A Berkeley professor wrote about students cutting corners, but a detector flagged her op-ed
A Berkeley professor wrote about students cutting corners, but a detector flagged her op-ed

Zvezdelina Stankova published an op-ed on 15 August arguing that Berkeley admits students who cannot do middle school mathematics. Within days, the argument had been overtaken by a question about how the op-ed itself was written. Zvezdelina Stankova, a…

A Turing Award winner says the industry’s fix for running out of data is ‘a big mistake’
A Turing Award winner says the industry’s fix for running out of data is ‘a big mistake’

Richard Sutton thinks the AI industry’s answer to running out of training data is a mistake, and he has picked a blunt word for it. “ That’s just a big mistake,” he said of the turn to synthetic data on Sequoia Capital’s Training Data podcast, publishe…

Deutsche Telekom buys Macquarie’s Polish fibre and TV assets in a €1bn bet on convergence
Deutsche Telekom buys Macquarie’s Polish fibre and TV assets in a €1bn bet on convergence

Deutsche Telekom has agreed to buy two of Poland’s best-known fibre businesses, Fiberhost and INEA, from the Australian investment group Macquarie, in a deal worth roughly €1bn and aimed squarely at the country’s scramble to bundle mobile, broadband, a…

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…

Thrive Capital’s first investor letter shows how completely OpenAI has come to define it
Thrive Capital’s first investor letter shows how completely OpenAI has come to define it

Joshua Kushner’s Thrive Capital has sent its first formal letter to investors, and the standout figure captures the AI era in miniature. One of its funds has swelled to about $3.7bn in value, driven overwhelmingly by early bets on OpenAI and SpaceX. Th…

Weather drones are filling the data blind spot that armies and traders both need
Weather drones are filling the data blind spot that armies and traders both need

The artificial-intelligence weather boom has a dirty secret. For all the talk of models that see storms days ahead, an AI forecaster is only as good as the observations that feed it, and lately those have run thin. According to Bloomberg, drones are no…

This Bengaluru startup is training dogs and AI to sniff out cancer early
This Bengaluru startup is training dogs and AI to sniff out cancer early

Dognosis pairs trained sniffer dogs with artificial intelligence to flag cancer from a breath sample. It is a charming idea aimed at a real problem, with equally real caveats: this is prescreening in trials, not a proven diagnostic. A dog’s nose has lo…

Mark Zuckerberg’s ‘personal superintelligence’ pitch lands as a Rorschach test
Mark Zuckerberg’s ‘personal superintelligence’ pitch lands as a Rorschach test

In a roughly 6,500-word essay published a couple of weeks ago, Meta’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, laid out a vision of “personal superintelligence”, an artificial intelligence built for everyone rather than a centralised system that automates peo…

Amazon’s $5m campaign against Mamdani’s delivery bill is the best argument for passing it
Amazon’s $5m campaign against Mamdani’s delivery bill is the best argument for passing it

Amazon is spending $5M to kill a single New York City bill, and the size of that cheque is the most honest story the company has said about the fight. The measure is the Delivery Protection Act, backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani and carrying a majority of…