Category: Semafor

Reed’s view Antitrust advocates on the left and the right are upset that, yet again, a big tech giant has avoided being broken up after an antitrust lawsuit. This time, it’s Google — again — that gets to stay together despite being found guilty of flouting antitrust law with its ...

OpenAI’s new AI model, Astra, is delighting its fans with its ability to complete tasks with very little human intervention. But AI safety experts want to know how it’s accomplishing these feats, a more urgent concern in the wake of OpenAI’s Hugging Face hack, which exposed humans’ inability to fully ...

A new California law passed earlier this week creates a framework for “Independent Verification Organizations” that can test frontier AI models before they are released, thereby limiting any risks those models pose. The new law comes as the feasibility of AI oversight is in question for being impossible and too ...

by Gloria Steinem. The trailblazing American feminist, Gloria Steinem, who died Wednesday, lived a life defined by movement in every sense of the word. In her 2015 memoir, Steinem recounts her dynamic, nomadic career as a writer and activist, and pays vivid homage to the people, places, and conversations that ...

Yinka’s view West African governments are competing for something that, by definition, belongs to the region as a whole: the descendants of Africans taken during the transatlantic slave trade. Benin, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, and Sierra Leone have all created pathways to citizenship, hoping to turn ancestral ties into tourism, investment — ...

The News Hollywood’s dirty little secret is that filmmakers do like AI, and they use it to save money. A finalist in this year’s Reply AI Film Festival competition, Mike Bennion told Semafor he was recently asked to use AI for a Hollywood movie currently in production that was short ...

The US labor market added 162,000 jobs in August, blowing past economists’ expectations, and the unemployment rate held steady at 4.1%. The gains came largely from a rebound in leisure and hospitality and local government, after declines in both over the summer. The stronger-than-expected numbers have fed funds futures traders ...

South African drugmaker Aspen Pharmacare said the rollout of its weight-loss drugs will help drive a 17% rise in earnings next year. Aspen sells Mounjaro, the weight-loss drug made by US manufacturer Eli Lilly, in South Africa. It will begin offering its own generic drug, targeting local markets as well ...

The News Uber ended operations in Nigeria and Uganda this week, extending a year-long retreat from Africa. But its exit from the continent’s most populous country has prompted fresh scrutiny of the conditions facing global companies as Nigeria undertakes an economic revamp. The California-based firm introduced its pioneering ride hailing ...

Saudi Arabia’s $8.1 billion beauty market is forecast to grow 8.7% annually through 2030, almost double the global average. It’s already the Gulf’s largest, accounting for more than half of regional sales, according to Euromonitor data cited by Business of Fashion. The boom is being driven by Saudi women’s rising ...