Mark Zuckerberg yesterday discussed ways to deepen Meta Platforms Inc’s strategic alliance on extended-reality (XR) technology with LG Electronics Inc, during his latest stop on a tour of Asia that has taken the billionaire founder from Tokyo to Seoul.
Zuckerberg and LG Electronics CEO William Cho spent two hours going over business strategies for XR devices, considered a next phase after early virtual and augmented reality devices such as Meta’s Quest headset.
The pair also discussed Meta’s large language models and the potential to build artificial intelligence (AI) into consumer devices, LG said in a statement.
Photo: LG Electronics via AP
The South Korean company mentioned in particular how Meta’s platform could dovetail with LG’s content and TV business to create a “distinctive ecosystem.”
Zuckerberg is in Seoul after spending several days on a ski trip with his family in Japan. The Meta CEO met Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida on Tuesday and discussed a broad range of topics, including the status of AI’s technological advancement and the risk surrounding generative AI, top Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi told reporters yesterday.
AI and Quest have featured heavily on Zuckerberg’s agenda so far, given Meta’s accelerating investment into AI and growing competition in hardware from the likes of Apple Inc’s Vision Pro. In South Korea, he is expected to meet up with Samsung Electronics Co, a longtime rival of LG that has also collaborated with Meta on virtual reality (VR).
Zuckerberg, who arrived in Seoul late on Tuesday, is attracting outsized attention during an Asian tour that has largely remained under wraps.
The billionaire is returning to the city as Meta, whose businesses range from Facebook to Instagram, races to compete in AI with powerful competitors from OpenAI and Microsoft Corp to Alphabet Inc. It is an undertaking that requires huge amounts of Nvidia Corp chips and investment to build what Zuckerberg has dubbed a “massive compute infrastructure.”
Meta remains far and away the industry leader in VR headsets — holding nearly half the market, according to Counterpoint Research — but is losing money on that venture and now has to contend with Apple’s latest device.
It is unclear if mainstream consumers would ever fully embrace the products.
Zuckerberg’s next stop is India, where he is slated to attend the prewedding celebrations of billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s youngest son. The three-day festivities, which are to start tomorrow, are expected to draw celebrities in business, technology and entertainment.
GEOPOLITICAL ISSUES? The economics ministry said that political factors should not affect supply chains linking global satellite firms and Taiwanese manufacturers Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SpaceX) asked Taiwanese suppliers to transfer manufacturing out of Taiwan, leading to some relocating portions of their supply chain, according to sources employed by and close to the equipment makers and corporate documents. A source at a company that is one of the numerous subcontractors that provide components for SpaceX’s Starlink satellite Internet products said that SpaceX asked their manufacturers to produce outside of Taiwan because of geopolitical risks, pushing at least one to move production to Vietnam. A second source who collaborates with Taiwanese satellite component makers in the nation said that suppliers were directly
Top Taiwanese officials yesterday moved to ease concern about the potential fallout of Donald Trump’s return to the White House, making a case that the technology restrictions promised by the former US president against China would outweigh the risks to the island. The prospect of Trump’s victory in this week’s election is a worry for Taipei given the Republican nominee in the past cast doubt over the US commitment to defend it from Beijing. But other policies championed by Trump toward China hold some appeal for Taiwan. National Development Council Minister Paul Liu (劉鏡清) described the proposed technology curbs as potentially having
EXPORT CONTROLS: US lawmakers have grown more concerned that the US Department of Commerce might not be aggressively enforcing its chip restrictions The US on Friday said it imposed a US$500,000 penalty on New York-based GlobalFoundries Inc, the world’s third-largest contract chipmaker, for shipping chips without authorization to an affiliate of blacklisted Chinese chipmaker Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯). The US Department of Commerce in a statement said GlobalFoundries sent 74 shipments worth US$17.1 million to SJ Semiconductor Corp (盛合晶微半導體), an affiliate of SMIC, without seeking a license. Both SMIC and SJ Semiconductor were added to the department’s trade restriction Entity List in 2020 over SMIC’s alleged ties to the Chinese military-industrial complex. SMIC has denied wrongdoing. Exports to firms on the list
TALENT FACTOR: The nation’s chip sector would be difficult to replace, but to maintain that advantage, Taiwan must retain skilled workers, an academic said A group of experts on Sunday called on Taiwan to strive to maintain its world-leading position in the semiconductor industry, with a US-China chip dispute expected to continue regardless of who becomes the next US president. Tamkang University Graduate Institute of International Affairs and Strategic Studies director Li Da-jung (李大中) said at a Taipei seminar on global semiconductor security that the relationship between the two superpowers would remain confrontational. There appears to be “no turning back” in US-China relations, as US presidential candidates US Vice President Kamala Harris and former US president Donald Trump are both expected to continue Washington’s hawkish stance
RSS