On the eve of Saturday, Jan. 18, TikTok went dark in the U.S. in response to a federal ban, after the U.S. government raised concerns about the apps China-based owner ByteDance and the access it might have to U.S. data. But the social media platform restored service to its U.S. users the very next dayciting a promised executive order from President Donald Trump, who was then just one day away from his Inauguration Address. After being sworn in, Trump signed an executive order granting TikTok a 75-day extension to comply with a law that requires a sale or ban of the platform, instructing the Attorney General to not enforce the law while he bides time for the app to be sold. As Trump gives ByteDance more time to find an appropriate buyer, many moguls and businesses have thrown their hats in the ring for a chance to purchase the social media platforma bid that could be as much as $50 billion, per an estimate by CFRA Research's Senior Vice President Angelo Zino.While ByteDance had initially been opposed to selling the apps U.S. operations, General Atlantic CEO Bill Ford (General Atlantic is a major investor in ByteDance), told Axios on Wednesday, Jan. 22, that a deal will get done because it's in everybody's interest."With discussions circulating about potential deals, heres what you need to know about the top contenders to buy and save TikTok in the U.S.Elon MuskElon Musk arrives for President Donald Trump's Inauguration Day in Washington, DC., on Jan. 20, 2025. Kenny HolstonGetty ImagesListed byForbes as the worlds richest person, Tesla and SpaceX owner Elon Musk has found his name used widely among those discussing potential TikTok buyers.Trump said he would be comfortable with Muskwho he has entrusted to lead the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) buying TikTok.When asked by reporters on Jan. 22 if he was open to Musk purchasing the app, Trump said: I would be if he wanted to buy it.In mid-January, before the short-lived TikTok ban went into effect, Bloomberg released a report that China was considering Musk as a buyer for the app.However, TikTok responded via a cool statement shared with several outlets: We cant be expected to comment on pure fiction.Musk has posted on X (formerly Twitter) about his opposition to the bancalling it an exercise in censorship and government controlbut he has not publicly stated if he has plans to buy the app or if it was a consideration at any point. MrBeastMrBeast is seen in attendance during the UFC 299 event at Kaseya Center on March 9, 2024, in Miami, Florida.Chris UngerGetty ImagesContent creator Jimmy Donaldson, known on the Internet as MrBeast, has made it clear he is interested in buying TikTok. Donaldson has the most subscribers of any user on YouTube over 340 millionand boasts over 113 million TikTok followers. On Jan. 13, Donaldson began discussion of his potential bid for TikTok with a post on X that read: Okay fine, Ill buy Tik Tok so it doesnt get banned In a video posted on Jan. 15, Donaldson then told his followers: I just got out of a meeting with a bunch of billionaires. TikTok, we mean business.On Monday, Jan. 20, Donaldson posted another update. TikTok, Im on a private jet right now about to put in my official offer for this platform, he said. I might become your guys new CEO.The Associated Press that Donaldson had joined a consortium of investors, led by Employer.com founder and CEO Jesse Tinsley, in their bid for TikTok. Tinsley announced that the consortium made a formal, all-cash offer to purchase TikTok's U.S. operations and assets.Our offer represents a win-win solution that preserves this vital platform, while addressing legitimate national security concerns, said Tinsley. The statement did not disclose the amount of the bid.Kevin O'LearyKevin O'Leary visits Outnumbered at Fox News Channel Studios on April 18, 2024, in New York City.Roy RochlinGetty ImagesKevin OLeary, Canadian investor and star of the reality television show Shark Tank, has expressed a strong interest in buying TikTok. He has joined The Peoples Bid for TikTok, an effort led by Project Liberty Founder Frank McCourt.On Foxs Americas Newsroom on Jan. 17, OLeary said that $20 billion is on the table. Cash. And on social media, the business mogul pitted himself against fellow bidder Donaldson by posting