Technology

➚ MOVE FAST: Go. Easing trade tensions incentivized the US to lift limits on chip design software sales to China. While curbs on advanced AI chips and other sophisticated products are likely here to stay, the move shows the tech Cold War does allow for some openings.

➘ BREAK THINGS: Pause. European companies want the EU to delay implementation of its far-reaching AI rules for two years, citing risks to the region’s tech ambitions. Support from firms outside that sector, like Airbus, BNP Paribas, and Mercedes-Benz, show how concerning the regulations are to the overall corporate world.

Neural inkwork. Body art shops in New York and Austin are offering tattoos by an AI-powered robot created by startup Blackdot, The Wall Street Journal reported. The device tattoos using a needle attached to a robot arm and computer vision that measures the recipient’s skin. It hurts less than getting a tattoo from a human artist because the needle doesn’t pierce as deeply, according to the company.

“There are people that are wondering if technology should make its way into the tattoo industry,” Blackdot founder Joel Pennington told the Journal. “But that was what happened when Gutenberg came out with a printing press, and everyone thought that books should be handwritten.”

Some artists are wary that the technology could take their jobs or devalue the artistry that goes into tattooing. Pennington said he isn’t looking to replace tattoo artists but to serve customers wanting a less painful experience or who aren’t comfortable in a traditional tattooing environment. The machine could also service those looking for the kind of artwork that tattooists don’t particularly enjoy doing, like simple lettering, in some cases.

The number of paintings created since the 1400s that economists analyzed with AI, in an attempt to determine how people thought and felt when the art was made. An algorithm identified the emotions portrayed in individual artworks — including fear, anger, contentment, and awe — and compared those findings to the context in which the paintings were created, according to a new working paper, which was circulated by the nonprofit National Bureau of Economic Research. The economists found that the emotions portrayed in paintings align with known economic and social events, with depictions of “fear,” for example, increasing during times of political turbulence and wars.

OpenAI is warning people about “tokenized” shares of its stock that can be obtained through the online trading platform Robinhood. To promote its cryptocurrency products, Robinhood announced it would give some users €5 “stock tokens” that track the private-market values of OpenAI and SpaceX.

Robinhood does own tokenized shares of OpenAI and SpaceX, and the company said the tokens would be backed by blockchain-backed contracts, which are not available inside the US.

The unprecedented move represents a creative way to allow ordinary people to invest in privately held startups. We’ve covered this topic before, but Robinhood’s entry into the market signals the concept’s growing momentum.

The US has restrictive rules that disincentivize companies from going public. At the same time, it prohibits ordinary investors from putting their money in private companies. This tokenized trend could put pressure on US regulators to change financial rules — and as AI companies like OpenAI beat historical valuations, that could become a much bigger issue.

With R&D spending in the spotlight, Autodesk CEO Andrew Anagnost has repositioned his $68 billion design software company partly by killing some research-and-development flowers.

In an interview for The CEO Signal with Semafor’s Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson, Anagnost says he inherited a “let a thousand flowers bloom” approach when he became head of the company in 2017. That’s an expensive and inefficient way to “find the future” if you don’t ax failing projects, he says — “and, let’s face it, most people don’t have the discipline to kill the projects.”

Anagnost says Autodesk now makes fewer bets, and structures them around his suppositions on what the future might look like, rather than assuming that the future is unknowable.

“If you don’t have a guess on the future, then where are you going?” he asks. His message to the company is: “Let’s do a few things and do them well, and let’s make sure that innovation comes from the bottom up, but direction tension comes from the top down in a balanced way.”

With the final passage of the GOP megabill through Congress this week, the Republican Party won a generational victory. And they did it by co-opting some of Democrats’ strongest messages — promises to improve federal health care programs and prioritize the neediest Americans — to pass a bill that will cut Medicaid access.

“Republicans have talked a big game about becoming the party of working people,” Texas Rep. Greg Casar, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, told Semafor’s David Weigel. “This vote should be the final nail in the coffin of that idea.”