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Bankman-Fried was due to testify about the collapse of his cryptocurrency platform FTX before the US Congress on Tuesday.

Sam Bankman-Fried, the former CEO of the collapsed cryptocurrency exchange platform FTX, was arrested by Bahamian authorities on December 12 after US prosecutors filed criminal charges, the US Attorney’s Office Southern District of New York confirmed on Twitter.

Bankman-Fried was arrested at his apartment complex, in Nassau, Bahamas, and is scheduled to appear on Tuesday in a magistrates court in Nassau. The US prosecutors also added that an indictment would be unsealed on the day.

Tel Aviv-based D-ID released today the first multimodal generative AI video platform to combine text, image and animation in one interface. The self-service video platform integrates D-ID’s proprietary generative AI technology with GPT-3 from Open AI and Stable Diffusion from Stability AI, allowing users to generate digital composite faces and speech in 119 languages based on their text prompts.

“This is a game changer for creators,” says Gil Perry, D-ID co-founder and CEO. “It’s the bleeding edge of generative AI,” he asserts, touting the startup’s expertise in deep learning and computer vision. When I talked to Perry last year, he said that the company’s long-term vision is “to lead the next disruption in the video entertainment space by creating AI-generated synthetic media in a responsible way.”

In the rapidly evolving generative AI space, “long-term” means “next year,” so now Perry talks about providing “digital humans” to enterprises, “transforming the way we communicate with machines and elevating our capabilities as humans.” He hopes that sometime next year, we could chat with the digital humans we will create with D-ID’s help.

Japan wants to get back into the leading-edge semiconductor business and very recently a new company was formed to reboot its semiconductor industry. The company is named Rapidus, referring to rapid production of new chips, a clear reference to how the company plans to differentiate its business from other foundries such as TSMC, Samsung, and Intel. The company has announced a partnership with IBM Research to develop IBM’s 2nm technology in fabs that Rapidus plans to build in Japan during the second part of this decade. Previously, Rapidus announced a collaboration with the Belgium-based microelectronics research hub IMEC on advanced semiconductor technologies. Imec is collaborative semiconductor research organization working the world’s major foundries, IDMs, fabless and fablite companies, material and tool suppliers, EDA companies and application developers.

The IBM process uses gate-all-around transistors — IBM refers to them as nano sheet FETs — which is the next generation of transistor design that enables device scaling beyond today’s FinFETs. The 2nm structures will require Rapidus to use ASML’s EUV manufacturing equipment. Business details with IBM were not disclosed, but there’s likely two parts to the deal: a cross-licensing agreement for the intellectual property necessary to build the product and a joint development agreement. While the announcement is nominally for IBM’s 2nm process, it likely includes a long-term commitment to build advanced semiconductor chips going beyond the 2nm process node.

Rapidus was formed by semiconductor veterans such as Rapidus President Atsuyoshi Koike, with backing by leading Japanese technology and financial firms, including Denso, Kioxia, Mitsubishi UFJ Bank, NEC, NTT, Softbank, Sony, and Toyota Motor. The Japanese government is also subsidizing Rapidus. The big change for Japan compared to prior national efforts is the collaboration with international organizations. It’s a recognition Japan cannot go it alone. This appears to be a fundamental change in Japanese attitudes. Building a fab in Japan will be helped by Japan’s strong manufacturing ecosystem of materials, equipment, and engineering talent.

Things have been changing since Musk took over the platform.

Elonjet, the Twitter handle that tracks Elon Musk’s private jet, has alleged that the platform has shadowbanned him, Business Insider.

Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images.

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US officials announced Tuesday that researchers have produced a nuclear fusion reaction resulting in a net energy gain. Follow here for live news updates.

Hitting two targets at the same time may be the key to stopping the spread of aggressive cancers, according to new research from the University of East Anglia and the Quadram Institute.

Researchers have found that tumor growth in mice could be stopped by simultaneously targeting two signaling switches that trigger growth of new blood vessels.

Their study, published in the journal Cancer Research Communications, points to new approaches for treating cancer in humans.

A groundbreaking scientific discovery changes what we know about dying.

After injecting moderate doses of the dissociative anesthetic into the animals, previously “awake” brain cells go dark, and those that had been dormant suddenly light up.

The Rare Earth Hypothesis suggests that our planet may the product of an incredibly improbable sequence of events, and thus perhaps intelligent life is extremely rare in the cosmos. Here we tackle this highly influential idea and the arguments behind it. But, digging deeper, we’ll uncover some problems with the Rare Earth idea — some of which strike to the very core of our scientific quest.

Written & presented by Prof David Kipping.

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