Signal Foundation president Meredith Whittaker warned that AI agents that autonomously carry out tasks pose a threat to encrypted messaging apps [non-paywalled source] because they require broad access to data stored across a device and can be hijacked if given root permissions. Speaking at Davos on Tuesday, Whittaker said the deeper integration of AI agents into devices is “pretty perilous”...

AI will displace so many jobs that it will eliminate the need for mass immigration, according to Palantir CEO Alex Karp. Bloomberg: “There will be more than enough jobs for the citizens of your nation, especially those with vocational training,” said Karp, speaking at a World Economic Forum panel in Davos, Switzerland on Tuesday. “I do think these trends really do make it hard to imagine why we...

Cointelegraph, once one of the most-visited cryptocurrency news sites, has seen its monthly traffic plummet from roughly 8 million visits to 1.4 million — an 80% drop in three months — after Google issued a manual penalty in October 2025 for the outlet’s partnership with a blackhat SEO firm that used Cointelegraph’s domain authority to promote affiliate links to offshore casinos and betting...

He Jiankui, the Chinese scientist who served three years in prison after creating the world’s first gene-edited babies in 2018, is now preparing for another attempt at germline editing — this time to prevent Alzheimer’s disease. In an interview, He said he has established an independent lab in south Beijing and raised $7 million from private donors to fund research into introducing a protective...

An anonymous reader shares a report: Europe must invest in its own open source artificial intelligence labs and address soaring energy prices, or it will quickly find itself dependent on Chinese models, former Google chief executive and tech investor Eric Schmidt said. “In the US, the companies are largely moving to closed source, which means they’ll be purchased and licensed and so forth. And...

An anonymous reader shares a report: Ukraine will establish a system allowing its allies to train their AI models on Kyiv’s valuable combat data collected throughout the nearly four-year war with Russia, newly appointed Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov has said. Fedorov — a former digitalisation minister who last week took up the post to drive reforms across Ukraine’s vast defence ministry and...

The very capable robotic picker-upper can grasp things on both sides and roam around freely.

Energy costs will be key to deciding which country wins the AI race, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has said. CNBC: As countries race to build AI infrastructure to capitalize on the technology’s promise of huge efficiency gains, Nadella told the World Economic Forum (WEF) on Tuesday that “GDP growth in any place will be directly correlated” to the cost of energy in using AI. He pointed to a new...

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs are starting to be reflected in the price of some items, as sellers weigh how to absorb the shock of the added costs. From a report: Amazon and many of its third-party merchants pre-purchased inventory to try to get ahead of the tariffs and keep prices low for customers, but most of that supply ran out last fall, Jassy said in...

Sony plans to spin off its TV hardware business to a new joint venture controlled by Chinese electronics giant TCL, the two said Tuesday, a significant retreat for the Japanese giant whose Bravia line has long occupied the premium end of the television market. TCL would hold a 51% stake in the venture and Sony would retain 49% under a nonbinding agreement the two companies signed. They aim to...