The fight over AI’s harms has played out state by state. One US senator wants to make it federal, all at once. Ed Markey has a long list of worries about artificial intelligence. Thirsty data centres. Workplace surveillance. Biased algorithms. Chatbots that prey on children. On Friday the Massachusetts Democrat tried to turn that list […]
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 […]
Anthropic has built something close to a mind-reading tool for its own AI. What it found sits somewhere between a breakthrough and an unsettling party trick. Anthropic researchers now have the clearest view yet of what a large language model does while it thinks. In a paper published on the company’s Transformer Circuits site, they […]
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 […]
A three-year-old startup run by a 23-year-old is in talks to double its worth to $20bn. The numbers are dazzling. Read the footnotes. Mercor, the AI training marketplace, has told investors it can raise at a $20bn valuation. It says it already holds at least one term sheet at that price, Bloomberg reports. The talks […]
SpaceX lands its rockets on legs. Blue Origin uses a platform. China just caught one in a giant net. China has recovered the first stage of an orbital rocket for the first time. The milestone pulls it into a club with only two other members. On Friday, the booster of a Long March-10B lifted off […]
Anthropic is the hottest stock in private tech. It is also one of the hardest to buy, and that is exactly why the price keeps climbing. Shares in Anthropic are changing hands on secondary markets at an implied valuation of $1.2 trillion, Business Insider reports. That is a 550% jump in a year. It puts […]
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 […]
Anthropic has built a feature that does something odd for a tech company. It counts how much you lean on its product, then gently suggests you might want to lean a little less. The feature is called Reflect, and it landed in beta on Thursday. It is a dashboard, tucked into Claude’s settings, that shows […]
