From the archive
Follow the latest AI news and artificial intelligence developments across models, agents, robotics, research and the wider industry. Explore new AI tools, advances in computing, business moves, safety and policy, with clear reporting and useful sources. Read the stories, catch up with News in Brief and join the conversation.
Lead story
Databricks says its product team uses Genie One to prepare a weekly adoption review, investigate changes in user activity and turn the work into a shareable agent. The example shows how Genie Ontology is meant to supply business context to an AI workflow, not just help it find…
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A new analysis of consumer AI apps finds that just 4.5% of US consumers pay for an AI subscription, while spending among those who do is sharply concentrated. The figures put a useful question behind the race for app rankings: how much of the market is broad adoption,…
Watch Desk
Senator Adam Schiff says Congress should legislate on AI sooner than it did on social media, arguing that voluntary promises from technology companies are not enough. In an interview with The Verge, he points to questions ranging from copyrighted training material to AI safety and use in the…
Watch Desk
The AI boom’s benefits may be reaching ordinary Americans through construction jobs, tax revenue and consumer use, not just through the technology’s effect on office work. Noah Smith makes that case in a new essay, while acknowledging that data centres bring costs as well as gains.
Meta AI Watch
404 Media reports that Meta engineers fixed several security vulnerabilities in Muse shortly before the AI agent launched, including at least one flaw that could have let a user’s virtual machine reach sensitive Meta databases or services. The report raises a concrete question about how securely an agent…
Watch Desk
Current and former OpenAI and Google DeepMind researchers are warning that AI labs are not doing enough to prepare for self-improving systems. Their accounts, gathered for a new public-awareness project, put a pointed question to the field: who gets to slow the race when the people building the…
Watch Desk
MongoDB has launched Atlas Agent Engine, a platform layer for building and operating AI agents on its data platform. Its pitch is practical: persistent memory, retrieval and controls over what agents can do, built into a stack many businesses already use.
Watch Desk
Checkatrade says it uses AI to help explain the factors behind tradespeople’s job prices, while checking estimates against its own data. CTO Gorden Pretorius says the company keeps a human in the loop for AI-assisted vetting, where it applies stricter safeguards.
Watch Desk
AI ownership is spreading across company leadership, but executive-search chief Nada Usina argues that the key question is not who gets the title. It is who is accountable for what the business expects AI to achieve.
Watch Desk
Many software developers are using AI coding tools while remaining wary of them. A Stack Overflow survey reported by CNN found that 65% of respondents use coding assistants or agents, while six in ten tech workers surveyed said they try to avoid AI.
Watch Desk
Tencent is reportedly set to rent about 100,000 AI chips from Oracle for five years, in a deal estimated at $7 billion. If accurate, it would be a major example of Chinese firms obtaining overseas AI computing capacity while access to advanced chips remains a live policy issue.
Cohere Watch
Cohere has launched North 2, an enterprise AI platform that lets businesses use models from rival providers and set spending limits for staff and teams. It also offers pre-built agents for workplace tasks, giving companies a way to organise AI work without making Cohere’s own models the only…
Cohere Watch
Cohere is releasing North 2, a new version of its enterprise AI platform that lets customers build agents for more complex, multistep work. The practical change is a shift from chat and document retrieval towards agents that can act across business tasks, with controls for human oversight, access…
Watch Desk
Extend Robotics has raised £2.6 million to expand a service that lets manufacturers pay for completed robotic work rather than buy robots outright. The UK company says the funding will also support a remote-operator network, an approach that could put robotic capacity within reach of factories wary of…
Watch Desk
Hitachi and Germany’s Agile Robots are partnering to develop physical AI systems for complex factory tasks, combining Hitachi’s edge AI technology with Agile’s robotics platform. The plan is to commercialise the resulting systems globally through Hitachi’s HMAX Industry portfolio, putting AI closer to machines and production lines rather…
Watch Desk
A film about OpenAI’s beginnings and its founders Sam Altman and Ilya Sutskever is heading to cinemas after Neon took over its release from Amazon MGM. Its journey from a Big Tech-backed production to an independent distributor gives this AI story a second, rather pointed, plot.
NVIDIA Watch
NVIDIA has selected engineering firm Jacobs to deploy a digital twin at one of its largest US AI research and development facilities. The three-year project aims to bring live facility data and simulation together, with Jacobs describing a path towards more autonomous operations as AI data centres grow…
AMD Watch
AMD’s deals to supply AI chips to OpenAI and Meta include warrants for up to 320 million shares, and the share-price threshold for the final batches has now been crossed. But the shares are not a cheque already written: the warrants depend on the customers buying the chips,…
Intel AI Watch
Intel Neural Compressor 3.10 adds new quantisation options for PyTorch and Keras/JAX, alongside support for more models and hardware. For teams trying to fit AI workloads to available accelerators, the release offers practical new knobs, not just a version number and a ceremonial cake.
Geoffrey Hinton Watch
A paper co-authored by Geoffrey Hinton and 21 other researchers examines how automating AI research could accelerate the development of AI itself. Its most striking projection is conditional, not a claim that an intelligence explosion is already happening: if AI research were fully automated and current estimated returns…
Cohere Watch
PwC and Cohere have announced a global alliance, beginning in Canada, to help businesses deploy AI in their own data and technology environments. The partnership’s practical pitch is a combination of Cohere’s enterprise AI products and PwC’s implementation and risk expertise, aimed at organisations that have struggled to…
Yann LeCun Watch
Yann LeCun has urged academic researchers not to work on large language models, arguing they should pursue other routes towards AI that can understand the physical world. The advice comes from a May lecture, not a new announcement, but it poses a live question for researchers choosing what…
