| Hey, this is Jane reporting from Taiwan. Where exactly am I? It’s a question that drives the world. But first... Three things you need to know today: • The US tightened China trade curbs on AI memory and chip tools
• Disney’s Moana 2 set a new Thanksgiving weekend record
• Baidu won Hong Kong’s first license to test self-driving cars Without GPS, the half-century-old US global positioning system that tells us where we are using satellites, many of us would get lost in a hurry. The same technology is relied on for everything from commercial airliners to guided missiles and freighters crisscrossing the seas. At a time when spoofing, jamming and other malign manipulation of GPS are growing threats, the need for alternatives or fallbacks is clear. US military agencies are now looking to the challenging — many would say obscure — field of quantum physics for answers. Colorado-based Infleqtion said on Monday it’s secured $11 million from the US Department of Defense to help advance their quantum positioning systems. The startup’s technology uses subatomic reactions to provide ultra-precise timekeeping, an essential component to building a system that tracks location with a high degree of accuracy. “If you know where you started, and you know the changes in speed and direction you’re going, and you have an incredibly precise concept of time, you know exactly where you’ve gone. And that is un-spoofable,” said Matthew Kinsella, chief executive officer of Infleqtion. The company’s system is called Tiqker — yes, every quantum tech startup seems to feel compelled to jam Qs into their branding — and is effectively a very sophisticated clock, about the size of three stacked pizza boxes, Kinsella explained. “That clock ticks about three orders of magnitude faster, so is more precise than anything else portable out there,” Kinsella added. That’s one way to do it. Silicon Valley startup SandboxAQ, whose chairman is former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, has a contract with the US Air Force to develop its AQNav magnetic navigation system, which doesn’t rely on satellites at all, said Luca Ferrara, general manager of AQNav. This solution uses sensors to rapidly detect small changes in the earth’s magnetic field. It works by pumping light particles into electrons — one of the three basic building blocks of all matter — and studying the changes as the light comes back out. The data from the sensors is processed by SandboxAQ’s AI model and other algorithms — in real time — to determine, say, an airplane’s position on Earth. “We train our models so that they can distinguish between the Earth’s magnetic field below the flying jet and somebody’s cell phone in the jet,” said Ferrara. Each spot on the planet has a different magnetic fingerprint, which is how birds can intuit their way across large spans of ocean without any visual cues, he added. The company’s AI model matches what data it receives to a magnetic map of the Earth, with proprietary tech stitching together many map data sources. The hardware for SandboxAQ’s system fits in a space the size of a few shoeboxes and is ready for use, according to the company. Over in Australia, Q-CTRL has developed unique software techniques to help quantum sensors work more accurately by removing the interference that comes from aircraft and ships. The software acts like noise-cancelling headphones, says CEO Michael Biercuk. Q-CTRL is applying this software to its own quantum-sensing hardware in partnership with Airbus SE, the Australian military and the UK Navy for their navigation systems. The US Jet Propulsion Laboratory and United States Geological Survey are also working with the firm on gravity mapping, Biercuk said. While quantum computers have tantalized — to the tune of eliciting billions of dollars in investment — without yet delivering tangible benefits, quantum sensors have so far been largely overlooked. None of the tech currently under development will be in consumer devices anytime soon, but these are the first steps toward developing more sophisticated, accurate and resilient positioning systems. Hopefully, this will preempt any nightmare scenarios like self-driving cars veering off course or planes disappearing mid-air.—Jane Lanhee Lee Based on responses to a Federal Reserve Bank of New York consumer survey, economists established the existence of “an economically and statistically significant generative AI gender gap.” On average, they found that half of all men reported having used generative AI over the previous 12 months, while only 37% of women did. The generative AI gap is noteworthy because of the extent to which this particular technology is already radically and rapidly transforming the labor market. US crypto ETFs hit record inflows after Donald Trump’s election. Bulgari’s CEO is looking to India as a growth market as China luxury demand weakens. Donald Trump demanded a commitment from BRICS countries that they won’t try to compete with the US dollar. An electric Mercedes-Benz that caught fire in Incheon has soured South Koreans’ attitude to EVs. | 
