If it’s daytime, odds are a lone box truck is cruising the streets between Toronto and Brampton, Ont., with no one behind the wheel.
Bristling with more than two dozen cameras, radars and “lidar” — a laser-based measurement of distance — the vehicle ferries groceries daily from an automated Loblaw Cos. Ltd. warehouse at a supermarket in Etobicoke to its headquarters 25 kilometres west of the city.
Sikhs hardest hit …
Opposition parties in Italy have complained to the communications watchdog about a series of AI-generated images published on social media by deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini’s far-right party, calling them “racist, Islamophobic and xenophobic”, the Guardian has learned.
The centre-left Democratic party (PD), with the Greens and Left Alliance, filed a complaint on Thursday with Agcom, the Italian communications regulatory authority, alleging the fake images used by the League contained “almost all categories of hate speech”.
Which will conquer the White House?
Days before the Democrats left the White House, the president’s National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, issued a stark warning. “The next few years,” he said, “will determine whether artificial intelligence leads to catastrophe — and whether China or America prevails in the AI arms race.”
In this remark, Sullivan displayed far more lucidity regarding AI than did other members of the Democratic establishment. (Take Kamala Harris’ bewildering characterisation of bias and misinformation as “existential” threats.) Their successors in the White House, though, see AI as central to their plans for American dominance. Last week, the Trump administration slapped strict export controls on Nvidia’s H20 chip. And on Monday, the president’s science and technology policy chief, Michael Kratsios, told an audience of technologists that AI would be central to the new “Golden Age of America”.
Disruptive technologies like AI are empowering bad actors faster than law enforcement can respond.
On New Year’s morning, American citizens awoke to news of another mass-casualty terror attack. Using a rented a pick-up truck, a man plowed through revellers on New Orleans’s Bourbon Street, killing 14 and wounding at least 57 others.
This was no crude act of vehicular terrorism: the attacker employed smart glasses to reconnoiter the area before striking. He had wired his vehicle with improvised explosive devices (IEDs), and strategically planted additional bombs across the neighborhood. The materials used were not black-market contraband but commercially available technology, repurposed for destruction.
A few weeks ago, after the first preview of my play about artificial intelligence in San Francisco, I found myself talking to Edward (not his real name), an agreeable programmer with a ponytail who didn’t make much eye contact but was eager to discuss the performance and the tech world more broadly. “Have you heard of Iain Banks’s The Culture”? Edward asked. I hadn’t. The Culture, I would later learn, is a sci-fi series about a far-future, post-scarcity utopia run by godlike AIs, where death, suffering, and even traditional economics are obsolete.
I asked Grok to draw me an AI controlled dystopia.
Oddly the sphere triggered the memory of a recurring suffocating nightmare I used to have as a child.
I hadn’t thought of it in many years.
OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman once warned that artificial intelligence “may cause significant harm to the world.” His chatbot is already harming babies, mothers and pro-life volunteer organizations by directing them to the baby-killing organization Planned Parenthood for information on crisis pregnancy centers.
Uber is trialling taxis without drivers across America – but how safe are they really?
The driver of the car beside me realises, too late, that he is in the wrong lane. As the lights change he darts forward, directly into our path. With a whirl of the steering wheel, my Uber swerves, just in time to avoid collision. It’s lucky, as it turns out, that there wasn’t anyone in the driver’s seat – I’m not sure human reflexes would have been fast enough.
I’m in downtown Austin, Texas, where I’ve spent the day trialling the latest revolution from taxi company Uber: self-driving cars.
The entertainment industry is asking President Trump to protect its intellectual property. Yet don’t expect this to be the beginning of a beautiful friendship. While the letter about Mr. Trump’s AI Action Plan has over 460 signatures, it avoids mentioning the man Hollywood wants to ride to its rescue.
The letter, referring only to “the current U.S. administration,” takes issue with “a recommendation by OpenAI & Google … to remove all legal protections and existing guardrails surrounding copyright law protections for the training of Artificial Intelligence.”
Breaking re Dr. Theresa Tam FOI emails
I've used Claude 3.7 Sonnet A.I. to create a searchable database of the first 200 pages of the @Bret_Sears Tam FOI emails.
After testing Grok3, ChatGPT 4o, and Claude a.i. engines, only Claude could handle the detail work required.… pic.twitter.com/GGwS3dTYDM
— DonaldBest.CA * DO NOT COMPLY (@DonaldBestCA) March 3, 2025
Apple says it is working to fix its speech-to-text tool after some social media users found that when they spoke the word “racist” into their iPhones it typed it out as “Trump.”
The tech giant has suggested the issue with its Dictation service has been caused by a problem it has distinguishing between words with an “r” in them.
“We are aware of an issue with the speech recognition model that powers Dictation and we are rolling out a fix today,” an Apple spokesperson said.
More than 1,000 musicians – including Annie Lennox, Damon Albarn and Kate Bush – released a silent album on Tuesday in protest at the UK government’s planned changes to copyright law, which they say would make it easier for AI companies to train models using copyrighted work without a licence.
Under the new proposals, AI developers will be able to use creators’ content on the internet to help develop their models, unless the rights holders elect to “opt out”.
The artists hope the album, entitled Is This What We Want?, will draw attention to the potential impact on livelihoods and the UK music industry.
Pop music is already less musical and more formulaic than in any previous era.
The age of autotune has not produced much that AI could not do better.
Bonus – No more political statements by the likes of Madonna!
Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI – the maker of ChatGPT – has rebuffed a $97.4bn (£78.4bn) bid to take over the firm from a consortium of investors led by Elon Musk.
Musk’s attorney, Marc Toberoff, confirmed he submitted the bid for “all assets” of the tech company to its board on Monday.
The offer is the latest twist in a longstanding battle between Musk, the world’s richest man and right hand to US President Donald Trump, and Open AI chief executive Sam Altman over the future of the start-up at the centre of the AI boom.
Elon Musk is planning to replace tens of thousands of sacked government workers with artificial intelligence tools, according to US officials.
The world’s richest man has moved quickly to radically reduce spending and shrink the federal workforce, with more than 40,000 employees already accepting offers to resign for eight months of pay.
If Mr Musk’s plans succeed in full, he will cut the federal workforce by at least 10 per cent.
Last Tuesday, President Trump announced plans for billions of dollars in private-sector investment to strengthen artificial intelligence infrastructure in the United States. The initiative underscores his commitment to maintaining American leadership in AI research and industrial innovation. The Trump administration still faces many pressing questions about how to navigate the expanding influence of artificial intelligence. Chief among them: Are large language models (LLMs)—from OpenAI’s ChatGPT to Google’s Gemini—politically biased? A growing body of research suggests that they lean left. In my own studies, I have found that LLMs are more likely to use terminology favored by Democratic lawmakers, propose left-leaning policy solutions, and use more favorable language when discussing left-leaning public figures compared with their counterparts on the right.
Why DeepSeek’s AI innovations are blowing people’s minds
H/T DS
SINGAPORE—Take a team of young Chinese engineers, hired by a boss with disdain for experience. Add some clever programming shortcuts, and a loophole in American rules that allowed them to get advanced chips.
That is the formula China’s DeepSeek used to shock the world with its artificial-intelligence programs.
Conventional thinking held that developing leading AI required loads of expensive, cutting-edge computer chips—and that Chinese companies would have trouble competing because they couldn’t get those chips. DeepSeek defied those predictions with a resourcefulness that led to a $1 trillion bloodbath on Wall Street and is spurring Silicon Valley to rethink its approach.
