Humanoid robots learned to walk years ago. The thing still tripping them up is the hand. 1X has given its NEO home robot new hands, and they are the most interesting thing about it. A robot can stride across a stage and still be useless in a kitchen. Lifting a wet glass takes precision, fast […]
Britain is spending £2bn to train its army inside a simulation. It has handed the job to an American defence giant, with a German one taking a slice. The UK has signed a £2bn ($2.7bn) contract to train its soldiers with artificial intelligence. The deal, announced by the Ministry of Defence on Friday, runs for […]
Big Tech built its reputation on mountains of cash. It is building its AI empire on debt, and the bill is starting to land in Europe. The five biggest builders of AI data centres in the US have doubled their debt over five years. Together, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Oracle have piled on about […]
Brussels has decided that infinite scroll is not a feature but a hazard. On Friday, the European Commission told Meta to dismantle the design tricks that keep people glued to Facebook and Instagram, or risk a fine that could run into billions, in a fresh set of charges under the EU’s Digital Services Act. The […]
This week, two of the world’s biggest car regulators looked at the same question and reached opposite answers. The question is simple. What should sit between a human and a moving vehicle? In the United States, the top auto-safety official floated pulling the steering wheel out altogether. In Europe, new rules took effect that point […]
Europe uses about a fifth of the world’s chips, but makes only a tenth of them. A three-year-old Munich startup thinks it can help close that gap, and Brussels has just backed the bet. QuantumDiamonds is a spin-out of the Technical University of Munich. It has raised €91M to scale a new way of finding […]
A single European bank haggling with Amazon or Microsoft has almost no leverage. A few hundred of them haggling together might. That, stripped to its essence, is the recommendation Dutch regulators handed their government on Friday, in a report warning that Europe’s reliance on American technology is deepening rather than easing. The proposals came from […]
SAP has talked its way out of an EU antitrust fine. The European Commission said it would accept a set of commitments from the German software group, closing an investigation into how SAP handles maintenance and support for its on-premise enterprise software and sparing it a penalty that could have run into the billions. It […]
The European Parliament has voted to advance a bill letting tech companies legally scan for child sexual abuse material. On Thursday in Strasbourg, lawmakers sent the proposal to EU member states for approval, Politico reports. The twist is that Parliament rejected this same bill in March. It was revived after a push by the centre-right European […]
