Huawei is avoiding sanctions imposed by the US to import advanced microchips, a US Select Committee has alleged. The committee has claimed Huawei is grabbing US tech through strategic partnerships.

Chinese companies circumventing sanctions

The US government isn’t doing enough to curb Chinese companies from importing microchips and other advanced US tech, claimed the top Republican and Democrat on the House China Select Committee.

The Biden administration must step up efforts to block Huawei Technologies suppliers from buying American chipmaking gear. House China Select Committee Chairman John Moolenaar and Ranking Member Raja Krishnamoorthi reportedly wrote a letter to Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo voicing their concerns.

In the letter, the House China Select Committee stated certain companies are working with Huawei to help the company avoid sanctions. Raimondo’s agency oversees a pivotal trade restriction list as well as broader export controls on advanced chips and manufacturing tools.

Interestingly, the committee also submitted the names of the companies that might be colluding with Huawei. The committee accused Chinese companies Pengxinxu, SwaySure Technology, Qingdao Si’En, and “potentially many others” of working in Huawei’s “clandestine network.” The committee relied on a Bloomberg report to make these claims.

How is Huawei avoiding US sanctions?

A Commerce Department spokesperson reportedly confirmed they “have received the letter and will respond through the appropriate channels”. It is not immediately clear how the agency would move forward.

The US sanctions primarily intend to prevent China from developing a cutting-edge semiconductor industry. Multiple reports suggest China could be actively militarizing or weaponizing technology.

The US Select Committee indicated that delays in enforcing policies could be one of the reasons why Huawei can avoid sanctions. Delayed processes have allegedly allowed several Chinese companies to stockpile advanced equipment.

Interestingly, US sanctions on China seem to be driving innovation in the country. Huawei’s latest smartphone packs a 7nm chipset. It has been made by Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC), which is the largest contract chip maker in mainland China.

A new trailer dropped on the opening day of the New York Comic Con for the new six-episode spinoff series Dune: Prophecy, a prequel to the recent films directed by Denis Villeneuve.

The new series will premiere November 17 at 9PM on HBO. Each episode will be available to stream on Max on Sundays following its TV broadcast.

The Dune prequel is based on the novel Sisterhood of Dune by Kevin J. Anderson and Brian Herbert, the son of Dune creator and science fiction writer Frank Herbert. The new HBO series takes place 10,000 years before the rise of Paul Atreides when the Bene Gesserit begins its ascension to power.

It tells the story of two Harkonnen sisters Valya and Tula, played by Emily Watson and Olivia Williams, who create the sisterhood that will inevitably become the Bene Gesserit, the social, spiritual and political order of powerful women seeking to control and shape the universe. Other members of the cast include Travis Fimmel, Jodhi May and Mark Strong.

Enterprises can use their Perplexity dashboards to search for internal information and combine it with knowledge from the internet, but this will only be limited to specific files they deem important. 

Peplexity’s new Internal Knowledge Search lets Perplexity Pro and Enterprise Pro users search for information across the web or their internal databases. Customers can access both knowledge bases in one consolidated platform. 

However, internal knowledge bases will be limited to the files Perplexity users upload to the platform.

Frank te Pas, head of Enterprise product at Perplexity, told VentureBeat in an interview that Internal Knowledge Search will only look for information on files users have uploaded, not entire internal databases. 

“We believe this lets people bring only their most important and valuable data to the table and not the 90% of low-value files they normally sift through,” he said. “Customers told us they want to use information that’s important to them, which makes their own data even more valuable.”

Users have a file upload limit (500 for Enterprise Pro users), but te Pas said this may be expanded. Customers can also upload files directly from folders in all the popular document formats like Excel sheets, word documents or PDFs. 

Still, the company believes Internal Knowledge Search will improve many enterprise functions. 

Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas said research using both internal and external information used to be two separate products. One platform searches the internet and another accesses internal documents and data. 

“Being able to carry out all your research — across both internal and external sources of data — in one consolidated knowledge platform will unlock tremendous productivity gains for every enterprise,” Srinivas said in a blog post. 

