@HPC Podcast Archives - OrionX.net - HPC News Bytes – 20250804

Episode Date: August 4, 2025

- Comparing AI strategies: US, EU, China - AI emerges as one of top 5 reasons for job losses - AI startup funding continues to boom - VCs find it more challenging to raise their own funds [audio mp3="https://orionx.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/HPCNB_20250804.mp3"][/audio] The post HPC News Bytes – 20250804 appeared first on OrionX.net.

Welcome to HPC News Bites, a weekly show about important news in the world of supercomputing, AI, and other advanced technologies. Hi, everyone. Welcome to HPC News Bites. I'm Doug Black of Inside HPC, and with me is Shaheen Khan of OrionX.net. While the new AI action plan in the US, which was launched by the White House last week, is pushing for rapid advancement in AI capabilities, this week we saw two very different approaches to AI governance in Europe and then in China.

The EU proposed to govern AI in 2021, created a plan, and ultimately approved it last May and put it into effect last August. Its initial enforcement regime started in February and starting this month they took it up a notch to begin enforcement of the EU AI Act's voluntary code of practice for general purpose AI. Major providers must now comply with transparency, risk assessment, lawful data sourcing, and security by design practices, non-compliance risks, fines of up to 7% of global turnover. Yeah, we covered the EU AI Act last year. It includes six pillars, risk categorization,

life cycle risk management requirements, which is focused on accuracy, robustness, and cybersecurity. Transparency, so users are aware and can build trust in AI. Conducting what they call FRIAs, fundamental rights impact assessment. Number five is creating new entities like the EU AI office to help with enforcement and governance. And finally, to find ways for innovation, pushing for innovation with regulatory sandboxes. So the EU is trustworthy AI first, while the US is AI innovation first. So that leaves China for now. And there was news on that

front as well. Yes. At an event called the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, China introduced a global AI governance action plan advocating UN-led international cooperation regulation and safety standards. China proposed forming a World AI Cooperation Organization, WAICO, which could be headquartered in Shanghai with the missions to coordinate innovation, manage differences among member countries, and align different governance models globally. It would be a collaborative body working with the UN and aiming to complement UN-led frameworks like the UN Global Digital Compact.

So their strategy tries to paint a global perspective while keeping both innovation and ethics equally important. In fact, all these AI strategies seem to really optimize for one thing, driven by how they see their interests and capabilities and the world, while struggling to show a balance among conflicting forces in AI and policy like national versus regional versus global dynamics, innovation versus safety, lofty ideals versus practical realities, infrastructure, skills development and financing it all, critical use cases, national security considerations and on and on. You could say the Chinese model is based on nine pillars for implementation. Global infrastructure, which includes clean energy, interoperability, and support for

developing nations. Open source cooperation, which includes cross-border AI ecosystems. Industry level AI empowerment, which includes various industries like healthcare and agriculture, but also poverty reduction was mentioned. Standards, which includes the proposed body, but also the many existing bodies like ISO, which stands for International Organization for Standardization, IEC,

for International Electrotechnical Commission, ITU, for International Telecommunication Union, and others, and all of them have reasons to pay attention to AI. Risk governance and certification is the next one. Sustainable green AI practices, data resource sharing and privacy protection, which includes cross-border data flows

and secure sharing and recognition of cultural diversity and capacity building programs for infrastructure and energy and finally inclusive multi-stakeholder governance which points to the participation of governments, industry, academia and society. So again an indication of what they see as their needs and their capabilities and how they see the world. CBS News posted a story on job cuts in the US due to AI. Last month alone, use of generative AI technology by employers accounted for more than 10,000 job cuts according to a report from the firm of Challenger, Gray and Christmas. The

outplacement firm lists AI as one of the top five factors contributing to job losses in 2025. This comes after last week's lower than expected jobs report. So far this year, companies have cut more than 800,000 jobs, the most since the 2020 pandemic year, according to the firm. Along these lines, the Wall Street Journal had a story last week about the impact of Gen. AI on McKinsey, the consulting firm, saying the company is, quote, trying to steer through its own existential transformation, end quote, because of AI. And because AI is able to perform in minutes some of the work done by

highly paid consultants. AI assistants can create presentation decks, take notes and summarize interviews and documents, and they can do it in the style and voice of the firm. The result, McKinsey has cut its employee headcount from about 45,000 two years ago to 40,000 now, while also putting about 12,000 AI agents to work. It's just one crude data point, but two and a half agents per headcount, it sounds like. Continuing with this theme, Reuters recently ran a story on the rise in venture capital going to AI startups within an overall venture industry trend of greater difficulty in raising money for venture funds.

Citing a pitch book report, Reuters stated that US startup funding surged 76% in the first half of this year due to the ongoing AI boom, quote, putting it on track for its second best year ever, even as venture capital firms struggled to raise money. Startup funding during the first two quarters of the year increased to 163 billion with a B, the most since the same period in 2021,

which was a historic high point. They said this year's growth has been driven by major AI investments and funding from big tech companies, all of it ignited by the step functions that we have seen in AI, first with deep learning, then with generative AI, and now with agentic AI. The deals reflect continued investor confidence and the inevitability of AI and the big players focus on building the company of the future versus profitability now. This is one reason we see is a reporting difficulty raising their own funds, though recent IPOs and industry acquisitions helped with that. In the past three months alone,

$70 billion was invested in U.S. startups. Major deals included OpenAI's $40 billion round and Meta's $14 billion purchase of a stake in ScaleAI. AI accounted for 64% of the total deal value, indicating the big dollars that are involved, and 36% of the deal count in the first six months of 2025. It is, however, noteworthy that over 64% of deals were not categorized as AI. All right, that's it for this episode. Thank you all for being with us. HPC News Bytes is a production of OrionX in association with InsideHPC.

Shaheen Khan and Doug Black host the show. Every episode is featured on insidehpc.com and posted on orionx.net. Thank you for listening.