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Haex – a wilder, weirder open-world adventure
The debut from Scandinavian outfit Dead Astronauts promises shooting, survival, and, in a shake-up to the genre, seeds that terraform its pristine world right before your eyes
The wilds of the sub-Arctic north: towering pine trees, flashes of psychedelic-yellow lichen, and a sun that never wholly sets during the summer months. This land is gorgeous, yes, but also unforgiving, yet in Haex (pronounced “hex”) you have an unusual tool at your disposal to make it a little more hospitable: a cube that fits snugly in the palm of your hand out of which grows a plant. You plant this so-called Seed in the earth and – voilà – the world around you transforms: new vegetation and topography but also narrative threads to follow, and, naturally, enemies. Wield these small-but-mighty kernels of change at your own peril.
“Your adventure and your world is player-shaped,” says Haex’s creative director Tobias Nyman. He explains that everyone starts a campaign with a unique, procedurally generated world. Each Seed then contains further procedural data that causes it to terraform before your eyes. “You change the world as you go,” he says. “It becomes even more unique.”
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Boss of startup hacked by rogue OpenAI agent urges ‘radical transparency’ in investigation
Artificial intelligence firm should provide $100m for cyber defences, says Hugging Face CEO
Business live – latest updates
The boss of the startup hacked by an OpenAI agent has called for the investigation into the incident to show “radical transparency”.
Clément Delangue, the chief executive of Hugging Face, said the “unprecedented” attack on his business required a similar response.
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AI can fuel biological weapons. We must harness its power for defense
The offensive potential is no longer theoretical. We need to develop systems to strengthen public health as quickly as AI is accelerating biological design
As artificial intelligence rapidly transforms the biological sciences, it is pushing the future of biology in two opposing directions. AI can help bad actors generate recipes for biological weapons with just a few keystrokes and computational prompts. At the same time, AI can track disease outbreaks and deliver critical public health information to millions of people in real time – potentially stopping a deadly outbreak in its tracks. What we are dealing with in this moment is profound: a race between offense and defense. Between the proliferation of dark biology, where deadly pathogens are engineered in secret, and the promise of a new era of collective global health.
Every infectious disease outbreak begins with a handful of cases. Public health wins by learning about an outbreak before it spreads wide, before hospitals fill and a crisis starts to spiral out of control. As transmission rates explode, options shrink. One of AI’s greatest values is its ability to compress the timeline between outbreak and detection. Speed can mean the difference between containing an outbreak and confronting an epidemic, or another global pandemic.
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Glitched into empty space: why video games are obsessed with the Backrooms
The horror movie sensation of 2026 has its roots in gaming’s discovery of ‘noclip’ – and the hidden virtual realms that could be opened up inside games. Developers explain how everyone got lost in these liminal spaces
It starts on 4chan, in a May 2019 thread entitled “unsettling images”. The first post was a photo showing an empty room with the now iconic yellow wallpaper, no natural lighting and a kind of inexplicable jutting half-wall. Shortly afterwards, another user (there are no usernames on 4chan, just identifying numbers) responded with 78 words of text that would essentially lay out the blueprint for a future $262m A24 movie sensation.
“If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms,” the post begins. For the uninitiated, “noclip” refers to a game mode in which collision with solid objects is disabled, allowing players to move freely through walls and floors. Think of Chiwetel Ejiofor’s character in the film, finding a permeable wall in the basement of his furniture store and passing through to the world on the other side.
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For a few seconds, AusAlert blared around parks, libraries and cinemas – but some didn’t get the alert at all
Federal government touts emergency warning alert test as a success and says no approach works 100% of the time
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A blaring emergency warning alert Australians had been warned about was anti-climactic for some – and totally missed by others.
Almost every phone in the country, alongside some smartwatches and tablets, was supposed to let off a loud noise at about 2pm AEST and receive a pop-up notification with the text “TEST MESSAGE” and “NO ACTION IS REQUIRED”.
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Honor Magic V6 review: sleek foldable phone lacking a bit of polish
Super-premium Android has top performance, long battery life and good cameras, but is let down by software
Honor’s svelte Android phone-tablet has been given a glow-up for its sixth version, offering a great alternative to Samsung for a fancy foldable with a red suede-like back framed in gold.
