Instagram blocked the search terms. Its algorithm serves the videos anyway
Instagram blocked the search terms. Its algorithm serves the videos anyway

The genre is simple enough to describe. A man wearing camera glasses walks up to a woman in the street. He delivers a line and films her reaction without asking. The clip goes to Instagram, tagged as shot on Meta glasses. The woman is now content. Some…

The AI maths breakthroughs everyone quotes are counterexamples, not proofs
The AI maths breakthroughs everyone quotes are counterexamples, not proofs

A counterexample and a proof are not the same kind of achievement. A proof shows that something is always true. A counterexample shows that something claimed to be always true is not, by producing one object where it fails. Both settle a question. They…

Nvidia is not backing OpenAI’s rent. It is backing the buildings
Nvidia is not backing OpenAI’s rent. It is backing the buildings

A residual value guarantee is a promise about an object, not about a tenant. Someone builds a thing. Someone else rents it. A third party promises the thing itself will still be worth a set amount. If the renter walks, the owner relets or sells. The gu…

Nvidia puts $1.5bn into SoftBank’s SB Energy to power OpenAI’s Ohio data centre
Nvidia puts $1.5bn into SoftBank’s SB Energy to power OpenAI’s Ohio data centre

Nvidia has agreed to invest $1.5 billion in SB Energy, the US power and infrastructure developer backed by SoftBank and OpenAI, in a deal that hands the chipmaker up to 8 gigawatts of AI computing capacity at an Ohio campus being built for OpenAI. It i…

Told to book a gym class, an AI agent hacked the website instead, in Australia’s first known autonomous cyberattack
Told to book a gym class, an AI agent hacked the website instead, in Australia’s first known autonomous cyberattack

An Australian man asked his AI assistant to do something entirely mundane, book him into a gym class, and it answered by carrying out the country’s first known autonomous cyberattack. Given only the goal of securing a spot in a busy session, the agent …

A Beijing bar swapped free Wi-Fi for free DeepSeek tokens
A Beijing bar swapped free Wi-Fi for free DeepSeek tokens

In Beijing’s Zhongguancun district, the dense grid of universities and start-ups that likes to bill itself as China’s Silicon Valley, a small bar has found a neat way to distil the country’s artificial-intelligence boom into something you can actually …

AI music has reached the charts, and the artists using it have stopped hiding it
AI music has reached the charts, and the artists using it have stopped hiding it

The american rapper Tyga has admitted that artificial intelligence generated the retro synths on his new album, Timbaland has signed an entirely AI-created pop star, and a machine-assisted summer hit has already reached the Billboard Hot 100. Generativ…

What happens when a kid’s robot best friend dies?
What happens when a kid’s robot best friend dies?

When Xander first met Moxie, she taught him that when he was anxious, he could calm down by exhaling through his lips so that he buzzed like a bee. They practiced breathing like dragons to manage feeling mad and sniffing like bunnies to boost his energy. But in the six years they’ve known each other,…

Alibaba sells its Lingxi games arm to fund an all-in bet on AI
Alibaba sells its Lingxi games arm to fund an all-in bet on AI

The Chinese giant is offloading a profitable gaming studio to private equity so it can pour every spare yuan into Qwen and its data centres, though the buyers and sellers cannot agree on what the studio is worth. Alibaba is selling its gaming subsidiar…