An alleged Iranian attack on a small reserve ‘peaker’ power plant went largely unnoticed despite causing four days of downtime. Cyber experts say the incident raises serious questions about CNI resilience.
How AI can monitor the growth of cracks and defects in engineering structures to predict the need for repairs
Prime minister will use national cabinet meeting to assuage premiers over new AI law as Aemo forecasts seven-fold rise in datacentre power useFollow our Australia news live blog for latest updatesGet our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcastAnthony Albanese will seek to use Wednesday’s high-stakes talks with premiers to quell growing unhappiness about national controls on datacentre developments, promising new approval laws will complement state rules.Faced with growing opposition from conservative governments in Queensland and the Northern Territory, Albanese will tell national cabinet he plans a major piece of legislation next year to ensure the economic benefits of AI are shared widely. Continue reading...
ThreatLocker CEO Danny Jenkins explains why aviation, energy and education organisations remain attractive targets, and why prevention should take precedence over detection
The Post Office has finally put pen to paper on its contract with an electronic point of sale system supplier after a three-month holdup
Navigating the UK datacentre boom requires robust site planning, early stakeholder engagement, and strategic grid alignment to overcome regulatory delays
If landing men on the Moon represented one giant leap for technology, we may just be at the cusp of another huge step forward
Fears of a datacenter buildout debt crisis are exaggerated. The risks are different than in the past and they are recoverableSome experts are warning of a looming “debt bomb” crisis because big datacenter builders such as Meta, Oracle, xAI and CoreWeave are not only raising billions to construct these facilities but are also not recognizing these long-term debt obligations on their balance sheets.Should we be concerned? No. I know because I’ve seen this movie before. Continue reading...
Chris Lehane tells Guardian of need to implement new safety standards as critics say AI firms acting ‘recklessly’A senior leader at OpenAI has said people should prepare to defend against “ongoing, persistent” cyber-attacks from AIs, as cutting-edge artificial intelligence models gain advanced capabilities to plan and launch offensives.The leading AI company this week announced a pause in development of its most advanced internal models amid rising safety fears, and Chris Lehane, its chief global affairs officer, said: “We are hitting a different chapter, a different moment within AI, in terms of what the capabilities of this technology can do.” Continue reading...
Streamed auctions offer a cheap way to buy the precious gems, but experts warn that quality is not guaranteedThe first time Andrea Greenhill came across a livestream auction for lab-grown diamonds while scrolling on TikTok, she was stunned. While the diamond engagement ring her husband proposed with years ago had cost thousands of dollars, these loose lab-grown diamonds were selling in seconds at a fraction of the price.“I have two rings that are both natural diamonds and cost a fortune,” she said. I saw the prices they were going for in the auctions, and I was like, “This is insanity.’” Continue reading...
In trial that opened on Tuesday, California and 28 other states accused the company of designing addictive sites and violating laws protecting children’s privacyMeta’s business can be boiled down to four words that begin with the letter H: hook, hold, harvest, hide, according to a lawyer who is prosecuting the world’s largest social media company.The owner of Facebook and Instagram “hooks” in users, “holds” them on its platforms for as long as possible, “harvests” their data and then “hides” the truth from the public, she argued. Continue reading...
Amid a jobs slump, award-winning writers, directors and producers taking on sometimes lucrative temp work teaching AI skills such as screenwriting and productionHollywood creatives are taking gig work to train AI models to replicate their skills in a bid to offset tightening earnings in a trend one compared to being “handed a shovel and asked to dig the grave of my profession”.Experienced and award-winning writers, directors and producers are being paid from $12 to $200 an hour to teach AI models the intricacies of their jobs, from writing a screenplay to devising a shooting schedule. Continue reading...
It’s clear here in Silicon Valley that AI is advancing faster than humans’ ability to control it. That means even sober prophecies seem optimisticHere in Silicon Valley, the experts think that within the next couple of years we’ll see an extraordinary takeoff for artificial intelligence. “Welcome to the foothills of the singularity,” as a Stanford University friend greeted me. More prosaically, the imminent breakthrough is described as “recursive self-improvement” – the point at which AI itself trains each successive model of AI, resulting in an exponential development to something which, in many significant respects, is more intelligent than us humans.As Robert Wright puts it in his book The God Test: “Never before has the near-term future … held such a wide array of not-implausible paths for humankind that would be so wildly transformative.” But will this be heaven or hell? Heaven, says Elon Musk, who predicts “an age of amazing abundance” – although he also sees a 10-20% chance of killer robots murdering us all. Hell is more likely according to Geoffrey Hinton, one of the intellectual founding fathers of AI. “My intuition is, we’re toast,” he told an interviewer in 2023. And talking to Sebastian Mallaby, author of The Infinity Machine, a book about the quest for superintelligence, Hinton estimates p(doom) – the probability of human extinction – at 50%, “because I haven’t got a clue how to estimate the real number”. “As soon as evolution [of AI] kicks in, we’re fucked,” he adds cheerfully. But whether it’s God or Godzilla, artificial superintelligence is just around the corner.Timothy Garton Ash is a Guardian columnist Continue reading...
In the wake of a series of cyber incidents involving AI agents, the NCSC has published interim guidance for operators of agentic systems, advising organisations retain the ability to pull the plug on AI systems entirely
Exclusive: Planning documents show annual emissions from North Ockendon project would be equivalent to 8,480 flights to New YorkA “hyperscale” datacentre in outer London would generate more than 1m tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, equivalent to the carbon footprint of 8,480 flights from London to New York, planning documents show.The East Havering Data Centre Campus (EHDCC) in North Ockendon would be one of the largest datacentres in Europe if approved by Havering council, using 218 hectares of green belt to run servers and data storage systems for AI and cloud computing. Its developer, Digital Reef, has described the scheme as “a unique opportunity to create a sustainable datacentre campus of the future”. Continue reading...
A collation of journalists, scholars and researchers have launched a database to document the increasing grassroots pushback against artificial intelligence technologies