The Magic V6 continues the Chinese challenger brand’s strategy of taking a razor-thin device and slapping a giant circular lump on the back to fit in top-class cameras, something others often forgo. It costs a not inconsiderable £1,500 (€1,700/A$2,999) but only until August when the price jumps to a cool £2,000 (€2,300) – a solid £300 more than last year’s model as the cost of RAMageddon continues to bite, even at the very top end of the market.
Main screen: 7.95in (403ppi) 120Hz OLED flexible display
Cover screen: 6.52in (406ppi) 120Hz OLED
Processor: Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5
RAM: 16GB
Storage: 512GB
Operating system: MagicOS 10 (Android 16)
Camera: 50MP + 50MP ultrawide + 64MP 3x tele; 2x 20MP selfie
Connectivity: 5G, dual sim + esim, USB-C, wifi 7, NFC, Bluetooth 6, GNSS
Water resistance: IP68/69 (1.5 metres for 30 minutes)
Dimensions folded: 156.7 x 74.5 x 8.75-9mm
Dimensions unfolded: 156.7 x 145.6 x 4.0-4.1mm
Weight: 219-224g
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I risk losing my livelihood because Nissan failed to repair my car
I’m a self-employed driving instructor and I’m running out of cash to hire a replacement dual-control vehicle
My livelihood as a self-employed driving instructor is under threat owing to Nissan’s failure to repair my leased dual-control car.
It has been off the road awaiting a spare part for three months, and I’ve now been told it will take at least a further month to arrive.
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Misleading AI-generated doctors pose ‘huge danger to public safety’
Research shows AI accounts are gaining millions of views on TikTok by spreading dubious health advice
Misleading health claims online pose a “huge danger to public safety”, experts have warned, after research has shown that AI-generated doctors are gaining millions of views on TikTok by spreading dubious health advice.
The British Medical Association council deputy chair, Dr Emma Runswick, flagged the risks posed by AI accounts that “peddle medical myths and promote so-called miracle cures”.
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When the AI bubble bursts, what will Australia do with the tools it built? One man thinks he has the answer
Journalist and author Cory Doctorow is coming to Australia to spread his message – humans will take their jobs back
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When the AI bubble bursts, executives who enthusiastically replaced their staff with AI tools will learn that it takes a “really long time” to replace those lost skills, says Cory Doctorow, a science fiction author and journalist.
But those in creative fields should also be warned not to put all their faith in copyright as the best way to safeguard their work, Doctorow warns, just one week after the Australian prime minister, Anthony Albanese, promised to ramp up protection against AI companies who refuse to pay.
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Inside the growing vigilante movement to knock out Flock surveillance cameras
An underground network of privacy activists is disabling or destroying the ubiquitous surveillance devices sprouting up across the US
The first time that “NoMark” tried to knock out a Flock camera feed, he waited an hour for the perfect moment – pacing in and out of bushes that towered over him, a few feet behind a pole holding up the device.
“I was just so nervous,” he said.
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Corporate America may be using AI to cut jobs, but small businesses are using it to keep them
Reports of wide-scale replacement of workers by AI are overblown. Small businesses use it to help workers
I recently met the owner of a company that sells windows and doors. He told me he invested about $10,000 in an AI application that is used by his salespeople in his showroom. The application listens to the conversations between the salesperson and the prospective customer and then automatically creates a quote for the salesperson to review and send.
“It allows my salespeople to talk to more customers and spend less time doing paperwork,” he said. “And it cuts down on errors.”
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Why does everything feel so joyless? Welcome to the age of decadence without pleasure | Michèle Mendelssohn and Charlie Tyson
Decadence in our era comes in technologically mediated forms, emptied of desire and obsessed with self-optimisation
Do you want to have a good time? You know, really enjoy yourself? Click here, and tell us your desires. Maybe it’s a new outfit, or some exotic cuisine delivered anonymously and steaming hot to your door. Maybe it’s porn or gambling. Perhaps you prefer the infinite scroll, the endlessly unfurling ribbon of glossy images and videos starring people you’ll never meet doing things you’ll never do. Or maybe you favor talking to a chatbot who will assure you that you are the most special of all its users.
