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2024 is set up to be the biggest global election year in history. It coincides with the rapid rise in deepfakes. In APAC alone, there was a surge in deepfakes by 1530% from 2022 to 2023, according to a Sumsub report.

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Cybersecurity experts fear artificial intelligence-generated content has the potential to distort our perception of reality — a concern that is more troubling in a year filled with critical elections.

But one top expert is going against the grain, suggesting instead that the threat deep fakes pose to democracy may be “overblown.”

Martin Lee, technical lead for Cisco’s Talos security intelligence and research group, told CNBC he thinks that deepfakes — though a powerful technology in their own right — aren’t as impactful as fake news is.

However, new generative AI tools do “threaten to make the generation of fake content easier,” he added.

AI-generated material can often contain commonly identifiable indicators to suggest that it’s not been produced by a real person.

Visual content, in particular, has proven vulnerable to flaws. For example, AI-generated images can contain visual anomalies, such as a person with more than two hands, or a limb that’s merged into the background of the image.

It can be tougher to decipher between synthetically-generated voice audio and voice clips of real people. But AI is still only as good as its training data, experts say.

“Nevertheless, machine generated content can often be detected as such when viewed objectively. In any case, it is unlikely that the generation of content is limiting attackers,” Lee said.

Experts have previously told CNBC that they expect AI-generated disinformation to be a key risk in upcoming elections around the world.

‘Limited usefulness’

Matt Calkins, CEO of enterprise tech firm Appian, which helps businesses make apps more easily with software tools, said AI has a “limited usefulness.”

A lot of today’s generative AI tools can be “boring,” he added. “Once it knows you, it can go from amazing to useful [but] it just can’t get across that line right now.”

“Once we’re willing to trust AI with knowledge of ourselves, it’s going to be truly incredible,” Calkins told CNBC in an interview this week.

That could make it a more effective — and dangerous — disinformation tool in future, Calkins warned, adding he’s unhappy with the progress being made on efforts to regulate the technology stateside.

It might take AI producing something egregiously “offensive” for U.S. lawmakers to act, he added. “Give us a year. Wait until AI offends us. And then maybe we’ll make the right decision,” Calkins said. “Democracies are reactive institutions,” he said.

No matter how advanced AI gets, though, Cisco’s Lee says there are some tried and tested ways to spot misinformation — whether it’s been made by a machine or a human.

“People need to know that these attacks are happening and mindful of the techniques that may be used. When encountering content that triggers our emotions, we should stop, pause, and ask ourselves if the information itself is even plausible, Lee suggested.

“Has it been published by a reputable source of media? Are other reputable media sources reporting the same thing?” he said. “If not, it’s probably a scam or disinformation campaign that should be ignored or reported.”

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Broadcom beats on earnings and revenue

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Broadcom beats on earnings and revenue

A sign is posted in front of a Broadcom office in San Jose, California, on Dec. 12, 2024.

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Broadcom reported second-quarter earnings on Thursday that beat Wall Street expectations, and the chipmaker provided robust guidance for the current period.

Here’s how the chipmaker did versus LSEG consensus estimates:

  • Earnings per share: $1.58 adjusted versus $1.56 expected
  • Revenue: $15 billion versus $14.99 billion expected

Broadcom said it expects about $15.8 billion in third-quarter revenue, versus $15.70 billion expected by Wall Street analysts. Revenue in the latest quarter rose 20% on an annual basis.

The company said net income increased to $4.97 billion, or $1.03 per share, from $2.12 billion, or 44 cents per share, in the year-ago period. The company instituted a 10-for-1 stock split a year ago.

Broadcom shares are up 12% this year after more than doubling last year on investor optimism for the company’s custom chips for artificial intelligence. In March, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan said it was developing AI chips with three large cloud customers.

Broadcom said that it had $4.4 billion in AI revenue during the quarter, attributing the sales to its networking parts that connect complicated server clusters.

Tan said in a statement that Broadcom expects $5.1 billion in AI chip sales in the third quarter, adding that the company’s “hyperscale partners continue to invest.”

Hyperscalers are companies that build out large cloud systems to rent out to their own customers. They include Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

Those sales are reported in the company’s semiconductor solutions business, which had $8.4 billion in revenue during the quarter, a 17% increase from last year, and above $8.34 billion analyst estimate, according to StreetAccount.