Today, we’re launching Perplexity for Internal Search: one tool to search over both the web and your team’s files with multi-step reasoning and code execution. pic.twitter.com/ftZGNgziBW— Aravind Srinivas (@AravSrinivas) October 17, 2024

Perplexity gave customers like Nividia, Databricks, Dell, Bridgewater, Latham & Watkins, Fortune and Lambda early access to the feature. During the early access testing, the company said customers used the Internal Search feature to do due diligence by combining internal research notes and news from the web, combine older sales materials with more current insights for proposal requests, help employees find benefit information and get product roadmap feedback based on best practices from the internet. 

Perplexity will also label data sources if the information was from a website or uploaded files so that the user can dive deeper later. 

In April, Perplexity launched Enterprise Pro, a paid tier of the Perplexity AI chat and search platform. The subscription offers SOC2 certification, single sign-on, user management, file upload alerts and query deletion after a week. 

Make space for Spaces

Perplexity also announced Spaces, a way for teams to share and organize research. 

Spaces will allow users to share files across a team and customize Perplexity’s AI assistant with specific instructions and responses based on their data. The company said customers will also get full control over who gets to access their information. Specific to Perplexity Enterprise Pro, all files and searches on Spaces “are excluded from AI quality training by default.” Pro customers have to voluntarily opt out of AI training. Perplexity also promises to provide the “highest levels of safety and privacy.”

Perplexity plans to add third-party data integration with Crunchbase and FactSet so Enterprise Pro users with subscriptions to those services can add data to their Spaces. 

“This will allow you to expand your knowledge base even further with the ability to search across the public web, internal files, and proprietary data sets,” the company said. 

Te Pas said that bringing in third-party databases like Crunchbase and FactSet means customers with subscriptions can also bring their personalized search queries on those platforms to Perplexity. For example, if a customer created a list of sectors to watch on either database, they can access that through a Perplexity search.

Enterprise RAG is not going away soon

Te Pas said Internal Knowledge Search and Spaces is a form of retrieval augmented generation or RAG, where users can leverage their internal ground truth to a search. 

RAG systems normally sift through databases to find the most relevant answers to queries contained within those files. Most RAG systems use large knowledge repositories, as most enterprises who want to query their own data have an extensive library of information. Occasionally, a company may deploy different RAG use cases, like a real-time information retrieval system or search-only information for a specific unit. Perplexity’s version of RAG still searches a database, except that database is one built on Perplexity’s platform by users who uploaded their documents to it. 

Perplexity has to compete with companies like Glean and Elastic, who have been offering RAG platforms for enterprises for a while. Glean launched its AI search chat platform, Glean Chat, which lets enterprises query their own data, last year.

Perplexity has increasingly taken traffic share from more traditional search engines like Google. Perplexity also has a revenue-sharing program with some partners, mostly media companies, whose links appear on Perplexity searches. 

Just like the Mac version of the app, ChatGPT on Windows lets you ask the AI-powered chatbot questions in a dedicated window that you can keep open alongside your apps. You can quickly access the app by using the Alt + Space shortcut.

It also lets you upload files and photos to ChatGPT and comes with access to a preview of OpenAI’s o1 model capable of “reasoning.” The app is still missing some capabilities, however, such as advanced voice mode.

Even though only ChatGPT Plus, Enterprise, Team, and Edu subscribers can use the app on Windows, OpenAI says it plans on bringing it to everyone later this year.

AI is the latest technology monster scaring people about the future. Legitimate concerns around things like ethical training, environmental impact, and scams using AI morph into nightmares of Skynet and the Matrix all too easily. The prospect of AI becoming sentient and overthrowing humanity is frequently raised, but, as Meta’s AI chief Yann LeCun told The Wall Street Journal, the idea is “complete B.S.” LeCun described AI as less intelligent than a cat and incapable of plotting or even desiring anything at all, let alone the downfall of our species.

LeCun is right that AI is not going to scheme its way into murdering humanity, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to be worried about. I’m much more worried about people relying on AI to be smarter than it is. AI is just another technology, meaning it’s not good or evil. But the law of unintended consequences suggests relying on AI for important, life-altering decisions isn’t a good idea.