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japanese tech investor softbank sells all its shares in chipmaker nvidia for almost $6 billion. uk unemployment hits its highest level since the pandemic, putting pressure on the bank of england to cut interest rates. reining in the crypto-queen - a chinese woman at the heart of the uk’s largest seizure of cryptocurrency gets a lengthy prison sentence. welcome to business today, i’m ben thompson. we begin in the us where shares of nvidia have fallen as much as 3% after major shareholder softbank revealed it’s sold its stake in the chipmaker.

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the $5.8 billion sale has prompted fears that the frenzy around artificial intelligence may have peaked, especially after recent warnings from wall street bank chiefs. the japanese tech investor said it had sold all the 32.1 million nvidia shares it held in october to bankroll ceo masayoshi son’s sweeping ai push, built around his “all in” bet on chatgpt-creator openai. i’m joined by our north america business correspondent erin delmore in new york. do we know what is going on here? just explain. we are seeing seeing a complicated picture and and basically the big question is is one you and i have spoken about about and one that we have covered covered about whether evaluations evaluations in the tech industry industry is too high at this moment. moment. when we are looking at nvidia, nvidia, we are looking at the stock

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stock that is the most valuable company company in the entire world at this this point, something that has doubled, doubled, tripled, gone to four or or five times its initial value in in the last couple of years alone, alone, something that has taken off off since 2022 and now we have seen seen that move to the downside. normally normally we talk about tech stocks stocks propelling the entire market market upwards, right now the nasdaq nasdaq is down around .8. it is the the biggest loser of the morning morning so far here. that is based based on this new surround softbank. softbank. with the big question being being who is going to be the winner winner of this ai race? if it is is not nvidia, who will it be? and and ids valuations and expectations expectations around these ai companies companies bigger than they deserve deserve to be? the big question is is whether firms can make money off off the back of those big investors, investors, because we see ai is changing changing the way we might do everything everything but it is whether they

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they can monetise it and use that that software and these chips and and technology to deliver real results results that we will pay for, and and therefore they will profit from. from. at the moment that has not not yet proven. exactly, what we we are looking at is the fundamentals, fundamentals, we are talking about about chips that propel technology technology forward and data centres centres that help make the technology technology possible. what we are are not talking about is the actual actual applications for the technology technology at this moment. it means means companies are being rewarded rewarded for what they say they might might be able to do if they may be be proper foundation. we see them them being rewarded for spending spending a lot of money on ai investments investments but not necessarily for for bringing in the revenue or a a showing that proof and how they they are applying the dollars and and technology. when you say is it it a bubble? that’s something we we hear a lot when we talk about about the tech sector and people people talk about the year 2000 and and the dot-com boom and bust. if if you go back to the year 2000 not not everybody who was playing in in the online space could be a winner,

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winner, and that is a big thing on on investors’ mind. it is just probability, probability, not everyone can be be a winner. we will find how this this plays out. here in the uk, official figures show the number of people out of work has risen - with the rate at its highest level in four years. unemployment rose to 5% in the three months to september, showing signs the jobs market has weakened. according to the data from the office for national statistics it is at the highest rate since 2021. the data also shows nearly 1.7 million people are claiming unemployment benefits, a slight decrease on the figure from a year ago. jane foley is head of fx strategy at rabobank. she told us more about what this means for the bank of england’s rate cutting strategy. it is the highest unemployment rate since 2021 but outside of the pandemic it is the highest rate for about a decade,

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but we have also got a slowdown or a reduction in the number of payrolled employees. there has been various other survey evidence, which is a little bit more forward-looking than some of the official data, showing us the hiring rate in the country has been slowing down for some while. whilst this data is poor, it is a disappointment, it tells us what we already know. in one respect, perhaps there is a silver lining here because it does increase the possibility that the bank of england could cut interest rates maybe as soon as december. do we know what is causing this? anecdotally, you hear from from a lot of employers saying they they have been hit with extra costs costs and they are paying higher higher taxes, and they are not a a position to take on new staff. staff. there are a number of commentators commentators and this has been going going on for a while. every point point back at last year’s budget budget and at the increase there there national insurance contributions contributions on employers, if you you look at the extra cost they would would have to bear, what are they

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they going to do? some of them will will have tried to pass on that cost cost in their pricing structure, structure, and it has been said for for some time that others may have have said if employees are becoming becoming more expensive because the the tax on them is more expensive, expensive, perhaps we hire less of of them. that has been associated associated with the reduction that that we have had in the number of of payroll to employees in recent recent months. the other thing we we have had that has gone down slightly slightly as the number of people people claiming unemployment benefit, benefit, and that seems perverse perverse given the number of people people out of work has risen. is is this people that have given up up on the jobs market? often you you do see that, it is a little bit bit country to what you perhaps would would normally anticipate but it it is often the case when the labour labour market improves that you see see more people trying their chances chances to get a job, people do give give up. this could be people like

