Category: Semafor

The News Three things surprised Nick Fox about ChatGPT’s breakout success in November 2022: how slow it was, how inaccurate it was, and how consumers embraced it anyway. “It was surprising to see there was appetite there,” he said. I asked him if, in retrospect, Google should have released its ...

Swiss privacy and security company Proton and Constella Intelligence found more than 116,000 instances where employees at The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post had their data exposed to the dark web. Across all three organizations, the company behind Proton Mail found exposure to the ...

Pope Leo XIV warned humanity against creating “new digital slaveries” in a 42,300-word encyclical about AI, the first major teaching document of his papacy. In , Leo “seeks to counterbalance alarm with hope but lands firmly on one side,” The Atlantic wrote: He condemned the use of AI in warfare, ...

Indian and Chinese companies are ramping up overseas acquisitions amid mounting domestic economic and business headwinds. Chinese firms have been snapping up Western consumer goods brands; fast fashion giant Shein announced it was buying US clothing label Everlane, and Luckin Coffee purchased upscale American cafe chain Blue Bottle, the Financial ...

The Kremlin blocked online access to 20 years of criminal records statistics, undermining efforts to track Moscow’s repression. The 15 million records showed an explosion in convictions for treason, espionage, and “cooperation with foreigners,” Meduza reported. It is part of a wider data blackout — in 2023 the prosecutor general ...

Waymo suspended service in six US cities after its driverless cars drove on flooded roads during storms last week. Footage showed one of the vehicles stopped in water almost up to its headlights in Atlanta, which received several inches of rain. Waymo, owned by Google’s parent company, also said it ...

China’s overhaul of its social insurance program for migrant workers could narrow urban-rural divides in the country and unlock new streams of economic growth, analysts said. Beijing on Friday moved to ease residency restrictions on coverage, removing a hurdle that required people working in Chinese cities to claim benefits in ...

Alexis’s view Senegal’s President Bassirou Diomaye Faye set off a political avalanche by firing his popular prime minister, Ousmane Sonko. Faye probably calculated that the move, announced late on Friday, could bury his own political career but was worth the risk to break an impasse that has prevented the country ...

When US President Donald Trump said on Saturday that a deal with Iran had been “largely negotiated,” he cited a phone call with a crowded list of Middle East rulers. One ostensibly lesser name stood out: Qatar’s Ali Al Thawadi is a minister without his own department, but he too ...

The Iran war is reshaping who performs Hajj this year, and how they get there: Iran’s allocation was cut to 30,000 pilgrims, nearly two-thirds fewer than usual. Their travel plans had shifted to using overland convoys through Iraq, before the ceasefire restored air access and enabled Iranian pilgrims to fly ...