Category: Semafor

Alexis’s view Ghana’s president gave a rare insight this week into what it is like to lead an African government hit by the shuttering of Washington’s international aid agency. Accra factored an average of $154 million a year from USAID into government budgets, of which nearly half went into “critical ...

The US labor market is on a hot streak. A strong May jobs report boosted market expectations that the Federal Reserve will have to raise interest rates this fall — putting President Donald Trump in a tough spot heading into the midterm elections. US employers added 172,000 jobs last month ...

The News Lakie Derrick was about to graduate from East Tennessee State University three years ago when she saw an intriguing piece of news from Italy. Giorgia Meloni, the country’s conservative prime minister, had attended a “Family Day” celebration of traditional values. Some news outlets, bungling the translation of the ...

Echoing throughout New York Tech Week this year were conversations from business leaders about AI’s ROI, as companies begin cutting back on token spending. CEOs are trying to prove to their boards that the cost is worthwhile during a time of “massive over-investment” industry-wide, IBM Vice Chairman Gary Cohn said ...

Voice capabilities are the future of AI, but customer service is still proving a difficult test case. That’s not because the voices don’t work, but because the broader experience often doesn’t. I went to an ElevenLabs pop-up in New York, where a robot powered by the company’s voice models took ...

The News Two telecom tower companies are committing more than $200 million to DR Congo, betting that rising data use and growing demand from the mining sector will transform one of Africa’s largest underdeveloped telecom markets. The investment comes as African internet data consumption is projected to quadruple over the ...

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy proposed face-to-face talks with Russian leader Vladimir Putin in a combative letter that comes as Kyiv strikes ever deeper into enemy territory and Moscow’s offensive stalls. Zelenskyy said the starting point for any negotiations would be “the front line today,” rejecting a prior proposal that would ...

Chinese leader Xi Jinping will visit North Korea next week, aiming to court the pariah state’s dictator Kim Jong-un, who has been strengthening ties with Moscow while tightening his own grip on power. In the seven years since Xi’s last trip, Pyongyang has sent troops and weapons to Russia for ...

Anthropic called for a slowdown in global AI development, saying that its models were increasingly capable of autonomously designing and developing their own successors. Claude now writes 80% of Anthropic’s code, the firm said, and proposes research directions and solves open-ended problems. AI safety thinkers have long warned of “recursive ...

Senate Republicans passed their $70 billion funding bill for Trump’s immigration enforcement agencies shortly before the sun rose on Friday, with Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski the lone Republican in opposition. The 52-47 vote sent the bill to the House for consideration and ended a long, convoluted saga in the Senate ...