WEDNESDAY, 16 JULY 2025, 11:14
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 […]
Funded by Anduril cofounder Palmer Luckey and Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale, the new bank—named, like their companies, after Tolkien lore—aims to serve startups in crypto, AI, and defense.
A survey of 500 IT asset managers in organizations that use Oracle Java has found that 73% have been audited in the last three years. From a report: At the same time, nearly eight out of 10 Oracle Java users said they had migrated, or planned to shift, to open source Java to try to avoid the risk and high costs of the dominant vendor’s development and runtime environments. Oracle introduced a...
The Presidency has issued a strong statement refuting the Democratic Alliance’s (DA) claims that Special Envoy Mcebisi Jonas was denied a US visa, calling it a deliberate attempt to spread disinformation. In a statement, the Presidency said: “The Presidency cautions South Africa against treating Democratic Alliance (DA) disinformation on matters of international relations and diplomacy as […]
Nearly half of young Americans feel unprepared for future jobs as AI reshapes the workforce faster than career guidance can adapt, according to a new study from the Schultz Family Foundation and HarrisX. The survey of thousands of workers aged 16-24, along with parents, counselors and employers, revealed differences between generations about job availability and requirements. While 71% of...
An organisation helping victims of abuse was hijacked in 2018 to apply for an R18-million grant from the National Lotteries Commission. The looters used a fraudulent bank account and transferred the funds, meant to go towards a rural cycling project in Limpopo, to their own companies. A property bought with the stolen funds has now […]
An anonymous reader shares a report: Hugging Face, a company with a multi-billion dollar valuation and one of the most commonly used platforms for sharing AI tools and resources, is hosting over 5,000 AI image generation models that are designed to recreate the likeness of real people. These models were all previously hosted on Civitai, an AI model sharing platform 404 Media reporting has shown...
Transport Minister Barbara Creecy has taken the decisive step of dissolving the Board of the Road Accident Fund (RAF), marking a critical intervention to address what she described as “persistent governance and operational challenges” that have severely compromised the entity’s ability to fulfill its mandate. The move comes after months of escalating crises that have […]
The National Transmission Company South Africa (NTCSA) has announced that Monde Bala, Group Executive: Eskom Distribution, will be seconded to the role of Interim Chief Executive Officer (ICEO), NTCSA, effective from 1 August 2025, succeeding Segomoco Scheppers. The accelerated process of recruiting and appointing a permanent chief executive officer for the NTCSA is currently underway. […]
Eskom’s outlook for the 52 weeks ahead shows a low chance of the power utility needing to implement load-shedding.
Candy Crush-maker King is cutting approximately 200 employees, with many positions filled by AI tools the departing workers helped develop, according to multiple sources who spoke anonymously to industry publication MobileGamer.biz. The layoffs heavily target level designers, user research staff, and UX and narrative writers across King’s London, Barcelona, Stockholm, and Berlin studios. The...
Chery Group’s iCAUR exclusively makes SUVs and features fully electric and hybrid models.
Deltatre, a leading international provider of streaming, digital, data, and graphics solutions for the sports, media, and entertainment industries, today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Endeavor Streaming from Endeavor Group Holdings, Inc.
Microsoft employs engineers in China to help maintain Defense Department computer systems, with U.S. citizens serving as “digital escorts” to oversee the foreign workers, according to a ProPublica investigation. The escorts often lack advanced technical expertise to police engineers with far more sophisticated skills, and some are former military personnel paid barely above minimum wage. “We’re...
The South African government aims to expand free broadband connectivity to 5.5 million underserved households by the end of 2026.
In a shocking revelation, the Democratic Alliance (DA) has uncovered that President Cyril Ramaphosa has known for months that his appointed “Special Envoy,” Mcebisi Jonas, is not recognised by the United States government. With just two weeks remaining before South Africa faces devastating 30% US tariffs, the DA confirms the following: The US denied Jonas […]
MyBroadband investigated the availability of counterfeit goods on Temu and found products featuring the logos of several local sports teams, as well as international brands like Le Creuset.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: CoreWeave is expanding a data center that is projected to double the electricity needs of a city near Dallas, another example of the strains that artificial intelligence workloads are placing on the US power supply. Local officials have grappled with how to handle the increased stress on the electricity grid from the project, according to a...
Some social media users had threatened to delete their accounts after WeTransfer’s terms were updated.