
Investec’s contrarian AI bet: people over machines
South Africa’s banks are taking divergent paths on AI, with Investec insisting people, not machines, define the institution.
MONDAY, 25 MAY 2026, 16:55

South Africa’s banks are taking divergent paths on AI, with Investec insisting people, not machines, define the institution.

Africa Finance Corporation has committed up to $100-million to tech fund managers to deepen local venture capital.
John Lennon’s last interview — just hours before he was shot on December 8, 1980 — has become a documentary directed by Steven Soderbergh, debuting Saturday at the Cannes Film Festival. In a new interview with the Associated Press, Soderbergh defends the film’s limited use of AI to visualize concepts from that two-hour interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono:Soderbergh was resolved to let...

Participants who got single dose of psilocybin were more likely to abstain from cocaine than those who got placebo
Results from a new clinical trial show that a single dose of psilocybin could be an effective treatment for cocaine addiction.
The study, published in Jama Network Open this month, showed that 19 participants who received a single dose of psilocybin were more likely to abstain from...

Africa Bitcoin Corporation, formerly Altvest Capital, is moving its JSE listing from AltX to the main board.

Paddy Rodgers said the Observatory’s rich history showed the power of human knowledge and the need to avoid “dependence” on AI.

As a business grows, keeping track of every conversation, commitment, and follow-up becomes increasingly difficult. Many small teams rely on memory, personal inboxes, or loosely maintained spreadsheets — an approach that works well enough, until it doesn’t. Contacts slip through the cracks, follow-ups get missed, and customer trust quietly erodes. Teams often start by tracking […]

Campaigners want a major Cape Town data centre plan blocked until its water and power impact is disclosed.

Microsoft estimates 23.1% of working-age South Africans use generative AI – well ahead of the rest of the continent.

State-aligned Iranian media is floating a plan to charge the world’s tech giants rent on subsea cables in the Strait of Hormuz.

Kaspersky GM for sub-Saharan Africa Chris Norton explains why SOCs are becoming a boardroom priority.
Iran’s government “wants to charge the world’s largest tech companies for using the subsea internet cables laid under the Strait of Hormuz,” reports CNN. Their article also notes that Iran’s state-linked media outlets “have vaguely threatened that traffic could be disrupted if firms don’t pay.”Lawmakers in Tehran discussed a plan last week which could target submarine cables linking Arab...

Netstar has opened an inner-city learning centre as Altron’s Jozi My Jozi partnership moves to measurable youth impact.

Anthropic will brief central bankers around the world on cyber vulnerabilities its new Mythos model has uncovered.

Starlink now operates in two dozen African countries, with Uganda becoming the latest to licence the satellite service.

Samsung Electronics and a trade union are holding last-ditch talks to avert a strike threatening global supply chains.

The slim arc of a two-day-old moon will pass Venus shining brightly
Keep an eye on the western sky after sunset this week to watch a beautiful sequence unfold over several evenings. A young crescent moon moves first past Venus and then Jupiter, creating a chance to track the moon’s movement through its orbit around the Earth.
The chart shows the view on 18 May looking west from London at 22.00....
Today Linus Torvalds announced another Linux release candidate on the kernel mailing list. But he also highlighted “documentation updates” to address a new problem. “The continued flood of AI reports has basically made the security list almost entirely unmanageable, with enormous duplication due to different people finding the same things with the same tools.” (The new documentation says the...
America’s Library of Congress “is preserving a little piece of Hell,” jokes Engadget, “by inducting the soundtrack to the original Doom into the National Recording Registry.” The album of demon-slaying tracks is joined by several other notable 2026 additions to the registry, like Weezer’s self-titled debut album (colloquially known as “The Blue Album”), Taylor Swift’s “1989,” Beyonce’s “Single...
Today former Google CEO Eric Schmidt “was booed multiple times,” reports NBC News, “while discussing AI during a commencement speech at the University of Arizona.” Schmidt had started by remembering how computer platforms “gave everyone a voice” but also “degraded the public square… They rewarded outrage. They amplified our worst instincts. They coarsen the way we speak to each other, and that...
160 miles north of New York City, a man was convicted of manslaughter “with the help of license plate reader technology,” reports a local news station. In the small town of Troy (population: 51,000), the mayor described the cameras as “a critical tool” in that investigation. But locals and city officials “have raised concerns about who can access the data collected locally, along with data...