BUSINESS
Google's most serious rival isn't Microsoft but startup Perplexity
Through strategic diplomacy, Perplexity AI's founder has become a formidable challenger in search
BUSINESS
AI slowdown is everyone else’s opportunity
Businesses will benefit from some much-needed breathing space to figure out how to deliver that all-important return on investment
BUSINESS
Elon Musk’s AI nightmares could blunt Donald Trump’s tech ambitions
The tech mogul’s zealous beliefs on AI doom could limit fast-and-loose policies for the industry
BUSINESS
Elon Musk and friends are smothering the internet’s truth seekers
Targeting groups studying disinformation is bad news for democracy
BUSINESS
Want to kill grunt work with AI? Careful what you wish for
Automating 'low-value' tasks shuts down a vital training ground for new recruits
BUSINESS
Apple and Google's easy ride is coming to an end
EU court rulings against Apple and Google mark a new era for of swifter regulation for tech giants
BUSINESS
AI phones from Google and Apple will erode trust in everything
When anyone can manipulate a photo in seconds, it’ll get harder to believe what we see and hear
WORLD
UK Riots: Elon Musk’s X drove lies right through a UK loophole
Even with an ambitious law, Britain can’t do much to get social media platforms to stem the toxic content that helped fuel riots here
BUSINESS
AI is failing on facts but crushing it on creative work
It will take a few more years for banks and health-care firms to solve AI’s hallucination problem, but creative industries already face some harsh disruptions
BUSINESS
Nvidia’s explosive growth masks AI disillusionment
To avoid a painful correction, tech companies must start managing expectations properly
BUSINESS
Google’s AI keeps hallucinating. Does anyone care?
Complacency over AI errors will make search an even worse experience. Google should shut its new feature down
BUSINESS
If AI wrecks democracy, we may never know
Propaganda doesn’t need to go viral to sway elections anymore. That makes AI’s impact more insidious and harder to detect
BUSINESS
Google, Facebook should use AI to combat conspiracy theories
New research suggests chatbots could combat much of the damage caused by people going down rabbit holes on YouTube and Facebook. But will tech companies use them?
BUSINESS
OpenAI tapping YouTube? Big Tech's trapped in a glass house of its own making
Having exploited user data for years, the tables are turning as Big Tech firms grab it from each other
BUSINESS
The tech giants are eating the chatbot kings
Open-source AI firms are meanwhile offering a better alternative to Silicon Valley
BUSINESS
The Inflection Point: AI's assembly line ends with Microsoft, Google and Meta
Inflection AI was on track to surpass OpenAI’s free version of ChatGPT with a model it had built, remarkably, from scratch, and had raised over a billion dollars. Had Inflection run out of all that money? That Inflection has been swallowed so quickly by Microsoft underscores that requirements around computing power and talent have made it too expensive for most companies to build cutting-edge generative AI models without the patronage of a tech giant like Microsoft, Google or Meta
BUSINESS
Advertising: Don’t believe what you see in the age of AI ads
History is littered with innovations that were exploited by unscrupulous marketers. The telephone opened up the floodgates to robocalls and e-mail to spam. Generative AI seems to have opened the door to a new era of fantasy where advertising will become more unreal than ever. From people having their identities stolen and publicised without permission to low-level fakery like unappealing, inauthentic food, AI poses a new challenge for consumers
BUSINESS
Elon Musk is right about Sam Altman’s OpenAI hypocrisy
Musk’s lawsuit points out that Altman created a non-profit board at OpenAI that could fire him if he wasn’t trying to benefit humanity anymore. They did. Then Altman returned and removed some of the board members who fired him. That was a good move for OpenAI’s business but a betrayal of its supposedly benevolent goals. The emperor was wearing no clothes, and Elon Musk was right to call him out
BUSINESS
Google’s AI Struggles: Gemini isn’t too woke. It’s too rushed
We know about Gemini’s diversity bug because of all the tweets on X, but the AI model may have other problems we don’t know about — issues that may not trigger Elon Musk but are no less insidious. The female popes and Black founding fathers are products of a deeper, years-long problem of putting growth and market dominance before safety
BUSINESS
Softbank’s great semiconductor hope Arm isn’t the AI play you think it is
The British semiconductor designer isn’t directly involved in the hottest business in town unlike Nvidia’s GPUs, whose superior parallel processing capabilities made them perfect for training and maintaining AI models. Arm can still benefit from the AI boom thanks to its business designing chips for data centres, but its path to capitalising will take a longer time
BUSINESS
Google, Microsoft, Nvidia will dominate AI as computing costs surge
Sam Altman’s goal of raising about $7 trillion to make AI chips tells a story beyond his borderline-insane ambitions. First, the infrastructure needed to build AI has become exorbitantly expensive. Second, most of that value is still held by a handful of large technology companies and the oligopoly is only going to get worse
BUSINESS
The human perils of giving ChatGPT more memory
OpenAI mustn't repeat Facebook's mistake of "remembering" user preferences and views and feeding more of the same, ultimately driving them into silos. It must offer diverse perspectives on political or social issues, even if they challenge a user’s prejudices
BUSINESS
We need to know how AI firms fight deepfakes
AI companies have unparalleled freedom to conduct their work in secret. But if they want to ensure the trust of the public, regulators and civil society, hiring more humans like Facebook's content moderators, wouldn’t be a bad idea either. Too much focus on racing to make AI “smarter” so that fake photos look more realistic, or text more fluent, or cloned voices more convincing, threatens to drive us deeper into a hazardous, confusing world
BUSINESS
Zuckerberg’s plan for AI hinges on your Facebook, Instagram data
If Zuckerberg wants to make a more powerful chatbot, the pile of data he’s sitting on is especially valuable because so much of it comes from comment threads. Any text that represents human dialogue is critical for training so-called conversational agents, which is why OpenAI heavily mined the internet forum Reddit Inc to build its own popular chatbot
