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- Taiwan blocks exports to China
Taiwan blocks exports to China
Plus: Bad AI medical advice; Wiz's $32B acquisition in jeopardy
Joey Padgett
June 16, 2025
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Hey people!
Welcome back to Forests Over Trees, your tech strategy newsletter. It’s time to zoom-out, connect dots, and (try to) predict the future.
I was off last week on a family beach trip, but it’s great to be back! Hope everyone’s having a good summer.
A quick thank you to a few of today’s partners:
Taiwan blocks exports to China
Plus: Bad AI medical advice; Wiz's $32B acquisition in jeopardy
⚡ Tech News Takes ⚡
What’s up: Google’s $32 billion acquisition of cybersecurity firm Wiz is under antitrust review by the US DOJ. The deal would be Alphabet’s largest ever, integrating Wiz into Google Cloud to boost enterprise risk mitigation tools. Google agreed to pay a $3.2 billion breakup fee if the deal falls through.
So what: It’s unclear whether this is a cursory review driven by the multi-billion-dollar pricetag, or if the DOJ will actually try to argue that this is anticompetitive. I hope it’s just the price… because 1/ cybersecurity is pretty competitive, 2/ it’s distinct from the ads and search monopoly cases Google is actively fighting, and 3/ Wiz’s product is multi-cloud (giving customers that use multiple cloud providers a unified set of security tools).
What’s up: Taiwan has added China’s Huawei and SMIC to its export control list, requiring Taiwanese firms like chipmaker TSMC to obtain permits before selling to them. The move reflects rising U.S.-China-Taiwan tech tensions and aligns with U.S. sanctions on both firms. Huawei and SMIC are central to China’s domestic AI chip push amid global supply restrictions.
So what: This is crazy. The restrictions will have the effect of limiting China’s access to chips. And a few years ago, China hawks would have argued that limits China’s access to AI, helping the US maintain military/competitive advantage…. but we’ve tried that! DeepSeek foiled that plan, overcoming trade restrictions and inferior chips by being scrappy and inventing new AI training methods. So what are we left with? An escalation in the Taiwan/China situation… if chips are mission-critical and the US pushes Taiwan to cut-off China, China might eventually be forced to take Taiwan and restore access.
What’s up: A University of Oxford study found that humans using chatbots to self-diagnose medical conditions performed significantly worse than those relying on other methods (i.e. checking with friends, WebMD, etc.). While LLMs correctly identified relevant conditions 94.9% of the time, participants often gave incomplete prompts, misinterpreted AI output, or ignored correct AI suggestions.
So what: Honestly, I’m surprised by this. But I have two theories that help explain why even WebMD is better than AI (for now). First, AI is deferential — the ChatGPTs of the world have been coded to agree with you, to keep the conversation going, etc. So when it gives you a correct suggestion that you disagree with, it goes along with you. Second, AI is convincing, so you’re inclined to believe what it says… And while I’m sure AI researchers will eventually fix these issues, for now they affect all AI usage — not just panicked self-diagnosis.
What’s up: Google launched an experimental audio overviews feature for mobile users, letting them create AI podcast-style summaries for some queries. The tool creates 40-second audio clips hosted by AI-generated voices, pulling from linked sources. The feature is currently available only in English in the U.S. through Google Labs.
So what: Longtime readers know I’m a huge podcast guy, so I love this! Plus, it shows Google is capitalizing on their AI momentum and getting comfortable experimenting again. Whereas they were slow to respond when ChatGPT first came out and got lambasted for Gemini’s bad performance… the latest Gemini launches have been great, and Google Labs has tons of AI experiments in flight getting user feedback.
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