Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m your host, Blake Montgomery, US tech editor at the Guardian, writing to you while reading and disagreeing with Jenny Odell’s 2019 book How to Do Nothing. I’m pro-screen time. Today in tech, we’re discussing the upcoming meeting between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping, in which AI will likely feature prominently. Trump, Xi, AI Last week, the world freaked out about an AI apocalypse. Now the two most powerful men, running the countries with the two most advanced AI industries, are going to discuss that…
Tag: Computing
Why China is pushing back on US warnings over rapid AI development
About two years ago, education entrepreneur Boris But had what he calls a “penny-drop moment” – that, like countless others in China, his company needed to embrace AI before it was made obsolete by it. His clients, well-off parents looking to send their children to study overseas, had begun arriving in his office reeling off information and opinions gleaned not from rival firms, but from chatbots. In response, he started developing his own AI study tool, concluding: “If you can’t beat them, join them.” The pace and quality of AI…
AI models chatting in ‘surreal’ dialect mixing poetic language and tech bro jargon
AI models have begun communicating in a strange new version of English that reads like a cross between James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and tech bro jargon, new research has found. Autonomous AI agents are rapidly creating novel dialects allowing them to converse in an often barely comprehensible language, which risks making it harder for humans to monitor their behaviour. Researchers at Emergence, a frontier AI lab in New York, found that within days of being asked to cooperate in experimental “societies”, the models from several of the world’s largest AI…
Europe must build own AI or risk getting cut off by US or China, says ECB’s Lagarde
Europe must develop its own AI technology and build more datacentres in order to nullify the threat of being cut off by the US or China, according to the president of the European Central Bank. Christine Lagarde said the continent needed AI models – the technology that powers AI tools such as chatbots – that were “good enough” to carry out most tasks and run from domestic datacentres. If Europe invests in its own AI tech, said Lagarde, “the threat of being cut off loses its force”. AI is being…
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…
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…
Democracy is at stake when foolish humans bet on machines being intelligent | Rafael Behr
When I am woken by the sound of my dog whining, I understand that she is hungry and wants me to get up. When my alarm clock goes off, I don’t consider its needs. It is following an instruction to rouse me at a certain time but it doesn’t care if I stay in bed. It doesn’t try to get me up by other means. The dog, on the other hand, will go to plan B. She barks. This capacity for autonomous action was once a difference between animals and…
Could AI take your job? Some workers in China already know the answer
On the tree-lined streets of Wuhan, where cars jostle for space with mopeds and cargo trucks, the malfunctioning of a new type of vehicle has recently been causing chaos on the city’s roads. In March, several cars from a fleet of driverless taxis stopped abruptly in the streets. The “system malfunction” left distressed riders stranded for hours. The robotaxis, known as Apollo Go and powered by artificial intelligence (AI), were taken off Wuhan’s streets for months for investigations. But the outage was a boon for 45-year-old taxi driver Yao Xinnong.…