ai technology

SACRAMENTO — Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill Monday that will create new transparency measures for large AI companies, including public disclosure of security protocols and reports of critical safety incidents.

Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) said Senate Bill 53 will create “commonsense guardrails” to ensure groundbreaking innovations don’t sacrifice safety and transparency amid the rapid growth of AI technologies. Newsom said the bill strikes the right balance of working with the artificial intellegence companies, while not “submitting to industry.”

“AI is the new frontier in innovation, and California is not only here for it – but stands strong as a national leader by enacting the first-in-the-national frontier AI safety legislation that builds public trust as this emerging technology rapidly evolves,” Newsom said in a statement.

The bill was introduced this year after Newsom vetoed a broader bill last year, which was also authored by Wiener. That bill, SB 1047, was supported by Elon Musk and prominent AI researchers, but opposed by Meta and OpenAI.

In his lengthy veto message last year, Newsom called SB 1047 “well-intentioned” but added that it was not the “best approach to protecting the public from real threats posed by the technology.” In punting the measure last year, Newsom announced that his administration would convene a working group of AI leaders and experts to develop more workable protections that became the basis for SB 53.

The new law will require companies to disclose their safety and security protocols and risk evaluations. It mandates reporting of critical incidents — such as cyberattacks or unsafe behavior by autonomous AI systems — to the state’s Office of Emergency Services.

Cal OES would begin publishing annual reports in 2027 that anonymize and aggregate critical safety incidents it receives. SB 53 also strengthens whistleblower protections for employees who report violations.

The Attorney General in California will be able to bring civil penalties of up to $1 million against companies who violate the new law.

“With a technology as transformative as AI, we have a responsibility to support that innovation while putting in place commonsense guardrails to understand and reduce risk,” Wiener said in a statement.

The bill was opposed by the California Chamber of Commerce and the Chamber of Progress, a tech industry association.

“This exhaustive approach compels developers to allocate significant time and resources toward preparing for hypothetical risks rather than addressing actual, demonstrable harms,” wrote the Chamber of Progress.

SAN FRANCISCO — Nvidia is already the world’s most valuable company being one of the biggest beneficiaries of the global artificial intelligence boom.

This week, the Santa Clara-based chip maker got another windfall.

The Jensen Huang-led technology giant on Monday received approval from the U.S. government to sell some of its AI chips in China, boosting Nvidia’s stock price by 4% to $170.70 a share on Tuesday. Rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc. has received similar assurances from the government.

Nvidia’s valuation has risen dramatically over the last two years since generative artificial intelligence became a mainstream topic. Last week, the 32-year-old company became the first publicly traded firm to reach $4 trillion in market capitalization, beating tech titans including Microsoft and Apple.

Though it’s a largely symbolic moment, the milestone raised the stakes for competition in the AI space, which has attracted enormous amounts of capital from established tech players and start-up investors.

“Once you reach that level of market cap, everybody and their brother wants to be you,” said Rob Enderle, principal analyst with advisory services firm Enderle Group. “So that means that there’s going to be a huge focus on creating competitive technologies to Nvidia because it looks incredibly lucrative.”

Nvidia has become a primary force in the growth of AI technology, as many applications are built with Nvidia’s chips.

Prior to the AI boom, Nvidia was mostly known for creating premium graphics cards that were attractive to gamers in rendering high-speed visuals. Most recently, the company is known for selling powerful chips that help chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and self-driving cars process information quickly enough to make the technology useful. Nvidia said in its 2025 annual report that it powers more than 75% of the supercomputers on the TOP500 list, which ranks the 500 most powerful computer systems in the world.

What is powering Nvidia’s rise?

Founded in 1993, Nvidia has ridden many technology waves, including the crypto frenzy.

But lately, Nvidia has seen tremendous growth thanks to worldwide investor interest — and competition for dominance — in artificial intelligence.

Companies are eager to explore how AI can make processes more efficient and figure out complex problems. But getting the computing power behind AI can be expensive if companies are building hardware on their own. That’s where Nvidia comes in.

Nvidia’s sales increased 69% to $44.1 billion in its fiscal first quarter compared to a year ago. Net income was nearly $18.8 billion, up 26% from a year ago. In its fiscal year 2025, the company’s revenue more than doubled to about $130.5 billion compared to a year earlier, and net income increased 145% to nearly $72.9 billion compared to fiscal year 2024.

In the last 12 months, Nvidia’s shares have increased more than 30%. Since five years ago, the stock has risen more than 16-fold.

“It is clear AI is going to change the world and people want to get on that train, and Nvidia is the easiest entry point,” wrote Berna Barshay, a partner at online investment platform Wall Street Beats, in an email. Over time, new winners and formidable rivals may emerge, Barshay said. “But during this foundational period of infrastructure creation, Nvidia has certainly been king.”

Other companies were slower to innovate in AI, including Apple and Intel, and underestimated how quickly AI technology would advance, analysts said.

Who is Jensen Huang?

