China Is Spending Billions to Become an A.I. Superpower
Beijing is taking an industrial policy approach to help its A.I. companies close the gap with those in the United States.
SATURDAY, 19 JULY 2025, 00:45
Beijing is taking an industrial policy approach to help its A.I. companies close the gap with those in the United States.
Bruce66423 shares a report from The Guardian: They went viral, amassing more than 1m streams on Spotify in a matter of weeks, but it later emerged that hot new band the Velvet Sundown were AI-generated — right down to their music, promotional images and backstory. The episode has triggered a debate about authenticity, with music industry insiders saying streaming sites should be legally obliged...
Jason Wei, who worked on OpenAI’s o3 and deep research models, will be joining Meta’s superintelligence lab. His colleague Hyung Won Chung is also joining Meta, a source tells WIRED.
The UK secretly relocated thousands of Afghans to the UK after their personal details were disclosed in one of the country’s worst ever data breaches, putting them at risk of Taliban retaliation. The operation cost around $2.7 billion and remained under a court-imposed superinjunction until recently lifted. Reuters reports: The leak by the Ministry of Defence in early 2022, which led to data...
Anthropic has launched a specialized version of its Claude AI tools for the financial services sector, designed to assist professionals with investment decisions, market analysis, and research. The Financial Analysis Solution “includes Claude 4 models, Claude Code and Claude for Enterprise with expanded usage limits, implementation support and other features,” reports CNBC. From the report: As...
xAI’s new $300 monthly subscription comes with two AI companions powered by its most capable model to date. I tried them. It got weird.
Plasma Bigscreen, KDE’s TV-focused interface, is being revived after years of inactivity thanks to contributor Devin, who overhauled the UI, redesigned the Settings app, improved app launching, and updated key modules. While still in progress — with features like HDMI-CEC remote support and a virtual keyboard pending — the project aims to rejoin KDE’s official Plasma release schedule,...
Mira Murati and several other former OpenAI researchers are behind the buzzy AI startup, now valued at $12 billion and officially out of stealth.
Trump administration officials say winning the artificial intelligence race with China is a top priority.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phoronix: Merged yesterday to the latest development code for the LibreOffice open-source office suite is now recognizing Bitcoin “BTC” as a supported currency for use within the Calc spreadsheet program and elsewhere within this cross-platform free software office suite. Stemming from a recent bug report requesting Bitcoin as an official currency option...
U.S. prosecutors and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) have officially closed their investigations into Polymarket, the decentralized, blockchain-powered prediction market platform where users bet with real cryptocurrency on the outcomes of future events. “The DOJ was investigating Polymarket last year, reportedly for allowing U.S. users to place bets on the site despite...
BrianFagioli shares a report from NERDS.xyz: Blender 4.5 has arrived and it’s a long-term support release. That means users get two full years of updates and bug fixes, making it a smart choice for anyone looking for stability in serious projects. Whether you’re a solo artist or part of a studio pipeline, this version is built to last. Here’s a list of key features and changes in this release:...
Metadata from the “raw” Epstein prison video shows approximately 2 minutes and 53 seconds were removed from one of two stitched-together clips. The cut starts right at the “missing minute.”
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Internet service providers BT, Virgin Media, Sky, TalkTalk, EE, and Plusnet account for the majority of the UK’s residential internet market and as a result, blocking injunctions previously obtained at the High Court often list these companies as respondents. These so-called “no fault’ injunctions stopped being adversarial a long time ago;...
The site became prominent last year when people bet on the outcome of the 2024 presidential election.
Ironheart, Doctor Who, and Star Wars: Tales of the Underworld are just a few of the shows you should be watching on Disney+ this month.
Many trains in the U.S. are vulnerable to a hack that can remotely lock a train’s brakes, according to the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the researcher who discovered the vulnerability. From a report:The railroad industry has known about the vulnerability for more than a decade but only recently began to fix it. Independent researcher Neil Smith first...
President Cyril Ramaphosa has appointed Minister of Mineral and Petroleum Resources, Gwede Mantashe, as Acting Minister of Police with immediate effect. “Minister Mantashe will serve in this capacity until Prof Firoz Cachalia, who will retire from his position at the University of the Witwatersrand at the end of this month, assumes his position at the […]
Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas warned young entrepreneurs that tech giants will “copy anything that’s good” during a talk at Y Combinator’s AI Startup School, telling founders they must “live with that fear.” Srinivas said that companies raising tens of billions need to justify capital expenditures and search for new revenue streams. Perplexity pioneered web-crawling chatbots when it launched...
NIST: There’s a new record holder for the most accurate clock in the world. Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have improved their atomic clock based on a trapped aluminum ion. Part of the latest wave of optical atomic clocks, it can perform timekeeping with 19 decimal places of accuracy. Optical clocks are typically evaluated on two levels — accuracy (how...
Two South African scientists are doing such internationally trailblazing research that the Oppenheimer Memorial Trust has granted each of them its most prestigious honours: the R2.5-million Harry Oppenheimer Fellowship Award. “Each of our awardees made such a strong case that we found it impossible to choose between them – so we decided to double down […]