Category: Semafor

Europe’s AI buildout is orders of magnitude too small, and if it does not step up it will be left as an economic backwater, a group of AI policy thinkers warned. Europe hosts just 5% of global AI compute, compared to the US’ 80%, the group said. The EU’s flagship ...

Chinese regulators accused leading e-commerce platforms of misleading marketing tactics ahead of 618, the country’s second-largest annual shopping bonanza. The scolding dented shares of Alibaba and JD.com and came weeks after regulators told the companies to avoid an aggressive price war that has squeezed profits and set the government back ...

China is a growing hub for medical tourism, offering cutting-edge procedures cheaper than Western patients can access at home. An infusion of CAR-T cancer immunotherapy costs up to $475,000 in the US; in China, as little as $150,000. China has set up a special international medical tourism zone in Hainan, ...

The globalization of professional soccer has turned players into polyglots, even as global entertainment is increasingly siloed. As soccer professionalized, clubs realized that verbal communication was an “essential working tool,” the Financial Times wrote: “Some multinational businesses could learn from the linguistic sophistication of football teams.” De facto polyglots, Belgians ...

Private credit giant Blue Owl Capital is opening a regional headquarters — somewhat of a loaded term in the Gulf — in Abu Dhabi, an indicator that Wall Street firms are still betting on the UAE capital despite uncertainty over the Iran war. The firm, which manages $315 billion in ...

The News Jeff Bezos is ready to open up about Prometheus, the secretive AI startup he’s leading with former Google X executive Vik Bajaj. In his first CEO role since handing over the reins of Amazon in 2021, the tech billionaire said in an interview that he had raised $12 ...

China’s main way of serving overseas markets is, by a wide margin, exports, but rising trade barriers may leave the country with little choice but to expand its investments in foreign countries’ clean tech manufacturing capacity. Since 2014, China has announced $173 billion of FDI in clean technology sectors, but ...

This year’s World Cup is already historic for being the biggest in the competition’s history, stretching across Mexico, the US, and Canada — but it could also become the hottest and most polluting tournament ever. Heat is a central concern, measured not just by air temperature but by the wet-bulb ...

, by Nick Greene. Tracing the sport’s growth from the “folk football” of medieval England — in which players kicked around sheeps’ bladders and human heads — to the 19th-century private schools that popularized the modern game, Greene writes that soccer is “less an invention than some side effect of ...

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for worker protection against AI-driven job losses and a new US regulatory body to oversee frontier AI research. Amodei said AI could soon threaten public safety, such as by producing biological or autonomous weapons that “in extreme cases could even threaten humanity itself,” and could ...