The company’s software business, which includes VMware, grew 25% year-over-year to $6.6 billion in sales, beating the StreetAccount estimate.

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Microsoft’s stock hits fresh record, rallying despite drop in broader market

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Microsoft's stock hits fresh record, rallying despite drop in broader market

Microsoft Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella speaks during the Microsoft Build 2025, conference in Seattle, Washington, on May 19, 2025.

Jason Redmond | AFP | Getty Images

On a down day for the market, Microsoft reached a record high for the first time in 11 months.

Shares of the software giant rose 0.8% to close at $467.68. Microsoft has once again reclaimed the title of world’s largest company by market cap, with a valuation of $3.48 trillion. Nvidia has a market cap of $3.42 trillion, and Apple is valued at $3 trillion.

Microsoft last recorded a record close in July 2024. The stock is now up 11% for the year, while the Nasdaq is flat.

Tech stocks broadly dropped on Thursday, led by a plunge in Tesla, as CEO Elon Musk and President Donald Trump escalated their public beef. Musk, who was leading the Trump Administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) until last week, has slammed the Trump-backed spending bill making its way through Congress, a spat that has turned personal.

But Microsoft investors appear to be tuning out that noise.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella focused on his company’s tight relationship with artificial intelligence startup OpenAI in an interview with Bloomberg, some portions of which were published on Thursday.

“Why would any one of us want to go upset that?” he told Bloomberg. Nadella told analysts in January that OpenAI had made a large new commitment with Microsoft’s Azure cloud. In total, Microsoft has invested nearly $14 billion in OpenAI.

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Anduril raises funding at $30.5 billion valuation in round led by Founders Fund, chairman says

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Anduril raises funding at .5 billion valuation in round led by Founders Fund, chairman says

The Anduril Industries headquarters in Costa Mesa, California, US, on Thursday, Dec. 14, 2023. 

Kyle Grillot | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Defense tech startup Anduril Industries has raised $2.5 billion at a $30.5 billion valuation, including the new capital, Chairman Trae Stephens said on Thursday.

“As we continue working on building a company that has the capacity to scale into the largest problems for the national security community, we thought it was really important to shore up the balance sheet and make sure we have the ability to deploy capital into these manufacturing and production problem sets that we’re working on,” Stephens told Bloomberg TV at the publication’s tech summit in San Francisco.

Reports of the latest financing surfaced in February, around the same time the company took over Microsoft‘s multibillion-dollar augmented reality headset program with the U.S. Army. Last week, Anduril announced a deal with Meta to create virtual and augmented reality devices intended for use by the Army.

The latest funding round, which doubles Anduril’s valuation from August, was led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. The venture firm contributed $1 billion, said Stephens, who’s also a partner at the firm.

Palmer Luckey, founder of Oculus and Anduril Industries, speaks during The Wall Street Journal’s WSJ Tech Live conference in Laguna Beach, California on October 16, 2023.

Patrick T. Fallon | AFP | Getty Images

Stephens said it’s the largest check Founders Fund has ever written.

Since its founding in 2017 by Oculus creator Palmer Luckey, Anduril has been working to shake up the defense contractor space currently dominated by Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman.

Anduril has been a member of the CNBC Disruptor 50 list three times and ranked as No. 2 last year.

Luckey founded Anduril after his ousting from Facebook, which acquired Oculus in 2014 and later made the virtual reality headsets the centerpiece of its metaverse efforts.

Stephens emphasized the importance of the recent partnership between the two sides, and “Palmer being able to go back to his roots and reach a point of forgiveness with the Meta team.”

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In April, Founders Fund closed a $4.6 billion late-stage venture fund, according to a filing with the SEC. A substantial amount of the capital was provided by the firm’s general partners, including Stephens, a person familiar with the matter told CNBC at the time.

Anduril is one of the most highly valued private tech companies in the U.S. and has been able to reel in large sums of venture money during a period of few big exits and IPOs. While the IPO market is showing signs of life after a three-plus year drought, Anduril isn’t planning to head in that direction just yet, Stephens said.

“Long term we continue to believe that Anduril is the shape of a publicly traded company,” Stephens said. “We’re not in any rapid path to doing that. We’re certainly going through the processes required to prepare for doing something like that in the medium term. Right now we’re just focused on the mission at hand, going at this as hard as we can.”

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