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
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.
Read the report & discussion ↗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…
Watch Desk
Scotland is weighing at least 23 proposed hyperscale data centres, including one planned site with capacity comparable to a large power station. The argument is not just about the AI they could run: it is about electricity, water, noise and what local communities get in return.
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An AI system at St Luke’s Hospital in Bradford is helping staff assess suspicious skin lesions more quickly, with clinics now seeing 32 patients per session instead of 24. The change offers a practical example of AI being used to ease pressure on NHS care, while clinicians remain…
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Google is making its free AI Educator Series available to educators across the UK and Ireland, alongside an AI policy toolkit for school governors and trustees. The practical tension for schools is already in view: training can help staff use AI, but leaders still need to decide which…
Watch Desk
AI tools are making it faster and cheaper for US political campaigns to produce ads, but viral reach has not proved a reliable shortcut to winning votes. Fox News reports that campaign strategists see the technology spreading, while pointing to high-profile cases where attention did not translate into…
Watch Desk
Voters are turning to AI chatbots to compare candidates and check claims ahead of the US midterm elections. The tools can make thinly covered local races easier to research, but an answer that feels persuasive is not necessarily a reliable one.
Watch Desk
AI is creating paid work for people who teach models the skills of their professions, while also raising the prospect of job displacement across those same fields. A CBS News 60 Minutes report puts both sides of that uneven transition in view, from freelance trainers to concerns about…
Anthropic Watch
Anthropic is launching a training programme for enterprise engineers, with a reported US$100 million commitment and a target of training 10,000 people by the end of 2027. The bet is that getting AI into working systems depends as much on skilled teams as on the models themselves.
