Category: Semafor

The Venice Biennale, the world’s most prestigious international art exhibition, is engulfed in controversy this year. The inclusion of Russia, which is participating for the first time since the 2022 Ukraine invasion, has set off protests, while the Biennale’s international jury resigned following backlash over its decision to not award ...

Russian President Vladimir Putin said he believes the Ukraine war is “coming to an end,” hours after vowing victory over Kyiv at a pared-down Victory Day parade devoid of its usual military hardware display. The Kremlin’s spokesperson tempered Putin’s remarks, saying “reaching a peace agreement is a very long road ...

The US and China are both heading into a landmark summit in Beijing this week with fundamental misunderstandings of the other, analysts said. Beijing is gripped by a “dangerous new overconfidence” stemming from an entrenched belief in American decline, one expert wrote, as Western scholarly frameworks have been purged from ...

China’s exports rebounded in April as overseas buyers rushed to stockpile goods in the second month of the Iran war. The data also showed Beijing’s trade surplus widened, just ahead of US President Donald Trump’s visit to China later this week. Trump has taken issue with the surplus. The leaders ...

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Sunday pledged to hang on after his party suffered the worst local election losses for a governing faction in decades. The results of last week’s races, largely seen as a referendum on Starmer, triggered calls for his resignation; he is planning a “reset” speech ...

The US economy added 115,000 jobs in April, blowing past expectations despite the economic fallout from the US-Israel war with Iran. Data published Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics also showed the unemployment rate holding steady at 4.3%. The figures come even as the war has upended oil and ...

The News Democrats’ jubilation over the prospect of claiming four new Virginia House seats evaporated on Friday, cementing a new GOP advantage in the mid-decade congressional redistricting war. In a 4-3 decision, the Virginia Supreme Court tossed the state’s Democratic-led remapping that voters approved late last month after House Minority ...

Who needs venture capital? Martin DeVido, a developer who attended Anthropic’s recent developer day, says he funds his AI-fueled tomato-growing project with proceeds from a meme coin. The Idahoan spent several months building an autonomous system controlled by Claude that grows tomatoes in Boise. He plants the seedlings, but then ...

Hundreds of software engineers traveled to San Francisco this week for Anthropic’s annual developer conference to hear what the frontier AI lab is up to. Many of the most cutting-edge coders were also there to figure out how close their jobs were to disappearing. At the conference, Anthropic announced adding ...

Reed’s view Elon Musk’s decision to sell compute power to Anthropic is an illustration of how the AI token is taking over the economy. When Elon Musk founded xAI (now owned by SpaceX) he rightly saw how AI compute power would become a scarce and valuable resource, and built his ...