Academic IT and network services network Jisc resigns a collaborative MoU with partners from Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the US.
Mark Papermaster says Europe’s commitment to interoperability and diversity of supply could become a strategic advantage as AI infrastructure grows more heterogeneous
Google’s AI struggles scream trouble as new Chinese models (again) throw US tech dominance into questionHello, I’m Blake Montgomery, writing to you after a double-header feature of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey and the World Cup final. What a great Sunday. Today in tech, we’re discussing how China is chipping away at the US’s lead in the AI race and how Silicon Valley’s workers are taking action to protect their jobs from AI.New York becomes first state to impose one-year pause on new AI datacentersTrump rails against New York’s statewide datacenter moratoriumAlbanese’s AI blueprint sparks calls for datacentre moratorium until new regulations in place‘Adversarial clothing’: are garments designed to confuse facial recognition systems about to go mainstream?IBM loses quarter of its value as tech giant’s shares plunge and profits falter‘What’s the point?’ Teenagers give their verdict on Britain’s social media curfewAmazon Web Services customers receive bills for up to $1.5tn after global glitchTrump made $1.4bn from crypto in one year. Is Justin Sun the man who helped him do it? Continue reading...
Tech workers are increasingly unionizing, trading Silicon Valley’s myth of exceptionalism for collective bargaining to contest the corporate deployment of artificial intelligenceFor decades, the technology industry was a fortress that labor unions couldn’t breach. Tech workers already had cushy compensation packages, dream benefits like unlimited vacation and free lunch, and a flat corporate hierarchy that made engineers feel as powerful as their bosses, all of whom dressed down in sneakers and hoodies. So why unionize?Now, that fortress is cracking from the inside. Unions have become increasingly popular for tech employees. After months of mass layoffs tied to artificial intelligence and mounting anxieties about how it’s being deployed, some tech workers say they’ve been saddled with higher workloads while facing the threat of job loss caused by the very products they’re building. Workers from Google DeepMind and Meta in the UK are also objecting to how their companies’ AI products are being used, such as for military purposes or to monitor employee productivity. Those same workers are now attempting to unionize. Continue reading...
AI minister will attend cabinet meetings held by UK prime minister Andy Burnham, with focus on ownership of UK tech
Maps of Hope has been certified by Proudly Human, a company led by former chief scientist, Dr Alan FinkelFollow our Australia news live blog for latest updatesGet our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcastA collection of speeches and writings by Pope Leo XIV has been certified as human-authored less than two months after Leo declared artificial intelligence the greatest threat to humanity.Proudly Human, the Australian company spearheaded by Australia’s former chief scientist, Dr Alan Finkel, undertook a review of a collection of writings and speeches by the pope, in collaboration with the publisher, the Australian Catholic University and cardinals in the Vatican. Continue reading...
The company argues that it’s for individuals to ensure they don’t ‘actively exploit’ this technology. That won’t keep children safeIt took me a while to realise what the man sitting next to me on the train was doing. He was flicking through pictures of a little girl on his phone; zooming in on some, cropping the images. Hardly unusual, of course, except that on closer inspection the pictures were very clearly of the toddler sitting opposite us, playing with her parents. On a crowded train of people mostly staring obliviously at our own phones, a stranger had been covertly photographing that little girl over and over again. And if it hadn’t been for that very visible phone screen giving him away, he wouldn’t have been caught.That encounter was a while ago but my memory was jogged last week listening to a clip of Meta’s VP of wearables, Alex Himel, talk fondly to the BBC about using his new smartglasses to film his daughter singing in a talent contest. They let him capture the memory without having to watch her through a screen, he said, freeing him to be “kind of living in the moment, head up and hands free”. So far, so sweet. But what about the risk of creeps potentially using them to film other people’s daughters covertly, heads up and hands free? Meta’s smartglasses have a tiny flashing warning light on the frame to indicate when the wearer is recording, but the technology is still new enough that many people don’t think to look for it. And in the age of AI, stolen images of children matter. Taken in real life or scraped from the internet, they’re the raw material for generating realistic-looking child abuse material of the most extreme and disturbing kind. (If that sounds like a grim but ultimately fairly victimless crime, the Internet Watch Foundation warned in a recent report that AI-generated material risks fuelling sexual interest in children, normalising violence and increasing the risk of real-life offending.)Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnistDo you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. Continue reading...
Research during Hungary election shows AI recommended parties not running and gave highly volatile answers to identical promptsAI chatbots provide inaccurate, inconsistent and unreliable guidance to voters asking which party they should back, a study suggests, often recommending the wrong party, not mentioning the right one, or listing parties not even running.“The results raise serious concerns about the reliability of general-purpose AI systems in electoral contexts,” the study, published by the civil liberties group Liberties and based on research during this year’s Hungarian parliamentary elections, concluded. Continue reading...
In this week’s Computer Weekly, we talk to Unilever’s global CIO about empowering people to innovate – from IT departments to entrepreneurial women in India. We analyse the arguments for and against the NHS’s controversial Federated Data Platform project. And veteran IT leader Paul Coby shares his top tips for business success. Read the issue now.
The 764 network is just one part of a growing online ecosystem that pushes young members into brutal and degrading acts. It has perpetrators and victims in dozens of countriesIn late 2024, in a quiet suburb of Stockholm, a 14-year-old boy approached a man in his 80s who was using a walker. He stabbed the man three times in the back.The video of the attack in Hässelby was streamed and spread quickly. It fed a global online ecosystem that actively encourages and glorifies acts of violence and degradation – the “gamification of harm”, as the researcher Marc-André Argentino puts it. Continue reading...
Employee data at US-based cosmetics firm Estée Lauder was compromised through a vulnerability in Oracle’s software, likely orchestrated by the Cl0p ransomware gang
Lithuania has built a network of tech startup companies the hard way, through bootstrapping. Today, it claims six companies with valuations over a billion dollars
Virgin Media O2’s CSO Dana Haidan is driving growth by embedding sustainability into core strategy, slashing emissions, boosting circularity and championing digital inclusion
Company aims to develop AI software that cuts research times and use of rare metals in chipmakers’ supply chainsBusiness live – latest updatesAmazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, and the UK government have invested in a £2bn British artificial intelligence startup that is aiming to become the “search engine for rare materials” that accelerates the next wave of technological breakthroughs.The Cambridge-based CuspAI has raised $450m (£330m) in funding from investors including Bezos and the government’s sovereign AI fund, valuing the two-year-old business at $2.6bn. Continue reading...
Controversial ID Scheme and government technology department to be tossed on scrap heap as new prime minister enters 10 Downing Street
Experts believe it’s at least possible. We urgently need a plan to navigate the ethical implicationsIn January, the AI company Anthropic published a new constitution for Claude, its most advanced large language model (LLM), which contained the comment: “We are caught in a difficult position where we neither want to overstate the likelihood of Claude’s moral patienthood nor dismiss it out of hand.” A month later, Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei went on a podcast and said his company couldn’t rule out the possibility that Claude was conscious. Philosopher David Chalmers, who coined the phrase “the hard problem of consciousness”, has said there is a significant chance of conscious LLMs within a decade. And what about Claude itself? When asked during testing to estimate the probability that it is a moral patient, meaning that its wellbeing matters in its own right, it gave numbers ranging from 5% to 40% and stressed how uncertain it was.Modern AI systems are extraordinarily complex, and they are advancing fast. In terms of structural complexity and computational scale, by some measures a few are already in the range of a mouse brain, and at recent growth rates, they could reach the range of a human brain within five to 10 years. Continue reading...