Huang, a former microprocessor designer, discussed the idea behind Nvidia inside a Denny’s in San Jose with fellow entrepreneurs Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem. The company’s name is partly based on the Latin word “invidia” — which means envy, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Many businesses are certainly jealous of Nvidia’s success now, but in the 1990s, the company almost went out of business when its first chip, NV1, failed, according to media reports. Huang has said in public comments, including commencement speeches, that adversity can help people become better leaders.

Born in Tainan, Taiwan, in 1963, the onetime Denny’s dishwasher has become one of the industry’s most recognizable names, on par with Apple chief Tim Cook and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg. Thousands of people watch Huang’s keynote at Nvidia’s developer conference, as his vision could provide a road map for companies eager to expand investments in AI. Some analysts regularly refer to him as the “godfather of AI.”

What challenges lie ahead?

The biggest challenges facing Nvidia are trade wars and competition, analysts say.

Tariffs in the semiconductor industry could hurt companies like Nvidia, which manufacture and sell countless chips abroad. The company said in its annual report that 53% of its revenue in its 2025 fiscal year came from outside the U.S.

The company said that worldwide geopolitical tensions and conflicts in countries like China, Hong Kong, Israel, Korea and Taiwan, where the manufacturing of its product components and final assembly are concentrated, could disrupt its operations, product demand and profitability.

Nvidia has worked with its production partners to increase U.S. manufacturing of its chips.

Several years ago, the U.S. restricted Nvidia’s sales of its chips in China due to concerns that its AI technology could be used to help the Chinese military. Huang has said that since the U.S. government could choose to apply restrictions, he didn’t think policymakers needed to be concerned about that and warned that allowing Nvidia to lose market share in China would cede a major advantage to Chinese tech company Huawei, according to Bloomberg.

While many analysts say Nvidia has a significant lead on competitors, it is possible over time they could catch up. OpenAI, which uses Nvidia products for ChatGPT, is developing its own chip design, according to Reuters.

There’s also the question of whether the power grid is robust enough to support the infrastructure needs of the fast-growing technology, which could slow down not just Nvidia but the larger AI ecosystem.

Despite the challenges, Thomas Monteiro, senior analyst at Investing.com, is bullish on Nvidia, saying it is possible that the company could reach $5 trillion in market cap during the next 18 months.

“The world’s still catching up and the thing is, it’s going to take years for them to catch up,” he said. “As long as we’re looking at the AI revolution as a multidecade transformation, it’s going to be really hard to take Nvidia out of that position.”

The titular character of the Apple TV+ series “Murderbot” doesn’t call itself Murderbot because it identifies as a killer; it just thinks the name is cool.

Murderbot, a.k.a. “SecUnit,” is programmed to protect people. But the task becomes less straightforward when Murderbot hacks the governor module in its system, granting itself free will. But the freedom only goes so far — the robot must hide its true nature, lest it get melted down like so much scrap metal.

The android, played by Alexander Skarsgård, is often fed up with humans and their illogical, self-defeating choices. It would rather binge-watch thousands of hours of trashy TV shows than deal with the dithering crew of space hippies to which it’s been assigned. On Friday, in the show’s season finale, the security robot made a choice with major implications for the relationships it formed with the Preservation Alliance crew — something the series could explore in the future (Apple TV+ announced Thursday it was renewing the show for a second season).

Though “Murderbot” is a unique workplace satire set on a far-off world, it’s one of several recent TV series dealing with the awkward and sometimes dangerous ways that humans might coexist with robots and artificial intelligence (or both in the same humanoid package).

Other TV shows, including Netflix’s “Love, Death & Robots” and last year’s “Sunny” on Apple TV+, grapple with versions of the same thorny technological questions we’re increasingly asking ourselves in real life: Will an AI agent take my job? How am I supposed to greet that disconcerting Amazon delivery robot when it brings a package to my front door? Should I trust my life to a self-driving Waymo car?

But the robots in today’s television shows are largely portrayed as facing the same identity issues as the ones from shows of other eras including “Lost in Space,” “Battlestar Galactica” (both versions) and even “The Jetsons”: How are intelligent robots supposed to coexist with humans?

They’ll be programmed to be obedient and not to hurt us (a la Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics) until, for dramatic purposes, something goes wrong. The modern era of TV robots are more complex, with the foundational notion that they will be cloud-connected, accessing the same internet bandwidth as humans, and AI-driven.

In HBO’s “Westworld,” Evan Rachel Wood played Dolores Abernathy, a sentient android. (HBO)

The robot in Apple TV+’s “Sunny” was designed to be a friendly helper to Rashida Jones’ Suzie. (Apple)

Often, on shows such as AMC’s “Humans” and HBO’s “Westworld,” these AI bots become self-actualized, rising up against human oppressors to seek free lives when they realize they could be so much more than servants and sex surrogates. A major trope of modern TV robots is that they will eventually get smart enough to realize they don’t really need humans or come to believe that in fact, humans have been the villains all along.

Meanwhile, in the tech world, companies including Tesla and Boston Dynamics are just a few working on robots that can perform physical tasks like humans. Amazon is one of the companies that will benefit from this and will soon have more robots than people working in its warehouses.