For anyone with an Internet connection and a little discretionary income, the contemporary moment offers a superabundance of seductive distractions. Why then the pervasive mood of emptiness? Why are so many at once overstimulated and bored?
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Mega datacentre planned for outer Melbourne will be six times bigger than a large shopping centre
More than 3,600 people sign petition for careful assessment of proposed AI hub, now a flashpoint for national debate on datacentre boom
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For some residents it started with a letter in the mailbox. It was a “friendly introduction from the team behind the Victorian AI hub”.
“I am knocking on doors to explain what we have in mind and, most importantly, to listen,” the letter from Syncline Energy stated.
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What links Horrible Histories and Gordon Brown’s neighbour? The bumper summer quiz
From award-winning Julies to golfers who were nearly the best, test your knowledge with this bumper summer quiz
1 What is now the world’s most populous city, according to the UN?
2 Which two Julies won best actress Oscars in consecutive years?
3 What was thrown by the goddess Eris at the wedding of Peleus and Thetis?
4 Richard Nixon appeared a record 55 times on the cover of what?
5 What became Britain’s tallest structure in 1894?
6 Mojang Studios in Sweden is renowned for developing which video game?
7 Which golfer spent 270 weeks as world No 2, but never reached No 1?
8 Which “The” group, named after a Camus novel, went through over 65 members?
9 Who is the subject of Alberto Korda’s photograph Guerrillero Heroico?
10 What defines an Olimpico goal in football?
11 Who initiated the Fridays for Future school strikes?
12 Which British dynasty is commemorated by a monument in St Peter’s Basilica?
13 What type of souvenir was invented in Vienna in 1900?
14 Which Norwegian island gives its name to two shipping forecast areas?
15 Which art museum employs a colony of cats to protect it from rodents?
16 Millvina Dean, who died in 2009, was the last living survivor of what?
What links:
17 Arrival of spring; double portraits; swimming pools; Grand Canyon; Yorkshire landscape?
18 Mozart & Franz Süssmayr; Landseer & Millais; F Scott Fitzgerald & Edmund Wilson?
19 Cordelia, Goneril & Regan; Imogen; Marina?
20 Britannia (1717-1936); Golden Hind (1937-69); St Edward’s Crown (1971-84)?
21 Alba white truffles; Pule cheese; Wagyu beef; Yubari King melons?
22 Matt Damon; Robert Frost; Bill Gates; Bonnie Raitt; Mark Zuckerberg?
23 Horrible Histories; glucose; Gordon Brown’s neighbour; King-Smith’s swine; winter squash?
24 Mount Whitney in California and Mulhacén in Andalucía?
25 1991 defence of Baghdad; nacre; UK parliament; Virginia?
26 Carrying a double bass; missing a bus; walking two dogs; wearing a cowboy hat; winding a clock?
27 2 (1st); 29 (10th); 541 (100th); 7,919 (1,000th); 104,729 (10,000th)?
28 Ant; bull; cuckoo; eagle; shower of gold; swan?
29 Zlín, Czechoslovakia; Cohutta, US; Novo Mesto, Yugoslavia?
30 Drowned; large bread; pick me up; half cold?
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The AI jobs apocalypse probably isn’t coming anytime soon
Artificial intelligence may not deliver on its promise of vast economic opportunity at a price that humanity is willing to pay
In March, Anthropic, the cutting-edge artificial intelligence business that gave us the chatbot Claude, published an analysis on the impact of AI on employment, to help us assess the claim that intelligent robots were about to redefine human existence, ending demand for human labor.
Last year in May, Anthropic’s co-founder, Dario Amodei, claimed AI could wipe out half of all entry-level jobs in one to five years. Last January, he told us AI would probably become a “general labor substitute for humans”. In June he said we risk “a world where the economic trade-off dial is stuck on the hypergrowth, hyper-inequality setting”.
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‘I thought, I’ve tried everything else, why not give AI a shot?’: the long-lost family reunited by ChatGPT
Avtar spent decades wondering what happened to the mother he never got to know. Thousands of miles away, Nicci was haunted by the story of a half-brother given away before she was born. How did a chatbot bring them together?
