Category: Semafor

The US pounded Iran with fresh strikes after two American soldiers were killed in an attack on an air base in Jordan on Friday, pushing the two sides closer to all-out war. The casualties, which bring the American military death toll from the conflict to 16, were the first since ...

Reed’s view Over the last decade, experts in artificial intelligence learned a “bitter lesson”: Their own knowledge was getting in the way of progress. “The actual contents of minds are tremendously, irredeemably complex,” computer scientist Richard Sutton wrote in 2019. The most successful AI breakthroughs involved humans getting out of ...

The AI world is going nuts over the Kimi K3 AI model, the latest open-weight offering from Chinese startup Moonshot. While the new model is a big deal, the concern is somewhat misguided. For instance, Nvidia’s stock (and American markets broadly) took a hit over fears that China is closing ...

Frontier AI labs don’t want to be known for helping teens commit harm against themselves or others. “The principle here is to avoid the mistakes that were made before us,” Lauren Jonas, OpenAI’s head of youth well-being, told Semafor. “AI is not social media,” she said, arguing that teens primarily ...

AI agents have made inroads in businesses and government. Now they’re hitting the pageant stage. Samantha Smitte, 37, who worked at IBM for a decade, spent about $150 on AI agents to train for the Miss New York USA pageant next week, she told Semafor. They run practice interviews with ...

Gulf states, already among the world’s biggest spenders on defense, have been rearming rapidly since March as they seek to deter future attacks. This week, the US approved a $2 billion Saudi order for weapons guidance systems, launchers, warheads, and other equipment, as well as a $484 million package of ...

The News The Trump administration is replacing the gutted American foreign aid apparatus with, in part, a push to export more US propane. US Energy Secretary Chris Wright made a digital appearance last week at an International Energy Agency summit focused on replacing African households’ use of charcoal and other ...

The News The sudden death of Lindsey Graham last weekend robbed foreign aid advocates of one of their most effective GOP champions in Washington, according to lawmakers and advocates who worked with the South Carolina Republican. As chair of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee overseeing State Department funding, Graham blocked steep ...

what’s at stake There’s broad, bipartisan momentum in Congress behind ending the twice-a-year change of clocks in much of the US. The problem is, lawmakers can’t quite agree on the right solution. The House this week passed a bill to make daylight saving time permanent in a 308-117 vote, with ...

The News Nigeria could face a complete freeze on US economic and security assistance under a bill approved by the US House of Representatives, despite Abuja’s recent progress in strengthening ties with the Trump administration. The vote comes days after Frank Garcia, the US assistant secretary of state for African ...