Category: Semafor

AI power users are increasingly controlling their agents via voice commands, but there’s still a lot of work to be done to get computers to understand us. Voice is our most natural form of daily communication, and the transition from keyboards and mice to conversation is profound. But it’s not ...

A person fired 13 shots at the home of an Indianapolis city councillor days after he advocated for data center construction at a local meeting. The council member was unharmed but the shooter left a chilling note in a Ziploc bag on his doorstep: “No Data Centers.” While police say ...

A respected AI research foundation released a new benchmarking test which, it said, will warn when true artificial general intelligence arrives. Frontier AIs pass existing benchmarks easily — but they test knowledge more than reasoning, a comparatively easy task for AIs trained on vast amounts of text, according to researcher ...

Reed’s view OpenAI is chaotic, even by Silicon Valley startup standards, so the palace intrigue chronicled by The New Yorkers’ 10,000-word opus is table stakes. What really matters though, as we approach one of the world’s largest IPOs, is how OpenAI is performing. Slowing revenue growth, which The Information first ...

Britain’s Royal Navy confirmed that it would deploy new anti-drone laser weapons on its ships from next year. The DragonFire system can target 400 mph drones and, while the weapon itself costs around $200 million, each shot is only $13, compared to hundreds of thousands of dollars for a high-tech ...

Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s purging of a third Politburo member points to the failure of his long-running anti-corruption program, as well as that of the Communist Party’s promotions system, analysts said. Authorities said this week that Ma Xingrui was being probed for graft, confirming experts’ suspicion that he was in ...

Cuba introduced two new banknotes in a bid to simplify transactions amid runaway inflation. Cubans have long been accustomed to shopping with wads of cash stuffed into bags after compounding bouts of soaring inflation. But a tightened US embargo — including restrictions on oil imports, which generate the vast majority ...

Democracy is strengthening worldwide, according to a leading index, but the improvement is far from universal. Nearly 75% of countries held firm or saw measures of democracy improve, according to the research firm EIU. The most marked growth has been in Latin America and the Caribbean, while current trends bode ...

The News UAE trucking company TruKKer was enabling the movement of more than 1,200 loads a day for petrochemical producers, steel manufacturers, and consumer goods companies when Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz at the start of the war. Since then, it has seen volumes surge by 30%, CEO Gaurav ...

The Scoop OpenAI is expanding its bitter legal dispute with Elon Musk to sweep in Hollywood mogul Ari Emanuel and his talent agency WME. OpenAI’s lawyers have instructed the firm to preserve communications about the ChatGPT-maker and explain the work it has done for Musk and his lawyers, according to ...