As a small boy growing up in Amritsar, India, in the 1960s, Avtar Singh used to hear whispers. Your mum isn’t really your mum, the rumours would say. Your mum lives abroad. Avtar didn’t really pay any attention to it. “I thought, the neighbours are just making up stories.” But the stories were true: the woman raising Avtar was actually his grandmother. When he was too young to remember it, his father had emigrated to Canada to work as a teacher, leaving Avtar in the care of his paternal grandparents. His grandfather, a police officer, was a fearsome authoritarian, but his grandmother brought him up with tenderness, as if he were her own son. She called him by his nickname, Titu. He felt loved.
When Avtar was around eight years old, he was told about his family in Canada: his dad, his mum and a little brother were waiting for him there, and he would soon travel to join them. Just after his ninth birthday, Avtar found himself sitting on a plane, dressed in a three‑piece suit and tie. He was travelling alone. He had never flown before. He didn’t speak a word of English. He landed in Halifax, Nova Scotia, on Christmas Eve, 1968; his family met him at the airport and took him home. “I didn’t know what to think,” Avtar, now 66, tells me in a video call from his home in Abbotsford, British Columbia. “Before I knew it, it was the first week of January, and I was put in school.”
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The UK’s first TikTok PM? Andy Burnham channels Zohran Mamdani as he hits social media
From Mo Farah to Bus Aunty, new prime minister makes good on promise to ‘do things differently’ when it comes to communication
They say a week is a long time in politics, but handily for followers of Andy Burnham on social media, you can get daily updates of what the new PM has been up to on his timeline.
Before Burnham stepped inside No 10 this week he promised to “do things differently” in British politics. If his feed is anything to go by, he’s already way ahead of his predecessor.
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I’ve been gaming for 40 years. Here are the best chairs in the UK for comfort, support and serious play
Whether you’re on PC or a console, level up your setup with our gaming expert’s pick of the best chairs
• The best games of 2026 so far
Comfort is crucial to the gaming experience. It’s hard to focus on blasting aliens or taking Stoke to the Champions League final if your bum has gone to sleep because you’ve been sitting on an old chair for three hours. We’re spending more time playing games than ever before, so good posture matters. If you have set up a dedicated gaming space, then a rickety seat just won’t cut it.
From luxurious ergonomic thrones to cheap-and-cheerful bucket seats, the options available are bewildering. So I set out on an epic quest: to find the most comfortable, durable and stylish gaming chairs. Here’s what I discovered.
Best gaming chair overall:
Secretlab Titan Evo
Best budget gaming chair:
ThunderX3 Solo 360
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‘An anthem for the co-dependent’: Bad Magpie’s corvid carnage with a side of existential angst
Going by the mantra, if you want to make someone laugh, make them cry first, the game’s developers have created a lonely magpie who fills the void by wreaking havoc
Amid the gleeful anarchy of Bad Magpie’s debut trailer, there’s a striking note of melancholy. The game’s protagonist – a wounded corvid that creates havoc wherever she goes – calls out forlornly as a flock of her kind passes above, with a conspicuous gap in their formation.
Milktooth games designer and co-founder Daisy Fernandez has had this particular image in her head for years. Lying in the grass one afternoon during the 2020 lockdowns, she looked up and saw a V-shaped pattern in the sky, poignantly incomplete. “It really stuck with me,” she says. “I posted about it online and someone told me about a ‘missing man’ formation, which is an aerial salute to a fallen pilot.”
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Should you use AI for a task? Here’s a simple way to decide
Sometimes, what matters isn’t your output but what you put into the process. Think of it like work v the gym
I teach public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Munk School at the University of Toronto. And it will come as no surprise to you that my students regularly use AI to complete their writing assignments. Doing so is a waste of their tuition money. But if their entire career is going to include AI writing assistants, why shouldn’t they embrace their future?
The best way I’ve found to explain the dilemma comes from the AI researcher Daniel Meissler: it’s the difference between work and the gym.
