

Clinton expects that in the next 2-3 years, we will begin to see semiconductor fabrication plants (fabs) pop up around the US. However, he says it will likely take a decade for American infrastructure to catch up to Taiwan, “unless we have some massive capital infusion, probably hundreds of billions of dollars.”

Clinton doesn’t see the growing demand for AI chips and fabs in the US as the dawn of an impending “AI industrial complex.”

He says, “You have hyperscalers. You have Meta, spending close to $10 billion dollars this year on Nvidia chips. I think they are seeing an opportunity in the market, I don’t think that their intent is to have undue control over government policy, I think their intent is that they see a huge opportunity in AI.”

He continues, “I think it’s very much market-driven… could there be a by-product where maybe there is some influence on the government? Sure, I think you could’ve said that looking back on the internet twenty-five years ago… I think we need to figure out the supply-chain more, get more diversity, and the chips away from Taiwan. That to me is more important than domestic influence on government policy.”

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