Artificial Intelligence
The CIA’s ‘Ghost Murmur’ supposedly found a downed US airman by detecting his heartbeat from afar, but physicists say the heart’s magnetic field is far too weak to read at any distance.
Two decades after being ousted from PayPal, Elon Musk is launching X Money, a payments service inside X that analysts say could disrupt his old company and reshape US payments.
Elon Musk has called Bitcoin an ‘energy currency’ whose value is rooted in physics and electricity rather than government policy, and mused that AI and robots could one day make money itself obsolete.
Cisco has launched Cloud Control, a toolset that lets companies build their own armies of defender AI agents, a response to a world where cyberattacks increasingly come from swarms of hostile agents.
Chinese researchers say a nine-qubit quantum system beat a 10,000-node classical network at weather prediction for under 1% of the cost, a hint that compact quantum machines could undercut today’s giant AI data centres.
China has made ‘ciyuan’ the official translation for AI ‘token’, a move widely read as the seed of a token-based currency for the AI age, and a long-term challenge to the US dollar.
China has launched a state-backed space-computing institute in Beijing, taking its AI rivalry with the US into orbit just as SpaceX eyes a $75 billion listing to fund its own space data centres.
A new UN report warns that AI data centres will drink as much water as 1.3 billion people by 2030, and that judging AI by carbon alone badly understates its true environmental cost.
With AI bills running far ahead of budgets, companies are turning to model routing, sending easy tasks to cheap models, in a shift that could squeeze the economics of OpenAI and Anthropic.
SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son says OpenAI’s next model is being designed by another model, a sign, he argues, that superintelligence is just two years away.
A senior UK minister has warned that AI-driven job losses could make the welfare state unaffordable within a decade, echoing Anthropic’s prediction of mass white-collar unemployment.
Polsia, an AI startup run by a single founder with no employees, has raised $30 million at a $250 million valuation by promising ‘AI that runs your company while you sleep’ — though sceptics question its revenue claims.