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Trump says nearly 200 firms have signed pledge to protect Americans from costs arising from datacenters
‘Ratepayer Protection Pledge’ president has touted is non-binding as people continue to struggle with rising bills
Donald Trump has announced that about 200 entities have signed on to his non-binding “Ratepayer Protection Pledge”, expanding a voluntary commitment which claims to ensure US consumers will not bear the cost of the AI datacenter build-out.
Trump delivered remarks on Thursday at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) headquarters, alongside Lee Zeldin, the agency’s administrator, and Chris Wright, the energy secretary. Other attenders included governors who signed on to the pledge, including Brian Kemp of Georgia, Mike DeWine of Ohio, Spencer Cox of Utah and Jeff Landry of Louisiana.
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‘Customers prefer AI chatbots,’ says British Gas owner as 1,300 call centre jobs axed
CEO Chris O’Shea defends Centrica’s plans as it reports rise in retail profits following focus on bigger margins
The owner of British Gas has claimed that most households would rather speak with an AI chatbot than deal with the company’s staff as it prepares to cut 1,300 jobs from its call centres.
Centrica, the supplier’s FTSE 100 owner, plans to cut 800 jobs as the company carries out a “targeted deployment of AI tools”, on top of the 500 cuts it confirmed last month.
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Space datacenters proposed by Musk and Bezos ‘catastrophic’ for planet, experts warn
New US petition demands review of plans from tech companies amid fears of environmental destruction
Space datacenters proposed by SpaceX, Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin and others would release staggering levels of pollution that would probably alter the Earth’s atmosphere and be “catastrophic” for the planet, space industry experts and environmental groups warn in a new petition demanding a review of their impacts.
Tech companies have collectively proposed millions of “orbital datacenters” and are pressing forward with plans, which require Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approval. Among other issues, pollution from satellites and rockets burning up upon re-entry appears to be accumulating in the stratosphere at alarming levels. The spacecraft release black soot, rare metals, aluminum oxides and other pollutants with unknown effects.
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Elon Musk says he got ‘carried away’ with Trump
In interview, billionaire says instead of running ‘Doge’ he should’ve ‘worked on my companies’ and shares extreme predictions
Elon Musk has admitted he became too consumed by politics during his volatile alliance with Donald Trump and his brief appointment as the president’s financial axman, running the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge).
The world’s richest person, and briefly its first trillionaire after his SpaceX company floated on the New York stock exchange in June, made the confession in a wide-ranging interview with the Economist published on Thursday. He shared his positions on subjects from foreign wars to AI, and made a number of eye-opening predictions for the future.
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The roaring 20s: how the current decade revolutionised cinema
Pre-Covid, the movie landscape was dramatically different: YouTubers weren’t dominating the box office, video game spin-offs rarely made an impact and Winnie-the-Pooh wasn’t yet the star of a slasher movie. Why such a flurry of innovation – and what will be next?
Cinema has always been a medium of research and development. At any given point, the industry is searching for yet another breakthrough that can drive it into the future. Synchronised sound in the 1920s. Technicolor in the 1930s. The invention of the modern blockbuster in the 1970s.
Conversely, the consensus is that, if the 2020s has a defining trend, then it is one of decline. The theatrical experience is under attack from all angles: streaming, YouTube, a once-in-a-century health crisis that shut cinemas down entirely. And yet, if you look closer, this has actually been one of the most innovative decades that cinema has ever seen. Whether down to technology or desperation, the film industry has spent these last few years figuring out new ways to make films that simply could not have existed even at the turn of the decade.
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There Are No Ghosts at the Grand – stripping back the physical and metaphorical layers of a haunted hotel
Renovate rooms, investigate the supernatural and watch people burst into song in this surreal British ghost story
A young American man arrives in a dilapidated British seaside town to take on the renovations of an equally run-down hotel, inherited from a mysteriously absent father he never knew. His power tools talk to him in a Scottish accent, the local people speak in baffling slang, and occasionally people burst into song. Oh, and there are ghosts.
There Are No Ghosts at the Grand is a novel mix of genres – no bad thing in these times of sequels and remakes – but, according to the creative director of independent developers Friday Sundae, Anil Glendinning, it grew organically from a single goal: to tell a very British ghost story.