his segment on Fox, the thumbnail reading: Is MrBeast really the competition?Only one group has the tech to pull this off without breaking a sweat. Guess who? OLeary said in his Instagram caption. Weve been pitching the solution on Capitol Hill. If this deal happens, its going to rewrite the rules of social media power, all on American terms.Trump has stated that he would like the United States to have a 50% ownership position in a joint venture.OLeary is keen on this idea, but told CNBC that he has concerns. That 50/50 deal, I would love to work with Trump on, so would every other potential buyer... But the problem with some of these ideas is they are inconsistent with the ruling of the Supreme Court, he saidLarry EllisonOracle CTO Larry Ellison speaks during a news conference with U.S. President Donald Trump in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on Jan. 21, 2025, in Washington, D.C.Andrew HarnikGetty ImagesWhile speaking from the White House, Trump stated that he would like Oracle chief technology officer and cofounder Larry Ellison to buy TikTok. In front of reporters, he turned to Ellison and said: Larry, lets negotiate in front of the media. So what Im thinking about saying to someone is, Buy it, and give half to the United States of America. He then asked Ellison if it sounded reasonable, with Ellison responding: Sounds like a good deal to me, Mr. President.Ellison, an ally to the President, previously made a bid for TikTok back in 2020, when Trump pushed for a ban on the platform during his first term at the White House.Perplexity AIAn image of a person holding a cell phone in front of a Perplexity AI logo displayed on a computer screen, on April 20, 2024, in Edmonton, Canada. Artur WidakGetty ImagesPerplexity is a free AI-powered answer engine, that arguably competes with the likes of OpenAI and Google.Perplexity AI reportedly made a bid to merge with TikTok on Saturday, Jan. 18, with the understanding it would allow most of ByteDances existing investors to retain their equity stake.TIME has reached out to the respective TikTok deal contenders for comment.

Highly anticipated: Sony's might have a fresh pair of flagship noise-canceling cans dropping soon. A few recent FCC filings have led to speculation that the company is preparing to unleash its next-gen WH-1000XM6 headphones sometime this year. Recent FCC filings give us a sneak peek into what could be Sony's next-gen XM6 headset. Drawings suggest a slightly tweaked physical design from the current XM5 model.One of the most intriguing changes is detachable earpads. The filing shows the earpads can lift off, with the headphone's nameplate and serial numbers tucked underneath. Sony hid that info along the inner pad edge on the XM5.It's unclear if the earpads use magnets, clips, or some other adhering system to stay put. Screws seem unlikely, given the FCC requires the nameplate to be visible to users. Whatever the mode, having the earpads be removable could allow for easier repairs or swapping in different pad materials down the line.The headphones also appear to sport a tweaked hinge. Hopefully, this translates to a foldable design. For context, the XM5 only folds flat, not allowing for more compact storage. Users considered this a major downside over the XM4, so this is Sony's chance to change a previously unfavorable design decision.The FCC filing indicates Sony is sticking with Bluetooth 5.3 and LE Audio support. Some minor antenna changes are evident, which could improve wireless performance and range. The Walkman Blog notes that the driver size remains unchanged at 30mm.Sony lists the tested unit as a prototype rather than production-ready. Most of Sony's previous FCC filings were for either pre-production or finished models. So take what you will from this. // Related StoriesNailing down an official unveiling is a guessing game, but the FCC filing requests a short confidentiality period ending July 22nd, 2025. So, we will likely get an official XM6 reveal before then.The most recent rollouts of Sony's XM series have followed a biennial schedule. The XM3 landed in August 2018, the XM4 in August 2020, and the XM5 in May 2022. That release cadence means the series is already overdue for a refresh, so a spring or summer 2025 launch for the XM6 seems probable.

