Technology Industry
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.
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.
OpenAI says one of its general-purpose reasoning models has disproved an 80-year-old conjecture by mathematician Paul Erdős, a result validated by mathematicians but one that still leaves the deeper problem unsolved.
Researchers in Texas have created a graphene leaf tattoo that reads a plant’s moisture in real time and can act as an artificial synapse, raising the prospect of forests and fields that monitor fire and drought themselves.
Google co-founder Sergey Brin uses the game of Go to argue that AI pushes humans to improve rather than simply replacing them, even as the future-of-work debate intensifies.
Young Chinese professionals fearing the “curse of 35” are using AI to launch one-person companies, backed by city subsidies aligned with Beijing’s tech self-reliance drive.
Uber has capped employees at $1,500 a month per agentic coding tool after blowing its entire annual AI budget in four months — a sharp signal that enterprise AI’s return on investment is still unproven.
Enterprise AI is so expensive that CFOs are blowing annual budgets in weeks, and AI leaders say firms now openly weigh buying tokens against hiring — with smarter model routing the main escape valve.
An Indian research team proposes pairing AI with two dozen brain structures so the system develops a personality, sleeps, dreams and eventually dies — a brain-mirroring route to AGI distinct from neuromorphic computing.
Elon Musk has unveiled AI1, SpaceX’s first orbital data-centre satellite — a 70-metre-wingspan craft carrying a Nvidia-class compute payload that SpaceX wants to mass-produce and fly off Earth’s power grid, days ahead of its IPO.