Category: Semafor

The News Not all AI companies want to slow down. Chris Butler, who runs drug discovery at Isomorphic Labs, the Google-backed drug company started by DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis, pushed back against the suggestion that calls by OpenAI, Anthropic, and other AI leaders to pace frontier would slow his company ...

The Scoop Michigan Democratic Sens. Elissa Slotkin and Gary Peters will implore their colleagues on Tuesday afternoon to help Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed in the state’s must-win Senate race, according to a person familiar with their plans. The duo will ask the Democratic Caucus at its first full meeting since ...

Liz’s view Chuck Prince, CEO of Citigroup from 2003 to 2007, is remembered for one quote that captured the greed and spinelessness of Wall Street bosses chasing riches while steering the global economy toward a cliff: “As long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance. ...

Any slowdown in AI spending would let hyperscalers catch their financial breath and ease their reliance on borrowing to fund their buildouts. A Semafor review of analyst estimates finds that at current projections, as tracked by S&P Capital IQ, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, and Microsoft are expected to spend $66 billion ...

The News The tech-focused creator Emily Higgins is speaking directly into the camera about the importance of a good hook for a social media video — she does what looks like three takes, each with a slightly different script. But Higgins only filmed one video. The other two were AI-edited, ...

China reported downbeat consumption and investment figures, bolstering economists’ calls for fiscal stimulus to drive growth in the world’s second-biggest economy. Overall retail sales grew less than expected, while fixed-asset investment declined more than the year-to-date average; the country is already grappling with its slowest non-COVID growth in decades, persistently ...

Saudi Arabia is coming under increased military pressure on both its northern and southern borders, marking one of the sternest challenges yet for Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Iran-backed Iraqi militias recently forced the closure of the kingdom’s East-West pipeline, which had emerged as a key conduit for oil exports ...

Multiple incidents involving NATO forces responding to what European powers said was Russian aggression drove calls for the military alliance to more actively hit back at Moscow. NATO forces shot down a drone over Lithuania, Warsaw scrambled jets over Russian aerial attacks near Poland’s border with Ukraine, and Denmark said ...

Chinese authorities imposed new restrictions on foreign travel in order to stop cutting-edge technology and top-flight researchers from leaving, taking a step closer to a regime that had characterized a more closed-off China of decades past. Though senior civil servants and executives at state-owned enterprises have long faced limits on ...

Political and business leaders poured cold water on calls from AI giants to slow the pace of technological development, while the prospects of a US-China detente looked slim. US President Donald Trump called Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang during a live panel discussion to argue that worries about AI’s impact were ...