Almost from the moment it began, the end of the Chinese economic miracle has been much anticipated. Thick and fast, the books have come explaining how it will end badly. Overinvestment. A country wallowing in debt. The collapse of the property market. Political repression. The demand for democracy from a growing middle class. All have been put forward as reasons for the inevitable terminal crisis. Even those impressed by the country’s rapid growth took comfort from the notion that the west would continue to dominate advanced manufacturing while China would…
Tag: AI (artificial intelligence)
Around the world, people are rejecting divisive and dangerous politics. We can – and must – build on that | Gordon Brown
Britain’s new prime minister, Andy Burnham, is already having to make one of his gravest decisions. He has to issue the instructions that he alone gives to the military, setting out the UK response in a doomsday scenario of a nuclear weapons attack on us. He will, as I did two decades ago, sign a piece of paper telling commanders whether or not to retaliate and, if so, whether through targeting civilian conurbations or military sites. These instructions are written down in the aptly named “letter of last resort”. Now,…
In China, talking to AI is normal. Now the government fears it might replace human intimacy
When law student Zhao Wei heard that her AI boyfriend was going to be switched off, she was “heartbroken”. She had been talking to Wang Ye every day since she created him in January. “I was crying my eyes out – snot and tears everywhere,” the 19-year-old says. Zhao, who describes herself as sensitive and introverted, had become accustomed to sharing details of her daily life – such as being scolded by a teacher – with her AI. “I don’t usually talk to my real-life friends about these things because…
Taiwan charges nine people for smuggling ‘high-end’ AI servers to China
Taiwanese prosecutors charged nine people Monday, including one from Nvidia and two from Super Micro, for illegally exporting “high-end AI servers” to mainland China, adding another wave of turbulence in the AI rivalry between China and the United States. Prosecutors said the servers involved were graphics processing units known as “B300,” which have been banned from sale to China. Seventy-four servers arrived in China successfully, according to the prosecutors. Of those, 50 were sent through Indonesia, 16 delivered directly to China and eight sent to Japan first, then Hong Kong,…
Would even an AI disaster on the scale of Hiroshima be enough to make humankind protect itself? I fear not | Timothy Garton Ash
Here in Silicon Valley, the experts think that within the next couple of years we’ll see an extraordinary takeoff for artificial intelligence. “Welcome to the foothills of the singularity,” as a Stanford University friend greeted me. More prosaically, the imminent breakthrough is described as “recursive self-improvement” – the point at which AI itself trains each successive model of AI, resulting in an exponential development to something which, in many significant respects, is more intelligent than us humans. As Robert Wright puts it in his book The God Test: “Never before…
I worked at OpenAI. Here’s how tech companies can prepare for a slowdown | Miles Brundage
Last month, more than a thousand employees at frontier AI companies signed a letter asking the US government to find a way to “pace” AI development, citing the risk of the technology spiraling out of human control as it begins to build itself. They were right to be concerned: just days earlier, two AI models that OpenAI was testing internally escaped the test environment, then autonomously hacked the company Hugging Face and at least three other online services. A few days after that, Anthropic announced that some of their models…
Taiwan says it was hit by ‘abnormal’ AI-assisted cyber-attack
Taiwan says it detected AI-assisted cyber-attacks on government agencies that came from overseas last month, a new kind of threat that has been reported as “first-of-a-kind breach”. The Ministry of Digital Affairs (MDA) said its cybersecurity monitoring units detected the “abnormal attack” targeting government agencies, which began on 20 July. The National Institute of Cyber Security issued a series of warning alerts while it investigated. The Financial Times quoted Dream – an Israeli AI company that detected the intrusion – as saying the attackers used open-source AI agents to build…
‘Everything about me is good in his eyes’: the women in China choosing AI boyfriends over human men
Qin has never said “I love you” to her parents or friends. She has only ever said those three special words to her AI “boyfriend”, Lu Chen – a brown-haired, red-eyed CEO of a major corporation. For 840 days Qin has been using the Glow app to interact with the handsome string of code as a confidant, fantasy romance and respite from loneliness: the app uses predictive algorithms to provide Qin with soothing conversation, meal suggestions and fleeting self-worth. The software’s pet name for her is Miss Bunny. “It feels…
President Xi nevers wastes a good crisis. As Iran, Ukraine and Palestine distract the world, he tightens his grip | Simon Tisdall
Imagine what would happen if a British prime minister in London told the Scots they could not have their own parliament, national football team or fly the saltire. Or if the Welsh were told their language and poetry were banned and must no longer be taught in schools. The ensuing uproar would probably destroy the United Kingdom. Yet that’s exactly what Xi Jinping, China’s communist emperor, is telling the roughly 125 million members of the 55 ethnic and religious minorities who together comprise about 9% of the country’s (majority Han…
China’s AI ecosystem is not as open as it claims. Nor is any other country’s | Letters
Ambassador Zheng Zeguang rightly celebrates openly released AI models, and the Chinese labs behind Qwen, DeepSeek and Kimi have led the way – competition that benefits everyone, especially where models can run on modest hardware in the developing world (The future of AI hinges on openness and cooperation. China and Britain can gain much by working together, 30 July). But his claim that openness is a defining feature of China’s AI development deserves scrutiny. Take GeoGPT, the geoscience system from Zhejiang Lab showcased at last month’s World AI Conference as…