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like students perhaps, merely housewives, people who would like a second income or a secondary secondary income, but perhaps only only try to get that job when they they think it is going to be easy easy to have. and when the labour labour market proves a bit more tough, tough, they do give up. openai has been ordered to pay damages for the use of copyrighted song material by well-known german artists. the case was brought by the german music rights collecting society - gema - on behalf of lyricists of nine well-known german songs. they argued that openai’s chatbot chatgpt reproduced lyrics from copyrighted german songs without authorisation, and that its ai was trained on protected content from the repertoire of its roughly 100,000 members. i spoke earlier to the ceo of gema, dr tobias holzmuller. he told me more about the importance of the ruling. it definitely is a landmark decision because it goes well beyond just the actual case that has been heard.

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it is the first case in europe where the court says under eu law, if you are an ai company operating a large language model, you have to ask prior permission from the rights holders whose content you are using to train your model and reproducing the content in the further process of this model. this changes everything. what was it that chat gpt or openai was trying to do in that data data that it had mined from these these songs? we were able to prove that openai not only trained on the data but stored these lyrics, written by our members permanently in the model, and the model reproduced these lyrics when users typed in simple prompts, such as “give me those lyrics for this and that song.” basically they were acting like a database of song lyrics where you could withdraw all the lyrics that you would request from the large language model. at the moment it was just about lyrics are not trying to recreate recreate new songs based on what

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what it had learned from your catalogue. catalogue. there is a parallel proceeding proceeding that is being heard early early next year against a music ai ai company, which has as its object, object, exactly the use of musical musical composition songs and melodies. melodies. that will be the parallel parallel proceeding, and we will will know by january. this goes to to the very heart of this debate, debate, that the ai models are not not able to earn from, or if they they are able to learn from original original content, there is no incentive incentive incentive to create original original content again. exactly, exactly, and this is why our members, members, songwriters, composers and and lyricists feel deeply threatened threatened by these types of models. models. there are legitimate uses uses for ai services, for big models, models, but they need to license license the training data and they they need to be deployed in a way way that it is not threatening human

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human creativity. that is why our our members encourage us to bring bring this case to court. a chinese woman at the heart of the uk’s largest seizure of cryptocurrency has been sentenced to over we will return to that story in just a second. let’s return to what we were hearing about about the crypto. it is a really really important story given the the concern of the theft of that. that. i am trying to bring you the the details. police! stay where you are. caught in bed. police raid the home of qian zhimin, the woman who brought 61,000 bitcoins to the uk. authorities say qian bought this bitcoin with money from a scam she led in china that pulled in 128,000 people. police were tipped off when qian tried to buy an £11.5 million property in north london with her

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assistant, wen jian, using the bitcoin. they weren’t able to explain the source of her wealth. in reality, it was very basic. miss wen and miss qian didn’t mix in criminal circles in the uk, so they didn’t really know the best way of laundering and they were trying to do the best that they could, um, which wasn’t particularly good. police raided qian’s home multiple times, finding bundles of cash and expensive jewellery. she needed lots of assistance. dc ryan’s team also found documents in which qian set out her dreams and ambitions, all carefully itemised and costed. some of them running into the millions of pounds. these ranged from buying jewellery and entering into uk high society... we’re here for kingdom design. ..to becoming queen of liberland, an unrecognised micronation on the croatian-serbian border. the price of bitcoin has risen 20 times since 2017,

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and the haul seized by uk police from qian is now worth £5 billion. and the uk courts are now deciding where it should go. some reports have suggested the uk government will seek to retain the cryptocurrency. victims believe they should be paid back. mr yu, not his real name, said he invested around £100,000. i suppose we were just too weak to resist. they pumped up our dreams until we lost all self-control, all critical judgement. yu was left in huge debt and his marriage broke down. we all read sherlock holmes, and that’s still the image of the ultimate detective - to find all this bitcoin. we are very grateful. we hope we get our money back. that’s our great hope. tony han, global china unit, bbc news.

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that was much clearer than my introduction. that

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hello. in india, the prime minister has described yesterday’s deadly car explosion in delhi as a conspiracy - and vowed to bring to justice those responsible. at least 12 people were killed and around 20 others injured when a vehicle stopped at a red light and exploded - according to delhi’s police commissioner. intense flames ripped through other vehicles near the popular landmark red fort in the crowded old delhi quarter. crime scene investigators are examining the wreckage for evidence but the cause is yet unkown. the red fort is closed for three days and police say security was being stepped up at other popular sites including the taj mahal. our correspondent devina gupta, is in delhi and following developments.

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Uploaded by TV Archive on November 11, 2025