Even more than robotics, AI technologies are developing more quickly than governments, users and even some of the companies developing them can keep up with. But we’re also starting to question whether AI technologies such as ChatGPT might make us passive, dumber thinkers (though, the same has been said about television for decades). AI could introduce new problems in more ways than we can even yet imagine. How will your life change when AI determines your employment opportunities, influences the entertainment you consume and even chooses a life partner for you?

So, we’re struggling to understand. AI, for all its potential, feels too large and too disparate a concept for many to get their head around. AI is ChatGPT, but it’s also Alexa and Siri, and it’s also what companies such as Microsoft, Google, Apple and Meta believe will power our future interactions with our devices, environments and other people. There was the internet, there was social media, now there’s AI. But many people are ambivalent, having seen the kind of consequences that always-present online life and toxic social media have brought alongside their benefits.

Past television series including “Next,” “Person of Interest,” “Altered Carbon” and “Almost Human” addressed potential abuses of AI and how humans might deal with fast-moving technology, but it’s possible they all got there too early to resonate in the moment as much as, say, “Mountainhead,” HBO’s recent dark satire about tech billionaires playing a high-stakes game of chicken while the world burns because of hastily deployed AI software. The quickly assembled film directed by “Succession’s” Jesse Armstrong felt plugged into the moment we’re having, a blend of excitement and dread about sudden widespread change.

Most TV shows, however, can’t always arrive at the perfect moment to tap into the tech anxieties of the moment. Instead, they often use robots or AI allegorically, assigning them victim or villain roles in order to comment on the state of humanity. “Westworld” ham-handedly drew direct parallels to slavery in its robot narratives while “Humans” more subtly dramatized the legal implications and societal upheaval that could result from robots seeking the same rights as humans.

But perhaps no show has extrapolated the near future of robots and AI tech from as many angles as Netflix’s “Black Mirror,” which in previous seasons featured a dead lover reconstituted into an artificial body, the ultimate AI dating app experience and a meta television show built by algorithms that stole storylines out of a subscriber’s real life.

Season 7, released in April, continued the show’s prickly use of digital avatars and machine learning as plot devices for stories about moviemaking, video games and even attending a funeral. In that episode, “Eulogy,” Phillip (Paul Giamatti) is forced to confront his bad life decisions and awful behavior by an AI-powered avatar meant to collect memories of an old lover. In another memorable Season 7 episode, “Bête Noire,” a skilled programmer (Rosy McEwen) alters reality itself to gaslight someone with the help of advanced quantum computing.

TV shows are helping us understand how some of these technologies might play out even as those technologies are quickly being integrated into our lives. But the overall messaging is murky when it comes to whether AI and bots will help us live better lives or if they’ll lead to the end of life itself.

According to TV, robots like the cute helper bot from “Sunny” or abused synthetic workers like poor Mia (Gemma Chan) from “Humans” deserve our respect. We should treat them better.

The robots and AI technologies from “Black Mirror?” Don’t trust any of them!

And SecUnit from “Murderbot?” Leave that robot alone to watch their favorite show, “The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon,” in peace. It’s the human, and humane, thing to do.

AMC Networks, known for series such as “Breaking Bad” and “The Walking Dead,” is partnering with AI startup Runway to use AI tools for marketing and developing its TV shows.

Runway’s AI technology will help AMC Networks ease access to standout scenes and generate pictures for promotional use.

The tech will also be used to speed up “pre-visualization” during development, which is when studios use images to come up with the look of a show before filming takes place.

Runway also said AMC Networks is exploring AI to be used for honing special effects ideas.

“As we explore the transformative potential of AI across our business, we see powerful opportunities to enhance both how we market and how we create,” said Stephanie Mitchko, the executive vice president of global media operations and technology at AMC Networks, in a statement.

“Our objective is always to use every tool at our disposal to help our creative partners fully realize the stories they want to tell,” Mitchko said.

Entertainment companies have been exploring how to use AI in their processes, which supporters say can help reduce costs and allow creatives to test bold ideas without as many financial constraints.

Last year, Runway announced a partnership with Lionsgate, in which Runway will create a new AI model for the studio to help with behind-the-scenes processes such as storyboarding. The company’s technology has also been used in series like “House of David” on Amazon Prime Video, according to Variety.

“We’re building the foundations for a new era of media — the way content gets made and green-lit is changing rapidly, and that’s impacting everything from production timelines and methodologies to distribution models and marketing tactics,” said Cristóbal Valenzuela, co-founder and CEO of Runway in a statement.

AI remains a controversial topic in Hollywood. Some creatives and unionized workers have expressed concerns about how AI could reduce jobs. Writers have complained that AI models are being trained on their scripts without their permission or adequate compensation.

Tech industry executives have said that they should be able to train AI models with content available online under the “fair use” doctrine, which allows for the limited reproduction of material without permission from the copyright holder.

AI filmmaking technology is advancing rapidly, such as with Google’s unveiling new features in its Veo 3 text-to-video tool and its Flow editing software. But experts say that artificial intelligence companies need to license content from professional studios in order to take the tools to the next level.