USA
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.
Three solo founders — behind Daymaker, OpenClaw and Base44 — have turned Sam Altman’s ‘one-person company’ idea into reality, showing how AI tools now let individuals build and sell businesses at startling speed.
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.
Sixteen researchers behind the Leiden Declaration, endorsed by the International Mathematical Union, warn that AI and tech-industry money threaten the values, autonomy and future of mathematical research.
Lloyds Bank has used IBM quantum hardware to successfully flag a money mule hidden in transaction data, an early sign quantum computing could sharpen banks’ fraud defences.
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.
Worldline, ING and Mastercard have run Europe’s first live agentic payment, with an AI agent assembling a purchase the shopper still has to approve — showing agent-led buying can clear existing bank security and authorisation.
A Walmart-backed startup, Eko, is hand-building an “AI-ready” product catalogue — photographing millions of items from every angle — so AI shopping agents like ChatGPT and Gemini can describe and sell them accurately.
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.
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.