Category: Semafor

Reed’s view Amazon’s decision to scrap its AI leaderboard after tokenmaxxing rapidly drove up costs is the most recent case of sticker shock hitting companies trying to implement AI. Those rising costs have led to a growing chorus of people hawking Chinese open-sourced models like DeepSeek. But in a recent ...

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered his forces to expand their control of the Gaza Strip while the country’s military launched strikes on south Beirut. The twin offensives are targeting Hamas and Hezbollah respectively, though critics argue that the operations are motivated at least in part by domestic politics — ...

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum’s popularity plummeted to its lowest-ever level, as she struggled to contain the fallout from a US corruption indictment of a close ally. US prosecutors allege that Sinaloa Governor Rubén Rocha Moya, a member of Sheinbaum’s party, relied on the state’s eponymous cartel to help win an ...

Britain’s net migration has halved during Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s tenure, but Britons believe it is still rising. Immigration surged after the pandemic, peaking at almost 1.5 million a year in 2023. The subsequent collapse has not reached the public consciousness, perhaps because the numbers of asylum seekers on small ...

Britain’s universities are firing staff, cutting courses, and curtailing research over an intensifying financial shortfall. Prior changes to the country’s higher education system expanded access while reducing government support, increasing institutions’ reliance on fees — particularly from international students — to generate revenue. Successive governments have, however, sought to curb ...

Physicists put a single chunk of metal into two places at once, the largest object ever shown to obey quantum mechanics’ weirdest rule. At atomic scales, matter behaves like both wave and particle, meaning an electron, say, is not in one location but is smeared across space in a probabilistic ...

Japan is bolstering ties with the Philippines as regional tensions grow over Chinese military activity. The countries’ leaders formally elevated their relationship and agreed to start talks on a military intelligence sharing agreement. Manila could be the first major customer for Japanese weapons since Tokyo scrapped an exports ban in ...

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is set to join the advisory board of an elite Chinese university, which counts Tim Cook, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg among its 65 members, the Financial Times reported. The board at the Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management, which also includes the heads of ...

Cutesy toys are going gangbusters among Japanese adults. Some 1,400 capsule toy stores, which sell trinkets dispensed from coin-operated machines, now exist in Japan, with many taking over retail space deserted during the pandemic. The popularity of the toys, known as comes as Japan’s population rapidly ages — the number ...

Anthropic on Thursday announced a new funding round valuing it at $965 billion, surpassing rival OpenAI as the world’s most valuable AI startup. The financing caps off a busy several months for the Claude maker, which has rolled out new coding and finance tools aimed at helping businesses be more ...