Category: Semafor

Andy Burnham becomes the UK’s new prime minister on Monday, and fixing Britain’s economy will be at the top of his agenda. Sluggish growth, high public debt, and elevated government borrowing costs are among his challenges. In his first speech as Labour Party leader on Friday, Burnham declared: “I have ...

Spain defeated Argentina to win the FIFA men’s World Cup on Sunday, capping a tournament that was broadly seen as a success for the North American host nations. Fans showed up despite fears that high ticket prices would keep them away and concerns that the US’ immigration crackdown would deter ...

China’s Jingye Steel is seeking compensation from the British government over the nationalization of its former steel production complex in England, further straining relations between London and Beijing. The UK government brought British Steel under the state’s control last year and took full ownership last week, citing national security considerations ...

A global AI memory shortage threatens to morph into a geopolitical fight as more countries campaign to shore up their own supply, a South Korean tech executive said. Prices for memory chips have skyrocketed in recent months as supply has failed to keep up with demand stemming from the AI ...

Two major global conflicts — in Iran and Ukraine — are both entering stages of serious escalation. In the Middle East, the deterioration of the US-Iran ceasefire has reignited fears of a prolonged regional war; the American defense secretary said the Iranian attack that killed two US soldiers in Jordan ...

The US pounded Iran with fresh strikes after two American soldiers were killed in an attack on an air base in Jordan on Friday, pushing the two sides closer to all-out war. The casualties, which bring the American military death toll from the conflict to 16, were the first since ...

Reed’s view Over the last decade, experts in artificial intelligence learned a “bitter lesson”: Their own knowledge was getting in the way of progress. “The actual contents of minds are tremendously, irredeemably complex,” computer scientist Richard Sutton wrote in 2019. The most successful AI breakthroughs involved humans getting out of ...

The AI world is going nuts over the Kimi K3 AI model, the latest open-weight offering from Chinese startup Moonshot. While the new model is a big deal, the concern is somewhat misguided. For instance, Nvidia’s stock (and American markets broadly) took a hit over fears that China is closing ...

Frontier AI labs don’t want to be known for helping teens commit harm against themselves or others. “The principle here is to avoid the mistakes that were made before us,” Lauren Jonas, OpenAI’s head of youth well-being, told Semafor. “AI is not social media,” she said, arguing that teens primarily ...

AI agents have made inroads in businesses and government. Now they’re hitting the pageant stage. Samantha Smitte, 37, who worked at IBM for a decade, spent about $150 on AI agents to train for the Miss New York USA pageant next week, she told Semafor. They run practice interviews with ...