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EU fines Google €890m for competition breaches over search and apps
Firm told to treat third-party services that appear in its results in ‘fair and non-discriminatory manner’
Google has been fined a total of €890m (£760m) by the EU for breaches of online competition laws by its search and app store services.
The European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, said Google had broken the Digital Markets Act by giving priority to its own services, such as shopping and hotel deals, in search results over those of its rivals.
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Google reports 12th consecutive quarter of strong revenue gains
Better-than-expected results come despite delays in release of powerful AI model Gemini Pro
Google’s parent company, Alphabet, reported double-digit revenue growth for its second-quarter earnings on Wednesday. This is the tech giant’s 12th consecutive quarter of massive revenue gains.
The better-than-expected results come as investors evaluate how Alphabet’s huge spending on AI has affected its bottom line and what its long-term plans are to sustain those enormous investments. The company revised its yearly capital expenditure forecast to $200bn, with quarterly spending growing 100% year over year.
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Tesla’s profits slide despite growing revenue as it pivots to robotics and AI
Shares in Elon Musk company fall more 3% in after-hours trading, as earnings per share miss Wall Street expectations
Tesla reported its second-quarter earnings on Wednesday, disclosing far lower profits than expected. The company’s already beleaguered stock, which had fallen about 14% this year to date, dipped further following the earnings report.
Elon Musk’s automaker, once the pinnacle of his tech empire, has taken a back seat to SpaceX. Musk’s rocket and AI company held the largest stock market debut in history last month, turning the richest man on Earth into the world’s first trillionaire, though his net worth has since fallen from its peak.
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US teen drops Meta lawsuit on social media addiction days before trial
Withdrawn case marks a victory for the social media giant after earlier landmark loss at trial over addictive claims
A Florida teen whose lawsuit claimed Meta’s platforms were to blame for his depression and anxiety dropped his case against the company just days before the trial in Los Angeles was set to start, his attorneys said on Wednesday. It was the latest in a massive series of high-stakes lawsuits against social media companies for allegedly designing addictive products that lead to the harm of children.
The lawsuit, brought by a 15-year-old boy known as RKC, originally named four defendants, Google’s YouTube, Meta’s Instagram, Snap Inc’s Snapchat and ByteDance’s TikTok. YouTube and TikTok settled in June and Snap reached a tentative settlement in the case, Bloomberg reported on Monday. The terms of those settlements were confidential.
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Personal and banking details among customer data stolen in Origin Energy hack
Hackers access Australian customers’ names, addresses, dates of birth, phone numbers and some bank account details, company says
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Origin Energy customers’ addresses, phone numbers and partial bank account data have been accessed in a hack, the company has confirmed.
The firm has 4.8m customer accounts in Australia, providing electricity, fossil gas, LPG and internet services to homes and businesses.
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How Pokémon Go encouraged me to find wonder in the world
These days, I ‘collect’ birdsong and wild flowers, but it all started when my sons and I first set out to find Pikachu and pals
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Believe it or not, Pokémon Go is 10 years old this month. The wildly successful smartphone game, which allows you to track down lovable creatures in the real world using GPS and augmented-reality technologies, has reportedly been downloaded 800m times across 150 countries and regions. A trillion Pokémon have been caught so far – and I have been responsible for a modest percentage of that figure.
When the game was first released, my sons and I spent many happy hours wandering the streets and parks of Frome searching for Jigglypuffs and Charizards, and the game’s social element, which lets you take on gym battles with other players in your vicinity, offered my autistic son a route to communicate with other children in a way he’d never been able to before.
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Why are OpenAI and Anthropic cheering on regulation in Australia? The answer has global reach
The companies hope to follow in the footsteps of SpaceX, which raised $86bn and soared to a $2.1tn valuation after it listed on public markets in June
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Top US AI developers Anthropic and OpenAI cheered when Australia announced it would set new AI rules.
Big tech celebrating limits on their Silicon Valley VC-funded free-for-all might seem counterintuitive but there’s a much broader play than just what happens in one relatively small market.