In brief: Shares of Electronic Arts are down nearly 20 percent after the company warned that earnings for the fiscal third quarter would be lower than initially forecasted due in large part to two franchises that underperformed during the holidays. As of writing, shares of EA are trading for $115.80. Ahead of the announcement, the stock was changing hands at $142.35.EA said its global football franchise, which had experienced two consecutive fiscal years of double-digit net bookings growth, hit a rough patch in the fiscal third quarter. Dragon Age also underperformed during the quarter; its 1.5 million players were nearly 50 percent less than EA had anticipated.As a result, EA revised its third quarter preliminary net bookings. The company now expects approximately $2.215 billion, down from the previous forecast of between $2.4 billion and $2.55 billion. Net revenue, meanwhile, should check in around $1.883 billion; previously, EA had forecasted net revenue in the range of $1.875 billion to $2.025 billion.EA CEO Andrew Wilson said that despite the hiccups, they remain confident in their long-term strategy and expect a full return to growth in FY26. The executive added that this month, teams conducted a comprehensive gameplay refresh in addition to their annual team of the year update in FC 25, and that early feedback has been encouraging.CFO Stuart Canfield concurred, adding that as they look to FY26, they expect grow with the launch of more iconic franchises.Electronic Arts had been at the forefront of soccer games with its popular FIFA franchise, which dates back to 1993. A licensing dispute with FIFA in 2022, however, brought an end to the popular series. The company still makes soccer games, but they're now under the EA Sports FC brand. The most recent, EA Sports FC 25, launched on September 27, 2024, for most major platforms.EA is scheduled to release its next earnings report on February 4, and will host a conference call do discuss the results at 5 pm Eastern. // Related Stories

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The AI-merican dream? AI startup founder allegedly faked profits to trick investors, buy fancy houses FBI claims GameOn founder forged six years of financial records in brazen scheme. Ashley Belanger Jan 24, 2025 3:12 pm | 6 Credit: Feodora Chiosea | iStock / Getty Images Plus Credit: Feodora Chiosea | iStock / Getty Images Plus Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreThe founder of an AI startup in San Francisco was indicted this week for allegedly conspiring with his wife for six years to defraud investors out of $60 million.According to a press release from the US Attorney's Office in the Northern District of California, Alexander Beckmanfounder of GameOn Technology (now known as ON Platform)and Valerie Lau Beckmanan attorney hired by GameOn who later became his wifewere charged with 25 counts, including conspiracy, wire fraud, securities fraud, identity theft, and other offenses. Lau also faces one charge of obstruction of justice after allegedly deleting evidence.If convicted, the maximum penalties for Beckman, 41, could exceed 60 years and for Lau, 38, potentially 80 years.GameOn was founded in 2014 and later became known for developing a popular customer service chatbot functionality that today is used by major sports leagues like the NFL and high-end luxury brands like Valentino and Armani Exchange.In the indictment, it's alleged that Beckman's business plan for GameOn was unsustainable. The AI startup initially offered its chatbot as a "free pilot without any contract" and seemingly only rarely benefited from revenue-sharing agreements. GameOn even sometimes would pay large annual fees to customers without receiving anything in return, including in one year paying "hundreds of thousands of dollars" to a sports league while receiving "no payments and no revenue sharing," an FBI investigation found.To keep the business afloat, Beckman depended entirely on investors, the indictment alleged. Seeking millions to cover both business and personal expenses, Beckman allegedly dreamed up a "brazen and wide-ranging" scheme to defraud investors starting in 2018, the indictment said.To further the alleged scheme, he "often described non-existent revenue, inflated cash balances," and "otherwise exaggerated customer relationships," the US Attorney's Office said, to convince investors to spend millions. As Beckman's accomplice, Lau allegedly manipulated documents, including documents allegedly stolen from the venture capital firm that employed her while supposedly hiding her work for GameOn.The scheme apparently also included forging audits and bank statements, as well as using "the names of at least seven real peopleincluding fake emails and signatureswithout their permission to distribute false and fraudulent GameOn financial and business information and documents with the intent to defraud GameOn and its investors," the US Attorney's Office said.At perhaps the furthest extreme, Lau allegedly falsified account