Category: Semafor

Russia’s Vladimir Putin suggested Thursday that a settlement to end the war was possible, while Ukraine predicted a “new dynamic” in peace efforts, marking a notable shift in rhetoric that could open a window for diplomatic progress. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he expected US envoys to hold talks in ...

China plans to spend at least $1 trillion in the next five years to become a “sports powerhouse,” officials announced Thursday, as Beijing bets that more outdoor sporting events can stimulate sluggish domestic consumption. Along with widespread renovation of sporting facilities, the push aims to root out the corruption and ...

OpenAI began a phased release of its newest model Thursday, which the company said surpasses Anthropic’s most advanced models and meaningfully approximates “artificial general intelligence.” GPT-6 Astra is the startup’s first to cross the “critical” cybersecurity capability threshold, OpenAI said, and will be initially limited to businesses to allow them ...

Nvidia has agreed to buy AI firm Hugging Face for $12.9 billion in a move that expands the chipmaker’s capabilities beyond hardware and up the AI stack. Hugging Face — the AI company at the center of a hacking incident earlier this year that raised cybersecurity concerns — has exploded ...

by Colm Tóibín. Deep in the Pyrenees mountains, a young man, Miquel, struggles in the wake of his mother’s death in a snowstorm — a tragic event that was at the center of Tóibín’s 2006 novella, . One year after her passing, Miquel wrestles with grief, desire, and the weight ...

US economic data may still be humming along, but consumer companies like Nespresso say they’ve had to try harder to convince shoppers to pony up hundreds of dollars for coffee makers. “We really know about our consumers that they’re facing pressure and impact on their wallets as gas prices rise,” ...

Google has once again avoided being broken up, despite a formal finding that it has operated an illegal monopoly. A federal judge agreed with prosecutors that Google had rigged the way its customers buy online ads but stopped short of forcing the company to sell the business. It followed a ...

Liz’s view The NBA just showed corporate wrist-slappers how it’s done. The SEC, CFTC, OSHA, EPA, etc. should take some notes. The penalty handed to the Los Angeles Clippers is the best I’ve seen as a reporter covering companies that sometimes behave badly. The Clippers will forfeit their next five ...

Tech firms are scrambling to reduce the threat of AI-driven bioterrorism, the Financial Times reported. AI models are increasingly powerful bioscience tools, already speeding up drug discovery. But as with cybersecurity, those capabilities are dual-use: Information used to make a vaccine can also “create a bioweapon,” one Google DeepMind researcher ...

Wael’s view Saudi Arabia’s deepest crude discount since the pandemic points to deeper divisions within the world’s most important oil group, and potentially to Riyadh’s mounting anxiety about losing market share. Saudi Aramco has priced its flagship Arab Light crude for Asian buyers at its widest discount since June 2020: ...