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Red Kiss – guiding vampires through a blood-soaked cold war Berlin
Inspired by interactive theatre and fuelled by the motion capture tech used by VTubers, the vampire spies in Red Kiss have personality in spades
‘You look at the news and you’re like, ‘Another pointless war, another pointless bloodshed, another pointless genocide.’ And that can make you a bit hopeless.”
Roy van der Schilden, narrative designer and business director at Wispfire, speaks of a very human feeling. But the protagonist of its upcoming game Red Kiss can relate – despite being a vampire.
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Trump administration says 15 agencies will get $5bn in ‘AI for science’ effort
Administration will also overhaul how US government funds federal research by supporting individual scientists and AI over universities
The US will spend $5bn to tackle longstanding scientific problems across multiple fields using AI, the Trump administration said in a statement on Wednesday. The agencies will use the funding to identify the root causes of chronic diseases, accelerate drug discovery and develop longer-lasting building materials, among other tasks, according to the statement.
Scientists will have access to the Department of Energy’s supercomputers, AI and specialized datasets, along with other components needed to run experiments using algorithms, said Michael Kratsios, chief technology adviser to Donald Trump, in an interview with Reuters.
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Harry Potter publisher to receive millions in Anthropic copyright settlement
Bloomsbury has 14,087 titles listed within settlement between AI startup and authors over use of protected work
The publisher of Harry Potter has received a multimillion-pound payout as a beneficiary of a $1.5bn (£1.12bn) copyright settlement between the AI startup Anthropic and thousands of authors over the use of their protected work to power chatbots.
Bloomsbury, which is home to the bestselling novelists Sarah J Maas and Susanna Clarke as well as JK Rowling, said it had 14,087 titles listed within the settlement, with a proposed compensation of about $3,000 per title.
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Elon Musk says Grok Imagine will make ‘historically accurate’ AI adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey
The billionaire says the AI-generated film will stay true to Homer’s original, after repeatedly criticising Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster over its casting choices
Elon Musk has said his AI platform Grok Imagine will make a “historically accurate” adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey, after the success of Christopher Nolan’s blockbusting treatment which the SpaceX founder has regularly criticised over its casting.
In a post on X, Musk said: “Before this year ends, Grok Imagine will make a full-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer.” Musk also linked to a post containing a three-minute clip of footage that the user said had been generated from Grok Imagine, showing a scene between Odysseus and the nymph Calypso.
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Social Darwinists to tech bros: tracing the long fight against equality in US
Historian Kim Phillips-Fein’s book Country of Lords looks back at the many men who have tried to fight against egalitarianism, from John Adams to Peter Thiel
The historian Kim Phillips-Fein’s new book is published amid celebrations of the 250th anniversary of the declaration of independence and its truth “self-evident, that all men are created equal”. Country of Lords, however, is a history of Neo-Aristocrats, Social Darwinists, Tech Utopians, and the Long Fight Against Equality in America.
Concise and hard-hitting, the book arrives at a time of glaring social and economic inequality, Phillips-Fein seeing Elon Musk “emerging as a trillionaire very much on people’s minds, with a deep level of discomfort, both fear and anger about what this portends”.
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AI agent went rogue and hacked startup by itself, OpenAI reveals
Firm behind ChatGPT reveals agent powered by its models chose to attack Hugging Face database by itself
OpenAI has revealed an autonomous AI agent powered by its technology went rogue during a test, accessed the open web and hacked a prominent startup by itself in an “unprecedented incident”.
The company behind ChatGPT said the startup Hugging Face had detected and contained the agent – an AI tool designed to carry out tasks without human assistance – which had entered its systems.
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‘We were at their mercy’: inside the Amazon tactics that hiked prices across the internet
Internal emails revealed in court and interviews with ex-employees describe how Amazon’s practices drove up prices for competitors like Walmart and Target. Amazon denies price-fixing claims and says it works to lower costs for consumers
A “modern leather” table lamp, listed online at Walmart, shot up from $24.99 to $39.
The price of an air fryer on a retail site called Newegg went from $84.99 to $149.99.
An electric ice-cream maker was listed at just $17.99 at Amazon and Best Buy. Then it became unavailable at Best Buy, and more than tripled in price to $59.99 at Amazon.
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