statements, including once faking a balance of over $13 million when that account only had $25 in it. The FBI found that GameOn's revenues never exceeded $1 million in any year, while Beckman allegedly inflated sales to investors, including claiming that sales in one quarter in 2023 got as high as $72 million.Beckman and Lau allegedly went to great lengths to hide the scheme while diverting investor funds to their personal accounts. While GameOn employees allegedly sometimes went without paychecks, Beckman and Lau allegedly stole funds to buy expensive San Francisco real estate and pay for their wedding in 2023. If convicted, they may be forced to forfeit a $4.2 million house, a Tesla Model X, and other real estate and property purchased with their allegedly ill-gotten gains, the indictment said.It took about five years for the cracks to begin to show in Beckman's scheme. Beginning in 2023, Beckman increasingly started facing "questions about specific customers and specific revenue from those customers," the indictment said. By February 2024, Beckman at last "acknowledged to at least one GameOn consultant" that a flagged audit report "did not contain accurate financial information," but allegedly he "attempted to shift blame to others for the inaccuracies."His alleged deflections, however, perhaps got him caught after he supposedly started creating fake email addresses of real financial institution employees to continue to raise money while questions were still swirling. Around June 2024, an investor partner serving on GameOn's board of directors asked to visit a bank branch to see a statement. Allegedly, Lau planted a fake statement at the bank to continue to cover up the scheme, a visit that the FBI showed in the indictment was caught on security cameras.Soon after, Beckman resigned from GameOn in July 2024, the indictment suggested.Employees, customers allegedly also harmedON Platform did not respond to Ars' request to comment, even though GameOn employees and customers were also allegedly harmed by the scheme."Beckman and Lau knew that GameOn depended on new investor funds to operate, burned through its funds, received overdraft notices from banks, was delinquent in paying certain customers, and often was on the brink of not having enough money in the bank to operate and make payroll," the indictment said. And they "knew that GameOn was late to pay payroll on multiple occasions and used individual bank accounts and credit cards to pay their employees."Further, Beckman "misled GameOn investors by describing certain customer relationships as producing revenue for GameOn when in fact Beckman knew that GameOn owed those customers money and was regularly late in paying them."Ars reached out to several ON Platform customers listed on the company's site, including the NFL, the United Soccer League, Valentino, Armani Exchange, and Live Nation, to find out how some of the biggest brands are responding to the indictment. None of the brands contacted responded by the time of this writing.Ashley BelangerSenior Policy ReporterAshley BelangerSenior Policy Reporter Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience. 6 Comments

The AI community is abuzz over DeepSeek R1, a new open-source reasoning model. The model was developed by the Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, which claims that R1 matches or even surpasses OpenAIs ChatGPT o1 on multiple key benchmarks but operates at a fraction of the cost. This could be a truly equalizing breakthrough that is great for researchers and developers with limited resources, especially those from the Global South, says Hancheng Cao, an assistant professor in information systems at Emory University. DeepSeeks success is even more remarkable given the constraints facing Chinese AI companies in the form of increasing US export controls on cutting-edge chips. But early evidence shows that these measures are not working as intended. Rather than weakening Chinas AI capabilities, the sanctions appear to be driving startups like DeepSeek to innovate in ways that prioritize efficiency, resource-pooling, and collaboration. To create R1, DeepSeek had to rework its training process to reduce the strain on its GPUs, a variety released by Nvidia for the Chinese market that have their performance capped at half the speed of its top products, according to Zihan Wang, a former DeepSeek employee and current PhD student in computer science at Northwestern University. DeepSeek R1 has been praised by researchers for its ability to tackle complex reasoning tasks, particularly in mathematics and coding. The model employs a chain of thought approach similar to that used by ChatGPT o1, which lets it solve problems by processing queries step by step. Dimitris Papailiopoulos, principal researcher at Microsofts AI Frontiers research lab, says what surprised him the most about R1 is its engineering simplicity. DeepSeek aimed for accurate answers rather than detailing every logical step, significantly reducing computing time while maintaining