USA
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.
CATL is chasing lithium-air batteries with a theoretical energy density of 12,000 Wh/kg, roughly that of petrol, a leap that could obliterate the range gap between EVs and combustion cars.
America’s biggest banks, led by JPMorgan and Bank of America, are building a tokenised deposit network to settle payments on a blockchain around the clock, their answer to the rise of stablecoins.
AI assistants with live access to your accounts could become everyday financial advisers, but the privacy trade-off is real.
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.
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.