a high level of effectiveness, he says. DeepSeek has also released six smaller versions of R1 that are small enough to run locally on laptops. It claims that one of them even outperforms OpenAIs o1-mini on certain benchmarks.DeepSeek has largely replicated o1-mini and has open sourced it, tweeted Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas. DeepSeek did not reply to MIT Technology Reviews request for comments. Despite the buzz around R1, DeepSeek remains relatively unknown. Based in Hangzhou, China, it was founded in July 2023 by Liang Wenfeng, an alumnus of Zhejiang University with a background in information and electronic engineering. It was incubated by High-Flyer, a hedge fund that Liang founded in 2015. Like Sam Altman of OpenAI, Liang aims to build artificial general intelligence (AGI), a form of AI that can match or even beat humans on a range of tasks. Training large language models (LLMs) requires a team of highly trained researchers and substantial computing power. In a recent interview with the Chinese media outlet LatePost, Kai-Fu Lee, a veteran entrepreneur and former head of Google China, said that only front-row players typically engage in building foundation models such as ChatGPT, as its so resource-intensive. The situation is further complicated by the US export controls on advanced semiconductors. High-Flyers decision to venture into AI is directly related to these constraints, however. Long before the anticipated sanctions, Liang acquired a substantial stockpile of Nvidia A100 chips, a type now banned from export to China. The Chinese media outlet 36Kr estimates that the company has over 10,000 units in stock, but Dylan Patel, founder of the AI research consultancy SemiAnalysis, estimates that it has at least 50,000. Recognizing the potential of this stockpile for AI training is what led Liang to establish DeepSeek, which was able to use them in combination with the lower-power chips to develop its models. Tech giants like Alibaba and ByteDance, as well as a handful of startups with deep-pocketed investors, dominate the Chinese AI space, making it challenging for small or medium-sized enterprises to compete. A company like DeepSeek, which has no plans to raise funds, is rare. Zihan Wang, the former DeepSeek employee, told MIT Technology Review that he had access to abundant computing resources and was given freedom to experiment when working at DeepSeek, a luxury that few fresh graduates would get at any company. In an interview with the Chinese media outlet 36Kr in July 2024 Liang said that an additional challenge Chinese companies face on top of chip sanctions, is that their AI engineering techniques tend to be less efficient. We [most Chinese companies] have to consume twice the computing power to achieve the same results. Combined with data efficiency gaps, this could mean needing up to four times more computing power. Our goal is to continuously close these gaps, he said. But DeepSeek found ways to reduce memory usage and speed up calculation without significantly sacrificing accuracy. The team loves turning a hardware challenge into an opportunity for innovation, says Wang. Liang himself remains deeply involved in DeepSeeks research process, running experiments alongside his team. The whole team shares a collaborative culture and dedication to hardcore research, Wang says. As well as prioritizing efficiency, Chinese companies are increasingly embracing open-source principles. Alibaba Cloud has released over 100 new open-source AI models, supporting 29 languages and catering to various applications, including coding and mathematics. Similarly, startups like Minimax and 01.AI have open-sourced their models. According to a white paper released last year by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, a state-affiliated research institute, the number of AI large language models worldwide has reached 1,328, with 36% originating in China. This positions China as the second-largest contributor to AI, behind the United States. This generation of young Chinese researchers identify strongly with open-source culture because they benefit so much from it, says Thomas Qitong Cao, an assistant professor of technology policy at Tufts University. The US export control has essentially backed Chinese companies into a corner where they have to be far more efficient with their limited computing resources, says Matt Sheehan, an AI researcher at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. We are probably going to see a lot of consolidation in the future related to the lack of compute. That might already have started to happen. Two weeks ago, Alibaba Cloud announced that it has partnered with the Beijing-based startup 01.AI, founded by Kai-Fu Lee, to merge research teams and establish an industrial large model laboratory. It is energy-efficient and natural for some kind of division of labor to emerge in the AI industry, says Cao, the Tufts professor. The rapid evolution of AI demands agility from Chinese firms to survive.